The Exciting Future

As everyone knows, things just keep getting better and better for our fun little country, and the future is looking as promising as ever. So I’m kind of re-branding this site to make it slightly less confusingly-named and hard to say and remember.*

One could be forgiven for assuming I had given up on this, but everything seemed a little crowded in the last year. I am not abandoning the concept of aggregating news for the working class, but that seemed like a niche that nobody was eager to crawl into, especially given the last presidential “election.” I think if people are genuinely interested in economics (and the violence justified under the veneer of, in order to perpetuate the system of,) they probably seek out this news on their own, from more able sources than myself. But in a broad sense I think there is something for me to contribute by synthesizing my perspective of what is going on (which is a political and economic perspective) and what people need to do to be aware of it.

Though No County for Poor Men was, to paraphrase Frank Zappa, a smash-flop endeavor, I still believe in the idea of explaining stuff to people who may not be aware. But I also thought there must be a better way to title the site, without the (admittedly clever) play on the title of a great book and movie, which, to my mind, kind of illustrates some parts of the American economic machinations that we are all trying to understand, survive, and, perhaps, get an understanding of, or at least a glimpse, and chase through the desert and try to kill. Or however the movie ended. You know what I mean.

But I think a broader scope beyond the “it sucks to be poor” could be useful to some readers. While that is certainly a considerable part of my political and economic outlook, I think the entwined threats of terminal capitalism, automation, and climate change are quickly becoming harder and harder to imagine surviving with anything left that resembles even our own half-assed democracy. #capitalism #climate #AI

While it may be hard to take much more of this fucking orange fascist potato man talking about bombing more brown people, we should still take the smart news seriously. And though our disgusting kleptocratic president will not be in office forever, it will be important to know what to expect in twenty or thirty years. I’m not going to lament the “norms” and institutional whatever that all these Comey-lovin’ news-heads are always talking about, but we will need institutions, and we will need civil rights and constitutional protections. We should all try to make sure the first and fourth amendments are around for every generation. Just as some fun examples.

Here are my notes on the awful, awful news and what you can do to stay informed and depressed. nocountry.info and on Twitter @NoCountryInfo.

There will be affiliate links on this site. I will make them relatively unobtrusive, as explained in this post from my other site. Affiliate links will help me pay for stuff.

Thanks.

-J.

*Also, I let the domain expire and didn’t want to pay about nine times more to renew than to get a new one. I’m sure both my readers will be able to navigate this change.

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Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few Paperback | by Robert B. Reich

Silent Spring Anniversary Edition by Rachel Carson

Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud by David Dayen