As a social critic, former
Dead Kennedys' singer
Jello Biafra has distinguished himself as an outraged citizen and humanitarian by creatively sticking it to the Man with his wealth of underreported facts and his dark, biting humor. On his fifth spoken word CD,
If Evolution Is Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Evolve, he discusses how the greedy wage war on the have-nots by forcing workers to compete for lower and lower wages and by gutting the welfare system, while Fortune 500 fat cats go about robbing the world blind. He talks about how the media presents the political arena as left vs. right when it is more often top vs. bottom. He criticizes the prison industrial complex, where in California a guard makes almost twice as much as a teacher, and rails on former president Clinton, whose drug war budget was triple that of Reagan's. Also, he attacks Congress, who is content to privatize everything and let Wall Street run the country. He goes on to give numerous examples of effective civil disobedience from protestors chaining themselves to equipment meant to build a dam in Tasmania until they gave up building it, to the Zapatistas and the groundswell of rebellion they've aroused in Mexico.
Biafra's words are inspiring and he covers a lot of ground on this three-CD set. He spends a lot of time on his number one topic, censorship, but the information here is well-rounded and often crucial. ~ Adam Bregman