Rand, Ayn
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see uber for history fun eg a-bomb
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THOM
REALLY GOOD SUM AYN RAND AN 9 26
Ka$h Patel’s (his preferred spelling) pathetic performance before Congress last week has left many Americans wondering what’s going on with our federal government. We now have, as a result of Trump’s choices and the endorsement of every or virtually every Republican in the US Senate:
— An alcoholic B-list weekend TV star in charge of our military,
— A formerly heroin- and sex-addicted brainworm-infected lawyer in charge of our public health,
— A wrestling promoter in charge of our Education Department,
— The president’s personal criminal defense lawyer in charge of the Justice Department,
— A C-list reality TV star in charge of our air traffic control system,
— A plumber in charge of Homeland Security,
— A “miracle weight-loss pill” TV hawker in charge of Medicare and Medicaid,
— A social media hustler and children’s book author in charge of the FBI,
— A predatory hedge fund guy in charge of the Treasury,
— A fracking CEO who denies the climate crisis in charge of the Energy Department,
— Jeffrey Epstein’s former next-door neighbor and Epstein Island visitor in charge of the Commerce Department,
— A politician who built his career on a phony story about his parents fleeing Castro in charge of telling America's story to the world,
— The mentee of an anti-democracy billionaire as our VP,
— A Project 2025 architect who was excited to put federal workers “in trauma” in charge of America’s federal budget,
— A racist whose own uncle publicly denounced him as an immigration hypocrite, and whose leaked emails pushed white nationalist material to Breitbart, in charge of immigration policy,
— A former NFL player in charge of public housing,
— A real estate developer and golf buddy with no diplomatic experience whatsoever negotiating with and sucking up to Vladimir Putin,
— The world’s richest man firing people investigating him and his companies while gutting the federal government and killing millions by “feeding USAID into the wood chipper,”
— And a self-described “proud Islamophobe” with no government job vetting the National Security Council staff.
The model here is straightforward: government is something to be exploited for personal gain not public service, because government is essentially an evil thing. So, load it up with incompetents, suck up as much money as you can, and leave the mess to the Democrats:
— Three Republican presidents borrowed over $35 trillion, put it all on the national credit card, just to hand all that money to the billionaires who fund their campaigns and sustain their lavish lifestyles.
— Republicans in Congress have thrown millions off of food stamps (SNAP) and Medicaid and refuse to fix Social Security or Medicare.
— Trump just discarded many of our pollution rules, a move that will lead to more cancers and asthma among our children.
— Bob Kennedy saluted putting cancer-causing chemicals on our food supply.
— Anything Putin wants from Trump he gets.
— They’re selling off public lands and destroying our park system like there’s no tomorrow, while rewriting America’s history into a white supremacist fantasy.
— Miller’s ICE goons are murdering Americans and getting away with it while imprisoning brown-skinned people without due process.
— Trump has made billions since becoming president through crypto scams and bets on his own war proclamations.
And that’s just the beginning. Which is causing millions of Americans, scratching their heads in wonder, to ask:
“Where did this anti-American-government insanity come from, and how did it come to seize control of the entire Republican Party?”
Reporter Mark Ames documents how, back in the 1940s, a real estate lobbying group came up with the idea of creating a new political party to justify deregulating the real estate and finance industries so they could make more money.
This new Libertarian Party would give an ideological and political cover to their goal of becoming government-free, and they developed an elaborate pretense of governing philosophy around it.
Their principal argument was that if everybody acted separately and independently, in all cases with maximum selfishness, such behavior would actually benefit society. There would be no government needed beyond an army, a police force, and a court system to defend the rights of property owners. It was a bizarre twisting of Adam Smith’s reference to the “invisible hand” that regulated trade among nations.
In 1980, billionaire David Koch ran for vice president on the newly formed Libertarian Party ticket. His platform included calls to privatize the Post Office, close public schools, give Medicare and Medicaid to big insurance companies, end food and housing support and all other forms of “welfare,” deregulate all corporate oversight while shutting down the EPA and FDA, and selling off much of the federal government’s land and other assets to billionaires and big corporations.
Reagan, who won that 1980 election, embraced this view in his inaugural address, saying, “[G]overnment is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
He then doubled down on the idea by beginning the systematic process of gutting and crippling governmental institutions that historically had supported working people and the middle class.
Reagan wasn’t just echoing the Libertarian vision; he was also endorsing Ayn Rand’s “Objectivist” view of the world, which traces its roots to a murderous psychopath in 1927.
Back in 2015, Donald Trump told *USA Today*’s Kirsten Powers that his favorite book was Ayn Rand’s raped-girl-decides-she-likes-it novel, “The Fountainhead.”
“It relates to business, beauty, life and inner emotions,” he told Powers. “That book relates to … everything.”
Ayn Rand’s novels have animated libertarian Republicans like former Speaker of the House of Representatives and current Fox News board member Paul Ryan, who required interns to read her books when they joined his staff.
Powers added, “He [Trump],” told her that he “identified with Howard Roark, the novel’s idealistic protagonist who designs skyscrapers and rages against the establishment.”
Rand’s hero Roark, in fact, “raged” so much in her novel that he blew up a public housing project with dynamite just to get what he wanted. Sort of like tearing down the East Wing of the White House and threatening to level the Kennedy Center.
Rand, in her Journals, explained where she got her inspiration for Howard Roark and so many of her other novels. She writes that the theme of The Fountainhead, for example, is:
“One puts oneself above all and crushes everything in one’s way to get the best for oneself.”
On Trump’s hero Howard Roark, she wrote words that Trump must have loved, saying that he:
“[H]as learned long ago, with his first consciousness, two things which dominate his entire attitude toward life: his own superiority and the utter worthlessness of the world. He knows what he wants and what he thinks. He needs no other reasons, standards or considerations. His complete selfishness is as natural to him as breathing.”
It turns out that Roark and many of her other characters were based on a real person. The man who so inspired Ayn Rand’s fictional heroes was named William Edward Hickman, and he lived in Los Angeles during the Roaring Twenties.
Ten days before Christmas in 1927, Hickman, a teenager with slicked dark hair and tiny, muted eyes, drove up to Mount Vernon Junior High School in Los Angeles and kidnapped Marion Parker — the daughter of a wealthy banker in town.
Hickman held the girl ransom, demanding $1,500 from her father — back then about a year’s salary. Supremely confident that he would elude capture, Hickman signed his name on the ransom notes, “The Fox.”
After two days, Marion’s father agreed to hand over the ransom in exchange for the safety of his daughter. What Perry Parker didn’t know is that Hickman never intended to live up to his end of the bargain.
The Pittsburgh Press detailed what Hickman, in his own words, did next.
“It was while I was fixing the blindfold that the urge to murder came upon me,” he said. “I just couldn’t help myself. I got a towel and stepped up behind Marion. Then, before she could move, I put it around her neck and twisted it tightly.”
Hickman didn’t hold back on any of these details: he was proud of his cold-bloodedness.
“I held on and she made no outcry except to gurgle. I held on for about two minutes, I guess, and then I let go. When I cut loose the fastenings, she fell to the floor. I knew she was dead.”
“After she was dead I carried her body into the bathroom and undressed her, all but the underwear, and cut a hole in her throat with a pocket knife to let the blood out.”
Hickman then dismembered the child piece-by-piece, putting her limbs in a cabinet in his apartment, and then wrapped up the carved-up torso, powdered the lifeless face of Marion Parker, set what was left of her stump torso with the head sitting atop it in the passenger seat of his car, and drove to meet her father to collect the ransom money.
He even sewed open her eyelids to make it look like she was alive.
On the way, Hickman dumped body parts out of his car window, before rendezvousing with Marion Parker’s father.
Armed with a shotgun so her father wouldn’t come close enough to Hickman’s car to see that Marion was dead, Hickman collected his $1,500, then kicked open the door and tossed the rest of Marion Parker onto the road. As he sped off, her father fell to his knees, screaming.
Days later, the police caught up with a defiant and unrepentant Hickman in Oregon. His lawyers pleaded insanity, but the jury gave him the gallows.
To nearly everyone, Hickman was a monster. The year of the murder, the Los Angeles Times called it “the most horrible crime of the 1920s.” Hickman was America’s most despicable villain at the time.
But to Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, a 21-year-old Russian political science student who’d arrived in America just two years earlier, Hickman was a hero.
Alissa was a squat five-foot-two with a flapper hairdo and wide, sunken dark eyes that gave her a haunting stare. Etched into those brooding eyes was burned the memory of a childhood backlit by the Russian Revolution.
She had just departed Leninist Russia where, almost a decade earlier, there was a harsh backlash against the Russian property owners by the Bolsheviks. Alissa’s own family was targeted, and at the age of 12 she watched as Bolshevik soldiers burst into her father’s pharmacy, looted the store, and plastered on her Dad’s doors the red emblem of the state, indicating that his private business now belonged to “the people.”
That incident left such a deep and burning wound in young Alissa’s mind that she went to college to study political science and vowed one day she’d become a famous writer to warn the world of the dangers of Bolshevism.
Starting afresh in Hollywood, she anglicized her name to Ayn Rand, and moved from prop-girl to screenwriter/novelist, basing the heroes of several of her stories on a man she was reading about in the newspapers at the time. A man she wrote effusively about in her diaries. A man she hero-worshipped.
William Edward Hickman was the most notorious man in American in 1928, having achieved the level of national fame that she craved.
Young Ayn Rand saw in Hickman the “ideal man” she based The Fountainhead on, and used to ground her philosophy and her life’s work. His greatest quality, she believed, was his unfeeling, pitiless selfishness.
Hickman’s words were carefully recounted by Rand in her Journals. His statement that, “I am like the state: what is good for me is right,” resonated deeply with her. It was the perfect articulation of her belief that if people pursued their own interests above all else — even above friends, family, or nation — the result would be utopian.
She wrote in her diary that those words of Hickman’s were:
“[T]he best and strongest expression of a real man’s psychology I ever heard.”
Hickman — the monster who boasted about how he had hacked up a 12-year-old girl — had Rand’s ear, as well as her heart. She saw a strongman archetype in him, the way that people wearing red MAGA hats see a strongman savior in Donald Trump.
As Hickman’s murder trial unfolded, Rand grew increasingly enraged at how the “mediocre” American masses had rushed to condemn her Superman.
“The first thing that impresses me about the case,” Rand wrote in reference to the Hickman trial in early notes for a book she was working on titled The Little Street, “is the ferocious rage of the whole society against one man.”
Astounded that Americans didn’t recognize the heroism Hickman showed when he proudly rose above simply conforming to society’s rules, Rand wrote:
“It is not the crime alone that has raised the fury of public hatred. It is the case of a daring challenge to society. … It is the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatever for all that society holds sacred, with a consciousness all his own.”
Rand explained that when the masses are confronted with such a bold actor, they neither understood nor empathized with him. Thus, she wrote,
“[A] brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy [was] turned [by the media] into a purposeless monster.”
The protagonist of the book that Rand was writing around that time was a boy named Danny Renahan. In her notes for the book, she wrote, “The model for the boy [Renahan] is Hickman.” He would be her ideal man, and the archetype for a philosophical movement that would transform a nation.
“He is born with the spirit of Argon and the nature of a medieval feudal lord,” Rand wrote in her notes describing Renahan. “Imperious. Impatient. Uncompromising. Untamable. Intolerant. Unadaptable. Passionate. Intensely proud. Superior to the mob… an extreme ‘extremist.’ … No respect for anything or anyone.”
Rand wanted capitalism in its most raw form, uncheck by any government that could control the rules of the market or promote the benefits of society. Such good intentions had, after all, caused the hell she’d experienced in the Bolshevik Revolution.
Ayn Rand, like Hickman, found peace and justification in the extremes of her economic, political, and moral philosophy. Forget about democratic institutions, forget about regulating markets, and forget about pursuing any policies that benefit the majority at the expense of the very rich — the petty political rule-makers and rule-enforcers could never, ever do anything well or good.
Only billionaires should rule the world, Trump has suggested.
And he tried to put it into place, installing a billionaire advocate of destroying public schools in charge of public schools, a coal lobbyist representing billionaires in charge of the EPA, a billionaire-funded oil lobbyist in charge of our public lands, and a billionaire described by Forbes as a “grifter” in charge of the Commerce Department. Trump’s former chief of staff said that putting children in cages and billionaire-owned privatized concentration camps (where 25 so far have died) would actually be a public good.
As Ayn Rand might say, “Don’t just ignore the rules; destroy them.”
Welfare and other social safety net programs were, as Rand saw it, “the glorification of mediocrity” in society. Providing a social safety net for the poor, disabled, or unemployed, she believed, were part of a way of thinking that promoted, “satisfaction instead of joy, contentment instead of happiness… a glow-worm instead of a fire.”
Rand, like Trump, lived a largely joyless life. She mercilessly manipulated people, particularly her husband and Alan Greenspan (who brought a dollar-sign-shaped floral arrangement to her funeral), and, like Trump, surrounded herself with cult-like followers who were only on the inside so long as they gave her total, unhesitating loyalty.
Like Trump, Patel, Musk, Vance, Kennedy, and their billionaire backers, Rand believed that a government working to help out working-class “looters,” instead of solely looking out for rich capitalist “producers,” was throwing its “best people” under the bus.
In Rand’s universe, the producers had no obligations to the looters. Providing welfare or sacrificing one nickel of your own money to help a “looter” on welfare, unemployment, or Social Security — particularly if it was “taken at the barrel of a gun” (taxes) — was morally reprehensible.
Like Trump saying, “My whole life I’ve been greedy,” for Rand looking out for numero uno was the singular name of the game — selfishness was next to godliness.
Rand’s philosophy, though popular in high school and on college campuses, never did — in her lifetime — achieve the sort of mass appeal she had hoped. But today Ayn Rand’s philosophy is a central tenet of today’s Republican Party and grounds the moral code proudly cited and followed by high-profile billionaires and three former presidents of the United States.
Ironically, when she was finally beginning to be taken seriously, Ayn Rand became ill with lung cancer and went on Social Security and Medicare to make it through her last days. She died a “looter” in 1982, unaware that her her promotion of William Edward Hickman’s sociopathic worldview would one day validate an entire political party’s embrace of a similarly psychopathic president.
The result so far is over a half-million Americans unnecessarily dead from Covid, an economy laid waste, another unending war, the destruction of America’s standing around the world, and the collapse of this nation’s working class.
While the ideas and policies promoted by the libertarian wing of the Republican Party have made CEOs and billionaire investors very, very rich in recent decades, it’s killing the rest of us.
In the 1930s through the 1960s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and JFK/LBJ put America back together after the First Republican Great Depression and built the largest and wealthiest middle class in the history of the world at the time.
Today, 45 years of Ayn Rand’s ideas being put into practice by libertarian Republicans from Reagan to Bush to Trump have gutted the middle class, made a handful of oligarchs wealthier than any kings or Pharaohs in the history of the world, and brought a whole new generation of predators, hustlers, and grifters into the GOP.
And then there’s Trump’s war against Iran, his theft of Venezuela’s oil and gold, his attacks on NATO and threats against Greenland, his cutting off weapons to Ukraine, his cashing in on the presidency in ways that clearly violate the Constitution, and his and the GOP’s multiple efforts to rig our elections.
There’s a popular meme going around the internet these days that says:
“If a monkey hoarded more bananas than it could eat while most of the other monkeys starved, scientists would study that monkey to find out what the heck was wrong with it. When humans do it, we put them on the cover of Forbes.”
If America is to survive as a functioning democratic republic, we must repudiate the “greed is good” ideology of Ayn Rand and libertarianism, get billionaires and their money out of politics, stop Trump and his lickspittles, and rebuild our civil institutions.
That starts with waking Americans up to the incredible damage that 45 years of Rand’s writings and libertarian “Reagan Republicans” have done to this country and giving Congress to Democrats who’ll actually investigate and prosecute these crimes against both democracy and our nation itself.
And that starts with checking your voter registration at vote.org and making a plan today to be sure your vote is both cast and counted.
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theconv What’s wrong with secret donor agreements like the ones George Mason University inked with the Kochs
The activist group wants to learn, among other things, which anonymous donor ponied up $20 million alongside the Koch Foundation’s $10 million to rename George Mason’s law school after the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
The university did share some of the Koch agreements with the media, but not until after it was sued.
Activists and journalists have long monitored Koch higher education donations because of the scope and breadth of their giving, which totaled about $150 million between 2005 and 2015, according to media reports. Still, the concern should extend beyond the Kochs to cover transparency for all gift agreements of whatever political hue.
Consider what happened when John Allison, an avowed fan of author and libertarian icon Ayn Rand, led BB&T. The U.S. bank offered colleges and universities grants averaging $1.1 million, usually with the stipulation that they design a new course incorporating Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.”
BB&T also demanded that grantees create faculty positions, centers, speaker series and scholarships as part of a “Moral Foundations of Capitalism” program.
Accounting scholar S. Douglas Beets identified at least 63 schools that took this deal. But he had to scour local news stories and press releases to find them. If open records laws automatically made all such agreements public, he would not have had to do all that sleuthing....
:{Tuition and government funding does not adequately support the mission of many colleges and universities, and increasingly, corporations are responding to this need by making payments to institutions of higher learning with significant contracted expectations, including influence of the curriculum and content of college courses. One large, public banking corporation, BB&T, has funded grants to more than 60 colleges and universities in the United States to address what the corporation refers to as the “moral foundations of capitalism.”
These grants vary in size but average $1.1 million and typically require design of a new course that includes discussion of Atlas Shrugged, one of the novels of the author Ayn Rand. With many of the participating universities, the agreement with BB&T also stipulates the creation of chaired faculty positions, library reading rooms, designated capitalism centers, speaker series, scholarships, and the distribution of free student copies of Atlas Shrugged. Several ethics concerns about these grants, including their threat to academic freedom, are discussed in this article, as well as the need for focused guidance for university administrators regarding the temptation of large donations with attached questionable expectations.}:
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fears of corporate influence on higher education are nothing new. But are colleges and universities, which receive smaller and smaller shares of their budgets from public funding, and which have struggled to bounce back from the 2008 recession, more likely to accept gifts with ideological strings attached than they would have been previously?
That’s the idea behind a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Academic Ethics, called, "BB&T, Atlas Shrugged and the Ethics of Corporation Influence on College Curricula." It says it is the first study to track a particular set of donations by the financial services holding company BB&T to colleges and universities stipulating that they teach the works of free-market capitalist Ayn Rand and address the “Moral Foundations of Capitalism.”
The paper says these agreements, which have largely ceased, happen under a veil of secrecy, often without the knowledge of faculty members, and that BB&T’s foundation is set on correcting what it sees as an overly liberal curriculum.
“This has been reported on ad hoc, mostly by individual universities and their campus newspapers,” said Douglas Beets, the article’s author and a professor of business at Wake Forest University, which has its own BB&T-funded program. “But otherwise you can’t find information on [BB&T’s] website, and that’s one of the major problems -- this is not transparent.” And Beets says that, given current discussions over allegations of corporate influence over university research agendas, the Ayn Rand grants need more attention.
Prior to Beets’s study, he says, the most comprehensive list of colleges and universities affiliated with BB&T Moral Foundations program was kept by Clemson University’s Institute for the Study of Capitalism. But the list was not complete, and the funds each institution received, in exchange for what kinds of curricular requests, were not listed.
By scouring local news stories and university press releases, along with other means, Beets determined that at least 63 colleges and universities received Moral Foundations grants, averaging about $1 million each.
The grants typically stipulate that the institution will offer a course featuring Ayn Rand’sAtlas Shrugged -- a famously pro-free market novel -- and provide even unenrolled students in the relevant department a free copy of the book; in some cases, Atlas Shrugged is the only book on the course syllabus. The requirements are notable because, even though donors regularly will give support to a given department or field of study, dictating a book to be read would for many professors and others cross a line into inappropriate donor influence.
Beets quotes a BB&T spokesperson telling Bloomberg in 2008, “These gifts are really about the study of capitalism from a moral perspective and all we want is to make Rand part of the dialogue.”
One contract included the creation of an Ayn Rand “reading room” in the department, while others stipulated the development of a dedicated “center” of some sort -- in some cases, just a website. Others funded faculty chairs or other professorships, contractually geared in some cases to ideological allies. A 2011 Western Carolina University advertisement said applicants for its BB&T Distinguished Professor of Capitalism should be “at least familiar with, if not actively receptive to, the writings of Ayn Rand.”
Many of the contracts required an Ayn Rand-inspired speaker series, and some specified the series was to appeal to the general public.
Beets broke down the grants by three metrics to determine their proportionate influence on each institution: funds per student, university endowment per student and grant divided by endowment. Barton College, Johnson C. Smith University and Presbyterian College are among those colleges with the biggest grant-per-student values, at $500 each.
Beets determined that 78 percent of identified contract agreements were announced from 2006-10, although some were made as early as 2002 and some as late as 2012. Amounts varied widely, from $150,000 to Shenandoah University to $4.9 million to Clemson University. The mean contract was $1.1 million.
Contracts between BB&T and the participating institutions typically ran over 10 years, with the stipulation that nonperformance of requirements could result in cessation of funding.
Geography seemed to be the main determinant of where BB&T looked to grant. Most identified institutions are in the bank’s operating region, the Southeastern U.S., with 39 located in North Carolina, the bank’s home state.
The grants resulted in “superlatives” at some colleges and universities, according to the study. At the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, for example, the contract doubled the number of endowed professorships, to four from two. At Fayetteville State University, the contract was the largest corporate donation ever.
Beets asserts that it wasn’t shared ideology with BB&T’s former chief executive, John Allison, who reportedly made his managers read the book, that led colleges and universities to accept the grants. Rather, he says it was financial desperation from shifting funding structures. No longer able to count on public funding, many colleges and universities had to look elsewhere.
“College presidents often delegate a significant degree of fund-raising to subordinate deans and department heads, thereby charging those whose former priority was the quality of academic programs with fund-raising responsibilities and consequently shifting and reprioritizing their job descriptions,” Beets wrote. “These factors combine to make unusual and ideologically based grants alluring that once would have been considered unethical threats to the missions of higher education.”
It stands to reason, then, that regional universities in North Carolina, which have been hit hard by state budget cuts, and smaller, private colleges would be the most vulnerable.
One notable exception is Meredith College, a small, private liberal arts institution in Raleigh, N.C., which rejected a $420,000 Moral Foundations grant in 2006 that would have funded a course on global capitalism and ethical values. The decision was based on a faculty vote, 54-34. Opposed professors said they worried the contract would result in loss of some academic freedom, given that an outside entity would be dictating part of the curriculum.
Melyssa Allen, a college spokeswoman, said the faculty at that time also approved a resolution supporting academic freedom and limiting external funding for curricular offerings. “There was a consensus among faculty in attendance that academic freedom is a core value at Meredith,” Allen said.
A curriculum committee at Auburn University, a public institution with an enrollment of 25,000, turned down a $1.5 million grant from BB&T in 2009.
Beets says these grants can have outsize influence, as some states have programs that match corporate donations with public funding. Beets also points to a major funding overlap with Charles and David Koch, billionaires who have poured millions into conservative causes; some 42 institutions with Moral Foundations programs also had received donations from the Koch brothers’ charities. Both BB&T and the Kochs also have been major contributors to the Ayn Rand Institute.
One campus that’s accepted both BB&T and Koch grants is Florida State University, the latter of which caused much tumult on that campus. The institution accepted a $3 million BB&T Moral Foundations grant in 2008, in exchange for creating a course on market ethics, among other requirements.
“We are very appreciative of the confidence that BB&T has placed in Florida State University to create programs to emphasize the moral and ethical dimensions of our free enterprise system,” T. K. Wetherell, FSU's former president, said in an news release announcing the grant. "In these difficult economic times, it is more important than ever that public universities find new ways to partner with the private sector to develop the sorts of academic programs that our society will need in the coming decades."
The BB&T grant is still active; it’s set to expire in 2018. A spring 2015 syllabus for the course, called Market Ethics: The Vices, Virtues and Values of Capitalism, does feature a discussion called “Taxation is theft” but otherwise hardly suggests it’s a breeding ground for ardent capitalists.
“Critics of capitalism say it is an amoral system, or worse, that it encourages immoral behavior,” the syllabus reads. “Capitalism exploits people, it is unfair, and it values material things over more virtuous values. This course will examine the vices, virtues and values of capitalism to evaluate its ethical properties … the course is not designed to give you answers to these questions, but rather to raise questions and clearly structured issues so that you can think through them and form your own ideas.”
Still, the grant has riled faculty members who say that BB&T and Koch Industries are buying their way into the curriculum. Part of the problem was the way Allison, the CEO, dictated terms of the grant to administrators.
“It is very important to us that any program we support meets the highest academic standards and encourages students to hear all points of view,” Allison wrote in a letter to the deans of business and social sciences. “Frankly, we are confident that, when given a fair hearing, capitalism will prevail. Unfortunately, we find that many graduates of business schools, while understanding the ‘technology’ of business, do not have a clear grasp on the moral principles underlying free markets.”
Allison requested that the economics department create the new course, and that Ayn Rand be required reading. The finance department would add additional readings and course content on free markets, according to the letter, and both working paper and speaker series would be organized. All business graduate students and finance and economics majors will get a copy of Atlas Shrugged. BB&T requested two professorships, and that the program initially be directed by a department head, among other details.
The deal caught the attention of Kent Miller, a professor emeritus of psychology at Florida State, and Ray Bellamy, a medical faculty member, who expressed their concerns in the American Association of University Professors’Academe journal in 2012.
“Could these provisions be considered intrusive?” they wrote. “In exchange for his ‘gift,’ the donor got to assign specific readings, select speakers brought to the campus and instruct them with regard to the focus of their lectures, shape the curriculum with new courses and specify the number of students in the courses, name the program’s directors and initiate a student club. BB&T also received a disturbing amount of free online advertising through the web pages of FSU’s BB&T Center for Free Enterprise.”
They continued, “We do not know how thoroughly the college has obeyed Allison’s instructions. But if there is any concern about avoiding even the appearance of outside interference in the university, we are in trouble. The university has never existed as an ivory tower, but the ideals of academic freedom, the search for truth, scientific integrity, open debate and faculty control of the curriculum are worth defending. The university should be a place where the search for and transfer of knowledge are not shaped by outside money.”
A group called Progress Coalition also has criticized the grants, saying they violated the university's gift acceptance policy. Ralph Wilson, a recent Ph.D. student in math from Florida State and the group's co-founder, said the BB&T agreement amounts to "selling academic credit to outside influences." And even giving out free books to students signals they're "valid," he said.
Dennis Schnittker, a Florida State spokesman, said the instructor of the market ethics course determines what Ayn Rand readings are appropriate, and that the university has never dictated what should be taught. The university “has a long tradition of strong faculty governance and faculty sets the curriculum,” he said. “Donors do not unduly influence the curriculum.”
At UNC Charlotte, faculty outcry over the initial letter of agreement for Moral Foundations on that campus caused the university to revise its deal with BB&T. Steven Ott, dean of the Charlotte Belk College of Business on that campus, said that under the new agreement, “faculty assigned to the course would determine course content, in their sole and unfettered discretion.” Additionally, he said via email, language requiring a faculty member to have a positive interest in and be well versed in objectivism was elimination. The Ayn Rand reading room requirement also was scratched.
Not all faculty members are opposed to the program, however. In 2008, professors at Marshall University were debating the ethics of that campus’s BB&T grant. But Calvin A. Kent, the vice president for business and economic research and distinguished professor of business at Marshall, who was set to teach the Ayn Rand-based course, told*Inside Higher Edthat telling professors he was looking forward to teaching *Atlas Shrugged. Telling professors what not to teach violated academic freedom, he said, whereas simply suggesting that they teach one view among others is not.
"The expectation is that this book will be used. I don't think that is an unreasonable expectation," he said. "I would not go around telling the history department or the English department that they have no business using a particular novel or a particular historian. … For someone to tell us that we should or should not include something smacks of censorship.”
Beets disagreed. He said it was simply inappropriate for a corporation -- whether it was pushing Ayn Rand or Karl Marx -- to buy its way into the curriculum.
“I have to admit I’m biased because I’m a university professor,” he said, “but the content and course work in a university has traditionally been based on faculty standards. … I’m not sure what you’re buying when you’re a student and paying top dollar and not really getting the professor’s best course design. Instead you’re getting the corporation’s perspective of what they want to you learn, and that’s a different education and feel.”
Cynthia Williams, a BB&T spokeswoman, said the bank was essentially out of the Ayn Rand business, since it stopped awarding Moral Foundations of Capitalism grants roughly five years ago, when Allison left the bank. BB&T’s foundation now focuses on financial literacy and leadership programs for K-12 students, adults and some college students. Williams rejected the idea that the bank had a transparency problem in relation to Moral Foundations, saying that it doesn’t advertise any of its charitable work.
“When we give money to someone, we just give it," she said.
Beets said that even if the bank’s stopped giving grants, the story still needs to be told.
“Much of the reason for the continuing importance of BB&T's influence on university curricula is the precedent it sets for other corporations,” he said. “BB&T was able to pay an average of $1.1 million to many colleges and universities to include a specific ideology in college courses with minimal transparency and minimal concern from academia, BB&T stockholders or depositors, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Securities and Exchange Commission. And in many cases, state governments even matched their payments. This is a successful example of exporting corporation ideology that many corporations are likely to follow in the future.”
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coinbase's plan to go public last April highlights a troubling trend among tech companies: Its founding team will maintain voting control, making it mostly immune to the wishes of outside investors.
The best-known U.S. cryptocurrency exchange is doing this by creating two classes of shares. One class will be available to the public. The other is reserved for the founders, insiders and early investors, and will wield 20 times the voting power of regular shares. That will ensure that after all is said and done, the insiders will control 53.5% of the votes.
Coinbase will join dozens of other publicly traded tech companies – many with household names such as Google, Facebook, Doordash, Airbnb and Slack – that have issued two types of shares in an effort to retain control for founders and insiders. The reason this is becoming increasingly popular has a lot to do with Ayn Rand, one of Silicon Valley's favorite authors, and the “myth of the founder" her writings have helped inspire.
Engaged investors and governance experts like me generally loathe dual-class shares because they undermine executive accountability by making it harder to rein in a wayward CEO. I first stumbled upon this method executives use to limit the influence of pesky outsiders while working on my doctoral dissertation on hostile takeovers in the late 1980s.
But the risks of this trend are greater than simply entrenching bad management. Today, given the role tech companies play in virtually every corner of American life, it poses a threat to democracy as well.
All in the family
Dual-class voting structures have been around for decades.
When Ford Motor Co. went public in 1956, its founding family used the arrangement to maintain 40% of the voting rights. Newspaper companies like The New York Times and The Washington Post often use the arrangement to protect their journalistic independence from Wall Street's insatiable demands for profitability.
In a typical dual-class structure, the company will sell one class of shares to the public, usually called class A shares, while founders, executives and others retain class B shares with enough voting power to maintain majority voting control. This allows the class B shareholders to determine the outcome of matters that come up for a shareholder vote, such as who is on the company's board.
Advocates see a dual-class structure as a way to fend off short-term thinking. In principle, this insulation from investor pressure can allow the company to take a long-term perspective and make tough strategic changes even at the expense of short-term share price declines. Family-controlled businesses often view it as a way to preserve their legacy, which is why Ford remains a family company after more than a century.
It also makes a company effectively immune from hostile takeovers and the whims of activist investors.
Checks and balances
But this insulation comes at a cost for investors, who lose a crucial check on management.
Indeed, dual-class shares essentially short-circuit almost all the other means that limit executive power. The board of directors, elected by shareholder vote, is the ultimate authority within the corporation that oversees management. Voting for directors and proposals on the annual ballot are the main methods shareholders have to ensure management accountability, other than simply selling their shares.
Recent research shows that the value and stock returns of dual-class companies are lower than other businesses, and they're more likely to overpay their CEO and waste money on expensive acquisitions.
Companies with dual-class shares rarely made up more than 10% of public listings in a given year until the 2000s, when tech startups began using them more frequently, according to data collected by University of Florida business professor Jay Ritter. The dam began to break after Facebook went public in 2012 with a dual-class stock structure that kept founder Mark Zuckerberg firmly in control – he alone controls almost 60% of the company.
In 2020, over 40% of tech companies that went public did so with two or more classes of shares with unequal voting rights.
This has alarmed governance experts, some investors and legal scholars.
Ayn Rand and the myth of the superhuman founder
If the dual-class structure is bad for investors, then why are so many tech companies able to convince them to buy their shares when they go public?
I attribute it to Silicon Valley's mythology of the founder –- what I would dub an “Ayn Rand theory of corporate governance" that credits founders with superhuman vision and competence that merit deference from lesser mortals. Rand's novels, most notably “Atlas Shrugged," portray an America in which titans of business hold up the world by creating innovation and value but are beset by moochers and looters who want to take or regulate what they have created.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Rand has a strong following among tech founders, whose creative genius may be “threatened" by any form of outside regulation. Elon Musk, Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong and even the late Steve Jobs all have recommended “Atlas Shrugged."
Her work is also celebrated by the venture capitalists who typically finance tech startups – many of whom were founders themselves.
The basic idea is simple: Only the founder has the vision, charisma and smarts to steer the company forward.
It begins with a powerful founding story. Michael Dell and Zuckerberg created their multibillion-dollar companies in their dorm rooms. Founding partner pairs Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and Bill Hewlett and David Packard built their first computer companies in the garage – Apple and Hewlett-Packard, respectively. Often the stories are true, but sometimes, as in Apple's case, less so.
And from there, founders face a gantlet of rigorous testing: recruiting collaborators, gathering customers and, perhaps most importantly, attracting multiple rounds of funding from venture capitalists. Each round serves to further validate the founder's leadership competence.
The Founders Fund, a venture capital firm that has backed dozens of tech companies, including Airbnb, Palantir and Lyft, is one of the biggest proselytizers for this myth, as it makes clear in its “manifesto."
“The entrepreneurs who make it have a near-messianic attitude and believe their company is essential to making the world a better place," it asserts. True to its stated belief, the fund says it has “never removed a single founder," which is why it has been a big supporter of dual-class share structures.
Another venture capitalist who seems to favor giving founders extra power is Netscape founder Marc Andreessen. His venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is Coinbase's biggest investor. And most of the companies in its portfolio that have gone public also used a dual-class share structure, according to my own review of their securities filings.
Bad for companies, bad for democracy
Giving founders voting control disrupts the checks and balances needed to keep business accountable and can lead to big problems.
WeWork founder Adam Neumann, for example, demanded “unambiguous authority to fire or overrule any director or employee." As his behavior became increasingly erratic, the company hemorrhaged cash in the lead-up to its ultimately canceled initial public offering.
Investors forced out Uber's Travis Kalanick in 2017, but not before he's said to have created a workplace culture that allegedly allowed sexual harassment and discrimination to fester. When Uber finally went public in 2019, it shed its dual-class structure.
There is some evidence that founder-CEOs are less gifted at management than other kinds of leaders, and their companies' performance can suffer as a consequence.
But investors who buy shares in these companies know the risks going in. There's much more at stake than their money.
What happens when powerful, unconstrained founders control the most powerful companies in the world?
The tech sector is increasingly laying claim to central command posts of the U.S. economy. Americans' access to news and information, financial services, social networks and even groceries is mediated by a handful of companies controlled by a handful of people.
Recall that in the wake of the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, the CEOs of Facebook and Twitter were able to eject former President Donald Trump from his favorite means of communication – virtually silencing him overnight. And Apple, Google and Amazon cut off Parler, the right-wing social media platform used by some of the insurrectionists to plan their actions. Not all of these companies have dual-class shares, but this illustrates just how much power tech companies have over America's political discourse.
One does not have to disagree with their decision to see that a form of political power is becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of companies with limited outside oversight.
Jerry Davis, Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and Professor of Management and Sociology, University of Michigan
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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alternet-no lnx
Noblesse oblige is dead: Today’s wealthy elite just don’t give a damn
Scientists explain why the wealthy struggle with empathy
Thom Hartmann
October 30, 2024
Last Sunday the richest man in America — who owes most of his wealth to President Obama bailing out his electric car company and government contracts — endorsed a man for president who’s a naked racist, fascist, and xenophobe who famously said:
“My whole life I’ve been greedy, greedy, greedy. I’ve grabbed all the money I could get. I’m so greedy. … I want to grab all that money.”
Two days before, we learned that the billionaire owners of The LA Times and The Washington Post killed their own newspaper’s planned endorsements of the Harris presidential campaign, presumably to avoid angering Donald Trump so he wouldn’t mess with their business interests should he be elected.
“To hell with democracy,” they essentially said. “There’s money to be made!”
What ever happened to the sense of obligation that wealthy Americans used to feel to help out their country and her people in need?
Maybe it’s all the new money. Maybe it’s just good old-fashioned greed. Maybe it’s the nearly psychopathic drive to crush everything and everyone in your way to make that first billion dollars that twists people’s perspectives and their view of their fellow citizens.
Whatever it is, the concept of noblesse oblige — the obligation to give back to the society that helped make you rich — seems dead for today’s “conservatives” among the morbidly rich.
It wasn’t always this way.
— At 13, Andrew Carnegie came to this country from Scotland with his parents, his younger brother, and two dollars in their collective pocket; he became, within four decades, the richest man in the world. And he funded 2,509 libraries, ultimately giving away his entire fortune before the end of his life. “The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced,” he wrote in his book The Gospel of Wealth.
— Joe Kennedy was a bank president at 25 and a millionaire by 30; he and his wife Rose pounded into their children the idea that, because of their great wealth, they had an absolute obligation to serve their nation and its people, particularly those most in need. From that simple childhood instruction came Joe Jr., who died when his plane was shot down during WWII, and the political careers of John, Robert, and Ted Kennedy.
— Foundations established by the Ford, Mellon, and Rockefeller families have all done great good in America (until Timothy Mellon disgraced his family by giving millions to Trump), and self-made billionaires Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have made funding good works central to their lives by giving away most of their fortunes.
But that noble old concept is now lost on most among the current crop of billionaires and multimillionaires. Instead of devoting themselves and their fortunes to bettering our nation, so many are instead promoting climate change denial, funding politicians who promise them tax cuts, and spearheading efforts to strip America of its social safety net and public education system.
Changing attitudes toward wealth and success have been a hallmark of the post-Reagan “greed is good” era. When the Libertarian Party was started in the 1950s by the real estate lobby to provide a front to fight against rent control and low-income rent subsidies, it — along with Ayn Rand’s writings — provided the morbidly rich with a convenient excuse for greed.
If everybody acted with maximum greed at all times, they argued, all of that greed would power society toward a new utopian era. It was demonstrably a lie, but provided a great excuse for extremely wealthy individuals to back away from the philanthropy that helps America and its people, replacing those efforts by funding think tanks and politicians who champion more tax loopholes, deregulation, and voter suppression.
As John Kenneth Galbraith famously wrote:
“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”
These billionaires have also supported sycophantic scholars and media stars willing to promote the idea that they didn’t get rich because of luck or coming from wealthy families, but, rather because of their rare and extraordinary talent and brilliance.
To this bizarre end, at least one of today’s billionaires who came to America from South Africa seems committed to impregnating as many white women as possible to spread his good genes.
As the gap between the ultra-wealthy and everyone else has widened, we’ve experienced less social connection and empathy between economic classes.
America also now has the greatest income inequality in the developed world. The morbidly rich have largely separated themselves from the rest of us, traveling on private jets through private airports that don’t even check security, vacationing on their massive private yachts with Supreme Court justices, and living in gated compounds with round-the-clock security and live-in butlers, cooks, and nannies.
Another thing that may be causing so many of America’s billionaires to abandon philanthropic efforts to help the country that made them rich is the globalization of wealth.
Because many now run business empires that span the globe, they feel less tied to any particular local community or even to the United States. Others, wanting to continue to do business with authoritarian regimes, simply avoid doing anything here that might be seen as supportive of democracy or even of America.
Reagan’s massive income tax cuts, lowering the top bracket from 70 percent down into the twenties, give another strong incentive to obscenely wealthy individuals to hang onto every penny. When you’re no longer looking at high tax rates, you no longer need the tax breaks that come with charitable good works.
Finally, between the decline of social expectations of generosity and the fetishizing of capitalism, some billionaires are now embracing what they call “philanthrocapitalism.” Pushing everything from private prisons to private schools to privatizing Medicare and Social Security, they argue that the so-called “free market” will solve all social problems.
We thus need to create a cultural shift that reframes wealth not just as a privilege, but as a responsibility to contribute positively to society, bringing back the notion of noblesse oblige. This requires a multi-faceted approach involving education, incentives, and a redefinition of social norms.
We should teach the concept of noblesse oblige in our elementary schools, both to inculcate future individuals who may rise to great wealth and to give our people the ability to spot and shame those rich people who ignore their obligations to society.
Social recognition is another way to amplify noblesse oblige by publicly acknowledging and celebrating wealthy individuals and families whose generosity has had real and positive impact.
We also need to return to the tax incentives for philanthropy by returning to a top tax bracket well north of 50 percent which can be reduced through charitable contributions. Similarly, corporations should be both socially pushed and financially incentivized to consider their broader social impact.
Finally, let’s encourage and reward those filmmakers and television producers who embrace social issues like Frank Capra did with It’s a Wonderful Life.
We occasionally get a taste of this with movies like the Dark Knight series, where wealthy Bruce Wayne becomes Batman to help his city and its people, but more movies and TV shows with a message of social conscience and noblesse oblige could have a real impact on the generation coming up now.
The rich, as Jesus noted obliquely when speaking of the poor, will always be with us. But there are ways we as a society can encourage them to be less destructive of the public good. We should take them.
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alternet-no lnx
Inside the billionaire's trick to keep people from voting
Thom Hartmann
September 23, 2024
Outside of Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan (and a hedge fund guy), just about all American billionaires are white. And while their white privilege helped most of them to become billionaires in the first place, for the politically active billionaires on the right, it’s their money that they care about the most.
Fred Koch, the founding patriarch of the Koch family, was an early supporter of the John Birch Society (JBS), which vigorously opposed any efforts to reduce the powers of the very wealthy white people or elevate the wealth or political power of poor or working-class people. Their most public positions in the 1950s and 1960s were against racial integration and communism— the ultimate method for leveling the fortunes of the rich. The JBS opposed virtually all “welfare” legislation, from Social Security to Medicare to unemployment insurance, calling it socialism and equating it with a softer version of communism. Around that same time, a Russian immigrant who’d fled the Soviet Union (her father had lost his pharmacy shop to the Bolshevik Revolution) came to America with dreams of becoming a great author or actress. Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum chose the stage and pen name of Ayn Rand, and in the 1950s she wrote a rather simplistic novel celebrating inherited wealth.
In Atlas Shrugged, a young woman and her hapless brother inherit a railroad from their father and try to grow it strong over opposition from the unions, which want a safe workplace and reasonable pay. As George Monbiot wrote:
In a notorious passage, she argues that all the passengers in a train filled with poisoned fumes deserved their fate. One, for instance, was a teacher who taught children to be team players; one was a mother married to a civil servant, who cared for her children; one was a housewife “who believed that she had the right to elect politicians, of whom she knew nothing.”35
It means nothing, in other words, if average people are ground into the dirt. But when people who inherited wealth face challenges, particularly those from average working families, they should be able to utterly destroy them.
ALSO READ: Trump has a brand new front in the Haitian conspiracy push
In a subsequent novel, The Fountainhead, one of the “producers” of her mythology rapes a woman, but it’s all good because the woman decides that she enjoys it mid-rape. Monbiot boils it down simply: “Rand’s is the philosophy of the psychopath, a misanthropic fantasy of cruelty, revenge, and greed.”
While Fred Koch was helping the JBS in its fight against taxes and regulation, his sons were apparently reading Ayn Rand and taking her philosophy of radical selfishness to heart. They were also, by the 1970s, running the Koch oil operation and having constant struggles with regulators, particularly during the Carter administration.
Looking for political juice, David Koch joined and then largely took over the Libertarian Party in the late 1970s.
That political party had been created by the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), a lobbying group formed in 1946 that represented the Big Three carmakers, the top three US oil companies, Monsanto, DuPont, GE, Merrill Lynch, Eli Lilly, and both US Steel and Republic Steel. Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society, was on its board of directors, as were United Fruit president Herb Cornuelle; National Association of Manufacturers director and DuPont and GM board member Donaldson Brown; and Leonard Read, a longtime US Chamber of Commerce executive.
The mission of the new libertarian movement was straightforward: to lobby for the interests of big business and the uber-wealthy people that such business had created.
The same year that the FEE was created and they began the rollout of libertarianism, Congress busted an obscure University of Chicago economist named Milton Friedman for illegally shilling for the real estate industry.
As Mark Ames wrote:
The purpose of the FEE—and libertarianism, as it was originally created—was to supplement big business lobbying with a pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-economics rationale to back up its policy and legislative attacks on labor and government regulations.
This background is important in the Milton Friedman story because Friedman is a founder of libertarianism and neoliberalism, and because the corrupt lobbying deal he was busted playing a part in was arranged through the Foundation for Economic Education.36
Friedman was later implicated in the aftermath of the brutal and violent takedown of democracy in Chile, and his acolytes helped privatize the state-owned properties of the Soviet Union, creating the kleptocratic and oligarchic government that now runs Russia and many of the former Soviet states. Libertarianism, it turns out, has had real-world impacts, which include the deaths of hundreds of thousands.
No country has ever successfully established a libertarian form of economy or governance; it was, after all, a scam set up to front for the very rich, and the corporations that made them that way. But that hasn’t stopped libertarian and corporatist ideologues from trying.
While Chile and Russia are well-known examples, few Americans seem to remember how George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld simply stood on the sidelines watching as the treasures of Iraq were looted after the United States took down their government.
It was to be a Grand Experiment: they’d finally prove that without government interference in a nation’s economy or social systems, an utopia would emerge. L. Paul Bremer was their front man, arriving in Iraq on May 2, 2003, to begin the process of “freeing” the country’s economy so that the world’s corporations would flood in and create a paradise.
As Naomi Klein wrote for Harper’s Magazine in an article titled “Baghdad Year Zero”:
The tone of Bremer’s tenure was set with his first major act on the job: he fired 500,000 state workers, most of them soldiers, but also doctors, nurses, teachers, publishers, and printers. Next, he flung open the country’s borders to absolutely unrestricted imports: no tariffs, no duties, no inspections, no taxes. Iraq, Bremer declared two weeks after he arrived, was “open for business.”
One month later, Bremer unveiled the centerpiece of his reforms. Before the invasion, Iraq’s non-oil-related economy had been dominated by 200 state-owned companies, which produced everything from cement to paper to washing machines. In June, Bremer flew to an economic summit in Jordan and announced that these firms would be privatized immediately. “Getting inefficient state enterprises into private hands,” he said, “is essential for Iraq’s economic recovery.” It would be the largest state liquidation sale since the collapse of the Soviet Union.37
Once again, Milton Friedman, the FEE’s heirs, and libertarianism made a few more billionaires and destroyed the lives of literally millions of people.
The source of the funds being channeled to Friedman back in 1949 was a man named Herbert Nelson, who was the chief lobbyist and executive vice president of the National Association of Real Estate Boards, which not only was opposed to rent control laws but also had one of the largest lobbying budgets in Washington, DC.
Congressional investigators found a letter he wrote in 1949 saying:
“I do not believe in democracy. I think it stinks. I don’t think anybody except direct taxpayers should be allowed to vote.
“I don’t believe women should be allowed to vote at all. Ever since they started, our public affairs have been in a worse mess than ever.”38
Although the details are still a bit fuzzy, it appears that libertarianism (and the creation of a political party using that name) was Nelson’s idea, or at least one he promoted vigorously. With a budget of over $60 million (in today’s dollars), Nelson hired the FEE to come up with a third party that would argue for the interests of the wealthy developers and landlords he represented. The FEE, in turn, hired Milton Friedman.
Reason Magazine, heavily funded by the Kochs, was the main voice of the libertarian movement in the 1970s, and in 1977 it published a fascinating article by Moshe Kroy that described how libertarians should market their free-market fundamentalism to skeptical Americans.
Noting that it was important not to lie to people outright, Kroy wrote:
“The point is that you can use tricks—and you’d better, if you really want libertarianism to have a fighting chance.”39
The tricks involved repackaging and reframing libertarian dogma and using “salesmanship.”
For example, Kroy asserted that the average person wouldn’t understand an abstraction like individual rights. So don’t even bother explaining how libertarianism would shrink government and empower corporations and the rich. “Instead,” Kroy wrote”
“[W]hat you can do is to explain to him that libertarianism is just against one thing: CRIME. By crime you mean just what he means: theft, robbery, kidnapping, enslavement. He will of course agree, because he thinks this is obvious. Then you just explain (at great length, and with many examples) that taxation is armed robbery, that inflation through deficit spending and money printing is theft—as well as forgery of money—that draft is basically kidnapping, etc.”40
This was something the average person could understand. The government that people thought would protect them from polluting corporations, would provide an efficient court and fiscal system to protect their jobs and bank accounts from corporate grifters, and would defend their lives in war if necessary—that government was, in fact, an evil thing.
If the billionaires could get the average American to look at government the way that oil, chemical, real estate, and banking industry billionaires did, and just elect politicians who were bought and paid for by those industries, then things would get very, very easy.
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no lnx
Robert Reich: Donald Trump and Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand by Talbot
August 11, 2023
Friends,
:{:{Thanks for joining me again as we explore the common good — what it is, where it went, how it can be revived and strengthened.}:
The idea of “the common good” was once widely understood and accepted in America. After all, the U.S. Constitution was designed for “We the people” seeking to “promote the general welfare” — not for “me the selfish jerk seeking as much wealth and power as possible.”
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What happened? One clue is found in the writings of writer-philosopher Ayn Rand, who argued that the common good was bunk.
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Donald Trump has called Rand his favorite writer and said he identifies with Howard Roark, the protagonist of The Fountainhead — an architect who dynamites a housing project he designed because the builders did not precisely follow his blueprints. (I doubt Trump has ever read Rand, but for the sake of this essay, let’s assume he has.)
Rex Tillerson, secretary of state under Trump, called Rand’s Atlas Shrugged his favorite book. Former Trump CIA chief Mike Pompeo cited Rand as a major inspiration. Before he withdrew his nomination to be Trump’s secretary of labor, Andrew Puzder said he devoted much of his free time to reading Rand. Paul Ryan, former Republican leader of the House of Representatives, required his staff to read Rand.
Rand fans are also found at some of the high reaches of American business. Uber’s founder and former CEO, Travis Kalanick, has described himself as a Rand follower. He applied many of her ideas to Uber’s code of values. Kalanick even used The Fountainhead’s original cover art as his Twitter avatar.
Ronald Reagan professed to being a follower of Rand. His policies — and those of his contemporary conservative leader, Margaret Thatcher of Great Britain — appeared to draw inspiration from her thoughts and writing.
In order to understand what happened to the common good, we need to examine Ayn Rand and her arguments against it.
Rand was a Russian émigré to the United States whose father’s business had been confiscated during the Russian Revolution. Her most influential writing occurred in the 1940s and 1950s, in the shadow of European fascism and Soviet communism.
She was best known for two highly popular novels that are still widely read today — The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957) — and for other writings and interviews in which she expounded her views about what she called the “virtue of selfishness.”
“The common good is an undefined and undefinable concept,” she wrote, a “moral blank check for those who attempt to embody it.”
When the common good of a society is regarded as something apart from and superior to the individual desires of its members, “it means that the good of some men takes precedence over the good of others, with those others consigned to the status of sacrificial animals.”
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Rand saw government actions that require people to give their money and resources to other people under the pretext of a “common good” as steps toward tyranny. It was far better, in Rand’s view, to base society on autonomous, self-seeking, and self-absorbed individuals. To her, the only community that any of us has in common are family and friends, maintained voluntarily.
If we want to be generous, she thought, that’s fine, but no one should have the power to coerce us into generosity. And nothing beyond our circle of voluntary associations merits our trust.
No institutions or organizations should be able to demand commitments from us. All that can be expected or justified from anyone is selfish behavior, she thought.That behavior is expressed most clearly through the acts of selling what we have to sell and buying what we want to buy in a free market. For her, the common good does not exist.
Rand’s philosophy was updated and formalized in 1974 by Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick in his bestselling book Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Nozick argued that individual rights are the only justifiable foundation for a society. Instead of a common good, he wrote, “there are only individual people, different individual people, with their own individual lives.”
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When Rand and Nozick propounded these ideas, they seemed quaint if not far-fetched. Anyone who lived through the prior half-century had witnessed our interdependence during the Great Depression and World War II.
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After the war, we had pooled our resources to finance all sorts of public goods — schools and universities, a national highway system, and health care for the aged and poor (Medicare and Medicaid). We rebuilt war-torn Europe. We sought to guarantee the civil rights and voting rights of African Americans. We opened doors of opportunity to women.
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Of course there was a common good. We were living it.
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But starting in the late 1970s, Rand became the intellectual godmother of modern-day American conservatism, especially its libertarian strand.
I BELIEVE RAND, NOZICK, AND THEIR MORE MODERN INCARNATIONS are dangerously wrong. Not only does the common good exist, but it is essential for a society to function.
Without voluntary adherence to a set of common notions about right and wrong, daily life would be insufferable. We would be living in a jungle where only the strongest, cleverest, and most wary could hope to survive. This would not be a society. It wouldn’t even be a civilization, because there would be no civility at its core.
Americans sharply disagree about exactly what we want for America or for the world. But we must agree on basic principles — such as how we deal with our disagreements, the importance of our democratic institutions, our obligations toward the law, and our respect for the truth — if we’re to participate in the same society.
It’s our agreement to these principles that connects us.
To take the most basic example, we depend on people’s widespread and voluntary willingness to abide by laws — not just the literal letter of laws but also the spirit and intent behind them.
Consider what would happen if no one voluntarily obeyed the law without first calculating what they could gain by violating it, as compared with the odds of the violation’s being discovered multiplied by the size of the likely penalty.
We’d be living in bedlam.
If everyone behaved like Donald Trump, much of our time and attention would have to be devoted to outwitting or protecting ourselves from other Trumps. We would have to assume everyone else was out to exploit us, if they could.
Every interaction would need to be carefully hedged. Penalties would need to rise and police enforcement to increase, in order to prevent the Trumps among us from calculating they might have more to gain by violating the law and risking the penalty than by abiding by it. And because laws can’t possibly predict and prevent every potential wrong, laws would have to become ever more detailed and exacting in order to prevent the Trumps from circumventing them.
Even then we’d be in trouble. We couldn’t rely on legislators to block or close legal loopholes, because Trump lobbyists would bribe legislators to keep them open, and Trump legislators would be open to taking such bribes. Even if we managed to close the loopholes, we couldn’t rely on police to enforce the laws, because Trumps would bribe the police not to, and Trump police would also accept the bribes.
Without a shared sense of responsibility to the common good, we would have to assume that everybody — including legislators, judges, regulators, and police — was acting selfishly, making and enforcing laws for their own benefit.
The followers of Ayn Rand who glorify the “free market” and denigrate “government” are fooling themselves if they think the “free market” gets them off this Trump hook.
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The market is itself a human creation — a set of laws and rules that define what can be owned and traded and how. Government doesn’t “intrude” on the “free market.” It creates the market. Government officials — legislators, administrators, regulators, judges, and heads of state — must decide on and enforce such laws and rules in order for a market to exist. Without norms for the common good, officials have no way to make these decisions other than their own selfish interests.
HOPEFULLY, government officials base these sorts of decisions on their notions about the common good. But if Trumps were making and enforcing such rules, the rules would be based on whatever it took for these Trump officials to gain personal wealth and power. The “free market” would be a sham, and most people would lose out in it. (As we will see in the pages to come, something close to this has in fact occurred.)
Truth itself is a common good. Through history, one of the first things tyrants do is attack independent truth-tellers — philosophers (Plato), scientists (Galileo), and the free and independent press — thereby confusing the public and substituting their own “facts.”
Without a shared truth, democratic deliberation is hobbled. As poet and philosopher Václav Havel put it, “If the main pillar of the system is living a lie, then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living in truth.”
Yet in a world populated by people like Trump, we could not trust anyone to be truthful if they could do better for themselves by lying. We couldn’t count on any claim by sellers of any product or service. Internet-based “reputational ratings” would be of little value, because Trump raters would be easily bribed.
Journalists would shade their reports for their own selfish advantage, taking bribes from advertisers or currying favor with politicians. Teachers would offer lessons to satisfy wealthy or powerful patrons. Historians would alter history if by doing so they gained wealth or power. Scientists would doctor evidence for similar selfish motives. The truth would degenerate into a cacophony of competing factual claims.
We couldn’t trust doctors or pharmacists to give us the right medications. We couldn’t trust bankers and accountants not to fleece us, restaurants not to poison us, lawyers not to hoodwink us. Professional ethics would be meaningless.
The common good is especially imperiled when a president of the United States alleges that an election was stolen from him, with no evidence that it was. Such baseless claims erode trust. They fuel conspiracy theories. They can lead to violence.
MOST BASICALLY, THE COMMON GOOD DEPENDS ON PEOPLE TRUSTING that most others in society will also adhere to the common good, rather than lie or otherwise take advantage of them. In this way, civic trust is self-enforcing and self-perpetuating.
Polls tell us that a majority of today’s Americans worry that the nation is losing its national identity. The core of that identity has never been “we’re better than anyone else” nationalism. Nor has it been the whiteness of our skin or the uniformity of our ethnicity.
Our core identity — the most precious legacy we have been given by the generations who came before us — is the ideals we share, the good we hold in common. If we are losing our national identity, it is not because we are becoming blacker or browner or speak in more languages than we once did. It is because we are losing our sense of common good.
THE GENIUS OF A SYSTEM BASED ON POLITICAL EQUALITY is that it doesn’t require us to agree on every issue, but only to agree to be bound by decisions that emerge from the system.
Some of us may want to prohibit abortions because we believe life begins at conception; others of us believe women should have the right to determine what happens to their bodies; some of us want stricter environmental protections; others, more lenient. We are free to take any particular position on these and any other issues. But as political equals, we are bound to accept the outcomes even if we dislike them. This requires enough social trust for us to regard the views and interests of those with whom we disagree as equally worthy of consideration to our own.
Ayn Rand had it completely wrong. Moral choices logically involve duties to others, not just calculations about what’s best for ourselves.
When members of a society ask, “What is the right or decent thing to do?” they necessarily draw upon understandings of these mutual obligations. Our contemporary culture of self-promotion, iPhones, selfies, and personal branding churns out cynics and narcissists, to be sure. But our loyalties and attachments define who we are.
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These weekly essays are based on chapters from my book THE COMMON GOOD, in which I apply the framework of the book to recent events and to the upcoming election. (Should you wish to read the book, here’s a link).
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https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/how-a-serial-killer-set-the-stage-for-today-s-gop/
Last weekend Senator Pat Toomey went on Jake Tapper’s State of the Union to try to clean up Republican sabotage of a bill to provide healthcare to millions of veterans exposed to toxic burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan. He didn’t do himself or his party any favors as he tried to weasel out of responsibility; America knows that after the bill was defeated Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley fist-bumped in celebration of screwing our vets.
How is it that Republicans can casually embrace such cruelty? Why have 12 GOP-controlled states refused to this day to expand Medicaid for their 30 million minimum-wage working people when the federal government covers 90 percent of the cost?
Why are Republicans so committed to destroying Medicare and Social Security? Why do they go so far as to use the disrespectful slur “democrat party” when there’s no such thing in America and never has been?
Why are Democratic members of Congress having to armor their own homes, having received over 9000 death threats so far this year, virtually all of them from domestic terrorists who Republicans refuse to repudiate? The FBI today is looking for a Matt Gaetz supporter who threatened to murder Gaetz’s Democratic opponent: why are these people attracted to the GOP?
It turns out this is not just politics; the roots of this brutal movement in today’s GOP run from a 1927 child murderer, through a greedy real-estate lobbying group, to Ronald Reagan putting both of their philosophies into actual practice and bringing morbidly rich right-wing billionaires into the GOP fold.
As a result, Republican policies over the past 40 years not only gutted America’s middle class and transferred $50 trillion from the middle class to the top 1 percent, but also led straight to the Trump presidency and the attack on the Capitol on January 6th that he led.
The Libertarians
Reporter Mark Ames documentshow, back in the 1940s, a real estate lobbying group came up with the idea of creating a new political party to justify deregulating the real estate and finance industries so they could make more money.
:{:{This new “Libertarian Party” would give an ideological and political cover to their goal of becoming government-free, and they developed an elaborate pretense of governing philosophy around it.}:
Their principal argument was that if everybody acted separately and independently, in all cases with maximum selfishness, such behavior would actually benefit society. There would be no government needed beyond an army and a police force, and a court system to defend the rights of property owners. It was a bizarre twisting of Adam Smith’s reference to the “invisible hand” that regulated trade among nations.}:
:{:{}:
In 1980, billionaire David Koch ran for vice president on the newly formed Libertarian Party ticket. His platform included calls to privatize the Post Office, end all public schools, give Medicare and Medicaid to big insurance companies, end all taxation of the morbidly rich, terminate food and housing support and all other forms of “welfare,” deregulate all corporate oversight while shutting down the EPA and FDA, and selling off much of the federal government’s land and other assets to billionaires and big corporations.}:
Reagan, who won that 1980 election, embraced this view in his inaugural address, saying, “[G]overnment is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” He then doubled down on the idea by beginning the systematic process of gutting and crippling governmental institutions that historically had supported working people and the middle class.
The child-killer who inspired a movement
Reagan wasn’t just echoing the Libertarian vision; he was also endorsing Ayn Rand’s “objectivist” view of the world, which traces its roots to a murderous sociopath in 1927.
Back in 2015,Donald Trump told USA Today’s Kirsten Powers that his favorite book was Ayn Rand’s raped-girl-decides-she-likes-it novel, “The Fountainhead.”
“It relates to business, beauty, life and inner emotions,” he told Powers. “That book relates to … everything.”
Ayn Rand’s novels have informed libertarian Republicans like former Speaker of the House of Representatives and current Fox News board member Paul Ryan, who required interns to read her books when they joined his staff.
Powers added, “He [Trump],” told her that he “identified with Howard Roark, the protagonist who designs skyscrapers and rages against the establishment.”
Rand’s hero Roark, in fact, “raged” so much in her novel that he blew up a public housing project with dynamite.
Rand, in herJournals, explained where she got her inspiration for Howard Roark and the leading male characters in so many of her other novels. She writes that the theme of The Fountainhead, for example, is, “One puts oneself above all and crushes everything in one’s way to get the best for oneself.”
On Trump’s hero Howard Roark, she wrote that he “has learned long ago, with his first consciousness, two things which dominate his entire attitude toward life: his own superiority and the utter worthlessness of the world. He knows what he wants and what he thinks. He needs no other reasons, standards or considerations. His complete selfishness is as natural to him as breathing.”
It turns out that Roark and many of her other characters were based on a real person. The man who so inspired Ayn Rand’s fictional heroes was named William Edward Hickman, and he lived in Los Angeles during the Roaring Twenties.
Ten days before Christmas in 1927, Hickman, a teenager with slicked dark hair and tiny, muted eyes, drove up to Mount Vernon Junior High School in Los Angeles and kidnapped Marion Parker — the daughter of a wealthy banker in town.
Hickman held the girl ransom, demanding $1,500 from her father — back then about a year’s salary. Supremely confident that he would elude capture, Hickman signed his name on the ransom notes, “The Fox.”
After two days, Marion’s father agreed to hand over the ransom in exchange for the safety of his daughter. What Perry Parker didn’t know is that Hickman never intended to live up to his end of the bargain.
The Pittsburgh Press detailed what Hickman, in his own words, did next.
“It was while I was fixing the blindfold that the urge to murder came upon me,” he said. “I just couldn’t help myself. I got a towel and stepped up behind Marion. Then, before she could move, I put it around her neck and twisted it tightly.”
Hickman didn’t hold back on any of these details: he was proud of his cold-bloodedness.
“I held on and she made no outcry except to gurgle. I held on for about two minutes, I guess, and then I let go. When I cut loose the fastenings, she fell to the floor. I knew she was dead.”
But Hickman wasn’t finished. “After she was dead I carried her body into the bathroom and undressed her, all but the underwear, and cut a hole in her throat with a pocket knife to let the blood out.”
Hickman then dismembered the child piece-by-piece, putting her limbs in a cabinet in his apartment, and then wrapped up the carved-up torso, powdered the lifeless face of Marion Parker, set what was left of her stump torso with the head sitting atop it in the passenger seat of his car, and drove to meet her father to collect the ransom money.
He even sewed open her eyelids to make it look like she was alive.
On the way, Hickman dumped body parts out of his car window, before rendezvousing with Marion Parker’s father.
Armed with a shotgun so her father wouldn’t come close enough to Hickman’s car to see that Marion was dead, Hickman collected his $1,500, then kicked open the door and tossed the rest of Marion Parker onto the road. As he sped off, her father fell to his knees, screaming.
Days later, the police caught up with a defiant and unrepentant Hickman in Oregon. His lawyers pleaded insanity, but the jury gave him the gallows.
To nearly everyone, Hickman was a monster. The year of the murder, the Los Angeles Times called it “the most horrible crime of the 1920s.” Hickman was America’s most despicable villain at the time.
Ayn Rand falls in love with a “superman”
But to Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, a 21-year-old Russian political science student who’d arrived in America just two years earlier, Hickman was a hero.
Alissa was a squat five-foot-two with a flapper hairdo and wide, sunken dark eyes that gave her a haunting stare. Etched into those brooding eyes was burned the memory of a childhood backlit by the Russian Revolution.
She had just departed Leninist Russia where, almost a decade earlier, there was a harsh backlash against the Russian property owners by the Bolsheviks. Alissa’s own family was targeted, and at the age of 12 she watched as Bolshevik soldiers burst into her father’s pharmacy, looted the store, and plastered on her Dad’s doors the red emblem of the state, indicating that his private business now belonged to “the people.”
That incident left such a deep and burning wound in young Alissa’s mind that she went to college to study political science and vowed one day she’d become a famous writer to warn the world of the dangers of Bolshevism.
Starting afresh in Hollywood, she anglicized her name to Ayn Rand, and moved from prop-girl to screenwriter/novelist, basing the heroes of several of her stories on a man she was reading about in the newspapers at the time. A man she wrote effusively about in her diaries. A man she hero-worshipped.
William Edward Hickman was the most notorious man in American in 1928, having achieved the level of national fame that she craved.
Young Ayn Rand saw in Hickman the “ideal man” she based The Fountainhead on, and used to ground her philosophy and her life’s work. His greatest quality, she believed, was his unfeeling, pitiless selfishness.
Hickman’s words were carefully recounted by Rand in her Journals. His statement that, “I am like the state: what is good for me is right,” resonated deeply with her. It was the perfect articulation of her belief that if people pursued their own interests above all else — even above friends, family, or nation — the result would be utopian.
She wrote in her diary that those words of Hickman’s were, “the best and strongest expression of a real man’s psychology I ever heard.”
Hickman — the monster who boasted about how he had hacked up a 12-year-old girl — had Rand’s ear, as well as her heart. She saw a strongman archetype in him, the way that people wearing red MAGA hats see a strongman savior in Donald Trump.
As Hickman’s murder trial unfolded, Rand grew increasingly enraged at how the “mediocre” American masses had rushed to condemn her Superman.
“The first thing that impresses me about the case,” Rand wrote in reference to the Hickman trial in early notes for a book she was working on titled The Little Street, “is the ferocious rage of the whole society against one man.”
Astounded that Americans didn’t recognize the heroism Hickman showed when he proudly rose above simply conforming to society’s rules, Rand wrote, “It is not the crime alone that has raised the fury of public hatred. It is the case of a daring challenge to society. … It is the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatever for all that society holds sacred, with a consciousness all his own.”
Rand explained that when the masses are confronted with such a bold actor, they neither understood nor empathized with him. Thus, “a brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy [was] turned [by the media] into a purposeless monster.”
The protagonist of the book that Rand was writing around that time was a boy named Danny Renahan. In her notes for the book, she wrote, “The model for the boy [Renahan] is Hickman.” He would be her ideal man, and the archetype for a philosophical movement that would transform a nation.
“He is born with the spirit of Argon and the nature of a medieval feudal lord,” Rand wrote in her notes describing Renahan. “Imperious. Impatient. Uncompromising. Untamable. Intolerant. Unadaptable. Passionate. Intensely proud. Superior to the mob… an extreme ‘extremist.’ … No respect for anything or anyone.”
Rand wanted capitalism in its most raw form, uncheck by any government that could control the rules of the market or promote the benefits of society. Such good intentions had, after all, caused the hell she’d experienced in the Bolshevik Revolution.
Ayn Rand, like Hickman, found peace and justification in the extremes of her economic, political, and moral philosophy. Forget about democratic institutions, forget about regulating markets, and forget about pursuing any policies that benefit the majority at the expense of the very rich — the petty political rule-makers and rule-enforcers could never, ever do anything well or good.
Libertarianism and Ayn Rand set the stage for Trumpism
Only billionaires should rule the world, Trump has suggested.
And he tried to put it into place, installing a billionaire advocate of destroying public schools in charge of public schools, a coal lobbyist representing billionaires in charge of the EPA, an billionaire-funded oil lobbyist in charge of our public lands, and a billionaire described by Forbes as a “grifter” in charge of the Commerce Department. Trump’s chief of staff said that putting children in cages and billionaire-owned privatized concentration camps (where seven so far have died) would actually be a public good.
As Ayn Rand might say, “Don’t just ignore the rules; destroy them.”
Welfare and other social safety net programs were, as Rand saw it, “the glorification of mediocrity” in society. Providing a social safety net for the poor, disabled, or unemployed, she believed, were part of a way of thinking that promoted, “satisfaction instead of joy, contentment instead of happiness… a glow-worm instead of a fire.”
Sociopaths of the world, unite!
Rand, like Trump, lived a largely joyless life. She mercilessly manipulated people, particularly her husband and Alan Greenspan (who brought a dollar-sign-shaped floral arrangement to her funeral), and, like Trump, surrounded herself with cult-like followers who were only on the inside so long as they gave her total, unhesitating loyalty.
Like Trump, McConnell, Stefanik and their billionaire backers, Rand believed that a government working to help out working-class “looters,” instead of solely looking out for rich capitalist “producers,” was throwing its “best people” under the bus.
In Rand’s universe, theproducershad no obligations to thelooters. Providing welfare or sacrificing one nickel of your own money to help a “looter” on welfare, unemployment, or Social Security — particularly if it was “taken at the barrel of a gun” (taxes) — was morally reprehensible.
Like Trump saying, “My whole life I’ve been greedy,” for Rand looking out for numero uno was the singular name of the game — selfishness was next to godliness.
Later in Rand’s life, in 1959, as she gained more notoriety for the moral philosophy of selfishness that she named “Objectivism” and that is today at the core of libertarianism and the GOP, she sat down for an interview with
of60 Minutes.
Suggesting that selfishnessunderminesmost truly American values, Wallace bluntly challenged Rand.
“You are out to destroy almost every edifice in the contemporary American way of life,” Wallace
to Rand. “Our Judeo-Christian religion, our modified government-regulated capitalism, our rule by the majority will… you scorn churches, and the concept of God… are these accurate criticisms?”
As Wallace was reciting the public criticisms of Rand,
, as her eyes darted back and forth between the ground and Wallace’s fingers. But the question, with its implied condemnation, didn’t faze her at all. Rand said with confidence in a matter-of-fact tone, “Yes.” (4:20 in the clip)
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aha me v we // rights responsibilities ayn lurks here;
10 21 an
i know you want to know if I know what US Senator Joe Manchin wants. I do not. I do know, however, that our national discourse over taxing and spending is so warped he opposes a so-called billionaire's tax while favoring a tax on billionaires not called a billionaire's tax. Such word games conceal the truth.
Taxes pay for a full and equal democracy.
This is not how the GOP would prefer we talk about taxes. They would prefer a national debate centering on individuals living an atomized existence, separate from and unequal to others, while encouraging individuals to think of themselves as "taxpayers" who are "liberated" from the moral obligations of fellowship, community and citizenship.
There was a time when this perspective was thought radical — either it was a cover-up for greed or for something more sinister. That's why Ronald Reagan, before he was president, cited a widely admired transcendentalist writer to make that view seem respectable. In 1964, while stumping for conservative Barry Goldwater, Reagan said: "Henry David Thoreau was right: that government is best which governs least."
Thoreau was right, but Reagan was wrong. That line comes from "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience" (1849), in which Thoreau famously developed the principle of moral conscience superseding the citizen's uncritical adherence to law. The occasion was Thoreau's refusal to pay taxes he believed the government was using to fund imperial expansion, on the one hand, and advancing slavery, on the other.
So the government that Thoreau said would be better if it governed least was, to his way of thinking, an anti-democratic government — a government that, before Abraham Lincoln became president, was not of, by and for the people but instead of, by and for the interests of proto-fascist slavers in the American south. That's why Thoreau accepted prison time for failing to pay his taxes. He refused to be morally complicit in his government's crimes against humanity.
By the time Reagan stumped for Goldwater, the government had become of, by and for the people more completely than any time in the country's history. By then, President Lyndon Johnson had signed into law the 1964 Civil Rights Act, followed by the 1965 Voting Rights Act, together representing American democracy in its fullest flower yet. This is the proper context for knowing what you need to know about anti-tax rhetoric, which struggled in the 1960s but has dominated our national discourse from the time of Reagan's election through today. What you need to know is this: anti-tax is anti-democracy.
With the passing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, it began illegal for the United States government to do what it had been doing since the American founding — treating non-white people, but especially Black people, as if they were not equal citizens fully and morally entitled to the same rights and privileges as their white counterparts. Of course, an equal democratic union did not sit well with some white people.
Before 1964, anti-tax rhetoric was, to them, rich people bitching about paying their fair share. After 1964, it sounded different. It sounded, to them, like the very obscenely rich defending their "freedoms" and their "rights." With enough time and effort, the anti-tax rhetoric of the very obscenely rich was no longer thought to cover up for greed or something sinister. It was thought downright principled. By standing against the government, and standing up for "taxpayers," the GOP seemed to have a noble lineage going back to Henry David Thoreau.
Beneath the rhetoric was a belief long-standing and deeply rooted in the blood and soil of America — that nonwhite people, but especially Black people, don't count in this experiment in self-rule. "The people" doesn't include them. "The people" is us.["real am"] A government treating them as equals to us, therefore, is not a government that "sovereign citizens" can support with their tax dollars in good conscience. The whole of the "conservative movement" in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, was a movement to defund a government that would not, because it could not, treat Black people like second-class citizens. A democratic government governing the least became the best of all governments.
That Joe Manchin is trying to have it both ways is, in a sense, not surprising. He has one foot in two worlds. A world that Reagan built, in which billionaires are "job creators" who should not be "punished" for being successful. And a world being built right now, I think, on the ashes of Reagan's in which billionaires are increasingly seen, for all the right reasons, as abominations offensive to all lovers of democracy.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/business/02bbt.html
no lnx
Give BB&T Liberty, but Not a Bailout
John A. Allison IV, chairman of the banking company BB&T, is a devoted follower of Ayn Rands antigovernment views.
By Andrew Martin
Aug. 1, 2009
OVER much of the last four decades, John A. Allison IV built BB&T from a local bank in North Carolina into a regional powerhouse that has weathered the economic crisis far better than many of its troubled rivals ? largely by avoiding financial gimmickry.
And in his spare time, Mr. Allison travels the country making speeches about his bank’s distinctive philosophy.
Speaking at a recent convention in Boston to a group of like-minded business people and students, Mr. Allison tells a story: A boy is playing in a sandbox, only to have his truck taken by another child. A fight ensues, and the boy’s mother tells him to stop being selfish and to share.
“You learned in that sandbox at some really deep level that it’s bad to be selfish,” says Mr. Allison, adding that the mother has taught a horrible lesson. “To say man is bad because he is selfish is to say it’s bad because he’s alive.”
If Mr. Allison’s speech sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because it’s based on the philosophy of Ayn Rand, who celebrated the virtues of reason, self-interest and laissez-faire capitalism while maintaining that altruism is a destructive force. In Ms. Rand’s world, nothing is more heroic ? and sexy ? than a hard-working businessman free to pursue his wealth. And nothing is worse than a pesky bureaucrat trying to restrict business and redistribute wealth.
Or, as Mr. Allison explained, “put balls and chains on good people, and bad things happen.”
Ms. Rand, who died in 1982, has all sorts of admirers on Wall Street, in corporate boardrooms and in the entertainment industry, including the hedge fund manager Clifford Asness, the former baseball great Cal Ripken Jr. and the Whole Foods chief executive, John Mackey.
But Mr. Allison, who remains BB&T’s chairman after retiring as chief executive in December, has emerged as perhaps the most vocal proponent of Ms. Rand’s ideas and of the dangers of government meddling in the markets. For a dedicated Randian like him, the government’s headlong rush to try to rescue and fix the economy is a horrifying realization of his worst fears.
Indeed, so many bad things are happening that many followers of Ms. Rand, known as objectivists, believe that the ugly scenario in her 1957 novel “Atlas Shrugged” ? in which the government takes over industry as the economy progressively collapses ? is playing out in real life.
New regulations are being enacted by the day. The rich may be forced to pay for health care for the poor. The auto industry is a ward of the state. An activist administration occupies the White House. And, of course, the federal government has inserted itself into the nation’s banks, including BB&T, which accepted $3.1 billion in bailout money under the Troubled Asset Relief Program.
“Rand predicted what would happen 50 years ago,” says Mr. Allison, who notes that his bank was forced to take the money, which he labels “a rip-off.” “It’s a nightmare for anyone who supports individual rights.”
But as cringe-inducing as the government’s actions may be for objectivists like him, there is a silver lining: sales of “Atlas Shrugged,” which Ms. Rand considered her definitive work, are better than ever.
In the first six months of 2009, Penguin Books shipped more than 300,000 copies of the book, which opens with the famous question, “Who is John Galt?” That’s 25 percent more than in all of 2008.
“It’s just gone through the roof,” said Kara Welsh, publisher for the New American Library, a division of Penguin. There’s even a renewed effort to make a miniseries out of the book. The studio Lionsgate, along with the producers Howard and Karen Baldwin, hope to begin shooting as early as next spring.
“It is incredibly timely,” said Michael Burns, vice chairman of Lionsgate.
While book sales haven’t translated into a flood of new converts to objectivism, Yaron Brook, president of the Ayn Rand Institute, said attendance at this year’s Objectivist Summer Conference in Boston ? where Mr. Allison delivered his speech ? was the best yet for an East Coast event. (Attendance at conferences on the West Coast, where the institute is based, tends to be 25 percent higher, he says.)
Among the participants was Dr. Shira Miller, who became interested in Ms. Rand’s writing in college. She says objectivism continues to provide her with “a moral philosophy for how to live a good and happy life.”
Dr. Miller, who practices age-management medicine in Los Angeles, doesn’t accept Medicare or health insurance so there can be no third-party interference with her individual rights or those of her patients, she says. “Medicine is a product just like any other,” says Dr. Miller, likening it to toasters, computers or legal advice. “I should have the right to sell or trade it on my own terms, just like any other business owner.”
For his part, Mr. Brook is encouraged by the new interest in Ms. Rand’s work, but feels that it has yet to have much impact on the political debate. He’s also struggling to change a popular perception that the financial crisis was caused by deregulation and the fiscal policies of a top Rand disciple: Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman.
Mr. Brook argues that the problem wasn’t deregulation, but “misregulation.” He also says it’s unfortunate that Mr. Greenspan continues to be associated with Ms. Rand. While the two were close in the 1960s and ’70s, Mr. Greenspan abandoned objectivism decades ago, he says. Through a spokesman, Mr. Greenspan declined to comment.
“If you look at every aspect of the political world, things are going against us, from health care to cap-and-trade,” Mr. Brook says. “And it’s accepted wisdom that the financial crisis was caused by capitalism.”
“In the narrow sense of objectivism, things have never been so good,” he adds. “When you look at the larger world, it’s pretty depressing.”
THE enduring popularity of Ms. Rand bewilders her many detractors, who complain that her writing is melodramatic, heavy-handed and intellectually bereft.
“To describe her as a minor figure in the history of philosophical thinking about knowledge and reality would be a wild overstatement,” says Brian Leiter, director of the Center for Law, Philosophy and Human Values at the University of Chicago. “She’s irrelevant.”
Professor Leiter conducted an informal poll in March on his philosophy blog, asking, “Which person do you most wish the media would stop referring to as a ‘philosopher’?” The choices were Jacques Derrida, Ms. Rand and Leo Strauss. Ms. Rand won by a landslide, with 75 percent of the roughly 1,500 votes cast.
Professor Leiter says Ms. Rand’s views on moral philosophy and objective reality are “simple-minded in the extreme.”
“She doesn’t understand the historical positions of thinkers on these issues, such as Hume and Kant,” he says. “Even the minority of philosophers with some sympathy for her celebration of the virtues of selfishness usually find her general philosophical system embarrassing.”
Others contend that a lack of constraints on self-interested and greedy business people set the financial crisis in motion ? a view that tends to undermine Ms. Rand’s theories on the value and social benefits of unfettered ambition and limited government.
“It takes a great leap of ideological blindness to look at the past few years and think that the main problem was too much government involvement,” said Robert B. Reich, a public policy professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who was a labor secretary in the Clinton administration.
Mark A. Thoma, an economist at the University of Oregon, says the financial crisis would have been worse if the government hadn’t rapidly intervened.
“I completely disagree with the idea that letting the markets heal themselves is the best idea,” he says. “We tried that in the ’30s, and it didn’t work out so well.”
Fiscal conservatives take an opposite tack, arguing that the government has intervened in overly aggressive and risky ways. They find much to praise in Ms. Rand’s economic views. Yet even for that crowd, her social views are a tougher sell.
Ms. Rand was an ardent atheist who considered the cross a symbol of how “a man of perfect virtue” sacrificed himself for a bunch of losers. “It is in the name of that symbol that men are asked to sacrifice themselves for their inferiors,” she said.
She had little time for women who stay home to raise children. Ms. Rand wrote sex scenes that one critic recently described as “dark, kinky and weird, but not in a good way,” in which normally tough businesswomen melt under the steely gaze and rough hand of übercapitalists.
Even so, Ms. Rand’s books have sold briskly without the sanction of academics and book critics since they were published.[Image
Alan Greenspan, center, was a follower of Ayn Rand, right with her husband, Frank OConnor. With them in 1974 were Mr. Greenspans mother, Rose Goldsmith, and President Gerald R. Ford.]
Her black-and-white views were shaped by her upbringing in Russia, where her father’s pharmacy was taken over by Communists, who also suppressed free thought at her university. In 1926, she came to the United States, which she had idealized as a free nation that valued human achievement.
A short, chain-smoking woman with a severe haircut and heavy Russian accent, she once worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood and fashioned herself as “a radical for capitalism.” As her reputation grew, she was interviewed by Johnny Carson, Phil Donahue and Playboy magazine.
A member of her New York salon was the young economist Mr. Greenspan. Ms. Rand called him “the Undertaker” for his dark clothing and dour manner.
Mr. Greenspan, who wrote an article for one of Ms. Rand’s nonfiction books advocating a gold standard, was among those who listened to and praised early drafts of “Atlas Shrugged,” which Ms. Rand started writing in 1946.
It tells the story of Dagny Taggart, a brilliant and leggy railroad executive who steamrolls the “looters” and “moochers” who populate a deteriorating America to keep her trains running on time.
She is part of a loose collection of can-do industrialists who struggle against a rising tide of government intervention that seeks to lessen competition and redistribute wealth “for the common good.”
As conditions worsen, the most talented people flee society to an idyllic mountain retreat overseen by an ingenious inventor, John Galt, who wants to deprive a corrupt nation of its greatest minds and to facilitate its demise. He warns that the best thing the bureaucrats could do is “get the hell out of my way.”
Mr. Brook, of the Ayn Rand Institute, says Ms. Rand understood then, in 1957, an emerging trend toward more government influence, where “somebody’s need is a claim against our wealth.”
The problem with this, he says, is all too real.
“The last 50 years have been an orgy of placing need above wealth creation, above personal pursuit of happiness,” Mr. Brook says. “I think we are seeing the consequences of that today.”
MR. ALLISON of BB&T has the tall, lean frame, copper-colored hair and confident demeanor of many of Ms. Rand’s fictional heroes, including John Galt ? a look “which would not seek forgiveness or grant it.”
He also has a résumé befitting a Rand prophet. He started at BB&T, once known as the Branch Banking and Trust Company, in 1971 and became chief executive in 1989, when the bank had $4.7 billion in assets.
By the time he retired as C.E.O. in December, he had overseen 60 bank and savings-institution acquisitions and turned BB&T into the 11th-largest bank in the nation, with $152 billion in assets, according to the bank.
A 60-year-old who speaks in a rapid-fire Southern accent, Mr. Allison says the current financial crisis is primarily the government’s fault. He criticizes the Fed as trying to manipulate normal business cycles and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as facilitating mortgages to people who couldn’t afford them.
The government’s remedies have made matters only worse, he says: “Almost everything that has been done since this crisis started is going to reduce our long-term standard of living.”
Mr. Allison says the government forced BB&T and some other healthy banks to accept TARP money to obscure that they were simply trying to save several large banks like Citigroup.
“Everyone thinks we got some kind of subsidy,” he says, noting that his company paid the money back in June, with interest. “It’s going to cost us about $250 million for money we didn’t want.”
He suggests that government get out of the way and let businesses start making money again. An example of how to make money? Look no further than BB&T, which, he says, has a proven formula for success that centers on “an uncompromising commitment to reason.”
Under Mr. Allison, new executives were handed a copy of “Atlas Shrugged.” All employees get a 30-page pamphlet describing BB&T’s philosophy and values: reason, independent thinking and decisions based on facts.
“Wishing something is so does not make it so,” Mr. Allison says. “I guarantee that long before the rest of us knew, those geniuses at Lehman Brothers knew that something was wrong, but they evaded it.”
Mr. Allison was introduced to Ms. Rand’s work in college, when he read her book “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.” He describes egalitarianism as the “most destructive principle in our society” and believes that the best employees should receive the most rewards.
“It’s not true that everybody is equal,” he says. “A lot of business people don’t want to deal with nonperformance.”
Mr. Allison cites two examples in which the bank’s philosophy guided its real-world decisions.
After the Supreme Court upheld the right of local governments in 2005 to condemn private property and hand it to someone else for commercial development, he says, BB&T refused to make loans to developers who obtained property that way.
He also says BB&T decided not to offer the controversial “pick a payment” mortgages that got so many of its competitors into trouble. Such loans, also known as “option A.R.M.’s” or “negative amortization loans,” allow borrowers to make payments that don’t even cover the interest on the loans, which causes the amount they owe to grow.
“While we did not foresee the decline in the real estate market, we knew home prices would not continue to appreciate at 15 percent per year forever,” he says, adding that his bank knew that pick-a-payment loans would be trouble for many homeowners.
“We believe Rand’s concept of the ‘trader principle,’ where life is about trading value for value, where both parties benefit from the transaction,” he says.
MR. ALLISON says that only a small fraction of the bank’s employees are objectivists. Among the many who are not is his successor as chief executive, Kelly S. King.
Bob Denham, a bank spokesman, says that “most employees don’t equate our values as being tied to John’s objectivist philosophy,” adding that “they just think of them as practical values, which they are.”
Christopher Marinac, an analyst at the research firm Fig Partners, says the culture at BB&T is definitely different from that of most other banks, attracting employees who “have their heart and soul in their job.”
He recalled attending his first analysts’ meeting at the bank a decade ago and being surprised when Mr. Allison launched into an hour-and-a-half lecture on philosophy.
“I think those of us who are a little more open-minded got something out of it,” Mr. Marinac says. “Their employees drink the Kool-Aid. If they don’t drink the Kool-Aid, they don’t work at the bank.”
Although BB&T has had problems during the financial crisis, it has outperformed its peers and remained profitable. After the government stress-tested major banks’ balance sheets in May, BB&T wasn’t required to raise additional capital.
“The philosophy has clearly been a competitive advantage,” Mr. Allison says.
Besides making speeches, Mr. Allison is also trying to spread Ms. Rand’s ideas to the nation’s colleges and universities. BB&T spends about $5 million a year to finance teaching positions and research on “the moral foundations of capitalism.”
Mr. Allison, who is now teaching at Wake Forest University, says the money isn’t specifically slated for objectivism but rather to support the work of “free-market professors, especially those that have a serious interest in Rand’s philosophy.”
Despite the current bleak state of capitalism, he’s also optimistic about the future.
“In some ways, Ayn Rand filled in the ideas of Aristotle. It’s a whopping competitive advantage,” he says. “I personally believe objectivism will be the dominant philosophy in this country in 25 years.”...?
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https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/ayn-rand-myths
Coinbase's plan to go public in April highlights a troubling trend among tech companies: Its founding team will maintain voting control, making it mostly immune to the wishes of outside investors.
The best-known U.S. cryptocurrency exchange is doing this by creating two classes of shares. One class will be available to the public. The other is reserved for the founders, insiders and early investors, and will wield 20 times the voting power of regular shares. That will ensure that after all is said and done, the insiders will control 53.5% of the votes.
Coinbase will join dozens of other publicly traded tech companies – many with household names such as Google, Facebook, Doordash, Airbnb and Slack – that haveissued two types of shares in an effort to retain control for founders and insiders. The reason this is becoming increasingly popular has a lot to do with Ayn Rand, one of Silicon Valley's favorite authors, and the “myth of the founder" her writings have helped inspire.
Engaged investors and governance experts like me generally loathe dual-class shares because they undermine executive accountability by making it harder to rein in a wayward CEO. I first stumbled upon this method executives use to limit the influence of pesky outsiders while working on my doctoral dissertation on hostile takeovers in the late 1980s.
But the risks of this trend are greater than simply entrenching bad management. Today, given the role tech companies play in virtually every corner of American life, it poses a threat to democracy as well.
All in the family
Dual-class voting structures have been around for decades.
When Ford Motor Co. went public in 1956, its founding family used the arrangement to maintain 40% of the voting rights. Newspaper companies like The New York Times and The Washington Post often use the arrangement to protect their journalistic independence from Wall Street's insatiable demands for profitability.
In a typical dual-class structure, the company will sell one class of shares to the public, usually called class A shares, while founders, executives and others retain class B shares with enough voting power to maintain majority voting control. This allows the class B shareholders to determine the outcome of matters that come up for a shareholder vote, such as who is on the company's board.
Advocates see a dual-class structure as a way to fend off short-term thinking. In principle, this insulation from investor pressure can allow the company to take a long-term perspective and make tough strategic changes even at the expense of short-term share price declines. Family-controlled businesses often view it as a way to preserve their legacy, which is why Ford remains a family company after more than a century.
It also makes a company effectively**immune from hostile takeovers and the whims of activist investors.
Checks and balances
But this insulation comes at a cost for investors, who lose a crucial check on management.
Indeed, dual-class shares essentially short-circuit almost all the other means that limit executive power. The board of directors, elected by shareholder vote, is the ultimate authority within the corporation that oversees management. Voting for directors and proposals on the annual ballot are the main methods shareholders have to ensure management accountability, other than simply selling their shares.
Recent research shows that the value and stock returns of dual-class companies are lower than other businesses, and they're more likely to overpay their CEO and waste money on expensive acquisitions.
Companies with dual-class shares rarely made up more than 10% of public listings in a given year until the 2000s, when tech startups began using them more frequently, according to data collected by University of Florida business professor Jay Ritter. The dam began to break after Facebook went public in 2012 with a dual-class stock structure that kept founder Mark Zuckerberg firmly in control – he alone controls almost 60% of the company.
In 2020, over 40% of tech companies that went public did so with two or more classes of shares with unequal voting rights.
This has alarmed governance experts, some investors and legal scholars.
Ayn Rand and the myth of the superhuman founder
If the dual-class structure is bad for investors, then why are so many tech companies able to convince them to buy their shares when they go public?
I attribute it to Silicon Valley's mythology of the founder –- what I would dub an “Ayn Rand theory of corporate governance" that credits founders with superhuman vision and competence that merit deference from lesser mortals. Rand's novels, most notably “Atlas Shrugged," portray an America in which titans of business hold up the world by creating innovation and value but are beset by moochers and looters who want to take or regulate what they have created.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Rand has a strong following among tech founders, whose creative genius may be “threatened" by any form of outside regulation. Elon Musk, Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong and even the late Steve Jobs all have recommended “Atlas Shrugged."
Her work is also celebrated by the venture capitalists who typically finance tech startups – many of whom were founders themselves.
The basic idea is simple: Only the founder has the vision, charisma and smarts to steer the company forward.
It begins with a powerful founding story. Michael Dell and Zuckerberg created their multibillion-dollar companies in their dorm rooms. Founding partner pairs Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and Bill Hewlett and David Packard built their first computer companies in the garage – Apple and Hewlett-Packard, respectively. Often the stories are true, but sometimes, as in Apple's case, less so.
And from there, founders face a gantlet of rigorous testing: recruiting collaborators, gathering customers and, perhaps most importantly, attracting multiple rounds of funding from venture capitalists. Each round serves to further validate the founder's leadership competence.
The Founders Fund, a venture capital firm that has backed dozens of tech companies, including Airbnb, Palantir and Lyft, is one of the biggest proselytizers for this myth, as it makes clear in its “manifesto."
“The entrepreneurs who make it have a near-messianic attitude and believe their company is essential to making the world a better place," it asserts. True to its stated belief, the fund says it has “never removed a single founder," which is why it has been a big supporter of dual-class share structures.
Another venture capitalist who seems to favor giving founders extra power is Netscape founder Marc Andreessen. His venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is Coinbase's biggest investor. And most of the companies in its portfolio that have gone public also used a dual-class share structure, according to my own review of their securities filings.
Bad for companies, bad for democracy
Giving founders voting control disrupts the checks and balances needed to keep business accountable and can lead to big problems.
WeWork founder Adam Neumann, for example, demanded “unambiguous authority to fire or overrule any director or employee." As his behavior became increasingly erratic, the company hemorrhaged cash in the lead-up to its ultimately canceled initial public offering.
Investors forced out Uber's Travis Kalanick in 2017, but not before he's said to have created a workplace culture that allegedly allowed sexual harassment and discrimination to fester. When Uber finally went public in 2019, it shed its dual-class structure.
There is some evidence that founder-CEOs are less gifted at management than other kinds of leaders, and their companies' performance can suffer as a consequence.
But investors who buy shares in these companies know the risks going in. There's much more at stake than their money.
What happens when powerful, unconstrained founders control the most powerful companies in the world?
The tech sector is increasingly laying claim to central command posts of the U.S. economy. Americans' access to news and information, financial services, social networks and even groceries is mediated by a handful of companies controlled by a handful of people.
Recall that in the wake of the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, the CEOs of Facebook and Twitter were able to eject former President Donald Trump from his favorite means of communication – virtually silencing him overnight. And Apple, Google and Amazon cut off Parler, the right-wing social media platform used by some of the insurrectionists to plan their actions. Not all of these companies have dual-class shares, but this illustrates just how much power tech companies have over America's political discourse.
One does not have to disagree with their decision to see that a form of political power is becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of companies with limited outside oversight.
Jerry Davis, Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and Professor of Management and Sociology, University of Michigan
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-august-19-2019/
whitaker chambers "to a gas chamber go" in nat rev (wfb novel ~ 3 incl her, also JBS)
mean girls
denied cigs danger but died of cancer
her fanboy greenspan had to admit error in gt rec, and shd have dived but actually resurgence in TP (Roark apocalypse?)
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“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Ringsand Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
[Kung Fu Monkey -- Ephemera, blog post, March 19, 2009]”
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719 mean girls booktv
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/the-right-wing-love-affair-with-ayn-rand-ties-conservatism-to-one-of-the-most-disturbing-sociopathic-killers
see main (longish) legit
==
new
https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/how-real-history-shaped-the-fountainhead-and-kept-ayn-rands-fans-coming-back/
truncated see HNN
Fans of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead consider the novel timeless, with its themes of individual freedom and the heroism of the creator. But the story — about an innovative architect of skyscrapers who grows frustrated by critics skeptical of his vision — is also a direct product of the historical moment leading up to its publication 75 years ago Monday, on May 7, 1943.
Rand experts note that she wrote the book in response to what she saw as a very specific threat to liberty at that point in time — and that the evolution of that threat helped keep the book popular among her fans for decades following.
Indeed, as she worked on the book during World War II, the threats to liberty were clear. Rand was watching closely the advances of the Nazis as well as that of communism in her native Soviet Union. She had come to the U.S. in 1926 aspiring to be a screenwriter and hoping to make a fortune, a goal she adopted after her family never recovered when their property was seized during the Russian Revolution.
But she was even more concerned about what she saw as a subtler form of fascism within the U.S.: the work of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, architect of the New Deal.
She initially started writing The Fountainhead as “a meditation on popularity,” a response to the actors and fellow screenwriters trying to make it in the golden age of Hollywood in the ’30s. But the more she listened to the way her fellow artists and thinkers talked about communism, the more she thought they were “very misinformed,” tending to “idealize and romanticize it,” says Jennifer Burns, author of Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. …
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https://onezero.medium.com/how-ayn-rand-bridges-silicon-valley-billionaires-and-fossil-fuel-moguls-6735765be18
In 1989, Bill McKibben?—?then a journalist who had recently quit a five-year stint at the New Yorker?—?published a landmark environmental text called The End of Nature. One of the first books to attract mainstream attention to the subject of climate change, The End of Nature warned that human materialism and the exploitation of natural resources would be disastrously harmful to the planet.
Thirty years later, McKibben has become one of America’s most renowned climate change activists, and he’s out with a new book, Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? While The End of Nature focused on the impact of climate change on our physical planet, Falter explores what these changes will mean for the humans who live here. McKibben is interested in the fate of what he calls the “human game”?—?“the sum total of culture and commerce and politics; of religion and sport and social life; of dance and music; of dinner and art and cancer and sex and Instagram.”
Falter is a sprawling book, but it leans on two distinct lenses through which we can understand our future: climate change and the rise of artificial intelligence. McKibben tells OneZero that we’re “well past the point where we can stop climate change,” but with enough effort, we can slow it down. We’re currently doing a bad job of that: Last year, carbon emissions rose by 3.4%, the largest annual jump since 2010. McKibben explores how we arrived at our current predicament, and his diagnosis echoes an increasingly mainstream conclusion: Since the Reagan years, the wealthy and politically powerful have been fueling global warming at the expense of the rest of us.
McKibben is generally skeptical of “Big Tech” and certain technologies currently in development. He’s concerned that while computers may be able to perform some tasks “better” than we can, it’s important to preserve “the experience of being human?—?which is precisely the thing that’s disappearing.” But he’s not a tech pessimist, either. He’s hopeful that avoiding the dangers of automation “is at least possible,” and he says that “watching the rapid spread of a technology as world-changing as the solar panel cheers me daily.”
Falter doesn’t reveal much new science. In fact, McKibben argues that the science of climate change has been agreed upon?—?and ignored?—?for decades. Now, McKibben insists, it’s time for collective action. The climate activist group he helped found, 350.org, has been doing just that around flash points like the Keystone pipeline protests. Most recently, 350.org has turned its attention to the fossil fuel divestment movement.
OneZero caught up with McKibben to discuss Falter, the dangers of libertarian philosophy, and how to stand up to wealth and power in the fight to slow climate change.
OneZero: Americans may be aware of all the facts about climate change, yet, as you write, “we’ve gone on more or less as usual. We literally don’t want to hear about it.” How do we combat apathy?
Bill McKibben: So, the problem is not that people don’t understand that we face real danger from climate change. Increasingly, people really get that, and Mother Nature is doing her best to make the case year after year. The polling shows that after the fires in California, we seem to have reached a kind of new movement of climate consensus?—?that something needs to be done. The problem is that people have a hard time imagining what it is we’re going to do. Or imagining that anything they could do would be large enough to matter. And truthfully, as individuals, that’s kind of true. I mean, I have solar panels all over the roof of my house, and I’m proud of them, but I don’t try to fool myself that they are how we’re going to stop climate change.
What we’ve tried to do is build movements big enough to let people feel there’s a plausible chance of actually getting something done. And these movements are achieving victories. Whether they’re going to work or not, I can’t tell you.
You write that “we need to understand what drives [those in power]. We need to diagnose the intellectual and spiritual hookworm that has entered their bodies and attached itself to their brains.” What is your diagnosis?
Look, I think our society has gotten dangerously out of balance. You can tell by the fact that the temperature is going up and the gap between rich and poor is even wider. I don’t think the people at the top are ever going to do anything about it, not unless those of us who aren’t at the top force them to.
If you look at the Democratic presidential contenders, there are two people talking about the need for real redistribution and rebalancing of power, but it’s not going to come easily, because the people in control, the very rich and powerful, have the resources to stay in control. They’ve figured out how to game our political system in all kinds of ways. There’s no shortcut around people getting together to demand change.
You devote a hefty chunk of the book to the influence of Ayn Rand, saying that she’s arguably the most “important political philosopher of our time,” and “when the United States was occupying the role of superpower, charting the course for a planet, she was occupying the hearts and minds of many of its most powerful people.” How is her free market ideology related to climate change?
So, it’s just the wrong moment in American history and world history [for us to follow the principles of Ayn Rand]?—?the ideology that markets solve all problems, that we should leave the rich alone. When I say “worst moment,” it’s because over the past 30 years, from the Reagan era on, we could have done something about climate change, but we didn’t. We were locked into the belief that a free market economy was somehow going to do it on its own. It clearly hasn’t.
That idea—that selfishness was all we needed, that greed was good—simply turns out to be incorrect.
You also argue that although “the tech billionaires who inhabit Silicon Valley aren’t at all like the fossil fuel moguls and assorted other magnates who celebrated Trump’s rise to power,” Ayn Rand is the “one human being that bridges the cultural gulf between different species of plutocrat.”
If you start reading the biographies of [tech moguls like Elon Musk, Travis Kalanick, Peter Thiel]?—?and they’re almost all guys?—?Ayn Rand is one of the few commonalities. People who have made a whole lot of money and don’t want to be bothered in any way find her enormously appealing. And that’s why there’s an awful lot of yachts on this planet named The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged. I mean, these guys are usually social progressives. They just don’t want anyone telling them what to do.
And we’ve now seen how that works out. I mean, people have used Facebook to rig elections, massacre racial minorities. Finally, 10 years too late, Mark Zuckerberg is saying, “Well, maybe we need some regulation here to help us get things under control.” But that’s precisely the opposite of what they were saying for a long time, when the slogan was “move fast and break things.”
It broke a lot of things, including, in many ways, the politics of this country.
One of the absolute side effects of turning people into products is that they become obsolete, which is new for human beings.
...
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ah, the gift that keeps giving:
the other one has orcs
https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/trumps-new-fed-pick-actually-said-that-ayn-rands-atlas-shrugged-was-a-road-map-to-respond-to-the-2008-financial-crisis/
When reports broke that President Donald Trump had picked Stephen Moore to serve at the Federal Reserve, the backlash was swift and severe.
Moore is best known for being an economic analyst who is terrible at his job. Jonathan Chait called him a “famous idiot.” Economist Greg Makiw, one of the most venerated conservative economists, said he “does not have the intellectual gravitas for this important job.” Catherine Rampell humiliated him in a debate about deflation.
But one point in Moore’s unimpressive history is a piece he wrote in early January of 2009, in the depths of the financial crisis that began in 2008.
In this perilous time, with the United States facing financial disaster and the world economy staring over the edge of a cliff, Moore advised policymakers to turn to a book at the center of his worldview: Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.”
It’s not a historical analysis of past recessions or a methodical examination on various economic theories of boom and bust cycles. Instead, it’s a far-right melodramatic novel, a favorite of libertarian extremists, that paints the government as incompetent and a few select entrepreneurs as all-knowing titans.
It provides no actual insights about how the government might mitigate a recession, and Moore is unable to extract any real guidance from its pages in his op-ed, aside from perhaps abolishing all income taxes (!?). But nevertheless, he writes, “If only “Atlas” were required reading for every member of Congress and political appointee in the Obama administration. I’m confident that we’d get out of the current financial mess a lot faster.”[sic]
This isn’t meaningful analysis or actionable policy guidance — it’s ideological mouth noise designed to impress the uninformed.
In one bizarre passage, he analogizes Rand’s story of an innovative metal inventor having his discovery co-opted by the government to the Treasury secretary pressuring banks to accept bailouts at the cost of giving the United States a financial stake. These instances couldn’t be more different — the government seizing rights to an invention versus taking partial control of banks while providing bailouts to prevent financial catastrophe. A catastrophe driven, in part, by wildly reckless banking practices. And despite Moore’s implications, the actions taken during the recession, whatever their wisdom, didn’t lead the government to keep seizing control of banks — it backed off once the crisis was averted.
The Fed, under the leadership of Chair Ben Bernanke, played a key role in the efforts to respond to the 2008 recession. There are good arguments that it could and should have done more, but those counterfactuals will always be difficult to prove.
But Moore’s view at the time appears to have been that the government should have just stood back and watched as the world burned. And he based this view, of all things, on an absurd novel written by a non-economist.
Now, Trump thinks he should have a say in U.S. monetary policy.
==
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/paul-ryans-biggest-influence-here-are-10-things-you-should-know-about-lunatic-ayn
Thhe reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand." That's freshly minted GOP vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan talking -- statements he would eventually recant -- at a party celebrating what would have been the prolific author's 100th birthday,
Rand's books are a big driver in the long-term right-wing campaign to delude millions of people into believing that there's no such thing as society -- that everyone must look out only for themselves. Lately, Rand's work has enjoyed a major revival of interest. Besides Ryan, she's inspired yoga-wear company Lululemon to publish her quotations on its products, and she's even made inroads into the North American semi-socialist enclave of Canada.
AlterNet has kept the pace with Rand's resurgence, doing our best to educate people about what a nutcase she was and how harmful her ideas are. These 10 articles, previously published on AlterNet, shed light on why Rand's influence on Ryan is so dangerous.
1.How Ayn Rand Seduced Generations of Young Men and Helped Make the U.S. Into a Selfish, Greedy Nation
"When I was a kid," AlterNet contribuer Bruce Levine writes, "my reading included comic books and Rand’s The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. There wasn’t much difference between the comic books and Rand’s novels in terms of the simplicity of the heroes. What was different was that unlike Superman or Batman, Rand made selfishness heroic, and she made caring about others weakness."
Bruce Levine's explanation of how Rand has captured the minds of so many is a must-read. "While Harriet Beecher Stowe shamed Americans about the United State’s dehumanization of African Americans and slavery, Ayn Rand removed Americans’ guilt for being selfish and uncaring about anyone except themselves. Not only did Rand make it 'moral' for the wealthy not to pay their fair share of taxes, she 'liberated' millions of other Americans from caring about the suffering of others, even the suffering of their own children."
2.Rand's Philosophy in a Nutshell
The bloggers at ThinkProgress explain that the philosophy Ayn Rand laid out in her novels and essays was, "a frightful concoction of hyper-egotism, power-worship and anarcho-capitalism. She opposed all forms of welfare, unemployment insurance, support for the poor and middle-class, regulation of industry and government provision for roads or other infrastructure. She also insisted that law enforcement, defense and the courts were the only appropriate arenas for government, and that all taxation should be purely voluntary. Her view of economics starkly divided the world into a contest between 'moochers' and 'producers,' with the small group making up the latter generally composed of the spectacularly wealthy, the successful, and the titans of industry."
AlterNet's Joshua Holland has the goods: "Her books provided wide-ranging parables of 'parasites,' 'looters' and 'moochers' using the levers of government to steal the fruits of her heroes' labor. In the real world, however, Rand herself received Social Security payments and Medicare benefits under the name of Ann O'Connor (her husband was Frank O'Connor).
4.Rand Worked on a Movie Script Glorifying the Atomic Bomb
According to author Greg Mitchell, Rand called the nuclear weapon capable of incinerating entire cities "an eloquent example of, argument for and tribute to free enterprise."
5. Billionaires and Corporations Use Rand's WritingsTo Brainwash College Students
Pam Martens reported that Charles Koch, who pushes "millions of dollars through his foundation into economic programs at public universities and mandating approval of faculty and curriculum in some instances," partnered with the "southern banking giant BB&T ... mandating that Ayn Rand’s book Atlas Shrugged is taught and distributed to students."
6. How Rand Became the Libertarians' Favorite Philosopher
Author Gary Weiss explains how the "Rand movement, which was little more than a cult when the Atlas Shrugged author died 30 years ago, has effectively merged with the vastly larger libertarian movement. While many differences are likely to remain ... this means that Objectivism, Rand’s quasi-religious philosophy, is going to permeate the political process more than ever before."
Author Hal Crowther writes, "For an eyewitness portrait of Ayn Rand in the flesh, in the prime of her celebrity, you can’t improve on the 'Ubermensch' chapter in Tobias Wolff’s autobiographical novel Old School. Invited to meet with the faculty and student writers at the narrator’s boarding school, Rand arrives with an entourage of chain-smoking idolaters in black and behaves so repellently that her audience of innocents gets a life lesson in what kind of adult to avoid, and to avoid becoming. Rude, dismissive, vain and self-infatuated to the point of obtuseness — she names Atlas Shrugged as the only great American novel — Rand and her hissing chorus in black manage to alienate the entire school, even the rich board member who had admired and invited her. What strikes Wolff’s narrator most forcefully is her utter lack of charity or empathy, her transparent disgust with everything she views as disfiguring or disabling..."
8. Red-State 'Parasites,' Blue-State Providers
Ayn Rand loved to throw around the word "parasite." If you aren't a psychopath billionaire, in Rand's eyes you're a parasite. It's a psychology totally in keeping with the myths of blue-state/red-state America, as AlterNet's Sara Robinson explains.
9. Ayn Rand Was a Big Admirer of a Serial Killer
No exaggerating here. Mark Ames writes, "Back in the late 1920s, as Ayn Rand was working out her philosophy, she became enthralled by a real-life American serial killer, William Edward Hickman, whose gruesome, sadistic dismemberment of a 12-year-old girl named Marion Parker in 1927 shocked the nation. Rand filled her early notebooks with worshipful praise of Hickman. According to biographer Jennifer Burns, author of Goddess of the Market, Rand was so smitten with Hickman that she modeled her first literary creation ... on him."
"The most devoted member of [Rand's] inner circle," George Monbiot writes, "was Alan Greenspan, former head of the US Federal Reserve. Among the essays he wrote for Rand were those published in a book he co-edited with her called Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. Here, starkly explained, you'll find the philosophy he brought into government. There is no need for the regulation of business – even builders or Big Pharma – he argued, as 'the "greed" of the businessman or, more appropriately, his profit-seeking … is the unexcelled protector of the consumer.' As for bankers, their need to win the trust of their clients guarantees that they will act with honour and integrity. Unregulated capitalism, he maintains, is a 'superlatively moral system.'"
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https://www.alternet.org/economy/heres-how-ayn-rand-helped-turn-us-selfish-and-greedy-nation
b levine
Ayn Rand’s “philosophy” is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society....To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.— Gore Vidal, 1961
Only rarely in U.S. history do writers transform us to become a more caring or less caring nation. In the 1850s, Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) was a strong force in making the United States a more humane nation, one that would abolish slavery of African Americans. A century later, Ayn Rand (1905-1982) helped make the United States into one of the most uncaring nations in the industrialized world, a neo-Dickensian society where healthcare is only for those who can afford it, and where young people are coerced into huge student-loan debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.
Rand’s impact has been widespread and deep. At the iceberg’s visible tip is the influence she’s had over major political figures who have shaped American society. In the 1950s, Ayn Rand read aloud drafts of what was later to become Atlas Shrugged to her “Collective,” Rand’s ironic nickname for her inner circle of young individualists, which included Alan Greenspan, who would serve as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board from 1987 to 2006.
In 1966, Ronald Reagan wrote in a personal letter, “Am an admirer of Ayn Rand.” Today, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) credits Rand for inspiring him to go into politics, and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) calls Atlas Shrugged his “foundation book.” Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) says Ayn Rand had a major influence on him, and his son Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is an even bigger fan. A short list of other Rand fans includes Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas; Christopher Cox, chairman of the Security and Exchange Commission in George W. Bush’s second administration; and former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford.
But Rand’s impact on U.S. society and culture goes even deeper.
The Seduction of Nathan Blumenthal
Ayn Rand’s books such as The Virtue of Selfishness and her philosophy that celebrates self-interest and disdains altruism may well be, as Vidal assessed, “nearly perfect in its immorality.” But is Vidal right about evil? Charles Manson, who himself did not kill anyone, is the personification of evil for many of us because of his psychological success at exploiting the vulnerabilities of young people and seducing them to murder. What should we call Ayn Rand’s psychological ability to exploit the vulnerabilities of millions of young people so as to influence them not to care about anyone besides themselves?
While Greenspan (tagged “A.G.” by Rand) was the most famous name that would emerge from Rand’s Collective, the second most well-known name to emerge from the Collective was Nathaniel Branden, psychotherapist, author and “self-esteem” advocate. Before he was Nathaniel Branden, he was Nathan Blumenthal, a 14-year-old who read Rand’s The Fountainhead again and again. He later would say, “I felt hypnotized.” He describes how Rand gave him a sense that he could be powerful, that he could be a hero. He wrote one letter to his idol Rand, then a second. To his amazement, she telephoned him, and at age 20, Nathan received an invitation to Ayn Rand’s home. Shortly after, Nathan Blumenthal announced to the world that he was incorporating Rand in his new name: Nathaniel Branden. And in 1955, with Rand approaching her 50th birthday and Branden his 25th, and both in dissatisfying marriages, Ayn bedded Nathaniel.
What followed sounds straight out of Hollywood, butRand was straight out of Hollywood, having worked for Cecil B. DeMille.Rand convened a meeting with Nathaniel, his wife Barbara (also a Collective member), and Rand’s own husband Frank. To Branden's astonishment, Rand convinced both spouses that a time-structured affair—she and Branden were to have one afternoon and one evening a week together—was “reasonable.” Within the Collective, Rand is purported to have never lost an argument. On his trysts at Rand’s New York City apartment, Branden would sometimes shake hands with Frank before he exited. Later, all discovered that Rand’s sweet but passive husband would leave for a bar, where he began his self-destructive affair with alcohol.
By 1964, the 34-year-old Nathaniel Branden had grown tired of the now 59-year-old Ayn Rand. Still sexually dissatisfied in his marriage to Barbara and afraid to end his affair with Rand, Branden began sleeping with a married 24-year-old model, Patrecia Scott. Rand, now “the woman scorned,” called Branden to appear before the Collective, whose nickname had by now lost its irony for both Barbara and Branden. Rand’s justice was swift. She humiliated Branden and then put a curse on him: “If you have one ounce of morality left in you, an ounce of psychological health—you'll be impotent for the next 20 years! And if you achieve potency sooner, you'll know it’s a sign of still worse moral degradation!”
Rand completed the evening with two welt-producing slaps across Branden’s face. Finally, in a move that Stalin and Hitler would have admired, Rand also expelled poor Barbara from the Collective, declaring her treasonous because Barbara, preoccupied by her own extramarital affair, had neglected to fill Rand in soon enough on Branden's extra-extra-marital betrayal. (If anyone doubts Alan Greenspan’s political savvy, keep in mind that he somehow stayed in Rand’s good graces even though he, fixed up by Branden with Patrecia’s twin sister, had double-dated with the outlaws.)
After being banished by Rand, Nathaniel Branden was worried that he might be assassinated by other members of the Collective, so he moved from New York to Los Angeles, where Rand fans were less fanatical. Branden established a lucrative psychotherapy practice and authored approximately 20 books, 10 of them with either “Self” or “Self-Esteem” in the title. Rand and Branden never reconciled, but he remained an admirer of her philosophy of self-interest until his recent death in December 2014.
Ayn Rand’s personal life was consistent with her philosophy of not giving a shit about anybody but herself. Rand was an ardent two-pack-a-day smoker, and when questioned about the dangers of smoking, she loved to light up with a defiant flourish and then scold her young questioners on the “unscientific and irrational nature of the statistical evidence.” After an x-ray showed that she had lung cancer, Rand quit smoking and had surgery for her cancer. Collective members explained to her that many people still smoked because they respected her and her assessment of the evidence; and that since she no longer smoked, she ought to tell them. They told her that she needn’t mention her lung cancer, that she could simply say she had reconsidered the evidence. Rand refused.
How Rand’s Philosophy Seduced Young Minds
When I was a kid, my reading included comic books and Rand’s The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. There wasn’t much difference between the comic books and Rand’s novels in terms of the simplicity of the heroes. What was different was that unlike Superman or Batman, Rand made selfishness heroic, and she made caring about others weakness.
Rand said, “Capitalism and altruism are incompatible....The choice is clear-cut: either a new morality of rational self-interest, with its consequences of freedom, justice, progress and man’s happiness on earth—or the primordial morality of altruism, with its consequences of slavery, brute force, stagnant terror and sacrificial furnaces.” For many young people, hearing that it is “moral” to care only about oneself can be intoxicating, and some get addicted to this idea for life.
I have known several people, professionally and socially, whose lives have been changed by those close to them who became infatuated with Ayn Rand. A common theme is something like this: “My ex-husband wasn’t a bad guy until he started reading Ayn Rand. Then he became a completely selfish jerk who destroyed our family, and our children no longer even talk to him.”
To wow her young admirers, Rand would often tell a story of how a smart-aleck book salesman had once challenged her to explain her philosophy while standing on one leg. She replied: “Metaphysics—objective reality. Epistemology—reason. Ethics—self-interest. Politics—capitalism.” How did that philosophy capture young minds?
Metaphysics—objective reality. Rand offered a narcotic for confused young people: complete certainty and a relief from their anxiety. Rand believed that an “objective reality” existed, and she knew exactly what that objective reality was. It included skyscrapers, industries, railroads, and ideas—at least her ideas. Rand’s objective reality did not include anxiety or sadness. Nor did it include much humor, at least the kind where one pokes fun at oneself. Rand assured her Collective that objective reality did not include Beethoven’s, Rembrandt’s, and Shakespeare’s realities—they were too gloomy and too tragic, basically buzzkillers. Rand preferred Mickey Spillane and, towards the end of her life, “Charlie's Angels.”
Epistemology—reason. Rand’s kind of reason was a “cool-tool” to control the universe. Rand demonized Plato, and her youthful Collective members were taught to despise him. If Rand really believed that the Socratic Method described by Plato of discovering accurate definitions and clear thinking did not qualify as “reason,” why then did she regularly attempt it with her Collective? Also oddly, while Rand mocked dark moods and despair, her “reasoning” directed that Collective members should admire Dostoyevsky, whose novels are filled with dark moods and despair. A demagogue, in addition to hypnotic glibness, must also be intellectually inconsistent, sometimes boldly so. This eliminates challenges to authority by weeding out clear-thinking young people from the flock.
Ethics—self-interest. For Rand, all altruists were manipulators. What could be more seductive to kids who discerned the motives of martyr parents, Christian missionaries and U.S. foreign aiders? Her champions, Nathaniel Branden still among them, feel that Rand’s view of “self-interest” has been horribly misrepresented. For them, self-interest is her hero architect Howard Roark turning down a commission because he couldn’t do it exactly his way. Some of Rand’s novel heroes did have integrity, however, for Rand there is no struggle to discover the distinction between true integrity and childish vanity. Rand’s integrity was her vanity, and it consisted of getting as much money and control as possible, copulating with whomever she wanted regardless of who would get hurt, and her always being right. To equate one’s selfishness, vanity, and egotism with one’s integrity liberates young people from the struggle to distinguish integrity from selfishness, vanity, and egotism.
Politics—capitalism. While Rand often disparaged Soviet totalitarian collectivism, she had little to say about corporate totalitarian collectivism, as she conveniently neglected the reality that giant U.S. corporations, like the Soviet Union, do not exactly celebrate individualism, freedom, or courage. Rand was clever and hypocritical enough to know that you don’t get rich in the United States talking about compliance and conformity within corporate America. Rather, Rand gave lectures titled: “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business.” So, young careerist corporatists could embrace Rand’s self-styled “radical capitalism” and feel radical — radical without risk.
Rand’s Legacy
In recent years, we have entered a phase where it is apparently okay for major political figures to publicly embrace Rand despite her contempt for Christianity. In contrast, during Ayn Rand’s life, her philosophy that celebrated self-interest was a private pleasure for the 1 percent but she was a public embarrassment for them. They used her books to congratulate themselves on the morality of their selfishness, but they publicly steered clear of Rand because of her views on religion and God. Rand, for example, had stated on national television, “I am against God. I don’t approve of religion. It is a sign of a psychological weakness. I regard it as an evil.”
Actually, again inconsistent, Rand did have a God. It was herself. She said:
I am done with the monster of “we,” the word of serfdom, of plunder, of misery, falsehood and shame. And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride. This god, this one word: “I.”
While Harriet Beecher Stowe shamed Americans about the United States' dehumanization of African Americans and slavery, Ayn Rand removed Americans’ guilt for being selfish and uncaring about anyone except themselves. Not only did Rand make it “moral” for the wealthy not to pay their fair share of taxes, she “liberated” millions of other Americans from caring about the suffering of others, even the suffering of their own children.
The good news is that I’ve seen ex-Rand fans grasp the damage that Rand’s philosophy has done to their lives and to then exorcize it from their psyche. Can the United States as a nation do the same thing?
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https://www.alternet.org/culture/happy-selfish-christmas-here-are-21-ayn-rand-holiday-cards
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Comment: How Ayn Rand became the new right's version of Marx: Her psychopathic ideas made billionaires feel like victims and turned millions of followers into their doormats.(Guardian Comment and Debate Pages)
George Monbiot
The Guardian (London, England), March 6, 2012, p.32
Shrugged) and her nonfiction (such as The Virtue of Selfishness) she explained a... rollback of the state, even as the wreckage of that policy lies all around. online ucsc
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https://www.alternet.org/philosophy-shrugged-ignoring-ayn-rand-wont-make-her-go-away
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https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/literary-salon-made-ayn-rand-famous-180969025/
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matt t says greenspan prediction record terrible (pundit zombie pension plan); ayn rand groupie, paul ryan ...
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https://www.alternet.org/election-2016/paul-ryans-biggest-influence-10-things-you-should-know-about-lunatic-ayn-rand
"The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand." That's freshly minted GOP vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan talking -- statements he would eventually recant -- at a party celebrating what would have been the prolific author's 100th birthday,
Rand's books are a big driver in the long-term right-wing campaign to delude millions of people into believing that there's no such thing as society -- that everyone must look out only for themselves. Lately, Rand's work has enjoyed a major revival of interest. Besides Ryan, she's inspired yoga-wear company Lululemon to publish her quotations on its products, and she's even made inroads into the North American semi-socialist enclave of Canada.
AlterNet has kept the pace with Rand's resurgence, doing our best to educate people about what a nutcase she was and how harmful her ideas are. These 10 articles, previously published on AlterNet, shed light on why Rand's influence on Ryan was so dangerous.
- How Ayn Rand Seduced Generations of Young Men and Helped Make the U.S. Into a Selfish, Greedy Nation
"When I was a kid," AlterNet contribuer Bruce Levine writes, "my reading included comic books and Rand’s The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. There wasn’t much difference between the comic books and Rand’s novels in terms of the simplicity of the heroes. What was different was that unlike Superman or Batman, Rand made selfishness heroic, and she made caring about others weakness."
Bruce Levine's explanation of how Rand has captured the minds of so many is a must-read. "While Harriet Beecher Stowe shamed Americans about the United State’s dehumanization of African Americans and slavery, Ayn Rand removed Americans’ guilt for being selfish and uncaring about anyone except themselves. Not only did Rand make it 'moral' for the wealthy not to pay their fair share of taxes, she 'liberated' millions of other Americans from caring about the suffering of others, even the suffering of their own children."
- Rand's Philosophy in a Nutshell
The bloggers at ThinkProgress explain that the philosophy Ayn Rand laid out in her novels and essays was, "a frightful concoction of hyper-egotism, power-worship and anarcho-capitalism. She opposed all forms of welfare, unemployment insurance, support for the poor and middle-class, regulation of industry and government provision for roads or other infrastructure. She also insisted that law enforcement, defense and the courts were the only appropriate arenas for government, and that all taxation should be purely voluntary. Her view of economics starkly divided the world into a contest between 'moochers' and 'producers,' with the small group making up the latter generally composed of the spectacularly wealthy, the successful, and the titans of industry."
- Ayn Rand Railed Against Government Benefits, But Grabbed Social Security and Medicare When She Needed Them
AlterNet's Joshua Holland has the goods: "Her books provided wide-ranging parables of 'parasites,' 'looters' and 'moochers' using the levers of government to steal the fruits of her heroes' labor. In the real world, however, Rand herself received Social Security payments and Medicare benefits under the name of Ann O'Connor (her husband was Frank O'Connor).
- Rand Worked on a Movie Script Glorifying the Atomic Bomb
According to author Greg Mitchell, Rand called the nuclear weapon capable of incinerating entire cities "an eloquent example of, argument for and tribute to free enterprise."
- Billionaires and Corporations Use Rand's Writings To Brainwash College Students
Pam Martens reported that Charles Koch, who pushes "millions of dollars through his foundation into economic programs at public universities and mandating approval of faculty and curriculum in some instances," partnered with the "southern banking giant BB&T ... mandating that Ayn Rand’s book Atlas Shrugged is taught and distributed to students."
- How Rand Became the Libertarians' Favorite Philosopher
Author Gary Weiss explains how the "Rand movement, which was little more than a cult when the Atlas Shrugged author died 30 years ago, has effectively merged with the vastly larger libertarian movement. While many differences are likely to remain ... this means that Objectivism, Rand’s quasi-religious philosophy, is going to permeate the political process more than ever before."
- Ayn Rand in Real Life
Author Hal Crowther writes, "For an eyewitness portrait of Ayn Rand in the flesh, in the prime of her celebrity, you can’t improve on the 'Ubermensch' chapter in Tobias Wolff’s autobiographical novel Old School. Invited to meet with the faculty and student writers at the narrator’s boarding school, Rand arrives with an entourage of chain-smoking idolaters in black and behaves so repellently that her audience of innocents gets a life lesson in what kind of adult to avoid, and to avoid becoming. Rude, dismissive, vain and self-infatuated to the point of obtuseness — she names Atlas Shrugged as the only great American novel — Rand and her hissing chorus in black manage to alienate the entire school, even the rich board member who had admired and invited her. What strikes Wolff’s narrator most forcefully is her utter lack of charity or empathy, her transparent disgust with everything she views as disfiguring or disabling..."
- Red-State 'Parasites,' Blue-State Providers
Ayn Rand loved to throw around the word "parasite." If you aren't a psychopath billionaire, in Rand's eyes you're a parasite. It's a psychology totally in keeping with the myths of blue-state/red-state America, as AlterNet's Sara Robinson explains.
- Ayn Rand Was a Big Admirer of a Serial Killer
No exaggerating here. Mark Ames writes, "Back in the late 1920s, as Ayn Rand was working out her philosophy, she became enthralled by a real-life American serial killer, William Edward Hickman, whose gruesome, sadistic dismemberment of a 12-year-old girl named Marion Parker in 1927 shocked the nation. Rand filled her early notebooks with worshipful praise of Hickman. According to biographer Jennifer Burns, author of Goddess of the Market, Rand was so smitten with Hickman that she modeled her first literary creation ... on him."
- We've Already Had a Randian in High Office (Alan Greenspan), and It Was Devastating to the Middle Class
"The most devoted member of [Rand's] inner circle," George Monbiot writes, "was Alan Greenspan, former head of the US Federal Reserve. Among the essays he wrote for Rand were those published in a book he co-edited with her called Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. Here, starkly explained, you'll find the philosophy he brought into government. There is no need for the regulation of business – even builders or Big Pharma – he argued, as 'the "greed" of the businessman or, more appropriately, his profit-seeking … is the unexcelled protector of the consumer.' As for bankers, their need to win the trust of their clients guarantees that they will act with honour and integrity. Unregulated capitalism, he maintains, is a 'superlatively moral system.'"
Jan Frel is AlterNet's editor-at-large and associate publisher
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http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/scary-ghost-ayn-rand-looms-over-**trump-cabinet
Rand was a terrible person who wove a philosophy of selfishness and greed out of the threads of her own psychopathy. Rand’s writings and speeches should be recognized as rantings suited for an audience of a well-trained therapist, instead of inflicted upon millions of English students.
Rand, who declared “altruism” a national disease, wrote admiringly of child-murderer William Edward Hickman's callous indifference toward others and his “immense, explicit egotism.” Her contempt for the poor and middle-class are pronounced by anti-Robin Hoods who brag about stealing from "the thieving poor” to give to "the productive rich." Rand defended Native American genocide and murderous white supremacy, once stating “any white person who [brought] the elements of civilization had the right to take over this continent.” Objectivism, Rand’s refutation of basic human decency in favor of pathological self-interest and ruthless capitalism, was correctly identified as “perfect in its immorality” by Gore Vidal more than half a century ago. Today it’s the prevailing ethos of the GOP, embraced by Republicans going back to Ronald Reagan and especially beloved among the incoming Trump administration.
As James Hohmann of the Washington Post notes, Trump pledged his affection to Rand in an interview earlier this year with Kirsten Powers. Trump, who proudly admits he doesn’t read—neither books nor intelligence briefings that might slow his roll toward starting a nuclear war—told Powers he relates to Howard Roark, the architect protagonist of The Fountainhead. Roark espouses the warped belief that selfishness is a virtue (“Man’s first duty is to himself”) and commits a violent sexual assault. Without specifics, it’s hard to know precisely where Trump thinks the resemblance begins and ends.
Trump shares an affinity for Rand with several other members of his cabinet—though that's not the worst thing you can say about them, considering the group is a motley assortment of Islamophobes, white supremacists, alleged wifebeaters, and anti-worker .1 percenters.
Hohmann writes that Trump’s labor secretary pick Andy Puzder “is the CEO of CKE Restaurants, which is owned by Roark Capital Group, a private equity fund named after Howard Roark.”When the New York Times asked for a few personal insights about Puzder from one of his business cohorts, the fast-food titan was described only as an “avid reader who love[s] Ayn Rand.” Puzder recently told the Wall Street Journal’s Jennifer Grossman that he’s advised all six of his kids to read The Fountainhead, in the hope they’ll “lead the kind of lives of achievement, integrity and independence that Ayn Rand celebrated in her novels.”
Trump’s choice for secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, who's as famous for being the CEO of ExxonMobil as for his coziness with Vladimir Putin, is also a Rand adherent.Hohmann discovered the oil baron “listed [Atlas Shrugged] as his favorite book in a 2008 feature for Scouting Magazine.” Trump’s choice to head the CIA, Mike Pompeo, previously indicated to the Washington Post that many of his political views are the result of “a long interest in libertarian and conservative thought, first formed at age 15 when he read Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead.”John A. Allison IV, the former CEO of BB&T Bank and Cato Institute who had a closed-door meeting with Trump late last month, reportedly gave his executive staffers copies of Atlas Shrugged, calling it "the best defense of capitalism ever written.” Paul Ryan and Donald Trump have had some friction, but maybe now they can now bond over their mutual love of Rand and the belief that “money is the creation of the best power within you.” After years of saying Rand inspired his whole career, Ryan has more recently claimed he no longer subscribes to objectivism. His policy proposals beg to differ.
“The fact that all of these men, so late in life, are such fans of works that celebrate individuals who consistently put themselves before others is therefore deeply revealing,” Hohmann writes. “They will now run our government.”
Ayn Rand finally hit a wall through which her delusions could no longer pass; by the time of her death in 1982, she was enrolled in both Medicare and Social Security. After a lifetime of pushing a fever-dreamed philosophy, she was forced to reconcile with reality by old age, illness, and the boundaries of her own personal wealth. The GOP was all too happy to pick up the torch. Trump’s team of millionaires and billionaires, bonded by a philosophy of cruelty, are now running with it.
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Rand was not only a schlock novelist, she was also the progenitor of a sweeping “moral philosophy” that justifies the privilege of the wealthy and demonizes not only the slothful, undeserving poor but the lackluster middle-classes as well.
Her books provided wide-ranging parables of "parasites," "looters" and "moochers" using the levers of government to steal the fruits of her heroes' labor. In the real world, however, Rand herself received Social Security payments and Medicare benefits under the name of Ann O'Connor (her husband was Frank O'Connor).
As Michael Ford of Xavier University's Center for the Study of the American Dream wrote, “In the end, Miss Rand was a hypocrite but she could never be faulted for failing to act in her own self-interest.”
Her ideas about government intervention in some idealized pristine marketplace serve as the basis for so much of the conservative rhetoric we see today. “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,” said Paul Ryan, the GOP's young budget star at a D.C. event honoring the author. On another occasion, he proclaimed, “Rand makes the best case for the morality of democratic capitalism.”
“Morally and economically,” wrote Rand in a 1972 newsletter, “the welfare state creates an ever accelerating downward pull.”
Journalist Patia Stephens wrote of Rand:
[She] called altruism a “basic evil” and referred to those who perpetuate the system of taxation and redistribution as “looters” and “moochers.” She wrote in her book “The Virtue of Selfishness” that accepting any government controls is “delivering oneself into gradual enslavement.”
Rand also believed that the scientific consensus on the dangers of tobacco was a hoax. By 1974, the two-pack-a-day smoker, then 69, required surgery for lung cancer. And it was at that moment of vulnerability that she succumbed to the lure of collectivism.
Evva Joan Pryor, who had been a social worker in New York in the 1970s, was interviewed in 1998 by Scott McConnell, who was then the director of communications for the Ayn Rand Institute. In his book, 100 Voices: An Oral History of Ayn Rand, McConnell basically portrays Rand as first standing on principle, but then being mugged by reality. Stephens points to this exchange between McConnell and Pryor.
“She was coming to a point in her life where she was going to receive the very thing she didn’t like, which was Medicare and Social Security,” Pryor told McConnell. “I remember telling her that this was going to be difficult. For me to do my job she had to recognize that there were exceptions to her theory. So that started our political discussions. From there on – with gusto – we argued all the time.
The initial argument was on greed,” Pryor continued. “She had to see that there was such a thing as greed in this world. Doctors could cost an awful lot more money than books earn, and she could be totally wiped out by medical bills if she didn’t watch it. Since she had worked her entire life, and had paid into Social Security, she had a right to it. She didn’t feel that an individual should take help.”
Rand had paid into the system, so why not take the benefits? It's true, but according to Stephens, some of Rand's fellow travelers remained true to their principles.
Rand is one of three women the Cato Institute calls founders of American libertarianism. The other two, Rose Wilder Lane and Isabel “Pat” Paterson, both rejected Social Security benefits on principle. Lane, with whom Rand corresponded for several years, once quit an editorial job in order to avoid paying Social Security taxes. The Cato Institute says Lane considered Social Security a “Ponzi fraud” and “told friends that it would be immoral of her to take part in a system that would predictably collapse so catastrophically.” Lane died in 1968.
Paterson would end up dying a pauper. Rand went a different way.
But at least she put up a fight before succumbing to the imperatives of the real world – one in which people get sick, and old, and many who are perfectly decent and hardworking don't end up being independently wealthy.
The degree to which Ayn Rand has become a touchstone for the modern conservative movement is striking. She was a sexual libertine, and, according to writer Mark Ames, she modeled her heroic characters on one of the most despicable sociopaths of her time. Ames’ conclusion is important for understanding today’s political economy. “Whenever you hear politicians or Tea Partiers dividing up the world between ‘producers’ and ‘collectivism,’” he wrote, “just know that those ideas and words more likely than not are derived from the deranged mind of a serial-killer groupie....And when you see them taking their razor blades to the last remaining programs protecting the middle class from total abject destitution—Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid—and bragging about how they are slashing these programs for ‘moral’ reasons, just remember Rand’s morality and who inspired her.”
Now we know that Rand was also just as hypocritical as the Tea Party freshman who railed against “government health care” to get elected and then whined that he had to wait a month before getting his own Cadillac plan courtesy of the taxpayers.
But, as I note in my book, The Fifteen Biggest Lies About the Economy, that's par for the course. A central rule of the U.S. political economy is that people are attracted to the idea of “limited government” in the abstract—and certainly don’t want the government intruding in their homes—but they really, really like living in a society with adequately funded public services.
That's just as true for an icon of modern conservatism as it is for a poor mother getting public health care for her kids.
Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet
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kos
In 2011, news broke that notorious libertarian/objectivist Ayn Rand had accepted Social Security and Medicare in the 1970s after she was diagnosed with lung cancer (unsurprisingly she was a cigarette-cancer connection denier). Among liberal circles, a lot of attention was paid to the hypocrisy angle of all this (and much more to taking SS cheques than enrolling in Medicare). A person who spent her life railing against collectivism and dependency accepting the benefits of the very programs her beliefs called "evil."
Hypocrisy isn't the important thing here. Ideological failure is.
To the defenders of Rand, the most common reply is that Rand had paid into these programs through her involuntarily seized taxes, and if she was going to be forced ("at gunpoint" as libertarians always say) to pay for these programs, why shouldn't she at least get something back from them? Actually, I don't really disagree with that. Liberals didn't support the Bush tax cuts, but I doubt many liberals gave back the government the extra taxes they would have had to pay under the Clinton rates after the tax cuts passed. You're not typically morally obligated to martyr yourself for your beliefs.
A Failure of Ideas, Not the Individual
No, the really important fact that this episode reveals is not Rand's hypocrisy, but the utter failure of her ideas. Even she couldn't live without the social safety net. Here's how the woman who persuaded her to take part in socialism explained it to a fellow objectivist in 1998 (emphasis added):
“The initial argument was on greed,” Pryor continued. “She had to see
that there was such a thing as greed in this world. Doctors could cost
an awful lot more money than books earn, and she could be totally wiped
out by medical bills if she didn’t watch it. Since she had worked her
entire life, and had paid into Social Security, she had a right to it.
She didn’t feel that an individual should take help.”
McConnell asked: “And did she agree with you about Medicare and Social Security?”
Pryor replied: “After several meetings and arguments, she gave me her
power of attorney to deal with all matters having to do with health and
Social Security. Whether she agreed or not is not the issue, she saw
the necessity for both her and Frank. She was never involved other than
to sign the power of attorney; I did the rest.”
Ayn Rand was at that point a successful author with several best sellers which continued to move well. No, she wasn't a billionaire or anything, but she was certainly not hurting for cash in ordinary people terms. This site claims* that the NY Times reported her estate as being worth $500,000 at her death in 1982. An online inflation calculator says that's worth $1.2M today. Most people would be thrilled if they were told they'd be worth that much in retirement. Yet even so, Rand looked into the giant gulping maw of the for-profit medical industry and blinked, fearing her cancer would bankrupt her.
That's the failure here; Rand needed society's help. Rand ran headlong into the very premise of why Medicare was created in the first place: The for-profit insurance market is terrible for the elderly and particularly to those already stricken with serious diseases. It's not about chortling at Rand as yet another greedy right wing hypocrite, it's about realizing she implicitly acknowledged the superiority of liberalism with her actions. This is her endorsement, and as Paul Ryan's sort gears up to destroy Medicare, we shouldn't hesitate to remind them that Ayn Rand, whatever her rhetoric and books, ended her life on our side.
Naturally, Rand showed no signs of rethinking anything in the face of her own personal failure to survive in the world she would see created. She strutted the high wire for a while, but when the wind picked up, she was glad to have the safety net there to catch her as she fell.
* - that author actually uses that figure of $500,000 to claim Rand didn't need to take Medicare but I think the quoted part above shows the person closest to her deciding to take part clearly thought fear of medical bankruptcy was the primary motivating factor. While it's possible $500,000 would have been enough to cover her medical bills to death in 1982, 1974 Rand would have no way to know how long she would live or what costly care she'd need. Finally, a big part of the safety net is not just the literal fact of avoiding medical bankruptcy, but having the sense of security that you won't. I would bet heavily that Ayn Rand slept a little more soundly after going on Medicare knowing she wouldn't die a pauper under any circumstances.
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paul ryan 180 not releflect in his budgets/ eg food snap
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2012/04/26/471730/paul-ryan-ayn-rand/
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http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/ayn-rands-onesided-love-affair-with-the-fbi
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gary weiss
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5dNkLmFVdM
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hickman serial killer hero: true innate psychology of a superman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkYOBnspYgg
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hartmann crit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHnnnmuYAdw
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http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/02/28/resurrecting-ayn-rand-hedge-fund-money-teams-up-with-koch-bbt/
...
Thanks to the trail paved in Weiss’ book, we did some further digging into the money cartel financing this “spontaneous” outpouring of campus and Tea Party interest in Rand, whose work is regularly considered by top academics to be mediocre and simpleminded.
This cartel has a striking similarity to the network of university economists set up by Big Tobacco in a money for hire scheme from 1983 to the mid 90s to blanket Congress and the media with bogus OpEds and research papers.
While it has been well known that the oil billionaire, Charles Koch, has been funneling tens of millions of dollars through his foundation into economic programs at public universities and mandating approval of faculty and curriculum in some instances, it has not heretofore been reported that a sweeping partnership in these programs has sprung up between Koch and the southern banking giant, BB&T, the latter corporation mandating that Ayn Rand’s book Atlas Shrugged is taught and distributed to students.
Koch is based in Wichita, Kansas; BB&T in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. An email request to the Charles G. Koch Foundation for information on how this partnership evolved went unanswered, despite Koch’s copious web site claiming to want to set the record straight on his past funding schemes.
Raising more eyebrows is the discovery that the so-called populous craze for Ayn Rand’s seminal work, Atlas Shrugged, is also being financed by a decidedly non-populist pact of deep-pocketed hedge fund operators.
As we reported yesterday in this space, the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) has already conceded the following on its web site:
“ARI seeks to spearhead a cultural renaissance that will reverse the anti-reason, anti-individualism, anti-freedom, anti-capitalist trends in today’s culture. The major battleground in this fight for reason and capitalism is the educational institutions—high schools and, above all, the universities, where students learn the ideas that shape their lives…To date, more than 1.4 million copies of these Ayn Rand novels have been donated to 30,000 teachers in 40,000 classrooms across the United States and Canada.
“Based on a projected shelf life of five years per book, we estimate that more than 3 million young people have been introduced to Ayn Rand’s books and ideas as a result of our programs to date…partnerships have been established between ARI and the corporate community to advance Ayn Rand’s ideas in the universities. (Italics added.)....
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http://www.alternet.org/print/media/how-ayn-rand-was-used-vet-its-wonderful-life-commie-propaganda
BillMoyers.com [1] / By Michael Winship [2]
How Ayn Rand Was Used to Vet "It's a Wonderful Life" for Commie Propaganda
December 24, 2014 |
A number of years ago, I was telling a longtime city dweller friend of mine yet another story about the small, upstate New York town in which I grew up.
Simultaneously baffled and captivated, he said, “I think you were born and raised in Bedford Falls,” the fictional burg at the center of Frank Capra’s classic Christmas movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
Well, I wasn’t. Actually, I grew up about 27 miles west of there. Its real name is Seneca Falls, NY – yes, the same place that’s also the birthplace of the women’s suffrage movement. While not absolutely certain, there’s a compelling body of circumstantial evidence that Capra had the town in mind when he created his cinematic version of Bedford Falls. The steel bridge over the canal, for example, like the one from which the hero George Bailey contemplates jumping in a suicide attempt, only to dive in to save his guardian angel, Clarence. The old Victorian homes, the design of town streets, a large Italian population, mentions of nearby cities Rochester, Buffalo and Elmira are just a few of the other similarities. There’s even the perhaps apocryphal tale of Frank Capra finding inspiration after stopping in Seneca Falls for a haircut on his way to visit an aunt.
Enough coincidences abound that Seneca Falls now holds a yearly “It’s a Wonderful Life” festival, and although it may not draw as many visitors as the nearby Women’s Rights National Historical Park, there’s also an “It’s a Wonderful Life” museum. Whatever the ultimate truth, there’s no denying that the movie is a storybook evocation of bygone small town America, places like Seneca Falls and my own hometown, right down to the underside of greed and malice that often lurks just around the corner from the film’s compassion and wholesome neighborliness. As for Frank Capra, as he prepared to make the movie, he told the Los Angeles Times, “There are just two things that are important. One is to strengthen the individual’s belief in himself, and the other, even more important right now, is to combat a modern trend toward atheism.”
Which makes it all the crazier that when the movie first came out, it fell under suspicion from the FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) as Communist propaganda, part of the Red Scare that soon would lead to the blacklist and witch hunt that destroyed the careers of many talented screen and television writers, directors and actors.
Screenplay credits on “It’s a Wonderful Life” went to Frances Goodrich and her husband Albert Hackett, Capra and Jo Swerling, although a number of others took turns at different times, including Clifford Odets,Dalton Trumbo and Marc Connelly – not an unusual situation in Hollywood. But a 1947 FBI memorandum, part of a 13,533-page document, “Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry,” first went after the writers Goodrich and Hackett:
“According to Informants [REDACTED] in this picture the screen credits again fail to reflect the Communist support given to the screen writer. According to [REDACTED] the writers Frances Goodrick [sic] and Albert Hackett were very close to known Communists and on one occasion in the recent past while these two writers were doing a picture for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Goodrick [sic] and Hackett practically lived with known Communists and were observed eating luncheon daily with such Communists as Lester Cole, screen writer, and Earl Robinson, screen writer. Both of these individuals are identified in Section I of this memorandum as Communists.”
The memo goes on to cast doubt on the movie’s storyline, in which Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey and his struggling savings and loan fight on behalf of the good people of Bedford Falls against the avarice and power of banker and slumlord Henry Potter, played by Lionel Barrymore:
“With regard to the picture ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’, [REDACTED] stated in substance that the film represented a rather obvious attempt to discredit bankers by casting Lionel Barrymore as a ‘scrooge-type’ so that he would be the most hated man in the picture. This, according to these sources, is a common trick used by Communists.
“In addition, [REDACTED] stated that, in his opinion, this picture deliberately maligned the upper class, attempting to show the people who had money were mean and despicable characters. [REDACTED] related that if he had made this picture portraying the banker, he would haveshown this individual to have been following the rules as laid down by the State Bank Examinersin connection with making loans. Further, [REDACTED] stated that the scene wouldn’t have ‘suffered at all’ in portraying the banker as a man who was protecting funds put in his care by private individuals and adhering to the rules governing the loan of that money rather than portraying the part as it was shown. In summary, [REDACTED] stated that it was not necessary to make the banker such a mean character and ‘I would never have done it that way.’”
This was part of an FBI evaluation of several Hollywood movies – others included “The Best Years of Our Lives” (which beat “It’s a Wonderful Life” at the Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director), “Pride of the Marines,” and Abbott and Costello in “Buck Privates Come Home.”
Wait – it gets nuttier. According to the media archival website Aphelis, [3]“Among the group who produced the analytical tools that were used by the FBI in its analysis of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ was Ayn Rand.”
“Abbott and Costello Meet Ayn Rand” – what a comedy horror picture that would have made, scarier and funnier than their encounters with Frankenstein or the Wolfman. Rand’s group told the FBI:
“The purpose of the Communists in Hollywood is not the production of political movies openly advocating Communism. Their purpose is to corrupt non-political movies — by introducing small, casual bits of propaganda into innocent stories and to make people absorb the basic principles of Collectivism by indirection and implication. Few people would take Communism straight, but a constant stream of hints, lines, touches and suggestions battering the public from the screen will act like drops of water that split a rock if continued long enough. The rock that they are trying to split is Americanism.”
But redemption of an odd sort came for “It’s a Wonderful Life” at the infamous October 1947 House Un-American Activities Committee hearings. Just days before the appearance there of the Hollywood 10 – writers (and one director) who refused to testify and subsequently went to prison — a parade of “friendly witnesses” (including Ayn Rand, Gary Cooper, Ronald Reagan and Walt Disney) came before the committee to insinuate and weave dark tales of Communist infiltration and subversion in the movie business. One of them was a former Communist and screenwriter named John Charles Moffitt. Aphelis reports [3]:
“When asked by HUAC Chief Investigator Robert E. Stripling if Hollywood is in the habit of portraying bankers as villainous characters, Moffitt takes the opportunity to try to clear the reputation of Frank Capra’s movie ‘It’s A Wonderful Life:’ he tries to argue that the film isn’t, in fact a Communist movie.”
MR. STRIPLING. The term “heavy” has been used here as a designation of the part in which the person is a villain. Would you say that the banker has been often cast as a heavy, or consistently cast as a heavy, in pictures in Hollywood?
MR. MOFFITT. Yes, sir. I think that due to Communist pressure he is overfrequently cast as a heavy. By that I do not mean that I think no picture should ever show a villainous banker. In fact, I would right now like to defend one picture that I think has been unjustly accused of communism. That picture is Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The banker in that picture, played by Lionel Barrymore, was most certainly what we call a “dog heavy” in the business. He was a snarling, unsympathetic character. But the hero and his father, played by James Stewart and Samuel S. Hines, were businessmen, in the building and loan business, and they were shown as using money as a benevolent influence.[a co-op?]
At this point, there was a bit of commotion in the hearing room.
THE CHAIRMAN. Just a minute. Come away. Everybody sit down. Will all you people who are standing up please sit down? And the photographers.
MR.MOFFITT. All right.
THE CHAIRMAN. Go ahead.
MR. MOFFITT. Well, to summarize, I think Mr. Capra’s picture, though it had a banker as villain, could not be properly called a Communist picture. It showed that the power of money can be used oppressively and it can be used benevolently. I think that picture was unjustly accused of Communism.
Since then, the movie has been more than redeemed as it slowly became a sentimental and beloved holiday perennial. And if anything, its portrayal of a villainous banker has been vindicated a thousand fold as in the last seven years we’ve seen fraudulent mortgages and subsequent foreclosures, bankers unrepentant after an unprecedented taxpayer bailout and unpunished after a mindboggling spree of bad calls, profligacy and corkscrew investments that raked in billions while others suffered the consequences.
It’s a wonderful life, alright, but not if you’re homeless or unemployed tonight, not if your kids are hungry and you can’t pay for heat. There are still a lot of Mr. Potters in the world. We know who you are and we’ll keep calling you out. God rest ye merry, gentlemen.
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http://www.alternet.org/print/culture/how-ayn-rand-helped-turn-us-selfish-greedy-nation
AlterNet [1] / By Bruce E. Levine [2]
How Ayn Rand Helped Turn the U.S. Into a Selfish, Greedy Nation
December 10, 2014 |
Ayn Rand’s “philosophy” is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society....To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.— Gore Vidal, 1961
Only rarely in U.S. history do writers transform us to become a more caring or less caring nation. In the 1850s, Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) was a strong force in making the United States a more humane nation, one that would abolish slavery of African Americans. A century later, Ayn Rand (1905-1982) helped make the United States into one of the most uncaring nations in the industrialized world, a neo-Dickensian society where healthcare is only for those who can afford it, and where young people are coerced into huge student-loan debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.
Rand’s impact has been widespread and deep. At the iceberg’s visible tip is the influence she’s had over major political figures who have shaped American society. In the 1950s, Ayn Rand read aloud drafts of what was later to become Atlas Shrugged to her “Collective,” Rand’s ironic nickname for her inner circle of young individualists, which included Alan Greenspan, who would serve as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board from 1987 to 2006.
In 1966, Ronald Reagan wrote in a personal letter, “Am an admirer of Ayn Rand.” Today, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) credits Rand for inspiring him to go into politics, and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) calls Atlas Shrugged his “foundation book.” Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) says Ayn Rand had a major influence on him, and his son Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is an even bigger fan. A short list of other Rand fans includes Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas; Christopher Cox, chairman of the Security and Exchange Commission in George W. Bush’s second administration; and former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford.
But Rand’s impact on U.S. society and culture goes even deeper.
The Seduction of Nathan Blumenthal
Ayn Rand’s books such as The Virtue of Selfishness and her philosophy that celebrates self-interest and disdains altruism may well be, as Vidal assessed, “nearly perfect in its immorality.” But is Vidal right about evil? Charles Manson, who himself did not kill anyone, is the personification of evil for many of us because of his psychological success at exploiting the vulnerabilities of young people and seducing them to murder. What should we call Ayn Rand’s psychological ability to exploit the vulnerabilities of millions of young people so as to influence them not to care about anyone besides themselves?
While Greenspan (tagged “A.G.” by Rand)was the most famous name that would emerge from Rand’s Collective, the second most well-known name to emerge from the Collective was Nathaniel Branden, psychotherapist, author and “self-esteem” advocate. Before he was Nathaniel Branden, he was Nathan Blumenthal, a 14-year-old who read Rand’s The Fountainhead again and again. He later would say, “I felt hypnotized.” He describes how Rand gave him a sense that he could be powerful, that he could be a hero. He wrote one letter to his idol Rand, then a second. To his amazement, she telephoned him, and at age 20, Nathan received an invitation to Ayn Rand’s home. Shortly after, Nathan Blumenthal announced to the world that he was incorporating Rand in his new name: Nathaniel Branden. And in 1955, with Rand approaching her 50th birthday and Branden his 25th, and both in dissatisfying marriages, Ayn bedded Nathaniel.
What followed sounds straight out of Hollywood, but Rand was straight out of Hollywood, having worked for Cecil B. DeMille. Rand convened a meeting with Nathaniel, his wife Barbara (also a Collective member), and Rand’s own husband Frank. To Branden's astonishment, Rand convinced both spouses that a time-structured affair—she and Branden were to have one afternoon and one evening a week together—was “reasonable.” Within the Collective, Rand is purported to have never lost an argument. On his trysts at Rand’s New York City apartment, Branden would sometimes shake hands with Frank before he exited. Later, all discovered that Rand’s sweet but passive husband would leave for a bar, where he began his self-destructive affair with alcohol.
By 1964, the 34-year-old Nathaniel Branden had grown tired of the now 59-year-old Ayn Rand. Still sexually dissatisfied in his marriage to Barbara and afraid to end his affair with Rand, Branden began sleeping with a married 24-year-old model, Patrecia Scott. Rand, now “the woman scorned,” called Branden to appear before the Collective, whose nickname had by now lost its irony for both Barbara and Branden. Rand’s justice was swift. She humiliated Branden and then put a curse on him: “If you have one ounce of morality left in you, an ounce of psychological health—you'll be impotent for the next 20 years! And if you achieve potency sooner, you'll know it’s a sign of still worse moral degradation!”
Rand completed the evening with two welt-producing slaps across Branden’s face. Finally, in a move that Stalin and Hitler would have admired, Rand also expelled poor Barbara from the Collective, declaring her treasonous because Barbara, preoccupied by her own extramarital affair, had neglected to fill Rand in soon enough on Branden's extra-extra-marital betrayal. (If anyone doubts Alan Greenspan’s political savvy, keep in mind that he somehow stayed in Rand’s good graces even though he, fixed up by Branden with Patrecia’s twin sister, had double-dated with the outlaws.)
After being banished by Rand, Nathaniel Branden was worried that he might be assassinated by other members of the Collective, so he moved from New York to Los Angeles, where Rand fans were less fanatical. Branden established a lucrative psychotherapy practice and authored approximately 20 books, 10 of them with either “Self” or “Self-Esteem” in the title. Rand and Branden never reconciled, but he remained an admirer of her philosophy of self-interest until his recent death in December 2014.
Ayn Rand’s personal life was consistent with her philosophy of not giving a shit about anybody but herself. Rand was anardent two-pack-a-day smoker, and when questioned about the dangers of smoking, she loved to light up with a defiant flourish and then scold her young questioners on the “unscientific and irrational nature of the statistical evidence.” After an x-ray showed that she had lung cancer, Rand quit smoking and had surgery for her cancer. Collective members explained to her that many people still smoked because they respected her and her assessment of the evidence; and that since she no longer smoked, she ought to tell them. They told her that she needn’t mention her lung cancer, that she could simply say she had reconsidered the evidence. Rand refused.
How Rand’s Philosophy Seduced Young Minds
When I was a kid, my reading included comic books and Rand’s The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. There wasn’t much difference between the comic books and Rand’s novels in terms of the simplicity of the heroes. What was different was that unlike Superman or Batman, Rand made selfishness heroic, and she made caring about others weakness.
Rand said, “Capitalism and altruism are incompatible....The choice is clear-cut: either a new morality of rational self-interest, with its consequences of freedom, justice, progress and man’s happiness on earth—or the primordial morality of altruism, with its consequences of slavery, brute force, stagnant terror and sacrificial furnaces.” For many young people, hearing that it is “moral” to care only about oneself can be intoxicating, and some get addicted to this idea for life.
I have known several people, professionally and socially, whose lives have been changed by those close to them who became infatuated with Ayn Rand. A common theme is something like this: “My ex-husband wasn’t a bad guy until he started reading Ayn Rand. Then he became a completely selfish jerk who destroyed our family, and our children no longer even talk to him.”
To wow her young admirers, Rand would often tell a story of how a smart-aleck book salesman had once challenged her to explain her philosophy while standing on one leg. She replied: “Metaphysics—objective reality. Epistemology—reason. Ethics—self-interest. Politics—capitalism.” How did that philosophy capture young minds?
Metaphysics—objective reality. Rand offered a narcotic for confused young people: complete certainty and a relief from their anxiety. Rand believed that an “objective reality” existed, and she knew exactly what that objective reality was. It included skyscrapers, industries, railroads, and ideas—at least her ideas. Rand’s objective reality did not include anxiety or sadness. Nor did it include much humor, at least the kind where one pokes fun at oneself. Rand assured her Collective that objective reality did not include Beethoven’s, Rembrandt’s, and Shakespeare’s realities—they were too gloomy and too tragic, basically buzzkillers. Rand preferred Mickey Spillane and, towards the end of her life, “Charlie's Angels.”
Epistemology—reason. Rand’s kind of reason was a “cool-tool” to control the universe. Rand demonized Plato, and her youthful Collective members were taught to despise him. If Rand really believed that the Socratic Method described by Plato of discovering accurate definitions and clear thinking did not qualify as “reason,” why then did she regularly attempt it with her Collective? Also oddly, while Rand mocked dark moods and despair, her “reasoning” directed that Collective members should admire Dostoyevsky, whose novels are filled with dark moods and despair. A demagogue, in addition to hypnotic glibness, must also be intellectually inconsistent, sometimes boldly so. This eliminates challenges to authority by weeding out clear-thinking young people from the flock.
Ethics—self-interest. For Rand, all altruists were manipulators. What could be more seductive to kids who discerned the motives of martyr parents, Christian missionaries and U.S. foreign aiders? Her champions, Nathaniel Branden still among them, feel that Rand’s view of “self-interest” has been horribly misrepresented. For them, self-interest is her hero architect Howard Roark turning down a commission because he couldn’t do it exactly his way. Some of Rand’s novel heroes did have integrity, however, for Rand there is no struggle to discover the distinction between true integrity and childish vanity. Rand’s integrity was her vanity, and it consisted of getting as much money and control as possible, copulating with whomever she wanted regardless of who would get hurt, and her always being right. To equate one’s selfishness, vanity, and egotism with one’s integrity liberates young people from the struggle to distinguish integrity from selfishness, vanity, and egotism.
Politics—capitalism. While Rand often disparaged Soviet totalitarian collectivism, she had little to say about corporate totalitarian collectivism, as she conveniently neglected the reality that giant U.S. corporations, like the Soviet Union, do not exactly celebrate individualism, freedom, or courage. Rand was clever and hypocritical enough to know that you don’t get rich in the United States talking about compliance and conformity within corporate America. Rather, Rand gave lectures titled: “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business.” So, young careerist corporatists could embrace Rand’s self-styled “radical capitalism” and feel radical — radical without risk.
Rand’s Legacy
In recent years, we have entered a phase where it is apparently okay for major political figures to publicly embrace Rand despite her contempt for Christianity. In contrast, during Ayn Rand’s life, her philosophy that celebrated self-interest was a private pleasure for the 1 percent but she was a public embarrassment for them. They used her books to congratulate themselves on the morality of their selfishness, but they publicly steered clear of Rand because of her views on religion and God. Rand, for example, had stated on national television, “I am against God. I don’t approve of religion. It is a sign of a psychological weakness. I regard it as an evil.”
Actually, again inconsistent, Rand did have a God. It was herself. She said:
I am done with the monster of “we,” the word of serfdom, of plunder, of misery, falsehood and shame. And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride. This god, this one word: “I.”
While Harriet Beecher Stowe shamed Americans about the United States' dehumanization of African Americans and slavery, Ayn Rand removed Americans’ guilt for being selfish and uncaring about anyone except themselves. Not only did Rand make it “moral” for the wealthy not to pay their fair share of taxes, she “liberated” millions of other Americans from caring about the suffering of others, even the suffering of their own children.
The good news is that I’ve seen ex-Rand fans grasp the damage that Rand’s philosophy has done to their lives and to then exorcize it from their psyche. Can the United States as a nation do the same thing?
See more stories tagged with:
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Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/culture/how-ayn-rand-helped-turn-us-selfish-greedy-nation
Links:
[1] http://alternet.org
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/bruce-e-levine-0
[3] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on How Ayn Rand Helped Turn the U.S. Into a Selfish, Greedy Nation
[4] http://www.alternet.org/tags/greed
[5] http://www.alternet.org/tags/ayn-rand-0
[6] http://www.alternet.org/tags/selfishness
[7] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
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August 2, 200
Give BB&T Liberty, but Not a Bailout
OVER much of the last four decades, John A. Allison IV built BB&T from a local bank in North Carolina into a regional powerhouse that has weathered the economic crisis far better than many of its troubled rivals — largely by avoiding financial gimmickry.
And in his spare time, Mr. Allison travels the country making speeches about his bank’s distinctive philosophy.
Speaking at a recent convention in Boston to a group of like-minded business people and students, Mr. Allison tells a story: A boy is playing in a sandbox, only to have his truck taken by another child. A fight ensues, and the boy’s mother tells him to stop being selfish and to share.
“You learned in that sandbox at some really deep level that it’s bad to be selfish,” says Mr. Allison, adding that the mother has taught a horrible lesson. “To say man is bad because he is selfish is to say it’s bad because he’s alive.”
If Mr. Allison’s speech sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because it’s based on the philosophy of Ayn Rand, who celebrated the virtues of reason, self-interest and laissez-faire capitalism while maintaining that altruism is a destructive force. In Ms. Rand’s world, nothing is more heroic — and sexy — than a hard-working businessman free to pursue his wealth. And nothing is worse than a pesky bureaucrat trying to restrict business and redistribute wealth.
Or, as Mr. Allison explained, “put balls and chains on good people, and bad things happen.”
Ms. Rand, who died in 1982, has all sorts of admirers on Wall Street, in corporate boardrooms and in the entertainment industry, including the hedge fund manager Clifford Asness, the former baseball great Cal Ripken Jr.and the Whole Foods chief executive, John Mackey.
But Mr. Allison, who remains BB&T’s chairman after retiring as chief executive in December, has emerged as perhaps the most vocal proponent of Ms. Rand’s ideas and of the dangers of government meddling in the markets. For a dedicated Randian like him, the government’s headlong rush to try to rescue and fix the economy is a horrifying realization of his worst fears.
Indeed, so many bad things are happening that many followers of Ms. Rand, known as objectivists, believe that the ugly scenario in her 1957 novel “Atlas Shrugged” — in which the government takes over industry as the economy progressively collapses — is playing out in real life.
New regulations are being enacted by the day. The rich may be forced to pay for health care for the poor. The auto industry is a ward of the state. An activist administration occupies the White House. And, of course, the federal government has inserted itself into the nation’s banks, includingBB&T, which accepted $3.1 billion in bailout money under the Troubled Asset Relief Program.
“Rand predicted what would happen 50 years ago,” says Mr. Allison, who notes that hisbank was forced to take the money, which he labels “a rip-off.” “It’s a nightmare for anyone who supports individual rights.”
But as cringe-inducing as the government’s actions may be for objectivists like him, there is a silver lining: sales of “Atlas Shrugged,” which Ms. Rand considered her definitive work, are better than ever.
In the first six months of 2009, Penguin Books shipped more than 300,000 copies of the book, which opens with the famous question, “Who is John Galt?” That’s 25 percent more than in all of 2008.
“It’s just gone through the roof,” said Kara Welsh, publisher for the New American Library, a division of Penguin. There’s even a renewed effort to make a miniseries out of the book. The studio Lionsgate, along with the producers Howard and Karen Baldwin, hope to begin shooting as early as next spring.
“It is incredibly timely,” said Michael Burns, vice chairman of Lionsgate.
While book sales haven’t translated into a flood of new converts to objectivism, Yaron Brook, president of the Ayn Rand Institute, said attendance at this year’s Objectivist Summer Conference in Boston — where Mr. Allison delivered his speech — was the best yet for an East Coast event. (Attendance at conferences on the West Coast, where the institute is based, tends to be 25 percent higher, he says.)
Among the participants was Dr. Shira Miller, who became interested in Ms. Rand’s writing in college. She says objectivism continues to provide her with “a moral philosophy for how to live a good and happy life.”
Dr. Miller, who practices age-management medicine in Los Angeles, doesn’t accept Medicare or health insurance so there can be no third-party interference with her individual rights or those of her patients, she says. “Medicine is a product just like any other,” says Dr. Miller, likening it to toasters, computers or legal advice. “I should have the right to sell or trade it on my own terms, just like any other business owner.”
For his part, Mr. Brook is encouraged by the new interest in Ms. Rand’s work, but feels that it has yet to have much impact on the political debate. He’s also struggling to change a popular perception that the financial crisiswas caused by deregulation and the fiscal policies of a top Rand disciple: Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman.
Mr. Brook argues that the problem wasn’t deregulation, but “misregulation.” He also says it’s unfortunate that Mr. Greenspan continues to be associated with Ms. Rand. While the two were close in the 1960s and ’70s, Mr. Greenspan abandoned objectivism decades ago, he says. Through a spokesman, Mr. Greenspan declined to comment.
“If you look at every aspect of the political world, things are going against us, from health care to cap-and-trade,” Mr. Brook says. “And it’s accepted wisdom that the financial crisis was caused by capitalism.”
“In the narrow sense of objectivism, things have never been so good,” he adds. “When you look at the larger world, it’s pretty depressing.”
THE enduring popularity of Ms. Rand bewilders her many detractors, who complain that her writing is melodramatic, heavy-handed and intellectually bereft.
“To describe her as a minor figure in the history of philosophical thinking about knowledge and reality would be a wild overstatement,” says Brian Leiter, director of the Center for Law, Philosophy and Human Values at the University of Chicago. “She’s irrelevant.”
Professor Leiter conducted an informal poll in March on his philosophy blog, asking, “Which person do you most wish the media would stop referring to as a ‘philosopher’?” The choices were Jacques Derrida, Ms. Rand and Leo Strauss. Ms. Rand won by a landslide, with 75 percent of the roughly 1,500 votes cast.
Professor Leiter says Ms. Rand’s views on moral philosophy and objective reality are “simple-minded in the extreme.”
“She doesn’t understand the historical positions of thinkers on these issues, such as Hume and Kant,” he says. “Even the minority of philosophers with some sympathy for her celebration of the virtues of selfishness usually find her general philosophical system embarrassing.”
Others contend that a lack of constraints on self-interested and greedy business people set the financial crisis in motion — a view that tends to undermine Ms. Rand’s theories on the value and social benefits of unfettered ambition and limited government.
“It takes a great leap of ideological blindness to look at the past few years and think that the main problem was too much government involvement,” said Robert B. Reich, a public policy professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who was a labor secretary in the Clinton administration.
Mark A. Thoma, an economist at the University of Oregon, says the financial crisis would have been worse if the government hadn’t rapidly intervened.
“I completely disagree with the idea that letting the markets heal themselves is the best idea,” he says. “We tried that in the ’30s, and it didn’t work out so well.”
Fiscal conservatives take an opposite tack, arguing that the government has intervened in overly aggressive and risky ways. They find much to praise in Ms. Rand’s economic views. Yet even for that crowd, her social views are a tougher sell.
Ms. Rand was an ardent atheist who considered the cross a symbol of how “a man of perfect virtue” sacrificed himself for a bunch of losers. “It is in the name of that symbol that men are asked to sacrifice themselves for their inferiors,” she said.
She had little time for women who stay home to raise children. Ms. Rand wrote sex scenes that one critic recently described as “dark, kinky and weird, but not in a good way,” in which normally tough businesswomen melt under the steely gaze and rough hand of übercapitalists.
Even so, Ms. Rand’s books have sold briskly without the sanction of academics and book critics since they were published.
Her black-and-white views were shaped by her upbringing in Russia, where her father’s pharmacy was taken over by Communists, who also suppressed free thought at her university. In 1926, she came to the United States, which she had idealized as a free nation that valued human achievement.
A short, chain-smoking woman with a severe haircut and heavy Russian accent, she once worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood and fashioned herself as “a radical for capitalism.” As her reputation grew, she was interviewed by Johnny Carson, Phil Donahue and Playboy magazine.
A member of her New York salon was the young economist Mr. Greenspan. Ms. Rand called him “the Undertaker” for his dark clothing and dour manner.
Mr. Greenspan, who wrote an article for one of Ms. Rand’s nonfiction books advocating a gold standard, was among those who listened to and praised early drafts of “Atlas Shrugged,” which Ms. Rand started writing in 1946.
It tells the story of Dagny Taggart, a brilliant and leggy railroad executive who steamrolls the “looters” and “moochers” who populate a deteriorating America to keep her trains running on time.
She is part of a loose collection of can-do industrialists who struggle against a rising tide of government intervention that seeks to lessen competition and redistribute wealth “for the common good.”
As conditions worsen, the most talented people flee society to an idyllic mountain retreat overseen by an ingenious inventor, John Galt, who wants to deprive a corrupt nation of its greatest minds and to facilitate its demise. He warns that the best thing the bureaucrats could do is “get the hell out of my way.”
Mr. Brook, of the Ayn Rand Institute, says Ms. Rand understood then, in 1957, an emerging trend toward more government influence, where “somebody’s need is a claim against our wealth.”
The problem with this, he says, is all too real.
“The last 50 years have been an orgy of placing need above wealth creation, above personal pursuit of happiness,” Mr. Brook says. “I think we are seeing the consequences of that today.”
MR. ALLISON of BB&T has the tall, lean frame, copper-colored hair and confident demeanor of many of Ms. Rand’s fictional heroes, including John Galt — a look “which would not seek forgiveness or grant it.”
He also has a résumé befitting a Rand prophet. He started at BB&T, once known as the Branch Banking and Trust Company, in 1971 and became chief executive in 1989, when the bank had $4.7 billion in assets.
By the time he retired as C.E.O. in December, he had overseen 60 bank and savings-institution acquisitions and turned BB&T into the 11th-largest bank in the nation, with $152 billion in assets, according to the bank.
A 60-year-old who speaks in a rapid-fire Southern accent, Mr. Allison says the current financial crisis is primarily the government’s fault. He criticizes the Fed as trying to manipulate normal business cycles and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as facilitating mortgages to people who couldn’t afford them.
The government’s remedies have made matters only worse, he says: “Almost everything that has been done since this crisis started is going to reduce our long-term standard of living.”
Mr. Allison says the government forced BB&T and some other healthy banks to accept TARP money to obscure that they were simply trying to save several large banks like Citigroup.
“Everyone thinks we got some kind of subsidy,” he says, noting that his company paid the money back in June, with interest. “It’s going to cost us about $250 million for money we didn’t want.”
He suggests that government get out of the way and let businesses start making money again. An example of how to make money? Look no further than BB&T, which, he says, has a proven formula for success that centers on “an uncompromising commitment to reason.”
Under Mr. Allison, new executives were handed a copy of “Atlas Shrugged.” All employees get a 30-page pamphlet describing BB&T’s philosophy and values: reason, independent thinking and decisions based on facts.
“Wishing something is so does not make it so,” Mr. Allison says. “I guarantee that long before the rest of us knew, those geniuses at Lehman Brothers knew that something was wrong, but they evaded it.”
Mr. Allison was introduced to Ms. Rand’s work in college, when he read her book “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.” He describes egalitarianism as the “most destructive principle in our society” and believes that the best employees should receive the most rewards.
“It’s not true that everybody is equal,” he says. “A lot of business people don’t want to deal with nonperformance.”
Mr. Allison cites two examples in which the bank’s philosophy guided its real-world decisions.
After the Supreme Court upheld the right of local governments in 2005 to condemn private property and hand it to someone else for commercial development, he says, BB&T refused to make loans to developers who obtained property that way.
He also says BB&T decided not to offer the controversial “pick a payment” mortgages that got so many of its competitors into trouble. Such loans, also known as “option A.R.M.’s” or “negative amortization loans,” allow borrowers to make payments that don’t even cover the interest on the loans, which causes the amount they owe to grow.
“While we did not foresee the decline in the real estate market, we knew home prices would not continue to appreciate at 15 percent per year forever,” he says, adding that his bank knew that pick-a-payment loans would be trouble for many homeowners.
“We believe Rand’s concept of the ‘trader principle,’ where life is about trading value for value, where both parties benefit from the transaction,” he says.
MR. ALLISON says that only a small fraction of the bank’s employees are objectivists. Among the many who are not is his successor as chief executive, Kelly S. King.
Bob Denham, a bank spokesman, says that “most employees don’t equate our values as being tied to John’s objectivist philosophy,” adding that “they just think of them as practical values, which they are.”
Christopher Marinac, an analyst at the research firm Fig Partners, says the culture at BB&T is definitely different from that of most other banks, attracting employees who “have their heart and soul in their job.”
He recalled attending his first analysts’ meeting at the bank a decade ago and being surprised when Mr. Allison launched into an hour-and-a-half lecture on philosophy.
“I think those of us who are a little more open-minded got something out of it,” Mr. Marinac says. “Their employees drink the Kool-Aid. If they don’t drink the Kool-Aid, they don’t work at the bank.”
Although BB&T has had problems during the financial crisis, it has outperformed its peers and remained profitable. After the government stress-tested major banks’ balance sheets in May, BB&T wasn’t required to raise additional capital.
“The philosophy has clearly been a competitive advantage,” Mr. Allison says.
Besides making speeches, Mr. Allison is also trying to spread Ms. Rand’s ideas to the nation’s colleges and universities. BB&T spends about $5 million a year to finance teaching positions and research on “the moral foundations of capitalism.”
Mr. Allison, who is now teaching at Wake Forest University, says the money isn’t specifically slated for objectivism but rather to support the work of “free-market professors, especially those that have a serious interest in Rand’s philosophy.”
Despite the current bleak state of capitalism, he’s also optimistic about the future.
“In some ways, Ayn Rand filled in the ideas of Aristotle. It’s a whopping competitive advantage,” he says. “I personally believe objectivism will be the dominant philosophy in this country in 25 years.”
==
http://bigthink.com/harpys-review/serial-killer-is-the-new-cowboy
Libertarian heroine Ayn Rand was fascinated by an early serial killer, William Hickman. She came by her gruesome preoccupation honestly, and ingenuously. Like Rand’s imagined subject, the serial killer inhabits a cold, ruthless world where the individual must survive or languish on his own. Her fascination isn’t to say that she found him admirable, per se (although some claim that she did) but simply the disturbing terminus of her own logic. Like a tumor, the serial killer was the monstrous thing created—and perhaps inevitably-- by the gross proliferation of what she thought to be otherwise non-monstrous, normal ideals.
The normative values of any society spawn their own caricatured monsters and heroes or, in some cases, hybrid monster-heroes in fiction about whom we’re undecided. They raise the “what if” extreme fringe of common beliefs… what if… every single individual acted only as an individual, and did only what they desired to do… what if… we were all maximally, unrestrainedly, if monstrously, self-realized and determined? The cowboy used to play with some of that tension. Now, it’s the serial killer. As I find myself thinking about our young century quite often, and to quote The Who, "it's a hard hard world."
==
rt nation
ayn wore black cape, encouraged orgasms and wore gold dollar sign (cross emblem of torture, also at funeral) 46
==
AlterNet [1] / By Jan Frel [2]
Paul Ryan's Biggest Influence: 10 Things You Should Know About the Lunatic Ayn Rand
August 12, 2012 |
"The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand [3]." That's freshly minted GOP vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan talking -- statements he would eventually [4] recant -- at a party celebrating what would have been the prolific author's 100th birthday,
Rand's books are a big driver in the long-term right-wing campaign to delude millions of people into believing that there's no such thing as society -- that everyone must look out only for themselves. Lately, Rand's work has enjoyed a major revival of interest. Besides Ryan, she's inspired yoga-wear company Lululemon [5] to publish her quotations on its products, and she's even made inroads into the North American semi-socialist enclave of Canada [6].
AlterNet has kept the pace with Rand's resurgence, doing our best to educate people about what a nutcase she was and how harmful her ideas are. These 10 articles, previously published on AlterNet, shed light on why Rand's influence on Ryan is so dangerous.
1. How Ayn Rand Seduced Generations of Young Men and Helped Make the U.S. Into a Selfish, Greedy Nation [7]
"When I was a kid," AlterNet contribuer Bruce Levine writes, "my reading included comic books and Rand’s The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. There wasn’t much difference between the comic books and Rand’s novels in terms of the simplicity of the heroes. What was different was that unlike Superman or Batman, Rand made selfishness heroic, and she made caring about others weakness."
Bruce Levine's explanation of how Rand has captured the minds of so many is a must-read. "While Harriet Beecher Stowe shamed Americans about the United State’s dehumanization of African Americans and slavery, Ayn Rand removed Americans’ guilt for being selfish and uncaring about anyone except themselves. Not only did Rand make it 'moral' for the wealthy not to pay their fair share of taxes, she 'liberated' millions of other Americans from caring about the suffering of others, even the suffering of their own children."
2. Rand's Philosophy in a Nutshell [8]
The bloggers at ThinkProgress explain that the philosophy Ayn Rand laid out in her novels and essays was, "a frightful concoction [9] of hyper-egotism, power-worship and anarcho-capitalism. She opposed [10] all forms of welfare, unemployment insurance, support for the poor and middle-class, regulation of industry and government provision for roads or other infrastructure. She also insisted [10] that law enforcement, defense and the courts were the only appropriate arenas for government, and that all taxation should be purely voluntary. Her view of economics starkly divided the world into a contest between 'moochers' and 'producers,' with the small group making up the latter generally composed of the spectacularly wealthy, the successful, and the titans of industry."
AlterNet's Joshua Holland has the goods: "Her books provided wide-ranging parables of 'parasites,' 'looters' and 'moochers' using the levers of government to steal the fruits of her heroes' labor. In the real world, however, Rand herself received Social Security payments and Medicare benefits under the name of Ann O'Connor (her husband was Frank O'Connor).
4. Rand Worked on a Movie Script Glorifying the Atomic Bomb [12]
According to author Greg Mitchell, Rand called the nuclear weapon capable of incinerating entire cities "an eloquent example of, argument for and tribute to free enterprise."
5. Billionaires and Corporations Use Rand's Writings [13]To Brainwash College Students [13]
Pam Martens reported that Charles Koch, who pushes "millions of dollars through his foundation into economic programs at public universities and mandating approval of faculty and curriculum in some instances," partnered with the "southern banking giant BB&T ... mandating that Ayn Rand’s book Atlas Shrugged [14] is taught and distributed to students."
6. H [15]ow Rand Became the Libertarians' Favorite Philosopher [16]
Author Gary Weiss explains how the "Rand movement, which was little more than a cult when the Atlas Shrugged author died 30 years ago, has effectively merged with the vastly larger libertarian movement. While many differences are likely to remain ... this means that Objectivism, Rand’s quasi-religious philosophy, is going to permeate the political process more than ever before."
7. Ayn Rand in Real Life [17]
Author Hal Crowther writes, "For an eyewitness portrait of Ayn Rand in the flesh, in the prime of her celebrity, you can’t improve on the 'Ubermensch' chapter in Tobias Wolff’s autobiographical novel Old School. Invited to meet with the faculty and student writers at the narrator’s boarding school, Rand arrives with an entourage of chain-smoking idolaters in black and behaves so repellently that her audience of innocents gets a life lesson in what kind of adult to avoid, and to avoid becoming. Rude, dismissive, vain and self-infatuated to the point of obtuseness — she names Atlas Shrugged as the only great American novel — Rand and her hissing chorus in black manage to alienate the entire school, even the rich board member who had admired and invited her. What strikes Wolff’s narrator most forcefully is her utter lack of charity or empathy, her transparent disgust with everything she views as disfiguring or disabling..."
8. Red-State 'Parasites,' Blue-State Providers [18]
Ayn Rand loved to throw around the word "parasite." If you aren't a psychopath billionaire, in Rand's eyes you're a parasite. It's a psychology totally in keeping with the myths of blue-state/red-state America, as AlterNet's Sara Robinson explains [18].
9. Ayn Rand Was a Big Admirer of a Serial Killer [18]
No exaggerating here. Mark Ames writes, "Back in the late 1920s, as Ayn Rand was working out her philosophy, she became enthralled by a real-life American serial killer, William Edward Hickman, whose gruesome, sadistic dismemberment of a 12-year-old girl named Marion Parker in 1927 shocked the nation. Rand filled her early notebooks with worshipful praise of Hickman. According to biographer Jennifer Burns, author of Goddess of the Market, Rand was so smitten with Hickman that she modeled her first literary creation ... on him."
"The most devoted member of [Rand's] inner circle," George Monbiot writes, "was Alan Greenspan [20], former head of the US Federal Reserve. Among the essays he wrote for Rand were those published in a book he co-edited with her called Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal [21]. Here, starkly explained, you'll find the philosophy he brought into government. There is no need for the regulation of business – even builders or Big Pharma – he argued, as 'the "greed" of the businessman or, more appropriately, his profit-seeking … is the unexcelled protector of the consumer.' As for bankers, their need to win the trust of their clients guarantees that they will act with honour and integrity. Unregulated capitalism, he maintains, is a 'superlatively moral system.'"
See more stories tagged with:
ayn rand [22],
paul ryan [23]
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Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/paul-ryans-biggest-influence-10-things-you-should-know-about-lunatic-ayn-rand
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/jan-frel
[3] http://www.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/43705712.html
[4] http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2012/04/26/ryan-now-rejects-ayn-rand-will-the-real-paul-ryan-please-come-forward/
[5] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/28/business/media/combines-ayn-rand-and-yoga.html
[6] http://thetyee.ca/Books/2012/07/19/Ayn-Rand-Nation/
[7] http://beta.alternet.org/reproductivejustice/153454/how_ayn_rand_seduced_generations_of_young_men_and_helped_make_the_u.s._into_a_selfish%2C_greedy_nation/
[8] http://beta.alternet.org/culture/150680/the_truth_about_gop_hero_ayn_rand/?page=entire
[9] http://thinkprogress.org/2011/04/18/truth-about-ayn-rand/
[10] http://www.playboy.com/articles/ayn-rand-playboy-interview/index.html
[11] http://www.alternet.org/story/149721/
[12] http://beta.alternet.org/culture/152268/revealed%3A_ayn_rand_worked_on_a_movie_script_glorifying_the_atomic_bomb/
[13] http://beta.alternet.org/economy/154327/resurrecting_ayn_rand%3A_how_corporate_money_pushes_economic_poison_on_campus/
[14] http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0452011876/counterpunchmaga
[15] http://beta.alternet.org/news/156231/ayn_randroids_and_libertarians_join_forces%3A_will_her_noxious_philosophy_further_infect_america/
[16] http://www.alternet.org/story/156231/
[17] http://beta.alternet.org/module/printversion/151674
[18] http://beta.alternet.org/visions/154338/ayn_rand_worshippers_should_face_facts%3A_blue_states_are_the_providers%2C_red_states_are_the_parasites/
[19] http://beta.alternet.org/economy/154451/how_ayn_rand%27s_bizarre_philosophy_made_the_new_right_so_toxic/?page=2
[20] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Greenspan
[21] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism:_The_Unknown_Ideal
[22] http://www.alternet.org/tags/ayn-rand-0
[23] http://www.alternet.org/tags/paul-ryan-0
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http://front.moveon.org/is-ayn-rand-really-the-person-republicans-want-to-imitate/?rc=daily.share
paul ryan
==
Kung Fu Monkey has a great quote on Tolkien and Ayn Rand:
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
==
The Ayn Rand/Milton Friedman theories may have purported to believe that the “free market” would somehow generate benefits for the society as a whole, but their ideas really represented a moralistic frame which held that it was somehow right that the wealth of the society should go to its “most productive” members and that the rest of us were essentially “parasites.”
Apparently, special people like Rand also didn’t need to be encumbered by philosophical consistency. Though a fierce opponent of the welfare state, Rand secretly accepted the benefits of Medicare after she was diagnosed with lung cancer, according to one of her assistants.
She connived to have Evva Pryor, an employee of Rand’s law firm, arrange Social Security and Medicare benefits for Ann O’Connor, Ayn Rand using an altered spelling of her first name and her husband’s last name.
In 100 Voices: An Oral History of Ayn Rand, Scott McConnell, founder of the Ayn Rand Institute’s media department, quoted Pryor as justifying Rand’s move by saying: “Doctors cost a lot more money than books earn and she could be totally wiped out.” Yet, it didn’t seem to matter much if “average” Americans were wiped out.
Essentially, the Right was promoting the Social Darwinism of the 19th Century, albeit in chic new clothes. The Gilded Age from a century ago was being recreated behind Reagan’s crooked smile, Clinton’s good-ole-boy charm and George W. Bush’s Texas twang.
Whenever the political descendants of Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt tried to steer the nation back toward programs that would benefit the middle class and demand greater sacrifice from the super-rich, the wheel was grabbed again by politicians and pundits shouting the epithet, “tax-and-spend.”
Many average Americans were pacified by reminders of how Reagan made them feel good with his rhetoric about “the shining city on the hill.” see sourcewatch: [http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=America_is_a_shining_city_upon_a_hill ]
The Rand/Friedman elitism also remains alive with today’s arguments from Republicans who protest the idea of raising taxes on businessmen and entrepreneurs because they are the ones who “create the jobs,” even if there is little evidence that they are actually creating American jobs.
Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin, who is leading the fight to replace Medicare with a voucher system that envisions senior citizens buying health insurance from profit-making companies, cites Ayn Rand as his political inspiration.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/06/28-12
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wore dollar sign and big one at funeral
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http://www.theawl.com/2011/04/when-alan-met-ayn-atlas-shrugged-and-our-tanked-economy
OBJECT LESSONS
When Alan Met Ayn: "Atlas Shrugged" And Our Tanked Economy
by Maria Bustillos April 12, 2011
That pill-popping, boy-crazy nincompoop Ayn Rand has got a lot to answer for. Indeed, it’s not too much of a stretch to say that we owe at least part of the recent economic crisis to her and her philosophy of Objectivism, since former Fed chief Alan Greenspan was a lifelong disciple of both.
The two first met in the ’50s. Back then, a gang of acolytes, calling themselves the Collective, used to gather at Rand’s apartment on East 36th Street every Saturday night so they could tell each other how smart they all were. Along came Greenspan one evening, shy and somber.
It took a while for Greenspan and Rand to warm to one another. She nicknamed him “the undertaker,” owing to his dark clothes and mournful air, and he, a self-avowed logical positivist, required a certain amount of wooing on the philosophical side. But in time he became fiercely devoted to Rand, one of her most trusted confidants; he taught her something of the economics she shoehorned into Atlas Shrugged. He wrote for The Objectivist magazine, and stayed a close friend until her death in 1982.
Though the schemes of both these idealists crashed mightily and catastrophically to earth, both steadfastly refused ever to regret or repudiate the follies of Objectivism. The shocking thing is that despite all the evidence—which could not possibly be more damning—many on Wall Street and on the right continue to insist that Ayn Rand is a genius and that Objectivism is the answer to all mankind’s problems.
If that were so, doesn’t it stand to reason that the top genius’s own life would demonstrate at least a few of the benefits of being an Objectivist? Which, sadly, it really, really does not.
Greenspan’s tenure of nearly two decades as the chairman of the Federal Reserve is the second longest in history. Shouldn’t he have bestowed on a grateful public a legacy demonstrating the wisdom of Objectivist laissez-faire policies? We know how that turned out, too.
There’s about to be a movie, ostensibly the first of a trilogy, of Atlas Shrugged, Rand’s magnum opus. The trailer is absurd but mesmerizing, and it quickly gained over a million views on YouTube. Paul Johansson, an actor and neophyte director best known for his work on “One Tree Hill,” seems to have done a fine job with a tiny budget of somewhere between $15 and $25 million; the production looks terrific, sparkling with evening gowns and champagne, like a hopped-up version of Dynasty (which, come to think of it, Atlas Shrugged really does kind of resemble.) “If you double-cross me, I will destroy you,” the sleek blonde in the business suit informs her foe, with less conviction than an ordinary person would employ in ordering a salad. If the trailer is to be believed, this movie has a lot of campy pleasure in it. I kind of can’t wait!
Atlas Shrugged is about the tender love of a beautiful girl for her railroad, and also for a heap of powerful, visionary men. Nietzsche meets Harlequin, basically. It is also intended as a manifesto and rallying-cry for Objectivism: an XXL-sized political pamphlet.
Okay, so what is Objectivism, exactly?
In 1959, Mike Wallace asked Rand to “capsulize” her philosophy, which she proceeded to do, in a Boris Badenov accent and a comically self-satisfied manner.
I am primarily the creator of a new code of morality which has so far been believed impossible, namely a morality not based on faith, not on arbitrary whim, not on emotion, not on arbitrary edict, mystical or social, but on reason; a morality that can be proved by means of logic which can be demonstrated to be true and necessary.
Now may I define what my morality is? [I guess.] Since man’s mind is his basic means of survival […] he has to hold reason as an absolute, by which I mean that he has to hold reason as his only guide to action, and that he must live by the independent judgment of his own mind; thathis highest moral purpose is the achievement of his own happiness […] that each man must live as an end in himself, and follow his own rational self-interest.
Mike Wallace could scarcely believe his ears. His pop-eyed astonishment is a big part of what made this interview such great television.
Nietzsche Was Her Homeboy
Rand’s commitment to egoism as the basis for morality began as a reaction against the “collectivist” impulses she reckoned to be responsible for the collapse of Russia, where she was born in 1905. Her family’s wealth had been grabbed in the Revolution, so it’s no surprise that Rand would be anti-Communist. What is a surprise is that she would suppose as she did that the “altruistic” motives of Communism were to blame for everything that went wrong in her native country.
Objectivism is 100% pro-individualism and anti-altruism. Rand believed that altruism is literally wrong, that it weakens the all-important Individual and his chances of finding happiness. She took most of her shtick (enthronement of the Will, super-individualism, exaltation of “artists,” atheism, the Übermensch who is superior to the regular kind, etc. etc.) straight from Nietzsche, although she later denied his influence, claiming only Aristotle (!) as a philosophical forebear. But according to Rand biographer Jennifer Burns (whose book Goddess of the Market: Ayn Randand the American Right is really good), Rand’s early notebooks and journals all but feature little hearts drawn around Nietzsche’s name: “Nietzsche and I think,” “as Nietzsche says,” and so on.
The possibility that the unfettered egoism of guys like Stalin was the main problem with the Russian government, rather than too much altruism, escaped Rand entirely. As someone whose family likewise hails from a Communist country, I find it bizarre that this was not obvious to her. When all the big houses, all the money and privileges in a society accrue to just one class of people, it is safe to conclude that those people are acting out of self-interest and not altruism or whatever other bogus virtues they are ascribing to themselves. Just watch who gets richer, if you want to know what the real motivation is. Not to put too fine a point on it, Stalin was probably about the greatest Objectivist who ever lived, with a few possible exceptions like Mao Tse-Tung, Hitler and Pol Pot.
After the 1929 crash, many in the West believed that some form of Communism was inevitable in the developed world. For a long time American (and Knifecrime Island) intellectuals generally believed that Stalin was a fine man who was just trying to do the best he could for his people; that enraged Rand, who’d arrived in the U.S. in 1926 and knew the score. It wasn’t until the Non-Aggression Pact between Stalin and Hitler became public in 1939 that Americans really turned conclusively and permanently against Communism.
The Fountainhead, Rand’s first real go at a manifesto, was published in 1943. Though reviews were mixed, the book was a runaway success both as a publishing phenomenon and as a calling card for Objectivism. A movie was made in 1949, directed by King Vidor and starring Patricia Neal and Gary Cooper. Rand was at the zenith of her success with the public, celebrated and admired in New York, Ginger Rogers and Ira Levin wrote her fan letters, and the Collective began to collect around her.
Atlas Heaves into View
Into this milieu came Greenspan, age 26, dragged along by his first wife, Joan Mitchell.
Although very young, Greenspan was already a successful economic analyst whose consulting firm, Townsend-Greenspan & Co., Inc., was paid hefty sums to figure out what the hell was being said in government reports and things. Unlike most of the other Collectivists, who were students, Greenspan had something concrete to contribute to Rand’s work. She asked him all sorts of questions about the steel and railroad industries relating to her new novel. He, for his part, thought she was the smartest person ever, saying, “talking to Rand was like starting a game of chess thinking I was good, and suddenly finding myself in checkmate.”
The Collective was convinced that all mankind would rush to become Objectivists the moment Rand’s next novel was published. It was called Atlas Shrugged, and for once the words “eagerly awaited” were for real. A gap of 14 years separated the first blockbuster and the second. But there was an anger, contempt and malevolence toward the common man in the second book that had not been present in the first one. This time the reviews were scathing.
In Atlas Shrugged Rand creates a world where there are people who deserve to live because they are “intelligent” and “creative,” and those who do not. The former set out to rid themselves of the latter. These “men of the mind,” whom their author clearly worships, go “on strike” and refuse to be creative any more, which means that everybody else must perish. And because it’s a work of fantasy entirely under Rand’s control, they all go ahead and obediently perish. (IRL, people were not quite so obedient, as we shall see.)
For those who are inclined to find such ideas ludicrous, the book will fail, and utterly; its premises betray a bottomless ignorance of the deep interconnectedness of humankind, and the needs—economic, social, emotional, intellectual—of one human being for another. In the real world, someone is growing lettuce, someone else is writing a book or feeding a baby, yet another is designing the rails of a high-speed train. Someone else is teaching six-year-olds to read. All of us benefit from all of these activities—sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly. Each life can and does touch many thousands of others. The idea of the Nietszchean Superman who acts against his fellows (whom Rand called “the mob” and “looters” and whatnot) is consequently fatally flawed. Not even the Superest Superman can grow all his own food, make all his own paper, design and build his own cars and airplanes, etc. (Hadn’t Rand ever read Robinson Crusoe?) Humanity is a collaborative project, as well as a project of individuals.
This is to say nothing of the flatness of the book’s characters, its clanking exposition, its interminable speechifying or the woodenness of its dialogue. On the upside, there is a character named Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastian d’Anconia. Not even Baroness Orczy had that kind of nerve.
Atlas Shrugged burst onto the scene in 1957 and was promptly and categorically reviled from both right and left, as it has continued to be. It also sold like hotcakes, as it still does.
Whittaker Chambers’s famous takedown of Atlas Shrugged, “Big Sister is Watching You” appeared in The National Review in December of 1957. Rand claimed never to have read it (mmmhmm) but refused to let anyone so much as mention Chambers in her presence.
He wrote, “Out of a lifetime of reading I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal. In addition, the mind which finds this tone natural to it shares other characteristics of its type. 1) It consistently mistakes raw force for strength, and the rawer the force, the more reverent the posture of the mind before it. 2) It supposes itself to be the bringer of a final revelation.”
This essay and its message stood between many on the far right and a potentially fervent embrace of Objectivism. After all, Chambers was the pumpkin-growing former Communist who became a bona fide ferreter-out of real live Communists In Our Midst, having been responsible for sending Alger Hiss to jail; and if there is anything a hard-right conservative used to love more than putting Communists in jail, it was a former lefty who’d come over to the other side, like Ronald Reagan. That is, after all, what they hope is going to happen to all the lefties.
Other reviews were not so much negative as incendiary. In Esquire, Gore Vidal wrote that Objectivism was “nearly perfect in its immorality.” Time’s reviewer asked, “Is it a novel? Is it a nightmare?”
So the loyal Alan Greenspan, then around thirty years old and already a big shot in financial circles, wrote to the New York Times to defend the book as follows: “‘Atlas Shrugged’ is a celebration of life and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should.”
Note how human fulfillment is distributed here in Randian terms, to the “deserving”, whereas the “parasites” are going to go up in flames “as they should.” It is a little chilling to hear a grown man say that sort of stuff, particularly a grown man who will come to have that much influence over the fortunes of so many.
Greed Is So, So Good
So why have so many loved (and still love) this book so very much?
In addition to praising people for being selfish and money-worshiping, Atlas Shrugged has a second rare virtue—a real one, this time—a genuine fascination with business. Few novels of the twentieth century provide a halfway credible or interesting take on business, largely because the arcane details that go into running one are hard to dramatize well. (There are exceptions, of course. James Clavell is great at this, and so is Eric Ambler. Best of all, maybe, is Nevil Shute, whose A Town Like Alice is the novel Ayn Rand or anyone else should have wished she could write. It has got business, suspense, romance, exoticism and adventure, and is a pure delight to read.)
Even today, financial and business types are drawn to Atlas Shrugged for its unusual preoccupation with industry and economics. Plus, it’s not just that literature does not ordinarily occupy itself much with business; literary sophistication is not a prized quality on Wall Street or in business circles generally. Across the table from you, a VC or Wall Street guy will wax all lyrical about Atlas Shrugged and you’ll say wow, you read novels? If you ask what other books they like, though, they might mention The Art of War, which has been a big deal with them since the ’80s, or maybeThe Big Short, or a biography of Warren Buffett. (But not Griftopia! Heh.)
Then there’s the matter of egoism, which is where the Libertarian or far-right angle comes in. Rand is all about the Self-Sufficiency. This is why there are no children in her books. In a Rand novel, no one ever helps anyone or even concerns himself much with anyone else. Pitilessness is the highest virtue there is, it signifies Will and Strength and stuff. The weak are “lice” and “parasites”. Atlas Shrugged is almost a caricature of social Darwinism. Gore Vidal explained it this way: “She has a great attraction for simple people who are puzzled by organized society, who object to paying taxes, who dislike the welfare state, who feel guilt at the thought of the suffering of others but who would like to harden their hearts.”
But the self-interest thing really has a nice ring to it, recalling as it does the elegance of Satanism’s single commandment: “Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” Rand’s books have sold nonstop from the moment they were published because people love hearing how not only can they get away with being totally selfish, it’s absolutely the right way to be. The best way to be, as in, morally the best. EST and the Prosperity Gospel have much the same appeal. And sure, that all sounds fine when you are home reading a book, by yourself, but just go out there and try it. As Rand herself did.
Love Is An Objectivism Battlefield
1968 was the year of doom for the Objectivist cult’s first wave. Rand had been having an on-again, off-again affair for over a decade with her prime minister and heir, the handsome wacko Nathaniel Branden (born Nathan Blumenthal), 25 years her junior.
Both of them were married when the affair began—he, 24; she, 49—but they rounded up the spouses and talked all four together about how Branden and Rand were going to be lovers, because, yeah, that always works out so well.
Fourteen years into the affair and Branden, now 38, was done with the whole thing. But every time he tried to break up with Rand, she would fly into torrents of rage and yell at him that he had “no right to sex with some inferior woman!” “The man to whom I dedicated Atlas Shrugged would never want anything less than me!” she shrieked. This went on for ages.
Meanwhile, Rand’s husband, Frank O’Connor, was off drinking himself into a stupor, and Branden’s wife Barbara was slowly losing what was left of her marbles.
Finally, unable to put up with any more scenes, Branden informed Rand by letter that their age difference “now made sex with her impossible” for him. She was devastated. But there was worse to come, because Branden had decided not to mention a secret affair he was having with one of his students, a beautiful young model named Patrecia Gullison. Because even though Branden was an Objectivist expressing his Highest Moral Purpose by Achieving his Own Happiness and all, he was also terrified of what would happen when Rand found out about it.
And for very good reason. When Rand did find out about it, she hit the ceiling and summoned Branden to her apartment and fired him and called the spouses in for another group powwow and screamed and slapped Branden’s face multiple times, in the foyer, because she wouldn’t let him in the living room. This, even though Branden had been Mr. Objectivism for years and years, and the Nathaniel Branden Institute had grown into a huge organization for the spread of Objectivism.
Reason, you would think, demanded restraint, and Rand had for decades styled herself the high priestess of Reason. There were relationships, reputations and institutions to protect on all sides, a thriving business, as well as the propagation of a mankind-saving philosophy to see to.
So what! She was a woman scorned.
Which meant that no sensible, rational considerations prevented Rand from publishing a letter addressed “To Whom It May Concern” in The Objectivist that accused Branden and his wife of deception, and (falsely, it appears) of financial hi-jinks—and of generally being bad Objectivists. “I repudiate both of them, totally and permanently,” she wrote, “as spokesmen for me or Objectivism.” A few prominent Objectivists signed this incoherent breakup letter along with Rand, among them—yes!—Alan Greenspan, the future Fed chairman.
The scandal caused lasting damage to Rand’s reputation, and to her organization. Nathaniel Branden would eventually move to California, found new organizations and therapeutic practices, and marry three times more; the beautiful Patrecia, sadly, drowned in a swimming pool after suffering an epileptic seizure in 1977. (Branden’s memoir My Years with Ayn Rand is hot as a pistol, absolutely riveting and danged scary, btw.)
Greenspan Frees The Market
Although the Collective never really recovered from the events of 1968, Alan Greenspan never broke with Ayn Rand. In his 2008 memoir, The Age of Turbulence, he writes, “[o]f all my teachers, Arthur Burns and Ayn Rand had the greatest impact on my life… Ayn Rand expanded my intellectual horizons, challenging me to look beyond economics to understand the behavior of individuals and societies.” He speaks warmly of her throughout the book, even knowing all that he did about her skeleton-packed closet; his loyalty elicits both sympathy and exasperation.
In his own way, Greenspan had inherited in toto Rand’s short-sightedness, egocentrism and complete lack of understanding of “the behavior of individuals and societies.” Though he would play his delusions out in a very different arena and not, so far as is generally known, be going around slapping anybody in the foyer. His big scene would come forty years later, in a Congressional hearing room.
Greenspan was no mere theorist when it came to Objectivism and was, in time, in a position to put its theories into practice on a massive scale. He believed fervently that business should not be regulated by us parasitic consumers, and had written to that effect from the ’60s onward. In 1987, he became Fed Chairman, succeeding the towering (and wholly unobjectivist) Paul Volcker. The results of his Objectivist convictions, made manifest in that role, were far-reaching. It has been argued in many quarters that Greenspan’s rock-ribbed laissez-faire policies resulted in a succession of bubbles—first in the dot-com boom, then in real estate and credit—that led directly to the 2008 crisis.
Part of the blame lies in his attitude toward derivatives. The efforts of the CFTC’s Brooksley Born to compel the regulation of derivatives trading began in 1994, but came to nothing owing largely to Greenspan’s objections. After the Enron debacle, which, thanks to “the smartest guys in the room,” left California holding the bag on about $9 billion of natural gas bills, Senator Diane Feinstein made herself very busy pestering Greenspan about the need to regulate derivatives. In 2004,Alan shrugged: he wrote to Congress in response to Senator Feinstein in what had by then become the signature Greenspan style of floaty, oracular, narcoleptic polysyllables:
Businesses, financial institutions, and investors throughout the economy rely upon derivatives to protect themselves from market volatility triggered by unexpected economic events. This ability to manage risks makes the economy more resilient and its importance cannot be underestimated. In our judgment, the ability of private counterparty surveillance to effectively regulate these markets can be undermined by inappropriate extensions of government regulations.
If the Enron disaster had not already made the hollowness of this argument horribly apparent, the financial crisis four years later could leave no doubt. And so it was that inOctober 2008, the mother of all Objectivist reckonings came to pass: The Span had to defend his disastrous policies to Congress one Thursday afternoon and explain why the U.S. economy, for decades under his stewardship, had gone kablooey. Here is what he said to that mob of furious congressmen who made up the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
“I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms […]
“Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief.”
Never mind that for years Greenspan had had a bunch of regulators and congressmen all but coming after him with baseball bats trying to get him to see that “the self-interest of lending institutions” was no match for the greed of unscrupulous individuals.
For Communist “altruism,” read “SEC regulation.” For Stalin, read Lloyd Blankfein et so many al. Just follow the money. How much does it cost such guys to pay lip service to the glories of the free market, Communism, whatever, while they grab everything that isn’t nailed down for themselves? Not too much, if all you care about is your own, um. Individualism.
“You had the authority to prevent irresponsible lending practices that led to the subprime mortgage crisis. You were advised to do so by many others,” said RepresentativeHenry A. Waxman of California, chairman of the committee. “Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you had not made?”
Mr. Greenspan conceded: “Yes, I’ve found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I’ve been very distressed by that fact.”
He found a flaw! I bet Diane Feinstein popped an aneurysm right then and there.
If Alan Greenspan had had a lick of sense he would have known that the jig was up and it was time for him to say, Ayn Rand was the biggest dope on record, except for me, because I listened to her. But guys like Greenspan don’t ever seem to say that sort of thing. I suspect that it’s because they have gotten so completely used to thinking of themselves as the “elite” who needn’t reckon with the “weak” objections of lesser men.
So Greenspan maintained his convictions to the last. Even in 2008 with the shit engulfing the fan, he was still trying to prevent more stringent securities regulation. Why?
“Whatever regulatory changes are made, they will pale in comparison to the change already evident in today’s markets,” he said. “Those markets for an indefinite future will be far more restrained than would any currently contemplated new regulatory regime.”
Using the exact same reasoning he’d just admitted to be erroneous, he was still claiming that the market would take care of itself. He found a flaw and then he lost it again pretty much instantly. The remains of the market are sitting right in front of him in a smoking ruin and what is his prescription? More of the same!
And what is the result, three years later? The markets in unregulated derivatives, Warren Buffett’s “financial weapons of mass destruction,” were never outlawed and are alive and well. Nobody went to jail or even really had his hand slapped, except for Bernie Madoff. Nearly all the destructive forces Greenspan set in motion came roaring right back, along with Wall Street bonuses, despite his claims of the enormous restraint certain to follow the debacle of 2008, for “an indefinite future” that didn’t last for even one year.
So here we return to the “looters” who don’t create anything, and the policy of cherchez l’argent. Greenspan and all these free marketers and bankers and Wall Street guys who generally just love Ayn Rand, self-sufficiency and individualism, and so they would never see themselves as the looters. But the question is just so there, because while the financial services sector provides some valuable services to a society, it is very questionable indeed whether those services are worth 12% of GDP, which is, by the way, about what we’re all paying now, or roughly triple what they used to cost before the publication of Atlas Shrugged.
The real parasites, it turns out, are not the looting masses but the Objectivist elites (what is it that these hedge fund managers “create” again?), rabidly pursuing their own “happiness” at the cost of our social safety net, our environment and the prosperity and well-being of the world’s people. So much for the triumph of individualism.
Maria Bustillos is the author of Dorkismo and Act Like A Gentleman, Think Like A Woman..
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