also realize that such a loss is the product not of some lack in their personal ability to display competency, skillfulness, creativity, or persistence in their work but of widespread greed and dishonesty among the managers of our financial institutions as well as incompetence and corruption among bureaucrats and politicians operating at critical junctures of our regulatory systems. But so far most Americans have shown no concrete will to mobilize and unify against this unhealthy an order of things; they have instead chosen, in the hope of seeing positive change, to allow a significant leeway to the same financial managers, misguided bureaucrats and corrupt politicians who have caused these problems in the first place. So far no reform movements in the like of those of the American past have emerged to deal with an economic situation that clearly threatens the health of our society. Americans seem to have lost a set of socio-political skills they already mastered going back to the creation of their nation: the ability to undertake political activities that ensure that whatever political and economic arrangements that structure their lives operate according to their basic love for freedom, equity, and the power to re-make themselves. Indeed with the American revolution, they had rejected any notion of being governed by political masters whose worldview and interests not only diverged with theirs but also represented a threat to their identity as self-governing agents and economic actors whose goods and services could effectively compete in domestic or world market systems should they be devoid of any imperial mercantilist pretenses; with the progressive era, they had worked to ensure that the wealth and power inequalities that subsist in their