Occupy Delaware
GA Meeting Notes
2012-08-08
Spencer Plaza

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Meeting start: 1910 hr

Several new people at the meeting tonight. The GA process was reviewed. Facilitation meetings for proposals organization. GA meeting, with discussions, report-backs, proposals, announcements. “Dissent or disagree but don’t attack. Speak from experience. Trust each other and trust the process.” Hand signals; twinkle and twunkle fingers, point of process, speak up, point of information, direct-address, stack.

10-MINUTE DISCUSSION

1) Extend discussion time during the Wednesday GA and not have the Saturday Open-Forum GA.

2) Potential proposal: to converse and push for the creation of a local currency. Examples are DC; Keene, NH. Local currencies are the essence of sovereignty.

We’ll discuss both of these tonight.

1) Saturday open-forum GAs are free-flowing, but increasingly less attended. Do we need Saturday GA and would we want to extend the discussion period during the Wednesday GA? Other ideas for improving the GA.

Sometimes it’s difficult to get to a GA on Saturdays. Add into the Wednesday discussion period committee meetings. Even though some people are on more than one committee. They’d have to jump around. Our committees need to solidify a bit, we should have a discussion about how we want to work committee.

The Saturday GA provided a creative, learning environment, ideas would develop and flow into proposals, etc., for the Wednesday GA.

Meeting fatigue, 2 meetings a week (although most people didn’t attend both) may wear people out. Maybe relatively frequent meetings for action and affinity groups and less frequent GAs. Spend more energy on creating dramatic actions.

The action/affinity/working groups should meet more frequently.

Maybe every other Wednesday have the GA.

We need to have meetings to get stuff done, so we can make our meetings more flexible, figure out how to have something for everybody. Process stuff, open discussion stuff. Adding more discussion into Wednesday, so we could have both things. If we reduce GA to twice a month, and increase working group meetings, then we have more meetings and more meetings to coordinate. If we have committee meetings after GA it’ll be more efficient, and everybody would be together. Sometimes we need to decide things as a larger group, the GA.

No meeting is mandatory, nobody should feel bad about not making a meeting. We can still get together on Saturday and talk about stuff. I’d be afraid to not meet every week. That increases the likelihood of extensive time passing between not seeing people. We were using Saturday’s as a good action day.

I like the action/affinity groups, we need to make clear meeting times, and action times. Post it. I’m worried about losing communication between working groups (which the GA helps with). I like every Wednesday night for GA, but we have to post times to facilitate people’s attending.

What about, and I know and I apologize ahead of time not everybody would have access to this but what if we had because some people like the free flow of discussion but if we could set up an online chat with a topic and who cares if it leads in another direction and we could say we’ll have a discussion I don’t know about the banks and set it up for a specific time and I don’t know how it would be set up I’m not a technical person and it gives people the ability to do it from the comfort of their own homes I wouldn’t want to replace the GA I think it’s important to see each other face to face but to add to the robustness of the group it would pull more people in.

We can have actual voice interaction online also for those of us who don’t like to type. We would have the same process, norms. People shouldn’t be so sensitive and get their panties in a bunch. Get to the truth. But there are those who’s only intent is to upset people. [There are interaction and communication limitations for online communication.]

Good discussion! We’ll discuss the second topic later in the meeting.

REPORT-BACKS

Actions

I went to the CBTU meeting last Saturday, I talked for a couple minutes about ODE. What was the meeting’s topic? They do announcements and reports at the beginnings, then politicians talk and answer questions, the others get to speak.

Wilmington Rally, 2LiveCru, lots and lots and lots of positive beeps and waves! The same old negative people, too.

The Mayors thing was cool. A lot of CBTU people were there and we hugged each other, they’re a hugging group. It was in the West Side, with city council people there. All the questions were about the 35 million dollar improvement of the West Side.

The Birthday Bash

It was a good day on Sunday. To bring closure to the camp on a positive note. It was a very good thing, we did the right thing. We got good media coverage. I want to give credit to the people who spent a lot of time on site. Also we got an unsolicited editorial in the NJ today, an awesome letter from Ciro Poppitti, thanking us for being here and talking about what he is doing fighting unjust foreclosures. We had about 50 people here, a good turnout. Some were new, came out to show support. Congratulations to all of us!

DISCUSSION

Local currency. The essence of sovereignty and disassociating communities from the corporate state. Keene, NH, a “libertopia,” volunteerism, localism. In Baltimore they have the B-note for currency. The idea is to coin our own local currency and through the Wilmington city council we can distribute and manage it through the city, with oversight, and develop a movement to subvert the corporate structure that exists here. As long as we’re tied to the dollar we’ll never have local sustainability. A dollar spent here immediately leaves the community. We’re trying to increase interdependence.

Has anything been done in Delaware up to now? I don’t know. The bit-coin may have been used here. But I don’t know of any home-grown currency.

Indigenous people have always had their own currency, wampum, that they still use. Indigenous sovereigns, native American tribes, have their own currencies. What we’re trying to develop is a currency that is ratified by the local government, so that it’ll be accepted by local business community.

How do we distinguish this sovereignty from the groups who want to secede, they’re not about human rights…also there’s a history of banks distributing their own currency, which balkanized the economy. There would have to be exchange between local groups. Globalization means the world ruled by the 1%, but it also means global solidarity. Would many different currencies impede that?

How dissimilar is this to a barter system? It’s not a barter system, it’s a currency that’s only good locally. Would the dollar still be used as a medium of exchange?

We’ve talked about food being a form of currency. Gets it down to basics.

Bartering could solve some problems. I like bartering, I do it when I can, it’s not practical all the time, but we’ve lost that skill. There are festivals where no money is used, you barter for the whole week. PorcFest.

It flies in the face of the corporatocracy, it represents individualism. It’s not going to be useful for everything. Delaware’s big enough to support its own currency. We may want to push it through several city councils.

People are always free to barter, and really nothing is stopping any parties from bartering. A local currency specifically has to be coined so that it can’t be duplicated, counterfeited. I really believe that the best thing to do is to coin our own currency for the city of Wilmington, extending it beyond the city is fine, but it should be focused on the city.

Small groups of stores use their own currency. In the Berkshires they create $2.3 million of their own currency. It’s a way to address poverty by giving people a chance to buy locally. It was done during the Depression, when money was scarce. The model is a voluntary association that accepts the currency.

I want to address the issue of exchanging goods over long distances. How will local communities exchange goods? This will look at global structures of governance, bottom up, not global government. Vehicles, modalities that would facilitate exchange.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

WeAreWoman march in DC, August 18, bus to DC, 33 seats left, needed to confirm the bus. $20 round-trip to DC! WeAreWomen.org, state forums, bus links.

On that day, Aug. 18, there’s Lemonade Freedom Day, in DC. It’s illegal to sell lemonade on the lawn of the Capitol but last year people were doing it, little kids were getting arrested! FB.

I’m developing a lesson plan for writing press releases, I want to organize a class for how to write an effective press release. How to manage a press list. Twinkle fingers.

Who has the paint? I want to make a shirt for the trip.

The August Quarterly, the 12, Sunday, wreath hanging at Spencer Plaza, a 2 pm. [] We should attend. I will be there.

Aug. 17, another food giveaway. Please give extra veggies from your garden to Norris or Michele. Friday, 1 pm. Rodney Square. Across from the library. Last time we couldn’t give food away during the farmer’s market.

Tomorrow is National Chalk Day [] so chalk it up tomorrow!!!

Next Tuesday, Sierra Club mentioned it, it’s on the FB page, in West Chester they want to enlarge a pipe to transport frack gas, it runs through Brandywine Creek, which supplies drinking water to Wilmington. A public presentation of the project.

Obama gave $25 million to attack the Taliban in Syria, which means that he’s aiding terrorists. Nobody in the news is calling him on it. I notified the FBI! They haven’t responded…yet.

We just came from Frieda Berryhill Memorial Lecture, a retired Japanese engineer, doing a US tour to raise awareness about conditions at Fukushima, he and 800 other senior veteran engineers and managers are petitioning TEPCO to hire them so that they will be exposed to radiation instead of younger people, so the chromosome damage doesn’t go into the next generation. They’re raising international awareness to put pressure on the Japanese government, media, TEPCO. It was a very sobering talk. The way they’re doing the cleanup is very secretive, the group is calling for transparency. It’s a minimum 50-year cleanup. There is a site, fukushimaresponse.org, with the presentation and video. Encourage grassroots groups to publicize this, it affects everybody on the planet. There’s a documentary on TV.

Meeting adjourned: 2039 hr.

Action committee meetings followed the GA.

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