• Misguided Scheme from NYT’s Friedman 
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Personal life  | If [Thomas] Friedman had any journalistic integrity, he would have declared that today’s extremist Republican Party has become the chief threat to the nation’s wellbeing – and indeed the planet’s survival. He would say that only the decisive defeat of this Ayn Rand radicalism offers a pathway to the future. However, to do that would put his cherished (and profitable) status as a “centrist” in danger. So, he undertakes his “evenhanded” denunciation of both sides.  

• Cause of 2008 Financial Collapse Remains Lost on Corporate Chieftains 
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Capitalism  |Image  | A “banking guru” received a standing ovation this week when he told a group of Alabama business leaders that the federal government largely caused the 2008 financial collapse. John Allison, former CEO of BB&T Corp., told the Birmingham Kiwanis Club that banks were not the primary culprits in the financial crisis. Instead, he placed the blame almost entirely on the federal government, drawing a round of orgasmic applause from the audience. What should we make of this? Allison, a devotee of conservative icon Ayn Rand, has been making such comments since at least October 2008, so his words aren’t new. Allison now is a professor at Wake Forest University, meaning he carries some weight--but the railings of one misguided former banker should not concern regular Americans.  

• • How Wall Street Was Able to Profit from Trashing America’s Mainstreet Economy 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Inaccurate  | “Pity the Billionaire,” Thomas Frank marvels that the Ayn Rand myth of the free market could make such a sweeping comeback with “free market” deregulation which even then was almost cratering the US economy. On page 118 of this new book, Frank brings up Naomi Klein’s shock doctrine theory and the irony that the right claimed that the Obama administration was trying to take advantage of the economic crisis to move America to the left. In reality however, the conservatives and their captive economists apply the shock doctrine to America’s economic meltdown to invent an even more utopian vision of a free market.  

• • • Ayn Rand: The Blinkered Visionary 
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Alan Greenspan  |Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Capitalism  |Egoism  |Individualism  | Ultimately, Ayn Rand & the Prophecy of Atlas Shrugged is an exercise in spin control. The 2008 financial meltdown has focused a great deal of public attention on the global financial environment--and, in particular, upon the character flaws of its leaders. The obstinacy of the Occupy movement has further sharpened that focus: common folk have been encouraged to blame Wall Street one-percenters for the burgeoning climate of socio-economic difficulties that the 99% are facing. In an environment wherein Ayn Rand’s self-interested heroes are beginning to feel the heat, Ayn Rand & the Prophecy of Atlas Shrugged, is an attempt to deflect attention from Rand’s heroes to her favorite straw man: big government.  

• • I Am Spartacus! 
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Capitalism  | The “job creators” attitude in our free market, capitalist system is that hiring human beings is a necessary evil, and if you could be replaced by a monkey or a machine, who would not talk back to them or demand raises, they would do so in an instant. Too many employers take the works of Ayn Rand seriously, and believe that their employees are merely things: parasites who survive solely because of the employer’s creativity and entrepreneurial spirit.  

• Clint Eastwood and Chrysler upset the “Hope America Fails” Republicans 
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Atheism  | The American auto industry is back. The American autoworkers are back. The American jobs market is coming back. Let the Hope America Fails Republicans quote the atheist Ayn Rand, Austrian economists or creative-destruction theorists so popular in Mitt Romney’s circles.  

• • • Thomas Frank on Mimesis, Capitalist Fundamentalism and Stealing Liberal Ideas 
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Alan Greenspan  |Atlas Shrugged  |Audio  | Here are my very rough notes from the interview [with Thomas Frank, author of Pity the Billionaire]: Favorite book of conservatives-- Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. [....] Kenneth Greenspan was a member of Ayn Rand’s inner circle. All these new members of congress think AYN Rand is greatest writer ever, one member of congress required all staffers to read Atlas Shrugged. So Thomas read it. IT’s a novel about the 1930’s-- the a counterfactual story of the great depression as conservatives believe it should have happened. Recessions and depressions happen because of government interference. That’s what we get in Atlas Shrugged. She’s very good a describing these scenes of rural poverty. Conservatives taking liberal archetypes and turning them upside down.  

• • • Koch Brothers Buy Ayn Rand 
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Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Egoism  |Image  |  

• • Built on Shifting Sands 
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This is what is wrong with reactionary radicalism: whether it is Socrates decrying Athenian democracy, or Ayn Rand complaining about our modern equivalent: They always argue that they are superior, and must be atop the hierarchy that they create.  

• Republicans Boo the Golden Rule 
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Newt Gingrich says that the proper thing to do with enemies is “Kill them.” That, of course, receives ecstatic applause. What could Paul say in response? He could have quoted almost anything Jesus Christ or Ronald Reagan or Ayn Rand had ever said and been booed for it.  

• • Let’s Play: Name That Candidate 
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Personal life  | Are you familiar with Ayn Rand? The queen of selfishness and hypocrisy believed in the “me” society where everyone is “on their own”.  

• • Occupy Wall Street + NDAA = I join the Socialist Party 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Atlas Shrugged made me fit to be tied; I found it practically a handbook on how to be a sociopath.  

• • GREED! Anatomy of a revolution 
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Alan Greenspan  |Capitalism  | It is mind boggling that after all the Ayn Rand, unregulated, free market cowboy capitalism so obviously caused a world wide economic disaster” the GOP now doubles down and claims that we didn’t go far enough! Hell even Ms. Rands high priest Alan Greenspan admitted he was wrong and that banks and wall street can’t be trusted and need regulation.  

• Ron Paul, the Obama Deception, and the Occupy Evolution 
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Capitalism  | Ron Paul has some ‘right on’ stances -- the wars, drug policy. But his Randian take on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, environmental regulation, banking controls, unemployment insurance, child labor laws and unions are ALL either unconstitutional or just “not good for business.” That only unfettered free-market capitalism (Milton Friedman Economics) will pull this country from the depths of collapse, that the evil is government itself, is clearly the very political/economic ideology that has driven this country to the depths of ruin.  

• • America’s Corpocracy: The Legacy of U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Lewis F. Powell (1907-1998) 
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Ayn Rand Institute  |Capitalism  |Essay Contests  | To give one example of "Corporcracy High," the arch conservative and corporate funded Ayn Rand Institute uses high schools as a "major battleground" to advance the ideas of unfettered capitalism. It does so by giving hundreds of thousands of Rand's books to high school teachers and by sponsoring annual high school essay contests. I will never endorse book burning, but Rand's books tempt me!  

• • People as Livestock: The Cult of Fundamentalist Materialism and the Cheapening Life 
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Inaccurate  | Is there any inherent value to an individual human life? Authoritarians of the left, libertarians of the right, objectivists, conservatives and even liberals and progressives fixated on “jobs” and “rehabilitation” of the socioeconomically dysfunctional give the answer “no; “ sometimes directly (as in the case of the Stalinist and the American conservative) and other times through actions, policies, and preferences. [....] What do Stalinism, objectivism, authoritarian capitalism, and global corporatism all have in common ? They are in my opinion fundamentalist-materialist cults that value the inanimate over the living, the concrete over the abstract and have effectively reduced the vast majority of the human race to livestock, or wild beasts to be hunted down, captured, contained, broken, or in the alternative, simply slaughtered and destroyed.  

• The Occupy Movement and the Great Shift 
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Individualism  | Neoliberal policies (aka free market fundamentalism) and the accompanying philosophy of Ayn Rand-style individualism have led to yawning gaps between the plutocracy and the rest of us, between the rich countries and the poor nations, growing insecurity spreading like the concentric circles of waves in a lake after a large object has dropped into the water, multiple and deepening disasters on the global, regional, local, and personal level, and the aggressive rejection of the meaning of objective reality that emanates most overtly from the Republican Party - which hasn’t met a made up fact that it doesn’t fall in love with - but that is also expressed in the form of the Democrats saying that they are upholding the rule of law while they are relentlessly sabotaging it, with both parties operating on the presumption that what matters is what they claim, not what is actually happening.  

• • One Veteran’s Rough Path from Killing and Torturing to Peace 
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Atheism  | Evan Knappenberger says he began as an Ayn Rand fan, an atheist and a Republican (and you thought Karl Rove was the only atheist Republican!). Knappenberger has since turned against Ayn Rand and rightwing politics including war, and gone religious.  

• Pat Buchanan’s White Supremacist Republican Vision 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Buchanan, like all of the great right-wing propagandists wraps this swill in the cloak of the great struggle of civilizations, his column’s title conjures up memories of the mass murdering Christian Anders Breivik who wrote an Atlas Shrugged sized manifesto that also used a year, 2083 in his case to draw attention to a darkly racist message.  

• • • Hard Right Utopia 
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Altruism  |Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Capitalism  |Egoism  |Personal life  |Image  |Inaccurate  | It’s been said that doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is its twin brother. This seems particularly relevant these days since, although many hard right conservatives are likely to characterize their lifestyles as “faith” based, it seems doubtful that very many truly see themselves as “thy brother’s keeper.” In fact, it’s probably safe to bet against the propspect of Jesus being the primary focal point of their inspiration. In seeking guidance, the odds are that many of these hard-right faith-shouters would be more likely to ask: What would Ayn Rand do?