Rich Men North of Richmond

A tale of woe and the forgotten class of American workers...

(Source: Getty Images)

Bill Bonner, reckoning today from Youghal, Ireland...

I've been sellin' my soul, workin' all day
Overtime hours for bullshit pay
So I can sit out here and waste my life away
Drag back home and drown my troubles away

It's a damn shame what the world's gotten to
For people like me and people like you
Wish I could just wake up and it not be true
But it is, oh, it is

Livin' in the new world
With an old soul
These rich men north of Richmond
Lord knows they all just wanna have total control
Wanna know what you think, wanna know what you do
And they don't think you know, but I know that you do
'Cause your dollar ain't shit and it's taxed to no end
'Cause of rich men north of Richmond

~ Oliver Anthony

First, a news flash: our legendary Doom Index has turned suddenly and decisively down – more so than in 2020. What that means, we don’t know…but we’ll find out. Dan will have more details later this week.

Back to the ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’…

Increasingly Insufferable

Virginia used to be a ‘southern’ state. But today, north of Richmond, is the red, white, and blue of the US federal government…reaching down to Fredericksburg…with the military industrial/spook complex concentrated around the northern suburbs of Washington, DC.

The rich men north of Richmond are a fabulous race of super-achievers. After subduing the South, they fanned out – Nicaragua…Panama…Cuba…the Philippines…France…and they kept going until they had troops all over the world. They built factories to turn out automobiles and tanks. They built big cities – New York, Gary, San Francisco. They made movies, sang songs and got rich.

But in 1913, they set up the Fed…and the IRS. Then, in 1971, they changed the dollar to make it easier for them to get even richer. And over time, they became more and more insufferable.

Why do US soldiers still camp in South Korea, Japan and Germany – not to mention Niger and the Gulf of Guinea, you might ask? Why does the president of the US, on his own say-so, tell us with whom we can trade and with whom we cannot? Why can’t we say what we really think without getting canceled or charged with a ‘hate crime.’ It’s because the rich men north of Richmond ‘just wanna have total control.’

They created the US empire, with its $33 trillion in debt…its 200,000 pages of regulations…its lobbyists, politicians, grifters, scoundrels and hacks…it perennial, losing wars…its vast, clunky bureaucracy…its incompetent experts…its giveaway programs…unbalanced budgets…claptrap theories…and worthless campaigns against drugs, poverty and free speech.  

“Bullsh*t Pay”

For most people, the federal government is a terrible burden, a scam and a shame. But it works well for the people north of Richmond. Just look at the big, new sparkling office buildings along the beltway…and the many new McMansions in McLean or Falls Church.

But away from the centers of power, things are not so sweet. Real wages, south of Richmond, have not increased significantly since 1975, nearly 50 years ago. And today, many…if not most…Americans work for “bullsh*t pay” going further and further into debt. The total amount of credit card debt outstanding bounded over $1 trillion for the first time last week. And the interest rate rose over 20%. How much is left? How do they pay the rent?

The Wall Street Journal reports:

The U.S. has seen a record increase in homeless people this year as the Covid-19 pandemic fades, according to a Wall Street Journal review of data from around the country.

The data so far this year are up roughly 11% from 2022, a sharp jump that would represent by far the biggest recorded increase since the government started tracking comparable numbers in 2007. The next highest increase was a 2.7% jump in 2019, excluding an artificially high increase last year caused by pandemic counting interruptions.

Deaths of Despair

And here’s Joseph Stiglitz describing the grim lives of half the country:  

Families in the bottom 50 percent hardly have the cash reserves to meet an emergency. Newspapers are replete with stories of those for whom the breakdown of a car or an illness starts a downward spiral from which they never recover.     

… U.S. life expectancy, exceptionally low to begin with, is experiencing sustained declines. This in spite of the marvels of medical science, many advances of which occur right here in America and which are made readily available to the rich. Economist Ann Case and 2015 Nobel laureate in economics Angus Deaton describe one of the main causes of rising morbidity—the increase in alcoholism, drug overdoses and suicides—as “deaths of despair” by those who have given up hope.

The Associated Press adds the latest numbers:

About 49,500 people took their own lives last year in the U.S., the highest number ever, according to new government data posted Thursday.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which posted the numbers, has not yet calculated a suicide rate for the year, but available data suggests suicides are more common in the U.S. than at any time since the dawn of World War II.

“There’s something wrong. The number should not be going up,” said Christina Wilbur, a 45-year-old Florida woman whose son shot himself to death last year.

Yes, there’s something wrong. A “bi-partisan stench” is coming from the Potomac, says Spectator magazine, with “plenty of blame to go around.”

Or, as Glenn Greenwald puts it:

"The relevant metric now isn't left versus right. It's anti-establishment versus pro-establishment.     

Namely, do you think the loss of trust that these institutions of authority have suffered is valid or not? Do you think that they deserve the contempt in which they are held by a large portion of the population? I believe it's absolutely justified to hold them in contempt...     

That's the fundamental distinction that defines our political spectrum more than old definitions of left versus right."     

Yes…Oliver Anthony is right.  It’s the ‘rich men north of Richmond’ who threaten us all.

More to come…

Regards,

Bill Bonner

PS: Our daughter has moved down to Argentina with her husband. They are trying to manage our farms down there. Maria writes a weekly letter, now on Substack, to chronicle their adventures. If you would like to follow along, you can sign up (it’s free) here: