It used to be you trusted either biz'nez or the guv'ment.

Since the powers of each have dispensed with the fiction that the two were separate, it will now be very hard to look up to either, whether your primary allegiance is to liberal politics or capitalist economics.

Americans gave up on regarding government as a force for good long ago, but lately even the monied classes have lost faith in institutions which handle money.

You mean they actually do teach "responsible business practices and organizational ethics" to businesspeople? We're told that's the subject of Barbara Toffler's teaching at Columbia Business School, but the classes must have been very small indeed.

She worries now about what will bring investors back to a market whose image has been shattered in recent months. She says the ethics problem is "systemic and intractable."

"And we're not going to be able to get out of this crisis of credibility and concern about who can we trust, because nobody really wants to break up the nice, neat little ring of conflicts of interest that go from the corporate world to the streets of Wall Street to the political suites of our government," Hoffman said.