Governments and their hired negotiators are designing the supranational rules and pressing for their adoption and for compliance - and the US government first and foremost. These governments are elected by us, funded by us, acting on our behalf, sensitive to our will, and so, we are not mere bystanders observing the injustice.

Economists operate with this image of the homo economicus, the rational economic agent, and while such agents are rare in the wider world, they are common in economics departments. Exemplifying the homo economicus paradigm, economists typically choose their research projects and hypotheses so as to promote their own careers, to maximize their lifetime income. This explains the astonishing pressures toward conformity in academic economics: how deviant views (except those by a few who have already achieved stardom) get crushed by an army of conformists.

Countries compete in offering easy working conditions to their banks. In many jurisdictions, you can deposit money anonymously with no questions asked, even if the accepting bank knows that it derives from criminal activities.

The Bank and the media continue to propagate the story that the global elite wishes to be told: that the number of poor has declined by 24 percent in those 15 years [1990-2005].

One citizen, or a few, may be powerless if all the rest are determined to benefit from the imposition of unjust supranational rules. But this excuse cannot work for large numbers. Just imagine 10 million US citizens saying in unison: "I am just one powerless citizen. There is nothing I can do to change my government's policies!"

Social rules are susceptible to moral analysis. This is, again, relatively familiar in the domestic case, where we now condemn slavery as unjust. And when we affirm this judgment, we're not merely saying that all those people who owned slaves were unethical people; they shouldn't have done that. We do believe this, but that's only part of the point. We also believe that the fugitive slave laws were unjust.

Ordinary people like you and me can achieve very little on their own. We need to build support. Even if you are a thought leader and have some good ideas on how to make the world better, and even if you write five or ten books - that won't have much effect unless you have people who are willing to support your ideas.