Even if I wasn't a New Yorker, or Jewish - two legitimate legacies of willful anxiety - I'd still be prone to doubt and rumination about how It All is going to Go. To compensate for this tendency, I have a small mental scrapbook of things that Undeniably Worked Out. Quitting a job to write something and actually completing what I wrote. Falling in love at first sight with Donna, who turned out to actually like me too. Election Night 2008. I got another one this week, when my friend Laura found her dog Jackie after losing her, for a week. In an unknown city. During a honeymoon. The story is here, but the moral seems to be, as absurd as it still feels to say, sometimes things work out, misfortunes are vacated, and you're forced to not only set down your sandwich board with "martyr" on one side and…

Yesterday I heard about CorpWatch and Crocodyl.org from Tonya Hennessy and Lena Zuniga. The Crocdyl tool shows how the big teeth of corporations lead down to small spiny tails in subsidiaries all over the world. It also seems very usable, though I have not dug in. They are hoping that wiki-people from all over will participate by adding information on subsidiaries and corporate activity from all corners. But they also have a couple of cracker-jack researchers keeping up core profiles for about 50 corporations. Funding sources include Sunlight, of course ... From a Revenue Watch perspective, I wonder what the best use of a platform like this is. Corporate watchdogging is implied in much of RWI's work, for instance in the participation of industry in EITI, or more explicitly in the PRT index we produced last year with Transparency International. But it is central to RWI's mission primarily as part…

As the health care debate turns ugly at the local level, the anger and disorientation of Republican voters is a ready tool for corporate demagogues like Sean Hannity, who's calling for grassroots Obama opponents to "Become a part of the mob" in opposition to health care reform. The NYT account of the town-hall clashes around the country shows what happens when a sleepy, corporate, top-down democracy begins to shake its arms and feel the pins and needles (and apparently blows in some places) of local participation. Also makes me wonder if you can shove the elephant of a nationally mobilized mob into the parlor of local, handshake politicking. And the vast and permanent influence of online media is evident throughout the story - from the emails exhorting and instructing disruption, to the LinkedIn page that outs a protestor who claims no party-based motive. The town halls themselves, of course, are…