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Editorial: Leading an ailing America
Fri, 10/17/2008 10:27 AM | Opinion
Whoever wins next month's U.S. presidential election, whether Senator Barack Obama or Senator John McCain, the world can only hope the U.S. economic turmoil will not last too long, because the cost of curing the U.S. disease will be very high and will have to be paid not just by the Americans but by the entire global population.
Even the U.S.'s most bitter foes, such as Iran or Venezuela, will share the global anxiety no matter how strong their economy is, because their revenues from oil and gas will also be affected.
We hope that American voters will listen to their conscience and that they are able to elect the right person -- Obama or McCain -- to lead them in dealing with a devastating economic recession. In years to come the ailing giant will be very inward-looking and its economic policies will be protective, despite its consistent claim that it is the champion of the free market. Global security also will reach new equilibrium as other players such as China and Russia step in and deflate the U.S.'s superpower status.
In this context, millions of people outside the United States followed the third debate between Obama and McCain on Wednesday evening (Thursday morning Jakarta time).
It was George W. Bush who thwarted McCain's ambition to become president in 2000 because he lost to Bush in the 2000 Republican Party convention. And in next month's presidential election, it is likely to be that same person who will again block McCain's last chance to lead the United States, despite his loyalty to President Bush over the past eight years.
The 72-year-old senator is not likely to be able to defeat his rival Obama in next month's election. Various surveys and polls consistently indicate Obama will win the race.
And it's not just in the United States that Obama is likely to win. The senator would score a landslide victory, 67 percent of the vote, if the U.S. presidential election was held in Indonesia, a poll by Reader's Digest concluded Tuesday. The senator is hugely popular here because he spent a few years of his childhood in Jakarta, although generally Indonesia feels more comfortable with a Republican-led government because the Democrats tend to be more demanding on human rights, labor issues and democracy.
Globally also, Obama is more popular than his Republican rival. But whoever wins the U.S. presidential race, the whole world will feel the bitter impacts of the U.S. economic mismanagement in the long years to come.
The collapse of the U.S. economy has angered millions of Americans. The U.S. financial disaster has spread to nearly every part of the world, and the whole globe will be forced to bear the burden. The world is on the brink of global recession, the worst since the Great Depression in the 1930s.
Many TV viewers might have become excited or even irritated when, during this week's televised debate, Senator McCain sought to distance himself from President George W. Bush, even though Americans well know that as a Republican senator he is a staunch supporter of Bush.
"Senator Obama, I am not President Bush. If you want to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago," McCain told Obama in the debate.
But Obama responded with a smile, "If I've occasionally mistaken your policies for George Bush's policies, it's because on the core economic issues that matter to the American people -- on tax policy, on energy policy, on spending priorities -- you have been a vigorous supporter of President Bush."
In 1997 and 1998, at the time of the financial crisis in Asia, American political and business leaders preached about responsible economic management. Through the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, they diagnosed all of Indonesia's diseases and, like doctors, offered several prescriptions. We had little choice but to swallow the medicine those doctors gave us.
Now, 10 years on, the American people may have to swallow a similarly bitter pill. The medication will be very painful and there is no guarantee that the patients will fully recover from their disease. Just like what happened with us 10 years ago.
It is the American voters who will decide who will replace President Bush in the White House in January, but if they make the wrong choice, not just the Americans but the whole world will suffer.
Donna Wilder (not verified) — Mon, 10/20/2008 - 3:59pm
Neither the biggest speculators (who have helped create this financial crisis) nor the arrogant economists (who recently came to lecture countries like Indonesia during the ‘krismon’ monetary crisis) will become the true victims of this recession. Some of them might loose huge sums of money – money that was previously gained but didn’t really exist in reality – but they will still have enough capital and networks left to live a comfortable life.
The true losers will be poor and lower middle class people – especially in developing countries – who will struggle to pay for their food and basic commodities, lose their jobs, see the education and health services provided to them diminish etc. They will also not be helped by governments which are now pouring their resources in financial black holes of the defunct virtual financial industry, giving themselves an excuse to cut down on public spending and social programs.
Now let us not forget that the USA wasn’t alone in setting up ‘fake’ bubbles of financial wealth which eventually lead to the collapse. From Reykjavik to Dubai and from Moscow to Shanghai, regimes and markets have gone along in this collective form of insanity in spite of the rhetoric and the hypocritical moralizing of various religious cultures and political systems. Of course unlimited greed and stupidity are deeply ingrained in human nature and little can be done about that. We have already seen many similar crises in human history. In the seventeenth century, the ‘tulip mania’ in Holland was a popular example of a speculative bubble with surprising similarities to the current one. Maybe the book ‘Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds’ (Charles Mackay, first published in 1841) should be mandatory reading in schools in order to attempt to educate people about the limitations and dangers of money-based economy? Maybe future students, investors, economists and people who depend on them will be less brainwashed than they are now?
It is naive to think that either Obama or McCain offer any real solutions. They produce just more rhetoric that can easily be proven conflicting with itself and thus flawed.