Politics and Social Movements

Someone made a map that shows US Military Casualties from the Iraq war.

Hopefully someone will be inspired to create a map of Iraqi civilian casualties. You could use data from Iraq Body Count, and the Geonames database to convert Iraqi cities into longitudes and latitudes.

There is a recent trend in the US discussion about politics that argues that the Left needs a big rethink, because it has failed to get its message across and we're seeing a New Era of rightwing dominance.

There are numerous problems with this assertion. First of all, you can find evidence for it, but finding conclusive evidence is very difficult as this is a very hard thing to demonstrate.

The "Left"
Unfortunately this is narrowly defined as the Democrats. Thus what people are really concerned about the fact is that Democrat canidates, who are moving closer and closer to Republican/rightwing values, keep losing elections. Instead we should be focussing on the fact that society is making very little progress on issues of racism and class inequality.

I hope to attend and meet people. Yay networking!

Aspiration is pleased to host AdvocacyDev II. The second in a series of events that began with the first Advocacy Dev gathering in June 2004, Advocacy Dev II will convene organizers and activists using free and open
source (F/OSS) online advocacy tools, and developers and designers
building those tools.

There is an interesting conflict in progressive non-profits which is heightened in the more radical organizations which have the least money.

The conflict is between wanting to treat their workers well, and wanting to get as much work done as possible for the greater good of society.

I'm fine arguing that well-funded moderate non-profits and for-profit corporations should be paying very high wages, but it's harder when then money comes out of organizations that are doing good work.

Should staff members in radical social change organizations be paid just enough to survive, a "living wage", or somewhere in between?

The city of Philadelphia is trying to become the first major US city with public-provided wireless access.

Here are a few possible shortcomings

May 5 - UK votes. Labour is ahead by around 5-8% and expected to win a majority. Aparently Labour benefits from the distribution of its votes and could pull off a majority even if the Conservatives got the same number of votes. I'm upset with the rightwing moves that Labour has been making (at least since Neil Kinnock in the Eighties) which have now become obvious to the world as Blair was Bush's favorite imperialist ally.

I wonder if Blair is any worse than prior Labour leaders in this move to the right? It seems like social-democrats/labour parties have been moving to the right... perhaps almost since the 1880s (when the German social democrats first started moving away from Marxism). I guess there have been shifts back to the left in 1917-1919 (due to the Russian Revolution), the Thirties, 1943-1946 (after communist Russia defeated Hitler, and before the Cold War was up and running), and 1968-1971.

People who want to change the world need advice on the most effective way to do this.

Generally books that try to give you most of what you need to do activism are called "Organizing Guides" or "Activism Handbooks".

In my mind, the two leading organizing guides are that by the War Resister's League and Midwest Academy's one. SEAC also has a good guide.

However, none of these guides come close to providing the level of detail that would reflect the variety of experiences of thousands of social movement activists. I think the solution is to develop a new online collaboratively written set of resources that would be sorted and edited to provide a level of quality worthy of a good Organizing Guide.

Defense Contracts in St. Joseph Valley county, from 1983-2003.
(In $1000s)
Note: I attended Notre Dame, in St. Joseph Valley county, Indiana. It's a small county, but apparently very industrial and militarized.

1983 $ 685,057
1984 $ 769,751
1985 $ 850,550
1986 $ 699,475
1987 $ 640,365
1988 $ 281,183
1989 $ 305,130
1990 $ 381,573
1991 $ 440,858
1992 $ 475,263
1993 $ 430,820
1994 $ 313,661
1995 $ 163,539
1996 $ 356,432
1997 $ 333,954
1998 $ 282,088
1999 $ 289,241
2000 $ 301,217
2001 $ 175,629
2002 $ 384,345
2003 $ 619,560

I wrote a chapter for a book that is finally going to be released within the next month: Student Freedom Revisited.

My chapter is a brief comparison of current and recent student activism with that of the Sixties. The book is a follow-up to one that was originally published in the Sixties ("Student Freedom").

I haven't read the rest of the book, so I don't know if it is good or not. I think I wrote the most politically/progressive/activist-minded chapter, though hopefully other chapters will

Recently United For Peace and Justice (UFPJ) held a national assembly in St. Louis. They put too much emphasis on mass mobiziliation (another large demonstration), trying to lobby Congress to stop funding for the Iraq occupation (which doesn't have a chance), and educating the public.

Instead we should be focussing on stopping people from joining the military. I'm guessing there are hundreds or more of recruitment centers around the US. There are something like 1000 JROTC programs (high school) and several hundred ROTC ones (in colleges/universities). In addition, the military recruits even when there isn't a program.