The Justice Department is very selective in how it views monopolies. For example, there is one government-sanctioned monopoly in this country that has more power than all past monopolies put together. It's called the Federal Reserve System. Here's what a reporter in Worth magazine of November 1998 wrote about it: "The U.S. Federal Reserve is the most powerful central bank in the world. It can send stock markets around the world soaring or crashing with merely a word, and wipe out or create billions of dollars with a hint."

Now that's a monopoly! It was conceived by a cabal of New York moneyed interests that met in secret at the private resort of J.P. Morgan in November of 1910. In fact, Woodrow Wilson, president at the time, was put in the White House by the very men masterminding the Fed.

The basic argument for the Federal Reserve System was that it would provide stability for the economy and end the boom and bust cycles that plagued the stock market. It is true that the stock market had its ups and downs, but they were never prolonged, and recovery took place in a relatively short time. So how come the worst stock market crash and prolonged depression took place after the Federal Reserve was in power for more than 15 years?

The answer is quite simple. The Federal Reserve is a monopoly, or more correctly, a cartel of New York banks. Their aim was to shake out the economy, get rid of the hundreds of small, local banks that held the deposits of millions of people, and reduce the price of stocks so that they could be bought up on the cheap by those with cash waiting for the fall. In fact, many of the top money men got out of the stock market knowing that the Fed would destabilize it and bring about a crash. They sold their stock when prices were at their height, and bought them back when they were at their lowest.

And because our economy is now run by bankers, we have become a debt economy in which all of us are up to our ears in debt. We can't save money because taxes are so high, so we must borrow money for homes, cars, vacations, college tuition and just about everything else. And that's how the banks get rich, charging interest on borrowed money.

The banks prefer debtors to savers, because savers collect interest from the bank, while debtors pay interest to the bank. And since the Federal Reserve can create money out of nothing, banks don't even need savers for money to lend out. They can borrow it from the Federal Reserve.

What a racket! Americans are now so used to buying everything on credit, that the whole concept of thrift and saving is now considered old fashioned. Why delay gratification when plastic can get you what you want now? Yes, you become a debtor, but that's OK because everyone is now a debtor, and banks have liens on virtually all of our assets.

So when the Justice Department and Janet Reno talk about the evils of monopolies, one must stop and think and wonder when the nation will wake up to the biggest monopoly of them all.

The Asian financial crisis has taught one thing to many--gold is more reliable than the local currencies or the banking system. Traders said the slump in world gold prices was unlikely to hurt people's belief in the yellow metal. Rather, it is a great opportunity to stack up more gold, especially as their currencies have recovered over the past few months, they said. "If you had the experience that Indonesia had during the crisis, you definitely know the value of keeping your wealth in the form of gold," a gold trader in Singapore said. Rural Asians added the Asian crisis had only proved how wise their grandfathers had been in buying gold chains instead of turning to the banks, many of which had gone bankrupt over the past two years.

Since I subscribe to the cheerful theory that the stock market is a cross between a giant casino and a pyramid scheme, little that happens there seems to me of much social import.

But Doug Henwood's book, "Wall Street: How It Works and For Whom," is an instructive manual on this giant craps game, one of the most interesting examples of the fine art of debunking to come along in years. For those of you who think the stock market exists to raise capital for corporations to invest their plants and equipment, Henwood points out that the stock market has almost nothing to do with this.

Corporations finance about 90 percent of their investments internally, through their own profits, and according to Henwood, on those rare occasions when they turn to outside finance, they go first to banks and then to the bond market. "A more accurate description of what the market is all about is that it's a mechanism for the very rich, as a class, to own the productive assets of the U.S. economy and extract wealth from them," Henwood wrote for the Los Angeles Weekly. "The richest 1 percent of the population has more investable wealth than the bottom 90 percent. Financial democracy is even more an affair of the elites than the political kind."

The Left Business Observer recently reviewed a book by an apostate derivatives salesman, "F.I.A.S.C.O." by Frank Portnoy, and quotes the following passage on why he left that lucrative trade: "By April 1995, I had become the most cynical person on earth. I now believed everything was a fraud, and I had a well-founded basis for my beliefs. Derivatives were a fraud, investment banking was a fraud, the Mexican and Japanese financial systems were frauds…. The value system I had acquired in recent years included shooting at clients and blowing people up (Wall Street slang for parting clients from their money), all in the name of money."

SEOUL, South Korea-- He embarrassed his friends and frightened fellow executives when he did the "unthinkable." In a nation where a man's status is largely measured by position and power, Suh Sang-rok quit the No. 2 job at one of South Korea's largest conglomerates to wait on tables in a restaurant. His message: Position is not important. Any job is honorable.

In Korea, that's an almost heretical idea. Recent generations of South Koreans grew up thinking real success came from attending the country's top schools and getting a white-collar job at a top conglomerate, known as chaebol.

But near-economic collapse, wholesale corporate bankruptcies and record joblessness in the last two years have forced Koreans to rethink old ways.

Never in recent memory has a man from one of Korea's most elite and powerful chaebol steered himself into a job so modest. Suh's age, 62, makes him more of a puzzlement because Confucian values dictate the young should honor and serve their elders--not the other way around.

As vice chairman of the Sammi Group for five years, Suh held an enviable position in what once was Korea's 26th largest conglomerate and the world's third biggest producer of specialty steel.

He now calls it "a pig's life" because he sometimes ate four, five or six times a day, in breakfast, lunch and dinner meetings with bankers who kept the company afloat.

After Sammi went bankrupt in early 1997, Suh stayed for several months "with nothing to do" as the company bumped along in bankruptcy proceedings. Then he left and "decided never, never to work at the executive level again," he says. Suh says the bankruptcy left him without a pension and with little savings. He applied for jobs as a waiter at 15 restaurants where he used to wine and dine bankers.

All turned him down, uncomfortable giving a common job to a former big-spending client--and afraid Suh's customers and much younger co-workers would feel uncomfortable as well.

After a three-month job search, he was hired by the Schoenbrunn, a pricey restaurant on the top floor of the downtown Lotte Hotel. His salary is about $500 a month, roughly one-tenth his previous pay.

"Koreans try to save face," says Suh. "But if I'm not robbing anybody, I'm not stealing, I'm not killing--why am I losing face? I just changed my job. I feel great! My wife is happy because I get to spend more time with her. I also don't have to lie to bank people anymore."

"My co-workers said that if I--the vice chairman--became a waiter, what were they supposed to do," says Suh.

His suggestion to all: "How about assistant waiter?"

So loose nukes may be rolling through the taiga, the ruble may be in ruins, tuberculosis flares in Siberia. Who cares?

Not so long ago it was assumed that Russia's health was essential to world stability. Then Russia's troubles slid from bad to worse, and the rest of the world hardly seemed to notice. Now some in Washington are suggesting that maybe Russia didn't matter so much after all.

Certainly many Russian politicians believe that the U.S. has written them off. (Most of the rest believe the U.S. is out to destroy them.)

But it's not just Russians who suspect the Clinton administration has given up. Republican Sen. Dick Lugar recently said, "The U.S.-Russian relationship has, in the last eight years, gone from a relationship of benign neglect to one that is lurching toward malign neglect."

Most administration officials have not concluded that Russia doesn't matter. They just aren't sure what to do about it.

As Russia's post-Communist transition has stalled, the nation has lost much of its ability to influence the world--at least in a positive way. Its economy now accounts for something like one percent of world output.

Russia remains the world's biggest country, but territory has long since ceased to be a key indicator of power. It holds vast stores of oil and mineral wealth, but in a global economy based increasingly on knowledge and technology, those, too, are of dwindling value.

Russia's declining population of 150 million is too impoverished to tempt many companies as a consumer market. And despite a high level of education, its value as a labor pool is dimmed by the crime and uncertain laws and taxes that keep most foreign companies away.

So Russia's potential influence is mostly negative. It can scare the world with the consequences of collapse: untended nuclear weapons, degraded missile-launch computers, the export of crime and pollution and contagious disease.

U.S. policy has evolved in two ways as a result. Not surprisingly, most of its aid is aimed at averting the bad, not promoting the good. Three-quarters of U.S. assistance dollars, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said last fall, "are devoted to programs that diminish the threat of nuclear war and the danger that weapons of mass destruction will fall into the wrong hands."

And, as Russia has moved "from the core of the international system to the periphery," as the Carnegie Endowment's Michael McFaul said, it has also moved to the periphery of U.S. foreign policy. On issue after issue--Kosovo, Iraq, Iran, NATO expansion, anti-missile defense--the message from the administration is that Russia matters, but not enough to derail U.S. policy.

Excluded from policymaking, Russia then emphasizes its spoiler role: shipping dangerous technology to Iran, encouraging Serbian aggression, tweaking the U.S. wherever possible. And so the two nations find themselves in an unhealthy downward cycle--a long way from the strategic partnership envisioned at the opening of this decade.

Veronica, 15 and homeless, is too young to remember what it was like in the 1980s—Latin America’s "Lost Decade" when debt crises and hyperinflation plunged the region into economic mayhem.

But for her, sleeping on a pile of dirty blankets, old sweaters and ragged sofas between the roar of a major Mexico City thoroughfare and the hiss of the Metro, the 1990s were probably no better.

"It’s OK here. We’re going to fix up the shelter soon so the rain doesn’t get in," said the girl, who shares her home under plastic sheets with seven other teenagers.

Veronica is just one of millions of Latin Americans who have yet to taste the fruit of a decade of free markets, open trade and privatizations. In fact, the Inter-American Development Bank says the economic reforms that swept the region like wildfire in the 1990s failed to make a dent in grinding poverty and one of the world’s most unequal distributions of wealth.

"Latin America has made minimal progress in reducing poverty and improving wealth distribution," said Nora Lustig, chief of the IADB’s Poverty and Inequality Advisory Unit. She estimated that one in three Latin Americans earns less than $60 a month, the bank’s definition of extreme impoverishment.

In the streets of Argentina’s capital Buenos Aires, middle-class professionals hawk shoes to make the bus fare home; in Venezuela, the once-wealthy sell houses to pay for their 15-year-old daughters’ coming-of-age parties; in Mexico, the poor huddle in shantytowns built on massive rubbish heaps outside Mexico City or scrape a living in arid mountain soil, little different from their ancestors 300 years ago.

Statistics speak almost as loudly as grim reality. Mexico’s Inegi statistics institute says the ranks of the poor have been swollen by 9.6 million since 1989, while the top 20 percent of wage earners have 55 percent of the country’s wealth.

Globally, Brazil is king of the wealth gap. The top 10 percent of Brazilians have 50 percent of national income while the poorest 50 percent share just 10 percent.

In Argentina last year, the richest 10 percent earned 25 times as much, on average, as the poorest 10 percent. In 1975, it was just 7.9 times as much.

Peru’s government says it has managed to cut the proportion of extreme poor to 14 percent of the population but the IADB said that in 1995, the last year figures were available, extreme poverty afflicted 35 percent of Peruvians.

The debate on how to help the poor means little to one couple in an underground home on the edge of Mexico City. Sleeping on a rough concrete ledge surrounded by festering rubbish and the incessant drip of water, the 17-year-old and his 16-year-old girlfriend shrugged at their misery. Things had not changed much in the 10 years he had been living on the streets, the boy said, asking not to be named. "They probably won’t change much now."