Wampum

I've written quite a few times on the domestic politics of Iran, the 24-part+ Return of the ... One True King series on the last two election cycles for the Majlis and the Presidentials, and the 6-part+ Return of the ... One True King (New Series) on the post-Presidential politics, and related in the 8-part+ Is Pakistan? series, and my other posts on the maritime balance of forces in the Indian Ocean / Gulf of Oman and the Port of Gwadar and access to energy and access to markets, traversing, as Borodin reminds us, the steppes of Central Asia, a piece originally written for jubilee of Tsar Alexander II.

More recently I wrote about what we can, and haven't done, lacking state power, budget, imagination, and perhaps even a determination to prevail. Hugo Chavez demonstrated, in principle at least, that progressives can reach past the barriers of dysfunctional states and their controlling elites. It makes me sick with grief that I lead the effort to get Maine Tribes involved with Hugo Chavez, that CITGO has categorized "Tribes" as belonging to States, and most of all that Melvin Francis was killed a week ago this evening in pursuit of a hare I started. But the fact remains that, as I wrote in Snake Oil and Hope, Wampum, November 15, 2005

... we still have to figure out our relationships, and not just with les banlieues populaires in France, through, or independent of, several preconceptions of race and migration, but also with the progressives in Iran, the secular nationalists in Iraq, the Reconcilliation and Peace movements in Israel/Palestine...

I've added emphasis because as usual, the "muscular" wing of the Democratic Party, and the always insane body of the Republican Party, are working the Domestic Dependent Media for another AUF, and all an AUF entails. I suppose the "muscular" Democrats hope to replace the insane Republicans, leaving the rest of the AUF debris unchanged.

I've invited Jeffery Lewis from armscontrolwonk.com to post here, and I'm asking others as well. The ground rules are simply no drooling. This note simply serves notice that during the Koufax period we'll be putting the best material that we can on Wampum. These will be our Lettres persanes de 1721.