Failing elites threaten our future

Davastating analysis in the FT of "... three visible failures: First, the economic, financial, intellectual and political elites mostly misunderstood the consequences of headlong financial liberalisation ... The rescue was necessary. But the belief that the powerful sacrificed taxpayers to the interests of the guilty is correct. Second, ... a globalised economic and financial elite ... ever more detached from the countries that produced them. In the process, the glue that binds any democracy – the notion of citizenship – has weakened ... If the mass of the people view their economic elite as richly rewarded for mediocre performance and interested only in themselves, yet expecting rescue when things go badly, the bonds snap. We may be just at the beginning of this long-term decay. Third, in creating the euro, the Europeans took their project beyond the practical into something far more important to people: the fate of their money... it is the constitutional disorder of the eurozone that is least emphasised. Within the eurozone, power is now concentrated in ... principally Germany and a trio of unelected bureaucracies... The peoples of adversely affected countries have no influence ... the politicians who are accountable to them are powerless. This divorce between accountability and power strikes at the heart of any notion of democratic governance. The eurozone crisis is not just economic. It is also constitutional. ... The result is the birth of angry populism throughout the west, mostly the xenophobic populism of the right... The elites need to do better. If they do not, rage may overwhelm us all." - Failing elites threaten our future - FT.com The EP elections are gonna be interesting, given this context.