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.”

Justice For Berkin

Ankara, Turkey - March 12th, 2014

Photograph © Reuters/Umit Bektas via In Focus

If There Is No Struggle There Is No Progress

"Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters... This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." -Frederick Douglass

The Worldwide Wave Of Action begins April 4th and runs through July 4th. During this three-month cycle, people throughout the world will be protesting corruption, rallying around solutions and taking part in alternative systems. The new paradigm will be on full display.

Studies have proven that it only takes 3.5% of the population taking nonviolent action to create meaningful and positive change. The Worldwide Wave Of Action gives all of us who want change a powerful opportunity to make it happen and move society forward. Change-makers all over the world will be engaged at the same time in an unprecedented wave of transformation.

On April 4th, there will be Worldwide Wave launch celebrations at hundreds of former Occupy locations globally to honor Dr. Martin Luther King’s legacy of nonviolent action. The day will be spent connecting with allies and strategizing Spring action campaigns. This campaign will become what you, the people, make of it, self-organizing and organically evolving, a new culture will emerge.

What are you most passionate about? What are you doing to be the change? Whatever it is, passionately be it in public this Spring. We have power in numbers. United we are unstoppable.

War Is Not Healthy For Children And Other Living Things

This Is What War Does To Children

Since the beginning of the conflict, children have been the forgotten victims of Syria's horrific war. Today, over five million children are in need of assistance, including over 1 million children who have sought refuge in neighboring countries. These children are at risk of becoming a "lost generation" and cannot be ignored. Save The Children is on the ground, providing much-needed relief. Donate to the Syrian Children's Relief Fund to support their response and help refugee children survive and thrive.

A Collective Struggle

"This International Women's Day, we are highlighting the importance of achieving equality for women and girls not simply because it is a matter of fairness and fundamental human rights, but because the progress in so many other areas depends on it... Countries with more gender equality have better economic growth. Companies with more women leaders perform better. Peace agreements that include women are more durable. Parliaments with more women enact more legislation on key social issues such as health, education, anti-discrimination and child support. The evidence is clear: equality for women means progress for all." -Ban Ki-moon, UN Secretary General

Life Is Lived In Common

"It was as a socialist, and because I was a socialist, that I fell in love with America. In saying that I am not indulging in romantic nostalgia about youthful days on the road but rather underlining a crucial political truth. If the Left wants to change this country because it hates it, then the people will never listen to the Left and the people will be right. To be a socialist — to be a Marxist — is to make an act of faith, of love even, toward this land. It is to sense the seed beneath the snow; to see, beneath the veneer of corruption and meanness and the commercialization of human relationships, men and women capable of controlling their own destinies." -Michael Harrington

From Fragments Of The Century: A Social Autobiography, 1973.

Protest And Survive

“The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.”

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.)