I just wanna say one thing! God Bless America.
-Biff Tannen
In the garish and decaying empire of asinine triviality, raw greed, political corruption and brain jellying, TV induced dumbness perhaps there is no more fitting figure to ascend to the throne of king of the dipshits than Donald Trump. With his assumption of the mission of the holy mission to expose the black devil Obama as the hidden Muslim that he has so far gotten away with lying about, the man with the roadkill pelt on his noggin has scrambled his ace staff of 'private detectives' and sent them to the Aloha State ala Hawaii Five-O to track down the illusive birth certificate. One can only imagine the motley crew on Trump's payroll and bereft as they likely are of any sense of decency will likely find themselves spending more time on Hotel Street smoking da kine bud and spending their ill-gotten cash on hookers, perhaps Trump can even dispatch Charlie Sheen who is looking for a new gig these days and has plenty of experience with the ladies of the night. While millions of ignoramuses, nitwits and mouth-breathing red state fascists view outing Obama as the Antichrist as their holy mandate a scoundrel like Donald Trump knows damned well that he is doing it for publicity and the support of the dregs of society that are the Birthers, a fringe-faction of the ridiculously over-hyped Tea Party (aka the re-branded post Bush GOP base) so moronic that are mocked outright and kept locked away in the attic like a vicious retarded child by most Republican politicians. This mission, which will enthrall not only an ugly part of the subculture that should be universally shunned but also a good many other electronic crackpipe addicts will surely boost the Donald's cred and vault him into position for his run at the presidency in 2012. In a perverse sort of way Trump would bring much experience to the job, his string of bankruptcies would be a huge asset in a country that is on the brink of insolvency and his arrogance combined with a flamboyant way of coming across as a professional horse's ass would be like George W. Bush only with more entertainment value.
Like so many other of the putrid misfits, stone-crazy ideologues, financial swindlers and just plain dunces that have wrecked the country the festering wart on our national ass that is Donald Trump is largely a product of the 1980s and the Reagan era. Trump burst onto the national scene while parlaying his ownership of the now defunct United States Football League's flagship franchise the New Jersey Generals into media coverage. In an era where one of the seven deadly sins known as greed became an exalted form of virtuousness in the USA thanks to Reagan's cadre of tax chiselers, weasels and full-blown crooks fictional characters such as J.R. Ewing and Gordon Gekko became icons as a nation of hard workers who actually produced physical goods began the long and miserable slouch into the future where they would become burger flippers (fast food jobs were transformed into manufacturing jobs under Bush II) and paper pushers who managed to in a high tech version of King Midas transform shit (bad mortgages) into gold (mortgage backed securities) and then into shit (post-housing crash) again. When Saint Ronnie fired the air traffic controllers it was the opening fusillade of the class war, the casualties of which are still being tallied and along with a blistering crackerjack propaganda campaign designed to dupe Americans into thinking that they could actually hit it big in the Wall Street casinos real virtues such as innovation, entrepreneurship and actually building a business were dumped for the get rich quick fantasies purveyed by pigs like Donald Trump.
To use a cultural analogy from the Reagan era one could easily imagine Trump's America straight out of the smash hit Back to the Future II. When Marty McFly and Doc Brown ride the flying DeLorean int the future where Marty procures a copy of a post 20th Century edition of Gray's Sports Almanac which has the results of all sporting events from 1950-2000. An elderly Biff Tannen gets ahold of the book, travels back into the past and gives it to his younger self thereby altering the future. When Marty and Doc return to 1985 Biff has parlayed the book into vast wealth and fame from his amazing run of luck in picking the winner of sports events or in other words, Biff became mega-rich the true American way, by cheating and gambling. A great metaphor for the Reagan years and a perfect one for the ascent of 'the Donald' as well. I could think of no one individual who better exemplifies the true America than Donald Trump, as H.L. Mencken once wrote, Imagine a gentleman and you will have imagined everything that he is not. However I digress ... when Marty McFly returns to 1985 he comes back to a changed world thanks to Biff's parlaying of his immense gambling winnings into an ugly empire of gauche sin and spectacle while the entire city of Hill Valley devolved into a hellish, third world land of gangs, crime and poverty while “Biff’s”, the gleaming towering casino jutted skyward above the filth and fury, poking up like a blood engorged, rock-hard penis. It doesn’t take much to conjure up visions of Donald Trump’s America and it ain’t pretty.
Trump's real estate developments already blight the landscape like an ugly recurrent strain of Herpes lesions and as far as the poverty, crime and general state of economic deterioration, well just take a look around. The teabaggers have allowed Ayn Rand cultists and political criminals to once again successfully roll Obama with crushing cuts in social programs to fund the malefactors of great wealth like 1985 Biff Tannen and Donald Trump with his cave in on the government shutdown. Worse, even more savage cuts in essential services and 'entitlements', that great term that has been successfully used by the think tanks and the monied political whores to diminish what was once a social safety net that was the envy of the world are facing an even more cruel evisceration with the coming raising of the debt ceiling to accommodate more borrowing from China to fund the endless wars and subsidize tax cuts for the rich and corporations. And of course Social Security is in the crosshairs as the economic royalists smell blood with Obama a cornered and terrified animal who is about to have his head ripped off and then suffering the indignity of the oligarchy pigs shitting down his throat and kicking his decapitated dome around like a soccer ball as they destroy FDR's hated New Deal on his watch. That is of course assuming that the Pope of Hope hasn't been in on it all from the beginning which given the ongoing decimation of economic conditions and civil liberties on his watch could make a strong case for. As George Carlin remarked in his famous rant, "it's a big club and you aren't in it". With the 2012 presidential election looming and Americans facing a three-headed monster in Obama-Trump-Romney, a ferocious and fearsome hydra, any of which would further destroy the lives of millions at the behest of the plutocrats and corporate thugs that finance their campaigns perhaps the Mayan predictions of apocalyptic doom are in the future here in Der Heimat.
Of course none of forces that have successfully driven America slowly down the road to a fascist third world banana republic could have succeeded without the help of a massively stupid electorate. While the teabaggers are the corporate media darlings for their ability to easily be mustered against phantoms and duped into voting against their own economic self-interests they are only a recent phenomenon. To really see just how bereft of intelligence, rationality and logic that this country has become one needs to jump into Doc Brown's DeLorean time machine and take a trip back to the Reagan years which is exactly where the demarcation point between fantasy and reality occurred. I have been saying this for years as have others who get it yet as in the national orgy of reverence to the old fool as was evident in the celebrations a few months back in honor of Ronald Reagan's Centennial birthday, the big lie of the Gipper as some sort of father of the country has become the truth to millions, especially the poorly educated and electronically lobotomized generations who came to age after Reagan was elected. The schools have been under assault for decades by not only the corporate class that wants obedient workers but assisted largely by the fanatical Christians seeking the implementation of a real theocracy in America. Now as never before teachers are under assault by the looters who rule the roost, in another spot-on column this week Chris Hedges writes on Why the United States is Destroying it's Education System from which I excerpt:
A nation that destroys its systems of education, degrades its public information, guts its public libraries and turns its airwaves into vehicles for cheap, mindless amusement becomes deaf, dumb and blind. It prizes test scores above critical thinking and literacy. It celebrates rote vocational training and the singular, amoral skill of making money. It churns out stunted human products, lacking the capacity and vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate state. It funnels them into a caste system of drones and systems managers. It transforms a democratic state into a feudal system of corporate masters and serfs.
Teachers, their unions under attack, are becoming as replaceable as minimum-wage employees at Burger King. We spurn real teachers—those with the capacity to inspire children to think, those who help the young discover their gifts and potential—and replace them with instructors who teach to narrow, standardized tests. These instructors obey. They teach children to obey. And that is the point. The No Child Left Behind program, modeled on the “Texas Miracle,” is a fraud. It worked no better than our deregulated financial system. But when you shut out debate these dead ideas are self-perpetuating.Passing bubble tests celebrates and rewards a peculiar form of analytical intelligence. This kind of intelligence is prized by money managers and corporations. They don’t want employees to ask uncomfortable questions or examine existing structures and assumptions. They want them to serve the system. These tests produce men and women who are just literate and numerate enough to perform basic functions and service jobs. The tests elevate those with the financial means to prepare for them. They reward those who obey the rules, memorize the formulas and pay deference to authority. Rebels, artists, independent thinkers, eccentrics and iconoclasts—those who march to the beat of their own drum—are weeded out.
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The demonizing of teachers is another public relations feint, a way for corporations to deflect attention from the theft of some $17 billion in wages, savings and earnings among American workers and a landscape where one in six workers is without employment. The speculators on Wall Street looted the U.S. Treasury. They stymied any kind of regulation. They have avoided criminal charges. They are stripping basic social services. And now they are demanding to run our schools and universities.
“Not only have the reformers removed poverty as a factor, they’ve removed students’ aptitude and motivation as factors,” said this teacher, who is in a teachers union. “They seem to believe that students are something like plants where you just add water and place them in the sun of your teaching and everything blooms. This is a fantasy that insults both student and teacher. The reformers have come up with a variety of insidious schemes pushed as steps to professionalize the profession of teaching. As they are all businessmen who know nothing of the field, it goes without saying that you do not do this by giving teachers autonomy and respect. They use merit pay in which teachers whose students do well on bubble tests will receive more money and teachers whose students do not do so well on bubble tests will receive less money. Of course, the only way this could conceivably be fair is to have an identical group of students in each class—an impossibility. The real purposes of merit pay are to divide teachers against themselves as they scramble for the brighter and more motivated students and to further institutionalize the idiot notion of standardized tests. There is a certain diabolical intelligence at work in both of these.”
Or as George Carlin so eloquently put it:
They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking... They don't want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that . . . that doesn't help them. That's against their interests. That's right. ... ... They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard thirty fucking years ago. ... ... They don't want that! You know what they want? They want obedient workers . . . Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. ... And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shitty jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it,
The dumbing down of America was essential for the hostile corporate takeover, the banishment of critical thinking skills and a knowledge of history, true history that is, had to be stifled. Creativity and questioning of idiotic people and policies are not things that are desired in the corporate state and no dissent is brooked let alone tolerated. Today's average office settings are top down authoritarian entities where a group identity that is far more akin to classical Stalinist communism rather than the grand capitalism that they trumpet is the norm. Asking questions is denounced as heresy or gasp..."negative thinking" and the poor souls packed into cubicles slightly smaller than the cells at Gitmo are policed with ruthless efficiency by networks of finks, stooges and goons straight out of Solzhenitzen's Gulag Archipelago. Any violation of the corporate thought police is the cause for scorn from one's co-inhabitants of cubicle hell, ostracism and in situations with psychotic mid-level straw bosses lead to collective punishment and eventually exile. These people are the lucky ones in corporate Amerika because at least they have jobs in air-conditioned settings, the less fortunate who have been culled out at an earlier production stage in the educational process end up as harangued Wal-Mart clerks, prison guards, manual toilers and food service workers. It's the ownership society and the snorting porkers who run it own all of our asses, high-rolling, four-flushing pigs like Donald Trump. The prototypical ugly American is now rocketing to the top of the polls largely due to his brazen I'm an asshole and proud of it! attitude, his pandering to the dumbest motherfuckers on the planet who are the racist birthers and scumbaggers and having a hit show on the tee-vee to boot! Only in America, a land where one now evolves into a grunting cave person over time, bred to worship their rich masters always at the expense of themselves and the closer their understanding to the primitive concept of "God's will" the better. While the Germans aspired to the perfect Aryan Übermensch 21st Century Americans are blessedly ignorant, filled with primal hatred and fear and devolving by the minute thanks to the electronic dreck vomited forth from their televisions. It is truly eugenics American style.
One step closer to the end of the world. The one-two combo of corporate greed and organized religion apparently proved to be too much for reason, sanity and compassion.
-Trent Reznor
Eugenics American Style: The current pathetic state of this shambling into historical infamy, god-kissed, flag-swaddled giant lemming farm would seem to make Mike Judge's vastly underrated satire Idiocracy prophetic.Unlike Soylent Green, Logan's Run, Brazil ,Blade Runner or any other cinematic vision of a dystopian society, Idiocracy is far more terrifying because it is actually in the process of becoming reality. With the ongoing assault on the American education system, the electronic lobotomizing of the populace thanks to the mind rot that is television, government lies about pretty much everything, the metastasizing of a vile anti-intellectual cancer promulgated by the Christian institutions of the land and the transformation of citizens as consumers the march towards the society of morons, by morons and for morons as portrayed in the film is already well underway. Much like fear in the post 9/11 era, willful ignorance and entrenched magical thinking are now as American as apple pie. As the educational system is dismantled, public schools decimated by money changers waving private vouchers and the cost of college becoming unaffordable the country has already lost far too much ground to China and other rising economic powers that value innovation and creative thinking. As the U.S. wails away like a mastodon being sucked under in a tar pit other more civilized and forward looking nation states are shoveling money into alternative energy, stem cell research and advanced systems of transportation, these nation states place a high value on an educated citizenry that can turn projects into reality. As the Republican party has continued to rely on the vicious religious right as a means to attain political power they must provide the requisite shovels of bloody red meat to keep their shock troops marching to the polls. Therefore schools are bullied into not teaching science and evolution, stem cell research is disregarded and rational thinking is exorcised in favor of biblical dogma that only appeals to simpletons, cretins and lunatics. In America stupidity is not only tolerated but exalted as long as it continues to enable the war profiteers, greed heads, Wall Street gambling houses and Big Pharma not to mention 'allies' like Israel who only feed the fantasies of those drunk on Jesus juice and waiting for Armageddon and the Rapture when they can get dirty, nasty nekkid and fly up to join God to watch the heathens rip themselves apart for their entertainment.
Atlas Yawned, Jesus Wept: The high priestess of the religion of "fuck you I got mine" who is novelist and cult leader Ayn Rand has always been a driving force for the destroyers of economies and the anal raping of the working class. Rand, who emigrated to America from her native Russia suffered from a delusional worldview resulting from her families experience during the rise of communism during the revolution days. Rather than learning a valuable lesson from the oppressive thugs who rose to power and then murdered with impunity and stole whatever the hell they wanted to all under the guise of a corrupt ideology instead became some sort of intellectual prophet of a ridiculous school of thought called objectivism which can be boiled down into bumper sticker simplicity as FUCK THE POOR. Rand worked her way up by writing screenplays and eventually novels which took on an increasingly political theme that demonized the state and basic human cooperation and decency which endeared her to the sort of high-rolling assholes that wrecked the country and while waging class war under the battle flag of free market capitalism they are nothing more than the parasites, looters and moochers that Rand condemned. Rand hit it big with her novel The Fountainhead in which the selfish prick hero Howard Roark waged battle and triumphed over an evil socialist system, although the book was rejected by twelve publishers it as all dreck does eventually finds a sucker, usually a self-interested one. The book was published and Rand was well on her way to becoming a cultural icon with a cause celebre. While Rand is often praised as a libertarian idol by selfish dolts it was prominent libertarian thinker Murray N. Rothbard who wrote on The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult, the glassy-eyed members would go on to use the work of Rand to justify the strip-mining of American society through removing the regulatory restraints on financial sociopaths whose crony capitalism is far closer to textbook style fascism than the cynical individuality that Rand often invoked.
An article from Mother Jones magazine pegs the goddess of greed dead on, the piece is entitled And the Rand Played On states that:
The plot for Idiocracy features a U.S. Army dullard Joe Bowers (who could just as well be Joe the Plumber), a man of completely average intelligence and a prostitute named Rita who are the subjects of a secret military hibernation experiment of limited duration. Well of course things go awry and the officer in charge, Lt. Col. Collins is ensnared by a sex scandal bringing shame and a base closure and a much longer nap for Joe and Rita who sleep until they are freed from their test chambers during the great garbage avalanche of 2505. They wake up to find a world that is totally FUBAR, the infrastructure is crumbling and looks as though it were designed by idiots (or privatized out to greedy contractors skimming their cut at the expense of quality - see privatization), the commercialization of society has been completed with corporate logos everywhere and characters named after fast food items and commercial products like Dr. Lexus, Frito and Beef Supreme. The populace speaks in crude tongues, hurls insults and pejoratives at everything and berate Joe for “talking like a fag” because in the 26th Century a numbskull speaking in 20th Century dumbed-down lingo sounds like an egghead. It’s as though Koch Brothers funded social engineering along with Karl Rove demographic wizardry created a Republican party dream of a reverse master race of abject morons with hair trigger tempers and a birthright of simplicity - think of Sarah Palin’s anti-intellectualism only on steroids. The entire population has become twentieth generation white trash who in a gross parody of Social Darwinism have outbred those with any intelligence or discretion. The opening few minutes that show how this happened are as classic as they are painfully true with the educated putting off reproduction while the rednecks breed like rabbits. The exponential growth of toxic trailer park peckerwoods, bitterly angry teabaggers and just plain dangerous Christian fascists seems to me to be the strongest possible argument for abortion that could ever be presented. It is no wonder that the fascist Republican party and those who control it want to do away with a woman's right to choose because more poor, dumb and futureless babies eventually grow up to be loyal voters and party activists.
Centuries of consumerism and way too much television have reduced the citizenry to the point of borderline retardation and the greatest advances in technology are huge multi-screened televisions that allow for multiple reality trash programs to be presented simultaneously while the viewer is ensconced on a huge plush chair sucking down goo from a tub while reveling in the delights of shows the likes of Ass, Ow! My Balls and the Masturbation Channel. Those three examples are the descendents of current era moronic programming like American Idol, Dancing With the Stars, The Biggest Loser and the explosion of potty humor as entertainment provided by movies featuring such Earthly delights as diarrhea daiquiris, cacophonies of farts and belches, flying wads of semen used as hair gel and horny teenager boners buried in mom’s homemade apple pie that have made the society dumb and dumber as well as ruder and coarser. Corporations like Starbucks now offer handjobs as an enticement to buy a latte and Fuddruckers has become Buttfuckers - the corporate satire is as hilarious as it is mostly absent from the media and society today and the scene that takes place at St. God's Memorial Hospital with the health care system being reduced to a combination fast food joint/casino is down and out classic.
The society that Joe finds himself in is mean, greedy and stupid and the police are drooling overly aggressive thugs (much like they are now) who must have viewed Judge Dredd as a training film. After a series of mishaps and an IQ test he is summoned to the White House by President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho because he is now the most intelligent man on the planet and more than up to the task of solving the food crisis that plagues America. The crops are dying because instead of using water (that stuff in the toilet) they are irrigated by mega selling sports drink Brawndo: The Thirst Mutilator. Joe suggests using H2O and is met with incredulity by cabinet members reciting Brawndo's advertising mantra of "It's got electrolytes." After causing massive social unrest and unemployment after replacing Brawndo which just happens to be the nation's biggest employer Joe is taken to an arena for a gladiatorial style event that is a wild combination between Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome and the local monster truck extravaganza that is televised on FOX which to no surprise is much the same as it is today other than the appearance of the anchors. Joe eventually triumphs and saves the day when the crops grow again and becomes a truly honored hero of Uh-merica. His best advice is to turn off the TV and read something once in awhile and everyone lives happily ever after.
If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.
-Ayn Rand
Atlas Yawned, Jesus Wept: The high priestess of the religion of "fuck you I got mine" who is novelist and cult leader Ayn Rand has always been a driving force for the destroyers of economies and the anal raping of the working class. Rand, who emigrated to America from her native Russia suffered from a delusional worldview resulting from her families experience during the rise of communism during the revolution days. Rather than learning a valuable lesson from the oppressive thugs who rose to power and then murdered with impunity and stole whatever the hell they wanted to all under the guise of a corrupt ideology instead became some sort of intellectual prophet of a ridiculous school of thought called objectivism which can be boiled down into bumper sticker simplicity as FUCK THE POOR. Rand worked her way up by writing screenplays and eventually novels which took on an increasingly political theme that demonized the state and basic human cooperation and decency which endeared her to the sort of high-rolling assholes that wrecked the country and while waging class war under the battle flag of free market capitalism they are nothing more than the parasites, looters and moochers that Rand condemned. Rand hit it big with her novel The Fountainhead in which the selfish prick hero Howard Roark waged battle and triumphed over an evil socialist system, although the book was rejected by twelve publishers it as all dreck does eventually finds a sucker, usually a self-interested one. The book was published and Rand was well on her way to becoming a cultural icon with a cause celebre. While Rand is often praised as a libertarian idol by selfish dolts it was prominent libertarian thinker Murray N. Rothbard who wrote on The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult, the glassy-eyed members would go on to use the work of Rand to justify the strip-mining of American society through removing the regulatory restraints on financial sociopaths whose crony capitalism is far closer to textbook style fascism than the cynical individuality that Rand often invoked.
An article from Mother Jones magazine pegs the goddess of greed dead on, the piece is entitled And the Rand Played On states that:
Rand's particular genius has always been her ability to turn upside down traditional hierarchies and recast the wealthy, the talented, and the powerful as the oppressed. This topsy-turvy philosophy has echoed through the blame-the-victim ranting of CNBC host Rick Santelli and the tax-day tea parties. In this world, it is not possible to admit that the rich and the Republicans may have been undone by their own greed and cluelessness.
While Ayn Rand falls short of Ronald Reagan in being invoked by the bazoonies and nutjobs on the right but her lunacy is always floating in the air like a slowly dissipating fart. Teabagger hero, the ambitious little twerp Rand Paul praises her efficiency when justifying the removal of energy standards for appliances. Now while I myself have always been an admirer of Ron Paul for his anti-imperialist, anti-Federal Reserve and pro-civil liberties views as well as his outspoken nature I have none of the feelings towards his son who is a jabbering loose cannon with zero principles. Rand (actually short for Randal not named after the goddess of gibberish) was quoted in a recent article as invoking Ayn Rand while submitting the amendment “On the energy efficiency standards, I think that in order to be consistent with a free society we should make them voluntary”. Well Eichmann was praised for his "efficiency" as well at one time but the real idiocy in that statement as well as all others pimped by the Rand acolytes is that they are so ridiculous in their reliance on humans (especially Americans) to act in a socially beneficial manner were there to be no rules that they can't possibly be taken seriously. The entire concept of laissez-faire capitalism and an honest self-regulating system is absurd, absent rules the big fish will eat the little fish and as in today's America will soon begin eating each other. Look at the Wall Street vermin and the devastation that they wrought in the name of self-regulating markets and crackpot economic philosophy thanks largely to Alan Greenspan who incidentally was a Rand worshipper who regularly was in attendance at the great one's tony New York digs. Greenspan under whose guidance of of the Federal Reserve was instrumental in wrecking the economy with his idiotic Randian policies was absolutely lit up by writer Matt Taibbi in a must-read chapter of his latest book Griftopia. The chapter, which deals with Greenspan is entitled "The Biggest Asshole in the Universe" and delves into 'the Maestro's' infatuation with Ayn Rand and her influence on his thinking. Taibbi writes of Greenspan:
Rand's magnum opus of bullshit was the massive tome Atlas Shrugged, a 1,200 + page hunk of rancid tripe and sanctimonious garbage so incredibly boring that I was never able to finish the damned thing and I am well accustomed to plowing through tedious volumes of writing. Hell...I couldn't stand it after the first couple of hundred pages, it is not only as large as a phone book but as entertaining as well. Rand wrote it while holed up in her New York digs jacked up on amphetamines which could explain the length of her screed. The plot is based on the wealthy being portrayed as social victims and seeking out a cultish figure named John Galt as though he is the messiah who can deliver them absolution for their self-centered, sociopathic natures and justification for their throwing a tantrum and withdrawing their 'gifts' from a society that doesn't deserve them primarily because they are not turned into demigods like Donald Trump. Galt has bolted from a society that he like all snobs see no common interest in being good citizens of despite such concepts as basic human decency and morality. Rand uses a climactic speech from Galt that runs from 60-75 pages long depending on the edition as the centerpiece for Shrugged which is very nicely summed up by Taibbi as:Greenspan's rise is instead a tale of a gerbilish mirror-gazer who flattered and bullshitted his way up the Matterhorn of American power and then, once he got to the top, feverishly jacked himself off to the attentions of Wall Street for twenty consecutive years - in the process laying the intellectual foundation for a generation of orgiastic greed and overconsumption and turning the Federal Reserve into a permanent bailout mechanism for the super-rich.
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Greenspan met Rand in the early fifties after leaving Columbia, attending meetings at Rand's apartment with a circle of like-minded intellectual jerk-offs who called themselves by the ridiculous name of "The Collective" and who provided Greenspan with the desired forum for social ascent.
Rand's book Atlas Shrugged, for instance, remains a towering monument to humanity's capacity for unrestrained self-pity - it's a bizarre and incredibly long-winded piece of aristocratic paranoia in which a group of Randian supermen decide to break off from the rest of society and form a pure free-market utopia, and naturally the parasitic lower classes immediately drown in their own laziness and ineptitude
The book fairly gushes with the resentment these poor "Atlases" (they are shouldering the burdens of the whole world!) feel toward those who try to use "moral guilt" to make them share their wealth. In the climatic scene the Randian hero John Galt sounds off in defense of self-interest and attacks the notion of self-sacrifice as a worthy human ideal in a speech that lasts seventy-five pages.
It goes without saying that only a person possessing a mathematically inexpressible level of humorless self-importance would subject anyone to a seventy-five page speach about anything. Hell, even Jesus Christ barely cracked two pages with the Sermon on the Mount. Rand/Galt manages it, however, and this speech lays the foundation of objectivism, a term that was probably chosen because "greedism" isn't catchy enough."
Amen! The oligarchy has Rand down and is currently in the process of propagandizing the costumed idiots that are the teabaggers into adopting Randian philosophy in promoting the filthy Republican 2012 budget and the destruction of Medicare and Social Security in order to give more tax cuts to the "Atlases". There has been a recent campaign by the front group for tax chiselers, Dick Armey's Orwellian named Freedom Works to promote a low-budget film adaptation of Atlas Shrugged using a guerilla marketing campaign designed to circumvent the librul [sic] media and mobilize their mouth-breathing brownshirts to bully theater chains into showing the flick. How effective the introduction of the real Rand into a disorganized, anti-intellectual, semi-literate gaggle of angry rabble whose fourth grade level reading skills are challenged by the ghost written books of Glenn Beck is unknown. The movie has gotten for the most part poor reviews outside of the normal neocon propaganda organs thus reason for the end run around the traditional marketing methods that would normally promote such epics. It is all just more of the same crap though, there will likely be many meetup groups in which selective portions of Rand's book will be spoonfed to the lemmings much like the constitution was after the GOP co-opted the movement. It's going to be just like bible study groups where the peaceful and humane messages of Jesus Christ are twisted like inflatable balloon animals into justification for prejudice, servitude, war-mongering and idolatry of the money changers and since so many of the scumbaggers overlap between the churches of false prophets it should be at least marginally successful. Sales of Atlas Shrugged will surely skyrocket although I suspect the majority of those buying will be bored to death after a few dozen pages and simply park it in a place where it can be easily observed by fellow miscreants and travelers.
Regarding Ayn Rand, I will give the devil her due for one thing - she was a devout atheist who allegedly once admonished the iconic neoconservative propagandist William F. Buckley by telling him that "you are too intelligent to belive in God." That the teabaggers and right-wing freaks in general have latched onto Rand's rapacious looter theology while they pound their bibles and caterwaul about the evils of liberalism, altruism and scientific advancement is just another example of both their hypocrisy and their imbecility. But the fascists are relentless, well-funded and with Ayn Rand and God on their side are determined to once and for all overthrow the system and the secret Muslim in the White House who doesn't have a birth certificate. There are no shortage of con-artists, grifters, liars, cheats and flim-flammers who don't understand the great political benefit of having millions of easily hoodwinked and malleable useful idiots at their disposal which is why a guy like Donald Trump has such appeal. In the end of course we all lose but there is no shortage of nincompoops and jackasses who are happy to wage war against phantom menaces and have no problem whatsoever in putting their children to bed at night cold and hungry as long as they can stick it to the enemy du jour that is rolled out by the plutocrats who depend on their remaining ignorant as an insurance policy.
Really, in the end what it all boils down to is people who base their entire lives and form their belief systems based on one book should not only be ignored but should be shunned like lepers. Whether that one holy book happens to be The Bible, Atlas Shrugged or even Gray's Sports Almanac for that matter it makes no difference, given man's capacity for learning and the availability of information if one just gets the fuck off of the couch and turns off the television people who live in an impenetrable bubble of willful ignorance that limits their worldview to the delusions of primitives, madmen, snake oil salesmen (or women) and money grubbers is a misfit. Why is it that in our creeping empire of idiocy that such simpletons and bags of shit bursting at the seams with false morality and certitude are accepted as rational people? It is only in the doomed and dying former land of plenty that rationality could be perversely turned upside down and idiocy worshipped.
As Leonard Cohen once proclaimed, I have seen the future and it's murder....
Just my two cents
EE
