Apple (AAPL) is about to take our digitalized, gadgetized life to a whole new level with the introduction of the iPad next month. There’s a quietly building synergy here, because in the same year that our consumption of media (probably) changes forever, through the iPad’s enabling of the handheld, intimate Web, the way we get around will also begin to change forever, as the first generation of mass-market electric vehicles arrives.

All established carmakers are trying to bring the consumer products/gadget culture into their vehicles, because that’s what buyers are asking for. They want to be able to download music from the Web and play it immediately in their cars. They want to be able to stream video. They want their cars to have GPS-enabled situational awareness. Cars aren’t yet computers. But even though the Great Toyota Recall has caused some consumers to question the increased electrification of the automobile, cars are becoming more like computers every day.

This has led some to call for the same kind of leap that we made when centralized mainframe computing gave way to distributed, personal computing. We’re not exactly talking about open-source cars, although that idea has already been developed and executed on a modest scale. Rather, we’re talking about remaking mobility along the lines of technological innovation and powering it with electricity derived, as much as is possible, from renewable resources. (It’s not clear that this will be entirely possible, but that’s the hope.)

The whole New Mobility scene is highly fragmented, but all the players have one thing in common: They want to move the argument forward. This could take the form of Tesla Motors and its $100,000-plus high-performance electric Roadster, or it could look like a modest little no-nonsense commuter car, such as the REVA G-Wiz. We could see the batteries as a semi-permanent part of the car, as they are now with Toyota Prius. Or we could see batteries become swappable, as they would be under a scheme proposed by Better Place.

The point is that carmakers big and small are all driving toward the same convergence, which we might as well just go ahead and call the iCar. 

So who’s going to succeed in building it? In other words, what new car or car company will pair best with the iPad, one contraption remaking mobility, the other radically disrupting media consumption?

By all rights, it should be Tesla, the most Apple-like of the electric carmakers. But it won’t be, because the company’s extremely compelling product is available only to wealthy customers. Other E.V. makers are still in evolutionary stages or also planning to sell cars that are too pricey. 

That leaves us with the only carmakers who have announced an E.V. or plug-in E.V. for 2010: Nissan and General Motors.

On its face, the Nissan Leaf, an all-electric car capable of traveling 100 miles on a charge, looks more like the iCar. It appeals precisely to the early-adopting core of urbanites, San Franciscans and New Yorkers and their ilk, who will be first in line for iPads and who are already up to their eyeballs in other Apple products. They own multiple iPods, multiple iPhones. 

But there’s a problem, and it’s tipped off by Nissan’s recent announcement that it plans to build the Leaf in England, far from the U.S., and with a price closer to $40,000 than $20,000: Apple’s reliably early-adopting gadget crowd … doesn’t need a car. It certainly doesn’t need to take out a car loan on a $40,000 ride to satisfy its vision of itself and its destiny. It can do that with an iPad and about $500.

So what about GM’s Chevy Volt? Well, it’s not aimed at an urban audience. Instead, it’s optimized for garage-owning commuters, who’ll be able to use its 40-mile battery range to get to work and back each day, plugging in overnight to recharge, but want to have a small gas motor to fall back on when the juice runs out—or just to use for longer excursions.

But wait a second, can’t we count Ford (F) in here someplace? Not really, even though Ford has done a solid job of bringing the consumer-electronics experience into its cars. Ford doesn’t have an E.V. or plug-in that will compete with the Leaf or the Volt arriving this year (there are plans for an EV next year, however). All it has is a delivery van, the Transit Connect, designed for fleet customers. Definitely not an iCar.

And thus, because 2010 is the Year of the iPad, and the Year of the Electric Car, it must also be the Year of the iCar, just not the one you think. Of course it’s the Volt, a car that was originally designed to be everything an all-electric, putative iCar isn’t. The Volt was supposed to push forward the technology pioneered by the original game-changing hybrid, the Prius. It was supposed to be a Prius killer, and a market definer for extended-range, plug-in hybrids. It wasn’t meant to go up against the Leaf.

But reluctantly, it has become the iCar. And GM has figured this out, as Chevy’s presence at SXSW decisively indicates. But, you might ask, how can the iCar be a … suburban thing? My answer: Does it really matter? The iCar is the iCar—its natural environment doesn’t have to be the realm of other iProducts. But given the overall digitizing trends in the auto industry, it will be the leader in both widespread (semi)-electrification of mobility, as well as the networking of the personal-transportation grid. It will also enable the oil companies to stay in the game.

So it happens in Texas rather than New York—so what? What matters is that in 2010 we get our iPads, we get E.V.s—and on top of it all, we get the iCar.

And you might ask: Wait, didn’t you say the iCar is a stupid idea? 

Well, I did. But now that I’ve seen how GM is thinking about the Volt and studied some of the reactions, I think the actual iCar may not be the iCar I complained about. Rather than a reinvention, it will be an evolution. I know this is going to require you to think it through, but just as the iPad is really just an evolution of tablet devices that came before and failed, so the Volt is a car that delivers mobility and is a modest rather than radical advancement over the previous paradigm. Apple doesn’t ask us to accept something shockingly different; it asks us to think differently about how we already do things (buy music, browse the Web, read magazines, think of our cell phones). And so shall the Volt, our true iCar.

Fresh off his party's success in local elections, Geert Wilders spoke to the House of Lords in London on Friday. He also showed his controversial film "Fitna."

His very appearance was a victory, inasmuch as the British government turned him away when he tried to enter for the same purpose last yer. Here is most of what Wilders said to the House of Lords:

Thank you. It is great to be back in London. And it is great that this time, I got to see more of this wonderful city than just the detention centre at Heathrow Airport.

Today I stand before you, in this extraordinary place. Indeed, this is a sacred place. This is, as Malcolm always says, the mother of all Parliaments, I am deeply humbled to have the opportunity to speak before you.

Thank you Lord Pearson and Lady Cox for your invitation and showing my film 'Fitna'. Thank you my friends for inviting me.

I first have great news. Last Wednesday city council elections were held in the Netherlands. And for the first time my party, the Freedom Party, took part in these local elections. We participated in two cities. In Almere, one of the largest Dutch cities. And in The Hague, the third largest city; home of the government, the parliament and the queen. And, we did great! In one fell swoop my party became the largest party in Almere and the second largest party in The Hague. Great news for the Freedom Party and even better news for the people of these two beautiful cities.

And I have more good news. Two weeks ago the Dutch government collapsed. In June we will have parliamentary elections. And the future for the Freedom Party looks great. According to some polls we will become the largest party in the Netherlands. I want to be modest, but who knows, I might even be Prime Minister in a few months time!

Ladies and gentlemen, not far from here stands a statue of the greatest Prime Minister your country ever had. And I would like to quote him here today: "Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. No stronger retrograde force exists in the World. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step (...) the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome." These words are from none other than Winston Churchill wrote this in his book 'The River War' from 1899.

Churchill was right.

Ladies and gentlemen, I don't have a problem and my party does not have a problem with Muslims as such. There are many moderate Muslims. The majority of Muslims are law-abiding citizens and want to live a peaceful life as you and I do. I know that. That is why I always make a clear distinction between the people, the Muslims, and the ideology, between Islam and Muslims. There are many moderate Muslims, but there is no such thing as a moderate Islam.

Islam strives for world domination. The Quran commands Muslims to exercise jihad. The Quran commands Muslims to establish shariah law. The Quran commands Muslims to impose Islam on the entire world.

As former Turkish Prime Minister Erbakan said: "The whole of Europe will become Islamic. We will conquer Rome". End of quote. Libyan dictator Gaddafi said: "There are tens of millions of Muslims in the European continent today and their number is on the increase. This is the clear indication that the European continent will be converted into Islam. Europe will one day soon be a Muslim continent". End of quote. Indeed, for once in his life, Gaddafi was telling the truth. Because, remember: mass immigration and demographics is destiny!

Islam is merely not a religion, it is mainly a totalitarian ideology. Islam wants to dominate all aspects of life, from the cradle to the grave. Shariah law is a law that controls every detail of life in a Islamic society. From civic- and family law to criminal law. It determines how one should eat, dress and even use the toilet. Oppression of women is good, drinking alcohol is bad.

I believe that Islam is not compatible with our Western way of life. Islam is a threat to Western values. The equality of men and women, the equality of homosexuals and heterosexuals, the separation of church and state, freedom of speech, they are all under pressure because of islamization. Ladies and gentlemen: Islam and freedom, Islam and democracy are not compatible. They are opposite values.

No wonder that Winston Churchill called Adolf Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' "the new Quran of faith and war, turgid, verbose, shapeless, but pregnant with its message". As you know, Churchill made this comparison, between the Koran and Mein Kampf, in his book 'The Second World War', a master piece, for which, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Churchill's comparison of the Quran and 'Mein Kampf' is absolutely spot on. The core of the Quran is the call to jihad. Jihad means a lot of things and is Arabic for battle. Kampf is German for battle. Jihad and kampf mean exactly the same.

Islam means submission, there cannot be any mistake about its goal. That's a given. The question is whether we in Europe and you in Britain, with your glorious past, will submit or stand firm for your heritage.

We see Islam taking off in the West at an incredible pace. Europe is Islamizing rapidly. A lot of European cities have enormous Islamic concentrations. Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels and Berlin are just a few examples. In some parts of these cities, Islamic regulations are already being enforced. Women's rights are being destroyed. Burqa's, headscarves, polygamy, female genital mutilation, honour-killings. Women have to go to separate swimming-classes, don't get a handshake. In many European cities there is already apartheid. Jews, in an increasing number, are leaving Europe.

As you undoubtedly all know, better then I do, also in your country the mass immigration and islamization has rapidly increased. This has put an enormous pressure on your British society. Look what is happening in for example Birmingham, Leeds, Bradford and here in London. British politicians who have forgotten about Winston Churchill have now taken the path of least resistance. They have given up. They have given in.

Last year, my party has requested the Dutch government to make a cost-benefit analysis of the mass immigration. But the government refused to give us an answer. Why? Because it is afraid of the truth. The signs are not good. A Dutch weekly magazine - Elsevier - calculated costs to exceed 200 billion Euros. Last year alone, they came with an amount of 13 billion Euros. More calculations have been made in Europe: According to the Danish national bank, every Danish immigrant from an Islamic country is costing the Danish state more than 300 thousand Euros. You see the same in Norway and France. The conclusion that can be drawn from this: Europe is getting more impoverished by the day. More impoverished thanks to mass immigration. More impoverished thanks to demographics. And the leftists are thrilled.

I don't know whether it is true, but in several British newspapers I read that Labour opened the door to mass immigration in a deliberate policy to change the social structures of the UK. Andrew Neather, a former government advisor and speech writer for Tony Blair and Jack Straw, said the aim of Labour's immigration strategy was, and I quote, to "rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date". If this is true, this is symptomatic of the Left.

Ladies and gentlemen, make no mistake: The left is facilitating islamization. Leftists, liberals, are cheering for every new shariah bank being created, for every new shariah mortgage, for every new islamic school, for every new shariah court. Leftists consider Islam as being equal to our own culture. Shariah law or democracy? Islam or freedom? It doesn't really matter to them. But it does matter to us. The entire leftist elite is guilty of practising cultural relativism. Universities, churches, trade unions, the media, politicians. They are all betraying our hard-won liberties.

Why I ask myself, why have the Leftists and liberals stopped to fight for them? Once the Leftists stood on the barricades for women's rights. But where are they today? Where are they in 2010? They are looking the other way. Because they are addicted to cultural relativism and dependent on the Muslim vote. They are dependent on mass-immigration.

Thank heavens Jacqui Smith isn't in office anymore. It was a victory for free speech that a UK judge brushed aside her decision to refuse me entry to your country last year. I hope that the judges in my home country are at least as wise and will acquit me of all charges, later this year in the Netherlands.

Unfortunately, so far they have not done so well. For they do not want to hear the truth about Islam, nor are they interested to hear the opinion of top class legal experts in the field of freedom of expression. Last month in a preliminary session the Court refused fifteen of the eighteen expert-witnesses I had requested to be summoned. Only three expert witnesses are allowed to be heard. . . [and] their testimony will be heard behind closed doors. Apparently the truth about Islam must not be told in public, the truth about Islam must remain secret.

Ladies and gentlemen, I'm being prosecuted for my political beliefs. We know political prosecution to exist in countries in the Middle East, like Iran and Saudi-Arabia, but never in Europe, never in the Netherlands.

I'm being prosecuted for comparing the Quran to 'Mein Kampf'. Ridiculous. I wonder if Britain will ever put the beliefs of Winston Churchill on trial... Ladies and gentlemen, the political trial that is held against me has to stop.

But it is not all about me. . . .Free speech is under attack. Let me give you a few other examples. As you perhaps know, one of my heroes, the Italian author Oriana Fallaci had to live in fear of extradition to Switzerland because of her anti-Islam book 'The Rage and the Pride'. The Dutch cartoonist Nekschot was arrested in his home in Amsterdam by 10 police men because of his anti-Islam drawings. Here in Britain, the American author Rachel Ehrenfeld was sued by a Saudi businessman for defamation. In the Netherlands Ayaan Hirsi Ali and in Australia two Christian pastors were sued. I could go on and on. Ladies and gentlemen, all throughout the West freedom loving people are facing this ongoing 'legal jihad'. This is Islamic 'lawfare'. And, ladies and gentlemen, not long ago the Danish cartoonist Westergaard was almost assassinated for his cartoons.

Ladies and gentlemen, we should defend the right to freedom of speech. . . .I believe it is our obligation to preserve the inheritance of the brave young soldiers that stormed the beaches of Normandy. That liberated Europe from tyranny. . . .As George Orwell said: "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear".

Ladies and gentlemen, I believe in another policy, it is time for change. . . .If I may quote one of my favourite American presidents: Ronald Reagan once said: "We need to act today, to preserve tomorrow". That is why I propose the following measures, I only mention a few, in order to preserve our freedom:

First, we will have to defend freedom of speech. It is the most important of our liberties. In Europe and certainly in the Netherlands, we need something like the American First Amendment.

Second, we will have to end and get rid of cultural relativism. To the cultural relativists, the shariah socialists, I proudly say: Our Western culture is far superior to the Islamic culture. Don't be affraid to say it. You are not a racist when you say that our own culture is better.

Third, we will have to stop mass immigration from Islamic countries. Because more Islam means less freedom.

Fourth, we will have to expel criminal immigrants and, following denaturalisation, we will have to expel criminals with a dual nationality. And there are many of them in my country.

Fifth, we will have to forbid the construction of new mosques. There is enough Islam in Europe. Especially since Christians in Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and Indonesia are mistreated, there should be a mosque building-stop in the West.

And last but not least, we will have to get rid of all those so-called leaders. I said it before: Fewer Chamberlains, more Churchills. Let's elect real leaders.

Ladies and gentlemen. To the previous generation, that of my parents, the word 'London' is synonymous with hope and freedom. When my country was occupied by the national-socialists the BBC offered a daily glimpse of hope in my country, in the darkness of Nazi tyranny. Millions of my fellow country men listened to it, underground. The words 'This is London' were a symbol for a better world coming soon.

What will be broadcasted forty years from now? Will it still be "This is London"? Or will it be "This is Londonistan"? Will it bring us hope? Or will it signal the values of Mecca and Medina? Will Britain offer submission or perseverance? Freedom or slavery? The choice is yours. And in the Netherlands the choice is ours.

Ladies and gentlemen, we will never apologize for being free. We will and should never give in. And, indeed, as one of your former leaders said: We will never surrender.

Freedom must prevail, and freedom will prevail.

Forget Billy Graham and Jimmy Swaggart – the most popular and influential pastor in the US is Joel Osteen. On the surface he is modest and quietly spoken, but his belief in the "prosperity gospel" is changing the way people pray

The praise and worship brought me here," says Natalie, sitting beside me in the fifth row of Houston's Lakewood Church – a vast, converted stadium that seats 16,000. "I was raised Catholic, but I don't feel the spirit there like I do here."

Three enormous video screens advertise church groups such as Griefshare: From Mourning to Joy and the Freedom Series. But just as I'm wondering what the Quest for Authentic Manhood involves, the house worship band kicks out the jams. It's 11am exactly and the day's second service has begun. The stage is dominated by an enormous revolving golden globe, in front of which is a rock orchestra flanked on either side by a multiracial gospel choir. Meanwhile, no fewer than nine lead singers are dancing about the stage, praising the Lord. And as if the stage isn't busy enough, down on the floor a small army of serious-looking men dressed in black suits stands alert, ever watchful, communicating with each other through radio mics. Theoretically they're church ushers, but they look more like secret service men guarding a president. Gently but firmly they guide latecomers to their seats, leaving nothing to chance, as if one wrong step could upset the delicate balance that keeps 16,000 evangelical Christians from erupting into violence and anarchy.

Men on wheeled chairs scoot past these special agents, thrusting cameras into the faces of the congregation, while overhead a camera on a crane swoops past, instantly transmitting the action on stage to the giant video screens above. Looking up, I watch as the walls and ceiling periodically change colour, from blue to purple to orange as if we were at an intergalactic disco. Make no mistake: Lakewood is no ordinary church, it's a megachurch. No, let's go further: it's an ultrachurch, the largest in America, with more than 40,000 attending five services weekly and a further 7 million watching in their living rooms. And let's not forget the tens of millions more joining us in 100 countries around the world.

The main draw is Joel Osteen, "America's pastor". He's at the edge of the stage with his glamorous wife and co-pastor, Victoria. I've watched his televised sermons, seen him on the cover of his bestselling books, and observed interviews on TV with megastars such as Larry King, Sean Hannity and Barbara Walters. Powerful politicians from both parties crave to be seen with him, just as in the past they paid homage to Billy Graham (who has endorsed Osteen). The Republican governor of Texas, Rick Perry, made sure to attend the grand opening of Lakewood in July 2005; Osteen in turn led the prayer during Perry's inauguration two years later. But Osteen doesn't pick political favourites; when Houston elected its first openly gay mayor this year (a Democrat), he said the prayer during her inauguration. The Clintons like to be seen worshipping at Lakewood when they're in town, and John McCain was happy to sing the praises of Osteen while campaigning in 2008. And while Obama is yet to pay a visit, last December he found the time to receive Osteen at the White House. These disparate and often opposed politicians recognise one thing: if anybody is the face of evangelical Christianity in America today, it is Joel Osteen.

And what a face it is! The smile is what I notice most of all. Impeccable, white, ultra-regular, it never vanishes: it's the natural setting for his features, the default look to which his face always returns, as if illuminated from within by radiant joy.

The music stops. Joel and Victoria welcome us. In a soft Texan drawl, Joel declares that we're going to take off the heaviness of the week and put on a garment of praise. No matter what has happened, it's in our power to decide we are going to be happy and make progress every day. We are God's people and we're going to be victorious!

"Lakewood was started by my father, John Osteen, in 1959 in a little feed store," says Joel. We are sitting in a meeting room below the church an hour after the service. He negates most stereotypes of the TV preacher: quiet rather than loud, reserved rather than extrovert, perhaps even a little naive. He looks boyish, delicate, much younger than his 46 years.

"Dad had been Southern Baptist," he continues, "but that was before I was born. He left to start Lakewood, partly because he didn't like all these denominations keeping people apart. We were in that remodelled store until I was nine or 10 years old. It held about 150 people, but we started with 90. I didn't realise it was that small. There was a centre aisle and a pew on one side and a pew on the other. So it had 20 rows or something. I just remember going there as a boy and sitting in the front row, listening to my dad. That's where I grew up."

"The talent is incredible," says Natalie, marvelling at the horde of singers and musicians blasting out electrified praise. The worship leader is Israel Houghton: his story is told in Osteen's third and latest New York Times bestseller, It's Your Time. The child of a drug-addicted white mother and absent black father, Houghton ultimately became a Grammy award-winning singer-songwriter.

It's Your Time is a major plank of a media empire that comprises e-votionals, daily podcasts and much else. Osteen's mother, Dodie, also features in the book: she miraculously recovered from terminal cancer in the early 80s. Jesus, Job and King David make appearances. But Osteen mixes in more mischievous examples of God's favour – he is particularly fond of telling us about the Almighty's many intercessions to save Joel from a speeding ticket. His goal is to help us realise God's wonderful plan for "supernatural increase" in our lives, so we stay faithful no matter how bad the odds seem.

Osteen ran his father's television ministry for 17 years behind the scenes. He understands communication – not only the power of the word but also of sound and vision. A perfectionist, he hires only the best. Singing alongside Houghton is Cindy Cruse-Ratcliffe, scion of a famous Christian music dynasty. Every Sunday Lakewood delivers a flawless, high-energy spectacle, precisely the kind of thing that repulses church traditionalists. Yet although it appears ultra-contemporary, this style of worship is a manifestation of ecstatic praise, which is as old as religion itself, and much older than the hymn books and cathedrals which are no less engineered to engender certain effects in congregations.

Osteen, a college dropout, never planned to be a preacher. For years he rebuffed his father's invitations to preach, until in January 1999 he finally accepted. His father was ill at the time. "I didn't want to," he says, "but I just felt inside that I was supposed to. So I spoke that Sunday for the first time. And… that next Friday is when he died. We didn't think he was going to die. But… you know, when I put that together I knew it wasn't a coincidence that I spoke the last Sunday of his life. And then a couple of days after he died I felt that same feeling – that I was supposed to pastor the church. And so I just started."

Osteen was 35, married, a father. The next week, still grieving, he preached again. He hoped to maintain the 8,000-member megachurch his father had built. Instead Joel's uplifting preaching resonated and Lakewood quadrupled its membership. He had to find a new building, and after fighting multiple lawsuits he leased the Compaq Center in downtown Houston for 30 years at a cost of $12m (while agreeing to fund renovations costing $90m). The congregation moved into its new home in 2005. It was destiny.

"And that's why I encourage people… The phrase I use a lot is: 'God's dream for your life is bigger than your own.' You don't know what He has in store if you'll just keep being your best, keep being faithful."

Twenty minutes into the service and people are still flooding into Lakewood. "It was like this at the 8.30 morning service, too," says Natalie. "Every week it's packed."

The video screens show the view from the back of the arena: it looks like a stadium rock gig. But it's not just the size of the crowd that's stunning; it's also its diversity. Eleven o'clock on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America, said Martin Luther King – and even today Christians frequently worship in predominantly black churches, white churches, Korean churches, Hispanic churches, Chinese churches. In Lakewood no single group dominates. I see Texas blondes, hair piled high atop their heads; men in dreadlocks; sloppy dudes in T-shirts; black women in their Sunday best; old coots in double-breasted suits. All of them are dissolving together, lost in praise. Decades of government intervention in the name of equality have never come close to achieving the success of Lakewood.

"There are no walls here; nobody judges you," says Natalie. "I feel incredibly free. Sometimes I think this is what heaven is like."

Lakewood was multiracial from the start. For years, sociologists and visiting pastors have tried to understand the phenomenon, but according to Osteen there was never anything conscious about it: his father was simply "for people".

"I wondered when I took over – I'm white and young – will I continue to draw Hispanic, black? Was that just something unique to my father? But I'm amazed even when we go in other cities, it'll be black, white, Hispanic…"

Osteen pauses: "I think now the spirit of the congregation itself is welcoming. It's not only very diverse racially but also socioeconomically. There's some very poor people and some very wealthy people, but I think… One thing about my parents and what we try to do as well… we try to… it's not about… We try to never even think about the race and… I don't know."

Articulate and assured when preaching, Osteen offstage is tentative and freely admits to areas where he lacks expertise. This humility has landed him in trouble: during a 2005 interview with Larry King he prevaricated over whether a non-Christian could enter heaven. It was classic Osteen: polite, nice, nonjudgmental. Cue outrage among fellow evangelicals. The next time Osteen appeared on Larry King he was certain faith in Christ was essential.

Even so, he is still open about his weaknesses: "Billy Graham, his gift was to go out and win people to Christ. It's different being a pastor. I'm trying to teach people – how do you live the abundant life? That's my gift. Some people are good at taking the scripture line by line and talking about how it was written, but that's not my gift… I believe you've got to repent of your sins; you've got to have a relationship with Christ. So I believe all the fundamental things, I just don't focus on that."

The worship ends. Osteen takes centre stage. He invokes God's power, urging the congregation to release negative emotions: "Let go of offence. Let go of fear. Let go of revenge. Don't live angry, let go now!" Some respond with an "Amen!" or "Hallelujah!" Osteen himself eschews traditional "gospel" stylings.

Now he explains the importance not only of thinking positive thoughts, but also speaking them aloud – for the Bible says that spoken words have power. We must dare to ask God to fulfil our dreams! For He loves us, and His dream for each of us is bigger than we can imagine. Get ready for supernatural increase because… "You're going to be anointed, redeemed, blessed, prosperous, disciplined… You've got a great week coming!"

Osteen is often labelled a preacher of the "prosperity gospel", a movement that dates back more than half a century. It is resolutely worldly, focused on receiving blessings and gifts from God now as well as in the afterlife. According to a Time magazine poll in 2006, 17% of Christians declare themselves adherents, while a total of 61% believe God wants His children to prosper.

But many evangelicals despise the doctrine. Rick Warren, the California megapastor who gave the invocation at Obama's inauguration, told Time magazine: "This idea that God wants everybody to be wealthy? There is a word for that: baloney. It's creating a false idol. You don't measure your self-worth by your net worth. I can show you millions of faithful followers of Christ who live in poverty. Why isn't everyone in the church a millionaire?"

Many have attacked Osteen personally, pointing to the scarcity of references to Jesus in his books, the absence of a cross on stage, his lack of theological training, his refusal to talk about sin. Michael Horton, a professor of theology, more or less called him a heretic on national TV. Others say he's not a preacher at all, but a secular self-help showman, selling platitudes and false hope.

And then in a whole other league there's the distinguished journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, who included Osteen in her spirited evisceration of America's Oprahfied culture of positive thinking in her recent book Smile or Die. Throwing him in with other prosperity preachers, assorted health gurus, faith healers and new age "philosophers", Ehrenreich accused Osteen and co not only of peddling falsehoods and pseudo-spiritual claptrap, but of contributing to a culture of mass self-delusion that left Americans unable to contemplate negative outcomes and thus led to the great banking collapse of 2008. According to Ehrenreich, the nation's CEOs just could not believe in a world where their desires did not translate into results, while Americans in general just can't believe in the terrible things that are obviously coming down the pipe: they have been conditioned to believe that everything is going to be just grrrreat!

Osteen is sanguine about criticism, accepting it as a result of his high profile. He doesn't talk about sin because "people have been beaten down enough" and "it's better to encourage than condemn". Nor does he get involved in moral or political controversies. He did not attend Bible college, but points out that he did spend 17 years editing his father's sermons for broadcast. And you don't have to be a Lakewood true believer to think that Ehrenreich is over-egging the pudding with her wilder claims; the banking crisis was a global phenomenon, not just restricted to readers of Osteen's Your Best Life Now. The label of prosperity preacher does sting, however. "It's just the way I grew up. We believed God is good and He wants to bless you and He wants you to be healthy – but when I think of a prosperity preacher, that to me is somebody who's on TV asking for money every second. I don't talk about money."

The first time I watched Osteen on TV I kept waiting for the appeal for cash. It never came. I was confused. This was a decision Joel made at the inception of his father's television ministry in 1983. He wanted to give people as few reasons to turn off as possible, and nothing alienated an audience more than a begging preacher. (Another principle was to keep the message broad, so non-believers would keep watching.)

The strategy works. The church brought in $80m last year. Osteen is personally wealthy: after his first book sold 5m copies, rumours swirled that he received an eight-figure advance for his second. Even tithing 10% still leaves him with an immense chunk of change. Osteen cites Abraham as an example of a wealthy man supported and loved by the Deity. And then there's Malachi: "Bring all the tithes into the storehouse… and try me now in this, if I will not for you open the windows of heaven and pour out for you such blessing that there will not be room enough to receive it."

But Osteen insists that his idea of prosperity is broad: "It's not just money. God wants you to have good relationships, to have healthy children, to have peace in your mind; you know, have friends – that's prosperity. If people know you are sincere, then they will respond to you."

Osteen's only brush with scandal came in December 2005 when Sharon Jones, a flight attendant, accused his wife, Victoria, of assault on a flight from Houston to Vail, Colorado. Jones alleged that Victoria was so enraged by some liquid that had been spilt on her first-class seat that she grabbed her by the shoulders, rammed her against a toilet door and then elbowed her in the chest – as you do – and all this while passengers were still boarding. As a result of the traumatic incident, Jones claimed that she not only lost her faith but also developed a terrible case of piles. Clearly she deserved at least $400,000 in damages.

For nearly three years the lawsuit hung over the Osteens, and when it finally went to trial in August 2008 the national media gleefully descended upon Houston, hoping for some fun with a classic TV evangelist scandal. It was certainly dramatic. Words such as "devil" and "cult" and "racist" were thrown at the Osteens by their accuser. Alas for Jones, a key eyewitness retracted her support of Jones's story in court and with nobody else backing her version of events, the jury tossed the case out after three hours, declaring it "a waste of time". The Osteens were exonerated, although Victoria Osteen did pay a $3,000 fine to the federal aviation authority for "interfering with a crew member". She stressed, however, that she was guilty of no wrongdoing and was only doing so to put the experience behind her.

Osteen is now alone on stage, the golden globe revolving behind him. He is so quiet, so gentle, so modest; his speech stripped down and lacking in rhetorical flourishes – and yet although he is addressing millions, it feels as if he is talking directly to you. This is the miraculous moment. Osteen knows what's going on inside your soul, he sees your frustrations, your loneliness, your hopes, fears; and he knows what you must do.

The theme is: bloom where you're planted. The tone is darker than in the books. Sometimes we don't seem to be fulfilling our dreams; sometimes we suffer for no apparent reason. But look at Joseph, who was tossed in a pit and enslaved. He didn't lose faith and God made him viceroy of Egypt. But victory can be a long time coming – and more often than not God wants to change us, not our situation. Even if you can't see any benefits to your situation, know that God is using you to work in someone else's life. Do your best where you can, when you can. Be a flower among the weeds. God has a plan.

Sixteen thousand souls are sitting in perfect silence. For 25 minutes there is perfect concentration in the stadium. I've never experienced anything like it.

Osteen's greaT AUNT Johnnie Daniels was a good Christian woman. Her door was always open. She provided money, food and shelter to those in need. As a reward for her kindness, she was beaten to death in her home by a crack addict with a claw hammer. She was 86.

"Surely," I say, "when a thing like this happens it's difficult to keep 'living your best life now'?"

But Osteen – unflustered, calm, polite – disagrees. "I don't want to sound like I'm super spiritual or anything but… I don't… I haven't… From the time that I was little I've had a good sense of trust and confidence that God was in control. Even with my great aunt. I believe part of faith is trusting… Maybe this would be a better example. We had a good friend and their 16-year-old boy left one night and he wasn't supposed to take the car. He hit a tree and killed himself. They're still not over it. And you know, they're good people. It's hard to explain, but… I believe that God can keep you… that you won't leave this earth until you're supposed to go. That's kind of my thing now. Now I know it would be hard if someone was taken away tomorrow, but I just think that's the way you have to look at it. You know, God's in control and we don't understand everything. I don't have to understand why my mother got healed and a lot of people, they're in the hospital and they're not going to make it. But I look at them and say this: 'God's got you in the palm of His hand. You won't leave one second before your time. If God wants you to be here, then you're going to be here.' So I try to see it like that."

After the service I tour the complex. I see the Wall of Champions, the study rooms for new believers, the baby rooms, the media centre selling DVDs, CDs, Bible studies and the collected works of Joel and Victoria.

Osteen is signing books. Indefatigable, he will spend an hour posing for photographs, listening to problems, giving advice and blessings. The main hall is filling up for this afternoon's Spanish-language service, led by another Grammy winner, Marcos Witt – 8,000 will attend.

There are more than 300 full- and part-time staff at Lakewood, and approximately 5,000 volunteers. It is a vast, thrumming God-machine. But that metaphor only goes so far, for without the man at its centre – gifted, elusive, open, childlike; the anti-preacher who is the most successful preacher of them all – there would be nothing. Joel Osteen is the brilliant, unquantifiable, animating essence. And after meeting him, while there is much I still don't understand, I do recall Jesus's words to his disciples in Matthew's gospel: Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.

Joel Osteen will be at the O2 Arena in London on 8 October (theo2.co.uk)

THE NEXT TIME I HEAR a politico or banker or Detroit executive talk about institutions “too big to fail,” I’ll direct them to the 34 percent of Americans who are obese. Last I heard, these big Americans, themselves a kind of cultural institution, were failing en masse, racked by diabetes, asthma, heart trouble, and bound for early death. The human form can only grow so big. Or I could point them to Pig #6707. Conceived in the laboratories of the U.S. Department of Agriculture during the 1990s, Pig #6707’s embryo was genetically altered with a human growth gene to develop a super-pig, bigger and faster-growing and more productive of meat. But the genetic alterations produced a monster, impotent and nearly blind, its legs arthritic, its body crippled, the creature able to stand up and be photographed only with the support of a plywood board. When asked by a reporter why he created the sick pig, the lead researcher said his intent was to make livestock more efficient.

There is, of course, a caution for our species in Pig #6707. When an organism grows beyond its design, nature will determine it to fail—a fact of life, in the strictest sense. Nowhere in evolutionary theory is hypertrophic growth posited as the key to success. What is key is optimum size, what we’d more accurately call right size. All living things have a right size, and historically evolved to that size because it was optimal for survival. So, for example, elephants and giraffes and rhinoceroses, though comparatively huge, are in fact just the right size—their bigness operating as a defense against predators, allowing for greater reach in forage, and much else. The same goes for polar bears and walruses and whales, which require extra tissue volume to retain heat against cold water and long winters. Dinosaurs, as we all know, were likely the biggest creatures to walk the Earth, but bigness didn’t help them meet the challenge of changing conditions. The largest of the dinosaurs disappeared altogether, the smaller ones got even smaller and eventually evolved into birds, while the animals of more moderate size, the marsupials and primitive mammals, found that being small in the first place was a blessing.

On the cellular level, biologists have long understood that large cells, the kind found in cancer, are always unstable and heading for collapse. In physics, too, the principle of right size holds fast. “Atoms of middle weight are stable and inert,” writes Sir George Thomson, the nuclear physicist and Nobel laureate, “but the light as well as the heavy atoms have stores of energy. If one thinks of the heaviest atoms as overgrown empires which are ripe for dissolution and only held together by special efforts . . . one may think, on the other hand, of the lightest of the atoms as individuals which run together naturally for mutual help and readily coalesce to form stable tribes and communities.” As with atoms and empires, so also the stars, which when grown too big will collapse under their own weight in the spectacle of the supernova. So also for animal communities, which rarely aim for bigness. Birds fledge their nests; they don’t keep crowding in. Bees and ants split their colonies when they grow too large, decentralization as instinct. Trees self-prune when laden with too much ice or snow or assailed by wind, dropping limbs to sustain the trunk. Naturalized goldfish in the carp family, kept in an outdoor garden, will only grow to a size proportionate to their pond—unless they are fed (and if fed too much, they grow terribly obese and soon lose the knack for swimming, procreating, and everything else that makes a fish a fish).

Nothing in nature just keeps growing, except where the usual evolutionary constraints are removed from the picture. Isolation from predators, in the example of island gigantism, allowed a host of species to grow to outsize proportions. The elephant bird of Madagascar, the giant gecko of New Zealand, the giant ducks of Hawaii, the giant rabbits of Mediterranean islands, the famed dodo—all were extinguished at astonishing speed after meeting the wily Homo sapiens and his diminutive camp followers (dogs, cats, rats). Without effective competition to keep them fit, the island gigantics were in fact terribly vulnerable when conditions changed.

The United States, it would seem, is suffering its own kind of island gigantism. Bigness is the prejudice of American life, our cultural albatross, the axiom being that when something is big it is automatically better. Why we’ve been saddled with love of bigness as a people perhaps comes down to the matter of geography, the vastness and richness that the landscape offered for the taking from the moment of European settlement. Size was our birthright, our conditioning, the justification for our exceptionalism, bigness our manifest destiny, and for a long time, whole centuries, it worked. The free land and timber and animals to be hunted down and coal and oil and ore to be dug out of the ground made us very wealthy very fast, taught us that growthmania was the norm, the shape of progress, the American way.

Thus, we prefer our Big Macs and our Whoppers, our food portions supersized, our big cars and sprawling cities, our enormous football players (growing bigger every year, the average offensive lineman now topping three hundred pounds), our big breasts and big penises and big houses (up from an average of 1,200 square feet in 1950 to 2,216 square feet today), our big armies with big reach, and, though we complain about it incessantly, big government that spends big money running up big debt (more now than at any other period in our history). That we allow corporations to grow to outrageous size is just another symptom of the disease. Bigness worship permeates every layer of the culture; it is racked into our brains with every turn of the advertising screw; it is a totalizing force.

WHEN LOUIS BRANDEIS WROTE The Curse of Bigness in 1934, he had been a lawyer for many years and, famously, a Supreme Court justice, and much of his work in the courts was busting up bigness. He was particularly concerned about the corporate monopolies that afflicted American life at the turn of the twentieth century. The Curse of Bigness was not a big book, because the arguments were pretty obvious. The great robber baron trusts—in oil, rubber, steel, tobacco, sugar, and railroads (and let’s not forget the Writing Paper Trust, the Woolen Trust, the Upper Leather Trust, the Paper Bag Trust)—had rigged bids, defrauded patentees, crushed labor movements, and could sway prices in any direction regardless of supply or demand. The ur-trust that by 1904 controlled 91 percent of U.S. oil production, Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, was found by the Justice Department to have secured its position via “discriminatory practices in favor of the combination by railroad companies; restraint and monopolization by control of pipe lines . . . ; contracts with competitors in restraint of trade; . . . espionage of the business of competitors, the operation of bogus independent companies”—the stratagems as expectable as they were ugly.

The threat that behemoths like Standard Oil posed to the republic, wrote Brandeis, was their concentration of economic power and decision making to the extent that they were effectively a state within the state, operating under their own laws. Many of the trusts were shattered, in a long struggle that Brandeis pioneered. It was his advocacy that helped push into effective action the antitrust mechanisms in government (the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914, the Federal Trade Commission), which led to the breakup of Standard Oil and many of its sister monopolies by 1911. “American development can come on the lines on which we seek it, and the ideals which we have can be attained, only if side by side with political democracy comes industrial democracy,” Brandeis wrote. “It is the relatively small man who pre-eminently needs the aid and solicitous care of industry and government. We have, gentlemen, to bear all the time that democratic view in mind.”

But we have not. Today we find ourselves in an unprecedented age of corporate gigantism. This situation is characterized not by the outright monopolies that worried Brandeis, but by the rise of oligopolies, a few very obese firms, the Big Three or Big Six, dominating their sectors while being insulated from failure by the hand of government. Republican and Democratic administrations alike for the last thirty years, spellbound by so-called laissez-faire ideology, abandoned their antitrust duties and watched as the total value of mergers and acquisitions rose to an unprecedented $20 trillion—abetting, in other words, the growth of stupendous privileges in the corporatocracy. At the same time, federal and state governments have done most everything they can to ignore, discourage, and imperil the small man in the world of business.

It’s an old story, and it bears repeating: Government subsidies favor large-scale standardized activity (in farming, manufacturing, retail—the list is long) at the expense of the local, the small, the diverse, the upstart. By 2005, four firms controlled 60 percent of the nation’s grain business. The four largest meatpackers controlled 70 percent of beef supply. In some states, the four largest grocery chains controlled as much as 88 percent of all retail sales. Today, a handful of merged energy companies, the Big Five, dominate the petroleum business, with ExxonMobil, Chevron-Texaco, Conoco-Phillips, BP, and Royal Dutch / Shell proving, in the words of Lord Browne, former chief executive of British Petroleum, that “many of the components of the old Standard Oil [trust have] been brought together.” The pattern of oligopoly holds in banking (Citigroup, Chase, and Bank of America now issuing one out of every two mortgages, two out of every three credit cards), accounting, tobacco, automobiles (the triopoly of GM, Ford, and Chrysler), defense, steel, telecommunications (Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint-Nextel), pharmaceuticals, airlines (Delta, American, United), in every major stage of the food business (even including grain elevator storage), and in the generation, transmission, and local distribution of electricity.

What we’re told is that all this consolidation, this predilection for bigness, always and every time—per the usual knee-jerk size-valuation—brings “synergies,” “economies of scale,” efficiency, innovation. But the opposite is too often the case. To take perhaps the obvious example: The Big Three automakers, which for the last half-century have trumpeted “efficiency” and “innovation” as the bywords to justify their great size, in fact failed over the years to produce automobiles at prices and quality comparable to smaller Japanese automakers like Honda and Nissan, the U.S. oligopoly by the 1980s requiring nearly twice as many engineering hours per new car project, and today taking up to two weeks to change plants for new model assembly while little Honda does it in one night. And all this for products that are more expensive and less advanced than those of the competitors. GM, among all automakers, was routinely the least efficient, the least visionary, its mastodonic bureaucracy trained to crush new ideas in the cradle. “At GM, if you see a snake, the first thing you do is to hire a consultant on snakes,” said Ross Perot during his tenure on GM’s board of directors. “Then you get a committee on snakes, and then you can discuss it for a couple of years. The most likely course of action is—nothing.” One might go so far as to charge that the neglect and recalcitrance of the Big Three in the field of invention, their strangling of innovation, has been a danger to the public and disastrous for the environment. They ignored and sometimes actively suppressed safety innovations (seatbelts, padded dashboards, shatterproof glass), a decision that arguably cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of motorists who otherwise might have survived crashes. They have consistently resisted fuel economy and emissions technologies. They colluded to destroy public transit in cities throughout the nation, with the planned effect of getting more people into cars (which rendered cities, by default, more destructively auto-dependent). They killed the electric car—invented out of their own labs, years before anyone had heard of a Prius (and now, as it happens, they are seeking tax dollars to reinvent it). If the nation is to be efficient in its use of fast-dwindling fossil fuels, innovative in curbing pollution and greenhouse gases—effective at imagining even the possibility of a sustainable future—the Big Three are, and will continue to be, a monstrous hindrance.

But why confine ourselves to automakers? Look at U.S. Steel, the “big sprawling inert giant,” in the words of the company’s own assessment, which survives only by government subsidy and protectionist measures from friends in Congress. The smaller steel companies, the so-called mini-mills operating throughout the U.S., produce at lower cost and with fewer man-hours and better pay for workers. Or look at IBM, where a senior vice-president once described the managerial hierarchy as “a giant pool of peanut butter we have to swim through.” The company was out-invented at every turn of the 1980s, in the dawn of personal computing, by upstart Microsoft, which preyed on the inventions of Apple. (Microsoft today is an oligopolist like no other, with the Windows operating system installed on 95 percent of personal computers worldwide.)

Or consider how giant pharmaceutical firms license scores of products from tiny innovative biotech labs every year, perfect and mass-market the inventions of the little companies, but invent few, if any, new drugs inside their own labs. It has always been thus: the big private research laboratories of the modern age are marked by their creative barrenness, a pattern identified by no less a luminary than the former vice-president of the General Electric Company back in 1953: “Not a single distinctively new electric home appliance has ever been created by one of the giant concerns—not the first washing machine, electric range, dryer . . . razor, lawn mower, freezer, air conditioner, vacuum cleaner, dishwasher, or grill. The record of the giants is one of moving in, buying out, and absorbing after the fact.”

Kodachrome film? Not invented by Eastman Kodak, but by two musicians in a bathroom. The earliest turbojet engines? Blew in from none of the major aircraft firms. The Google search platform now fast becoming—in one of those tasteless ironies we have learned to expect—an internet monopoly? Conceived by two geeks in a dorm room. You don’t paint the Sistine ceiling by committee, though perhaps one day a corporation will try. Creativity, in any case—the radical’s creativity, which is the only kind—is not what the corporation looks for. Rather, it pursues what William Whyte called “the fight against genius.” It looks for Whyte’s “Organization Man,” who seeks protection, safety, succor in bigness, who can be relied on to conform and submit. What it lacks in creativity, of course, the big corporation makes up for in coercion.

THE STANDARD OIL PLAYBOOK, it turns out, is very much alive, because with corporate obesity always comes the institutionalization of unfairness. Economists Walter Adams and James Brock have done more than any contemporary scholars to chronicle the effects on the ground. They find, for example, that the oligopolists in the grain and meat industries drive down prices for family farmers and ranchers, starving the small men out of business. The defense industry, they report, consolidates in the 1990s, and what follows is an explosion in contract fixing and price fraud, with procurement costs skyrocketing at the Pentagon. The oil oligopoly intentionally withholds gasoline supplies from the market in 2001—a “profit-maximizing strategy,” in the words of the Federal Trade Commission—costing Americans billions of dollars in overcharges. The giant airlines tacitly collude to fix prices, always higher and higher, and so do the automakers, while service and quality continue to decline. In the ninety-seven top radio markets, where two broadcasters now control some 80 percent of the spectrum, we hear allegations of censorship, and we stop hearing the music and opinions considered unpalatable by corporate ownership. The power of bigness everywhere corrodes the regulatory instruments of government through the usual means (lobbyists, campaign money, revolving doors, conflicts of interest). And all this is tolerated, which is to say it is not questioned (so much for regulating with a “democratic view in mind”). It can’t be otherwise, when money and influence grows with every aggrandizement of industry, and corruption of the state is only a matter of the size of the checks one can write, the stature of the executives one can place to gorge in the henhouse. American government, write Adams and Brock, “is in constant danger of being transformed into a welfare state for powerful private interests.” The danger has swallowed us whole; we are now living inside its belly.

I think particularly of Goldman Sachs, one of the most powerful players in the banking oligopoly, which for two decades has been a berserker in the marketplace, sowing discord, leading people into shoddy investments and out of their homes, making huge money in the process, all while dictating terms to government and looting the public treasury. Matt Taibbi, in an article in Rolling Stone, recently deconstructed how effective Goldman has been in exploiting its bigness. The achievements in regulatory capture alone are momentous: Bush’s treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, architect of the 2008 bailouts, was a former CEO of Goldman; Robert Rubin, the treasury secretary under Clinton, spent twenty-six years at Goldman; former Goldman director Ed Liddy was placed in charge of the bailout of crumbling insurance goliath AIG (which owed Goldman billions of dollars); the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York were Goldmanites; and on and on.

Taibbi reports that Goldman was among the chief promoters of the tech stock bubble of the 1990s (and profited from the collapse), the real estate bubble of the 2000s (and profited from the collapse), and throughout these debacles it was variously accused of securities fraud, tacit bribery, insider trading. Goldman’s commodities bubble predations in 2008 are perhaps most illustrative of how a bigness complex with tentacular reach touches all Americans. With friends placed on the Commodities Futures Trade Commission, Goldman quietly secured an exemption from a Depression-era federal law, specifically the Commodity Exchange Act of 1936, which limits the number of speculators in the commodities market, stating that if speculation gets too big in those basics of existence—corn, wheat, coal, oil—it’s a risk to society as a whole. Armed with the exemption, Goldman was free to set its traders loose in the commodities markets to balloon oil prices even though oil production was up and consumption was down. Due in part to Goldman’s manipulations, Taibbi writes, the average barrel of oil in the summer of 2008 was traded twenty-seven times before it reached the consumer, and with the parasitic middleman taking his cut through aggressive—often lawless—interference in the laws of the marketplace, we had four-dollar-a-gallon prices that crimped the livelihoods of tens of millions of drivers.

For this good work, the company demanded a bailout, stretching its many arms to twist the necks of these same taxpayers. Goldman executives were brought in to help plan the bailout arrangements, for themselves and other banks, and the $700 billion was dispersed mostly in secret, with little or no oversight. They helped to oversee the AIG bailout, because Goldman’s investments were bound up in AIG, and, as anticipated, when AIG received $85 billion at the direction of ex-Goldmanite Paulson at the Treasury, $13 billion was promptly routed from AIG to Goldman. Goldman then machinated for its own bailout, while Paulson opted to let Goldman’s chief competitor, Lehman Brothers, collapse for the pickings. This had the benefit of allowing Goldman to sop up Lehman’s share of the market, so that Goldman, among the prime perpetrators of excess that led to the crash, now grows even bigger, presumably to go on to further excesses.

What must be understood is that this bailing out of bigness is nothing new. It happened, for example, with Chrysler in 1979—$4 billion was allocated by Congress so the company could continue making stupid decisions and crappy cars—and with Long Term Capital Management in 1998, after the hedge fund invested too much money in too much risk, which is just the model of profligacy required for a company to achieve the coveted status of “too big to fail.” The difference in the recent bailout is only its size, stretching into the hundreds of billions of dollars, saddling generations of Americans with government debt larger than any single generation past had to contend with.

There is no learning curve, only the upward sweep of profits and size and government intervention. Bailing out bigness masterfully incentivizes bigness, because to be big is apparently the ultimate indemnity against the rigors of the marketplace, i.e., against the real world in which you and I are supposed to muck around for a living. And the bigger the losses among the giants, the better—how else can one threaten the “system” and demand a bailout and grow still bigger? The small community and state banks in boring places like North Dakota are holding course just fine in the throes of the “crisis”—they were humble and frugal—as are many smaller banks that operate nationally. But the necessary consequence of bailing out losers like AIG and Goldman Sachs and the other giants is that the small guys, who were modestly surviving, lose business to the subsidized goliaths. The bailouts in their scale have one other big incentivizing consequence: they reframe the mistakes of the private sector as social catastrophes, which makes us all vulnerable by encouraging the socialization of foolishness and greed that would better remain the burden of boardroom executives. The private enterprise economy is revolutionized in the most cynical and ironic fashion, so that unfairness bears down like a jackboot on the small man, while it’s socialism for the rich, the big, the abusive, the powerful, the ones doing the stomping. “Marx, in his innocent, and now obsolete, way thought it would be the workers who would force the pace of socialism,” wrote John Kenneth Galbraith way back in the comparative innocence of 1985. “He must be looking with surprise at the way, in our time, it is the bankers and the big industrialists who lead the march, carry the flag.” And lo, swollen with government money, while the world economy immolated throughout the summer and fall of 2009, Goldman Sachs posted its largest profits ever.

In 1834, Roger B. Taney, who would become chief justice of the Supreme Court, warned about the supersized hostage-taking capacity of big concentrations in business. Listening to the bailout justifications throughout 2009, one could appreciate the fatefulness in Taney’s message. The big interests, he observed, “may now demand the possession of the public money . . . and if these objects are yielded to them from apprehensions of their power, or from the suffering which rapid curtailments on their part are inflicting on the community, what may they next not require? Will submission render such a corporation more forbearing in its course?” Ask Goldman Sachs.

The Founding Fathers were concerned about the problem from day one, though they described the influence and power of bigness in terms of “factions,” those groups of citizens—and now, more problematically, in a way the founders did not foresee, those groups of fake citizens known as corporations—“who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” Madison’s solution in the Federalist Papers was to allow a multiplicity of interests that, ideally, would balance each other out, so that no one interest could hold sway. In other words, competition for power among factions—that itself could only function in a decentralized system—was key to keeping all factions free.

The principles of representative democracy and the principles of free-market economics were able to coexist in the small-scale schematic of eighteenth-century America. But the bigness complexes of today require that we sacrifice one or the other. We can refuse to bail out the big companies while letting the economy falter—dragging into penury no small number of Americans—and fail in our oath to caretake the interests of the people. Or we can sacrifice free-market principles and fund the bailouts and let corporate obesity run riot till it crashes power-drunk into another wall—and it will, it always does. “The irony,” says James Brock, “is that we have established a reverse economic Darwinism, where we ensure the survival of the fattest, not the fittest, the biggest, not the best.”

THE 9/11 ATTACKS presented one of those classic moments when bigness failed spectacularly. The $75-billion-and-counting “central intelligence” apparatus, this lumbering giantist peanut-butter bureaucracy, was outsmarted by a dispersed, small-scale, “small-cell” operation of nineteen men armed with box cutters and bad English and funded by a Saudi exile languishing in the mountains of Afghanistan. I got on the phone recently with a sociologist at Yale University named Charles Perrow, who a few years ago wrote a book called The Next Catastrophe, in which he singles out Islamist terrorist networks for their adaptive dexterity, their adroitness in adversity, and for the schooling they offer in the vulnerability of being too big, which is to say too centralized. Terrorist networks “are very reliable,” says Perrow. “They can live largely off the land, can remain dormant for years with no maintenance costs and few costs from unused invested capital, and individual cells are expendable. There are multiple ties between cells, providing redundancy, and taking out any one cell does not endanger the network.”

Islamist terrorists operate, to their credit, Perrow says, by virtue of the same “resiliencies” and “decentralizations” that characterize small-firm networks, those systems of disparate though interrelated companies that most economists would associate with low economic development—because of their smallness—but that in fact do very well while spreading the wealth. Looking at small-firm networks, where each firm had twenty or fewer employees, Perrow found “efficiency, resiliency, reliability, innovativeness and positive social outcomes” in Japan, Taiwan, Italy, across Northern Europe, and, not least, in the Silicon Valley of the United States. Dependency, the chief factor in Perrow’s understanding of how catastrophes past and future can envelop whole societies, was what small-firm networks cut out of the equation. “Dependencies are low because there are multiple sources of suppliers, producers, customers, and distributors,” he writes. “Wealth is decentralized, since it is spread over many units, and thus the economic power of individuals or single units is kept in check while the power of the network is enhanced.”

It echoes what the founders were thinking, though presently such thoughts are considered wholly un-American. The American way in business and government and infrastructure is to systematically increase dependencies and call it “efficiency.” Perrow singles out three areas of dangerous concentration: in energy, in populations, and in economic/political power. In energy, there is not simply the fact that U.S. refining capacity agglomerates just where hurricanes like to hit, but that industrial storage and toxic processing facilities sit one atop the other, some of them prone to explosion, such as the ruptured oil storage tanks in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. It’s not just cities too big for the floodplains in which they sprawl, but the fact that they are supplied by electricity grids too centralized and increasingly prone to blackouts like the one that surprised much of the American Northeast in 2003, resultant from a single broken link in the grid. It’s not just that the grids are centralized and so tightly coupled, but that they became this way because energy companies, growing into oligopoloid monoliths, captured and undermined the centralized regulatory agencies of government. In Perrow’s analysis, it all interlinks, cross-pollinates, conduces to perpetuate ever-increasing bigness. The bigger and more complex and more total our systems and institutions become, Perrow is saying, the weaker and more vulnerable they really are.

Anybody who’s been on a camping trip with too many friends can understand Perrow’s thinking. Small groups of people prove to be more cohesive, effective, creative in getting things done. In the 1970s, the English management expert and business scholar Charles Handy put the ideal group size in work environments at “between five and seven” for “best participation, for highest all-round involvement.” Alexander Paul Hare, author of the classic Creativity in Small Groups, showed that groups sized between four and seven were most successful at problem solving, largely because small groups, as Hare observed, are more democratic: egalitarian, mutualist, co-operative, inclusive. Hundreds of studies in factories and workplaces confirm that workers divided into small groups enjoy lower absenteeism, less sickness, higher productivity, greater social interaction, higher morale—most likely because the conditions allow them to engage what is best in being human, to share the meaning and fruits of their labor.

This might have something to do with the evolution of the human brain over the hundred thousand years that man survived by hunting and gathering in small tribes. Cognitive neuroscience suggests that the regions of the brain controlling emotion are hard-wired for a small-group dynamic, that the frontal cortex itself is severely limited in the amount of information it can synthesize on a large scale. Indeed, these same researchers of group dynamics show that a disturbing thing happens as groups expand. Large groups develop quickly into a committee structure, with an executive or leadership that directs and often dominates the decision-making process. Power, in other words, is centralized, hierarchies are built, authority is increasingly top-down, consent is gently coerced or it arrives by default, as members of the group simply stop participating—not speaking, or initiating, or deciding, or acting, their invisibility growing in proportion as the group grows in size. In short, the experience of most members of the big group could accurately be described as one of alienation, powerlessness, meaninglessness.

Needless to say, in our very modern world of enormous institutions, we are daily confronted with this alienating experience, not merely in corporations, banks, automakers—to whom we say, “Yes, too big to fail, and nothing to be done about it!”—but in our most prestigious universities, our proudest labor unions, our staunchest advocates for environmental action and civil rights, our best hospitals, our gigantic corporate organic farms, not to mention the multi-trillion-dollar machine of a welfare government—the social safety nets, the regulatory functions, the housing and healthcare authorities, and all its octopus arms that reach into the lives of citizens. In such environments, people, as Paul Goodman once put it, are reduced to personnel, certainly if they don’t secure a place at the top of the heap or near it, which most do not; they become functionaries, bureaucrats, organizers for the organization, jugglers of abstractions. Goodman, a self-described anarchist, observed in 1963 that “no matter how benevolent the goals, the style of execution is dehumanizing. So long as people are transformed into personnel—management-personnel, labor-personnel, professional-personnel,” and to this Goodman goes on to add sales-personnel, consumer-personnel, client-personnel, voting-personnel, to which we might as well add military-personnel, security-personnel, police-personnel, killing-personnel—“we cannot expect the organization to be internally humanized by their persons, for there are no persons.”

IT WAS E. F. SCHUMACHER WHO, in the 1950s, as the chief economist at the British National Coal Board, came to the quite reasonable—at the time unthinkable—conclusion that energy supply, the coal that England so ravenously was burning up, could not satisfy an ideology of unlimited growth. It was, Schumacher concluded, a suicide pact with Planet Earth. What Schumacher offered instead in the book that made him famous, Small Is Beautiful, is the common-sensical idea that man is small, therefore should think small—that is, think along the lines of human scale.

When in 1955 Schumacher was invited by the government of Burma as an advisor on economic development, he understood at once that the rote econometrics of the West had little to offer the Burmese. Schumacher fell in love with the country, the people, the culture, and it was Buddhism that most impressed him, Buddhism in practice in the little villages, the Buddhism of the Middle Path. The experience was transformative, inspiring him to gestate the notion of a “Buddhist economics,” an “economics as if people mattered.” Instead of demanding that his hosts modernize, he urged the Burmese to hold fast to the middle path, employing energy-light, human-scale technology—what he called “democratic or people’s technology”—to develop the economy on the organic scale of the village. Instead of industrial irrigation super-projects, there would be drip-irrigation and foot-operated treadle pumps (which have worked in Burma to this day). Instead of breakneck urbanization and huge capital investments and centralized planning, the Burmese would do better to decentralize as much as possible, he said, to keep decision-making local for the local production of food and handicrafts to be locally consumed.

Mahatma Gandhi’s development plans for India were much along the same lines. “If we feel the need of machines,” said Gandhi, “we certainly will have them. Every machine that helps every individual has a place, but there should be no place for machines [that] turn the masses into mere machine minders.” What in the intervening years has been the alternative? In China, great leaps forward have poisoned the rivers and the lakes and the fields and the coastal beds, displacing huge populations, concentrating them in the filth of cities as machine minders, impoverishing every rank of traditional society while enriching a very few, for whom tradition is nothing more than an attachment to the nonmaterial.

Of course, among the economists for whom growth was the unquestioned ideology—growth for its own sake, the ideology of the cancer cell—Schumacher was considered a crazy old man, a godforsaken crank. And to that he was said to have replied that a crank is small, safe, cheap, comprehensible, nonviolent, and efficient, a perfect tool of intermediate technology.

Let us be cranks then, though the consensus conspires against us—against the very notion that the small-scale and low-tech may hold the means to a workable future. We can start by downsizing the monster corporations. The antitrust law is there, waiting, a fist in our pockets. Let’s have a third party in politics that might dare to confront bigness—hell, let’s have a second party, given that Republicans and Democrats are at odds only in the perfumes they wear. Let’s have ten or twenty parties. Let’s encourage local production with local labor within easy commuting distances; pay a living wage; restructure land-use patterns to provide easy access to work; grow most of our food close to where it will be consumed. Let’s dream small.

Of course, bigness may still be needed to provide certain goods and services, but the most realistic future for humankind lies in a determined return to the human scale. The transformation will no doubt be costly in the short term, that is, less profitable for Big Ag and Big Oil and Big Coal and all the other bigness complexes, but it will produce vast benefits to social health in the long run. And how shall we quantify that kind of quality? Not in the usual gibberish of national product—the original definition of gross meaning “repellently fat”—or exports and imports, or capital-output ratios, or capitalization, not with the metrics of the idiot savants in the finance industry, who produce nothing one can hold in the hand, nothing of real value in a human-scale economy. Instead of depending on slave labor abroad, we can have jobs at home for the things we need, not the things we are told to want. Instead of processed food, we can have fresh food. Instead of faraway hierarchies, we can have local networks. Instead of militarism, cooperation. Instead of repression, innovation. Instead of homogenous, homegrown.

It goes against every urging in our recent history and our covetous training, and therefore it may only happen when some external force comes into play. Most likely that force will be the limits of Planet Earth, and our fitness will be determined, as it was with the dinosaurs, by our ability to adapt to the new conditions. Or not. We might do well to remember that the laws of nature are bigger than Goldman Sachs or the Big Three or the United States of America. Until then, we will continue to think of our systems as too big to fail, during which time we may end up presiding with a blithe mind over their failure—which, ultimately, will mean our failure.

12:02 P.M. PST

THE PRESIDENT:  Hello, everybody.  Thank you.  (Applause.)  Thank you so much.  Thank you.  Everybody, please have a seat.  Thank you very much.  Thank you.

Well, what a extraordinary introduction from an extraordinary leader.  I just want to reiterate something I said at the town hall meeting earlier.  You could not have a better fighter on behalf of the people of Nevada than Senator Harry Reid.  (Applause.)  And I am just proud -- I'm proud to call him a friend. 

A lot of people in Washington forget where they come from.  Harry Reid has not.  And that's something that I've always admired about Harry, ever since I first got to the Senate.  He retains that honesty and decency and homespun good sense and, yes, sometimes some bluntness, that he's carried with him since his boyhood in Searchlight.

We've got a number of other special guests that I just want to acknowledge.  First of all, I want to thank Jim for helping to organize this.  Thank you so much to Jim Murren.  I want to acknowledge Congresswoman Shelley Berkley and Congresswoman Dina Titus, who are here.  (Applause.)  Assemblyman Joe Hogan is here and state Senator David Parks.  (Applause.)  I want to thank the Las Vegas Asian, Henderson, Latin, North Las Vegas, and Urban Chambers.  (Applause.)  Thank you, guys, for helping to organize this.  And the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.  (Applause.)

You know, I was mentioning the fact that Harry has retained that sense of who he is, despite the extraordinary journey that he's traveled.  Over the past year under very trying circumstances for the country, I've seen something else in Harry.  Harry comes across as soft-spoken, but he's made of very strong stuff.  He's never been afraid to make tough decisions, even if they weren't politically popular, if they were the right decisions for his state and the right decisions for America.

And so I just want to reiterate his leadership has made a tremendous difference, and through these economic storms he's never lost sight of the struggles and the hardships of the people who sent him to Washington.  And every Nevadan should know the strength and the character of a man that I hope and expect to serve in Washington for many years to come.  (Applause.) 

So, thank you, Harry, for the great work you do.  Harry also gets embarrassed when you compliment him too much.  You know, he kind of -- (laughter) -- see, he looks away.  (Laughter.)

Now, before I go any further, let me set the record straight:  I love Vegas!  (Applause.)  There you go.  Always have.  Love Vegas.  (Laughter.)  Enjoy myself every time I've gotten an opportunity to visit.  In fact, just last night, I drew a flush on the river and cut the budget deficit in half.  (Laughter.)  Some of you know I can play some poker.  (Laughter.) 

Now, I did receive a little bit of heat, I know, from maybe some in this room, when I said that folks shouldn't blow their college savings in Vegas.  That doesn't mean I don't love Vegas.  It wasn't meant to be a shot.  I think everybody here would agree that the only place where people should spend their college savings is in college.  (Applause.)  There's no contradiction there.

But, look, I understand how hard things have been here.  In the worst economic turmoil that we've faced in generations, Las Vegas has been at the eye of the storm.  When the economy suffers, the tourism industry is deeply affected; in fact, you've seen perhaps the steepest drop in tourism in the state's history.  And I know things are starting to bounce back, but it's been tough going.  When folks are hurting and don't have the money to spend on a night out or a weekend getaway, that hurts the broader economy as well.  So what happens in Vegas reflects what's happening across America.

And this area has also been hit by the home mortgage crisis as hard as just about anywhere in America.  And this doesn't just affect the families at risk of losing their homes, as devastating as that can be.  It also affects the many more families who've lost value in their homes, and the equity that makes it possible to finance a business or secure a retirement.  From their peak, home prices in Las Vegas have fallen in half.  This is something all of you are aware of.

And finally, Nevada has not escaped the wider devastation that's ripped through the financial markets and the economic fabric of our country a whole, as credit became scarce and consumer spending dropped and businesses were forced to close their doors. 

Today, more than one in eight people in Las Vegas can't find work.  So no one needs to explain to the members of the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce that we've been through a punishing recession -- as bad as anything since 1930.  The recession in 1980-'81, doesn't come close to what we've gone through over the last two years. 

And no one needs to tell you how important it is that we remain absolutely focused on bringing about a strong recovery.  Our great challenge as a country is to create the environment in which businesses can expand and hire workers; in which middle-class families can find good jobs and save for the future; in which our economy is growing, and that growth is sustained and broadly shared.  That's my focus; that's Harry Reid's focus:  to not only rebuild this economy, but to rebuild it stronger than it was before the crisis.

At the same time, standing before this group of business leaders, it's important to emphasize that there's only so much that government can do -- and only so much that government should do.  Sometimes in Washington it sounds a little contradictory when I hear folks say, "Obama wants the government to take over the economy."  Then they'll turn around and say, "Why isn't the government doing more to create jobs?" 

Now, Harry and I understand that's politics.  But putting politics aside, what I believe -- and what I know you believe -- is that the true engine of job creation and economic expansion in this country has never been found in the halls of Congress or in the corridors of the White House.  America's economic success begins elsewhere, in more humble settings:  in garages and basements and rented storefronts.

It begins when a worker decides to leave her job to be her own boss; when an inventor makes his first sale on the way to his first million; when an innovator sees a product that could be better or a service that could be provided more smartly; when an entrepreneur takes a chance on an idea that just might fail, but might also change the world. 

Now, that's the story of America -- the land of opportunity.  A nation where -- at our best -- we welcomed all those from around the world who are willing to work hard, all who are willing to take themselves as far as their talents would allow.  And what has made it possible to harness the incredible productive capacity of the American people -- the greatest economic force in the history of the world -- has been a free market where people can pursue their dreams, their goals and their happiness, and where you can take charge of your own destiny. 

So I don't believe my role as President, the role of the federal government or the state government or city governments, is to stifle the free market.  I think my role is to strengthen its ability to unleash that creativity and ingenuity which still makes this nation the envy of the world. 

Now, there are those who suggest that the only way government can promote strong markets is to allow them to operate wholly outside even the most modest rules of the road, even the most sensible reforms.  Many of these same folks also suggest -- whether in regard to proposed consumer protections in the health insurance industry, or proposed rules to prevent another financial crisis -- that these kinds of policies run counter to our economic interests.  And while I respect those who sincerely hold this view, the facts -- and our history -- do not favor this argument. 

Throughout our past, there have been times when markets have fallen out of balance.  And there have been periods of economic transformation and upheaval when prosperity and even basic financial security have eluded far too many citizens.  And at those moments, government has stepped in not to supplant private enterprise, but to catalyze it -- to create the conditions for entrepreneurs and new businesses to adapt and ultimately to thrive. 

Sometimes it requires government investment.  That's why we laid railroads and highways to spur commerce and industry and stitch this nation together.  Sometimes it means making sure that there's a safety net.  That's why we created Social Security while putting in place financial safeguards like the FDIC in the wake of the economic dislocations of the 1930s. 

A lot of times it involves investing in our people.  That's why we passed a GI bill to nurture the skills and talents of an entire generation.  That's why President Kennedy pointed us to the moon, knowing that the exploration of the skies above would lead to unimagined discoveries here on Earth.

That's how Las Vegas became Las Vegas -- a balance of private enterprise but also a regulatory structure that made sure that people could come here and enjoy themselves and thrive and bring their families in an environment that was safe for them and secure. 

At these moments of transformation, such efforts by government, they don't stifle our economy; just the opposite.  They've helped our economy achieve the growth that was not only more robust, but more widely shared by our citizens -- citizens who were in turn better able to contribute to our economy.  And when we've gone without sound rules of the road and sound investments in our future, then we've risked stagnation or worse -- we've risked full-blown economic crises.

And that's where we found ourselves one year ago when my administration came through the door.  I know sometimes we've got a short-term memory.  It's one of the things that makes America great, is we don't brood about the past.  But it's worth us just remembering where we were. 

Five trillion dollars of Americans' household wealth evaporated in just 12 weeks as the financial markets plummeted -- $5 trillion.  Several of the world's largest financial institutions were on the brink of collapse; some of them disappeared.  Home values were in freefall -- nobody knew what the floor was.  Businesses could not get credit, no matter how creditworthy.  Seven hundred and fifty thousand jobs were vanishing each month -- more than the entire population of Vermont was losing its job every single month when I was sworn in.  And the fear among economists across the political spectrum was that we were rapidly sinking into a second Great Depression.

So we undertook a series of difficult steps -- and, frankly, some of them were unpopular, deeply unpopular -- to prevent that outcome.  And I was at the town hall earlier today and I pointed out, it's not as if Harry and I don't have pollsters -- we got very good pollsters, and they tell us when things are unpopular.n  (Laughter.)  "Don't do that!"  But we thought it was important to do what was right, not what was popular.  (Applause.)

So we acted to get lending flowing again, so companies like yours could get loans to buy equipment and restock, keep your doors open, make payroll.  We thought it was important for ordinary Americans to be able to finance their homes, or buying a new car, or going to college, or starting or running a business.