thanks to Fred Wilson for this link to the new wave of open source business models beginning to crash over us, and older more traditional corporations that optimize for shareholder value over customer benefit.
note the most significant difference between 'Them' and 'Us' is the structure & limitation of current securitization models (typically: a for-profit & [most times] profitable corp with $25-50M annual revenue or larger). if we can bring securitization in some form to the masses and to the individual, we can likely remove this artificial separation of one group of society from another.
note that i am *not* advocating socialism here, nor criticizing the capitalist model -- however, in the future, a new & better model may evolve where shareholders = customers (basically a not-for-profit co-op). this interesting hybrid combination could take advantage of scale rqmts necessary for securization, yet optimize for mass customer benefit rather than for the interests of a small group of shareholders.
Craigslist already seems to be implementing this model to some extent, although they haven't gone public yet. BRAC and Grameen Phone/Grameen Telecom are also interesting examples.