Public policy, social issues, gender politics, religion, civitas, and other taboo topics fall under the hammer of Shava's iconoclasmic force of natural philosophy.
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Monday, February 24, 2003
11:43 PM
Mission K5 ready for launch!
Tonight I went to an organizational meeting for the Student Activist Association, seeking volunteer help and allies, and to help them organize furlough activities for the older kids (middle/high school) . KBOO-FM was there, and pulled me for an interview, so I guess I'm officially opening up the Mission K5 project, even though I wasn't going to go public until we had terms settled with the GSA and Parks & Rec.
So I guess I'm going public a week sooner than I thought. It shouldn't hurt at all. You can find the yahoogroup at Mission K5.
In organizing Mission K5, I'm finding this is probably the easiest organizing job I've had, even though the logistics are nearly impossible. But it's a project everyone can get behind, regardless of interests -- or that people would have a hard time being against, fer sure. I find myself wishing more people would get involved on an exec committee level, so I can have people to swap stories with from the inside. This is going to be fun...
Making community organizing transparent
No more secrets!
It's a basic truth of organizing and politics that no one will ever get a real journal of what goes into organizing a project. You try to protect your relationships. Sometimes you threaten people into giving you things, but you want it to seem to the rest of the world that it was all their idea to help. Sometimes you play one resource off against another. This is why I want to teach activism, because when most people talk about what they really do with organizing, they lie. It's like some strange mystery cult, the Masons or something odder -- traditionally you can't learn real organizing from a book because no one's been willing to make the process transparent. You have to gain the trust of a veteran, be sponsored, and mentored, and gain more trust. Then when someone trusts you really well, they'll tell you what's really going on...!
Well, the matter of fraternal organizations is just becoming the fabric of square society. I think it's time we separated the mysteries (which, perhaps, you do need a mentor to learn -- the artsy finesse bits!) from the secrets.
The "secrets" about organizing are all about keeping the tools out of the hands of the masses, because then we'd have a very noisy and participatory democracy. I say, about time to give everyone a toolkit -- it might take that much fixing to bring us all together.
I'm not exactly a populist, though I've come close. But I will say that the "noisy democracy" horse has been out of the barn since people learned to use the web. Now, if we want people to learn to be critical of media, to be truly informed and educated citizens, we need to expose the secrets of the media, the system, the marketing juju of it all. And we need to teach them to use it, to understand it.
If I can just slow down enough to write it all down, we'll have the book maybe by the end of this year.
It's the petroleum dollar standard vs. the petroleum euro standard, stupid!
Ever since we started pushing the UN so hard on Iraq I've been trying to figure out where the fire was. I mean, why would we be pushing for a spring invasion quite so hard and quite so unilaterally (counting Blair as being dimensional with Bush)?
My personal convictions say "follow the money." But even with the second largest certified oil reserves in the world, it's hard to believe that handing the extraction as well as refining rights to US interests would be worth the tens of $B and the lives and political capital spent on a unilateral war.
So, I've been musing to myself... Control of supply? Where's the money crisis here?
Then today, I got forwarded this article, originally on evworld (who better to criticize oil economics?), posted from this link from indymedia.
And I'm thinking, where's George Soros when I really need his opinion on a paper on the monetary system? Huh? Where?
The summary goes:
Although completely suppressed by the U.S. media and government, the answer to the Iraq enigma is simple yet shocking -- it is an oil currency war. The real reason for this upcoming war is this administration's goal of preventing further Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) momentum towards the euro as an oil transaction currency standard. However, in order to pre-empt OPEC, they need to gain geo-strategic control of Iraq along with its 2nd largest proven oil reserves. This essay will discuss the macroeconomics of the `petro-dollar' and the unpublicized but real threat to U.S. economic hegemony from the euro as an alternative oil transaction currency. The author advocates reform of the global monetary system including a dollar/euro currency 'trading band' with reserve status parity, and a dual OPEC oil transaction standard. These reforms could potentially reduce future oil currency warfare.
Now, ain't' it a pip when something like that comes in that perfectly fits your anxieties about the root economic causes of the war, and you just don't have the macroeconomic chops to deconstruct it?
Someone help me out, email me with a terse critique.
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