One Big Union - a new video for the people's risings of 2011
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- grimmreality
- added this
So here's what happened. I wrote this song as a new labor anthem in 2008 and issued it on an album in 2009. But, as much as it was for them, I meant it to be about more than just the current organizational structures for working people. The One Big Union idea, since it was the mantra of the IWW, has for a long time been about the permanent popular offset to entrenched institutional power so often run by bad people with sociopathic motives, aka corporations and faux "public interest" organizations bankrolled by wealthy despots to proselytize the notion that their despotism is a good thing.
Those people, those institutions, have successfully winnowed the numbers of the organized. The Randroids are ascendent in America, telling us that ALL collectivity is heretical communism. But thing about that is, our collectivity is not something up for debate, as viciously as they choose to argue it, as much money as the Kochs, Chambers of Commerce, ALECs and corrupt Supreme Court justices can dump into the message. "Government is collectivity, common sense is heresy, the GI Bill is a communism, rich people paying an extra .02 percent in taxes is theft and violence. You are you and only you, you exist in a vacuum, fuck everyone else."
Except antisocial behavior simply flies in the face of society. We are all a system, which is part of other systems. One Big Union is what cures us of their predations, and what shouts down their sociopathic marketing. It is what gives us a sense of community when financial machinations and shameless propaganda insist we are alone and that we should shut up and pull ourselves up by our own damn bootstraps.
In Wisconsin, in Egypt and Tunisia, in Occupy Wall Street and its affiliate actions around the U.S. and the world, I saw people pulling each other up by each OTHER's damn bootstraps. Look what happened. I saw this song realized anew. Brave people claimed it and made it more vital. I owed them something.
I have never worked in visual media but it dawned on me I really had no choice. I taught myself iMovie and I made this. I hope it is worthy of the amazing things people have done this year in the name of forwarding civil society everywhere.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwjiP6X3u1k
Those people, those institutions, have successfully winnowed the numbers of the organized. The Randroids are ascendent in America, telling us that ALL collectivity is heretical communism. But thing about that is, our collectivity is not something up for debate, as viciously as they choose to argue it, as much money as the Kochs, Chambers of Commerce, ALECs and corrupt Supreme Court justices can dump into the message. "Government is collectivity, common sense is heresy, the GI Bill is a communism, rich people paying an extra .02 percent in taxes is theft and violence. You are you and only you, you exist in a vacuum, fuck everyone else."
Except antisocial behavior simply flies in the face of society. We are all a system, which is part of other systems. One Big Union is what cures us of their predations, and what shouts down their sociopathic marketing. It is what gives us a sense of community when financial machinations and shameless propaganda insist we are alone and that we should shut up and pull ourselves up by our own damn bootstraps.
In Wisconsin, in Egypt and Tunisia, in Occupy Wall Street and its affiliate actions around the U.S. and the world, I saw people pulling each other up by each OTHER's damn bootstraps. Look what happened. I saw this song realized anew. Brave people claimed it and made it more vital. I owed them something.
I have never worked in visual media but it dawned on me I really had no choice. I taught myself iMovie and I made this. I hope it is worthy of the amazing things people have done this year in the name of forwarding civil society everywhere.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwjiP6X3u1k
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- groups:
- Music
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- tags:
- occupy wall street, Ohio, Koch Brothers, Scott Walker, 10 more
