Every voting cycle, we on the left can and do expect the rightwing propaganda machine to kick in full speed. Classless mudslinging and baseless accusations have become the "modus operandi" of the far right so rarely does any ridiculous thing they say surprise me, BUT...they have finally gone too far.  A true hero has been slighted and his honor must be defended.

The word certainly appears often enough here so at least some people have an idea that there is.  My thesis for this diary is that there is one and that it is at the heart of the primary battle we all wish would go away.  Furthermore, it would be in the vital  interests of that establishment to either defeat Senator Obama before he becomes the official nominee or certainly after he does.  For some strange reason these are goals shared by John McCain and Hillary Clinton.  Is it coincidence or is it part of the big picture?  It pays to look the anatomy and physiology of  the establishment meme.  Just what do we mean by an "establishment" in this context?

From the Merriam-Webster online dictionary:

a group of social, economic, and political leaders who form a ruling class (as of a nation).

Too often the concept congers up images of some conspiracy pulling the strings on the puppets that make up our society.  Are there real people to flesh out the idea? Look below and explore this with me.

Barack Obama is in political trouble for clumsily telling the truth.

About 10 days ago, at a fundraiser in San Francisco he made his now infamous “bitter” comments. Attempting to explain why he is having difficulty appealing to white, working class voters he said it may be because they are culturally out of step with what they perceive to be some of his views. Because they have slipped behind economically and been lied to by their government for decades they have become frustrated and thus:

“It’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustration.”

So Bill Kristol decided that the most attention-getting criticism he could throw at Obama was that something he said sounded like a couple of over-quoted and often misquoted sentences of Marx.

Like the worst thing anyone could be is a Marxist.

It would certainly be harmful as far as having a political career in this country, which is of course Kristol's interest in invoking the dread M word. He knows how foolish a comparison it is, he's just angling for attention.

I think of it like this:

I've been married for 23 years. Pretty good for a gay guy," laughs Ron Reagan over iced tea recently in Los Angeles. Gay buzz has surrounded the reed-thin son of former president Ronald Reagan since he dropped out of Yale University in his freshman year in 1976 to dance with New York City's Joffrey Ballet. It follows him still, even though he and his longtime wife, clinical psychologist Dorta Reagan, appear to be happily married, ensconced in Seattle with their three cats.

Being typed as gay "has never bothered me," says Reagan, 46, a political commentator for MSNBC and dog show host for Animal Planet. He was in town doing interviews for the Television Critics Association meeting, "I've always thought of it like someone thinking I'm Chinese or something. It's not pejorative, as far as I can see. It's simply incorrect."

As it happens, I've been teaching Marx for the last couple of weeks, from the same Tucker reader Kristol refers to, no less. Marx is fabulous. Were his predictions of revolution accurate? Um, no. But that doesn't diminish the power of his analysis of capitalism.

I mean, come on!

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors", and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment". It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
--snip--

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

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 connexions everywhere.

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

How can you not love it?

An interesting and moving article in the UK Guardian on Obama and Jessie Jackson, complete with a quote from Marx.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under given circumstances directly encountered and inherited from the past

The article starts with Jackson describing his campaign experience in 1988.

In Wisconsin, a state with a black population of just 2%, white people were handing him their babies to kiss. "Look, something is happening up here," he told one of his aides. "And I'm not quite sure what it is. But this outpouring of affection wherever I go, it's for real. It's real, I'm telling you, it's there. I know when it's there."

You don't have to agree with everything it says to see a connection. The babies that Jessie Jackson kissed 20 years ago: shit me not, they are going to the polls.

    Perhaps the day has come.

The most appropriate Christmas song: "The Rebel Jesus

I've been touting Jackson Browne's "The Rebel Jesus" since my very first Blogmas, but thanks to the miracle of YouTube, I can now offer up the music into the collection basket as well. The version below is pure Jackson Browne, and is reasonably well illustrated (something I've been meaning to do for a year but is unlikely will ever be a priority). A better (in my view) musical version is the version with The Chieftains, which has a pro-forma video (five minutes of the album cover), but you can listen to/"watch" that one here.

Mindful Economics
Understanding American Capitalism, Its Consequences & Alternatives
By Joel C. Magnuson // 366 pp, Pilot Light, 2007

A book review by Patrice Greanville

Michael Douglas as the memorable Gordon Gekko in the film Wall Street, with a character based on the real-life buccaneer conglomerateur Ivan Boesky.

"The richest one percent of this country owns half our country's wealth, five trillion dollars. One third of that comes from hard work, two thirds comes from inheritance, interest on interest accumulating to widows and idiot sons and what I do, stock and real estate speculation. It's bullshit. You got ninety percent of the American public out there with little or no net worth. I create nothing. I own."—Gordon Gekko to Bud Fox (Wall Street, 1987, directed by Oliver Stone)

From the so called great scramble to the new scramble, I believe that there never really is any difference or change in scrambling. The imperialist tendencies and actions towards Africa have been concentrated in one continuous scramble - for resources: land, people, minerals, diamonds, timber, markets, etc. A continuous scramble and a systematic exploitation and looting of the African continent. Globalization and the global political economy are generally not looked at through the African perspective. While I can hardly offer that perspective, I work to understand.

This is a review of Alf Hornborg's The Power of the Machine, a book by a professional anthropologist offering a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary critique of our global society.

The review is in four parts: the first part is an introduction to critical theory, the second part will detail Hornborg's main concern, which is that we are trapped in a "fetish" of economic "machines," and that this is why we keep offering "technological" and "capitalist" solutions to problems like abrupt climate change.  The third part is a short critique of his central concept, "machine fetishism," and the conclusion will summarize the book chapter by chapter.

(crossposted at Docudharma)

All in one week of Red Top madness...
The saga of Saint Barfly, a.k.a. Wino the Cursed....

On Monday, Antonio Maria Costa places blame squarely on the shoulders of Kate Moss and Mrs. Winehouse for drug cartel corruption and the related regional social degeneration in West Africa.
Clearly -- they are females -- he was echoing Republican Talking Points.

Then, Wednesay, a booger in St. B's right nostril made it to the lead entertainment pages of over a hundred newspapers worldwide, plus legions of television news programs.
This booger was magnified. Then eventually it took on a life of its own. Being groomed for a quick spot....

And Thursday, word arrived that Amy killed a hamster. Freddied its head right off. Again, hundreds of replays off the wire.
Munch !

And America only has Britney and Lindsay ???
Do I sense a "gap" similar to the "Missile Gap" that propelled Kennedy over Nixon ?
BTW: for a link to all out class war, go below the fold:

Crossposted at Docudharma

This is a defense of OPOL’s diary "Why I Am A Radical."  Some of the respondents thought that OPOL wasn't "really a radical," others thought that   our "solution" to present-day political problems should focus on the election of Hillary or Obama or Edwards or whomever, more others just cheered another well-decorated OPOL diary.  Here I wish to set radicalism on the bedrock of economic thinking incited by Karl Marx in the Preface to "A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy," and compare the words of OPOL to those of Vijay Prashad, from his book "Fat Cats and Running Dogs."

This is a short diary about personal goals, and political goals, under capitalism.

Karl Marx has, paradoxically, a bad name amongst the political mainstream and yet an abiding influence amongst scholars and political activists.

Yet, while mainstream Democrats may seek to abstain from ever mentioning the name of Marx, out of fear of appearing "too far to the left", Marx's thinking remains very useful for all those dedicated to progressive causes, whatever party label they may happen to embrace.

In my discipline, sociology, Marx is so influentiual that the main American sociological organization, the American Sociological Association has an entire section dedicated to Marxist sociology; I was briefly a member, but since my resources are limited and my scholarly interests lie slightly elsewhere, I am not at the moment; I still respect careful Marxian analysis, though.

"The only part of the so-called national wealth that actually enters into the collective possessions of modern peoples is their national debt." Karl Marx makes this remarkable statement in Chapter 31 of his monumental work Capital (available online). It shows both his keen insight and his sense of humor. Marx basically means that, no matter whether the government is a dictatorship, a constitutional monarchy, or a republic, when the government borrows money, the common people get stuck with the bill. Thus, national wealth—the wealth held in common—is just red ink.

The topic below was originally posted in my blog, the Intrepid Liberal Journal and crossposted at the Independent Bloggers Alliance.

Actually, Karl Marx never said that, not in those words. Here is a better translation of his actual words, in context.

Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man—state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.
Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

(crossposted to Progressive Historians)

Plenty of discursive forces have arisen in the present, leading to a diary on Marx.  I’ve had discussions with people on DKos who wish to contest what they see as my "marxism."  Actually, I suppose it all boils down to the student who asked me in my instructional communication class last fall, "are you a socialist."  So what is my relationship to the O. G. of socialism?  I'm sure this topic comes up whenever I've disputed the ability of the capitalist system to come up with a solution to any significant ecological problem.

I know the point of Markos’ snippet in the mid-day open thread yesterday was geared more towards intellectual wankery than Marx specifically, but I bristle at the sad fact that Marx has become the whipping boy of the new-new left. As an introduction, I’ll supply my bona fides on the wankery issue. I’m one that left academia a few courses short of a PhD in Philosophy for precisely this reason. I was tired of splitting hairs over the meaning of specific sentences, or even sentence clauses, and missing the forest for the trees. I was tired of the petty backstabbing born of such parsing when everyone involved was educated enough that you don’t treat people in that manner. Before I got to grad school, I was an intellectual wanker. I would spend hours with the OED researching words that I could contort to render my writing utterly meaningless [on purpose] – like a sand Mandala. I was of the post-structuralist lit-crit set [until I finally decided that I needed to know what words like commodification actually meant if I was going to employ them ad nauseum]. I could and did wank with the best of ‘em, including Derrida [with whom I briefly studied in grad school].