Social Fortitude

A really complex year comes to an end, which it does not precisely invite to the making of balances.

Instinctively, analysts are more inclined to outline predictions on the axes concerning which one might make a difference for the next exercise. They certainly are poor and worrying omens. A really complex year comes to an end. A polling year which managed to maintain the economic pulse until March; which immediately after got into a progressive deceleration and which, during the summer, officially opened the doors for the galloping crisis. A real, inexplicable crisis... Isn't it?

A crisis, anyway, which sinks its roots into the deep and long suspicion among market agents, due  much likely to the unavoidable explosion of a moral order bubble, presided by enrichment at all costs principle, on which the success was more valued than the means to obtain it.

The widest spread opinion points out that nothing will be the same after this worldwide trust crisis. However, supported by the liberals and social democrats' consent, meanwhile public money, belonging to everybody, desperately comes to the rescue of the big employment agencies, with the only purpose of avoiding the disaster and the social breakdown.

A somehow abrupt operation, which brings into light some not small fears, such as the effort made by everything public to control the social initiative: Are the administrations the best means for the creation of employment and the well-being among citizens?: is it effective, and profitable, to assign high quantities of resources to municipal corporations, in order, for example, to promote temporary employment? The experience precisely points in the opposite direction: public investment has achieved its maximum profitability as it has cooperated with proper citizens' initiatives being business, cultural or social character.

It is true: the year 2009 wakes up more unknowns than good omens. And nevertheless, it offers an unbeatable opportunity for the strengthening of society, cradle and origin of the most effective remedy against the effects of this indescribable and worrying crisis.

Translated by Miguel San José