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Rating, and financial and political crisis
The financial crisis revealed to the public opinion the incredible power of the so-called assessment agencies, tasked with evaluating the health of national economies thus signalling profitable investments with minimum risk. The problem is that agencies such as Fitch Ratings, Standard & Poor’s or Moody’s, are not only places of analyses or institutes where information that may later turn useful to governments is collected. Indeed, they have become uncontrolled centres of power. Their experts decide the future of Countries and of their inhabitants; the principle being that to provide the different Countries with marks. For example, the safest in terms of capitalist investment returns are given an AAA rank (maximum guarantee/safety). However, if on the basis of a self-established criteria, the agency decides that the mark must be lower, this decision could trigger an economic crisis, or worsen an existing one. This was the case of Greece. All governments, instead of establishing economic politics on the basis of their own analyses, or of their own choices and proposals on the eve of democratic elections, focus on the good ratings of the agencies and their concerns related to the risk of negative rating. It is not an exaggeration to say that world governments have been handed over to private agencies, which follow exclusively private interests. And what about the concept of the common good? It has completely disappeared, gone aground in a domineering capitalism, which no one controls. In another field, universities experience the same stress caused by ratings, the so-called Shanghaï ratings. Each year even the most prestigious ones, or those with high-level academic formation, dread the fact that someone, in some part of the world, has decided to evaluate all universities on the basis of subjective criteria, without considering the cultural context or the real results. The Shanghaï classification evidently completes ignores the human factor, having been developed exclusively on figures: the number of students, the number of research departments, the number of dissertations, etc. The teachers, the students, the administrative staff, and their contribution as human persons, are completely ignored. What is most disconcerting is the fact that before this rating trend, political will vanishes completely. No politician is heard in the attempt to put an end to this blind dictatorship, a new totalitarianism that pays no heed to democracy. Despite the 2008 banking crisis the G20’s commitment to step up capitalist surveillance is intoxicated, and everyone appears to be paralyzed before the capitalist hydra. The realm of politics has been marked by the absence of willpower. Statesmen like Robert Schuman, Alcide De Gasperi, Konrad Adenauer, Charles de Gaulle, Paul-Henri Spaak, Helmut Kohl, with their convictions and their view of the world, whose their glance was not fixed on survey results or on decisions taken by others in private circles, trigger nostalgic recollections. The ongoing crisis of the political domain is also the crisis of European culture, which created an economic system that places man at the centre. We may want to consider the famous Renanian capitalism: market social economy. Conversely, the Anglo-Saxon model has prevailed at all levels: implying a cultural defeat, the defeat of willpower and the defeat of the human person.
