Who Will The People? Lyrics

The CIA is pushing crack in the ghettoes of LA While the food crops in Colombia get sprayed by the DEA The FBI is reading your email with something called the carnivore And the rich are getting richer while the poor are staying poor They're launching nuclear-powered ships up into space One little accident could wipe out half the human race And they're putting radioactive waste into your silverware Or maybe your toaster or perhaps your wheelchair The Air Force is bombing people in Iraq every other day They don't like the government so the children have to pay The ozone hole is spreading and the sheep are going blind While the US spends more on arms than the rest of the world combined Journalists are getting fired from San Jose to Atlanta When they write about reality, not a fluff piece for Fanta A death threat every week and sometimes life is short When the truth is too dangerous for someone to report (Chorus) Who will tell the people that free speech is a ruse The corporations run the country and then they make the news Is it media or mind control, heroic victories or crimes Who will tell the people that we're living in these times The cancer rates are skyrocketing though people are smoking less If you live near a nuke your life is bound to be a mess Clean water's almost gone all over the earth And what's left they want to privatize and see how much it's worth Chevron is gunning down the students of Nigeria Turning the land to waste while the babies die of diptheria And the weather's getting hotter, the world's forests are on fire Pretty soon Brazil will be one giant funeral pyre (Chorus) One in three adult Americans cannot read or write And their children go to bed hungry every night And two million US citizens are rotting behind bars And while they're there they're working hard building parts for cars And the Army's running torture schools to keep the earth under control And they're relocating Navajos so they can mine some extra coal Our taxes pay McDonald's to sell tumors in Shanghai While a hundred thousand poisoned vets are just about to die (Chorus) And the people are resisting wherever you may go And this is the single biggest fact they don't want you to know From New Delhi to New Mexico there are battles going on And the darkest hour is just before the dawn And in Berkeley and New York they're raiding radio stations Trying to turn the voice of the people into the voice of the corporations Will we seize the airwaves, wipe the sweat off of our brow Stand and face the beast and shout, "Democracy Now!" (Chorus)