Live with Steve Earle.

My art is on Instagram @klonskyart

It’s not hard to find typos in my newsletter.

I read through it three times, but plenty get through and I apologize to those who receive the subscriber version through email. That’s where most of the typos show up and they can’t get fixed there, even when I catch them later.

…..

Anne and I don’t go to a lot of indoor entertainment events since Covid.

When we saw that Steve Earle and the Dukes were doing two shows at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music we couldn’t resist. OTSFM has a vaccine requirement, although they only recommend masks in the concert hall.

We got tickets before both shows got sold out and it was great. We kept our masks on.

Steve Earle has been a favorite of mine since I first bought his Copperhead Road LP in 1988.

If you remember the radio show and podcast (Hitting Left with the Klonsky Brothers) my brother Mike and I did before the pandemic, it was always Steve Earle’s Satellite Radio that we played to intro the show.

I can’t say enough about his band, The Dukes. So much talent on a small stage.

As we got near the end of the show, Earle showed why he is today’s working class voice.

He is the living spirit of Woody Guthrie.

He sang It’s About Blood from his 2020 album, Ghosts of West Virginia centers on the Upper Big Branch coal mine explosion that killed twenty-nine men in that state in 2010.

It’s About Blood.

Tell yourself it was an accident
Isolated incident, part of the job
Yeah, well tell that to the families
Kids without daddies, tell it to God
That the wind you hear howlin' through the holler
Or a ghost of a river that crashed?
For every man that died for a coal-covered dollar
Lung full of dust and a heart full of lies

It's about fathers
It's about sons
It's about lovers wakin' up
In the middle of the night, alone
It's about muscle
It's about bone
It's about a river runnin' thicker than water, and
It's about blood

It's about Carl Acord and Jason Atkins, Christopher Bell
Gregory Steven Brock, Kenneth Alan Chapman, Robert E. Clark
Charles Timothy Davis, Corey Davis, Michael Lee Elswick
William L. Griffith, Steven Harrah, Edward Dean Jones
Richard K. Lane, William Roosevelt Lynch, Nicholas Darryl McCroskey
Joe Marcum, Ronald Lee Maynor, James E. Mooney
Adam Keith Morgan, Rex L. Mullins, Joshua S. Napper
Howard D. Payne, Dillard Earl Persinger, Joel R. Price
Duke Scotten, Gary Quarles, Grover Dale Skeens, Benny Willingham, Ricky Workman

It's about blood

…..

I’ve been posting frequently about the impact of inflation and particularly on those of us over 65.

But I found some important date published by the Kaiser Family Foundation which came out before the current pandemic and war-driven inflationary crisis.

Half of all Medicare beneficiaries lived on incomes below $29,650 per person in 2019; one in four had incomes below $17,000 per person.

Half of all Medicare beneficiaries had savings below $73,800 per person in 2019; one fourth had less than $8,500 per person in savings, and 12% had no savings or were in debt.

Half of all Medicare beneficiaries had home equity below $73,350 per person in 2019, and one fourth (27%) had no home equity at all.

In 2019, prior to the coronavirus pandemic and its impact on the economy, the majority of Medicare beneficiaries lived on limited incomes and modest savings, with limited cushion to absorb unanticipated health expenses, and significant disparities by age, gender, and race/ethnicity. Our analysis raises questions about the extent to which Medicare beneficiaries will be able to bear additional, unanticipated costs that are likely to arise from the coronavirus pandemic, given the likely prospect of declining retirement resources.

This was before inflation.

Food costs are up 10% just this month from a year ago.