Today, we are ultra-psyched to debut the new tune by Danbert Nobacon, one of the founding members of Chumbawamba! his new album is out Wednesday!
You all know Danbert- he has been an anarcho-punk icon for years- Chumba had like 117 songs about corporate greed (mostly set to dance beats), Chumba supported the coal miners and fought back against Thatcher, during the massive 1984-5 strike, he dumped water on the head of the deputy Prime minister at an awards ceremony, and he is a nice guy. Well, his brand new, massive, double LP, Kochtopus's Garden—Now that's What I Call Capitalism—The Musical, might be his punkest record yet.
The record is set in the future and is about two robots running around an America, now controlled by “Dark Money Anon,” as they question the basic flawed premises and inherent contradictions of everyday capitalism that is eating the planet. It is also kind of funny. The new single, which is the album's title track, is heavy duty…
Danbert has a lot to say on the tune:"Long time, multi-billionaire Charles ‘dark money’ Koch, the 23rd richest man in the world is neither the first nor the last, in a long line of ‘dirty oil,’ ‘garbage crude,’ robber baron industrial extractivists who have benefitted from the pillage of the planet to the detriment of everyone else. Nor is he the only one who, by hook, or by hydrocarbon crook, to use a relatively tiny part of his exorbitant wealth, to concoct a version of American free market fundamentalism to justify and to protect the business privilege of the industrial scale dumping of greenhouse gases (and a whole host of other toxins) into the atmosphere, free of charge.
He is, however, the most adept at organizing his fellow centi-millionaires and billionaires, to join him in financing such ideologically toxic free malarketry. He is the Wichita dark wizard of dark money. And in so doing, whilst magnifying its reach many times over, he has added layers of libertarian economic extremism, embedding it as the dominant invasive species of narrative, that has become the cancer at the heart of the American condition. The tok-space has dubbed this process the ‘millions-into-billions’ koch-math. Not least, by hosting twice annual war-chest-filling-donor-summits, Koch has been able to redirect the ‘chump change,’ donations of his rich pals—chump change to them being a few hundred thousand dollars, or even a million or two, each—into an unprecedentedly weaponized and aggressive defense of business privilege. And in return, the donors can expect an ongoing war of attrition against taxes on the rich, against costly regulations on business, and against any money being spent by government to help ordinary Americans, generating savings and perks for them that can be measured in the billions of dollars.
The Cato Institute think-tank, one of many, co-founded and heavily sponsored down the years by Charles Koch, hosted what has since been recognized as the first climate denial conference back in 1991. Around this same time, and predating the rhetoric and town hall busting methods of the Tea Party by almost two decades, by deploying groups like Citizens for a Sound Economy, to agitate against taxes and government spending, Koch evolved what Lee Fang called “the cutthroat tactics … anything-goes approach,” that would infect the Republican party and voter base alike. Meanwhile, by pioneering newly vicious attack ads targeted at wavering Republicans and/or primarying them from the right, Koch would begin to exert a grip on the Republican party and seed the thru lines to the Trump MAGA extremism which dominates the GOP today. And when necessary the same tactics would be deployed against corporate Democrats. Not least, Koch has overseen the defeat of attempts by Clinton-Gore to tax carbon, and Obama-Biden to ‘cap and trade’ carbon, whilst flipping the entire Republican Party into the party of climate deniers.
Like a corporate Jekyll and Hyde, on the one invisible hand, Koch has outwardly projected a libertarian belief in the unadulterated free market as the natural and best mechanism for a healthy and free society. On the other invisible hand, the really invisible one, he has deployed his vast wherewithal to working away in the dark, to manipulate the market every which way and mold it to best serve the bottom line of Koch Industries, the well-being of everyone else, and the planet itself, be damned."
Danbert's new album is out on Wednesday. It's a masterpiece. You'll be able to pick it up here and you can check out the new single below, right now!