As we speak the number one country hit is "Rich Men North of Richmond". If you've been sleeping under a log, north of Richmond is the Washington D.C. metro area.. Home of our politicians and the bureaucrats that run the Federal Administrative Agencies, what we refer to cynically as the Deep State. And of course, lobbyists and so-called news reporters by the thousands.
The singer is a blue collar worker who according to his own account told God he'd get sober if he could get help following his dreams. That was just over a month ago. Now his song is topping the charts.
The lyrics are instructive: "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 song that vividly contrasts the life of working people who, inflation adjusted, are still working for 1970s wages while the ruling class in D.C. have gotten very rich indeed over the last 50 years, relatively speaking.
The phenomenon he describes is the result of Federal deficit spending and money printing which have caused the prices of assets owned by the rich (real estate, stocks and bonds) to go up exponentially while the wages of laborers are stagnant after adjusting for inflation.
In the chorus he alludes to the surveillance state and the quest by politicians to exercise more and more control over the people: "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."
When the wealth and income of the top 10% and the rest of us becomes too glaringly and unfairly obvious, and when the middle class all but disappears, those with the wealth and power resort to totalitarian methods to retain their ill-gotten privilege. Hence the increase in surveillance, the increase in taxation and ultimately the increase in population control. This has played out in the end stages of empires from the Romans to the British to, now, the American.
Can it be reversed? Maybe. The popularity of this song, which came out of nowhere and went viral on the internet, is a good sign. It's also instructive that the elite owned and controlled media are trying to discredit the song in any way they can.
That's this week's Report From the Fields. I'm Richard Fields. Talk to you again next week.