My first reaction, reading this thread, was to be surprised by the unwelcoming tone of the post from Joe, who seems to grow more self-important by the day.

But thanks to Frank Hamilton and (in another thread) Barry Finn, I have lost sympathy for this new member.

AWG should try to get hold of last week's edition of the Economist - one of the world's best informed and most comprehensive champions of capitalism. It has a wonderful article about the dollar. Makes the point that each and every greenback is actually worthless, as there are no reserves to back it up. Instead there is a debt in excess of $800 trillion, and growing. The only reason the dollar survives as a global currency is because it is the currency of oil. Yet now even that is under threat. OK, when Saddam started trading oil in euros his country was trashed by American bombs within months. But the US has not been able to stop Russia trading oil in roubles and euros. Nor can it stop countries like Iran, Venezuela and others which are now planning to switch to the euro.

The cause of the looming crisis is the Bush admin's one-card trick of fuelling growth by pandering to the rich, regardless of spiralling debt. And that can't go on for ever, as many of the spenders are themselves now at the limit of their debt, as revealed in the recent mortgages panic. Meanwhile the gap between rich and poor grows ever wider, threatening social stability and requiring colossal prison capacity - prison walls providing the wall that is needed to protect the obscenely rich from the desperately poor.

AWG is in cloud-cuckoo land in believing that the poor can reverse all this with honest hard work. Sure a few will be lucky enough to work their way out of poverty despite the colossal disadvantages in their path. And my god, how those few examples will be trumpeted by the AWGs of this world. But there is simply no way that ALL the millions of deprived people, or even a significant proportion of them, can work their way out of poverty - there is simply not enough wealth to go round. Pretending otherwise is exactly the same con as the pyramid-selling trick. So blatant that pyramid selling is illegal in many countries.

And yes, AWG, I read threads before posting to them. Partly it's a courtesy, but mostly it's just common sense.