[2005]
Lyrics and music by Ethan Miller and Kate Boverman
Album: Songs of Hope and Resistance

Dedicated to community gardeners everywhere, cultivating hope and resistance, re-claiming the power of communities and Earth to grow good food together!

[2005]
Lyrics and music by Ethan Miller

[2005]
Lyrics and Music by Ethan Miller
Album: If All The Land Would Rise

“Derrière chaque grande fortune il y a un grand crime” ~ Honoré de Balzac.
“Behind every great fortune, there is a crime”

[2002]
Lyrics & Music by Kate Boverman and Ethan Miller
Album: In Times of War

[2002]
Lyrics & Music by Ethan Miller and Kate Boverman
Album: In Times of War

"We wrote this song in first days of Afghanistan war.."

[2002]
Lyrics and Music by Ethan Miller
Album: In Times of War

During World War II, the Maine Department of Labor (D.O.L.) created the Bonded Labor Program to address labor shortages in the north woods. The program allows companies to bring in workers from outside of the US without the usual hassle of visas and green cards. The law states that the program must be discontinued if it is proven to have and adverse effect on Maine workers. Until 1998, no study was ever done (and even that one was done by corporate puppets). Meanwhile, the J.D. Irving Company, based in New Brunswick, Canada, has been using the Bonded Labor Program and emerging free trade laws to import cheap Canadian labor into the Maine woods. Since the early 1970's, Maine workers have found it harder and harder to sustain themselves in the face of Irving's (and other such company's) exploitative, cut-throat business practices.... (continuer)

[2002]
Lyrics and Music by Ethan Miller
Album: In Times of War

[2005]
Lyrics & Music by Ethan Miller and Kate Boverman
Album: If All The Land Would Rise

A song of asking: for strength, for hope, for compassion, for solidarity

"To sustain our struggles, we need nourishment not only from each other, but from the larger powers of creation of which we are a part. These are not the divine forces invented by the theologies of empires, those forces that are said to rule over us and demand our subordination and servitude. Rather, these are the divine powers of earthly creation in which we collectively participate, but which always exceed us with their mystery and force. These are the sources of power that give birth to life, dignity, joy, freedom and autonomy-with-solidarity, the fountains of hope. Whether in our weakness, our humble strength or our awe, we must sometimes fall to the earth and ask for this nourishment. It is not a giving-up of our own... (continuer)

[2006]
Album: Northern Spy (live)
(with Seth Yentis on Cello)
Lyrics and Music by Ethan Miller, except the finale: a part of a Joseph Bovshover's poem “Revolution” (also set to music by Dick Gaughan in 1982)

[2003]
Lyrics & Music by Ethan Miller
Album: Rainy Day Record

This song was written at the beginning of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, as a lament for the onset of yet another cycle of suffering. It is about the "other" history of America, and of empires and nation-states in general – the painful history that lies beneath the romantic stories about freedom and liberty, patriotism, and "how noble it is to die for one’s country." The true heroes of history are those who fought not for God, Glory or Nation, but for peace, justice, and the dignity of all.

[2005]
Album: If All The Land Would Rise
Lyrics and Music by Ethan Miller

"Jesus was a pacifist freedom fighter and a social revolutionary, NOT a conservative fundamentalist war-monger!"
This song is dedicated to the late Maine activist and rabble-rouser Peter Holmes, from whom the chorus-line comes. Peter came to a rally after the U.S. attack on Afghanistan with a sign that read, "Hey Bush: Wait ‘till Jesus gets his hands on you!"

It is addressed to all of those who had bad Sunday school teachers and somehow came to believe that wars, empires, armies, governments, banks, corporations, and “free trade” agreements might all be looked upon approvingly by the same great prophet who said: "Listen: it is harder for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God than it is for a camel to walk through the eye of a needle."

[2005]
Album: If All The Land Would Rise
Lyrics and Music by Ethan Miller

A song against the oppressive policies and actions of the eight capitalist superpowers of the world, and a call to resist the power of nation states with the power of grassroots self-organization and mutual aid!

[1880s]
Parole e musica di Thomas Phillips Thompson (1843-1933), inglese di nascita ma trapiantato in Canada, giornalista, militante del Knights of Labor e poi del Partito socialista. Autore del volumetto di canzoni “The labor reform songster”, pubblicato nel 1892 sul “Journal of the Knights of Labor”, in cui si trova anche questa canzone.

[2005]
Album: If All The Land Would Rise
Lyrics by Phillips Thompson (1892); Music by Ethan Miller

The anthracite coal of Pennsylvania, like all such precious industrial fuels, was extracted and refined by people working endless hours in dangerous conditions for little pay. The excessive costs of company housing and company store provisions forced mining families into an endless cycle of debt-ridden enslavement to the mine owners. In the mid to late 1800’s, the Knights of Labor organized miners to challenge these conditions. The Pinkerton Detective... (continuer)

[2005]
Lyrics and music by Ethan Miller
Album: Riot Folk live in PDX

In economics, the "invisible hand", also known as the invisible hand of the market, is the term economists use to describe the self-regulating nature of the marketplace. The invisible hand is a metaphor first coined by the economist Adam Smith in "The Theory of Moral Sentiments". For Smith the invisible hand was created by the conjunction of the forces of self-interest, competition, and supply and demand, which he noted as being capable of allocating resources in society. This is the founding justification for the laissez-faire economic philosophy.
« The old story says we have to depend on big corporations. The new story tells us we can earn a livelihood, gain freedom, and build community through cooperation.
Call it "globalization", or the "free market", or "capitalism". Whatever its name, people across the United... (continuer)

[2005]
Lyrics and music by Ethan Miller
Album: If All The Land Would Rise

It is all-too-easy for white folks to see racism as simply a white-supremacist attitude (that we, of course, don’t have) or a set of overtly discriminatory actions (that we, of course, don’t do). What more difficult to see—and to acknowledge—is the racism that is built into the very structure of our "whiteness": racism as a historically-constructed system of power which benefits some people (those marked as "white") at the expense of others (those marked as "black", “non-white", or simply "other”).
Those of us marked as “white,” no matter how well-intentioned our anti-racist attitude, benefit in various ways (differently, of course, depending on gender, sexuality, age, class, and ethnicity) from "white skin privilege". By our very birth into a racist system, we exercise this privilege. And we internalize this privilege,... (continuer)

[2005]
Lyrics and music by Ethan Miller
Album: If All the Land Would Rise

From "Truthout" to Congress: Stop Funding Endless War
Wednesday 07 October 2009
by TruthOut | Staff Editorial


On the war's eighth anniversary, we urge our president, our Congress and our country to cut the military purse strings and reject an escalation of violence in Afghanistan.
Yesterday, the Senate passed $128 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This appropriation could fuel a "surge" in deployment of US troops to Afghanistan; Gen. Stanley McChrystal recommends an increase of up to 40,000 soldiers.
If the American people had voted on this latest defence spending bill, they might well have rejected the funding. Most polls find that a definitive majority of Americans oppose an escalation of combat troops in Afghanistan. A recent McClatchy survey found that only 35 percent favored sending more... (continuer)

[2005]
Album: If All The Land Would Rise
Songwriters: Ethan Miller and Kate Boverman

The U.S. recruits its soldiers through systematic blackmail: By refusing to provide access to affordable higher education for all citizens, the government is able to use education as a “carrot-on-a-stick,” forcing young people from low-income backgrounds into military service as their only hope of accessing educational opportunities beyond high school. “Volunteer army”? Not quite.

This song dedicated to all of the families who keep the home fires burning, awaiting the safe return of their loved ones from the wars of the empire-builders.

[2005]
Album: If All The Land Would Rise
Songwriter: Ethan Miller

We cannot give in to the dark lullabies of fear, complacency and silence that are emanating from the halls of power. We must turn toward the sources of our outrage and fight for all its worth: struggle, create, dream, defend, overcome, undermine, imagine, build, cultivate, unearth, dismantle-working in all of the many creative and courageous ways that each of us can discover and enact. Ours is a struggle of hope against despair, memory against forgetting, life and livelihood against exploitation and greed, autonomy against coercion and force, solidarity against isolation and fear. Keep on loving, and keep on fighting!