The CD is a nice mixture of anti-bush music. I buy political music to play on KUMD 103.3 FM on Folk Migrations, which I DJ once a month. This particular CD has a lot of variety and will get airplay.
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This CD is clever, dynamic, fun, artistic and very timely.  It did not buy it because I wanted it - I bought it because I needed it.  It brings us back to the classic days of protest and brings fun back even in the darkest days of politics.  With the current political disaster going on, there are a lot of events for people who think they can do a better job than George - which is just about everybody.  I have chosen Howard Dean and plan to play this at all the fundraisers.
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It's good folk music, nice to listen to even independently of the subject matter. As for the subject, I think we really need music and the other arts to speak about what this admin. is doing to the country and the world. Get this CD and listen to it, Buy 'Poets Against the War' and read it.
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The Bush Backlash
By Baron Dave Romm 

The Bush Backlash
Hail to the Thief and union songs

George W. Bush has the morals of a televangelist without the oratorical skills. As long as he's preaching to the choir, his bumbling and stumbling sermons get polite applause and church bulletins print nice things about him. No one else is fooled. 

One of the great things about political satire from the center/left is that I can play them on the radio. What passes for conservative political commentary is rude, scatological and ad hominem; language unfit to play on the airwaves as restricted by Jesse Helms and co. While the left is not above the well-placed personal insult, there's usually substance behind it, and often a specific remedy beyond knee-jerk buzzwords.

My prediction (you heard it here first) is that the Bush administration will give rise to a new unionization movement. The workers who got shafted by Enron, Worldcom, etc. would still be out of a job -- if the company goes bankrupt, there is no work -- but a strong union would have helped prevent the loss of savings, protected severance pay and been the legal entity to sue the execs who cashed out leaving workers with nothing. Indeed, I predict that the new unions will want to be able to see the books of the company. Republicans are against trial lawyers because their arguments lose in a fair hearing. A union would provide necessary balance and oversight (governance in econo-speak), which would increase the value of the company.

I was therefore tickled pink to find the two strains together in the form of George Mann and Julius Margolin's Hail To The Thief. Buzzflash has been offering the CD as a premium for a while, and rightly so! The CD strikes the right political chords with well-chosen knocks on Bushisms and the stolen election with some well-crafted music. If anything, they're too nice, but the CD was pre-9/11 (I suspect) and the real criminal negligence of Bush and Cheney hadn't come to light. Still, it's fun and only a little cruel. The title song, Hail to the Thief, is a nifty short version of Hail to the Chief played on kazoo and saw. (The saw keeps sounding like a theremin to me; it's played well.)

My favorite cuts are It's Hard To Put Food On Your Family, about Bushisms (and only a few of the early ones) and I'm George W., to the tune of Oh Suzanna, "I'm George W., don't you cry for me, I've come all the way from Texas, just as dumb as I can be." This would be funnier if the issues weren't so important. The most serious, heavy-handed but ultimately damning song is The Whitewash, drawing a comparison between the lynching of an innocent black man a hundred years ago to the denying of votes to minorities by Katherine Harris in the 2000 elections. Also on the CD are songs about Corporate Welfare, a hidden track with the chant "three more years", a spiritual and several songs about unions. 

George and Julius' Wobbly roots are more directly evident on Miles To Go Before We Sleep. Julius lived through the Depression (caused when a dumb Republican president and GOP controlled House and Senate ignored with the economy while it was collapsing, they made things far worse and... never mind...) and his memories form the introduction to We Demand a Living Wage. With friends of age 82, Julius urges Don't Let Age Get You Down while nearly getting run over by a bicycle followed by a rollerblader leads to A Pedestrian's Lament. Being a computer guy, I like Somebody Robbed the Pension Plan, to the tune of Somebody Robbed the Glendale Train, about IBM's trying to screw their workers in 1999. I'm pleased that folkies know who Tom Watson was. They do nice updated versions of Hobo's Lullaby and We Shall Not Be Moved/This Little Light of Mine. Folk, rock, country and a cause they believe in raises the energy of Woody Guthrie's Union Burying Ground to anthem level. 

Ewan McColl died in 1989, but his influence is still being felt. He was a union man all the way, even to the point of being anti-technology in My Old Man. People worked for their bread, and it was good. Black and White, The Definitive Ewan McColl Collection, with several duets with his wife Peggy Seeger, has the songs that became hits (The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, Dirty Old Town) as well as a bunch of others, 20 in all. (You can order it and hear samples here. His working-class background and distrust of those who would deny work pop out in Ballad of Accounting, My Old Man, Black and White, The Press Gang, Nobody Knew She Was There, Looking for A Job, and so on. Maggie Thatcher may have tamped the unions in the UK, but their spirit (and the reason why they were formed in the first place) has never died. 

George W. Bush's dismal failure as a leader and hostility to labor unions is already drawing parallels with Hoover, and if the consequences are the same then the solutions will be similar. While I don't see anyone of FDR's stature on the horizon, one may have to rise to the job. 
Aside: My favorite current Bushism, to quote from the second page of this report: Making the London rounds is the anecdote of a bemused Tony Blair hearing George W. Bush's simple explanation for France's economic decline. In this account of an aside at a recent summit, Bush told Blair that "the French trouble is that they don't have a word for entrepreneur." 

Baron Dave Romm is a conceptual artist and a noble of Ladonia with a radio show, a very weird CD collection and an ever growing list of political links. He reviews things at random for obscure web sites. You can read all his music recommendations from Bartcop-E here.
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