Green Future

Put the Demos Back Into Democracy

There are two kinds of activist groups, equally (in)effective. Which are you? And why? Pop-up activists tend their topiary and anguish over bathroom fixtures until… a Big Bad Issue pops up and invigorates them. Permanent Waves — the second kind of activist group — inhabit longstanding, institutionalized power zip codes nestled among other shrubbery in …

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Can Pluto Help Us Understand “Free Trade”?

If we used Pluto’s new celebrity status as an opportunity to see Earth—from afar–as part of the solar system and part of a Galactic Trade Organization, would we gain any new insights? Pluto is a trip-and-a-half. The word pluto means both wealth (plutocracy) and hell (Pluto as god of Hades), so, already economics, myth, and …

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About that “Seat at the Table”…

You want a Seat at the Table. You fight for it. You get it. Yippee. Let’s consider it. (Welcome back to the DTP Blog. I’ve been absent from this table because, among other things, May is a huge month for gardening in Wisconsin and mine needed lots of TLC so I could put food on …

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Wrinkle in Ancient Corporate Code Reveals Democracy Remedy (Not for the faint of heart)

Crumbling pages in the rare books room of the Wisconsin State Law Library may hold the key to breaking the corporate stranglehold on the democratic promise so long dormant in the heartland. I’ve read those pages in that cool, dim room. But you can find the same info in the well-thumbed regular stacks that are …

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Making a Federal Case Out of It

“Don’t make a federal case out of it.” I used the phrase countless times without understanding its origin. But it turns out it’s full right up to the post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc with historical significance: lessons about corporations, democracy and local control–what you might call community rights. Take the train-hits-cow cases. Railroads began a rapid expansion in the …

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A Corporate Anthropologist Walks Into a Blog…

There are two kinds of corporate anthropologists. First, the kind that works for corporations and gets paid. I’m the other kind. The first kind works for and with corporations to increase worker productivity, advise what color greeting card to send a Chinese executive, or figure out how to sell personal hygiene products to Mayan grandmothers. …

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