“The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.”
Despite the fact that Marx first wrote about the concept of “commodification” one and a half centuries ago, it is only in the last 25 years or so that the term has come into popularity (leave it to liberals to ‘borrow’ one of Marx’s ideas 125 years after the fact and then call it their own and praise themselves for their magnificent brilliance).
But, given that new items are being commodified at alarming rates, maybe liberals can be forgiven for coming slightly late to the party.
There are countless examples of items which have become, as of late, owned and thus commodified by corporations. Two examples include: Human and animal genomes which are now owned by corporations every time a new discovery is made; Fox News successfully countered a court case challenging their right to own the phrase “Fair and Balanced”; and the song ‘happy birthday’, to which every sung performance must be met with royalties to the song’s owners, as Girl Scouts of America learned the hard way.
There is nothing particularly new or secretive about this development. However, when I learned of this new development in commodification, I was at a loss for words:
Marketing a product that claims to connect one to God is nothing new. The Catholic Church practiced something more or less similar to this for hundreds of years under their practice of the ‘buying of indulgences‘.
But actually copyrighting the phrase “Believe in God”? Chutzpah, pure chutzpah.
If anybody out there in reality-based reality was searching for more proof that right-wingers use some pretty tortured logic, search no more.
Paulitics 
The kiss of death for Ron Paul’s Presidential run
Published 1 August, 2007 2008 Presidential Race , America , American Empire , American Politics , current events , Elections , International Politics , libertarianism , news , News, Commentary & Op/Ed , odd , politics , Republican , Republicans , Ron Paul , socialist realism , U.S. Politics , U.S. Politics (domestic) 22 CommentsThose of you who know me are aware that I’m no fan of Ron Paul’s parochial brand of right-wing libertarianism. However, to be fair, there was a time when what he had to say on foreign policy issues really spoke to much of the issues which matter to me.
Now, obviously, as a socialist, it’s never been exceptionally important to me that a candidate be the most popular candidate in a given race.
So, given that, I didn’t really consider it a strike against the candidate that his supporters had deluded themselves into thinking that their own spam was evidence of a widespread, grassroots movement despite the fact that polls show Ron Paul within the margin of error of having zero support at all.
But afterwards, I started to suspect that Ron Paul didn’t have what it took to win the nomination when his supporters tried (unsuccessfully) to spam my blog. One day I opened up my spam box and *BAM* right there in between a post informing me about a revolutionary new discovery to make my erections harder than Chinese algebra and another offering free, young, and barely legal porn, there was Ron Paul spam.
Since then I’ve never really been able to divorce him in my mind from the two items of spam which served as bookends for his supporter’s little morsel of spam.
But despite this, it wasn’t until today when I opened up digg.com that I truly realized that Ron Paul has just received the political kiss of death.
Robert, “Duchebag”, Novak himself has just come out and endorsed Ron Paul.
Behold, Jon Stewart at his best:
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