Tag: justice

OCT 13, 2013 - Taylor Swift, the leading charitable musician of the year in 2012, has upped the ante even more. Taylor has given the biggest donation to the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum ever, $4 million dollars, to open up a "Taylor Swift Education Center" on 2 floors in the building. Ms. Swift is no stranger to the place, for she performed volunteer fundraising when she was younger and even performed as a teenager at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, and even signing her first contract there. 

The Taylor Swift Education Center features 3 classrooms, a learning lab and a state-of-the-art children's exhibit gallery, and increases their classroom capacity by sevenfold. It features dozens of instruments, and curators on display restoring musical instruments that will eventually go on display. Read more on Taylor Swift's website here, and also check out a great article about it on GuardianLV.com here. Check out a comment from Taylor Swift at the unveiling of the Education Center below.

I was jamming out to one of my favorite folk-bluegrass songs, "Green Rolling Hills (of West Virginia)" and researching who wrote the song, I ran into an awesome story about a great activist musician named "Utah" Phillips. Bruce "Utah" Phillips was a legendary activist musician that is described as poet, storyteller, labor organizer, and the "Golden Voice of the Great Southwest". He was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1935, eventually joined the army in 1956, and saw the horrors of war with his own eyes in the Korea following the war there. On his return he threw himself into activism, and worked at Joe Hill House, a house of hospitality. He even ran for US Senate and the US Presidency. He was a big fixture in the folk music scene in Saratoga Springs, New York for years, and was a proud member of the IWW, or Industrial Workers of the World. His concerts were his opportunity to opine his political thoughts, and were in essence IWW meetings. He wrote "Enola Gay" in 1991, commenting on the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was also a member of Veterans for Peace, a huge group here in Washington, DC when it comes to rallies and activism. As you will see below, "Utah" often preceded his songs with long storytelling.

He eventually settled down in Nevada City, California where he started up a shelter Hospitality House, and also the Peace and Justice Center. He died in 2008 of heart disease.

In the 1970s "Utah" wrote "Green Rolling Hills", which has become a folk and bluegrass music scene staple, and sings of the troubles of a coal miner in West Virginia not finding work (probably because there is no union).  Emmylou Harris covered the song in her 1978 album "Quarter Moon in a Ten Cent Town", and Kathy Mattea has recently recorded a version of it. In a Herald-Dispatch.com obituary, "Utah" describes traveling through West Virginia and connecting with the folks there who want to leave because there are no jobs, but cannot leave because, "It's these hills. They keep you. And when they've got you, they won't let you go." Listen to "Enola Gay" from "Utah" Phillips, a legendary activist-musician who will be long remembered, in a Youtube video below. Check out the wonderful and rich world of activist-musician "Utah" Phillips at his website: TheLongMemory.com.  (photo credit: Carptrash/CC)

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 5, 2013 - Medical marijuana has come to the District of Columbia, and the program is fully up and operational. As of October of 2013, about a dozen or so people with health aliments that are treatable by medical marijuana have signed up and received their DC medical marijuana card from the DC Department of Health. The list of health ailments for DC medical marijuana is short: HIV/AIDS, cancer, patients undergoing chemotherapy, protease inhibitors or radiotherapy treatments, glaucoma, and muscle spasticity diseases such as multiple sclerosis, fibromyalgia, Parkinson's disease and others. The last part is tricky, and sometimes reviewed by the DC Department of Health on a case-by-case basis, and they will be adding diseases as time goes by. Watch a brief video below detailing the whole process of a DC medical marijuana patient going through the process of obtaining a card, and filling their first prescription below. We also sat down and interviewed Rabbi Jeff Kahn, director of the Takoma Wellness Center, one of the medical marijuana dispensaries set up here in DC. JTMP strongly urges our supporters to contact your state and federal representatives, and tell them you want medical marijuana enacted or expanded in your state, and you want marijuana removed from the Category I drug classification, for marijuana DOES have many accepted medical uses and treatments.

OCT 2, 2013 - The LostWaterBoyz, three furloughed federal workers from Indiana as a result of the right-wing extremist Teabaggers shutting down the government like terrorists with ridiculous demands, used the time off to do what I like doing also; they wrote a song about it all. Set to the tune of Petula Clark's "Downtown", they updated the lyrics for the times and wrote, "Shutdown". Watch the LostWaterBoyz perform "Shutdown" below. Let's hope somebody corrals these insane Teabaggers (Hello?, Boehner?!) and gets them in line and we can get the government functioning like it is supposed to do, and these guys can get a paycheck again. They are essential! Passing a budget and keeping the government functioning is not a concession! Comments? Start a conversation on our JTMP Facebook Page.