Music To Resist Union Bashing: "Fight the Power"

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By MARC McDONALD

These days, the GOP is finally implementing the agenda that they've planned all along: to completely and totally crush organized labor in the U.S. They won't be satisfied until they've abolished every union in the country once and for all. It's all-out war on the working class.

I'm not sure that Public Enemy's classic, "Fight the Power" has anything to do with unions or organizing. But I do know that it's an extraordinarily angry (but understandably so) anthem from the Golden Age of Hip-Hop, recorded before that genre turned into a apathetic, predictable celebration of all things "bling-bling" and narcissism. It's a call to street action: which is precisely what we need now. Facebook petitions will only get you so far.

Back in the day, Public Enemy's righteous angry raps took on the Powers That Be, which made the band dangerous in a way that corporate sell-outs like Eminem can only dream of.

"Fight the Power," featured here with the brilliant opening credits to Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, kicked off one of the best films of the 1980s.

With the GOP cracking down on the working class, it's now time to get angry. Unless we all take to the streets and Fight The Power, we will eventually have no rights at all (except the right to starve to death as the economic serfs of fascist corporate America).