Progressive Music Classics. The Mekons' "Fight the Cuts"

.

.
By MARC McDONALD

Welcome to another edition of Progressive Music Classics.

In the era of "Occupy Wall Street," this is what it all comes down to: As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, every single right that workers today enjoy was fought for, tooth and claw. The 40-hour week. The minimum wage. The dole.

Hell, even the right of 8-year-old kids to not have to work in a dangerous, filthy coal mine in order to line the pockets of greedy plutocrats (who only ended child labor when legislation forced them to).

Now, the bastards want to take it all away from us. Everything from the New Deal to Medicare.

It's interesting how there's always trillions of dollars readily available for war, death and destruction and "military" profiteers.

But when it comes to the working class, "our" government can never do enough slashing and burning of the programs that we fought for decades to give us a decent life with some measure of dignity.

So while these plutocrats are spending trillions on the likes of Halliburton and the crooks on Wall Street, they're always claiming that the "money just isn't there" for "wasteful" domestic spending.

Yes, that's definitely the problem. Our nation simply has the wrong priorities.
We just spend too goddamn much on the likes of roads, bridges, schools, teachers
and firefighters.

In this song, Britain's mighty Mekons spell out what the working class must do: Fight the Cuts.

The Mekons have been going for some three decades now. Most of their existence,
they've produced a unique body of work that draws inspiration from the likes of
Hank Williams (the original, not his fascist retard son) as well as other traditional
country music, folk and rebel music.

But in an earlier incarnation in the late 70s, the Mekons were a punk band. On "Fight the Cuts" the band are gloriously amateurish and fired up by righteous progressive anger at the outrages of Tory Britain.

As the "Occupy Wall Street" continues to grow, it's important that we Fight the Cuts that the Ruling Class Pigs are trying to force down our throats.