This Week with David Rovics

New song: "Whatever They'll Pay (Ballad of Lars Fruergaard Joergensen)"

We interrupt these wars to bring you a Senate hearing with Bernie Sanders calling the shots. I'm still recovering from the shock of hearing a person with a Danish accent utter that much nonsense. Obviously they're not all fine upstanding radical leftists like almost everyone I know in Denmark!

If you've missed the proceedings, the upshot is that half of the expenditures for health care costs in the US these days goes for buying prescriptions of Ozempic, the new, extremely popular weight loss drug from Novo Nordisk. The reason it's so expensive is because the US government doesn't believe in regulating monopolies, and capitalism says charge whatever they'll pay -- it's basic supply and demand, after all.

Canadian Cancellations

If there were any press outlets interested in covering the trials and tribulations of a little-known traveling musician trying to sing any songs about Palestine without having people try to cancel his gigs, what might that coverage look like?

"Aysenur" REMIX #FreePalestine

Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi was born on July 27th, 1998, and killed by an Israeli sniper while standing in solidarity with besieged Palestinians in the town of Beita, in the Occupied West Bank, on September 6th, 2024.

Remixed rendition thanks to Chet Gardiner, from his studio in Hawai'i.

David Rovics interview on Gorilla Radio

Here's Chris Cook's interview with me from earlier today, wherein I wax eloquent about the horrors for a half hour. You can hear the entire show and subscribe to Gorilla Radio, which is a wonderful weekly podcast, on Substack. And to meet the host, come to my gig next weekend in Victoria, BC!

New song: "Aysenur"

Israeli settlers began a new campaign to steal more of the land from the people of the town of Beita, Palestine, in 2021. Turkish-American ISM activist Aysenur Ezgi Eygi was the 17th protester to be killed by Israeli troops in Beita since 2021.

Summer Podcasts 2024

Over the course of the summer I wrote a bunch of things, but didn't make audio versions of most of it.  Here's everything I missed, in one fell swoop, interspersed with appropriate songs.  The following segments are the order in which I recorded them, and the order in which they were published on Substack, and in the case of "I Survived Chicago," on Counterpunch as well.

• Reflections on Singing for Wikileaks
• Don't Shoot, Organize!
• Notes from a Month in Australia
• I Survived Chicago
• Seegerism -- and the War Against It
• Downtown Portland and the Screaming Silence

"Section 12 (Do You Support the Resistance?)" REMIX

My very prolific musical collaborator, Chet Gardiner, has come up with a very appropriately sinister backdrop for this song, which is the first of two songs I wrote after the arrest of Palestine solidarity organizer and influencer, Sarah Wilkinson, in England at the end of August.

Like the other song on the subject ("On the Streets of London"), this song is not just about Sarah's ordeal, but all the other journalists who have been getting arrested by Keir Starmer's balaclava-wearing Mossad thugs.

"On the Streets of London" REMIX

Sarah Wilkinson's outrageous and also impossible bail conditions have been dropped, due to popular pressure, but Keir Starmer's balaclava-clad Mossad thugs are still on the loose in England, terrorizing journalists. Here's Chet Gardiner's brilliant new remix of "On the Streets of London," the song I wrote a few days ago about this stark reality.

New song: "On the Streets of London (Free Sarah Wilkinson)"

Sarah Wilkinson was brutally arrested and her home ransacked. Now she's under house arrest, prohibited from using phones or other devices, awaiting the possibility of further persecution under the extremely anti-democratic Section 12 of the 2000 Terrorism Act in England.

 

This is a song about how you can be brutally abducted and charged with ridiculous offenses right now in modern-day England, on those lovely old and occasionally still cobblestoned streets of London. Sarah is only one of a number of journalists and others to be charged under this outrageous law, by the New Labor government.

"In Wisconsin in 1854 (Song for Joshua Glover)" REMIX

Chet Gardiner has improved the sound and added some very tasty instrumentation to this song I wrote and recorded in my living room last week.

The song is about one of so many historical events that could, if they were much better known, have a real impact on the outlook of so many people, about the prospects for civilization.

Anti-slavery sentiment was so strong in the state of Wisconsin that it was never necessary to institute military conscription there during the US Civil War.

In the decade prior to the Civil War, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, which legally required authorities in states where slavery was banned to return people who had escaped back to those who claimed to own them.

There was only one attempt to enforce this law in Wisconsin, and it resulted in the captured, formerly enslaved man, Joshua Glover, being freed from the jail in Milwaukee by a crowd of thousands of local people, who then protected Glover and made sure he had the means to get to Canada, where he could be beyond the jurisdiction of the slaveowners.