Tag: free speech

OCT 27, 2013 - Huge crowds turned out yesterday in cities across the world speaking out against excessive surveillance by the NSA and other agencies, demanding their civil rights of privacy be respected and protected. Many artists and musicians joined in the effort, such as the Flobots, YACHT, Ai WeiWei, Tom Morello,  and JTMP's favorite, Anti-Flag, who are close friends and a huge part of JTMP's early days. Many groups, organizations and individuals from all political stripes came together in this massive street protest against what people firmly believe is a excessive intrusion into their daily lives, and people wonder if their phone calls and emails are being snooped on by the NSA and other agencies. It came out this morning that Germany's Chancellor Merkel has had her cell phone "tapped" and spied on by America's NSA since 2002! The crowd was also protesting the use of military drones, and the huge, bloated military and security apparatus by the American federal government and other countries, which had become huge, hostile, intrusive and unresponsive to the very people it is supposed to serve and protect. JTMP urges our supporters to contact their elected officials at all levels, and scream that you want your privacy back, and tell them to "Stop Watching Us"!

One of the leading organizations leading the protests is the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and you can read more about them at EFF.org, and to read more about the various artists and musicians that were at a New York rally yesterday, check out BroadwayWorld.com. Watch an EFF YouTube video below of the scope of the chilling problem with our privacy, and if you want more check out the the rally's website at Rally.StopWatching.Us.

OCT 21, 2013 - Graham Nash talked music and politics with FOX411 recently, and he talked about how his father went to jail for a year over an incident where someone hid a $30 camera at his house, so he developed a "sense of unfairness." Nash told FOX411, "I always felt the justice system was buyable. Rich people don't go to jail, it's always the poor people." With JPMorgan trashing our economy and stealing money from people's retirement accounts and taxpayers and only paying a fine and nobody going to jail, it seems he is on to something. 

Nash talked about the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, and how he got a call from a friend telling him they needed defense money for people who disturbed the convention, and asked him to come out and sing. Nash said, "When I heard what happened to Bobby Seale, where they bound him and chained him and gagged him and called it a fair trial. When you put Bradley Manning into a room with bright lights for 24 hours a day and strip him naked and humiliate him for a thousand days before his trial, that's not fair to me." 

To read the entire FOX411 interview click here.  (photo credit: Matthew Harris/CC)

OCT 14, 2013 - In a great article and interview by David Daley on the Salon.com website, Daley writes about guitarist and musician Peter Buck, and how he he is deeply involved in helping lesser-known bands getting going and is so involved with making and producing music he actually made 4 albums in one month! His latest project is the band "Tired Pony" and they have just released their album "The Ghost of the Mountain". In the interview Buck talks about a lot of issues from releasing his first solo album on vinyl (he hates CDs) to how many of REM's "crew" they worked with went on to join Amnesty International and Greenpeace. Buck doesn't give many interviews, and this might be the last interview he will ever give. Read the interview on Salon.com here.

OCT 9, 2013 - One of JTMP's favorite activist musicians is David Rovics, who is a huge part of Occupy DC, and he has penned another great activist song about the Teabaggers shutting down the government. It's called "Government Shutdown", and it points out the total hypocrisy of how the Teabaggers want to shutdown parts of the government, and decrease spending...but of course we won't touch the corporate welfare subsidies or cut military spending one thin dime. He asks the great question. "Why don't we shut down the military too?" Check out David's new song in his YouTube video below.

OCT 7, 2013 - Miley Cyrus laid into the Republican extremist Teabaggers shutting down the whole government over Obamacare on SNL the other night and the video is hilarious; they're a bunch of crybabies in my opinion. Get over it. Anyways, I've been blogging about Miley Cyrus for the past few months, and here she is satirizing the Teabaggers on SNL. They spoof her song, "We Can't Stop", and she plays Michelle Bachmann; the batshit crazy US representative from Minnesota.