Some naysayers may point out a possible flaw in my "Fucking for Jesus" plan: that by having premarital sex (or by committing adultery, if they're married), the sex-evangelists would presumably be damned for all eternity. Thus Jesus would lose a soul in gaining a soul - with no net profit for Jesus. This overlooks two key points.

First, the souls that would be lost would only be those of women, while the souls that would be gained would be those of men. While it may not be "hip" or "cool" to say so in these permissive times, it's fairly clear that a man's soul is worth more than a woman's.

Second, don't forget that the sex-evangelists are reusable! They can screw hundreds of drunken males for Christ over a single Spring Break, and can come back in future years (as long as they remain reasonably attractive, a fairly low standard considering the inebriated state of their clients) to claim more souls.

Trading one female soul for hundreds or thousands of male souls is pretty much a no-brainer, don't you think? As our revered former Vice-President might say.

On the other side, what about the female-specific "shoes for your soul" plan? Shoes aren't as reusable as fallen Christian vaginas, you might argue. Good point. But once you've traded a nice new pair of fashionable shoes to a drunken co-ed in exchange for her soul, she's a Christian - and can be expected to tithe. With luck there's a good chance you could get her to contribute the very shoes you gave her, possibly while they're still in the box. Heck, you could recruit her to the "Fucking for Jesus" program! In which case, as a filthy fallen woman she could hardly expect to be allowed to keep the shoes.

Although during the male-focused portion of the program, she might be allowed to wear the shoes to gild the lily, so to speak. Since she'd spend most of her time on her back, wear and tear on the shoes would be minimal. The only danger would be that a drunken male "client" might vomit on them. The manager of the program would be wise to Scotch-Guard the shoes (particularly suede ones) and pray for their safety.

Some co-eds might insist on trying on those shoes, and there will probably be some who will backslide and keep them. So the cost of claiming female souls for Jesus will inevitably be higher than the cost of male souls. Cost-conscious evangelists may want to concentrate on male souls at first.

There's another article on the same topic which absolutely horrified me recently: "Infinite Debt" by Thomas Geoghegan in Harper's. It lays out in stark detail how the abolition of usury laws in the US (under the tender ministrations of credit-industry lobbyists and our corrupt Congress) allowed the financial sector to produce profits for their investors of 300% or more. With that sort of profit to be had, is it any wonder that investors ran away from the manufacturing industries - industries which would normally produce 3-5% profit?

There's a great deal more in the article, which is well worth reading. Unfortunately, it's only available to subscribers (and by coincidence, I got my subscription to Harper's for renewing my Salon subscription). It's well worth looking up. If you can't afford Harper's, try to see if you can find it in your local library; it's the April 2009 issue.

But I ran into an odd juxtaposition last night: a story on NBC's Dateline about the "Debt Trap". I thought it might shed an interesting sidelight on the insights raised in "Infinite Debt". And it did - but not in the way that I hoped or expected.

Rather than report on the wholesale usury of the financial sector and the complicity of Congress in abolishing age-old protection for the public from financial wolves, Dateline instead focused on some sleazy debt collectors who used "questionable" practices. They - gasp - lied to the people they were calling! Watching these lower-class employees chatting and smoking on secret camera in their parking lot, I couldn't help but be reminded of the "bad apples" like Lyndie England who carried the Bush Administration's torture policies and ended up taking the fall for them.

Dateline thoughtfully announced that everyone filmed by the secret camera had later been fired.

But it was the management of that debt collection company that really must have run up the Dateline dry-cleaning bill. The producers must have ejaculated into their pants about twenty times over when they found that the owners of the company were all black "gangsta"-types. Thugs and criminals, to be sure. But very minor criminals indeed compared to the real criminals: the respected members of Congress, the titans of industry, and the media who all cheered as organized labor was broken and the game was rigged in favor of a financial sector whose sole purpose was to shear the sheep - the public - to the bone.

The maximum interest rate allowed used to be 9% plus a small additional percentage. And now...there IS NO maximum. We have been turned into nothing more than beasts to be slaughtered in the financial stockyard. And the "winners" of society, obscenely wealthy and virtually all-powerful, continue to hold the reins of power firmly in their hands - and by all signs, they always will.

It's a bitter pill to swallow.