IN MY MAIL BOX- Bonnie Raitt & friends Energy Bill Event

7:30pm… Energy Bill Campaign w/ Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne & Graham Nash…

As a political activist, Raitt has embraced a wide range of leftwing causes. In 1979 she co-founded the anti-nuclear power group M.U.S.E. (Musicians United for Safe Energy) with Graham Nash and Jackson Browne. At Browne’s urging, she performed in places like Tucson, Arizona to support the Sanctuary Movement through which local law-enforcement and other government agencies refused to cooperate with federal efforts to apprehend illegal aliens. Also active in environmental causes, she is a longtime supporter of the Rainforest Action Network.

Raitt was a signatory to a July 28, 2000 political advertisement in the New York Times calling for an immediate end to the economic sanctions against Iraq, charging that the United States was responsible for "killing … over one million Iraqis, mostly children under five." Fellow signers included Rosie O'Donnell, Thomas Gumbleton, Pete Seeger, Daniel Berrigan, Philip Berrigan, James Lawson, Ed Asner, Mike Farrell, Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Martin Sheen, Ramsey Clark, Howard Zinn, and Noam Chomsky.

Raitt and a former producer for the Rolling Stones in 1996 were, according to one report, putting together an album “with high-profile rockers pounding out rhythms to back Chomsky’s lyrics.”

Raitt supported the Soviet-backed, Cuban-backed Sandinista dictatorship in Nicaragua during the 1980s. She performed at a concert to raise funds for the Christic Institute, which also supported the Sandinistas and spread blood libels against the U.S. military in Latin America.

In March 1999 Raitt was in Havana, Cuba to play at the Karl Marx Theatre along with a few other American musicians, including Peter Buck of R.E.M., another Vote for Change band. In Havana, Raitt met with and embraced Fidel Castro. On stage, she sang a new song she had composed in Castro’s honor titled “Cuba Is Way Too Cool!” Among its lyrics: “It’s just a happy little island!” and “Big bad wolf [a reference to the United States] you look the fool!”

While Raitt was in Havana, so was journalist David Corn, now Washington correspondent for The Nation. Corn witnessed Raitt telling Cuban journalists that it was “good to be here while Cuba is still not so under the influence of the West.”
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