The moment you have been waiting for has arrived.  Here it is…

The Sacrifice EP is out now for free download with…

1. When I Left Home
2. Don’t Tear Me Down
3. Coming Home To You
4. Sacrifice
5. Choke & Die
   

Click to download.

Or listen to it on my myspace page.

And while you’re at it become a fan on facebook.

Also, check out my interview from 3.2.10 with Allison from the 2 Real show on WMUC 88.1.

And be sure to be on the lookout for the full length album coming out early summer 2010.

Thanks.  Enjoy.

So my new promotional EP of new material will be out on March 8th for FREE download.  The link will for the download will go up here, my facebook page, and my myspace page once Monday rolls around.

The EP will feature 5 songs, 4 of which will be on my upcoming full length album to be released in a few months.  The whole point of this EP was to get something out into the ether.  I’ve been working quietly on these things for a long time now and I really just wanted to finally be able to put something out that I can use for promotional purposes and drum up some hype for the upcoming full length.

Here are the tracks

1. When I Left Home
2. Don’t Tear Me Down
3. Coming Home To You
4. Sacrifice
5. Choke & Die

To download a sneak preview of the songs which I premiered on the 2 Real radio show on WMUC 88.1 last Monday, and hear the edited interview go HERE

So I’ve decided to expand this blog to from a strictly political commentary blog to a political commentary blog and promotion tool for my musical endeavors.  Think of it as a two for one deal.  You can get all of your liberal diatribes and news about your favorite singer-songwriter all in one place.

So to get things kicked off for the this new promotional branch of Civil Disobedience I give you the announcement of NEW MUSIC!

That’s right folks I will be releasing a brand spanking new full length album of solo material within a matter of months.  Right now I am nearing the halfway point in the recording process and will hopefully be able to begin mixing soon.

What’s that you say?  You can’t wait for a few months time?  Understandable.  Well fortunately for you I am releasing a promotional EP next week on Monday March 8th featuring 5, count ‘em, 5 songs, 4 of which will be on the upcoming album.

Come again?  One week still too long?  Believe me, I get you.  No need to fret, because you can download an exclusive interview with yours’ truly at WMUC on the 2 Real show where I premiere all 5 new songs!  Download the edited interview with the 5 songs…

>>HERE<<

Keep posted here for all further news and updates.

First, the economics are simply not sound.  The whole idea is eerily similar to Herbert Hoover’s economic policies at the beginning of the Great Depression.  Here’s Krugman on the freeze…

It’s bad economics, depressing demand when the economy is still suffering from mass unemployment. Jonathan Zasloff writes that Obama seems to have decided to fire Tim Geithner and replace him with “the rotting corpse of Andrew Mellon” (Mellon was Herbert Hoover’s Treasury Secretary, who according to Hoover told him to “liquidate the workers, liquidate the farmers, purge the rottenness”.)

I’m not an expert in economics, but I know enough to know that when Harvard Economics professor and Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman uses phrases like “the rotting corpse of Andrew Mellon” things don’t look good.  Moreover, A spending freeze is essentially just a short term fix for a long term problem.  According the to NY Times,

…The estimated $250 billion in savings over 10 years would be less than 3 percent of the roughly $9 trillion in additional deficits the government is expected to accumulate over that time.

While the freeze may skim a few billion off the surface it does nothing to combat the deficit long-term or tackle the roots of the deficit like the unsustainable tax cuts for the wealthy that Bush put place.

So why is Obama pushing this?  Ultimately, this proposal seems to be more about politics than about economics.  Obama came into office with hopes of ending the decades of partisan deadlock but found a completely unwilling partner in the Republican party.  Now, with the election of Scott Brown to the Senate he is feeling the political winds shifting to the right and feels more than ever that in order to get anything done he has to shift with them.  Unfortunately this seems to mean making economic concessions to people who made the economic mess in the first place.  And, as we’ve seen time and time again, trying to appease Republicans is a game a Democratic president simply can’t win anyway.

Spending while in a deficit may not be pretty, but it’s essential in an economic recession.  While Obama has been getting a lot of flack for his deficit spending, it’s important to remember that it’s coming from a lot of the same people who voted in the irresponsible imbecile Republicans who cut taxes and spent like there was no tomorrow, and got us into this problem in the first place.  And furthermore, that while he, like Bush, contributed greatly to the deficit, his spending is going directly to stimulating the economy whereas Bush’s went to fund an unnecessary war and prescription drug plan that we couldn’t afford.

So essentially this proposal has two goals: to cut the deficit and buy some Republican votes, both of which have very low prospects of being successful.  Obama should tackle the deficit with serious spending and tax reform once the economy recovers.  Until then, he should focus more on job creation and less on trying to appease the deficit hawks.

courtesy NYTimes

You try and try and try, after eight years of bumbling morons and religious ideologues to get someone smart and competent.  Then after a long and tiring campaign you pull it off, and feel really good about yourself and the direction the country is going.  As it turns out though, its really no use, because smart as your guy is, he is and always will be surrounded by morons.

To be perfectly honest, I am envious of the Republicans.  When they ran the show they got so much done.  Granted, their legislation was all ill-informed, fiscally irresponsible, and rooted in psychotic Christian fundamentalism, but damn, they got it done.  The Democrats on the other hand can’t agree on what they need to get done, can’t come close to getting anything done without bribing people (ahem…Ben Nelson), and then, finally, after months of bribes and comprises, when they are just a hair short of getting through some meaningful legislation, they trip over themselves and let the likes of Scott Brown come and ruin everything.

Is it really too much to ask for a competent Liberal party in this country?

despite how diluted this bill ultimately ended up being, it certainly was nice seeing these guys actually do some work for a change instead of just going to fundraising luncheons.

Now, I already know what will happen.  The pseudo-liberal ‘blue-dogs’ will force the liberal wing of Democratic party, under the duress of a Republican filibuster, to cave on anything close to a public option.  We’ve heard their arguments a thousand times: “The public option is just a stepping stone to socialized medicine,” which we all know is an absolute evil.  If there’s one thing besides ironic sex scandals that Republicans are good at its using fear as a political tool, and nothing strikes fear in the hearts of real God-loving Americans like the threat of the reemergence of ‘The Red Menace‘.  The problem with this slippery slope argument is that it assumes that the thing at the bottom of the hill, socialized medicine, is something to be avoided at all costs.

Essentially, this ideology is basically just left over resentment from the cold war.  This country spent so much time and effort demonizing totalitarian communism, democratic capitalism’s perceived nemesis, that now anytime something that remotely resembles it, such as socialized health care, Americans run to the hills screaming.  The fact of the matter is though that socialized health care, or more broadly, democratic socialism, is not the ideological opposite.  Elements of socialism, in which the government controls key aspects of the economic and social life, have been implemented very successfully in just about every other industrialized nation on this planet, with very positive results and while still being able to maintain a free market.  The fact of the matter is, the communism of the Soviet Union is very different from the democratic socialism of most of today’s modern industrialized states.

Socialized medicine in countries like France or Germany, which have comparable per capita GDPs to the US, has been an integral part of health care for decades and both those countries have much better overall health care systems than we do.  They pay less than we do, and have higher life expectancy, lower infant mortality rates, and so on.  They’re simply better run systems.

I’m not suggesting we exactly mimic these European systems in this country.  American culture is markedly different from those of France or Germany, often emphasizing individual freedoms above societal need, (a paradigm which is other way around in most European countries).  Instead we should craft a version that fits of it that fits our way of life.  There are countless ways that social programs could be implemented to benefit of the greater population that is both cost effective and compatible with America’s individualistic culture.  We have many American-style social programs in place already.  Look at medicare or our public school system.  They’re government run programs that provide a very necessary service to specific sets of the population, are widely used, and compete with private businesses.  They satisfy a societal need and are done so in a way that preserves the ability for the market to function freely.

We need to bring that sensibility to health care and provide a public option.  We need to have a serious national debate about the real implications of the public option and the true meaning of socialized medicine.  Its time that we rid ourselves of our irrational fear of the infamous S-word and realize that the country could benefit tremendously from socialized medicine, because for God’s sake, every other modern country in the world has!  America needs to pull its head out of the conflicts of the mid 20 century and address the problems of the 21st with modern solutions, and that means seeing socialism for the facts, not the folklore.