Category: poverty

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The first thing I do when I get online each morning is read a few things:

  • Poems of the day from Rattle, The Academy of American Poets, and Second Coming.
  • Heather Cox Richardson and Robert Hubble for analysis of the craziness in the US government right now and how people are fighting back.
  • Seth Godin for his deep insight, creative thinking, and common sense in the business and learning worlds, and news roundups from among The Guardian, New York Times, and/or Associated Press. (Disclosure: I donate to The Guardian and Associated Press)
  • Bob Burg, with his daily sermon on succeeding by treating people right, is often on the list.

Today, Godin opened my eyes to a completely new understanding of economics with one sentence:

The price variation in any market reflects not what the market will bear, but what the people in that market can bear to charge.

Brilliant. And I don’t think I’ve come across this anywhere else. It changes everything, doesn’t it?

He backs up his thesis with examples as different as the pricing of luxury handbags and concert tickets. He discusses how rock musicians who allow promoters to scale tickets out of the range of affordability for most of their fans pay a price in loyalty. And he talks about how that particular dynamic came out of outsourcing concert pricing to third party vendors like Ticketmaster who don’t really give a flying f about the fans as long as they can find enough who are willing to pay hundreds of dollars when they could just as easily spend $10 on a movie in the theater or nothing to watch it at home.

I’ve made those choices many times. I paid $6 in 1972, as a 15-year-old without a lot of cash, to see the Rolling Stones in Madison Square Garden. That’s only $46.24 in today’s money. Most of the time, if a concert or theater ticket is more than $100, I will choose a different form of entertainment. I think I have made four exceptions: The Who, my all-time favorite rock band that I had never seen in concert; tickets for touring Broadway productions of “Hamilton” and “Wicked”; also an actual Broadway show, but I’m not sure which one it was.

The three that I remember were actually worth the money and I didn’t regret spending it. But if I had spent that much for some of the mediocre concerts I’ve seen by top acts, I would have been furious, feeling totally ripped off. I saw many of them as either a concert reviewer or an usher, and thus didn’t pay to be ripped off. But it was frustrating even to give up an evening for something that wasn’t worth it and was charging a lot, even though I wasn’t paying. it was an insult to the fans.

But concerts are by definition discretionary purchases. Let’s look at price elasticity in other contexts that Seth didn’t mention—such as necessities.

Many have jumped in price far beyond inflation. Housing is one of them. But housing is something we have to have. Other societies consider housing a basic right. There is no homelessness problem in Cuba. Medical care and higher education, two other sets of services that have shot up in price here in the US, are also provided to everyone there. But they have an authoritarian government and they have deep poverty.

When I visited in 2019, the biggest complaint that I heard, and I heard it from almost everyone I met, is the inability of wages to keep up with the cost of living. Most workers make about $20 US a month. Doctors make $60 or $70. Our guide told us that the only reason his wife is able to afford to be a doctor is because he makes far more than the typical Cuban income from his clients’ tips. Sometimes, it is about trade-offs.

But sometimes, it’s not. Europe proves that decent, democratic governments can afford to treat healthcare as a right and keep higher education extremely affordable as well (housing, not so much). And they’ve also made huge progress in greening the economy.

China also has an authoritarian government. But the streets of its cities are crowded with relatively inexpensive electric cars (which is to say, still totally out of reach for most Chinese—but enough can afford them that massive traffic jams are common). This transition was quite conspicuous between my first trip to China in 2016 and my return in 2024. I rode in several of them and was impressed with how well they seem to be designed. Those stubborn trade-offs with their moral dilemmas.

Yet, for the past year, we have an authoritarian government in the US. The ugliness of its actions and policies would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

But unlike Cuba and China, the benefits are not accruing to ordinary people. This government is about benefiting billionaires and openly, blatantly lining its leader’s and his friends’ pockets while collecting undeserved and insincere tributes from those who understand that they can flatter their way to what they want, even if they want things that are absolutely at odds with the interests of us ordinary people.

Seth’s thesis is not the whole picture, though. It’s a both-and, not an either-or. Price sensitivity is certainly an issue in purchase decisions—but so is sensitivity to what your market could pay without feeling exploited and ripped off. In my own business, I’ve kept my pricing far lower than most, because that makes me affordable to the solopreneurs and microbusinesses I enjoy serving. I don’t want to live in the corporate world enough to charge too much for my preferred clients, and those huge corporations have in-house people who do what I do. I also recognize that money is one means to an end, and there are others—such as what I referred to earlier: volunteering or reviewing instead of buying tickets

It is also quite possible to make a good profit serving the bottom economic tier. I recommend two great books on this: The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits by C.K. Prahalad (out of print; that’s a link to a used copy) and Business Solution to Poverty by Paul Polak and Mal Warwick. That link takes you to bookshop.org, where your purchase supports the independent bookstore of your choice instead of lining the pockets of an oligarch who has aided and abetted the authoritarian government that has taken over the US.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Activism, Business-general, Consumer Issues, Corporate Social Responsibility, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Eco-friendly, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Ethics in Government, Ethics-International, General Commentary, Gratitude, Green Business, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, Innovation, language, Marketing Trends/News, Media Ethics, media-general, Mindset, People Helping People, poverty, propaganda, Psychology, Publishing, Science, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side, Technology Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

“We have built the safest civilisation in human history while convincing ourselves that we live in the most dangerous. Billions of people experienced measurable improvements in health, safety, and material conditions in 2025. That progress didn’t make the news. But it happened anyway, one vaccine, one school meal, one kilowatt-hour at a time.”
—Angus Hervey, Fix the News

From Fix the News, one of several good-news publications I receive—and one that skews toward science-based progress. This one does start with a depressing summary of the news we’ve all heard—but then moves into a long series of victories that most of us didn’t even now about. It pauses to excoriate mass media for amplifying the negative and superficial (e.g., celebrities) while ignoring unsexy but vital stories such as the amazing ocean treaties and the actual elimination of rampant fatal diseases, country by country. And then it finishes with another long list of victories for humanity and the other creatures we share this amazing planet with.

You won’t be sorry to spend ten minutes with this. https://fixthenews.com/p/the-telemetry?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=4861955&post_id=182468358&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=sl4r&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Diversity, General Commentary, Mindset, Peace and War, People Helping People, poverty, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

A very merry and soulful Christmas to all who celebrate it today. May you be inspired not only by Christ’s holiness but by His words and deeds in the Sermon on the Mount, the Good Samaritan parable about welcoming and finding good in those from other cultures—even despised ethnic groups, His challenge not to kill a sinner unless you yourself are without sin, and his anti-greed action in the temple. May He inspire you to be a nonviolent warrior for social and economic justice, as He was. Have a blessed day.

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By Posted on Posted in Democracy, Diversity, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Ethics in Government, Ethics-International, language, Mindset, Peace and War, Politics, poverty, Protests and Crackdowns, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I admire your constant calls for peace, Donald. I just wish I could believe them. You see, there’s this little problem: saying you want peace isn’t enough. You have to actually BE a peacemaker. And you haven’t been one.

You’ve claimed to end eight wars. Independent fact checking shows that you did in fact have a role in bringing several of those countries to the table, and I commend you for that. However, your grand, sweeping claims that peace wouldn’t have happened without your aggressive diplomacy are highly exaggerated. And several of the peace agreements aren’t exactly working out. For example, the United Nations reports that 339 Palestinians were killed by Israel in the six weeks following the ceasefire. We’ll give you a B-.

You renamed the US Institute of Peace after yourself.  You spent months telling Oslo you deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. Yes, it’s true that some recipients didn’t deserve it either: Barack Obama was new in office and hadn’t done anything significant toward peace at that point. Henry Kissinger was a war criminal responsible for much harm during the Vietnam War, the Chilean Pinochet dictatorship that followed the US-aided coup, and many other foreign policy debacles. But still, if you have to nominate yourself for the peace price and name an institution that is supposed to be independent after yourself, it doesn’t scream “qualified.” It actually says “laughably insecure and demanding.” Grade: D-.

Then there’s Ukraine. You’ve been so inconsistent that nobody knows where you stand. You berate the Ukrainian president in person on national TV. Next, you tell Putin to negotiate. Then you bring forward a proposal so lopsidedly Russia-centric that even Mitch McConnell dismissed the plan and said Putin had made a fool of you. One key principle of peacemaking: It has to include all the sides and let all of them at least claim some small victory, which this plan utterly fails to do. Grade: F.

How about relations with our near neighbors? You’ve killed at least 87 people in 22 separate attacks on vessels in the Caribbean, claiming that they were smuggling drugs. You’ve provided no evidence that this is true (and your long record as a massive serial liar doesn’t boost our confidence). And even if it were true, the proper procedure is to interdict and seize the boat, arrest the crew, and hold the cargo as evidence—not to blow it out of the water without warning. Both Colombia and Venezuela have accused you of extrajudicial murder. At least two of those were killed while clinging to the wreckage after you destroyed their boat, in clear violation of international law.  And it’s hard to believe that you really care about keeping drugs out of this country when you just granted a full pardon to the former president of Honduras, who had just started serving more than 40 years for a huge cocaine smuggling operation. There’s widespread speculation that this is really about setting your sights on Venezuela’s oil, and that you’re willing to start a war against them. Grade: F.

And then there’s your “peacemaking” right here in the  good old United States of America.

  • You send armed, masked goons to snatch honest, hard-working non-criminal immigrants away from jobs, loved ones, and decent places to live,  without a shred of due process. Sometimes, your goons snatch up people who have citizenship or permanent residence. Other times, you target people who are going through all the proper steps of being able to stay legally. This creates terror, not peace. It serves no useful function, disrupts families and the economy, and makes the whole country unsafe. Grade: F.
  • You rip the safety net apart, causing economic dislocation of the kind that encourages crime, making our streets less safe and less peaceful.
  • Your energy policies, pushing the most destructive, resource-intensive, and economically unworkable energy options, will lead to resource conflicts, which will lead to more wars. Grade: F.
  • Finally, your public language is the opposite of a peacemaker’s. You issue all sorts of smears against people of color, non-Christians, people with disabilities, even those who happen to belong to a different political party, as well as people you have specifically named and declared they are your enemies. You are an attack dog with a remarkably thin skin who insults others but has zero tolerance for dissent. To paraphrase Three Dog Night, “That ain’t the way to make peace, please.” Grade: F.

So if you want to be seen as a peacemaker, you have to become one. That’s going to take major restructuring of your whole way of being president. Are you up to the challenge? I’d love to see you succeed at embracing peace and would cheer you on publicly if you’re sincere. I’m not optimistic that you’re up to it—but I’d love to be proven wrong.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Consumer Issues, Corporate Social Responsibility, Democracy, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Greenwashing, Mindset, People Helping People, poverty, Science, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , ,
Read. This. Article. It’s one of the most important articles I have read about climate change. Yes, the writing is a bit denser than most of what I share. But it’s still pretty readable. And it’s pretty short. If it feels like a struggle, take a couple of breaths and try again. The author’s points are marginalized in mainstream media and you won’t typically find them.
And along with that critique of Bill Gates’s climate theories, I would point out that the cooling centers he advocates are a Band-Aid on a gushing wound. Far better to prevent the need for cooling centers by switching immediately to REAL renewables (NOT nuclear fission power plants, which he has advocated elsewhere)–and mitigating not just the temperature but the social conditions of injustice that will be much much worse as the planet heats. One example in the article is setting up cooling centers for those on the margins—in other words, people who have no dwelling, who are homeless. That homelessness will in many cases be a direct result of climate change, which creates refugees directly (through crop failures and natural disasters and indirectly (through crime and resource wars).

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Ethics in Government, language, Mindset, People Helping People, Politics, poverty, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I was not expecting to be totally blown away by a politician’s victory speech on Election Night. But I was moved to tears several times.

Whether you like his politics or not, you have to acknowledge his oratorical skills—both in the crafting of this speech and in the delivery, where he comes across to me as humble, inclusive, and committed. And if speaking is any part of your communications (which it should be), there are a lot of lessons in this speech.

The politician is Zohran Mamdani, just elected as the first Muslim mayor of New York City—a municipality with more population than 38 of the 50 US states.

You can view it at https://www.c-span.org/program/campaign-2025/zohran-mamdani-election-night-victory-speech/668370 (including the sweet family moment at the very end) and read the full transcript at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/05/nyregion/mamdani-speech-transcript.html (I had to set up a free account to see it).

He hits high notes immediately, quoting Eugene Victor Debs, “I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity.” Debs ran for president as an open socialist—from his prison cell. Then Mamdani hits us with this powerful and poetic paragraph centering his working-class base:

Fingers bruised from lifting boxes on the warehouse floor, palms calloused from delivery bike handlebars, knuckles scarred with kitchen burns: These are not hands that have been allowed to hold power. And yet, over the last 12 months, you have dared to reach for something greater.

Next, a hat tip to his opponent, who he wishes “only the best in private life.”

Then came the only thing I would have edited out: “But let tonight be the final time I utter his name, as we turn the page on a politics that abandons the many and answers only to the few.” His deeper meaning is ambiguous, but it could be seen as holding some resentment, not wanting to even speak the opponent’s name again. I would have skipped the first clause and jumped to “We have turned the page on a politics that abandons the many and answers only to the few.” When I listened, I misheard the word “utter” as “honor,” and that may color my negativity toward the bit about not speaking his name.

But he pivots immediately to his mandate for change, for making the city affordable, and for including marginalized populations:

Thank you to those so often forgotten by the politics of our city, who made this movement their own. I speak of Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas. Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses. Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties. Yes, aunties.

He then tells stories of a few people he met during the campaign: a man who has to commute two hours each way because he can’t afford to live in the city, another who can’t afford to take a day off, and a woman who says she’d lost her love for her city.

His inclusiveness and focus on the glowing future expand to his enormous volunteer network:

This victory is for all of them. And it’s for all of you, the more than 100,000 volunteers who built this campaign into an unstoppable force. Because of you, we will make this city one that working people can love and live in again. With every door knocked, every petition signature earned, and every hard-earned conversation, you eroded the cynicism that has come to define our politics… To my campaign team, who believed when no one else did and who took an electoral project and turned it into so much more: I will never be able to express the depth of my gratitude. You can sleep now.

Then he acknowledges just how ambitious his goals are:

Central to that vision will be the most ambitious agenda to tackle the cost-of-living crisis that this city has seen since the days of Fiorello La Guardia: an agenda that will freeze the rents for more than two million rent-stabilized tenants, make buses fast and free, and deliver universal child care across our city.

Years from now, may our only regret be that this day took so long to come. This new age will be one of relentless improvement. We will hire thousands more teachers. We will cut waste from a bloated bureaucracy. We will work tirelessly to make lights shine again in the hallways of NYCHA developments where they have long flickered.

Safety and justice will go hand in hand as we work with police officers to reduce crime and create a Department of Community Safety that tackles the mental health crisis and homelessness crises head on. Excellence will become the expectation across government, not the exception. In this new age we make for ourselves, we will refuse to allow those who traffic in division and hate to pit us against one another.

From there, he segues directly into something even more ambitious: confronting a hostile federal government and the bigots who enable it—those who want to sow division and hatred, while he calls for unity and invokes, one after another, Jews and Muslims (two other groups who are often at odds on certain issues)—leading first with the community that he is not a member of, but that I am:

In this moment of political darkness, New York will be the light. Here, we believe in standing up for those we love, whether you are an immigrant, a member of the trans community, one of the many Black women that Donald Trump has fired from a federal job, a single mom still waiting for the cost of groceries to go down, or anyone else with their back against the wall. Your struggle is ours, too.

And we will build a City Hall that stands steadfast alongside Jewish New Yorkers and does not waver in the fight against the scourge of antisemitism. Where the more than one million Muslims know that they belong — not just in the five boroughs of this city, but in the halls of power.

No more will New York be a city where you can traffic in Islamophobia and win an election. This new age will be defined by a competence and a compassion that have too long been placed at odds with one another. We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about.

This next bit could sound like bravado—I’d love to hear some specifics on HOW he will meet those high expectations—but to me, it comes across instead as another call for unity and actual bravery: being willing to stand up and be counted—and looking ahead to what future would-be dictators we will need to organize against:

They want the people to fight amongst ourselves so that we remain distracted from the work of remaking a long-broken system. We refuse to let them dictate the rules of the game anymore. They can play by the same rules as the rest of us.

Together, we will usher in a generation of change. And if we embrace this brave new course, rather than fleeing from it, we can respond to oligarchy and authoritarianism with the strength it fears, not the appeasement it craves.

After all, if anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him. And if there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power.

This is not only how we stop Trump; it’s how we stop the next one. So, Donald Trump, since I know you’re watching, I have four words for you: Turn the volume up…

So hear me, President Trump, when I say this: To get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us. When we enter City Hall in 58 days, expectations will be high. We will meet them. A great New Yorker once said that while you campaign in poetry, you govern in prose.

If that must be true, let the prose we write still rhyme, and let us build a shining city for all. And we must chart a new path, as bold as the one we have already traveled. After all, the conventional wisdom would tell you that I am far from the perfect candidate…

He goes on to poke a bit of fun at himself, listing several characteristics that would have been thought of as liabilities—then proclaiming, “I refuse to apologize for any of this.”

And he concludes with inspiration: another strong call for hope:

Let the words we’ve spoken together, the dreams we’ve dreamt together, become the agenda we deliver together. New York, this power, it’s yours. This city belongs to you.

Again, I suggest that you watch the speech, take notes on what you feel did and didn’t work, and think about what you can bring to your own presentations.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Arts & Entertainment, Democracy, Diversity, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Gratitude, language, Mindset, Peace and War, People Helping People, Politics, poverty, propaganda, Protests and Crackdowns, Reviews, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Most of these are singable songs that can be used at rallies, though I snuck in a few harder to learn ones that tell really inspiring stories, marked with *, as well as some in other languages. Vaguely sorted but many of these songs could be in multiple categories. Authors’ names included where I have them. These are living songs. You will find versions with different lyrics, verses in different order as they evolve—adapted for new causes or new definitions or new sensibilities. You’ll also find some older works that don’t reflect the nth degree of what’s currently considered politically correct. They were important songs in their time, and part of what I’m trying to do is provide a sense of movement history. You’ll also find some musings about what a particular song means to me, sometimes with a memory thrown in. Enjoy!

 

The Strength of Ordinary People who “Activize” and Resist

Tyrants Always Fall (Nerissa Nields). When I got depressed during the first DT term, I often turned to this song for comfort. Western Mass folks will recognize the Northampton scenery, as The Nields are local and filmed their video downtown.

Something Inside So Strong (Labi Siffre). The Black Gay British man who wrote it was shocked by a video of South African police shooting into a crowd of anti-apartheid demonstrators—and also drew on his own background growing up gay and marginalized. It’s been widely adapted in the movements both to end apartheid and to gain LGBTQ rights. The couplet “The more you refuse to hear my voice/ The louder I will sing” is the earworm that’s been in my head a lot lately—and what inspired me to compile this resource.

*Denmark, 1943 (Fred Small) documents the incredible night when the people of Denmark rose up to smuggle almost the country’s entire Jewish population to safety in Sweden, just before the Nazis planned to swoop in to arrest and deport them. It has a singable chorus but I wouldn’t try to teach it to crowd that’s never heard it.

Never Turning Back (Pat Humphries). A great zipper song, easy to teach and lead.

Power to the People: We Rise (Laurie Woodward Garcia). Released in June, 2025, this song draws lyrics, energy, and photos from many struggles, including many from 2020 to the present.

If I Had a Hammer (Pete Seeger and Lee Hays). The original lyrics had “All of my brothers.” Decades ago, activist Libby Frank asked Pete at one of his concerts, “Why only brothers?” So Pete discussed it with Lee and they came back with “my brothers and my sisters.” In this version, Emma’s Revolution changed it to the more gender-inclusive “all of the resisters.” We still need to come up with something that has love not just for the resisters but for everyone, without reintroducing the gender binary. Got an idea?

Song of the Soul (Cris Williamson). An anthem of the women’s and lesbian movements, but I put it here because it’s also applicable generally.

Swimming to the Other Side (Pat Humphries). Like Song of the Soul, a song of spiritual renewal.

How Could Anyone Ever Tell You (Libby Roderick). I always thought of this as an LGBTQ community song. Turns out it’s been used in dozens of social movements. You’ll find a long list at the link, as well as several different recordings.

Rebecca Jones (Bob Blue). An ordinary mom steps into her greatness and gives a speech that inspires peace workers. I don’t know if this is based on one real person and one real incident, but I’ve met dozens and there have been tens of thousands of ordinary people who created massive social change, from 11-year-old Malala Yousafzai and 15-year-old Greta Thunberg (ages at the times they became activists) to Doris “Granny D” Haddock and Frances Crowe, both still activists on their hundredth birthdays. Despite dying at age 57, Bob was a prolific songwriter who left behind dozens of great songs. He’s probably best known for the feminist song “The Ballad of Erica Levine,” sung here by Kim Wallach. I’ve heard that one at several feminist weddings.

We’re Still Here (Holly Near). An upbeat, almost vaudevillian celebration of the resistance’s resilience and power.

What’s Going On (Marvin Gaye). That link is to an “official” video, released in 2019 (35 years after Gaye’s death) that includes images and sounds of protests and repression. If you would rather have it straight up, visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-kA3UtBj4M

 

LGBTQ

Singing For Our Lives (Holly Near). I love this video because not only do we have Holly’s beautiful rendition as it had evolved by 2004, but hugely inspiring footage of the massive march for women’s reproductive rights where she performed it. And some new lyrics put up at the end of the video. Holly literally wrote this song while carpooling to San Francisco to protest the murder of San Francisco Board of Supervisors member Harvey Milk—one of the first openly gay politicians in the US—and Mayor George Moscone by a right-wing homophobe. The driver, Holly herself, and a few others discuss the song’s origins and power in this short video.

*Scott and Jamie (Fred Small). Another true-story ballad from I Will Stand Fast (the same album as Denmark, 1943). How, in the 1980s, a gay male couple provided a loving, nonjudgmental home for two abused brothers only to have them ripped away by a homophobic government. Glad we have made big progress on this issue, at least.

*My Name is Joanna (Flight or Visibility). Misgendered once too often, my nonbinary younger child, a professional musician and music educator who also runs a school for social justice, wrote this after an encounter with a particularly clueless server in a cafe. Language warning: One f-bomb in the last line.

*When I Was a Boy (Dar Williams). A gender-bending song from the early 1980s that amazingly enough, I discovered because my local commercial FM rock station played it regularly! I very much identify with this song, especially the ending.

Thank You Anita (Charlie King). Released back in 1979, King counters Florida orange juice spokesperson Anita Bryant’s very public homophobia by saying she united people who hadn’t worked together before but now were joining forces to oppose her bigotry.

 

Peace

Oh What a Grand and Glorious Feeling (I think this is traditional, but it could have been written by Earl Robinson, who I learned it from at a house concert around 1978. Since then, I’ve taught it at many sing-alongs and rallies. I didn’t find a recording, just the lyrics, but the tune is the same as Oh How Lovely Is the Evening.)

Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream (Ed McCurdy). My folk-music-loving 4th grade teacher taught us this song and many other great ones!

*The Hammer Has to Fall (Charlie King). This song actually changed the way I felt about property-destruction civil disobedience that resulted in long prison terms. I used to resent the Ploughshare 8 for removing themselves from activism for decades. This song humanized them for me and touched my soul deeply.

Imagine (John Lennon). I could have put this in the general resilience category, or made a new section on visioning. But I’m putting it here because of the second verse that contains both “Nothing to kill or die for” and “Living life in peace.”

 

Safe Energy/No Nukes

Acres of Clams (Charlie King). Theme song of the Clamshell Alliance’s 1977 Seabrook occupation (one of my proudest moments in 55 years of activism).

We Almost Lost Detroit (Gil Scott-Heron). You may have never heard of the 1966 accident at the Enrico Fermi nuclear plant in Michigan, or the one at Browns Ferry in Alabama in 1975—or dozens of other near-calamities. Gill Scott-Heron helps us remember Fermi. By the way, I am convinced that the reason we DID hear about Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima while most of us have not heard of more than 100 other serious nuclear accidents was because of the safe energy movement, which inspired the movie, The China Syndrome, that came out right before the TMI accident. Lyrics.

 

US Civil Rights Movement

Oh, Freedom (traditional). I love Odetta’s version but could only find it as part of her Freedom Trilogy, so I went with Harry Belafonte’s.

I Ain’t Scared of Your Jail ‘Cause I Want My Freedom. From Pete Seeger’s 1963 Carnegie Hall concert, one of my favorite albums ever. More of this is telling the story than singing the very short song. But only Pete’s own recording turned up in a search.

We Shall Overcome (many authors over multiple generations). The anthem of the Civil Rights movement, carried over to many struggles since—in part, because it’s a “zipper song” where it’s easy to add new verses. Great article on the history of the song from Encyclopedia Britanica.

Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around (adaptation of a traditional Black gospel song). This performance by civil rights activists the Freedom Singers doesn’t have a date, but according to this university curriculum citation, it can’t be older than 1962 or newer than 1980. My guess is sometime between 1962-65. I think I first heard it at a community rally in Atlanta when I lived there briefly in 1976, during a college internship at a socialist community newspaper.

 

Immigration and Immigration Justice

Yes I Am (American) (Malini D. Sur, MD). This 2010 song joins Brown, Black, Yellow, and Red people through the common experience of coming from someplace else—even if it was 10,000 years ago across the Bering Strait.

Mexican Chef (Xenia Rubinos) celebrates the jobs immigrants, especially Latines, do for people in the US and how our society would grind to a halt without them. I could do without the fake-sexy dance moves, though.

Where You Go (I Will Go) (Shoshana Jedwab). Based on the Old Testament Book of Ruth, one of the earliest voluntary migration stories we have. The Old Testament contains many migration stories across many centuries: Adam and Eve leaving the Garden, Abraham leaving Iraq and later experiencing several temporary migrations, Hagar and Ishmael forced into the desert, climate refugees Jacob and his adult children seeing refuge in Egypt, where he reunites with Joseph, the son he’d been told had been killed, Moses and later Joshua leading the Israelites out of slavery…I’d say these migration stories contain a lot of the power in those texts.

Deportee (Woody Guthrie, words; Martin Hoffman. music). The ugliness of US immigration policy is nothing new; this song was written following the death of a plane full of migrants in 1948. Judy Collins’ voice is achingly beautiful.

Using the same melody and parallelling the lyrics, Yosl Kurland ties together the tragedy of the Ashkenazi (Northern European) Jews aboard the St. Louis—which was refused entry by several countries including the US, and most of whose passengers were killed in the Holocaust after being sent back to the country they’d sailed from—and the modern tragedies of refuges from the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Latin America still being turned away or imprisoned or abandoned, in a powerful 2017 update called Refugee.

Leaving Mother Russia (Robbie Solomon). A song written for Natan Sharansky in the 1970s, when he was imprisoned for Jewish rights activism by the USSR.

*Revelación (Genie Santiago). Bilingual English/Spanish rap with lots of images of protests and of people trying to cross the border. Like so many immigration songs, this could also go easily into the Class section.

*Immigrants (We Get The Job Done) (Lin-Manuel Miranda). A remix with pieces from various songs in his musical, Hamilton. Lyrics here.

Running (Refugee Song) (Keyon Harrold, Andrea Pizziconi, and Jasson Harrold) describes the hard life in refugee camps—and why they had to flee in the first place.

American Land (Bruce Springsteen). With a rollicking Irish melody, Springsteen contrasts the dreams of wealth and ease shared by so many immigrants in the 19th and early 20th centuries with the harsh realities they found here. This version, appropriately, was filmed live in Dublin. Also of note are the words Springsteen speaks at a 2025 concert in Manchester, UK before singing Land of Hopes and Dreams (another song from the same album).

Kilkelly, Ireland (Peter Jones). A 19th-century Irish farmer dictates letters to his son living in the US across several decades. This hauntingly beautiful song reminds us that until quite recently, people who emigrated left behind loved ones and had only very slow postal mail to keep in touch. And despite the magic of video calls and emails, what’s still true today is that for many, there is no going back.

 

Class, Labor, and Economic Justice

This Land is Your Land (Woody Guthrie). In 1975, I found myself co-leading a march of several thousand people through the streets of Washington, DC, playing this song on harmonica along with a violinist, a kazoo player, and I think a guitarist. Not only didn’t we rehearse, I had no idea I was going to be drafted into this impromptu marching band. The two string players were also singing. That day was memorable both because it remains the only time I’ve ever performed music for an audience (other than teaching “Oh What a Grand and Glorious Feeling”)—because it was the first time I heard the long-suppressed politically progressive “secret” verses. I used to own an LP where you could actually hear the needle scratch as it was pulled away to cut those verses out of the master. Guthrie wrote hundreds of lyrics but to the best of my knowledge, never wrote a tune.

This particularly moving performance is led by Pete Seeger, less than four months before he turned 90, with some help from his grandson Tao Rodríguez Seeger, Bruce Springsteen, and a mostly Black chorus—recorded at the Lincoln memorial during Obama’s inauguration concert.

Talkin’ About A Revolution (Tracy Chapman). Chart-topping class-based anthem about those who are “…standing in the welfare lines/
Crying at the doorsteps of those armies of salvation”

Is This the World We Created? (Freddie Mercury and Brian May of Queen). A British comparison of desperate hunger in the Global South with “a wealthy man…sitting on his throne.”

Step By Step (Words from a 19th-century union rulebook; music by Pete Seeger). We are strongest when we work together.

Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? (Yip Harburg and Jay Gorney). Written in 1932 during the Great Depression and a hit for both Bing Crosby and Rudy Vallee, it starkly illuminates the way corporate greed casts aside those who built that wealth. This much more recent version, soulful if a bit overblown, is by George Michael. Good backgrounder on the Kennedy Center website. In case the MAGAs have taken it down, this is the most recent version (April 12, 2025) on Archive.org. BTW, Harburg is a major Broadway songwriter probably best known for songs like “Somewhere, over the Rainbow” and “It’s Only a Paper Moon.”

I’m Changing My Name to Chrysler (Tom Paxton). A scathing response to the bailout of US automakers during the Carter years (not to be confused with the similar bailout under Bush II). Arlo Guthrie recorded the song when it was new, then recorded it with Tom’s updated lyrics for this 2008 Farm Aid benefit.

We Gotta Get Out of This Place (Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil). Hard-rocking ‘60’s hit about love amidst terrible working conditions.

 

Liberation Struggles Around the World

*Would You Harbor Me? (Ysaye Barnwell, USA, of Sweet Honey in the Rock). A beautiful song asking the title question about a wide range of people who are part of oppressed groups.

Woyaya (Sol Amarfio, Ghana, of Osibisa). You may know versions by Art Garfunkel or the Fifth Dimension. This is the composer’s band, Osibisa, from 1971.

Si se calla el cantor (Horacio Guarany, Argentina). “What will become of life if the Singer/Does not raise his voice in the stands/For those who suffer, for those for whom there is/No reason that condemns him to walk without a blanket.” Full lyrics and translation here.

Mbube (Solomon Linda, South Africa). Americanized as Wimoweh/The Lion Sleeps Tonight, this was a huge hit for the Weavers in 1951 and again 11 years later for the Tokens. This version by Ladysmith Black Mambazo is closer to the original but with lots of unique LBM touches. And this is very much what a local Black chorus sounded like when we heard them play this song on the streets of Cape Town. There is an upsetting chronicle about the way Mr. Linda was defrauded of proper compensation on Wikipedia.

Falasteen Biladi (Hamood Alkuder). A Palestinian cries out for justice in Gaza. Arabic with English subtitles.

Zahrat al-Mada’en (Assi Rahbani, Mansour Rahbani). The Palestinian narrator mourns the isolation from Jerusalem (whose name literally translates as “city of peace”), beloved by both Palestinians and Jews. Performed here by Fairuz. Translated lyrics here. For a Jewish perspective, listen to Ben Snof singing “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem” from Psalm 137 (many translations into English here). Interestingly, the same Biblical psalm also contains “By the Waters of Babylon,” another song of exiles longing for their homeland.

 

Resources

This list of 50 songs is a drop in a roaring river of great social change music. Find more in the songbooks Rise Up Signing and its second volume, Rise Again, compiled by Peter Blood and Annie Patterson, in We Rise: A Movement Songbook available for no-cost download, at the websites of Peoples Music Network and Sing Out magazine, at this Spotify playlist, and on the websites of many of the authors and performers.

 

Thank-yous to the many people (alphabetically) who suggested songs:

Janet Beatrice

Stephanie L.H. Calahan

Donna Cooney

Lisa Diaz

Raf Horowitz Friedman

Luis-Orlando Isaza Villegas

Riqi Kosovske

Yosl Kurland

Lauchlan Mackinnon

Oscar Martinez

Marcia Miller

Amanda Risi

Andrea Rudnik

Phil Stone

Sandy Sulsky

Melody Tilton

Dianne Turausky

Debbie Ward

Cat YurakaFacebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Energy & Sustainability, Ethics in Government, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, media-general, Mindset, Peace and War, People Helping People, Politics, poverty, Protests and Crackdowns, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

“When they go low, we go high.”
—Michelle Obama

This week, two prominent Democrats gave opposite but equally crazy advice?

Thom Hartmann says we should open up the bag of Republican dirty tricks and start using them. And in what he calls a “daring” maneuver, Carville tells us in a New York times op-ed to “roll over and play dead.”

The above Carville link is for subscribers. I don’t have a sharing link.

Carville’s “plan” was properly shredded by Gil Duran of FrameLab, who says what I would have said:  Carville is ignoring the moral issue that real people are getting hurt. Democrats have to frame themselves as the opposition, loudly and clearly; silence is complicity. And principled resistance is what creates change (more on that in the What to Do section, below)

But let ME take on Hartmann, who usually talks sense. The moral arguments are obvious, but let’s talk about the impact in practice. And then we’ll talk about what to do instead.

  1. This makes us no better than them. If we use the same slimy methods, voters will just say “Tweedledum and Tweedledumber” and stay home—as millions of Biden voters did this past November. Just as we don’t accept violent terrorism to redress wrongs, so we should not accept disenfranchising others And if you think the so-called “stop the steal” movement that tried to steal back the 2020 election was bad, imagine if they actually had cause!
  2. Republican-lite has never worked for the Dems. Republican-lite gave us the impasse under Biden when Manchin and Sinema blocked progress over and over. A generation ago, Republican-lite brought us Newt Gingrich and his “Contract with America” (which progressives dubbed “Contract ON America,” in the hitman sense).
  3. For decades, Republicans have been “the party of  no”—and that includes “no, you can’t vote.” Denying others voting rights, even those we disagree with, would make Democrats also the party of “no, you can’t vote.” Democrats were that party in the segregated South during my childhood, and we all know by now what a huge mistake that was. Ironically, the Republicans are still criticizing the Dems for these old sins, even though, as Greg Palast notes, they themselves have taken voter suppression to new levels. But Harris had the chance to call out Republican voter suppression well in advance of the election, and according to Palast, her failure to push on this was why she lost.

In the 2024 election, failing to speak directly and meaningfully to the working class—coming across as yet another Republican-lite—led to the perception that Harris was an elitist who was beholden to corporate funders and was not in tune with white working-class people, despite policy platforms (that got little coverage) that were much more favorable to workers. Being too timid not only to beat a continuous drum calling out her opponent’s slide toward open fascism AND his cognitive decline but to mobilize an army of respected surrogates and send them into swing states to bring that message home over and over and over was a huge mistake. The country should have been flooded with messages about the harm that her opponent would do, his history of crime, and his repeated failures of competence.

Mind y0u, I think Harris also did a lot of things right, despite the truncated campaign. The focus on joy was brilliant. The promise to undo the damage of Dobbs (the Supreme Court decision that overturned Rowe v. Wade) was given full weight. The promise to be a president for all in the US, not just the Blue states, inspired many.

What to Do to Change This for Next Tuime

  1. We win more when we play bigger. I think the things that hurt the Harris campaign the most other than voter suppression of Democrats in Red states was her unwillingness to play big on certain issues. Being way too weak on Gaza almost certainly cost her Michigan—and was the reason multiple New Hampshire voters told me (when I knocked on their doors this fall) they weren’t voting for either presidential candidate. It would have been so easy for her to give a slot to Ruwa Romman, Palestinian-American legislator from Georgia, whose unity speech had been vetted by the Harris team. Flip-flopping her former correct opposition to fracking and barely mentioning climate change cost her many environmentalist votes. And she seldom addressed the elephant in the room of Republicans denying Democrats and poor people and people of color and people who didn’t want to catch a contagious disease the right to vote.
  2. We also win when we’re much more visible. There’s been a ton of grassroots organizing going on since the election—but with a few exceptions such as the Democratic legislators’ protest in front of the Treasury, it’s not showing up in the media, people don’t encounter it on their way to work, and non-activists don’t know it’s happening—because it’s been on Zoom rooms and inside houses of worship and college classrooms, and not out on the streets. This is a both-and. Do the organizing, do the lobbying, do the important but quiet stuff—but also get out there by the thousands and be seen! In my teen years, I went to a peace demonstration almost every weekend, many times boarding a charter bus from NYC to Washington to participate. Tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, over and over again helped to bring that horrible war in Vietnam to a close. A few years earlier, the 1963 March on Washington and other massive demonstrations, plus people in the streets openly defying segregation, helped move a proud civil rights agenda forward into law, and gave LBJ the spine to back up those laws with enforcement. Even small actions can make a difference. Just 2000 people at Seabrook, New Hampshire in 1977 changed the course of US energy away from nuclear and toward renewables, when 1411 of us got arrested and held for up to two weeks. The sustained months of action at Standing Rock, opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline, started with just 200 people.
  3. The Dems have to combine Bernie’s anger and speaking truth to power, Kamela’s and Tim’s focus on joy, and AOC’s youthful energy and super-personable outreach that works equally well face-to-face or on video. (Note: the above link takes you to the links to all of my Facebook posts that mention her or share her work. It is open to the public; you should be able to view the videos and read the quotes even if you’re not on Facebook. If you want to pick one, go for the interview by Bernie, posted December 3, 2024.)
  4. As Bernie has done for years, they must focus on the class issue—not to the exclusion of its current constituencies, but intersectionally, inclusively. They have to recognize that the struggle for rights is the struggle for rights—whether those rights are denied for race, religion, gender, sexuality, economic position, class , age, ability, or any other category. This message has to be presented in ways that make all of these constituencies feel seen, heard, and valued: when one group gains, it “lifts all boats” and “makes the pie higher” for everyone; when one makes progress, it doesn’t take away from the others.
  5. Dems have to go to the Red states and Red audiences. Dems have to emulate Pete Buttigieg and get interviewed by MAGA media outlets like Fox—and do so as articulately and persuasively as he does. They have to reclaim populism and get in front of voters who wrongly saw the billionaire convicted-felon and serial-liar Republican candidate as populist.
  6. Democratic politicians have to be more outspoken. They need to cite real human tragedies resulting from these cruel policies and open hatreds by real people who’ve been hurt, name them, and tell their stories on the floor of the Senate and the House and at their Town Hall meetings back in their home districts. And they need to give copies in advance to the media and engage their base to pressure those media to show up and cover these statements.
  7. All of us need to widen our resistance tactics. In the pre-Internet, pre-COVID era, nonviolence scholar Gene Sharp listed 198 nonviolent social change tactics. Many more have been added since, including this list of 100 mostly digital nonviolent tactics. 21 more showed up when I searched for “nonviolent resistance techniques during covid.” And remember: governments typically fall when just 3.5 percent of the population stops complying and withdraws consent, according to research by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan.

So join a group, get out there and make some of what the late civil rights icon and long-time Congressman John Lewis called “good trouble.”Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

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If you’ve been bewailing the presidential election and wondering how the country you love could have voted to elect this monster, this may help you feel better: Maybe we didn’t! A respected commentator makes a strong case that millions of votes in heavily Democratic areas of red and purple states were not counted.

Greg Palast came to my attention in the aftermath of the 2000 election–yeah, the one that gave George W. Bush the victory, and eight years as the worst president the US had had until 2017.

Palast, an investigative journalist with a strong background in forensic economics, made a compelling case that the outcome, hanging on a margin of just 537 votes in Florida following a partial recount that was stopped by the Republican-dominated Supreme Court, may have had a lot more to do with the tens of thousands of likely Democratic voters (especially absentee voters) who were purged from the roles, often because of false reasons like their name matching or nearly matching that of some convicted felon. I remember the figure of 96,000, which was bad enough.

While I can’t find that stat right now, I found another article by Palast, from 2004, noting that 178,000 voters from heavily Black areas cast ballots that were disqualified for equally spurious reasons. It’s the one with the headline and picture about Roger Stone.

Well, what do you know! Palast is now making an equally compelling case that  “4,776,706 voters were wrongly purged from voter rolls according to US Election Assistance Commission data.”

He says a single Republican operative challenged the eligibility of 32,000 mostly Black voters  in her county, others challenged thousands of voters elsewhere in Georgia, and similar efforts in Wisconsin and around the country deprived those nearly 5 million people of their chance to vote. The Republicans claimed these people had moved, because they didn’t return a postcard that looked like junk mail–and in some parts of Georgia, only 1% returned the cards.

If Palast is accurate–and I believe he is–Harris would have won at least those two states, the popular vote, the Electoral College, and the presidency.  She might have even taken Texas, where a new requirement to add ID numbers raised the rejection rate on absentee ballots from just 1% to 12%. (This is the same link as the 4,776,706 voters link above.)

In order to read that post in Thom Hartmann’s Substack newsletter, I had to become a subscriber. There is a no-charge level. But if you’d rather not subscribe, Palast makes many of the same points in this video, which is freely accessible. (It’s  the same link as the “single Republican” link above.)

While this analysis makes me feel a bit better about US voters, it doesn’t talk about how to reclaim democracy. In the video, he notes that he told the Democrats what steps they needed to do to protect voters at risk of being barred from voting or having their ballots discarded, but they didn’t see a need for pre-emptive action. Perhaps if they see this new data, they could make a claim to some body like the International Court of Justice that the election was a cheat. And meanwhile, this information gives us yet more reasons to resist the coup through every nonviolent tactic we can.Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

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El Greco's painting of Jesus chasing the money changers out of the temple. Via Wikipedia.
El Greco’s painting of Jesus chasing the money changers out of the temple. Via Wikipedia.

There is a part of me that hopes the Republican Party nominates DeSantis, because when he loses the general election by a huge margin, it will be a repudiation of the entire loathsome cloak of hatred that DT and RDS both stand for. No one will be able to make a case that it was merely a rejection of DT’s criminal activity, egomania, lack of loyalty to those who stood by him, and/or incompetence.

While RDS shares and even exceeds DT’s vile politics, and has an equally thin skin, he at least appears to be rational and is not shadowed by a long list of personal scandals and accusations of criminality for personal benefit. The crimes he is accused of, such as breaking laws and misusing Florida tax dollars in deceiving immigrants to board planes from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard, have been about his policies–like those of the equally creepy governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, who booby-trapped the Rio Grande to prevent an influx of immigrants, breaking maritime laws and hurting local businesses in the process.

I like to think–and maybe it’s a delusion–that the vast majority of US voters want no truck with either of these men’s open racism, homophobia/transphobia, self-defined “Christian” nationalism, xenophobia, attacks on women’s reproductive rights, love of guns more than the right not to be randomly shot, and all the rest of it.

Why do I put “Christian” in quotes? Because Christ, based on my reading of the Four Gospels, would have had no truck with their bigotry in His name. Christ’s morals were about helping the poor, the downtrodden, those disabled and ostracized because of disease. Christ threw the moneychangers and merchants–the apex capitalists of their era–out of the Temple. He blessed the peacemakers and the poor and the meek, rescued a woman about to be stoned to death for violating sexual mores, embraced people of other cultures–the Samaritans were a despised cultural group, so it was a big deal for him to talk about the Good Samaritan.

Contemporary right-wing bigots treat immigrants and refugees as subhuman, while Jesus proclaimed, “Welcome the stranger!” They demand an end to the slightest restrictions on guns, while Jesus preached nonviolence not just in offering the other cheek to an attacker who strikes your cheek, but condemning even thoughts of hating another.

If I were to flag every passage of Jesus living His life and preaching His truth in direct opposition to the intolerance, violence, and small-mindedness of these “Christians,” this post would go on for many pages. But the elevator-pitch version is simply this: If you call yourself a Christian and claim to follow the teachings of Jesus, you must be willing to accept and even celebrate values like peace, nonviolence, diversity, equality, respect for the natural environment, fair treatment of “the stranger” (immigrants, those of different races or ethnicities or gender orientation), and improving the lot of the poor and the ostracized.

And as an immigration justice, social justice, and environmental activist who has read the Gospels more than once even though I’m not a Christian, I welcome His allyship.Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail