"We Can’t Make It Here" is the most played MP3 in my iTunes library.

On this computer, which I purchased in late 2006, I’ve got 159 plays.  And since the track is 5:22 long that’s a little over 850 minutes of listening, in other words a little over fourteen hours.

And that doesn’t include over a hundred plays on my previous Mac or on two laptops or on iPods that don’t transfer plays or partial plays, which iTunes doesn’t count.

In other words, in my world, "We Can’t Make It Here" is a gargantuan hit.

But most of America has never heard it.

Now hits today don’t last long.  Play something even two years old and much of the audience will wince.  But "We Can’t Make It Here" has stood the test of time because of its unmitigated truth.

If you’ve got the time, read Matt Taibbi’s new essay in "Rolling Stone" entitled "Why Isn’t Wall Street In Jail?":

Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?

Mr. Taibbi is a superstar.  Because unlike all the entertainment personages emblazoned with that moniker he is not a tool of the corporations, but is directly attacking them for their profligacy.

All you really need to know from the above article is that the government is pursuing Roger Clemens to the utmost letter of the law for lying about shooting steroids into his rear end, but these Wall Street bankers are getting off scot-free.  At best paying fines that are a fraction of their incomes, or having the company pay them for them, which really means, since they’re publicly held companies, you’re paying.

Oh believe me you’re paying.  I just finished Mr. Taibbi’s book "Griftopia".  Wherein he delineates the fallacy of the gas price run-up of two years ago.  There were no shortages, just a new exchange predicated upon commodity prices going up, as if they were stocks.  And a change in the system so that pension funds could invest in same.

You think what happens on Wall Street doesn’t affect you?  You’re dreaming.

Now to the degree Goldman Sachs has got a bad name at all, one must credit Mr. Taibbi, for his 2009 article labeling the bank "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money."

In the wake of said article, Mr. Taibbi was proven to be correct, but he was vilified anyway.  His "Griftopia" analysis with regard thereto is fascinating:

"Looking back now, what I experienced in the wake of the Goldman piece was a lesson in a subtle truth about class politics in this country.

Which is this: You can pick on the rich in an ironic ‘Arrested Development’ sort of way, you can muss Donald Trump’s hair, you can even talk abstractedly about class economics using clinical terms like ‘income disparity.’  But in our media you’re not allowed to just kick the rich in the balls and use class-warfare language.  The taboo isn’t so much the subject matter, the taboo is the tone.  You’re allowed to grimace and shake your head at their shenanigans, but you can’t call them crooks and imply that they haven’t earned their money by being better or smarter than everyone else, at least not until they’ve been indicted or gone bankrupt."

Whew!

That’s it.  You can’t criticize our heroes.

That’s what the rich have become.  You wonder why no one cares about these Top Forty artists? They’re just not rich enough.  If they were really smart, they’d be working in Silicon Valley, right? Becoming the next Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, or working on Wall Street!

The artists are an underclass, tools of the man.

You can’t get a good seat at the show?  It’s because the rich are paying insane prices to the scalpers, who are getting their tickets not only from performers, but rich season ticket holders who are coughing them up at inflated prices.

The public is stupid.  It blames Ticketmaster.

And the financial crisis was caused by poor people buying houses they could not afford, not the financiers who overlooked regulations and then bought and sold said mortgages, creating derivatives that were rated top-notch when they were really bottom of the barrel.

And Goldman Sachs gets its entire $13 billion from AIG, whereas the public endures a haircut.

Bothered yet?

Probably not.  Because then you’d have to look in the mirror, you’d have to question so much.

Performers think the new way to break is by being in commercials, being sponsored by corporations.  Did you ever wonder how those corporations got their money?  How much the executives make?  Whether the company pays any tax?

The performers are not winning, they’re just part of the problem.  Slaves who won’t say a bad word about the rich.

But Matt Taibbi will.

And James McMurtry too.

If we’re gonna have someone vocally challenged on the Grammy telecast singing social commentary why can’t it be Mr. McMurtry instead of Bob Dylan?

Because of ratings.  Dylan’s appearance got the geezers to tune in.

But it turns out when people do dial in, they don’t leave their minds behind.  They saw Mumford & Sons’ excellence despite the band not winning any awards and made their album number one, not the work of mindless twits.

You see when the public is exposed to the truth, they get it.

But with all the bought and paid for intermediaries, it’s so hard for people to know what’s right.

Here’s where we depend on the artists.

But the artists are letting us down.  They’re chasing the same dollars as the bankers, but in an anemic way.  And they’re crooks too.  Like I said, big acts scalp their own tickets.  But that’s Ticketmaster’s fault, I forgot.

Put Lloyd Blankfein in jail.  That’ll clear up a few problems.  Let him get fucked in the ass.  That’ll scare Wall Street.

But the only way this is gonna happen is if we’ve got honest leadership.

Unlike Judith Miller, Matt Taibbi values the truth more than being buddies with the people he’s writing about.

And James McMurtry is even better.  Because he’s working in the hot medium known as music, he’s singing from his head and heart, and we get it.

If we see it.

But only 157 people have watched this video so far.

You can be number 158.

_______________________________

The billionaires get to pay less tax
The working poor get to fall through the cracks

Seven years later and it’s just as accurate.

Listened to Ashlee Simpson’s "Pieces Of Me" recently?  That went to number 1 on August 28, 2004, around the same time McMurtry released "We Can’t Make It Here".

And that’s how it is
That’s what we got
If the President wants to admit it or not
You can read it in the paper
Read it on the wall
Hear it on the wind
If you’re listening at all
Get out of that limo
Look us in the eye
Call us on the cell phone
Tell us all why

In Dayton, Ohio
Or Portland, Maine
Or a cotton gin out on the great high plains
That’s done closed down along with the school
And the hospital and the swimming pool
Dust devils dance in the noonday heat
There’s rats in the alley
And trash in the street
Gang graffiti on a boxcar door
We can’t make it here anymore