COLUMN: The problem? No leadership

Are we living in a Third World country? It certainly feels like a it as we scurry around like rats looking for gas and watch extraordinary upheavals in the nation’s political and financial spheres.

Consider:

• We can hardly get gas in Georgia and when we do, it’s 60 cents more per gallon than other areas. Meanwhile, Gov. Sonny Perdue flies off to Spain on a junket trip like some Third World dictator who doesn’t give a damn about his subjects. The post-Katrina gas shortage three years ago should have been a warning to state officials to plan for the next Gulf hurricane and resulting gas disruption problems. Apparently, it wasn’t. In today’s world, a country that can’t move vital resources like fuel around when a hurricane hits is little more than a second-rate power.

• On Monday, Congress failed to find an agreement to shore up the teetering U.S. financial markets. Major banks are failing, the international credit markets are faltering and the stock market looks like a rollercoaster. Republicans blame Democrats; Democrats blame Republicans. Then they both leave town on a three-day recess so they can campaign back home. And they want us to trust them?

• President Bush is AWOL. When he does poke his head out of his shell, nobody pays attention or believes him. He cried “wolf” on Iraq and WMDs; failed to lead in the Katrina debacle; and with “terrorism” as a cover, planted the seeds of fear in the nation’s psyche to the extent that we have to go barefoot to fly on airplanes. Bush has so tainted his reputation that he has no impact on the important issues we now face. The presidency is in shambles.

• Wall Street has become a pejorative for greed. While there is a lot of blame to go around for the sub-prime mess and the current market turmoil, most people understand that the barons of Wall Street made millions off of simply moving paper around. They didn’t create anything other than flawed financial products that have now imploded. Now these “Masters of the Universe” are begging for a lifeline from the very political system they disdain. It’s insulting.

• We don’t make anything in this nation any more. Over the last two decades, we have off-shored many of the very core industries that we need as the basis for economic stability. We are a nation of services that we may not now need. When a nation gives up its core manufacturing sectors — automobiles, equipment, textiles and others — it gives up its ability to control its own destiny. A nation’s real economic wealth is created by taking raw materials and making something of value for consumers. The U.S. economy has ceded far too much of its manufacturing to other countries.

The common thread in all of this is a huge lack of leadership in both the public and private sectors. No national institution today commands the respect necessary to lead the American people out of the current crisis.

The result is no confidence in either the political or financial markets. If trust and confidence are the underpinnings of our financial and political systems, then no wonder the house of cards is collapsing.

Over the last 25 years, I’ve traveled a good bit around the world, often to Third World areas and developing nations. I’ve seen what happens when greed and narrow political interests undermine public confidence in political and economic institutions. The results are very, very ugly.

Without the emergence of some real leadership in this nation, we’re headed in the same direction.

Mike Buffington is editor of The Jackson Herald. He can be reached at mike@mainstreetnews.com.