Mighty Good Road

On the heels of yesterday’s “Trickle Down”, here’s a more personal perspective. This is a country swing called “Broke As A Muh’fuh”, and that’s “muh’fuh” as in “motherfucker”. I wrote this song awhile back, but it fits this set celebrating Occupy Wall Street. Given that the gap between the rich and poor is at a historical high, and wages haven’t grown for the 99% since the ’80s, and the 1% has rigged all financial and governmental systems to return ever-greater sums to themselves, and we have a self-congratulating, unapologetic GOP presidential candidate who has no idea what it’s like to wonder where the next paycheck will come from, I feel like it’s a good time for this song. 

Consider this: 6 Walmart heirs (just six people) are set to receive $90 billion, while thousands of Walmart employees need $2.7 billion in food stamps because their wages are so low. So Walmart is not only stealing money from their employees, they’re taking billions more from taxpayers who foot the bill for their underpaid employees. And of course, Walmart is anti-union, because god forbid the workers unify to be treated fairly and take any money from six deserving Walmart heirs. In a nutshell, Walmart is a perfect model of class warfare! And that’s broke as a motherfucker.

For day 3 of this Occupy Wall Street celebration, here’s a soft ballad homage to Ronald Reagan’s enduring economic legacy/fallacy, “trickle-down” economics. Whenever you hear economic conservatives spouting off on giving tax breaks to the “job creators”, they’re paying tribute to this notion that somehow giving rich people more money benefits the poor and the sick. In truth, much of the profits of the uber-rich gets stored in offshore accounts to avoid taxes, so I propose that “trickle-down” economics shall henceforth be known as “trickle-overseas” economics. 

For day 2 of our Occupy Wall Street celebration, here’s a new song called “Wall Street Would”. To prime you for the song, consider this fun factoid from the New York Times: “A recent study found that 10 percent of people who work on Wall Street are ‘clinical psychopaths’ and that they exhibit an ‘unparalleled capacity for lying, fabrication, and manipulation.’ ”

So yeah! Deregulation probably isn’t the answer so much as incarceration.

It’s been exactly a year since some insightful folks decided to draw attention to the unaddressed source of the Great Recession: Wall Street. In honor of what we think is the first political movement in a great while with something useful to say, we’ve written up some good old protest music in the tradition of Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly and Pete Seeger. Today, for the 1-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, we invite you to occupy some four-part harmony. 

“Not long ago, Rob Getzschman decided to turn Cypress Hills’ 1991 ode-to-police “Pigs” into a lullaby. Or, as he would say, “back into a lullaby.” (You can hear the song below.)”