blog wank talk

A coupla weeks ago Doug Henwood hosted an awesome conversation with Corey Robin - a Brooklyn Prof who recently wrote an amazing review article in the Nation that puts forth a very cultural reading of the American right and their identity politics. Robin is flanked on the right by Reihan Salam, the twentysomehing-sounding point man over at the American Scene, and also author of Grand New Party, a work that no less a mind than David Motherbleeping Brooks thinks is just the knife's dice. Salaam is a smart guy, no doubt, though I cannot understand why anybody would spend so much time or energy on such a generous and esoteric reading of the American Right. Anywho I've ended up subscribing to the blog at the Scene, which offers a weird glimpse into the 'politics and poetics' of our foils in the culture-trenches. Weird.

I've found an american communist blog that's worth spitting at, though this week it featured an International Socialist Review screed against "identity politics" that tries to calls Laclau and Mouffe out, and quickly gets in way over its head. I have a feeling that all of the sausage-making, "inside baseball" political operations I am working on will result in a post-November Left Turn. It's weird how many trotskyists are too purist (puerile?) to do what it takes to maintain members, but also rigidly inattentive to Marxist theory. If it's necessary to maintain this pretentious disposition, is it also essential that you ignore Western Marxism?

Dean Baker's "Meltdown Lowdown" is a weekly review piece on the US economy that features even zingier zingers than his Beat the Press blog, which i'm of course addicted to. Par Example:

It's amazing what you can find reading obscure documents from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The CBO's analysis of the Dodd-Frank housing-bailout package projects that 35 percent of the 400,000 homeowners (140,000) who get a new mortgage through the program will still eventually be unable to pay their bills and will lose their homes in foreclosure.

These families can look forward to two or three more years of struggling to pay their mortgages, sacrificing health care, child care, and other necessary expenses in order to hang on to their home. At the end of the day, these 140,000 families will end up out on the street with nothing.

This is what D.C. policy wonks call "asset building."