The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Walking Away From The Marketplace John Michael Greer The recent sequence of posts here on lenocracy (from Latin  leno , a pimp)—that is, the form of political economy in which productive economic activity gets squeezed dry by various kinds of legally mandated pimping—has fielded a response I find interesting. Next to nobody has tried to argue that lenocracy is an unfair description of the current state of affairs in the United States and its close allies. Everyone seems quite aware of the fact that most of the people who make big money in our grand post-industrial kleptocracies are doing it by exploiting those who actually produce goods and services, in exactly the same way that a pimp exploits sex workers. No, the question that’s come up over and over again is as simple as it is challenging:  what can we do about it?  I offered one answer  a month ago , discussing the way that modern lenocracies work by dangling various baits in front of you. If you take the bait—and nearly everythi

  The Real Book About the "White Working Class" Interview with Les Leopold, author of "Wall Street's War on Workers," the book neither party wants you to read MATT TAIBBI Mingo County, West Virginia. In late February a new book by journalist Paul Waldman and University of Maryland professor Thomas Schaller called  White Rural Rage  hit the bookshelves. The book was a compendium of  Hee Haw!  caricatures of hayseed America mixed with a blunt diagnosis: rural Americans are disproportionately racist, conspiratorial, authoritarian, and supportive of political violence, key culprits in the rise of Donald Trump. “Rural Americans,” Waldman and Waller wrote, “are overrepresented among those with insurrectionist tendencies.” Media response was instantaneous and ecstatic.  Morning Joe  hyped  White Rural Rage  as if it were a cross of  What Happened  and  The Grapes of Wrath;  Mika Brzezinski sat rapt as Schaller described rural voters as “ the most racist, xenophobic, an