“A Ring Around the Atlantic” MMS Review

A ring around the AtlanticMetro Music Scene: By turns a world music album, field recording, and power pop showcase, A Ring Around the Atlantic is thoughtfully written and orchestrated and features the standout production value of The Magpie Cage’s J. Robbins. Maybarduk’s voice, breathy and soft, reminds me of Hey Marseilles’ Matt Bishop and Michael Benjamin Lerner of Telekinesis. His songwriting is thought-provoking without being pedantic, helped by the album’s relentlessly catchy hooks and strong backing musicians.

Unprecedented campaign launched against pharma company | The Guardian

By Sarah Boseley as originally published in The Guardian
Sarah BoseleyThe multinational drug company Abbott is being targeted by health campaigners in a number of countries in a concerted campaign to try to break its monopoly on a valuable AIDS drug called Kaletra. …

Public Citizen in the USA is leading the charge, but campaigners in Brazil, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Colombia, Thailand, the Netherlands and elsewhere are all taking action – mostly by challenging Abbott’s monopoly in their own legal systems. One company is being challenged, over one drug, but Public Citizen believes the orchestrated attack has greater significance —>Continue reading

Campaigning For Change | Daily Press

W&M Junior Spurs Students Toward Political Activism

WILLIAMSBURG — He led a protest of Henry Kissinger as the new chancellor at the College of William and Mary.
He campaigned for living wages for hourly employees.
He dressed as a logger and carried a cardboard chain saw to protest Staples in Williamsburg.
And he took a group of William and Mary students to Wake Forest University in North Carolina last year to demonstrate against the format of the presidential debates.
All in the past school year. Continue reading

Peter Maybarduk ’02 and his amazing dueling careers | W&M Alumni Association

Maintaining a full-time position as an international public interest lawyer fighting to make medicines available to less-developed nations seems like a demanding enough job, but Peter Maybarduk ’02 juggles his other career with circus-like skills as an accomplished indie music artist. Not only does he enjoy successful careers in both fields, but he manages to give each the same dedication and passion that one man would find difficulty devoting to a single vocation. Continue reading

Daily Cal: Student Artist’s Debut Tackles Transience

By Daniel Karlin, Contributing Writer. Monday, April 9, 2007

Peter MaybardukLONELY PLANET. Peter Maybarduk promotes social change both as a student at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Law School and as a singer-songwriter. He addresses the loneliness of a transient society in his debut solo album: http://archive.dailycal.org/article.php?id=24086

The first sound we hear on Cal student Peter Maybarduk’s debut album is a familiar one: a high pitched mechanical whine, and a voice—almost human but not quite—calling out “8-car Richmond train. Now boarding. Platform 1.”

Then comes a soft voice saying, “Hello. Hello. Hello.” It’s someone checking the mic, greeting people he’s never met—reaching out to anyone, searching for anybody out there, inviting them to join him.

The sounds of the incoming BART train blend with a synthesizer, an acoustic guitar kicks in as the doors open, and the voice calls out to us: “Come inside, I’ve a story to tell.” The doors close and we’re off—on a journey with Peter Maybarduk, on his debut solo album Passengers.

“I wanted to tell a story with these songs,” Maybarduk said. “It could be one person traveling through the Bay Area and how they’re experiencing everything passing by.” On Passengers, the waves of the marina, yells of children’s playgrounds and tolling of the Campanile are interspersed between the Elliot Smith-style songs, carrying us on a journey right by Maybarduk’s side.

In fact, traveling is a recurring theme iPeter Maybardukn Maybarduk’s life. Born to an American diplomat living in Mexico City, Maybarduk has lived in Nicaragua, Sierra Leone, Cuba and Venezuela. In the United States, he’s lived in Washington, D.C., attended a reform school in New England and the College of William & Mary, all before coming to UC Berkeley’s Boalt Law School. Currently in his final year at Boalt, Maybarduk is working as a law fellow in D.C. while also playing venues along the East Coast.

With law school and a music career going on simultaneously, the question arises: How do the two come together?

Rather than occupying wholly separate spheres, Maybarduk said he felt music and law can accomplish “different but mutually helpful things. They’re really just two courses, two occupations, two passions towards making change.”

And Maybarduk is devoted to change. His current fellowship is with Essential Action, an NGO dedicated to increasing accessibility of essential medicines in developing countries. After graduation, he said he plans to continue in the legal field, striving for progress in public health, while also continuing with his music to address social ills.

In that way, his two endeavors go hand in hand. “We can change the regulations of institutional structures, and we can change the mind of the person sitting right next to us,” Maybarduk said.

With this debut album, he takes on a social isGreen Corner Mansue with a deep personal significance.

“I wanted Passengers to be more than a collection of songs,” Maybarduk said. By channeling his experiences and emotions from his journeys, the album conveys a sharp sense of the loneliness of travel. “We’re quite transient as a society … and it’s a social ill, this transience,” Maybarduk said. The separation between all of us in society shines through as a central theme.

“We’re not the only ones/Who feel alone,” he sings on opening track “Passengers.” “Yet we hide in the masquerade/We hide in the rivers of stone./ And we Peter Maybarduk with Last Clear Chance @ 924 Gilman Street 2006ride just like passengers/ Damned to never go home.”

From his time in the local indie rock band Last Clear Chance, to his current phase as a singer-songwriter, Maybarduk’s music has always been an instrument dedicated to social change. On Passengers, his lyrics, strumming guitar and voice invoke us to join him, calling us to journey with him to somewhere new.

Flat Hat: Protester’s Trip Ends in Arrest (2001)

Protester’s trip ends in arrest
By Darren Reidy

(April 21, 2000, The Flat Hat, student paper of the College of William & Mary, page 1, original available at: https://digitalarchive.wm.edu/)

The crowd erupted when sophomore Peter Maybarduk was released in front of the D.C. courthouse at 3:30 Monday morning after 13 hours in custody. Protesters gave him food and took him back into their masses, waiting for other activists to emerge from the doors. Their numbers had decreased but their zeal had not as the International Monetary Fund protesters’ weekend siege on the city came to a close.

Maybarduk, a member of Students for Environmental and Economic Justice and the
president of the Student Environmental Action Coalition, was voluntarily arrested last weekend in what has been called the “Mobilization for Global Justice.” Police opened a barricade for Maybarduk and his fellow protesters who understood they would be taken into custody as soon as they crossed the line.

“I’ve spent a lot of time in affected countries … At the time, it seemed the most powerful medium [of protest],” Maybarduk said in defense of his act of civil disobedience.

Maybarduk was one of 30 College students who attended the protest. Most came with
their respective interest groups, which included SEEJ, SEAC, the Tidewater Labor Support
Committee and Roots and Shoots. Although the groups differ, their major objectives of
promoting environmental and economic justice are similar.

The IMF protest was an important opportunity for the group, senior Kristina Bayman said.
In fact, Bayman, with the help of sociology professor Jennifer Bickham-Mendez, cofounded
SEEJ this semester with this event in mind.

“Our goal is to draw attention to issues and question institutions,” Bayman said. “The
IMF is run by the G-7 [seven richest nations], and wealth generally returns to these governments and the corporate elite.”

Other participants echoed the same frustration at the increasing debt impoverished countries suffer from when they borrow from the IMF and World Bank.

“There is no need for them [IMF and World Bank],” Maybarduk said. “They are
working backwards in alleviating poverty.”

James Spady, a graduate student and codirector of the Tidewater Labor Support
Committee, stresses the effects of IMF’s policies on American jobs.

“Globalization causes the exportation of jobs and sweatshop conditions in [less-developed countries],” Spadey said.

Spadey explained that the IMF includes stipulations with its loans, including a free trade
clause. In order to increase profit, corporations build factories within the boundaries
of these free-trade zones. He added that they hire local workers at low wages at the expense of American jobs.

Maybarduk, Bayman and Spadey all felt the media misrepresented the protest by focusing on acts of violence, rather than the views that the protesters were trying to project.
“It’s inaccurate reporting,” Maybarduk said. “I didn’t see a single aggressive act.”
Beyham and Spadey both called it peaceful and stressed the spirit of the protesters.
In fact, Beyham said that there was “good rapport between police and protesters.”
After his long weekend, which lasted from Thursday to Tuesday, Maybarduk summed up
the goal of the protest.

“The United States is the center for these organizations [IMF and World Bank],” he said. “If it can be shown they don’t have U.S. U.S. support, then they are invalid.”