A Systematic Imbalance

"For millions of people, 'wealth' amounts to little more than a few weeks’ wages in a checking account or low-interest savings account, a car, and a few pieces of furniture. The inescapable reality is this: wealth is so concentrated that a large segment of society is virtually unaware of its existence, so that some people imagine that it belongs to surreal or mysterious entities..."

Quotes from Capital In The Twenty-First Century, 2013

Brooklyn Stand Up!

Photograph by Jason DeCrow

Breathless

"Get away [garbled] for what? Every time you see me, you want to mess with me. I'm tired of it. It stops today. Why would you...? Everyone standing here will tell you I didn't do nothing. I did not sell nothing. Because everytime you see me, you want to harass me. You want to stop me [garbled]. Selling cigarettes. I'm minding my business, officer, I'm minding my business. Please just leave me alone. I told you the last time, please just leave me alone. Please please, don't touch me. Do not touch me. [garbled] I can't breathe. I can't breathe. I can't breathe. I can't breathe. I can't breathe. I can't breathe. I can't breathe. I can't breathe. I can't breathe..." -Eric Garner's final words

Solidarity In Our Collective Pain

"The law is meant to be my servant and not my master, still less my torturer and my murderer."

AP Photograph of Michael Brown Sr. (center) at his son''s funeral

Quote from James Baldwin's A Report From Occupied Territory, 1966

You Are Not Alone

You have the First Amendment right to:

Peacefully assemble • Photograph or videotape police

Protest in public spaces • Protest without a permit

The Undignified Poor

“America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, 'It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.' It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: 'if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?' There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register... Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.”

Quote from Slaughterhouse-Five, 1969

Freie Arbeiter Stimme

"The Free Voice of Labor: The Jewish Anarchists traces the history of a Yiddish anarchist newspaper publishing its final issue after 87 years. Narrated by anarchist historian Paul Avrich, the story is mostly told by the newspaper's now elderly, but decidedly unbowed staff. It's the story of one of the largest radical movements among Jewish immigrant workers in the 19th and 20th centuries, the conditions that led them to band together, their fight to build trade unions, their huge differences with the communists, their attitudes towards violence, Yiddish culture, and their loyalty to one another."

We Are All Ayotzinapa!

"On October 22nd, Mexico took to the streets to demand the return of the 43 missing normalistas, as well as answers about the identity of the bodies discovered in the mass graves, and how they ended up there. 'We are not all here — 43 are missing' and 'Alive they were taken, alive we want them back' were the main slogans that shook Mexico’s squares from North to South. Several universities went on a 48-hour strike and some of them — including the UNAM and the UAM — declared an indefinite strike until the government provides some answers regarding the fate of the 43 normalistas."

October 22nd march photograph by Yuri Cortez

Text excerpted from Reflections On A Revolution

Cradle Of Murders

"A political insurgency was repressed with violence... The massacre has shown just

how fragile Mexico's democratic institutions are." -Sergio Aguayo

"Pressure continues to mount on the Mexican authorities to find 43 student teachers who disappeared three weeks ago in the southern city of Iguala, many of them after being arrested by local police... Thousands marched through the resort city of Acapulco on Friday calling for the return of the students alive in the latest in a series of protests around the state of Guerrero, where the events happened, as well as in other parts of the country and abroad." -The Guardian

Photograph by Rebecca Blackwell/AP

Hurricane's Last Wish

David McCallum kisses his mother after being freed from prison

"When I walked through the doors of this office in January, I inherited a legacy of disgrace with respect to wrongful conviction cases." -Ken Thompson, Brooklyn District Attorney

"A Brooklyn man convicted of murder was ordered free Wednesday after he spent 29 years in prison for crimes he did not commit. The convictions of David McCallum and his late co-defendant, Willie Stuckey, were overturned by a judge at the prosecutor’s request." -International Business Times

Related: In The Palm Of Some Fool's Hand?

Do You Hear The People Sing?

"One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws." – MLK

Revolution Is Inevitable!

"The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers, the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labour... Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights... I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."

Excerpted from Albert Einstein's Why Socialism (Monthly Review, May 1949)

Photograph of Washington Square Park by Nancy Cricco (NYU Archives, 1980)

Democracy's High Stakes

Pay 2 Play follows filmmaker John Ennis' quest to find a way out from under the "Pay 2 Play System," where politicians reward their donors with even larger sums from the public treasury — through contracts, tax cuts, and deregulation.  Along the way, he journeys through high drama on the Ohio campaign trail, uncovers the secret history of the game Monopoly, and explores the underworld of Los Angeles street-art on a humorous odyssey that reveals how much of a difference one person can make. Pay 2 Play is the layman’s guidebook to taking back our democracy.

Low Pay Is Not Okay!

Fight For 15!

"According to a new analysis from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), the CEOs of America's top 25 restaurant corporations, including McDonald's, Burger King, the Cheesecake Factory, Chipotle, and Jack in the Box, took home an average of 721 times the money minimum-wage workers did, and 194 times the take-home pay of the typical American worker in a production or nonsupervisory job. Restaurants and food services employ nearly half of all American workers who earn the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour (or less)."

Quote from Mother Jones (July 14th, 2014)

Seize The Time

"You know the world. The depressed peoples of the world are very shortly going to grow tired of being wooed and lulled into passivity and quiet endurance by chromium and neon lights. The soft music from the many well-placed public-address loudspeakers and car radios will no longer serve as balm to the thwarted hopes, defeated aims, and brutal suppression of needed change. They'll come out of their coma with a bloodlust and justified indignation for social injustice that will sweep the asphalt right from under the empire builders. This is the only reason I hang on. I want to be in the vanguard."

From Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson, 1970

Hands Up, Don't Shoot

Justice For Mike Brown!

Workers Unite For A Fair Workplace!

"We work at Guitar Center and we are organizing across the country to improve wages and working conditions for all Guitar Center employees.

We love our jobs and our passion is helping our customers achieve their musical dreams. But we often have trouble making ends meet, thanks to the low wages and fluctuating hours we receive. We are asked to do many non-selling tasks which hurt our commissions, sales workers do not receive sick days, health benefits are expensive and part timers are not even offered them.

It’s been an exciting year for the Guitar Center campaign: workers in New York, Chicago and Las Vegas have successfully organized a union at their workplaces, over 100 bands and artists have endorse the campaign, and tens of thousands of people have signed petitions supporting us.

However, the company has responded by refusing to give us a fair contract and has launched an aggressive campaign to bust the union. The company's last offer is even less than what non-union stores have and is meant to punish us for standing up for ourselves. Our union has been forced to file charges detailing the company’s bad faith negotiating and union busting.

We now say: enough is enough! We are asking the public to support us as we enter the final stages of negotiations! Sign the petition to help us get a fair contract."

Het Achterhuis

"Not being able to go outside upsets me more than I can say, and I'm terrified our hiding place will be discovered and that we'll be shot. That, of course, is a fairly dismal prospect."

Seventy years ago today was the beginning of the end for a young girl who just wanted to live and express herself through her writing, with aspirations of being a journalist; a girl who somehow saw beauty in the world despite the unrelenting ugliness just outside her window ("In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart." "How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world"). Anne Frank was captured and arrested by the Nazis on the morning of August 4th, 1944 and sent to Huis Van Bewaring, then on to Auschwitz, and finally to Bergen-Belsen where she died at age 15.

It Stops Today!

Eric "Big E" Garner

Rest In Peace

Mother Of Exiles

"We have rescued Irish children from famine, Russian and Ukrainian children from religious persecution, Cambodian children from genocide, Haitian children from earthquakes, Sudanese children from civil war, and New Orleans children from Hurricane Katrina... Once, in 1939, we turned our backs on Jewish children fleeing the Nazis, and it remains a blight on our national reputation. The point is that this good Nation is great when we open our doors and our hearts to needy children, and diminished when we don’t."

Excerpted from a speech given on July 18th, 2014

I Hate The Capitalist System

"I hate the capitalist system,

And I'll tell you the reason why:

It has caused me so much suffering,

And my dearest friends to die."

An Emancipating Sun

"The working class must get rid of the whole brood of masters and exploiters, and put themselves in possession and control of the means of production, that they may have steady employment without consulting a capitalist employer, large or small, and that they may get the wealth their labor produces, all of it, and enjoy with their families the fruits of their industry in comfortable and happy homes, abundant and wholesome food, proper clothing and all other things necessary to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." It is therefore a question not of "reform," the mask of fraud, but of revolution. The capitalist system must be overthrown, class-rule abolished and wage-slavery supplanted by the cooperative industry."

From Outlook for Socialism In The United States, 1900

Humanity And Freedom

"The courageous thing for both sides is to embrace the dignity, grace and strength of the other. We have no choice but to work together to heal our wounds, wipe our tears and, while learning the lessons of the past, to look forward. George Orwell said that the further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it. We all bleed the same colour and the life of all is equal and precious. No cause justifies the killing, intimidating or threatening of human beings."

From ...I Call For An End To This Bloodshed, The Guardian July 2014

This Game Is Rigged

There's Just Us

"The current criminal justice system is shaped by economic bias — crimes unique to the wealthy are either ignored or treated lightly, while the so-called common crimes of the poor lead to arrest, charges, conviction, and imprisonment. The three propositions that support this statement are that (1) society fails to protect people from crimes they fear (homicide, burglary, assault) by refusing to alleviate the poverty that breeds them; (2) the criminal justice system fails to protect people from the most serious dangers by failing to define as crimes the dangerous acts of those who are well off (white collar crime, pollution, occupational hazards) and to prosecute accordingly; and (3) by virtue of these and other failures, the criminal justice system succeeds in creating the image that crime is almost exclusively the work of the poor, an image that serves the interests of the powerful. By focusing on individual criminals who are poor, the system diverts attention from the injustices of social and economic institutions. The failure to reduce crime reinforces this situation by concentrating fear and hostility on the poor. At the base of unequal justice is the unequal distribution of wealth and income. A criminal justice system cannot hold individuals guilty of the injustice of breaking the law if the law itself supports and defends an unjust social order. To counteract this failure, steps must be taken toward domestic disarmament; criminalization of white-collar crimes; creation of a correctional system that promotes human dignity and gives ex-offenders a real opportunity to go straight; a more reasonable exercise of power by police officers, prosecutors, and judges; and equal access to high-quality legal expertise for all individuals accused of crime."

From The Rich Get Richer And The Poor Get Prison: Ideology, Class And Criminal Justice, 1979

The Principles Of Our Freedom

"Let us close the springs of racial poison. Let us pray for wise and understanding hearts. Let us lay aside irrelevant differences and make our Nation whole."

Living A Life

"No real social change has ever been

brought about without a revolution -

Revolution is but thought carried into action.

Every effort for progress, for enlightenment,

for science, for religious, political, and

economic liberty, emanates from the minority,

and not from the mass."

Every Worker Deserves A Living Wage

Social and economic inequality in the US has reached historic proportions. The top 1% increased their income following capitalism’s Great Recession while the overwhelming majority of working people are still struggling or are even worse off than before. The movement for a minimum wage of $15/hour is an expression this enormous problem of inequality. The support for the fast food workers actions for $15 showed that the aspirations of Occupy to fight against poverty and inequality are alive and growing among millions.

15 Now was launched in January of 2014 by Seattle City Council Member, Kshama Sawant and Socialist Alternative to fight for a $15 minimum wage in Seattle. 15 Now chapters quickly spread across the country. It is a campaign that anyone can join and help build.

Speak Out!

"In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations."

Quote from The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment In Literary Investigation

Take Back The Night

Karen DeCrow

December 18, 1937 – June 6, 2014

"The feminist movement — the glorious perception that women can be valued for our brains and not just for our faces — makes it possible for a woman to become 50 and not to grieve."

Reset! Restart!

"One year ago, we learned that the Internet is under surveillance, and our activities are being monitored to create permanent records of our private lives — no matter how innocent or ordinary those lives might be.

Today, we can begin the work of effectively shutting down the collection of our online communications, even if the US Congress fails to do the same. That’s why I’m asking you to join me on June 5th for Reset the Net when people and companies all over the world will come together to implement the technological solutions that can put an end to the mass surveillance programs of any government. This is the beginning of a moment where we the people begin to protect our universal human rights with the laws of nature rather than the laws of nations.

We have the technology, and adopting encryption is the first effective step that everyone can take to end mass surveillance. That’s why I am excited for Reset the Net — it will mark the moment when we turn political expression into practical action, and protect ourselves on a large scale.

Join us on June 5th, and don’t ask for your privacy. Take it back."

Edward Snowden's public statement, released June 4th 2014

Wheels Of Fate

"Tiananmen showed the world that the Chinese people are no different from everyone else. When given the chance to express their views freely, they seized it and howled in unison their desire for democracy, freedom and human rights. Although their understanding of the concepts was elementary, they instinctively grasped, like the protesters in Place de la Bastille and Wenceslas Square before them, that these ideals formed the foundation of any civilised and humane nation."

Quote excerpted from Ma Jian's Tiananmen Square 25 Years On

"Life is not what you alone make it"

Yuri Kochiyama

May 19, 1921 – June 1, 2014

Oh! Good Old-Fashioned War!

The Ballad Of William Worthy

William Worthy

July 7th, 1921 - May 4th, 2014

"Only a gullible American public would go on, revolution after revolution, decade after decade, swallowing what Lippmann and Merz nailed as "double­ think" long before George Orwell coined the word. Even if a dying or already dead revolutionary government some­ how managed to spread feeble propaganda beyond its own borders, what revolution-hungry people anywhere on earth would buy into and emulate a widely heralded and demonstrable failure? ... With few exceptions, the American people for years after a revolution receive totally negative journalistic images, with virtually nothing to suggest a return to normalcy in the lives of most of the people."

Quote excerpted from Prolonged Surrender to Reality: U.S. Media Coverage Of Revolutions, 1985

When The Ship Comes In

"We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate facilities are inherently unequal." -SCOTUS ruling, May 17th, 1954

Keep On Keepin' On!

"The only thing workers have to bargain with is their skill or their labor. Denied the right to withhold it as a last resort, they become powerless. The strike is therefore not a breakdown of collective bargaining — it is the indispensable cornerstone of that process."

Quote from a Canadian Federation Of Labour publication, 1979

Free Cecily!

An Obvious Choice?

"The increasing anxiety of American life comes from the covert guilt that abundance and equality remain utterly separated, and we have reached the point where socialism is not only morally demanding but unconsciously obvious — obvious enough to flood with anxiety the psyches of those millions who know and yet do nothing." -Norman Mailer

From Advertisements For Myself, 1959

A Jury Of Her Peers

Justice For Cecily

Letter via The Guardian

A Vision Of The Future

"The verdict in the biggest Occupy related criminal case in New York City, that of Cecily McMillan, came down Monday afternoon. As disturbing as it is that she was found guilty of felony assault against Officer Grantley Bovell, the circumstances of her trial reflect an even more disturbing reality – that of normalized police violence, disproportionately punitive sentences (McMillan faces seven years in prison), and a criminal penal system based on anything but justice. While this is nothing new for the over-policed communities of New York City, what happened to McMillan reveals just how powerful and unrestrained a massive police force can be in fighting back against the very people with whom it is charged to protect." -Molly Knefel, The Guardian

Justice For Cecily's statement

Witness To History

The '60s: Decade Of Change

"My photographs became my protest. My friends stood up and picketed, and I was a surrogate of them. I protested for them and with them, through my pictures." -Benedict J. Fernandez

On exhibit from May 2nd – Friday, July 20th

Bronx Documentary Center

614 Courtlandt Avene, Bronx, NY

Photograph: 1968 MLK Solidarity march, © Benedict J. Fernandez

The Long Revolution

"It is our basic case, in this manifesto, that the separate campaigns in which we have been active, and the separate issues with which we have all been concerned, run back, in their essence to a single political system and its alternatives. We believe that the system we now oppose can only survive by a willed separation of issues, and the resulting fragmentation of consciousness. Our own first position is that all the issues, industrial and political, international and domestic, economic and cultural, humanitarian and radical, are deeply connected; that what we oppose is a political, economic and social system, that what we work for is a different whole society." -from The May Day Manifesto, 1967

"This is a language of socialist aspiration which is today scarcely uttered. At a time when many are coming to see that the triumph of neoliberalism — an unfettered version of capitalism — has come at enormous economic, social and environmental cost, it seems to me that The May Day Manifesto deserves to be read again as a contribution to the project of inspiring a concerted resistance to the system that now dominates much of the world." -from The May Day Manifesto, 1968 edition

Download: The May Day Manifesto

Action Is The Only Remedy

"I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe." -Elie Wiesel

Quote excerpted from Wiesel's 1986 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech

“They can incarcerate my body but never my mind."

Rubin "Hurricane" Carter

May 6th, 1937 - April 20th, 2014

Plutodemocracy

"Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism."

"What do our findings say about democracy in America? They certainly constitute troubling news for advocates of "populistic" democracy, who want governments to respond primarily or exclusively to the policy preferences of their citizens. In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it."

"Despite the seemingly strong empirical support in previous studies for theories of majoritarian democracy, our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts... We believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened."

Excerpts from Testing Theories Of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, And Average Citizens, April 2014

This Is Our Moment

Governments have abused the Internet and twisted it beyond recognition.

Now, we're taking it back. Are you in? Sign up to help Reset The Net.

Let Freedom Ring

Martin Luther King, Jr.

January 15, 1929 - April 4, 1968

"Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends. And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'"

Fight The Plutocracy!

"Today’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling in McCutcheon v. FEC strikes a devastating blow at the very foundation of our democracy. This is truly a decision establishing plutocrat rights. The Supreme Court today holds that the purported right of a few hundred super rich individuals to spend outrageously large sums on campaign contributions outweighs the national interest in political equality and a government free of corruption. In practical terms, the decision means that one individual can write a single check for $5.9 million to be spent by candidates, political parties and political committees. Even after Citizens United, this case is absolutely stunning. It is sure to go down as one of the worst decisions in the history of American jurisprudence." -Rob Weissman, Public Citizen

Everything you need to know about the McCutcheon v. FEC ruling

Hope And Dreams

"The principles underlying propaganda are extremely simple. Find some common desire, some widespread unconscious fear or anxiety; think out some way to relate this wish or fear to the product you have to sell; then build a bridge of verbal or pictorial symbols over which your customer can pass from fact to compensatory dream, and from the dream to the illusion that your product, when purchased, will make the dream come true. They are selling hope.

We no longer buy oranges, we buy vitality. We do not just buy an auto, we buy prestige. And so with all the rest. In toothpaste, for example, we buy not a mere cleanser and antiseptic, but release from the fear of being sexually repulsive. In vodka and whisky we are not buying a protoplasmic poison which in small doses, may depress the nervous system in a psychologically valuable way; we are buying friendliness and good fellowship, the warmth of Dingley Dell and the brilliance of the Mermaid Tavern. With our laxatives we buy the health of a Greek god. With the monthly best seller we acquire culture, the envy of our less literate neighbors and the respect of the sophisticated. In every case the motivation analyst has found some deep-seated wish or fear, whose energy can be used to move the customer to part with cash and so, indirectly, to turn the wheels of industry." -Aldous Huxley

From Brave New World Revisited, 1958

Victory For Scott Olsen!

$4.5 Million Tentative Settlement Reached In Scott Olsen’s
Lawsuit for “Less Lethal” Shooting by Oakland Police

“After serving two tours of duty as a US Marine in Iraq, Scott Olsen could never have imagined that he would be shot in the head by an Oakland Police officer while he was peacefully exercising his First Amendment rights in support of the budding Occupy economic justice movement... Scott was 24 years old when the shooting and ensuing brain damage robbed him of what had been a promising career as a computer network and systems administrator.” -Rachel Lederman, Esq.

A Vision That Speaks To Working People

"What I’m saying is that I do not want to see the US significantly dominated by a handful of billionaire families controlling the economic and political life of the country. That I do believe that in a democratic, civilized society, all people are entitled to health care as a right, all people are entitled to quality education as a right, all people are entitled to decent jobs and a decent income, and that we need a government which represents ordinary Americans and not just the wealthy and the powerful... The corporate media ignores some of the huge accomplishments that have taken place in countries like Denmark, Finland, Sweden and Norway. These countries, which have a long history of democratic socialist or labor governments, have excellent and universal health care systems, excellent educational systems and they have gone a long way toward eliminating poverty and creating a far more egalitarian society than we have. I think that there are economic and social models out there that we can learn a heck of a lot from." -Bernie Sanders

From John Nichols' interview with Sanders for The Nation, March 2014.

Stop The Trans-Pacific Partnership!

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a secretive agreement being negotiated behind closed doors by government bureaucrats and more than 600 corporate lobbyists. It threatens everything we care about: democracy, human rights, workers' rights, the environment, healthcare, freedom of speech, and the Internet... All in the name of so-called "free trade."

Only You Yourself Can Be Your Liberator

“Build your house on granite. By granite I mean your nature that you are torturing to death, the love in your child's body, your wife's dream of love, your own dream of life when you were sixteen. Exchange your illusions for a bit of truth. Throw out your politicians and diplomats! Take your destiny into your own hands and build your life on rock. Forget about your neighbor and look inside yourself! Your neighbor, too, will be grateful. Tell you're fellow workers all over the world that you're no longer willing to work for death but only for life. Instead of flocking to executions and shouting hurrah, hurrah, make a law for the protection of human life and its blessings. Such a law will be part of the granite foundation your house rests on. Protect your small children's love against the assaults of lascivious, frustrated men and women. Stop the mouth of the malignant old maid; expose her publicly or send her to a reform school instead of young people who are longing for love. Don't try to outdo your exploiter in exploitation if you have a chance to become a boss. Throw away your swallowtails and top hat, and stop applying for a license to embrace your woman. Join forces with your kind in all countries; they are like you, for better or worse. Let your child grow up as nature (or 'god') intended. Don't try to improve on nature. Learn to understand it and protect it. Go to the library instead of the prize fight, go to foreign countries rather than to Coney Island. And first and foremost, think straight, trust the quiet inner voice inside you that tells you what to do. You hold your life in your hands, don't entrust it to anyone else, least of all to your chosen leaders. BE YOURSELF! Any number of great men have told you that.” -Wilhelm Reich, from Listen, Little Man!

Artwork by William Steig 

The Persistent Commoner

Tony Benn

1925 - 2014

“It's the same each time with progress. First they ignore you, then they say you're mad, then dangerous, then there's a pause and then you can't find anyone who disagrees with you.”