A word to those impatient for reform in our financial and banking systems.

You are looking at overturning centuries of tradition. American commerce and industry has always looked to government--the legal repository of the use of physical force--as a back-stop to their authority and interests. Any regulation that occurred was designed to either secure those interests (think designated routes for the airlines and defined territories for auto dealerships) or provide protection from competition.

Regulation that aims to protect the natural environment from degradation and promote the welfare of the general public is an innovative concept which really didn't start to take off until "de-regulation" revealed that even the appearance of good (socially beneficial) behavior would evaporate with the removal of restraints. That this result applies across the board was only revealed when the financiers and banksters (traditionally risk averse scavengers) also turned into predators when oversight was removed.

What I'm saying is we're just at the beginning. There's a lot of tradition and myth to overcome, including the myth that poverty breeds crime. The reality is that it's the accumulators of wealth who have the time and the inclination to accumulate and sequester more. In the past, when they did that (hoarded the gold), it was necessary and possible for people to go find more and dig it out of the ground. That was a viable populist response. Now that our currency is inherently worthless (has no intrinsic value for any use other than to lubricate exchange and trade) its availability is both easier to manage and, ironically, easier to sequester.

The history of what happened to the gold plundered by the Spanish from Central and South America is instructive. Within a few generations, it was all gone out of Spain, sequestered in the vaults of the Dutch, who then used it to issue paper credits to fund the British industrial revolution.

On the other hand, it's my contention that Nixon "abandonment" of the gold standard, freeing currency of the leash of being tied to a relatively scarce measurable metal, had the perhaps unanticipated side effect of sinking the autocratic regimes in the Soviet Union and South Africa, since both were suddenly deprived of an asset with which to pay for their purchases. When "good faith and credit" became dependent on the good will of the people being represented, the agents of government had to mend their ways.

It's true that we've got a new world order--i.e. a new way of ordering world affairs. But, just as Dubya didn't understand the meaning of "I've got a mandate" and that democracy isn't something one spreads around, Poppy didn't understand that black gold is just as useless as the yellow kind when people are lacking in good faith. Poppy suckered Saddam Hussein and then Saddam Husseing returned the favor by suckering Dubya and Blair.