Ain’t In It For My Health, a doc about Levon Helm that was originally released in 2010, is now in wider release and opens in New York on April 19. We hope it comes to Philly soon because we’ll be among first in line at the box office.

NPR:

What shape there is to Hatley’s plain, rich portrait of Helm comes from its subject’s mixed feelings about the 2008 Grammys, which saw Dirt Farmer nominated for best traditional folk album and The Band awarded a lifetime achievement award. Helm dubs the latter honor “a g - - damn sales gimmick,” and his frustration — compounded by the honor’s arrival after the deaths of bandmates Rick Danko and Richard Manuel — suggests a lifetime spent trying to reconcile the joy he takes in making music with the frustrations of the industry built around the selling of it.

The clip above (via Rolling Stone) of Helm singing Randy Newman’s “Kingfish” is from the film.

Here is an interview with Helm from 2007. He died in 2012.

And for good measure, a 2004 interview with Newman

I think I’d just like to make the point that we tend to think of income inequality in this country as though it were a force of nature, that people really don’t have any control over. And certainly there are some underlying structural trends - the decline of unions, the increase of globalization and global trade - that are driving inequality to a certain degree.

But on top of that, and pushed by the Republican party, you have a tax policy that is favoring people who are getting more and more wealthy as a result of these structural trends and rewarding them with tax cuts that are allowing them to get richer still. And that is a new story in America and it’s not the one that we like to tell ourselves.

— Tim Dickinson: The Tax Policies That Increased Economic Inequality : NPR (via k8inorbit)

If you don’t like the nature of what government does — you don’t like that it funds a social safety net, you don’t like Medicare, you don’t like Social Security — it’s actually a good strategy to leave the government in a perilous fiscal situation, because energies will be directed into cutting spending and paring back these programs.

— Tim Dickinson on the neoconservative ‘starve the beast’ strategy that was designed to create a fiscal problem by cutting taxes.  [full interview here]

Almost without exception, every proposal put forth by GOP lawmakers and presidential candidates is intended to preserve or expand tax privileges for the wealthiest Americans. Most of their plans, which are presented as commonsense measures that will aid all Americans, would actually result in higher taxes for middle-class taxpayers and the poor.

— Rolling Stone’s political correspondent Tim Dickinson explains how the tax policies pursued by the Republican Party have changed in the past 14 years — and says those changes have led to greater economic inequality in our country.

Today we’re going to talk about how the wealthiest Americans have benefited from certain tax policies over the past 15 years — and how those tax policies have led to greater economic inequality in our country. 

rollingstone:

We live in a country where a bus driver making $26,000 a year is taxed five percentage points more than any of the nation’s top 400 wealthiest Americans.

How did this happen? In a scathing story in the new issue of Rolling Stone, Tim Dickinson explores how the Republican Party became “the Party of the One Percent - the Party of the Rich.”

- Parry Ernsberger

Tomorrow: Tim Dickinson from Rolling Stone looks back at why Presidents Reagan and George HW Bush raised taxes, how tax cuts became a focus of Republican policy and what their impact has been.