Economy: Losing Our Faith

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For a world leader, it must have set some sort of miserable record: in a poll in December, just 1% of French voters said they wanted President Jacques Chirac to stand for re-election in 2007. For Chirac, that capped a terrible year of economic torpor, electoral setback and, in November, a fiery eruption of social unrest in the suburbs of Paris and other major cities. Trying to restore his authority, the French President gave his customary televised New Year's address to the nation. "We must believe in France," he told his compatriots in a pathos-filled speech quickly lampooned by the nation's cartoonists and columnists.

Some of Chirac's peers may be smirking at his plight, but perhaps they should take note. For the French President's rock-bottom ratings are an extreme example of a corrosive trend in public opinion that poses just as much of a threat to President George W. Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and their colleagues in dozens of other countries, as well as to the heads of global institutions and corporations from IBM to the International Monetary Fund. As political and business leaders ready themselves for their annual trek to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, they do so at a time when the mistrust of authority--and an increasingly vocal disrespect for it--has gone global.

Deference is dead, replaced by sniping, cynicism and an outpouring of open protest. Thanks to the Internet, every individual's gripe can now be amplified and diffused to a mass audience, whether the gripers are retired Americans whose pension benefits have been slashed or Chinese peasants who have lost their farmland to the nation's torrid industrialization. A recent World Economic Forum poll of more than 20,000 people in 20 countries revealed that public trust in national governments, the U.N. and multinational companies has dropped significantly over the past two years and is close to the lows recorded after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

To some extent, that public hostility is well deserved. The bankruptcies of Enron and WorldCom in the U.S. and Parmalat in Italy have focused attention on corporate sleaze on both sides of the Atlantic. Revelations about how Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff allegedly bought influence in Congress have made a mockery of claims to clean government. The U.N. is struggling to recover from its own high-level corruption scandal relating to the oil-for-food program in prewar Iraq.

And at a time when stock markets are booming, the global economy is growing at its fastest clip in three decades and chief executives are cutting themselves huge paychecks, ordinary people the world over have cause to complain about being locked out of the party. "The top of the house shouldn't continue to award itself when the folks on the lower end of the ladder suffer," says C. William Jones, a retired telephone-company worker in Easton, Md., who was so incensed that Verizon cut his pension and health-care benefits that he helped start a protest group called the Association of BellTel Retirees. It now has more than 100,000 members and communicates mainly online.