There is a line in this song that has stuck in my mind for years, and I always realized that, it being an old English ballad, it was once literally true once as far as health care goes, but not anymore. The line goes “if living were a thing that money could buy, you know the rich would live and the poor would die.” I think about women who die in this country of breast cancer because they don’t have health insurance, and heart disease (and my friend Al who died because he couldn’t afford the procedure to fix his heart) and the thousands of other instances where money can indeed buy life.

I think about the death penalty and how money almost always can buy life, I think about... Well, you get the idea, there are so many examples of how a person’s lack of money can kill him or her. Many of our lefty blogger friends demonstrated that lack of health care kills when they wrote about what happened to Jim Cappozolla, the the owner of the Rittenhouse Review and many more examples of posts detailing what we in the left blogosphere lost when Jim died.

Jim’s death could have been prevented with adequate health care, but the recent untimely death of Jon Swift, one of the best “conservative” writers on the net, Jon Swift is an example of one that MAY have been preventable. Maybe not, although a good inexpensive screening can often find a latent aneurysm and the price for the screening is quite inexpensive. My wife and I had a screening for aneurysms done a year or so ago and the price was less than $200. Maybe if Jon Swift (aka Al Wiesel) had been screened for an aneurysm he would still be with us today. We will never know, I guess. But I’m sad to report that yes, Virginia, living is a thing that money can buy and Santa can’t save you from the Republicans who would rather see you die than perhaps be the person who finds a cure for cancer, who invents the solution to the energy problem, or who solves some other problem that has plagued humanity for decades.

Juan Cole reminds us that we are in last place in all the industrialized countries when it comes to preventing deaths that are preventable. How criminal is that? Maybe we should start calling those who are stopping health care reform criminals and murderers, because they are murdering those without health care, and violate the Fifth (or Sixth if you are Catholic or Lutheran) commandment which admonishes us all that we shall not kill. No legislators are excluded. No, not one. Particularly those legislators who are on the record as having stated that we must live by the Ten Commandments. God has a special place in hell reserved for these hypocrites when their time comes.

The chances of such solutions to the problems of humanity happening in this country without health care for all is thus substantially diminished. Some other nation will reap the benefits of that technological breakthrough if our health care system kills the one person here who could have solved that problem or some other problem of equal importance dies because our legislators stopped or held up health care for all the children of God that live in this country.

Thus this song is wrong in one important line. Remember that.

Continuing my Hard-Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People Series, this time I’ll put up two songs written by a couple of Woody’s Fellow Travelers and deviate from the original script that I set up which was to take only songs from the book by the same name as this series. Woody never belonged to the official version of the Fellow Travelers and the only things he had in common with what those words used to mean was that he was a fellow speaking up for other fellows and he traveled around a great deal. But he never joined any organization such as an “official fellow traveler” might have done. Let me add another fine point here and that is to note that the three men entertaining on these videos, Grant Rogers, Pete Seeger and Jim Garland were all blacklisted in one sort of another, either during the McCarthy era or as Union men. Kind of like what the Republicans have done or are trying to do to a lot of people, including what they are doing to some fine lawyers, the so called by Fox News “Gitmo Nine” lawyers.

But getting away from the past and back to the present, let’s not forget that our current situation with job losses started and accelerated under Bush and is just now starting to level off. It took President Obama a year but there are still a lot of unemployed people out there right now. So these songs are for all of those folks who don’t have a job or have a job that doesn’t allow them to live up to their full potential.

In addition, I’ve added a category for the songs posted in this series and will be going back and adding all the songs I’ve put up in this series so you can just click on the topic in the bottom left hand corner of these posts soon and see a list of all the songs in the series. Both of these selections come from a series that Pete Seeger had on Public Television called Rainbow Question. You can see all these YouTube entries for Pete’s old musical television show by clicking this link .

Howard Zinn Comments. If you haven’t read A People’s History of the United States by Zinn, get online or go out now and buy a copy.

Is this a great country or what......

I've heard that last sentence so many times by so many deluded folks that I had to not end it with a period.

Who would have thought Woody might have been the one who influenced Howard to write that book.

History is still speaking.

Thanks to Common Dreams and Sara Robinson who reminds us about fascism and how a country arrives there and where we are on that road and what to do about it :

We’ve arrived. We are now parked on the exact spot where our best experts tell us full-blown fascism is born. Every day that the conservatives in Congress, the right-wing talking heads, and their noisy minions are allowed to hold up our ability to govern the country is another day we’re slowly creeping across the final line beyond which, history tells us, no country has ever been able to return.

Woody reminds of of an earlier time. And goads us into moving in the direction of light and sunshine. But will we before it’s too late?

Ma, that’s not where we want to go.

Much more interesting than the song is that this film footage, as the person who put this item up reports, is from the Bonus Riots of 1932, the San Francisco General Strike 1934, the Republic Steel Strike 1937, the General Motors Labor Strike 1937, etc. Perhaps some of our readers can identify the etc. he mentions.

It does appear Americans from an earlier generation were willing to protest under extremely dangerous conditions that we don’t see in American today, at least on the news. Although those who were at the New York and the Chicago Republican conventions might find these scenes fascinating. The new trick is to round up all the protesters and place them in “This land is Your Land, but not an inch more” “Free Speech Zones”. I don’t advocate violence, but this is historical footage and shows just how brutal the American Government has been in the past We need Franklin Roosevelt now more than ever, although it might be noted that some of this footage occurred during his term. Chuck, you would have been there I’m sure.

James Fallows’s recent article in The Atlantic is, at the very least, thought-provoking. So much so that I subscribed. I find his insinuation that much of our discontent is intentionally manufactured eye- and mind-opening. I was getting Harper’s Magazine but now believe that I am going findThe Atlantic indispensable.

Martha, I haven’t yet subscribed to the &ldquoThe Nation”. Convince me. Done.

Thanks to this blog mainly, but also some others, I woke from my lifelong slumber a few short years ago and am slowly but surely gaining some important knowledge about the true history of America. As well as much more. And in the process found a wonderful lifetime partner.

My journey to obtain the knowledge that the man on the mythical mountaintop has is going to take more time, perhaps several more lifetimes, despite my holiness according to knowledgeable Indian doctors. [Did I just come out of the ADHD closet?] I hope you will join me in the quest for enlightenment. It might not bring satisfaction nor peace within your soul or innermost being, or whatever you care to call it, but the quest for enlightenment may light a fire within you that will never grow dim.