Recovering and restoring

The current serious international financial crisis ensues a five-year period marked by the evident worsening of the economic and social situation of a large part of the planet. The so-called Third World doesn’t succeed in becoming Second. Millions of families in America have rapidly lost their homes before even coming to realize it. In Europe, if on the one hand the Euro along with an unusual but well-received political decisionism have enabled to withstand the stock market and bank earthquakes, on the other, the often speculative price, bill, and interest rate surges, (often not adequately punished by the law) has kneecapped natural and legal persons. The equal redistribution of income remains dead letter, while fiscal policies tighten, and public services are often inefficient. Energy dependence on fossil fuels and natural gases – that in Europe are in short supply – has reached unsustainable levels, while investment on alternative energy (including latest generation safe nuclear energy) is still sporadic and cannot be viewed as structural or organic. In fact, the “new poverties” are rapidly increasing. These include: the families whose monthly income used to provide respectable living standards and which today – with equal salary and expenses – is hardly sufficient to cover a three-week period; the children, who are the most affected by the reduced purchasing power of their parents; the firms, overwhelmed by excessively high labor costs and unfair competition that hinders growth. While indebtedness, that until recently was held as a virtuous economic development and living-standard improvement tool, acts as a boomerang triggering vicious cycles of poverty. The situation is made worse by banks’ irresponsible policies that in order to obtain investors’ liquidity, that are often excessively consumerist, unscrupulously propose loan and/or investment packages that are also-ran to begin with. As a result, 20 million world jobs have crashed! Better late than never, the political and the economic realm are seeking last-minute solutions that account for past and recent failures: bank bailouts, recovery of the International World Bank, transatlantic new deals, strategic agreements with -demographic and economic – emerging areas. Europe is the promoter. The Old Countries of the Old Continent are on the forefront: if every cloud has a silver lining, we need to hope that the developing economy plan will bring not only stability and growth, but it will also lead to the establishment of the longed-for “Political Europe”, that already in 1950 the Founding Fathers of European unification had understood as representing the real key to prosperity and world peace. We’ve probably hit rock bottom. Now we can only recover and restore. It’s a commitment we must take at all levels on the basis of reason and faith in man. A famous song said, “nothing is born of diamonds, but flowers stem out of muck”.