The prize-winning Moroccan poet, Abdellatif Laâbi, is widely acknowledged as being one of the most important poets writing today. Laâbi was born in Fez in 1942. He began writing in the mid-1960s, publishing his first novel in 1969. In 1966 he founded the renowned literary magazine Souffles, a journal of literature and politics that was to earn its editor an eight-year prison sentence (from 1972 to 1981) under the authoritarian reign of Hassan II. Once released from jail, Laâbi left Morocco in 1985 and has lived in Paris ever since.
In France, Laâbi became a member of the Académie Mallarmé in 1988. A prolific novelist, poet and playwright, he is also the French translator of the Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, the Moroccan poet Abdallah Zrika, the Iraqi poet Abdelawahab Al Bayati and the Syrian novelist Hanna Minna. He has edited numerous anthologies, most notably one of twentieth-century Moroccan poetry.
Abdellatif Laâbi received the Prix Goncourt de la Poésie in 2009 and the Académie française’s Grand prix de la Francophonie in 2011. A translation of his 2004 memoir, The Bottom of the Jar, will be published by Archipelago Books in October 2012, in a translation by André Naffis-Sahely.
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Harriet Tubman is perhaps the most well-known of all the Underground Railroad’s “conductors.” During a ten-year span she made 19 trips into the South and escorted over 300 slaves to freedom. And, as she once proudly pointed out to Frederick Douglass, in all of her journeys she “never lost a single passenger.” Tubman was born a slave in Maryland’s Dorchester County around 1820. At age five or six, she began to work as a house servant. Seven years later she was sent to work in the fields. While she was still in her early teens, she suffered an injury that would follow her for the rest of her life. Always ready to stand up for someone else, Tubman blocked a doorway to protect another field hand from an angry overseer. The overseer picked up and threw a two-pound weight at the field hand. It fell short, striking Tubman on the head. She never fully recovered from the blow, which subjected her to spells in which she would fall into a deep sleep.
Around 1844 she married a free black named John Tubman and took his last name. (She was born Araminta Ross; she later changed her first name to Harriet, after her mother.) In 1849, in fear that she, along with the other slaves on the plantation, were to be sold, Tubman resolved to run away. She set out one night on foot. With some assistance from a friendly white woman, Tubman was on her way. She followed the North Star by night, making her way to Pennsylvania and soon after to Philadelphia, where she found work and saved her money. The following year she returned to Maryland and escorted her sister and her sister’s two children to freedom. She made the dangerous trip back to the South soon after to rescue her brother and two other men. On her third return, she went after her husband, only to find he had taken another wife. Undeterred, she found other slaves seeking freedom and escorted them to the North. Tubman returned to the South again and again. She devised clever techniques that helped make her “forays” successful, including using the master’s horse and buggy for the first leg of the journey; leaving on a Saturday night, since runaway notices couldn’t be placed in newspapers until Monday morning; turning about and heading south if she encountered possible slave hunters; and carrying a drug to use on a baby if its crying might put the fugitives in danger. Tubman even carried a gun which she used to threaten the fugitives if they became too tired or decided to turn back, telling them, “You’ll be free or die.”
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Like all ”Art” Kleemi is a derivatie and mashup of many pre existing: technologies, designs, and social consciousness ideals. In our view to say that Kleemi is absolutely ”Original” is to allow the history of the rebel rousers, trouble makers, revolutionaries and activist that have come before us to continue to be untold.
Kleemi is a Community Empowerment Platform that is based on the notion that technologies and the Communities that give them value can make long term change for the greater good.
Kleemi’s technology has been assembled and developed from the ground up with the essential goal of empowering and returning value to the “Community”.
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In the formulation of ideas and services that have become part of what kleemi is and will be, we have paid close attention tos everal ground breaking works that have show us possible paths to “Community” Empowerment. The Cluetrain Manifesto is a framework for thought on the coming revolution that is the “Community” driven Intention Economy” . The key concepts of The Cluetrain Manifesto” can be found in the 95 Theses.
95 Theses
- Markets are conversations.
- Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.
- Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.
- Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.
- People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.
- The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.
- Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.
- In both internetworked markets and amongintranetworked employees, people are speaking to each other in a powerful new way.
- These networked conversations are enabling powerful new forms of social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge.
- As a result, markets are getting smarter, more informed, more organized. Participation in a networked market changes people fundamentally.
- People in networked markets have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from vendors. So much for corporate rhetoric about adding value to commoditized products.
- There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone.
- What’s happening to markets is also happening among employees. A metaphysical construct called “The Company” is the only thing standing between the two.
- Corporations do not speak in the same voice as these new networked conversations. To their intended online audiences, companies sound hollow, flat, literally inhuman.
- In just a few more years, the current homogenized “voice” of business—the sound of mission statements and brochures—will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th century French court.
- Already, companies that speak in the language of the pitch, the dog-and-pony show, are no longer speaking to anyone.
- Companies that assume online markets are the same markets that used to watch their ads on television are kidding themselves.
- Companies that don’t realize their markets are now networked person-to-person, getting smarter as a result and deeply joined in conversation are missing their best opportunity.
- Companies can now communicate with their markets directly. If they blow it, it could be their last chance.
- Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At them.
- Companies need to lighten up and take themselves less seriously. They need to get a sense of humor.
- Getting a sense of humor does not mean putting some jokes on the corporate web site. Rather, it requires big values, a little humility, straight talk, and a genuine point of view.
- Companies attempting to “position” themselves need to take a position. Optimally, it should relate to something their market actually cares about.
- Bombastic boasts—”We are positioned to become the preeminent provider of XYZ”—do not constitute a position.
- Companies need to come down from their Ivory Towers and talk to the people with whom they hope to create relationships.
- Public Relations does not relate to the public. Companies are deeply afraid of their markets.
- By speaking in language that is distant, uninviting, arrogant, they build walls to keep markets at bay.
- Most marketing programs are based on the fear that the market might see what’s really going on inside the company.
- Elvis said it best: “We can’t go on together with suspicious minds.”
- Brand loyalty is the corporate version of going steady, but the breakup is inevitable—and coming fast. Because they are networked, smart markets are able to renegotiate relationships with blinding speed.
- Networked markets can change suppliers overnight. Networked knowledge workers can change employers over lunch. Your own “downsizing initiatives” taught us to ask the question: “Loyalty? What’s that?”
- Smart markets will find suppliers who speak their own language.
- Learning to speak with a human voice is not a parlor trick. It can’t be “picked up” at some tony conference.
- To speak with a human voice, companies must share the concerns of their communities.
- But first, they must belong to a community.
- Companies must ask themselves where their corporate cultures end.
- If their cultures end before the community begins, they will have no market.
- Human communities are based on discourse—on human speech about human concerns.
- The community of discourse is the market.
- Companies that do not belong to a community of discourse will die.
- Companies make a religion of security, but this is largely a red herring. Most are protecting less against competitors than against their own market and workforce.
- As with networked markets, people are also talking to each other directly inside the company—and not just about rules and regulations, boardroom directives, bottom lines.
- Such conversations are taking place today on corporate intranets. But only when the conditions are right.
- Companies typically install intranets top-down to distribute HR policies and other corporate information that workers are doing their best to ignore.
- Intranets naturally tend to route around boredom. The best are built bottom-up by engaged individuals cooperating to construct something far more valuable: an intranetworked corporate conversation.
- A healthy intranet organizes workers in many meanings of the word. Its effect is more radical than the agenda of any union.
- While this scares companies witless, they also depend heavily on open intranets to generate and share critical knowledge. They need to resist the urge to “improve” or control these networked conversations.
- When corporate intranets are not constrained by fear and legalistic rules, the type of conversation they encourage sounds remarkably like the conversation of the networked marketplace.
- Org charts worked in an older economy where plans could be fully understood from atop steep management pyramids and detailed work orders could be handed down from on high.
- Today, the org chart is hyperlinked, not hierarchical. Respect for hands-on knowledge wins over respect for abstract authority.
- Command-and-control management styles both derive from and reinforce bureaucracy, power tripping and an overall culture of paranoia.
- Paranoia kills conversation. That’s its point. But lack of open conversation kills companies.
- There are two conversations going on. One inside the company. One with the market.
- In most cases, neither conversation is going very well. Almost invariably, the cause of failure can be traced to obsolete notions of command and control.
- As policy, these notions are poisonous. As tools, they are broken. Command and control are met with hostility by intranetworked knowledge workers and generate distrust in internetworked markets.
- These two conversations want to talk to each other.They are speaking the same language. They recognize each other’s voices.
- Smart companies will get out of the way and help the inevitable to happen sooner.
- If willingness to get out of the way is taken as a measure of IQ, then very few companies have yet wised up.
- However subliminally at the moment, millions of people now online perceive companies as little more than quaint legal fictions that are actively preventing these conversations from intersecting.
- This is suicidal. Markets want to talk to companies.
- Sadly, the part of the company a networked market wants to talk to is usually hidden behind a smokescreen of hucksterism, of language that rings false—and often is.
- Markets do not want to talk to flacks and hucksters. They want to participate in the conversations going on behind the corporate firewall.
- De-cloaking, getting personal: We are those markets. We want to talk to you.
- We want access to your corporate information, to your plans and strategies, your best thinking, your genuine knowledge. We will not settle for the 4-color brochure, for web sites chock-a-block with eye candy but lacking any substance.
- We’re also the workers who make your companies go. We want to talk to customers directly in our own voices, not in platitudes written into a script.
- As markets, as workers, both of us are sick to death of getting our information by remote control. Why do we need faceless annual reports and third-hand market research studies to introduce us to each other?
- As markets, as workers, we wonder why you’re not listening. You seem to be speaking a different language.
- The inflated self-important jargon you sling around—in the press, at your conferences—what’s that got to do with us?
- Maybe you’re impressing your investors. Maybe you’re impressing Wall Street. You’re not impressing us.
- If you don’t impress us, your investors are going to take a bath. Don’t they understand this? If they did, they wouldn’t let you talk that way.
- Your tired notions of “the market” make our eyes glaze over. We don’t recognize ourselves in your projections—perhaps because we know we’re already elsewhere.
- We like this new marketplace much better. In fact, we are creating it.
- You’re invited, but it’s our world. Take your shoes off at the door. If you want to barter with us, get down off that camel!
- We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.
- If you want us to talk to you, tell us something. Make it something interesting for a change.
- We’ve got some ideas for you too: some new tools we need, some better service. Stuff we’d be willing to pay for. Got a minute?
- You’re too busy “doing business” to answer our email? Oh gosh, sorry, gee, we’ll come back later. Maybe.
- You want us to pay? We want you to pay attention.
- We want you to drop your trip, come out of your neurotic self-involvement, join the party.
- Don’t worry, you can still make money. That is, as long as it’s not the only thing on your mind.
- Have you noticed that, in itself, money is kind of one-dimensional and boring? What else can we talk about?
- Your product broke. Why? We’d like to ask the guy who made it. Your corporate strategy makes no sense. We’d like to have a chat with your CEO. What do you mean she’s not in?
- We want you to take 50 million of us as seriously as you take one reporter from The Wall Street Journal.
- We know some people from your company. They’re pretty cool online. Do you have any more like that you’re hiding? Can they come out and play?
- When we have questions we turn to each other for answers. If you didn’t have such a tight rein on “your people” maybe they’d be among the people we’d turn to.
- When we’re not busy being your “target market,” many of us are your people. We’d rather be talking to friends online than watching the clock. That would get your name around better than your entire million dollar web site. But you tell us speaking to the market is Marketing’s job.
- We’d like it if you got what’s going on here. That’d be real nice. But it would be a big mistake to think we’re holding our breath.
- We have better things to do than worry about whether you’ll change in time to get our business. Business is only a part of our lives. It seems to be all of yours. Think about it: who needs whom?
- We have real power and we know it. If you don’t quite see the light, some other outfit will come along that’s more attentive, more interesting, more fun to play with.
- Even at its worst, our newfound conversation is more interesting than most trade shows, more entertaining than any TV sitcom, and certainly more true-to-life than the corporate web sites we’ve been seeing.
- Our allegiance is to ourselves—our friends, our new allies and acquaintances, even our sparring partners. Companies that have no part in this world, also have no future.
- Companies are spending billions of dollars on Y2K. Why can’t they hear this market timebomb ticking? The stakes are even higher.
- We’re both inside companies and outside them. The boundaries that separate our conversations look like the Berlin Wall today, but they’re really just an annoyance. We know they’re coming down. We’re going to work from both sides to take them down.
- To traditional corporations, networked conversations may appear confused, may sound confusing. But we are organizing faster than they are. We have better tools, more new ideas, no rules to slow us down.
- We are waking up and linking to each other. We are watching. But we are not waiting.
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Victor Jara was a Chilean teacher, theatre director, poet, singer-songwriter, and human rights activist.
A distinguished theatre director, he devoted himself to the development of Chilean theatre, directing a broad array of works from locally produced Chilean plays, to the classics of the world stage, to the experimental work of Ann Jellicoe.
Simultaneously he developed in the field of music and played a pivotal role among neo-folkloric artists who established the Nueva Canción Chilena (New Chilean Song) movement which led to a revolution in the popular music of his country under the Salvador Allende government.
Shortly after the Chilean coup of 11 September 1973, he was arrested, tortured and ultimately shot to death with 44 bullet shots by machine gun fire. His body was later thrown out into the street of a shanty town in Santiago. The contrast between the themes of his songs, on love, peace and social justice and the brutal way in which he was murdered transformed Jara into a symbol of struggle for human rights and justice across Latin America
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#1: The Right to Informed Decision-Making
To the best of our ability Kleemi will provide Kleemi Community members with a clear user interface that allows them to make informed choices about who sees their data and how it is used.
Whenever possible, Kleemi Community members will be able to see readily who is entitled to access any particular piece of information about them, including other people, government officials, websites, applications, advertisers and advertising networks and services.
Whenever possible, Kleemi will give users notice when a government or a private party uses legal or administrative processes to seek information about them, so that the Kleemi Community members has a meaningful opportunity to respond.
#2: The Right to Control
Whenever possible Kleemi will ensure that Kleemi Community Members retain control over the use and disclosure of their data. Kleemi will only take a limited license to use members data for the purpose for which it was originally given to Kleemi. When Kleemi wishes to make a secondary use of the data, we will obtain explicit opt-in permission from the Kleemi Community Members involved.The right to control includes Kleemi Community Members right to decide whether other members of the Kleemi Community may authorize Klemmi to disclose their personal information to third-party websites and applications.
Kleemi will ask the involved Kleemi Community Members permission before making any change that could share new data about Kleemi Community Members, share Community Members’ data with new categories of people, or use that data in a new way. All Changes like this will be “opt-in” by default, not “opt-out,” meaning that Kleemi Community Members’ data is not shared unless the Kleemi Community Member makes an informed decision to share it
#3: The Right to Leave
Kleemi Community Members have the right permanently delete their account from the Kleemi Service. When a Kleemi Community Member deletes their account all of their personal data is permanently deleted from the Kleemi servers
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Kleemi is an ambitious project that seeks to make lasting change. Kleemi will revolutionize the possibilities of what can be achieved with technology that places the “Community” first.
As a reminder of our goals and aspirations we have chosen to name our internal release after Rebels, Revolutionaries and Human Rights activist.
While we are in the process of fine tuning the Kleemi platform we will use this blog space to pay homage to the believers and the rule breakers.
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Harold Pinter (10 October 1930 – 24 December 2008) was a Noble Prize–winning English playwright, screenwriter and a relentless out spoken Human Rights Activist.
Harold Pinter wrote twenty-nine plays including: The Birthday Part, The Caretake, The Homecoming, and Betrayal.
Harold Pinter’s interest in politics was a very public one. Over the years he spoke out forcefully about the abuse of state power around the world.
While Gravely ill with terminal cancer Harold Pinter bravely gave a stirring Noble Prize acceptance speech that was a call to action for Human Rights Activist to seek truth through relentless examination of political power structures.
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Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926) was a pioneer labor organizer, tireless campaigner for Human Rights, and a five-time candidate for the U.S. Presidency.
Debs advocated the abolition of child labor, the right of women to vote, unemployment compensation, and a graduated income tax. His proposals were radical in the early twentieth century, but later became standard public policy for both major political parties.
On November 18, 1918 Debs was sentenced to ten years in prison for urging resistance against the military draft of World War I. Debs presented what has been called his best-remembered statement at his sentencing hearing:
“years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
In the 1920 while in prison Eugen Debs ran for President of the United State. Despite not being on an official Debs still received 913,664 write-in votes
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