AI Has Already Taken Over. It’s Called the Corporation

Imagine a world where corporate charters were only granted if they adopted a triple bottom line, and where shareholder lawsuits threatened every time a company broke one of its own social and environmental standards. Until that happens, it may be that the “worst event in the history of our civilization” is not the future development of modern AI, but the decision by a group of 17thcentury politicians to unleash the power of the Corporation on an unsuspecting humanity.

The necessary transition to a new economy

Even Forbes is jumping on the bandwagon of the “sharing economy” with a recent article on AirBnB. This closely follows Van Jones’s CNN article about the “sharing economy,” but the push to transform our broken economy isn’t just about sharing, though; it isn’t even just about renewable energy, energy efficiency, public transportation, and the other elements of the green economy movement. There is a “new economy movement” that’s pushing for a fundamental shift away from the neoliberal policies that have dominated our economy and society for decades.

In a Time of Limits

When the French nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville toured the newly founded American republic in the early years of the nineteenth century, he encountered plenty of things that left him scratching his head. The national obsession with making money, the atrocious food, and the weird way that high culture found its way into the most isolated backwoods settings—“There is hardly a pioneer’s hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare,” he wrote; “I remember reading the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log cabin”—all intrigued him, and found their way into the pages of his remarkable book Democracy in America.

From Green New Deal to New Economy Coalition (Part I)

Here is a short overview and strategic assessment of the green economy movement, including its organizational makeup.  It concludes with recommendations for transitioning from a double bottom line movement to a triple bottom line one: being more inclusive of historically marginalized communities.

Occupy Sandy, from relief to resistance

Two weeks ago I was in my hometown of Hoboken, New Jersey, wading waist deep in a murky combination of floodwater, oil and sewage. More than a week later, after finally getting unstuck from New Jersey (even the deepest Jersey pride has its limits…), I found myself in a van full of Occupy Sandy activists delivering hot meals to housing-project high rises in Coney Island during a Nor’easter.