The Happy Tutor explains right wing political philosophy and the purpose of right wing philanthropy. One-upping John Locke, he muses, “What we owe the poor is the least they will accept in lieu of cutting our throats. We call that the social contract.”

Ann Florini argues that a new form of social capital is being created: global social capital. Enabled by new forms of information technology, what Jim Moore calls the “second superpower” is pushing a corporate and government “transparency movement” into high gear. Think freedom of information, but applied to corporations. In other words, they can’t control what they can’t see, but what they can’t see can see them all too clearly. What that will amount to is protest and reform movements that know their enemy, perhaps even better than he knows himself.

That’s a losing strategy for mammon. Time will tell if they pick up on it and start using the second superpower’s own tricks. I suspect that most governments and corporations are too busy to bother, although they probably aren’t too dumb to change. If anything, mammon knows how to survive, and right now it’s doing more than that–it’s thriving. The trick will be for the second superpower (1) to build enough social capital to at least hold its own on a global scale and (2) to convince mammon that it can still thrive if it plays well with others. There are some encouraging signs.