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Armed with his trusty acoustic guitar, Tom Morello led a crowd-turned-chorus at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in New York City last night for the 2012 Food Sovereignty Prize hosted by WhyHunger. The Nightwatchman was the musical accompaniment for an event celebrating the work of four activist groups across the globe fighting for policy that ends hunger and poverty. Woody Guthrie’s radical folk anthem “This Land Is Your Land” was a fitting set list pick.

“I’m a big supporter of what [WhyHunger] do principally because hunger is violence,” Morello told Rolling Stone before the ceremony. “Hunger is terror. And hunger, in a world where there is plenty, is a crime.”

Morello linked with WhyHunger rather coincidentally: For years he has directed audience members at Rage Against the Machine, Audioslave and Nightwatchman shows to the same network of food banks as Bruce Springsteen, who happened to start WhyHunger’s Artists Against Hunger and Poverty program. Morello says he grew acquainted over the years with longtime radio DJ Bill Ayres, who co-founded WhyHunger with folk legend Harry Chapin, and that the group “helped me with some friends who were in a personal situation.”

Read more at Rolling Stone.

“What’s past is past, but the future is unwritten,” Tom Morello declared last night at the Nokia Theater in Los Angeles, opening a benefit concert to help defeat Proposition 32, a California ballot measure that opponents say will strip the ability of unions to support candidates and influence elections across the state.

As a presidential debate unfolded a thousand miles away in Denver, Morello and headliners Crosby, Stills and Nash performed for a largely union audience to battle another local issue with national implications, not unlike last year’s Wisconsin law that curtailed collective bargaining for public employees. Morello appeared at protests there as well, as he did at various Occupy protests across the country.

During Morello’s half-hour set Wednesday as the Nightwatchman, CS&N joined him for a spirited reading of the uncensored version of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” which includes the questioning, rarely sung line, “As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking/ Is this land made for you and me?” Morello’s 89-year-old mother, led by the hand to the stage by Graham Nash, sung along with them by the microphone.

Backstage earlier, Morello told Rolling Stone that the California ballot measure “is another of the brushfire wars in this ongoing class warfare assault of the ruling class on working families. Stopping Prop. 32 is a crucial fight to keep dignity and justice in the workplace.”

Read more at Rolling Stone.

The Axis of Justice site crashed because so many people were trying to download We Are The 99% with Tom Morello, Tim McIlrath, Serj Tankian and Occupy Wall Street. Do not to worry you can still download it!

Click HERE for a FREE download of We Are The 99%.

‘I wanted to do a huge riff-rock anthem,’ says Morello

Click to listen to Tom Morello, Tim McIlrath, Serj Tankian and Occupy Wall Street’s ‘We Are the 99 Percent’

Since last fall’s protestor-led occupation of Zuccotti Park, Tom Morello has been an active and vocal supporter of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The guitarist has regularly gigged at rallies under the guise of his workingman alter-ego, the Nightwatchman, and most recently performed at a commemorative gathering in lower Manhattan to mark the one-year anniversary of the movement’s formation.

However, this hasn’t seemed like enough of a contribution to Morello; he tells Rolling Stone that he felt the Occupy canon – largely comprised of “earnest folk songs” – was missing a true rock anthem. “It’s our gift to the movement,” he says of “We Are the 99 Percent,” a fists-against-the-wall riff-riot that Morello penned with his “brothers in arms,” Rise Against singer Tim McIlrath and System of a Down singer Serj Tankian. The track is now available to stream exclusively on RollingStone.com; starting tomorrow, it will be available for free download on Morello and Tankian’s Axis of Justice website.

Read the full article at Rolling Stone.

Veteran activist supergroup Crosby, Stills & Nash will team with muckraking musician Tom Morello for an Oct. 3 concert at the Nokia Theatre in Los Angeles to raise awareness and money to defeat Proposition 32, a campaign-finance measure on the November ballot.

Morello will open for CSN in an evening that will also feature actor Edward James Olmos in rallying opposition to the measure that is opposed by the League of Women Voters, the California Alliance for Retired Americans and a consortium of teachers, firefighters, nurses and other members of organized labor.

“This measure is not the campaign finance reform measure its proponents say it is,” the California League of Women Voters states on its website. “Proposition 32 promises ‘political reform’ but is really designed by special interests to help themselves and harm their opponents. It looks like a campaign finance reform measure but unfairly targets one set of large campaign donors while giving other donors unlimited power. Its ban on payroll deductions for political giving will affect unions but not corporations, and even the restriction it places on contributions to candidates by corporations is full of loophole exemptions. It does not fix the problem of money in politics; Super PACs and independent expenditure committees will continue to spend without limitation.”

In a statement issued Monday, Morello said: “Out-of-state corporations are using Prop. 32 to tilt the playing field even more in their direction and away from real people. This is about oil, tobacco, banking and insurance companies gaining the power necessary to re-write laws to fit their agenda … [of] more tax credits for shipping jobs overseas, weaker consumer protections and relaxing air quality laws.”

Collectively and individually, David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash have more than four decades of political activism behind them.

As lead guitarist for Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave and in his solo work as the Nightwatchman, Morello has been a prominent voice in the music community for social and political change. With System of a Down member Serj Tankian, Morello co-founded Axis for Justice, a nonprofit political activist organization.

The 7 p.m. concert will be preceded by a reception from 5 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.

Read the full article at the LA Times.

Demonstrators returned to Lower Manhattan on Monday to commemorate the day protesters took over Zuccotti Park one year ago and launched the Occupy Wall Street movement, erecting tents, banging drums in solidarity and sustaining a presence in the heart of New York’s Financial District until their forcible eviction in November. Spread across “three days of education, celebration, resistance” over the weekend, the anniversary celebration featured a Sunday afternoon concert in Foley Square with performances by Tom Morello and other musicians, including Das Racist member Kool A.D., Dead Kennedys’ Jello Biafra and the rap trio Rebel Diaz.

Morello’s half-hour set as the Nightwatchman with the Freedom Fighter Orchestra included a cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “The Ghost of Tom Joad” and an instrumental run-through of Rage Against the Machine’s “Sleep Now in the Fire. The concert energized a relatively subdued crowd of a few hundred outside the U.S. Court House, some holding signs with messages like “Still Here” while others shared a joint in the park.

Read the full article at Rolling Stone.