The country hit song, “Rich Men North of Richmond,” embodies the GOP’s narrative of white male resentment. But collectivism and an embrace of racial diversity are far more powerful and popular. 

By Sonali Kolhatkar

American conservatism has always been excellent at storytelling. Convincing people to back regressive policies isn’t easy and therefore stories generating fear and resentment in particular work quite well to help garner support for lowering taxes on the wealthy or pouring money into militarism and policing instead of into healthcare and housing.

Effective storytelling is the reason why right-wing commentators like Joe Rogan and Laura Ingraham elevated “Rich Men North of Richmond,” a song with a simple message by a relatively unknown country artist, and helped boost it all the way to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The new song from country musician Oliver Anthony has suddenly become an anthem of the right, so much so that it was featured in the Republican Party’s first candidate debate for the 2024 presidential nomination.

Fox debate moderator Martha MacCallum asked Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, “Why is this song striking such a nerve in this country right now?” DeSantis answered, it’s because “our country is in decline right now. This decline is not inevitable, it’s a choice.”

Anthony’s song lyrics have a pithy answer to why the United States is apparently in decline: “We got folks in the street, ain’t got nothin’ to eat.” He then pivots to the source of this injustice: “the obese milkin’ welfare.”

While he explicitly engages in fat shaming, he doesn’t spell out that he’s actually referencing people of color when he talks about people milking welfare. But that’s because he doesn’t have to. Welfare recipients have long been a dog whistle for Black Americans in particular, a trope that Ronald Reagan popularized all the way to the White House, building on white people’s resentment of Black people benefitting from tax-funded programs. The myth that Black people disproportionately use welfare programs has persisted within the American public, even though in reality, welfare programs have disproportionately benefited white people and even excluded Blacks.

No wonder Republican politicians and their voting base love Anthony’s song. It correctly identifies economic insecurity but instead of laying the blame at the feet of wealthy corporations who are hiking up food prices, or GOP representatives who are cutting food stamps, it instead scapegoats poor people of color and paints them as wily, greedy, fraudsters who take advantage of hardworking (read: white, male) Americans.

But, what about the “rich men” Anthony sings about? That too could be coded language for Democrats who are painted in the GOP’s worldview as well-educated, privileged liberal elites and embodied by people like Hunter Biden. These “rich men” are ensuring that welfare recipients (read: people of color) suck up all the resources, sending white men like Anthony to an early grave.

The victims of injustice in Anthony’s song are precisely the ones that the GOP has been trying to uplift: white men. “Young men are puttin’ themselves six feet in the ground, ‘Cause all this damn country does is keep on kickin’ them down,” sings Anthony. He doesn’t explicitly say “white men,” because—again—he doesn’t have to. He signals it with his own demographic saying, “It’s a damn shame what the world’s gotten to for people like me… ” To be fair, he adds, “and people like you.”

Without actually spelling out the idea that people of color are taking over the nation and forcing white men to an early grave, Anthony’s song cleverly implies this powerful right-wing myth.

The narrative throughline of Republican ideology is the myth that America was a country built by white men but is now a nation where white men are deeply suffering. As America falls apart from this tragic turn of events, only white men can save it and can “Make America Great Again.”

Given how hard the GOP has beaten this drum it’s a wonder more Americans don’t buy this ludicrous, racist, and false idea. Just under a quarter of all Americans believe it. And nearly double that amount actively rejects it. And that is because the counternarrative to this grim world of white male resentment is a beautiful and far more seductive story: that America is a multi-hued nation where everyone has rights and everyone deserves freedom from hunger, homelessness, and illness. Although this is an ideal that has never been realized, especially for Black and Brown people, it remains an aspirational goal.

Indeed, even Anthony can’t help but embrace this collectivist idea. In an interview, the young singer identified “the roots of what made this country great in the first place,” as “our sense of community.”

He then said, “We are the melting pot of the world, that’s what makes us strong, is our diversity.” There’s no other way to interpret his words than the idea that the nation’s racial diversity is a good thing.

He then went further, saying, “We need to learn to harness that and appreciate it and not use it as a political tool to keep everyone separate.”

Whether or not Anthony actually believes such ideas that seem to be the opposite of his own hit song, or whether he was simply pandering to the cameras, is unclear. What is clear is that even the GOP’s newest poster boy, when asked to explain his position, publicly backed collectivism and embraced racial diversity. 

In fact, in a video he released on YouTube, Anthony even disavowed being associated with the GOP, saying it was ironic that his song was played at the Republican debate. He “wrote that song about those people,” he said, adding, “I do hate to see that song being weaponized,"

The truth, of course, is that rich men from the Democratic Party, but even more so from the Republican Party, represent the wealthiest people in the nation and routinely use that power to make themselves and their ilk richer. When a reporter in May 2023 asked House Speaker Kevin McCarthy if his party would consider increasing taxes on the wealthy, he spat out “No” before the question was over.

The GOP’s cover story, to obscure its real agenda of making rich men richer, is one of white racial resentment. And to the party, Anthony’s song embodies this cover story. But his interview reveals what most Americans, given the chance to think for themselves, would embrace: that it’s rich men versus the rest of us.

British folk singer Billy Bragg attempted to rewrite the GOP’s new anthem to better reflect the sort of working-class ideals that are popular all over the world. He identified the true perpetrators of injustice as, “Rich men earning north of a million,” who “wanna keep the working folk down.”

Instead of fat shaming and echoing rightwing dog whistles about people of color, Bragg sang:

“If you’re struggling with your health, and you’re putting on the pounds,
Doctor gives you opiates to help you get around,
Wouldn’t it be better for folks like you and me,
If medicine was subsidized and healthcare was free.”

In a Facebook post, Oliver revealed that he has struggled with depression and anxiety. Clearly, he, like the rest of us, would benefit from tax-funded, free healthcare.

Anthony also laid out his financial troubles and struggle with unemployment, one that so many Americans can relate to. Again, Bragg had a good answer to this problem in his version of the country music hit: “Join a union, fight for better pay… join a union brother, organize today.” Given Anthony’s reluctance to be co-opted by the right, perhaps he may yet be convinced by this.

Author: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her most recent book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

The values of the U.S. public are not the same as those of the wealthy and corporations. It took a UN official—an outsider—to point out the dissonance.

By Sonali Kolhatkar

Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, recently issued a scathing statement about the shameful state of the United States economy. On October 31, 2023, De Schutter called out several top private employers in the U.S., Amazon, Walmart, and DoorDash, for trapping their workers in a cycle of poverty.

He said, “Jobs are supposed to provide a pathway out of poverty, yet in all three companies the business model seems to be to shift operating costs onto the public by relying on government benefits to supplement miserably low wages.”

In a related letter to the U.S. government, De Schutter wrote, “Despite being one of the wealthiest countries in the world, the United States has a high rate of poverty among workers.”

Such public statements by the representative of a top international body ought to be a mark of shame for the U.S., which has historically marketed itself as being a place where people’s dreams come true.

In contrast to De Schutter’s rhetoric, the corporate media’s assessment is quite rosy, relying increasingly on the word “resilient” as a popular descriptor for the economy as a whole. According to the Financial Times, “The stunning resilience in the U.S. economy to date has stemmed from one primary force: consumer spending.” Economist Kathy Bostjancic, who was interviewed for the story, cited, “incredible job growth,” and lauded how “[b]alance sheets look in really good shape, stocks have generally performed really well.”

The U.S. government also sees nothing but cause for celebration. Officials at the Treasury Department on October 26, 2023, boasted how the nation’s economy this year “outperformed expectations along three key dimensions: growing economic output, labor market resilience, and slowing inflation,” and that the nation’s economic progress, “stands out across the globe.”

How to explain these striking contradictions in assessments between the United Nations and those of the corporate media and the U.S. government?

In short, evaluations by the U.S. media and politicians are based on corporate prosperity while the UN’s evaluation is based on individual prosperity.

If we look closely, there is a dissonance on display. We, the people, are being sold the lie that the values of the wealthy are the same as ours. But what’s on offer does not reflect reality.

Merriam-Webster defines the term “bait and switch” as “a sales tactic in which a customer is attracted by the advertisement of a low-priced item but is then encouraged to buy a higher-priced one.” It’s an apt phrase to understand the way in which mainstream economists, corporate media outlets, and many politicians promote the idea of stock values as something ordinary Americans should care about.

A year after dropping to a record low in 2022, child poverty in the U.S. more than doubled, partly as a result of COVID-19 related government benefits expiring. Additionally, median household income fell significantly. Economists rarely address such pesky details when celebrating the “resilience” of the stock market, preferring instead to focus on the fact that more people are employed, not whether their wages and benefits support a decent standard of living.

Occasionally there are stories that undermine the corporate narrative, such as an NBC story in March 2023, headlined, “Most people have jobs, but many are unhappy about their money.” But such coverage is the exception.

The story we are expected to internalize, in direct conflict with our own financial worries, is that we must be content with the nation’s financial status quo because stocks are performing well and corporate balance sheets look good.

There is another story, one that is consistent with individual bottom lines. “International human rights law recognizes a right to a living wage,” wrote De Schutter. “Workers should be provided, at a minimum, with a ‘living wage,’ regularly adapted in accordance with costs of living.”

De Schutter’s assertion that Americans have the right to earn a living wage is one that rarely enters mainstream U.S. discourse. When people are denied their rights, they will rise up to claim them, and the recent surge in union activity and strikes is an indicator that growing numbers of people are seeing through the economic bait and switch.

The changing narrative on wealth inequality, wage stagnation, and economic health is reflected in the simple and direct message that United Auto Workers (UAW) president Shawn Fain regularly displays on his “Eat the Rich” shirt. UAW members are voting on major wage gains that their union won from the Big Three automakers after weeks of militant strike activity grounded in an entirely different set of values than those that frame a rosy economic outlook.

The phrase “Eat the Rich” has its origins in the French Revolution and the anger of the poor aimed at 18th-century aristocracy. The quote, “When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich,” is attributed to French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Its popularity in contemporary U.S. society is a warning to those in the media and the halls of government against selling the lie that corporate values are equivalent to people’s values.

Congress and the White House could easily thwart the growing popular tide by adopting any number of simple and direct policy changes. Echoing progressive recommendations, De Schutter made several suggestions in his letter to the government: if the minimum wage is too low, raise the federal minimum wage and build in cost-of-living increases. If unions are too weak, close the loopholes that allow corporate employers to undermine union activity.

Another direct solution is this: if the pandemic-era benefits cut childhood poverty rates, renew the benefits.

One can understand why the Biden administration wants to cheer on the state of the U.S. economy. In spite of congressional gridlock and, especially, Republican roadblocks to commonsense economic legislation, economic stability is one of the central responsibilities that government is charged with, and achieving success in this realm is key to Biden’s reelection efforts in 2024. So, his administration is putting a happy face on the economy and papering over the contradictions between stock values and real wages.

One can also understand why the corporate media cheers on economic indicators that are important to the wealthy. Media companies are cut from the same commercial cloth as Amazon, Walmart, and DoorDash, the corporations that De Schutter singled out for exploitative treatment of their workers.

What is less understandable is why the public has accepted the bait and switch in economic values for so long.

AUTHOR BIO: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her most recent book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

 This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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Our economic priorities have created a serious housing crisis and fueled homelessness. Solving the problem simply requires us to change our priorities from profits to people.

By Sonali Kolhatkar

California is home to Hollywood and Disneyland, sun and sand, and… nearly one-third of all unhoused people in the entire nation. Compare this to the fact that 12 percent of the nation resides in the Golden State and it becomes clear that there is a serious problem of housing that undercuts the Left Coast’s liberal reputation.

An extensive study of the state’s struggle with homelessness by the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) paints a detailed picture of the problem, and it’s not pretty. Homelessness is thriving at the intersections of racism, sexual violence, overpolicing, and more. The report’s authors explain, it “occurs in conjunction with structural conditions that produce and reproduce inequalities.”

Contrary to the popular perception that good weather fuels voluntary homelessness and consists largely of transplants from out of the state, the report points out that 90 percent of the unhoused had been living in California when they lost access to housing. And, three-quarters continue to remain in the same county.

The problem also manifests in systemic racism, with Black and Indigenous people overrepresented among the unhoused compared to their populations. More than a quarter of all unhoused people in California are Black, and yet only 5 percent of the state’s overall population is Black.

Homelessness also fuels sexual violence that disproportionately impacts unhoused LGBTQ people and women. More than one-third of transgender and nonbinary people experiencing homelessness reported being victims of sexual violence, while 16 percent of cisgender women did so as well.

And, nearly half of all the study’s participants (47 percent) report being harassed by police. Law enforcement routinely subjects California’s unhoused population to violent police raids, dehumanizing searches and seizures of property, forced relocation, and incarceration. The unhoused are disproportionately criminalized by a system that pours a significant amount of tax dollars into policing rather than into affordable housing. Increasingly, cities are simply making it illegal to live outdoors, as if criminalizing homelessness will magically make the math of housing affordability work out.

The UCSF report is neither the first, nor will it be the last one to explore the extent of homelessness in California. And while it makes clear how serious the problem is, the main question remains: how to solve it?

There are several policy solutions put forward including rental assistance in the form of housing vouchers, an exploration of shared housing models, mental health treatment, and even a progressive-sounding monthly income program. But these are merely metaphorical band-aids being applied to a gaping, bleeding wound. None of them address the fundamental reason of why there are more than 171,000 people without housing in California.

Interestingly, the UCSF study’s main author, Dr. Margot Kushel, honed in on the core issue in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle when she said, “We have got to bring housing costs down, and we’ve got to bring incomes up… We need to solve the fundamental problem—the rent is just too high.”

This is a nationwide problem and California is merely on the front lines.

So, how to bring housing costs down? The federal government sees a shortage of homes as the problem, treating it as an issue of supply and demand: increase the supply and the price will fall. But there is no shortage of housing in the nation. There is a shortage of affordable housing and as long as moneyed interests keep buying up housing, building more won’t be a fix.

Since at least 2008, hedge funds have been buying up single-family homes and rental units in California, throwing a bottomless well of cash at a resource that individuals need for their survival and pushing house prices and rents out of reach for most ordinary people. This too is a nationwide phenomenon, one that was extensively outlined in a 2018 report produced by the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), Americans for Financial Reform, and Public Advocates.

That report makes it clear that Wall Street hedge funds see housing as the next frontier in profitable investing. Once these funds buy up homes and apartments to rent out, they cut the labor and material costs associated with maintenance, and routinely raise the rents.

And why wouldn’t they? Their bottom line is profits, not safe, clean, fair, affordable housing. In 2000, the average American renter spent just over 22 percent of their income on housing. Today that percentage has jumped to 30. Hedge fund landlords are likely celebrating their success at getting “consumers” to fork over a larger share of money for their “products.”

The only way to stop hedge funds from taking over the housing market is… [drumroll] to stop hedge funds from buying up homes. To that end, the ACCE report calls on local municipalities and state governments to offer tenants the first right of refusal in purchasing homes, along with appropriate supports, and then offer nonprofit institutions like community land trusts to have the second right of refusal to purchase. It also calls on the federal government to “not incentivize speculation, or act to favor Wall Street ownership of housing assets over other ownership structures.”

The other end of the problem is that incomes are too low. According to Dean Baker at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, the federal minimum wage ought to be $21.50 an hour in order to keep up with the rise in productivity. But it’s not. It’s a horrifyingly low $7.25 an hour. And while nearly half of all states have pushed that wage floor far higher to about $15 an hour, it doesn’t come close to what’s needed. Even the few dozen cities that have forced the minimum wage past their state requirements don’t get to $21.50 an hour.

Yes, individual incomes are rising because of worker demands on employers, but they are not keeping up with inflation. And even though government officials admit that rising wages don’t fuel inflation, the Federal Reserve sees rising wages as the problem, countering them with higher interest rates.

Putting together these pieces of the puzzle, one can only conclude that our economy is designed to keep ordinary Americans living hand to mouth, running on an endless treadmill just to keep from falling into homelessness.

The rent is too damn high—to cite affordable housing activists—and wages are too damn low. That is the nutshell description of an economy that is simply not intended to center human needs.

Passing laws to prevent hedge funds and other large businesses from buying up homes and apartments and raising the minimum wage to at least $21.50 are hardly radical ideas, but they offer course corrections for an economy that is running roughshod over most of us. Rather than tinkering at the edges of the problem and putting forward complex-sounding solutions that don’t actually address the root of the issue, wouldn’t society be better served by redesigning our economy to make homelessness obsolete?

Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her most recent book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

 This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

What do we know, and what can we support about the following?

By Colin Greer

1. The Psychology of the Scarcity Experience

Humans across all evolutionary forms have faced scarcity—from the impact of weather on the food supply to competition with nonhuman animals for food and shelter.

The experience of material scarcity of this scale generated an individual psychological dynamic and societal reflex of fear and loss. The perennial uncertainty of survival was also magnified by interhuman aggression, conflict, and hierarchy.

2. Historical and Transhistorical Trauma

What we call trauma—emergency response, risk, and loss—follows and has a multigenerational impact on individuals, families, social groups, and nations that is carried into all lives through the imposition of extreme fight-or-flight-response-triggered behaviors.

These dynamics inform the tendency in humans to impose a “scarcity experience” on nonmaterial scarcity situations. The scarcity experience has permeated across history into our institutions, conventions, expectations, and beliefs.

3. Variety Within the Human Population

Add to the uneven distribution of inherited trauma (and social responses to the scarcity experience) the genetic differences of human populations, which are combinations of distinct groups of human ancestors, and we can be sure that just as there are demonstrated physical markers of difference among populations with regard to biological systems, there are also key behavioral markers.

Understanding these behavioral markers may help unpack the crisis of legitimacy facing democratic nations in which extreme partisanship regarding values and politics has produced culture wars. Legitimacy and illegitimacy are essentially about the conflict between bonding nests of insular common sense, fear, blame, belief, and expectation.

4. The Uneven ‘Fight-or-Flight’ Response

These traumatic experiences have been unevenly distributed over populations and individuals over time and geography. This might be a part of the explanation for the fight-or-flight polarity of behaviors seen in the human population in response to fear, risk, and danger. The responses can produce a wide range of social environments, from calm and cooperative to conflictual and antagonistic.

5. Negative/Positive Human Bonding

“Good enough” bonding is key to cooperative and considerate social relations, and an overall society based on goodwill.

We know that when life is uncertain—when birthing and infancy are high-risk and death is so common that the naming of children was often delayed—blame for loss is rampant, and, as a result, multiple complex patterns of bonding fractures replace bonding with longing (selfishness, greed, violence, blame, hoarding) in likely individual and group behavior.

All this is processed through personal and cultural temperaments, and so a fairly wide range of action, values, and empathy exists and can be exaggerated in one or another direction—a sense of kin, widely or narrowly shared.

6. The Uneven History of Human Collaboration

There is widespread evidence stretching over centuries in different parts of the planet of goodwill and visions of shared well-being, of cooperative discourse and reparative ideals that might be called on with new vigor. These have long aimed to counter the dominance of extreme fight-or-flight/scarcity panic psychology, blaming and maiming communication and political engagement in the long and ongoing story of human society.

Making Use of It

Perhaps this perspective on scarcity and bonding can help us see ourselves differently and find our way.

Currently, we are witnessing the failure of the historic progressive agenda, and a dramatic decline in the legitimacy of democracy as a governing ideal.

At the same time, the right wing has, for over 50 years, rooted itself in key political positions and popularized regressive ideas and ideals through coercion, shaming, and exclusivity.

The power of the right is based on having gained the trust of people. As the public has lost its sense of higher purpose, the progressive agenda has become delegitimized. Ironically, rich people are lionized by working people—despite the damage to their own lives because wealth stands for strength and prospect.

The damaging philosophy of neoliberalism has morphed into something more sinister. We are witnessing the capture of the public sphere by dangerous politicians promoting destructive ideologies often built on lies and disinformation. These ideologies have led to a worldwide spread of authoritarianism, which some argue is a zeitgeist more capable than democracy for handling economic, environmental, and social crises. How do we shape a democratic future living in a zeitgeist that is tightening its grip across the globe?

 This article was produced by Human Bridges, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Author:   Colin Greer is the president of the New World Foundation. He was formerly a CUNY professor, a founding editor of Social Policy magazine, a contributing editor at Parade magazine for almost 20 years, and the author and coauthor of several books on public policy. He is the author of three books of poetry, including most recently Defeat/No Surrender.