The RNC is pushing a purity test for Republicans.  True to form, the modern GOP has enshrined an off-the-cuff remark of St. Ronnie the Intolerant and declared that anyone who doesn't leap over at least 8 of 10 newly-created hurdles is no longer welcome at the elephant trough. You don't have to read past the preamble to confirm that the Republicans are now completely in the grip of the most extreme faction of the Beck-heads.

WHEREAS, Republican faithfulness to its conservative principles and public policies and Republican solidarity in opposition to Obama’s socialist agenda is necessary to preserve the security of our country, our economic and political freedoms, and our way of life;

The whole scorecard of Republicanism is now measured in how strongly a candidate stands against the president. How impressive is it that the long dead host of Death Valley Days is always "President Ronald Reagan" while the sitting president of the United States is simply "Obama"? This is a party not just in opposition to Democrats, but to reality.

The idea of the GOP is that this list of "principles" can serve them as the "Contract with America" did the Newt generation over a decade ago. There's a slight problem with that idea. Even assuming that Newt's baby had something to do with GOP advances back then, the Contract at least contained something to do. The Contract with America contained at least eight pieces of proposed legislation. The new purity test? None.

As with all things GOP these days, there's not a single new idea in this test. Instead, it's a test of saying no. The rules require that would-be Republicans oppose health care reform, oppose stimulus, oppose amnesty for immigrants, oppose equal rights for gays, oppose protecting the environment, oppose unions, oppose diplomatic solutions, and oppose health care reform (again). There's a tip of the hat to the NRA, but not one, not one, actual solution proposed. Apparently, being a Republican is completely a negative test. You don't have to actually do anything, you just have to agree to oppose the right things.

Still, the purity test does provide a convenient check list. You too can be accepted as a Republican if you promise to hate gays, poor people, immigrants, and the environment (which, come to think of it, has been the Republican standard for decades). Out of pure bullet-point envy, I propose that Democrats must also have their own list. Ten litmus tests which every potential Democratic candidate should  be able to ace before they ever hope to put (D) after their names. In fact, I'll go so far as to be more pure than the Republicans. If you can't pass every one of these tests, don't bother to sign on.

(1) We support the rights extended to Americans extended under the Constitution. All the rights. For all Americans.

(2) We support thoughtful, pragmatic solutions that protect American lives, American standards, and American pocketbooks. This includes finding solutions that don't require bombing anyone.

(3) We support an America that has diversity in race, thought, background, and religion not out of some hazy idealism, but because it is our nation's greatest strength.

(4) We oppose torture in any form, in any place, at any time, for any reason.

(5) We support American business, and recognize that an unregulated market is an unfair market, an unstable market, and a market doomed to failure.

(6) We support American workers, and know that when workers are allowed to organize they make their jobs, their companies, and their nation stronger.

(7) We believe that the reputation of our nation is valuable and must be zealously guarded against those who place expediency ahead of law.

(8) We believe in spreading democracy and human rights to the rest of the world by vigorously upholding those ideals here at home.

(9) We believe that access to our government is not for sale. Not in the courthouse, not in the White House, and not in the legislature.

(10) We believe that the health of our planet is not a zero-sum game, not a game of "you go first," and not a game.

Not a particularly detailed set of positions, I know. But then it's not supposed to be. Unlike the GOP, we aren't short of ideas, and unlike Newt, we don't have to dream up a batch of legislation with cute names. We already have real legislation out there that meet these goals. Bills like the Employee Free Choice Act, the Clean Water Protection Act, the American Clean Energy and Security Act, the Affordable Health Care for America Act and many others.

But then, maybe 10 rules aren't enough. I left out the Democratic 11th commandment (thou shalt stop supporting Joe Lieberman's bigger-than-the-Snoopy-balloon-in-the-Macy's-parade-sized ego), and I'm sure I've left out plenty of others. Maybe ones that you feel are vital. What are your suggestions?

Meteor Blades has already written a well-researched and authoritative article on the job summit. So consider this one the completely personal, off-the-cuff alternative cup o' free advice to our president and everyone else involved in trying to find ways to connect Americans with paychecks.

1. Drop the word "infrastructure"
I spent years as an enterprise architect. My father did decades more as a city manager. I can tell you that whether you're talking about database servers or sewer pipe, the word "infrastructure" is the first step in either putting your audience to sleep or making your project seem too abstract to be relevant. If you mean "let's build highways," then say "let's build highways."

2. Don't build highways
Sure, it's popular. No one likes to sit in traffic. No one wants to ride some twisting lane spotted with sad makeshift crosses. Politicians love new highways because they always come with ribbon-cuttings and signs that remind people who their governor is, plus if you build enough of them odds are they will name one after you. The trouble is, the cost of a highway isn't in the building. Why does America have one quintillion failing bridges and six light years of crumbling highways in need of repair? Why is it easier to build a new ring of ex-ex-exurbs than deal with the issues of cities? Because generations of politicians couldn't think of any better way to create jobs than to pave more earth while saddling future generations with the world's largest system of asphalt white elephants.

3. Do big things with small companies.
Conservatives are always going on about how some bill will hurt mom and pop by taxing billionaires. Sometimes mom and pop even start to believe them. But hey, they'll believe this a lot quicker -- deal directly with mom and pop. Make your deals with companies that have fewer than a dozen employees. Hire them even when its for something they've never done before. Hire them especially when it's something they've never done before. Hire solo acts. Hire start ups. Hire retirees who want to put their experience to work and teenagers with enthusiasm. For once, just once, let it be Halliburton and the Carlyle Group and all the rest of those guys that are left pressing their noses against the glass, whimpering that they're not in on the deal.

4. Don't be afraid to do it yourself.
If you can't find a small business to do something, don't sweat it. Do it yourself. Grab people off the streets and out of the 7/11 parking lot. Put them to work. Give them training. Give them encouragement to dream up their first company and take this mess off your hands as fast as possible. Be a school, be an incubator, be America. And hey, still don't hire the big guys. Because the one thing that kills small business like nothing else is big business. You want to come out of this with the next generation of American companies ready to take on the world, not with the last generation only fatter.

5. There's no such thing as "make work" jobs
Work has consequences that are bigger than the thing being worked on. It doesn't matter whether it's cleaning trash along the highway or building rockets for NASA, work itself is a net positive. Besides, what turns out to be important is hard to predict. All those jobs that people complained about as "make work" seventy years ago? Those jobs built things like the gorgeous Timberline Lodge at Mount Hood. The splendid stone bridge at Cumberland Mountain State Park in Tennessee. Beautiful paths, lodges, shelters, cabins, and camping areas at hundreds of state and federal parks -- along with more than 3,000 fire towers to watch over those parks. Many of the structures created by the WPA and the CCC have far outlasted contemporary structures built by people doing "real jobs" and have done so elegantly, wonderfully, in a way that's uniquely and perfectly American.  Which brings me to...

6. My Secret Plan to Put America Back on Top
Beauty. Whether you believe in God, "providence," or simple good fortune, there is no doubt that America is blessed with some of the most spectacular places to be found on Earth. We don't just have the Grand Canyon and the astounding landscapes of Yellowstone, we have the literally matchless diversity of the forests along the Appalachian Mountains. We have the tropics of the Everglades and the glacial valleys of Alaska. Deserts? We got deserts. And lakes, and rivers, and seas. All of them, all of them, would benefit from (here's that word again) infrastructure that doesn't turn them into blurs along the roadway, but delivers us to them (and them to us) in a way that helps us appreciate every inch of what we have. If there must be a bridge across a river, let it be a glorious bridge. Where there's a road, let it be one that complements the landscape, sets it off, like a ring to a jewel. Don't replace miles of ugly blacktop with uglier blacktop, replace it with something achingly excellent. Hire people to be artists and architects. Train them for it. Harness America's two greatest resources -- creativity and diversity. While you're at it, don't stop with restoring the beauty of the natural landscape. Let's preserve some perfect small towns, and some city blocks that have a beauty as dignified as mountains. You know that one neighborhood near you that used to be run down, but which came back to life when artists moved in and turned shabby to chic? Let's call that neighborhood America.

Nature. Hard work. Small business. Art and beauty. That ought to do it. If you want to hire some folks to cook a few hot dogs and serve up apple pie, that would be a nice bonus.

Oh, and I'm serious -- no more roads. Unless, of course, they're lovely.

In the 1980s, Japan went through an enormous economic boom that was fueled mainly by explosive growth in real estate values. With interest rates at record lows and banks increasingly willing to lend larger and larger amounts with smaller down payments and lower incomes, the heights of real estate prices seemed unlimited. Ordinary salary men found themselves real estate millionaires. In Tokyo, one woman spent more than $10 million to widen her driveway by less than a foot. Some sushi bars offered delicacies served off the bodies of naked women and humble noodle shops added dishes sprinkled with flakes of real gold. To accommodate the burst of wealth, there was a new diversity of investment instruments and the highly conservative (in the "resistant to change" sense of the word) Japanese investment community developed a new streak of creativity when it came to finding ways to stow and grow the burgeoning piles of yen.

Our own recent experience in the United States makes it obvious where Japan was headed at the start of the 1990s -- it's just too bad that Japan's experience didn't keep us from inflating exactly the same type of bubble in the first half of this decade. However, if economists were all too willing to ignore the similarity of the Japanese situation in the late 1980s and the US situation in the early 2000s, there was one part of the Japanese experience that rarely left their radar. For years, economists and Wall Street insiders have warned against the possibility that the United States might suffer the horror of the lost decade.

Throughout the 1990s, the Japanese economy, as measured by the national GDP, was stagnant. It didn't shrink, as it would have in a classic recession, but it didn't grow. It just sat there. The prospect of this sustained period of "zero-growth" following on the collapse of an asset-fueled speculation bubble has been so great that warnings against the lost decade have come from both the right and the left.  Paul Krugman cautioned against the possibility of the US slipping into a similar situation. President Obama warned against the lost decade when introducing his stimulus plan. On the right, the Japanese example was used as a warning of what happens when government steps in to try and control the effects of an asset bubble.

But what if Japan's lost decade isn't a peril to be avoided? What if it's the target we should be aiming for?

In 1851, Herber Spencer, a columnist for The Economist magazine, published Social Statics. In the book, Spencer warned that government regulation -- in fact, the simple existence of government -- was standing in the way of man's progress.  

It is clear that man can become adapted to the social state, only by being retained in the social state. This granted, it follows that as man has been, and is still, deficient in those feelings which, by dictating just conduct, prevent the perpetual antagonism of individuals and their consequent disunion

In other words, because the government acts to make people behave, people don't learn to behave on their own. Spencer thought this was true both in daily life and in business affairs. Only by removing the government can man be allowed to evolve by "perpetual antagonism" to a state where mankind becomes capable of a self-sustaining society where actions are fairly rewarded. In shorter terms: government makes you soft.

What Spencer espoused was a pure form of Laissez-faire economics, one that countered the more moderated postulates of Adam Smith as well as the controlled markets of the "American System." He opposed any type of regulation, tax, or restriction on trade. Over the next decades, Spencer would go on to write books on not just economics but psychology, biology, and sociology -- laying the groundwork for the church of pure capitalism that was later adopted by everyone from Ayn Rand to Margret Thatcher.

For most of the last century and a half, the pure conservative idea made only sporadic gains.  The reason for this was that it was so obviously flawed. Any period of deregulation (in America or elsewhere) was sure to be truncated by markets run rampant with short-term greed and "creative" ways to bilk investors and customers. Each such period required an external force to step in before the system reached collapse. Only prompt government action saved the banks, the markets, the savings and loans, the market again, the banks again...

Until recently, this boom-bust "business cycle" was kept in check by some measure of pragmatism. But a funny thing happened in the 1980s. As unrepentant conservatives took their fantasy of pure capitalism out of textbooks and into government, the swings of the cycle became ever stronger. Thoughtful, practical action fell out of style as people increasingly internalized the idea that laissez-faire capitalism was somehow related to democracy. Not only have we accepted radical conservative approaches as answers to disaster, as Naomi Klein covered so well in the Shock Doctrine, we've bought into them as a daily remedy in good times or bad. Times are good? Cut taxes and deregulate. Times are bad? Hell, you better cut taxes and deregulate even more. Rather than being contrite when the cycle of business excess drove the system toward the brink, the church of pure conservatism began to insist that each period of dergulation had not been deregulatory enough.  Surely more deregulation and lower taxes on the wealthy would lead to conservative heaven -- where the conservatives would be rewarded for their righteous independence and the lazy left (filled with state-dependent minorities and corrupt labor leaders) would spiral into a well-deserved hell.

By the later decades of his life, Spencer embraced the idea of a strong central state as a critical partner for capital growth. That message never got to the generations that followed.

In Japan, as the government observed real estate values spiraling out of control and banks getting in over their heads, the government didn't wait for the asset bubble to pop -- it popped it. Then it tightened the flow of money and clamped down with new regulations and restrictions. Businesses screamed. Real estate values tumbled, with commercial real estate falling an amazing 87% (which sounds enormous until you realize it was was just about what that market had gained in the last years of the bubble's most rapid inflation). The imaginary millions vanished almost overnight. The gold flakes were no longer offered at the noodle shops. The government imposed tough new regulations, banks were forced to fold or merge. And the nation of Japan entered into that famous lost decade.

A decade in which the national GDP never declined below the value it held on the day the government stepped in.  A decade in which the maximum unemployment rate was 5.5%. A decade in which the government actually expanded its support of both business and individuals, a decade in which retirees gained new benefits, a decade in which the government did not coerce consumers to fuel the economy with reckless debt, a decade in which not one Japanese citizen lost his or her right to health care services provided by the government.

So just how lost was that decade again?

The Japanese government acted as governments have always done in reasonable, practical countries that are dependent on capitalism. When business gets out of control and markets are near to failure, the government steps in and picks up the burden. The government reestablishes order and holds the economy together while business cleans the red ink from their books and gets back on their feet. The regulatory holes that allowed markets to get out of control are patched to prevent and immediate repeat of the problem. Then, when business is booming again, the government counts on taxes from business to put government's books back in balance so government can be there the next time. And there will be a next time. It's one of the lessons that we taught Japan after World War II, when America was a more practical, pragmatic nation.

That's how it should be working in America today. Government holding the ship on course while business gets over the hangover of a real lost decade -- a decade of binging and excess.  

Only America is suffering from a purity problem. Not just the last decade, but the decades since the 1980s have seen a constant slackening of government regulation and, with the notable exception of a short period under Clinton, business has forgotten that part of the deal is that it support government during good times so that government is there when times are bad. Republicans, having converted to Spencer-style true believers in the divine intelligence of the markets, are loving capitalism to death. Rather than turn to government to damp out the waves of the business cycle and keep the markets on an even keel, they've fought against every attempt to reel in disastrous run-away, speculative balloons.  Instead of helping to craft regulations that patch over cracks exploited by bad actors, Republicans have argued that the cracks were not worth patching. After all, the people driving the markets toward destruction are the smart guys while the people trying to rein them in are just government sluggards. Isn't it clear that the smart guys will always win this race? Really, say conservatives, there's no point trying to regulate since the smart guys will just find a new way to wiggle around any barrier.  It is an argument that should be dismissed out of hand, but remarkably it isn't. And having mistaken rhetoric for reality, conservatives have turned the waves of the business cycle into tsunamis.

Government now has a hard time stepping in to help not just because Republicans have taken the position of preventing government of playing its traditional role, but also because Republicans spent us into such a pit of debt that the government isn't well positioned to shoulder the burdens of business gone sour. We should be able to afford a stimulus plan much larger than the one already established.  We need such a plan, along with direct intervention in the job market, and swift re-regulation of the financial instruments used to take the nation to the brink. However, the dollars that could have saved the economy were spent on building up a huge naval fleet that was never used, a fantasy defense system that has never worked, and lining the pockets of people whose pockets were already heartily lined.

Not only have conservatives-gone-wild emptied the pool as the nation was standing on the high dive, their constant drive to remove more and more regulation means that this dive is the highest ever. Even if we'd had good fiscal policy under Reagan, Bush, and Bush jr. it would be hard to cushion against the kind of blow that was delivered thanks to the anything goes market created by Phil Graham and colleagues.

Even with the support of both parties, it would be very hard to take the level of action needed to address the problems we face.  With one of the major parties doing nothing but shouting "jump! Jump!" as we try to edge back from destruction, the actions of those still grounded in reality will have to be more than tough. They'll have to be heroic.

Having abandoned practicality for a religion of lassiez-faire or death, conservatives don't care if they take everyone along with them on the way down. After all, when the government is handcuffed and the middle class disappearing, it's a sure sign that economic rapture and conservative paradise is just around the corner. Just around the corner. Just wait, you'll see.

It wouldn't hurt us to lose a decade, especially if what's lost is corporate profits in favor of higher employment and rising wages. It wouldn't hurt us to lose a decade in which we've swallowed poisonous ideas about the nobility of greed. Better yet, let's lose two decades -- the 1980s and the 2000s, along with the delusions they've carried.

If you open Karen Armstrong's new book, The Case for God, expecting to find a list of mysterious cures, scientific curiosities, or certified miracles all pointing toward the physical presence of a divine influence in the world, you will be sorely disappointed.  Armstrong has no interest in, and is in fact completely antithetical to, trying to prove God's existence.  Despite this, her book is positioned -- both in marketing and from its opening pages -- as a direct challenge to books like Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, Sam Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation, and Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. How can you make a defense of God if you've no interest in the existence of God? Quite well, actually, and if you do it as sharply as Armstrong, you can make hundreds of pages of what is basically theological analysis both entertaining and informative.

Armstrong argues for an idea very similar to the "non-overlapping magisteria" that were put forward by evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould (and in fact, Gould gets several nice mentions in The Case for God).  She refers frequently to the idea that, in the past, people tended to break arguments into two groups for which she uses the Greek terms logos and mythos. Logos reflects practical, immediate reasoning -- how do we build that aqueduct, what can we make from this wood, which crop would grow best in that field?  Mythos is more aimed at the why -- what does it mean that my friend has died, how can I recapture the joy I felt in a moment of pure experience, how can I find meaning and peace among the world's noise and violence? This sort of approach could easily fall into a gooey cheer for "being spiritual," but Armstrong is not talking about having a nice little breathing session now and then.  She focuses on the 3000 year history of monotheism and the great effort that was put into building flexible, thoughtful religions, on how those religions continue to have a meaningful role in the life of millions, and how the recent history of those religions has led to unfortunate developments that are unique over those three millennia.

No civilization of the past thought it could get by without logos. Pyramids were built with extensive use of mathematics and the most advanced technology of the time. The same could be said of the Acropolis and of medieval cathedrals. When we see those past societies as ignorant and driven out of unreasoning "myths" it's because we are the oddities of history. Having acquired so much new data to feed logos over such a short time, we've become completely centered in scientific reasoning and entirely dismissive of mythos -- perversely, that's even true when we talk about fundamentalist religion. We look back on some ritual of the past and dismiss it as mindless following of tradition and superstition. You don't need to plant at midnight, or sacrifice a lamb, or ferry a statue around the town to satisfy some some dumb animal-headed deity. We search for the hint of reasoning that might be behind these rituals, and discount the idea that they served to establish meaning in lives that were just as busy, joyful, tragic, and brief as our own. We've turned "myth" into another word for fantasy, or lie. In doing so:

We lost the art of interpreting the old tales of gods walking the earth, dead men striding out of tombs, or seas parting miraculously. We began to understand concepts such as faith, revelation, myth, mystery, and dogma in a way that would have been very surprising to our ancestors.

In particular, the concept of faith comes in for a close examination. We understand faith today as a kind of blind acceptance -- like Indiana Jones stepping off into space in his quest for the Holy Grail. Religious people cheer this kind of "faith" and many Christians tout this as the one and only qualification to be among Christ's chosen.  But that's not what the word translated as "faith" meant in Biblical times. It's not even what it meant when the Bible was first translated into English.

The term used in most New Testament texts (the Greek word pistis) meant something closer to loyalty or commitment, than unreasoning belief. When Jesus chastised his followers for their lack of faith, or commended a non-Jew for having faith, he wasn't talking about some unspoken creed. He certainly wasn't praising them for seeing that he was divine. He was talking about follow-through, about living up to ideas of selflessness and humbleness. Even the word "belief" has changed from a Middle English sense of "prize" to our modern idea of "accept at face value." Imagine how different every Christian creed would sound today if we replace "believe in" with "value" and "have faith in" with "commit myself to."

Unquestioning acceptance doesn't figure into the vigorous ethical and theological debates that ran through street conversations and popular songs of previous centuries, and Armstrong sees it as an invention of modern religion. Unable to separate logos and mythos, and trying to view everything through a lens of the logos-based society in which they live, fundamentalists reacted not by rediscovering the transcendent ideas of the past, but by inventing something new. Instead of science and religion, they tried to build a scientific religion in which every aspect of the world must conform to a literal interpretation of scripture (one that ignores the inherent, and quite intentional, contradictions built into that text).  Blind acceptance had to be inserted into the mix because only blind acceptance allows stepping around the wreck trying to force mythos to conform to logos makes of both. If you look for reviews of Amrstrong's book, you'll find that that the harshest reviews are not from the general "secular" press, but from fundamentalists. "Demon inspired" is one of the milder phrases you'll encounter if you make a search for reactions from Christian fundamentalists.

Though the heart of the book is a lengthy examination of theology that starts with the paintings of Neolithic caves and ends with twenty-first century philosophers, don't get the impression that Armstrong asserts that the meaning of religion can be found in a text -- whether that text is the Bible, the Torah, or her own book. The Case for God might as well be called The Case for Religious Practice. And by practice she doesn't mean doing something once, she means doing it over, and over, and over -- like practicing piano -- until you discover the passion at the end of all that rote, mechanical repetition.

Religion... was not primarily something that people thought, but something they did. It's truth was acquired by practical action. It is no use imagining that you will be able to drive a car if you simply read the manual or study the rules of the road. You cannot learn to dance, paint, or cook by perusing text or recipes. The rules of a board game sound obscure, unnecessarily complicated, and dull until you start to play, when everything falls into place. There are some things that can be learned only by constant, dedicated practice, but you find that you achieve something that seemed initially impossible. Instead of sinking to the bottom of the pool, you can float, you may learn to jump higher and with more grace than seems humanly possible, or to sing with unearthly beauty. You do not always understand how you achieved these feats, because your mind directs your body in a way that bypasses conscious logical deliberation, but somehow you learn to transcend your original capabilities. Some of these activities bring indescribable joy. A musician can lose herself in her music, a dancer becomes inseparable from the dance, and a skier feels entirely at one with himself and the external world as he speeds down the slope. It is a satisfaction that goes deeper than merely "feeling good."  It is what the Greeks called ekstatis, which means a stepping outside the norm.

Religion is a practical discipline that teaches us to discover new capacities of mind and heart. ... It is no use magisterially weighing up the teachings of religion to judge their truth of falsehood before embarking on a religious way of life. You will discover their truth -- or lack of it -- only if you translate those doctrines into ritual or ethical action. Like any skill, religion requires perseverance, hard work, and discipline.

Not only does Armstrong see the blind acceptance of doctrine as an impediment to religious practice, she discounts the idea that religious beliefs can have any value unless they are placed into a framework of daily practice, commitment, and ethical action.

If you're waiting for her to stop explaining where the fundamentalists went wrong and start her case against "Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens," you're going to be disappointed again -- because Armstrong seems them as both as flip sides of the same coin.

Like all religious fundamentalists, the new athesists believe that they alone are in possession of the truth; like Christian fundamentalists they read scripture in an entirely literal manner and seem to never have heard of the long tradition of allegoric or Talmudic interpretation... Harris seems to imagine that biblical inspiration means that the Bible was actually "written by God." Hitchens assumes that faith is entirely dependent on a literal reading of the Bible, and that, for example, the discrepancies in the gospel infancy narratives prove the falseness of Christianity: "Either the gospels are in some sense literal truth, or the whole thing is a fraud and perhaps a moral one at that." Like Protestant fundamentalists, Dawkins has a simplistic view of the moral teaching of the Bible, taking it for granted that its chief purpose is to issue clear rules of conduct and provide us with "role models," which, not surprisingly, he finds lamentably inadequate. He also presumes that since the Bible claims to be inspired by God it must also provide scientific information. Dawkins' only point of disagreement with the Protestant fundamentalists is that he finds the Bible unreliable about science while they do not.

Armstrong is not worried about the claim that God can't be found in science. Which is, in fact, a very old claim.

In fact, the new atheists are not radical enough. Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians have insisted for centuries that God does not exist and that there is "nothing" out there...

Her concern is that the Hitchens, Harris, Dawkins camp concern themselves only with tackling a theology that is itself "decidedly unorthodox" and limited -- they want to knock down a sickly child and then proclaim they've won the heavyweight title.

By taking on fundamentalism at both ends of the scale, Armstrong has assured that her book will draw the ire of both camps. In the process she's written a book that's fascinating, packed with information about the history of religion and philosophy, and illuminating when it shows the paths we followed to end up where we find ourselves today (from a political point of view, it's very instructive to look at the origins of modern Christian fundamentalism and in particular to look at how mainstream Protestantism fanned the flames of a dying fundamentalist movement by heaping on ridicule). If nothing else, The Case for God is a terrific reference -- and a splendid bit of long form argument. If you've read any of Karen Armstrong's books in the past -- including her biography of the Buddha, or her personal account of losing faith as a young novitiate -- you'll find some of the same points repeated here, but in new historical contexts. If you haven't read her works before... well, she warns you right in the introduction that this isn't exactly light reading. If you don't want to face detailed descriptions of theological conflicts and the development of religious frameworks, turn back now.

Whether anyone will find that argument convincing, in a world that's increasingly divided into extremes, is difficult to say.  But at least it should inspire some good conversations.

Update [2009-11-8 11:6:2 by Devilstower]: One thing that I greatly regret leaving out of the initial review: if there is a "hero" in this book, it's not God. It's Socrates. You can see the admiration that Armstrong has for that Socratic dialog -- a deep challenging of beliefs, but one that takes place in a friendly and open environment. The point of drawing a line between the fundamentalists and the Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris camp isn't to make an equivalence in beliefs, but an equivalence in approach. That is, yelling past each other doesn't lead to either side moving toward the middle. In fact, that kind of approach has, many times in the past, been the spark for more extremism. No matter what position we hold, I'd like to think that in this place we can take that Socratic approach -- challenging, tough, but still friendly and not resorting to punching below the belt.

Proving once again there is no situation that won't make a blue dog howl against his own party, Pennsylvania Rep. Jason Altmire suggests that losing some races tonight would be good for Democrats because it would get them to stop acting like Democrats before it's too late.

Rep. Jason Altmire (D-Pa.) argued that an election night rebuke for Democratic candidates across the nation could lead some in the party to rethink their plans on health care reform and other issues. ... "if the results show Republicans have a pretty good night, that probably is going to lead some Democrats to think that, going into next year, we need to take a second look at the way that we've done a lot of bills we've addressed up to this point," the Pennsylvania congressman added.

What doesn't seem to occur to Altmire is that Owens and Deeds are among the doggiest of blue dogs. What they should be seeing is that Democrats who run away from their party tend to lose.

But that's the lesson old blue dogs never seem to learn.

We drown the weakling and the monstrosity. It is not passion, but reason, to separate the useless from the fit. -- Seneca (63 CE)

Bananas have large, hard seeds. Lots of seeds, actually -- at least the undomesticated varieties still found in Southeast Asia are loaded with hard seeds. When the plant was originally domesticated (probably over seven thousand years ago in Papua New Guinea), they were grown from those seeds. However, you're unlikely to be surprised to hear that commercial bananas today are lacking seeds. Like seedless grapes, watermelons, and blackberries, they are reproduced though some other means.  In the case of bananas, commercial varieties are propagated form cuttings taken from a parent plant that was a demonstrated producer of large quantities of desirable fruit. So most bananas sold in the world come from "cultivars" of a single plant -- clones of a single seedless parent.

If you were born before the 1950s, you may have eaten two bananas in your life. If you're younger, chances are you've eaten only one.  Of course, you may be fond of plantains, or be lucky enough to live in an area where your grocery provides more variety, but for most of America and Europe "banana" actually means "Vietnamese cavendish banana." That's the banana that's sold in these markets today.  

Before the Cavendish, the bananas sold in most markets went by the name of Gros Michael -- the Big Mike. Big Mike was carefully selected for a whole set of properties that made it a terrific banana for the market.  It had a bright, attractive, relatively unblemished skin. It wasn't just pretty, it was also tough. The yellow skin peeled easily, but was thicker than that on other bananas and Big Mike lasted for a longer period without becoming overripe. That made it easier to ship the bananas without refrigeration. Many people who ate them in their childhood still have the memory of bananas being better back then -- and they are right.  It's not just nostalgia. The Gros Michael had a smooth texture, along with a taste that was sweeter than today's Cavendish.  

Breeding for market appeal isn't new and it isn't unique to bananas.  

A study by Thompson-Reuters confirms what the Obama administration has said: wasted spending in our existing health care system may exceed the total cost of health care reform.

The U.S. healthcare system is just as wasteful as President Barack Obama says it is, and proposed reforms could be paid for by fixing some of the most obvious inefficiencies, preventing mistakes and fighting fraud, according to a Thomson Reuters report released on Monday.

The U.S. healthcare system wastes between $505 billion and $850 billion every year, the report from Robert Kelley, vice president of healthcare analytics at Thomson Reuters, found. ...

"The bad news is that an estimated $700 billion is wasted annually. That's one-third of the nation's healthcare bill," Kelley said in a statement.

One third of the current health care costs goes to wasted spending including unnecessary care and medical mistakes.  

Sounds like a system badly in need of reform.  Is it still the "best health care system in the world" when only 2/3 of the money goes to health care?

What did the right say when the stock market was trailing downward in January? It was very, very important, and a critical indicator of Obama's economic plan.

"There's no confidence in Obama's plan," said Fox's Sean Hannity. "The markets respond to data. They have no confidence."

"The stock market is also demonstrating a lack of confidence in the president's big government agenda," said CNN's Lou Dobbs.

The always "fair and balanced" Murdochers over at the Wall Street Journal had a prescription for Obama.  Only by "channeling Ronald Reagan" could he stave off "Dow 5000."

Dear Mr. President,

Unfortunately, it’s true. The stock market doesn’t like you.

Only one month in and investors are giving up.

And of course, GOP party leader Limbaugh was blaming Obama for the stock market slide the day after the election.

So on Wednesday, the Dow drops about 486 points. It's down 346 points today. But of course, according to the drive-bys, these two events have nothing to do with each other. It's just a coincidence. The market's down today because of the jobless numbers. That's how the drive-bys see it. We have the largest market plunge after an election in history. Thank you, man-child Barack Obama.

Finally, no one can make a prediction like Dick Morris.

MORRIS: It's going to continue to tank. It's lost 12 percent of its value in the last two days. When it thought McCain was going to win because he was surging, it rose all the week before.  ... I think that there may be some profit-taking and some recuperation, but I think that Obama's tax increases will have the same effect as Herbert Hoover's.

So, what does the right have to say when the Dow touches 10,000 -- an increase of over 2,000 pts and 25% since Obama took office? Crickets:

Dow 10,000 just isn't that big a deal, House Republican leader John Boehner said Wednesday morning. ... "At the end of the day, the American people aren't looking at the stock market in terms of putting food on the table," Boehner said. "They want jobs, and they want them now."

Absolutely.  God knows, the Republicans have never been interested in the stock market!

In 2008, the Toyota Prius was the best selling gas-electric hybrid car in the world. In Japan, it was frequently at the top of the list of bestselling cars overall. In 2009, Honda introduced their new hybrid model, which looked... a lot like the Toyota Prius. The reason for this wasn't some plot among Honda designers to confuse their product with the Toyota. It was merely a case of form following function. Both automakers were trying to craft a vehicle that maximized available interior space, and provided the best gas mileage possible. To reach that second goal, they needed to minimize the drag caused by air flowing over the car. The result was two vehicles that, if not identical, could pass for siblings.

The same rules hold true in many areas of commerce.  An Apple iPhone looks a lot like a HTC Touch looks a lot like a Blackberry Storm, because all of them are trying to give their users the largest area of screen possible while keeping the shape and size of the device suitable for the average pocket.  From bicycles to washing machines, there are few pieces of technology that really stand out from the crowd.  Chances are that two items designed for the same task will have very similar forms.

A woman named Mary Anning was one of the first to discover that what applies to gadgets today, applied to animals through the ages.  Mary's father died of tuberculosis in 1810, leaving ten year-old Mary and her twelve year old brother, Joseph, to provide for the family.  They made a living by scouring the cliffs and beaches in Dorset, looking for fossils that weathered out of the limestone in an area known to collectors as the "Jurassic Coast."  Collecting fossils had become fashionable, and while the specimens she found were at first barely enough to keep the family fed, Mary soon gained a reputation for turning up extraordinary finds.  

At the age of twelve, she found the first complete skeleton of an animal called an ichthyosaur.  

When Waxman-Markey made it out of the House, I supported the bill. It isn't perfect -- isn't close to perfect. Honestly what eventually emerged from the House was such weak tea that it's unlikely to have any effect on either the course of global warming, or the structure of our energy infrastructure. I completely understand the position of those so disappointed that they feel obliged to refuse their support.

Still, it is at the very least a demonstration that we are willing to grab hold of what some of the richest interests in the country have spent million on million trying to turn into a "third rail." The same corporations that have wrecked towns, smashed unions, ruined landscapes, and made unbelievable fortunes doing it, managed to get people -- people who have suffered directly because of the policies of those corporations -- to march around carrying signs that conflated "cap and trade" with Nazism. Whether that's a measure of effective marketing, or of abject gullibility, it's still astounding. The same corporations that didn't stop with only passing along every cost increase directly to the consumer, but used disaster and conflict as an excuse to rack up profits unmatched by any industry, ever, in the history of the world, got senators and congressmen to scream that it was government limitations on these corporations that was the problem. The same corporations that abandoned US jobs and US communities to increase their operations in areas where they could ignore safety regulations and pollute to their heart's content, used the pollution that they were helping to create overseas as a lever to help prevent any changes in the country they had all but abandoned. Then, with PR warchests fat from profits carved out of family budgets and measured in lost jobs, they wrapped themselves in the flag and presented themselves with photoshopped populism.

To see anyone oppose these corporations, even in the slightest, is refreshing.  Maybe essential.  Or at least it would have been, had the Senate acted quickly enough to push this legislation through in time to show the rest of the world that the United States government wasn't a marketing arm for oil and coal.  That didn't happen.

With that in mind, I feel a bit more free to respond to the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act (which I'm going to refer to as "Boxer-Kerry" to keep from having to repeat that title and make a distinction with Waxman-Markey) put forward this week by Senators Boxer and Kerry.  There are certainly things to like in the plan.

First, Boxer-Kerry contains significantly more provisions for the promotion of natural gas.  If that sounds like a negative, consider this.  Natural gas produces only half the carbon of coal when used to generate electricity.  Not only can plants be built to burn natural gas, existing coal plants can be retrofitted to burn natural gas instead.  We're so used to thinking of "oil and gas" together, that we may assume that natural gas is mostly in the hands of the same companies that control big oil, but most natural gas is actually controlled by far smaller companies (which is part of the reason natural gas has been all but ignored in previous energy bills). Finally, while peak oil came in 1970 and no new significant coal reserves have been discovered in years, natural gas has enjoyed a resurgence by discovering means of extracting gas from deep shales.  Natural gas reserves are actually heading up while other fuels are going down. I don't want to sound like I've swallowed a T. Boone Pickens promotional brochure (and I still believe his scheme to be economically unworkable), but this combination of features makes gas a good bridge fuel as we work to replace electrical demand currently generated by coal.

Boxer-Kerry also contains a strong emphasis on conservation, with a series of programs designed to reward decreased consumption. The importance of this can't be overstated -- and the ability of Americans to conserve doesn't get nearly the press that it should. This past year has seen a sharp drop in electrical demand, something that opponents of energy legislation said was impossible, and only a small part of that has come from decreased manufacturing. Americans are watching the thermostat, and being rewarded by programs that help them conserve. We recently saw how effective the "cash for clunkers" program was in motivating people to make changes in their cars. Strong incentives to improve energy efficiency will leave us with both short term and long term gains, and do it more cheaply than any other provision. Without buying into the cutesy language of "negawatts," energy not consumed beats the tar out of any form of energy production. More energy is not equivalent to "progress," and using less energy is the most effective way of producing less pollution of all sorts.

On the feature that gets the most press, the carbon offset mechanism, Boxer-Kerry edges out Waxman-Markey by... actually, all the things that are being showcased as improvements (increased flexibility, a "carbon collar" that limits maximum cost, and provisions that make it easier for businesses to buy the offsets they need) actually make the bill weaker. There will be more carbon certificates available, available more readily, and available at a low price. These features ensure that the "cap and trade" structure will never impose enough of an economic cost to encourage movement from high CO2 sources. They've been so well designed to address business concerns, that they've been engineered into being inconsequential. Not that it's strict enough to have an effect under Waxman-Markey.  

Boxer-Kerry also follows Waxman-Markey's lead in awarding massive payments to the biggest winner under both bills: coal. By far the biggest payments in the bill go into the pockets of the industry most responsible for the problem. If this is supposed to protect some huge number of jobs, it doesn't. There are fewer people employed in the coal industry than there are unemployed auto workers in Indiana alone. Yes, America has significant reserves of coal, but here's the thing there's no law that says we have to burn it all. Giving billions to the coal industry didn't make any sense under Waxman-Markey, and it doesn't make any sense in Boxer-Kerry. It doesn't "improve national security," it doesn't generate jobs, and it doesn't take us one inch closer to the energy infrastructure we want. Worst of all, the coal industry is rewarded for past sins, and gives up nothing in return.

Personally, I'd propose an energy bill that's much more simple. Maybe even radical.

No cap and trade. None.

No funding for "clean coal." Zero.

If we really want to make advances, we need to provide the funding and guaranteed orders that will allow  alternative sources to compete on price.  For a fraction of the funding now offered for the R & D of CO2 sequestration, we can ensure that solar and wind actually outcompete coal in the marketplace.  Give them the boost they need to simply undercut the bastards.  If that's not coming fast enough, use the natural gas to cut your CO2 in half by retrofitting the existing plants.  For God's sake, don't do anything that encourages building more of the plants now causing the bulk of the problem.

If we really want to improve natural security, we won't do it by building power plants of any type.  Instead we have to entangle the two parts of our energy picture by electrifying transportation. Providing funds for mass transportation and for electric vehicles is reducing America's demand for oil. Everything else has nothing to do with it.

And hey, if you really must give money to coal why not at least demand that mountaintop removal be off the table forever so they're giving up something before you lay out the buffet of federal dollars?

Between 5,000 and 7,000 tigers live in the United States. That there should be that much uncertainty about just how many 500 pound cats are sharing our nation is a little surprising, since even the difference between those two numbers — the 2,000 tigers that we may have — is more than the population of tigers remaining in India. All of these tigers are supposedly behind bars. Most are in zoos, but a large number are involved in some type of entertainment (circuses, stage acts, etc). An insane number (in this case, insane being any number greater than zero) are in private homes as pets — a practice still allowed by over a dozen states. One county over from me there are two tiger sanctuaries located only a few miles from each other where a score of aging tigers slumber. One of them is a combination tiger sanctuary and golf course, which would seem to offer some unique opportunities for "hazards."

Across the country, there are frequent reports of tigers or other large exotic cats spotted "in the wild," if slouching through the shrubbery at the edge of a subdivision can be considered wild. No doubt some small number of tigers and other big have slipped loose over the years. Still, even if all the doors on all those tigers were to slip open at the same time, it would certainly result in temporary chaos and more than a few... incidents. But in the long term the results are easy to predict: all the tigers would die.

From the Columbia Journalism Review a short lesson in modern newsroom economics.

Katie Couric’s annual salary is more than the entire annual budgets of NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered combined. Couric’s salary comes to an estimated $15 million a year; NPR spends $6 million a year on its morning show and $5 million on its afternoon one.

But hey, Katie interviewed Glenn Beck on the evening news, and then followed up by devoting the whole of her new online "news program" to Beck, who has a new book out.  A book from a publisher that happens to be owned by CBS.

When you consider that NPR is doing news and Couric is doing pitch sessions for CBS-owned products, it's really not a fair comparison.  Billy Mays made about $10 million a year.  That's a much better match up with Katie.

Author, media analyst, and graphic novelist Douglas Rushkoff's new book Life Inc. discusses the rise of corporations, their role in society, and how by internalizing "corporate values" we've crippled the way in which we interact with other Actual Human Beings. Tonight, he's agreed to sit down with Daily Kos readers for a Q & A session.

Q: You date the development of corporations back to the Renaissance. Doesn't that suggest that corporations have been a part of our rise from Medieval culture?

Douglas Rushkoff: Well, the fact that the first real corporations were invented at the very end of the Middle Ages certainly suggests that they were part of what took us from that era to the next. It's the idea that we "rose" from one era to the next that we might want to call into question. Most of us think of the Middle Ages as the "dark" ages, and the Renaissance as a golden wonderful age of reason and art and development. A lot of that just isn't true. It was a mixed bag, at best.

The late Middle Ages was characterized by massive decentralization. The first six or seven centuries of the Middle Ages in Europe were mostly feudalism: ultra-wealthy lords owned everything. But by the eleventh and twelfth centuries, that began to change. A merchant class, capable of traveling from region to region, was quickly growing richer. Their wealth represented a threat to the feudal lords, who were essentially landlocked. They only knew how to extract wealth from the lands and people they controlled. Any loss of control represented a loss of power and wealth. Meanwhile, people farming the lands were bringing grain to the grainstore and getting receipts that could be used as local currency. These were currencies based on the abundance of crop, and were transacted vigorously. (They actually lost value over time, since some of the grain would be lost to spoilage each year, and the grain store needed to be paid. This kept people spending the money instead of hoarding it.) So local economies grew, money was reinvested in preventative maintenance on machinery, and on keeping workers happy. People worked four days a week at most, ate a lot, and the population grew faster than at any other time in European history. There was so much extra money, that small towns built cathedrals as a way of investing in the future. The late middle ages is also known as "the age of cathedrals." They weren't funded by the Vatican, but by the towns themselves.

The problem was that all this economic activity left out the Lords and other aristocrats, who had spent the previous few centuries simply being wealthy. They had to come up with a way to make money simply by having money. The two main innovations they came up with were corporations and central banking. Corporations gave them a way to invest their money passively. The king would pick a company, and then grant it a monopoly charter in return for a piece of the business. Each monopoly charter gave a particular company exclusive right to extract value from a given industry or region. So British East India Company would get exclusive control over America, and so on. Under the new system, however, people weren't allowed to trade with each other anymore. They weren't allowed to create and exchange value directly. They had to do it through whichever corporation controlled the industry in which they wanted to work. So American colonists who grew cotton couldn't sell it to other people, or, worse, fabricate it into clothes. This was illegal. They had to sell it to the Company, at fixed prices. The Company then shipped it back to England, where another monopoly corporation made it into clothes, and then shipped it back to America, where it was the only clothing permissible to be purchased. This biased corporations toward looking for ways of extracting value rather than innovating. There was no need to innovate - the markets were closed to everyone but themselves.

The second innovation was centralized currency. All local currencies were made illegal, and people had to borrow money, instead, from the central bank. At interest. Using anything but "coin of the realm" was punishable by death. But this gave the already-wealthy a way to make money by having money: lending it at interest. And yes, this led to a growth imperative. In order for money to be paid back at interest, the economy has to grow at the rate of interest. Where does the additional money come from? It is also borrowed. And so on.  

People got so poor, so dependent on jobs in the city, so incapable of doing subsistence farming on lands that were taken way that - just thirty years after France made local currency illegal - they had the big outbreak of the plague.

But a grow-by-any-means economy was all pretty consonant with the original Colonial powers' desire to grow into Africa, the Americas, and Asia. And it worked as long as there were new regions to conquer - in which to grow - and enough soldiers to conquer them.

It also worked to centralize all value creation. We celebrate the Renaissance, that there were great wealthy families who sponsored the great Renaissance artists. But why did they need patrons to begin with? Because all money came from the center.

So yes, economic and industrial development that came after might, in part, be credited to these centralizing innovations. Would we have developed battleships had we not been seeking to conquer new territory? Perhaps not. Would we have developed the rails and the automobile? Maybe not the same way - but I'm not sure developing them via corporate lobbies, taking land rights away from municipalities, doing massive PR campaigns to convince Americans they needed private homes in the suburbs in order to fulfill the American Dream, was the very best way to implement them.

So the short answer to your question is yes, our "rise" from Medieval culture was largely a function of these Renaissance innovations. But we don't know what kind of society might have arisen by now if our industrial development had followed human need rather than a quest to centralize power in the face of a rising middle class.

At your nearest bookstore, you'll find racks of books that deliver some edifying bit of history in an entertaining package. You'll also find the ground thick with books that leave you in despair over some aspect of our unbalanced society. But it's a rare book that doesn't just leave you better informed, doesn't just make you angry, but delivers that gape-mouthed moment, that instance in which your forehead becomes marked by a savage palm-slap, that second when you realize just how completely you've been duped.

Reading Douglas Rushkoff's Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back, you can’t help but recall the statement often attributed to Winston Churchill: history is written by the victors. What we tend to forget is that the victors of every battle for the last half a millennium have been the same -- corporations. That’s true if we’re talking about the Battle of the Bulge, or the battle to keep down your own bulge.

It’s easy, almost expected, that we should rail against the intrusion of corporations in our lives. Gouging by Haliburton. Destruction of communities by Walmart. Bonuses paid out to the executives of name-your-least-favorite-corporation-here.

But corporate influence is more than that. Deeper than that. It extends farther into the past than most of us realize (look too closely, and half of what you were taught in grade school goes up in a puff of marketing), and it extends more profoundly into our own "hearts and minds" than we want to admit. To a frightening degree, we’ve modeled our own lives, not after the people we say we admire, but after the corporations we claim to hate.

Many of the specific incidents Rushkoff uses in his book are familiar, but stripped of marketing inventions, those events have a very different feel. Underneath the textbook heroics, characters from the great "Age of Exploration" turn out to have been unconcerned with expanding human knowledge, or even with finding new markets. Instead they actively worked against exploration to protect their own interests. Adam Smith, conservative saint, is revealed as a crusader against the spread of international corporations, as someone whose plea to preserve small, local business was co-opted to serve the corporations he was warning against.

How would the people screaming around the reflection pool this past Saturday react if you told them that a big part of what drove the American Revolution was not the unfair actions the British government, but the grinding tactics of British corporations? That it was as much about stopping laissez-faire economics, as it was about turning back taxation without representation?

Quick: what's the purpose of a corporation? If you think about it for a few minutes, you can come up with a justification about encouraging innovation by protecting investors from failing along with their ideas. The truth is, corporations are such a part of our lives that most of us are as likely to ask the purpose of the sun. And heck, every heartwarming story of a corporate CEO seems to start with the tale of how he or she drove three businesses into the ground before hitting it big, and who would want to mess with a system like that?

Rushkoff shows that corporations don't owe their origins to a desire for fostering innovation or to open up the investor class. It wasn't about building an "ownership society" or encouraging enterprise. Corporations were invented to stop all those things. They were invented because the ruling class saw that the middle class was ascendant, that the would-be bourgeoisie were expanding their wealth and threatening to squirm out from under the thumbs of their upper-class lords. The aristocracy created the corporation to perpetuate the control of the aristocracy.

Corporations are business at a distance. Work once (or twice, or many times) removed from the people who do the work. They allow difficult tasks to be performed by surrogates who may never had met the people they serve. They allowed the aristocracy to get their hands dirty without actually getting their hands anywhere near the dirt. It's business, and life, lived as an abstraction. Why should we be surprised that modern corporations are increasingly reliant on complex and incomprehensible derivatives to fund their business, when they are themselves a kind of unquantifiable derivative of real people and real work?

If a casino can be described as a machine designed to extract money from those who come inside, a corporation is a machine designed to extract money from everyone it touches. Not just consumers, not just investors, but also anyone unfortunate enough to be in the way of resources the corporation hopes to exploit. The money from this machine is then funneled to a few people at the top. It's pocket feudalism, designed to sustain by law the hierarchy that threatened to be undermined by pesky things like freedom and individual enterprise.

It’s not that individual corporations are bad. It’s that corporations can’t help but be bad. It’s built into the design.

Integral to every modern corporation is a model that incorporates (literally) the power structure of the late Middle Ages, and the colonization strategy of 18th century empires. They don't open a store in an area, they establish a colony. That store isn’t the corporation, it’s an instrument of the corporation, and that’s a very different thing. The corporation establishes a beachhead in an area using any tactic necessary. If possible, they gain the help of local governments, secure the assistance of local land developers, whet the appetites of local consumers, even capture the unwitting aid of soon-to-be competitors with talk of "revitalizing" the area. All of which helps provide the advantage that the corporation needs to offer goods in a variety and at a price no local operation can match. If local competitors do happen to prove particularly inventive or persistent, the corporation steps up the pressure by slashing prices well below costs. They have the resources to keep this up. Small stores, dependent on making profit at only a few locations, can’t match these cuts. If the locals still hold out, the corporation can open a second store, or a third, raising the stakes until at last the locals throw up their hands in surrender. These are acceptable expenses. After all, once the corporation has finally driven local competition to extinction, they can always close the other stores and raise prices. And they will, because the intention is the same as it is everywhere else -- exploit all local resources as completely as possible.

You don’t have to make too many changes to see how this scenario applies equally to Walmart moving into the nearest small town, and Leopold II capturing the Congo.

What each chapter of the book drives home is that this activity doesn't require evil people at the helm. There doesn't need to be a cackling set of greedy bastards circling the board table. The structure of a corporation dictates how it will operate. Force of law and force of habit ensures that any action not intended to improve the corporation's means of exploitation is discarded. The corporation is drive to act... like a corporation. It's not an evil plot, it's an evil system.

Rushkoff provides numerous stories of the lengths that corporations have gone to in order to expand their reach. How do car dealers match demand to production capability after World War II? Well, you don’t actually have to destroy all public transportation -- just enough of it to leave people worried that the rest could go away at any time. Land developers didn’t need to ruin every city neighborhood and institution to raise the value of that worthless land on the outskirts -- they only had to make things bad enough that the newly minted commuters happy about their decisions to move on down the road.

Again, some of these actions fit together so well that they seem like parts of a fabulous plot. But a plot is not required. It's the outcome of the a corporate model that distances the people at the top of the later-day aristocracy from their actions. It's the inevitable result of the way corporations are formed and regulated. In it’s own way, the interwoven actions of corporation are organic.

The destruction of local businesses and the gutting of cities is only the medium-scale activity of the field on which corporations play. Armed with the assistance of the tools they’ve created -- the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization -- modern corporations can quite easily bludgeon whole nations. Why don't the nations that are the subjects of massive loans make economic recoveries? Because they're not supposed to. The structure of the loans, and the regulations that back them up, are designed like those of the most odious pay-day loan. They're designed to get nations in debt, then deeper in debt, while extracting from them anything of actual worth. Nations that participate may think they're getting a hand up in the international market. Instead they find that they are losing their best assets, surrendering their ability to control their own markets, giving up the ability to feed their own people, and providing cheap labor, raw materials, and a handy place to scatter the most toxic pollution.

I confess that I've watched protestors of these international organizations with a kind of disdain. How could the actions of a group of bankers managing loans to countries who are already poor, be the source of such emotions? All I can say now is; I'm sorry, I didn't understand.

To make an appropriately corporate-driven analogy, reading Life Inc. is like suddenly becoming "Claritin Clear" -- only it sometimes feels as if the film is being removed from your eyes with a pair of pliers. Once the comfortable illusions have been stripped away... it's hard to get them back.

But the stories about corporations aren’t the worst of it. In fact, that’s just the set up. The world is under the control of giant international companies which employ ruthless tactics to break down national barriers -- actually, who often don't even notice national barriers -- and we've all cooperated to the extent that we've helped them dismantle the few things that stood between these relentless abstractions and real people. Yeah, what else is new?

What’s new, at least relatively so, is the extent to which we’ve internalized the values of corporations. We criticize corporations for acting as if only the next quarter counts, but how often do we treat our own investments (an not just our financial investments) in the same way? How often is our response on any issue made on corporate terms, on terms that assume life is a zero-sum game where your advancement means my stagnation?

Just to give one example: language. How many times over the last four years have we sought the perfect phrase to remedy What's the Matter with Kansas? How much grudging admiration have we given to the effect of death tax and partial birth abortion? And in reaction, how much time have we devoted to strategies that first require us to treat our fellow Americans as if they are idiots? We roll our eyes at the antics of Glenn Beck, but if we feverishly look for ways to persuade rather than educate, how are we any better? There's a huge danger in treating politics as a kind of intellectual race to the bottom, a contest to reduce talking points to a three word phrase that carries the most emotional wallop. You can run that experiment a thousand times, and you know who will win? The side that has the best professional marketeers. You want to make a bet on which side that would be?

How about instead of working on our "elevator pitch," we work on our conversation skills? What if, instead of marketing, we explain? That's just one way, and it's not a small one, in which we can stop acting as if we are Progressives, inc, dealing with potential customers, and start acting as if we are real people trying to persuade other real people of the benefits of our approach.

Author, lecturer, graphic novelist, and documentary filmmaker Douglas Rushkoff will be here tomorrow night at 8PM EST to participate in a Q & A session. Come by, participate in the discussion, and voice your own certified non-corporate (tm) opinions)

There’s a popular story that concerns a very unpopular gate.  In the walls of first century Jerusalem, there was a city gate so small that it was of limited use.  A person passing through this gate would find it so low that they were forced to bow their head to pass.  A tall man might even be driven to his knees.  There was no question of riding any sort of mount through this gate.  A camel or donkey led through the tiny opening would find itself pressed from all sides, and any goods normally carried by the animal would have to be removed.  So, whether they liked it or not, anyone using this gate would enter the holy city in a posture of penitence and with their worldly goods — at least temporarily — left behind.  The tiny gate was known as “the needle’s eye.”

What makes the story so popular is this.

Then Jesus said to his disciples, "I tell you with certainty, it will be hard for a rich person to get into the kingdom of heaven.  Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to squeeze through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to get into the kingdom of God." — Matthew 19:23-24

Jesus’ statement has been making people wince for two millennia. The idea that "the eye of the needle" might have been the name for a snug gate or mountain pass is comforting to those inclined toward a literal interpretation of Jesus's statement (especially since, despite all the Old Testament smiting, the only people God whacks in the New Testament are a couple who welch on their commitment to hand everything over the church).

Unfortunately for those seeking to evade a divine poverty edict, the story of the gate is a myth. Tracing back the tale of the little gate shows that the story first appeared in the Middle Ages, as a kind of sop for those who weren’t ready to dispense with all their wealth (but who might have been inclined to share some of that wealth with the established church).  Though it’s a commonly told story today, and has been for centuries, there’s no indication “the eye of the needle” was ever the name for any pass, gate, path or portal during the first century. There’s no getting around it, the needle in Jesus’ story was of the sewing kind, and the eye was small enough that any camel passing through would have to be first reduced to something very close to its component atoms.

Fortunately for anyone (and any camels) confronting this dilemma, it's likely that Jesus was less literal in his interpretation of the statement than many modern followers -- stuffing that camel through a needle had been an aphorism for "darned tough" for several centuries before some rich kid started sweating about his afterlife. So there was no literal gate in the walls of Jerusalem, but also no literal needle. The eye of the needle, and the nervous camel, represent only the difficulty of reaching sanctity when your heart is more set on wealth.

Likewise, there was no literal gate sitting on the shores of the widening Atlantic at the end of the Cretaceous Period, 65 million years ago.  But there might as well have been, and if this gate needed a label, it would be this:

It will be hard for a large creature to get into the Tertiary Period.

Bank executives may be collecting millions in bailout cash, but meanwhile on the other side of town

Low-wage workers are routinely denied proper overtime pay and are often paid less than the minimum wage, according to a new study based on a survey of workers in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.... In surveying 4,387 workers in various low-wage industries, including apparel manufacturing, child care and discount retailing, the researchers found that the typical worker had lost $51 the previous week through wage violations, out of average weekly earnings of $339. That translates into a 15 percent loss in pay.

Low wage workers are getting 15% of their pay stolen, while executives earning hundreds of time as much whine about reduced bonuses and not being able to brag about their private jets. Of course, giving some support to unions might be one way to deal with this, but we don't need unions.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) promised that no Republicans will vote for the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), should it come to the Senate floor. ... In a speech before the business organization Commerce Lexington, McConnell explained that the reason for such uncompromising opposition is that workers don’t actually want to join unions due to the "very enlightened management in this country now, treating employees better and employees have decided they don’t want to pay the dues."

It's too bad all those folks out there getting angry are so distracted by imagined injustice that they don't have time for the real thing.

When FDR moved in during the Great Depression, his economic team purposely excluded investment industry "veterans" who were comfortable with the way things were done on Wall Street. Not only did these outsiders impose stiff regulations that reversed the excesses that had brought on the depression, they didn't reward people for screwing up the way we are today.

The top five executives at 10 financial institutions that took some of the biggest taxpayer bailouts have seen a combined increase in the value of their stock options of nearly $90 million, the report by the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies said.

"Not only are these executives not hurting very much from the crisis, but they might get big windfalls because of the surge in the value of some of their shares," said Sarah Anderson, lead author of the report, "America's Bailout Barons," the 16th in an annual series on executive excess.

That's what happens when you worry more about the delicate nerves of the investment bankers than you do about making sure problems are solved.

Oh, and the regulations that will keep the excesses of the last decade from gutting the economy again? Nonexistent.

Newsweek brings you the five biggest lies of the health care debate. These are whoppers so big that anyone should be embarrassed to be associated with them. But these lies didn't originate from some obscure quarter, and they're not being spread over the backyard fence. Here's a quick look at the Big Lies, and just a few examples of how the top names on the right are willing to bathe in bullshit if it helps their funders in the insurance industry.

1. You'll have no choice in what health benefits you receive.

If you read the bill – Title I, Subtitle E, Sections 141-143, on pages 41-48 – it turns out that the Health Choices Commissioner’s job is, essentially, to make your health choices for you. ... The so-called "Health Choices Commissioner" will be the closest the United States has come to having an absolute ruler since King George III.
-- Heritage Foundation

2. No chemo for older medicare patients.

After he was diagnosed with brain cancer more than a year ago, Sen. Kennedy had excellent care, including surgery and chemotherapy, before he died last week. ... In the future, will a man of Kennedy's age, with brain cancer but without the means of offsetting his own healthcare costs, be kept alive, operated on, given chemotherapy -- by a government obsessed with cutting healthcare costs? Rationed care is coming, and the death panels will not be far behind.
-- Pat Buchanan

3. Illegal immigrants will get free health insurance.

The National Council of La Raza and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus pushed to include illegal immigrants in the president’s healthcare effort. Despite statements to the contrary, the Obama administration could force the American people to pay for the healthcare of millions of illegal immigrants in the U.S.
-- Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas)

4. Death panels will decide who lives.

The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's "death panel" so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their "level of productivity in society," whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.
--- Sarah Palin


In Oregon, the law permits doctors to assist in the suicide of terminal patients who wish to end their lives. Let us assume numerous patients have Alzheimer's and, so, cannot be part of the decision to end their lives. Who then makes the decision to continue or end life? Would it be unfair to call the decision-makers in those cases a death panel?
-- Pat Buchanan


"I think that’s a legitimate point. You don’t have to call it death panels if you don’t want to. You can call it a panel. I call it rationing."
-- Michael Steele

5. The government will set doctors' wages.

First of all, what must be done, is to cancel the entirety of the current President's current policies ... for no lesser reason than that your sister might not end up in somebody's gas oven.
-- Lyndon LaRouche

What's that? This last statement is disconnected from the health care debate and really just the blathering of conspiracy crazed nutcase LaRouche? And how exactly do you tell the difference between that and the Republican leadership?

It's no wonder that so many "conservatives" mistook the question of a LaRouche Obama-is-a-Nazi speaker at Barney Frank's town hall for one of their own. They're all ladling their ideas from the same cesspit.