The Gifted Hunter... One Aim, One Destiny

Chokwe Lumumba

1947 - 2014

"Capitalism, at its rankest form, is not a humanistic economic system. It allows the most powerful to tear into the economic fabric of the least powerful. It allows people with big money to control people with no money, low money and small money in many ways including politically because the people with the money the determinant of who runs for office." -from Jackson Free Press interview

#FreeAlaa

"Whenever a regime is cornered, one of the first

things it starts doing is arresting activists." -Alaa

"Nearly three months since his arrest, the Egyptian blogger, software developer and activist Alaa Abd El Fattah remains imprisoned. Charged in December with organizing a demonstration to protest the failure of the draft constitution in legislating against military court martialing of civilians, Abd El Fattah is awaiting trial in prison."  -Jillian C. York, Electric Frontier Freedom Foundation

In The Palm Of Some Fool’s Hand?

"You may remember me from my other life as a middleweight boxer. But fate had other plans for me; I was wrongly convicted of a triple murder in Paterson, New Jersey, and spent 19 years in prison trying, along with generous friends and good people from every walk of life, to right this wrong and gain my freedom. I am now quite literally on my deathbed and am making my final wish to those with the legal authority to act. My single regret in life is that David McCallum of Brooklyn — a man incarcerated in 1985, the same year I was released, and represented by Innocence International since 2004 — is still in prison. I request only that McCallum be granted a full hearing by the Brooklyn conviction integrity unit, now under the auspices of the new district attorney, Ken Thompson... McCallum was incarcerated two weeks after I was released, reborn into the miracle of this world. Now I’m looking death straight in the eye; he’s got me on the ropes, but I won’t back down. I ask Thompson to look straight in the eye of truth, a tougher customer than death, and not back down either." -Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, excerpted from Hurricane Carter’s Dying Wish (NY Daily News)

Watch: Reasonable Doubt: The Story Of David McCallum (trailer)

The Moral Choice?

"I'm utterly committed to the idea that capitalism has to be the way we generate mass wealth in the coming century. That argument's over. But the idea that it's not going to be married to a social compact, that how you distribute the benefits of capitalism isn't going to include everyone in the society to a reasonable extent, that's astonishing to me. And so capitalism is about to seize defeat from the jaws of victory all by its own hand. That's the astonishing end of this story, unless we reverse course. Unless we take into consideration, if not the remedies of Marx then the diagnosis, because he saw what would happen if capital triumphed unequivocally, if it got everything it wanted. And one of the things that capital would want unequivocally and for certain is the diminishment of labor. They would want labor to be diminished because labor's a cost. And if labor is diminished, let's translate that: in human terms, it means human beings are worth less. From this moment forward unless we reverse course, the average human being is worth less on planet Earth. Unless we take stock of the fact that maybe socialism and the socialist impulse has to be addressed again; it has to be married as it was married in the 1930s, the 1940s and even into the 1950s, to the engine that is capitalism. The idea that the market will solve such things as environmental concerns, as our racial divides, as our class distinctions, our problems with educating and incorporating one generation of workers into the economy after the other when that economy is changing; the idea that the market is going to heed all of the human concerns and still maximise profit is juvenile. It's a juvenile notion and it's still being argued in my country passionately and we're going down the tubes. And it terrifies me because I'm astonished at how comfortable we are in absolving ourselves of what is basically a moral choice. Are we all in this together or are we all not?" -David Simon

Excerpt from a speech at the Festival Of Dangerous Ideas, December 2013

Days Of Decision

Photograph from Freedom Now! Forgotten Photographs Of

The Civil Rights Struggle (University of California Press, 2014).

Encoding/Decoding

Stuart Hall
1932 - 2014

"This is no time for simple retreat. What is required is a renewed sense of being on the side of the future, not stuck in the dugouts of the past. We must admit that the old forms of the welfare state proved insufficient. But we must stubbornly defend the principles on which it was founded – redistribution, egalitarianism, collective provision, democratic accountability and participation, the right to education and healthcare – and find new ways in which they can be institutionalised and expressed... All of us who oppose the current direction, whether from inside or outside party politics or other organisations, must invent. We must set about disrupting the current common sense, challenging the assumptions that organise our 21st-century political discourse."

Beneficial Constraints

"[Harley Davidson] knew it had to keep employing members of the International Association of Machinists and United Steelworkers, who were paid far more than nonunion workers in the South and several multiples of the going rate in Mexico. The company could only compete by redesigning the production system so that each worker created more value than they cost … Harley’s very existence was in question in 2009. Today it is a manufacturing role model, and that has a lot to do with its workers. The average tenure of a line worker at the York plant is 18 years, and these workers are extremely devoted to the company … Costs have fallen by $100 million at the plant and quality has improved even more significantly." -Adam Davidson, Building A Harley Faster

The blog post's title — also referenced in the article quoted — refers to a concept developed by Wolfgang Streeck which encourages the development of a long-term cooperative relationship between employers and their employees.

In A Time Of Universal Deceit

In 2013, we learned digital surveillance by world governments knows no bounds. Join the global movement demanding the protection of human rights and an end to mass surveillance. Let the world know: Privacy is a human right. Endorse the International Principles On The Application Of Human Rights To Communications Surveillance (aka the 13 Principles). And on February 11th, the Day We Fight Back, the world will demand an end to mass surveillance in every country, by every state, regardless of boundaries or politics. The SOPA and ACTA protests were successful because we all took part, as a community. We can set a date, but we need everyone, all the users of the Global Internet, to make this a movement.

(The Electronic Frontier Foundation is leading the fight against the NSA's illegal mass surveillance program. Learn more about what the program is, how it works, and what you can do.)

“Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.”

"When tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands, then millions of people are murdered, they become a kind of faceless blur, a numbing statistic in the public's mind. By contrast, the specific images of famous Rembrandt or Picasso paintings were personally familiar to many Americans — and that familiarity engendered the sympathy needed to bring about intervention." -Rafael Medoff, The Monuments Men Shows How America Saved Paintings While Letting Jews Die

The 'R' Word

Change The Mascot is a national campaign launched by the Oneida Indian Nation to end the use of the racial slur "redskins" as the mascot and name of the NFL team in Washington, DC... The campaign calls upon the NFL and Commissioner Roger Goodell to do the right thing.

Justice for Daryl Kelly Sr.

"My father, Daryl Kelly Sr., has been in prison since 1998 for a crime he never committed — based on a lie I told. When I was just 8 years old, my drug addicted mother forced me to make an accusation of sexual abuse against him. But the truth is that my father had never laid a finger on me. Even my mother has admitted she forced me to lie about this during one of her drug binges. But my father is still in prison, 15 years after being wrongfully convicted… My dad needs to be freed and this wrong must be righted. I will not stop until it is. So far, all of his appeals have been denied  — the courts need to listen or Governor Cuomo should grant my father clemency" -Chaneya Kelly

Sign Chaneya's petition