Union Song

For the fired auto workers

Who were twisted, tricked and robbed

To the peasant in Guatemala

In a sweatshop got your job

And she can't feed her family

On the pennies that she makes

Meanwhile the crime rate's rising

Up and down the Great Lake states

Like vegetables left in the field

The signatures smell rotten

On the contracts and the deeds

That push the race down to the bottom

As they load the rubber bullets

As they fire another round

I'm heading into the tear gas

Dig in man, hold your ground

For Joe Hill and Caesar Chavez

Who fought in their own time

For our brothers and our sisters

Up and down that picket line

For the unnamed and unnumbered

Who struggle brave and long

For the union men and women

Standing up and standing strong

Si nos quedemos

Juntos vamos a ganar? Si !

Hit em where it hurts

And bite the hand that feeds

You might get one to three

Or probation and a fine

But I know where I'm gonna be

I'm gonna be right on that front line

Now dirty scabs will cross the line

While others stand aside and look

But ain't nobody never got nothin'

That didn't raise their voice and push

Like the steel worker in Ohio

The miner in West Virginia

The teacher in Chicago

Janitor in Mississippi

From the sweatshops of L.A.

To the fields of Mission Flats

There's a thunder cloud exploding

And I'm free at last

They Don't Gotta Burn tha Books They Just Remove 'Em

When Pearl Jam played the Nightwatchman's home city of Chicago recently their fans who could not attend the final evening of the Lollapalooza festival experienced something very interesting during the AT&T webcast. Instead of hearing lead singer Eddie Vedder sing "George Bush leave this world alone" they heard silence. They experienced good old fashioned, almost Orwellian, censorship. But the corporation quickly learned that they'd messed with the wrong band. As more reports and supportive editorials sprang up; Pearl Jam themselves spoke up on their website and AT&T first called it an error and then later admitted it wasn't the first time it had happened...

Learn about net neutrality and then fight for it...

Elvis Was A Hero to Most....

As the thirteeth anniversary of Elvis's death arrived the media and the world celebrated the man's life with precious little criticism of any sort. Of course, there are some voices of dissent out there, like Helen Kolawole's 2002 piece from the Guardian which states in no uncertain terms:

Media arrogance and dishonesty means we are eternally bound to live in a skewed world where Elvis is king of rock'n'roll, Clapton is the guitar god, Sinatra is the voice and Astaire is the greatest dancer. Accustomed as we are to this parade of white heroes, the case of Elvis is particularly infuriating because for many black people he represents the most successful white appropriation of a black genre to date.

Found a Noose in My Garage...

Stanley Fish discusses (subscription required) the new Caveman show and it's racial metaphor, interestingly raising this issue vis a vis Walter Benn Michaels and his ”The Trouble With Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality”:

Michaels argues that if we think “racism is the problem we need to solve,” all we have to do to solve it is “give up our prejudices.” But if we think our problem is that too many people are poor, hungry, homeless and uneducated, solving that problem “might require us to give up our money.”

Read it yourself and decide....

It's in Colin Powell's Lies...

Or his successor's anyway. As decades of atrocities continued against Palestinians today and remained largely unreported (no link) and as Kareem Amir rots in a prison in Egypt, the U.S. did announce a proposed $15 in aid to Egypt and $30 billion in aid to Israel. Of course, Noam Chomsky was writing about this about a two and a half decades ago and sadly little seems to have changed...

No One Looks Behind the Curtain

On July 28, 2007 Rage Against the Machine took the stage at Randall's Island at the Rock the Bells festival. After tearing through several of their numbers, lead singer Zach de la Rocha took issue with the "fascist Fox News" channel and their reporting of his comments a few months back at Coachella. Indeed, RATM was subjected to some serious criticism in the wake of the following comments:

"A good friend of ours said that if the same laws were applied to U.S. presidents as were applied to the Nazis after World War II, that every single one of them, that every last rich, white one of them, from Truman on would've been hung and tried and shot. In this current administration there's no exception. They should be hung and tried and shot as any war criminal should be! "

Of course, what Fox chose to characterize de la Rocha's words as him calling for an assasination, when in fact he was explicitly calling for a trial. In fact, far from calling for an illegal assassination de la Rocha was clearly calling for the application of International Law.

But there are several other interesting points here:

- One prevalent meme with both conservative panelist Coulter and the more liberal panelist Jane Fleming is that Rage Against the Machine is no longer popular or relevant. Interesting that the show drew over 35,000 fans and received great reviews from the NYT, Newsday and MTV, among others...

- That this "fair and balanced" network yielded no one who vaguely came close to agreeing with RATM.

- Shortly after calling himself "a big fan of the First Amendment" long irrelevant Ted Nugent slips up and says "unfortunately, nobody is silencing these guys" before correcting and reversing himself with "or not necessarily silencing, but condemning this outrageous violence that they're recommending." Ted Nugent is on the record as "considering homosexuality morally wrong" and has said about Iraq that "our failure has been not to Nagasaki them".

- But perhaps the greatest irony here is that one of their panelists, none other than Ann Coulter back in the 1990's didn't call for the trial of Bill Clinton but stated, rather that the only question should be "whether to impeach or assasinate" him in her 1998 book High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case against Bill Clinton.

But watch the whole Fox shitshow here and judge for yourself...