When the police can routinely lie, and place innocent people under arrest, that is warfare. When their lies are compounded by overzealous prosecutors and never questioned by activist judges, that is war lawfare style. When you labored for decades to obtain a skill or craft, but are always subjected to a buyers market or do without anything, that is war. The economic interest always operates against the good of the whole but always favors the hegemony of slavery under many different names in a hijacked language and inverting the roles of the aggressors by denouncing those who are attacked by them. To be reduced to a condition of perpetual poverty, and knowing there is nothing you can do but survive the greedy onslaught, that is war. Thank you again Donald for covering so many of the bases that people do not want to address.
The reason we have an immoral and unethical government is because the people themselves have chosen mammon over salvation. I will likely die in the penury of my poverty, but it won't be from a lack of trying. I'm just no longer willing to "Soldier on" in the meat-grinder of madness they call "Civilization".
Curious TW. Although you posed a rhetorical question, I could only muse with the idea of they told "their" truth, to the omission of any dissenting opinions. As one man stated; for every question asked, there are 20 that remain unasked.
Someone, I don't recall who, once claimed that if you could withdraw all of the money and assets from every person in the country and then redistribute it all evenly to everyone, that in a given length of time the same people who had been wealthy would again be wealthy and those who had been poor would again be poor. I think that there is truth in this for a number of reasons, including greed, native abilities, intelligence, dishonesty, etc. However, it would be fun to see it tried, if for no other reason than to give a great many of us on the bottom and at levels below the 1% a fighting chance on a level field.
Yes, that very popular theory is inevitably trotted out by those who are financially secure, whenever a "Share the Wealth" kind of notion rears its head. It's just more class war: you're all too stupid and irresponsible, that we can't give you more money, or you'll just blow it. We are wealthy because we are special, and deserve it. As I've said many times, well, why don't we test that theory, just for laughs. Btw, as I noted in the updated paperback edition of "Survival of the Richest," if you took all the known wealth (this doesn't include any from the unaudited foundations or offshore profits, or illicit activities) in the country, and divided it up evenly, it would come to $344,000 for every man, woman, and child. I'm not suggesting we do that, but it does give you an idea of how much wealth is out there. Thanks, Jim!
I often wonder about that too, Robin. It just seems to absurd for some people to literally have more than they can possibly ever use (again to paraphrase Huey), while others can't afford food and shelter. Thanks.
I have heard that claim too. I know from personal experience that claim is not accurate.
I and many people I know were rather poor, but after getting just one lucky break, and enough seed money, it changed their life for the better, and were no longer poor.
If everyone got one lucky break, and enough seed money as a critical mass, many of them would invest it wisely enough to never be poor again.
True there will still be those unwise enough, who will blow it and be poor again.
In the end, you will still have ultra rich and poor, but a much larger middle class, and more even wealth distribution, like 80/20 instead of 99/1.
🙌🙌🙌 Absolutely right and well-said, Mr. Jeffries! Populist anger at the rich today is at its highest level since the Great Depression. This is why Occupy Wall Street happened. This is why Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders rose to prominence in American politics. This is why Luigi Mangione assassinated United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson and many applauded him for that. The past two decades have seen the greatest wealth inequality in American history since the Gilded Age. We basically live in the Second Gilded Age and I’m sure that’s how historians will remember the past two decades. Poverty in this, the richest society in human history-is rampant which is a disgrace! It’s a classic paradox and it’s because the Middle Class has gradually shrunk in the past thirty years.
The average wage in this country has been stagnant since 1980. Some of the slums we have in America resemble slums found in the third world. Millions are food insecure, homeless, can’t afford their medicine or medical insurance, or live in squalor resembling Victorian times rather than 2025. How is it we managed to put a man on the moon, create AI technology and explore the depths of the sea but yet millions in America and around the world can’t put food on the table? It just doesn’t make any sense. We lost the War on Poverty declared in the 60s. The Great Society was only moderately successful. This is because so much money was diverted to the Vietnam War. The Robber Barons of the 19th Century have been replaced with a new digital artisticracy led by the likes of Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, Page, Brin, and Gates. They are the modern version of Rockefeller, Gould, Carnegie, Morgan, Frick, and Pullman.
Poverty is not to be celebrated, romanticized or exhaulted. It’s terrible, and anyone who’s lived in it can tell you so. We have a ton of veterans on the street living in Medieval type conditions. Go back in time and ask a slave in the Antebellum South, a serf in Tsarist Russia or yeoman farmer in Medieval England or France how much fun day to day living was. I guarantee they’d correct you immediately! I’m sure Chinese coolies, Mexican ranch hands and white workers in the 19th Century woke up energized everyday and loved every second of their work.
Corporations have long exploited those from the underclass be it poor white people, people of color, immigrants legal or illegal, women, or children. The elites of our society have long used race as a way to divide us. A couple examples, are you familiar with Bacon’s Rebellion (1676-1677), Mr. Jeffries? Nathaniel Bacon with an army of colonists, black slaves and white indentured servants rebelled against Colonial Governor William Berkeley after he refused Bacon’s request to drive the state’s Native tribes out of Virginia. The coalition of the white and black underclasses for a common cause terrified the ruling class in Virginia and that is why they created laws that privileged poor whites over blacks, this in time would be adopted by all Southern states and after the Civil War would become the foundation for the infamous Jim Crow system.
Another example, during the Mexican-American War, a group of Irish immigrant soldiers who were persecuted for their ethnicity and religion defected and joined with the Mexicans who were more accepting of them. After being captured by the American Army, they were all hung and their commanding officer made to do hard labor. They were known as the St. Patrick’s Battalion. They are celebrated every year on St. Patrick’s Day in Mexico to this very day. There’s a great movie on them starring Tom Berenger called “One Man’s Hero.” Today I feel the modern day elites are using the divide and conquer strategy on everyday Americans more effectively than ever dividing us by politics, race, religion, gender, sexuality, gender identity, ethnicity, and national origin. After all, if you blame your Trump supporting neighbor or the blacks, the Jews or the Mexicans for all your problems, your not focused on them and can’t see that it’s not liberals or conservatives or the white man or the black man that’s responsible for your problems, it’s the establishment. Class warfare occurs everyday in this country and I pray it will come to in an end within the next couple decades, we can get upward mobility back and the American Middle Class can be the envy of the world once again! I wanted to recommend some books pertaining to this topic to everyone:
• The Great American Stick-Up: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street by Robert Scheer
• Huey Long by T. Harry Williams
• Every Man A King: A Short, Colorful History of American Populists by Chris Stirewalt
• A Godly Hero: A Life of William Jennings Bryan by Michael Kazin
• Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Interracial Solidarity in 1960s-70s New Left Organizing by Amy Sonnie and James Tracy
I appreciate that, Noah. I'm very familiar with Bacon's Rebellion, which was one of the first populist uprisings. I covered a few similar cases, Shays' Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion, in my book "Crimes and Cover-Ups in American Politics: 1776-1963." Thanks!
"Just say No to Drugs" didn't work so well either, did it? It wasn't supposed to, apparently, but sure sounded like a good plan back then. All the people who are hooked on fentanyl and meth is astounding. No way to remove these illegal drugs from our society along with the mega-push from Big Pharma on all the chemicals they pump out for a "healthier" lifestyle.
Whats left of a sane society is dwindling rapidly. I hope the next civilization, if there is one, does much better.
Absolutely right, John. I wrote all about the real Lincoln- our greatest tyrant- in both "Crimes and Coverups in American Politics: 1776-1963" and "American Memory Hole." With all due modesty, my own section on Huey Long in "Survival of the Richest" is the only place I know that tells the truth about him. Thanks.
On a slightly related note, I’m currently rereading Tom Wolfe’s great “From Bauhaus to Our House” (1983) and, in one chapter, he describes the economic consequences imposed by the stupid Bauhaus/International Style that swept across America in the 1930s–50s and altogether ruined the beautiful and previously economically fruitful (for all parties, company and worker alike) Beaux-Arts style that had been the preferred architectural mode in America up until those years.
Wolfe writes: “Henry Hope Reed tells of riding across West Fifty-third Street in New York in the 1940s in a car with some employees of E. F. Caldwell & Co., a firm that specialized in bronze work and electrical fixtures. As the car passed the Museum of Modern Art building, the men began shaking their fists at it and shouting: "That damn place is destroying us! Those bastards are killing us!" In the palmy days of Beaux-Arts architecture, Caldwell had employed a thousand bronzeurs, marble workers, model makers, and designers. Now the company was sliding into insolvency, along with many similar firms. It was not that craftsmanship was dying. Rather, the International Style was finishing off the demand for it, particularly in commercial construction.”
I’ve been to that hideous MOMA building in NYC and it’s another blight on the landscape (although NYC is a revolting place anyway, so, as far as I’m concerned, it can have all the Bauhaus monstrosities it wants, thus exposing the city for its lack of taste and morals). But the economic consequences of Bauhaus/International Style and, I might add, all things “urban renewal” are yet another sad story showing how the lives of everyday workers have been systematically destroyed.
I don't know WHERE you studied Medieval History, but that is by the most convoluted hyperbole I ever saw in a piece, especially the part where the peasants had to beat croaking frogs so Queen Annie could get some repose. (I'm guessing that most queens needed no such help, drinking themselves into a stupor and passing out, and being put to bed by the Parlor Girls.)
The Middle Ages had none of the festering poverty that characterizes modern America. What most Americans think of as the "Middle Ages" was really the early years of Mercantilism, when Capitalist Slumlords provided crowded housing for those working in their newfounded silk, spice, and lead industries, mines, and plantations. These early towns feature no plumbing, no sanitation, and no waste disposal. The street was your garbage dump, a basement the toilet. (It is little wonder millions died of "plagues".
Most truly Medieval Towns were centered around Monasteries, which had three types of Monks, Professed who "Sang Chant all Day" (I won't dive into details), the Confessed who were cloistered and did the day-to-day tasks inside the Monastery, and Oblates who worked the stables, tended flocks of sheep, orchards, and worked at trades like carpentry and blacksmithing.
The Monasteries were incredible centers of culture, learning, and technological advancement that have not since been duplicated. Modern Dog Breeding, Horse Breeding, Horticulture, Agriculture, Astronomy, Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, and Botany all had their start in the monasteries from about 900 to 1300 AD. Few Americans know that the beer they are drinking, the dog at their side, the cheese they put on a sandwich, and, if they live in an older house, the architecture all came from a Monastery.
That is not to glorify the Middle Ages. There were problems, especially an interminable series of wars and shifting alliances plotted by bankers- sound familiar??- of Genoa, Pisa, Venice, and the Vatican. These conflicts often spilled into the broader politics of Continental Europe and sometimes affected theology.
Without a shadow of a doubt, most of the worst kings, queens, and nobles lived after the Great Western Schism. The world has not been the same since.
While the Monasteries were not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, and had multitudes of political foibles and intrigues, they did provide bread and lodging to anyone who was truly destitute.
These days, even a bum under a bridge with his meth and smartphone is living better than King Herod ever did.
In many ways, poor is a relative term. Are you poor if you cannot daily put meat on the table and order a piece of Chinese Junk on Amazon? Are you poor even if you have a warm bed at night?
All other things being equal, I could have lived a comfortable life in a shack by the river with just the money from my paper route.
Back in the '70's somebody earning minimum wage at McDonald's who worked 40 hours a week could rent a room, eat, and perhaps even afford a used car.
When the police can routinely lie, and place innocent people under arrest, that is warfare. When their lies are compounded by overzealous prosecutors and never questioned by activist judges, that is war lawfare style. When you labored for decades to obtain a skill or craft, but are always subjected to a buyers market or do without anything, that is war. The economic interest always operates against the good of the whole but always favors the hegemony of slavery under many different names in a hijacked language and inverting the roles of the aggressors by denouncing those who are attacked by them. To be reduced to a condition of perpetual poverty, and knowing there is nothing you can do but survive the greedy onslaught, that is war. Thank you again Donald for covering so many of the bases that people do not want to address.
The reason we have an immoral and unethical government is because the people themselves have chosen mammon over salvation. I will likely die in the penury of my poverty, but it won't be from a lack of trying. I'm just no longer willing to "Soldier on" in the meat-grinder of madness they call "Civilization".
Great examples, Clyde. Thanks!
Great commentary, isn't it sad what it says about our society?
Yes it is, Robin. Thanks!
Yes, it is demoralizing. Now, when was it that a cop ever told the truth?
Curious TW. Although you posed a rhetorical question, I could only muse with the idea of they told "their" truth, to the omission of any dissenting opinions. As one man stated; for every question asked, there are 20 that remain unasked.
Truth is One, because God is One, and God is Truth. Even the simple Truths are God.
Someone, I don't recall who, once claimed that if you could withdraw all of the money and assets from every person in the country and then redistribute it all evenly to everyone, that in a given length of time the same people who had been wealthy would again be wealthy and those who had been poor would again be poor. I think that there is truth in this for a number of reasons, including greed, native abilities, intelligence, dishonesty, etc. However, it would be fun to see it tried, if for no other reason than to give a great many of us on the bottom and at levels below the 1% a fighting chance on a level field.
Yes, that very popular theory is inevitably trotted out by those who are financially secure, whenever a "Share the Wealth" kind of notion rears its head. It's just more class war: you're all too stupid and irresponsible, that we can't give you more money, or you'll just blow it. We are wealthy because we are special, and deserve it. As I've said many times, well, why don't we test that theory, just for laughs. Btw, as I noted in the updated paperback edition of "Survival of the Richest," if you took all the known wealth (this doesn't include any from the unaudited foundations or offshore profits, or illicit activities) in the country, and divided it up evenly, it would come to $344,000 for every man, woman, and child. I'm not suggesting we do that, but it does give you an idea of how much wealth is out there. Thanks, Jim!
Don- I drive around different affluent areas and wonder where people get all their money? I wonder how much wealth is in this country? Now I know!
I often wonder about that too, Robin. It just seems to absurd for some people to literally have more than they can possibly ever use (again to paraphrase Huey), while others can't afford food and shelter. Thanks.
I have heard that claim too. I know from personal experience that claim is not accurate.
I and many people I know were rather poor, but after getting just one lucky break, and enough seed money, it changed their life for the better, and were no longer poor.
If everyone got one lucky break, and enough seed money as a critical mass, many of them would invest it wisely enough to never be poor again.
True there will still be those unwise enough, who will blow it and be poor again.
In the end, you will still have ultra rich and poor, but a much larger middle class, and more even wealth distribution, like 80/20 instead of 99/1.
🙌🙌🙌 Absolutely right and well-said, Mr. Jeffries! Populist anger at the rich today is at its highest level since the Great Depression. This is why Occupy Wall Street happened. This is why Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders rose to prominence in American politics. This is why Luigi Mangione assassinated United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson and many applauded him for that. The past two decades have seen the greatest wealth inequality in American history since the Gilded Age. We basically live in the Second Gilded Age and I’m sure that’s how historians will remember the past two decades. Poverty in this, the richest society in human history-is rampant which is a disgrace! It’s a classic paradox and it’s because the Middle Class has gradually shrunk in the past thirty years.
The average wage in this country has been stagnant since 1980. Some of the slums we have in America resemble slums found in the third world. Millions are food insecure, homeless, can’t afford their medicine or medical insurance, or live in squalor resembling Victorian times rather than 2025. How is it we managed to put a man on the moon, create AI technology and explore the depths of the sea but yet millions in America and around the world can’t put food on the table? It just doesn’t make any sense. We lost the War on Poverty declared in the 60s. The Great Society was only moderately successful. This is because so much money was diverted to the Vietnam War. The Robber Barons of the 19th Century have been replaced with a new digital artisticracy led by the likes of Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, Page, Brin, and Gates. They are the modern version of Rockefeller, Gould, Carnegie, Morgan, Frick, and Pullman.
Poverty is not to be celebrated, romanticized or exhaulted. It’s terrible, and anyone who’s lived in it can tell you so. We have a ton of veterans on the street living in Medieval type conditions. Go back in time and ask a slave in the Antebellum South, a serf in Tsarist Russia or yeoman farmer in Medieval England or France how much fun day to day living was. I guarantee they’d correct you immediately! I’m sure Chinese coolies, Mexican ranch hands and white workers in the 19th Century woke up energized everyday and loved every second of their work.
Corporations have long exploited those from the underclass be it poor white people, people of color, immigrants legal or illegal, women, or children. The elites of our society have long used race as a way to divide us. A couple examples, are you familiar with Bacon’s Rebellion (1676-1677), Mr. Jeffries? Nathaniel Bacon with an army of colonists, black slaves and white indentured servants rebelled against Colonial Governor William Berkeley after he refused Bacon’s request to drive the state’s Native tribes out of Virginia. The coalition of the white and black underclasses for a common cause terrified the ruling class in Virginia and that is why they created laws that privileged poor whites over blacks, this in time would be adopted by all Southern states and after the Civil War would become the foundation for the infamous Jim Crow system.
Another example, during the Mexican-American War, a group of Irish immigrant soldiers who were persecuted for their ethnicity and religion defected and joined with the Mexicans who were more accepting of them. After being captured by the American Army, they were all hung and their commanding officer made to do hard labor. They were known as the St. Patrick’s Battalion. They are celebrated every year on St. Patrick’s Day in Mexico to this very day. There’s a great movie on them starring Tom Berenger called “One Man’s Hero.” Today I feel the modern day elites are using the divide and conquer strategy on everyday Americans more effectively than ever dividing us by politics, race, religion, gender, sexuality, gender identity, ethnicity, and national origin. After all, if you blame your Trump supporting neighbor or the blacks, the Jews or the Mexicans for all your problems, your not focused on them and can’t see that it’s not liberals or conservatives or the white man or the black man that’s responsible for your problems, it’s the establishment. Class warfare occurs everyday in this country and I pray it will come to in an end within the next couple decades, we can get upward mobility back and the American Middle Class can be the envy of the world once again! I wanted to recommend some books pertaining to this topic to everyone:
• The Great American Stick-Up: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street by Robert Scheer
• Huey Long by T. Harry Williams
• Every Man A King: A Short, Colorful History of American Populists by Chris Stirewalt
• A Godly Hero: A Life of William Jennings Bryan by Michael Kazin
• Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Interracial Solidarity in 1960s-70s New Left Organizing by Amy Sonnie and James Tracy
I appreciate that, Noah. I'm very familiar with Bacon's Rebellion, which was one of the first populist uprisings. I covered a few similar cases, Shays' Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion, in my book "Crimes and Cover-Ups in American Politics: 1776-1963." Thanks!
"Just say No to Drugs" didn't work so well either, did it? It wasn't supposed to, apparently, but sure sounded like a good plan back then. All the people who are hooked on fentanyl and meth is astounding. No way to remove these illegal drugs from our society along with the mega-push from Big Pharma on all the chemicals they pump out for a "healthier" lifestyle.
Whats left of a sane society is dwindling rapidly. I hope the next civilization, if there is one, does much better.
Lincoln was not the noble figure depicted in the hagiographic books and movies. He believed whites should rule over blacks, for example.
I'm persuaded that the North's primary goal was to subjugate the south in order to proceed with westward expansion.
Re: Huey Long, I recommend the T. Harry Williams book on the kingfish.
Absolutely right, John. I wrote all about the real Lincoln- our greatest tyrant- in both "Crimes and Coverups in American Politics: 1776-1963" and "American Memory Hole." With all due modesty, my own section on Huey Long in "Survival of the Richest" is the only place I know that tells the truth about him. Thanks.
I would argue that Roosevelt was a greater tyrant than Lincoln. But, when the dust settles, nobody will even be able to hold a candle to SuperTrump.
Lincoln set the template, TW. FDR was awful. I don't think Trumpenstein is in their league. Thanks.
Harding was actually a popular president.
After the first world war, Americans just wanted their lives back.
My sense is that Wilson's warmongering left a lot of people exhausted.
But Lincoln was the one who set that precedent.
I'm increasingly persuaded that the US should have remained a small, rural nation of farmers and mechanics.
Beware of people with big ideas.
I always love reading your Substack Don! I also like to read the comments from your fans! Interesting comments.
It is sad we have any poverty in this wealthy country, it is heartbreaking!
I always love reading your comments, Robin, because they're always so kind. Thanks!
A brilliant post!
Thanks, Katherine!
On a slightly related note, I’m currently rereading Tom Wolfe’s great “From Bauhaus to Our House” (1983) and, in one chapter, he describes the economic consequences imposed by the stupid Bauhaus/International Style that swept across America in the 1930s–50s and altogether ruined the beautiful and previously economically fruitful (for all parties, company and worker alike) Beaux-Arts style that had been the preferred architectural mode in America up until those years.
Wolfe writes: “Henry Hope Reed tells of riding across West Fifty-third Street in New York in the 1940s in a car with some employees of E. F. Caldwell & Co., a firm that specialized in bronze work and electrical fixtures. As the car passed the Museum of Modern Art building, the men began shaking their fists at it and shouting: "That damn place is destroying us! Those bastards are killing us!" In the palmy days of Beaux-Arts architecture, Caldwell had employed a thousand bronzeurs, marble workers, model makers, and designers. Now the company was sliding into insolvency, along with many similar firms. It was not that craftsmanship was dying. Rather, the International Style was finishing off the demand for it, particularly in commercial construction.”
I’ve been to that hideous MOMA building in NYC and it’s another blight on the landscape (although NYC is a revolting place anyway, so, as far as I’m concerned, it can have all the Bauhaus monstrosities it wants, thus exposing the city for its lack of taste and morals). But the economic consequences of Bauhaus/International Style and, I might add, all things “urban renewal” are yet another sad story showing how the lives of everyday workers have been systematically destroyed.
Good points, Rob. Thanks.
I don't know WHERE you studied Medieval History, but that is by the most convoluted hyperbole I ever saw in a piece, especially the part where the peasants had to beat croaking frogs so Queen Annie could get some repose. (I'm guessing that most queens needed no such help, drinking themselves into a stupor and passing out, and being put to bed by the Parlor Girls.)
The Middle Ages had none of the festering poverty that characterizes modern America. What most Americans think of as the "Middle Ages" was really the early years of Mercantilism, when Capitalist Slumlords provided crowded housing for those working in their newfounded silk, spice, and lead industries, mines, and plantations. These early towns feature no plumbing, no sanitation, and no waste disposal. The street was your garbage dump, a basement the toilet. (It is little wonder millions died of "plagues".
Most truly Medieval Towns were centered around Monasteries, which had three types of Monks, Professed who "Sang Chant all Day" (I won't dive into details), the Confessed who were cloistered and did the day-to-day tasks inside the Monastery, and Oblates who worked the stables, tended flocks of sheep, orchards, and worked at trades like carpentry and blacksmithing.
The Monasteries were incredible centers of culture, learning, and technological advancement that have not since been duplicated. Modern Dog Breeding, Horse Breeding, Horticulture, Agriculture, Astronomy, Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, and Botany all had their start in the monasteries from about 900 to 1300 AD. Few Americans know that the beer they are drinking, the dog at their side, the cheese they put on a sandwich, and, if they live in an older house, the architecture all came from a Monastery.
That is not to glorify the Middle Ages. There were problems, especially an interminable series of wars and shifting alliances plotted by bankers- sound familiar??- of Genoa, Pisa, Venice, and the Vatican. These conflicts often spilled into the broader politics of Continental Europe and sometimes affected theology.
Without a shadow of a doubt, most of the worst kings, queens, and nobles lived after the Great Western Schism. The world has not been the same since.
TW, the monks oversaw the construction of beautiful, timeless cathedrals and the like. But the poor were the poor. And as always, too many were poor.
While the Monasteries were not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, and had multitudes of political foibles and intrigues, they did provide bread and lodging to anyone who was truly destitute.
These days, even a bum under a bridge with his meth and smartphone is living better than King Herod ever did.
In many ways, poor is a relative term. Are you poor if you cannot daily put meat on the table and order a piece of Chinese Junk on Amazon? Are you poor even if you have a warm bed at night?
All other things being equal, I could have lived a comfortable life in a shack by the river with just the money from my paper route.
Back in the '70's somebody earning minimum wage at McDonald's who worked 40 hours a week could rent a room, eat, and perhaps even afford a used car.
Is it about being provided, or about lifestyle??