While President Bush likes to project an image of strength and courage the real truth is that in the presence of his large financial contributors he is a moral coward.

Over and over again financial experts and wonkish talking heads endeavor to explain these mysterious 'toxic' financial instruments to us lay folk. Over and over they ignobly fail because we all know that no one understands credit default obligations and derivatives except perhaps Mr. Buffett and the computers who created them.

The first reason for the preponderant influence of those Evangelicals who define themselves as advocates of Religious Right theological and political ideologies is that they have both the financial means and technological know-how to make widespread use of modern electronic forms of communication.

Imagine if the pension funds and endowments that own much of the equity in our financial services companies demanded that those companies revisit the way mortgages were marketed to those without adequate skills to understand the products they were being sold. Management would have to change the way things were done.

I don't think the Palestinian people or Afghan children or some other things I'm concerned about are at the top of other people's agendas - not right now when America is going through such a recession and people are suffering across the board financially. But I think all that will change.

Some argue that now isn't the time to push the green agenda - that all efforts should be on preventing a serious recession. That is a false choice. It fails to recognise that climate change and our carbon reliance is part of problem - high fuel prices and food shortages due to poor crop yields compound today's financial difficulties.

I get heartfelt thanks from all kinds of people. Today I heard from a waitress in Georgia who has lost her job and is trying to figure out how her local bank can change the terms on her credit card and I heard from a physicist at a major research university who wants to explain a better theory of financial stress tests.

We have got to change our ethics and our financial system and our whole way of understanding the world. It has to be a world in which people live rather than die a sustainable world. It could be great.

The best discussion of trouble in boardroom and business office is found in newspapers' own financial pages and speeches by journalists in management jobs.

Well I think that there's a very thin dividing line between success and failure. And I think if you start a business without financial backing you're likely to go the wrong side of that dividing line.