Ayn Rand - Teapotter Greedhead Dreamdate of the Neocon Set

[Octafish]

Amazing. Her influence extends both backwards and forwards in time.



[font size="1"]“At the Oval Office, 1974. From left are Rose Goldsmith, mother of Alan Greenspan;
President Ford; Greenspan; Rand; and her husband, Frank O’Connor.” (From the New York Times)[/font size]

Pam Martens gives the Atlas Shrugged Firsters the old what's for.

Alan Greenspan’s Cult Years and the Corporate Money Planning for a New Cult Today

Ayn Rand: the Tea Party’s Miscast Matriarch

by PAM MARTENS
CounterPunch
Feb. 27, 2012

Gary Weiss, long time Wall Street reporter and author, has written a new book, due out this week from St. Martin’s Press, on the rising influence of Ayn Rand in modern politics.  Titled Ayn Rand Nation: The Hidden Struggle for America’s Soul, the book removes the propaganda mask that has been so adroitly affixed to Alan Greenspan’s page-boy coiffed goddess of laissez-faire capitalism and the Tea Party’s mother ship.

While lecturing others for most of her life on the meaning of morality, Rand had extramarital sex for more than a decade with a younger man who worked for her. His wife was among her inner circle of friends and Rand herself was married. A believer in acquiescence to selfish desires, Rand published a 1964 collection of essays with Nathaniel Branden titled The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism.   Adding particular poignancy to the title, Branden was the young subordinate with whom she was sleeping.

Rand, and her supporters, including Alan Greenspan, viewed altruism as evil: altruism is evil, selfishness is good.  And tens of millions of dollars of corporate money is backing that philosophy today in America, no doubt to give obscenely paid CEOs a sip of Rand’s guilt-free narcissism while stoking the fires for more deregulation of a country just crawling back from the crippling effects of deregulation.  This is the mindless irrationality of Rand’s brand of rationality.

According to Weiss, Ayn Rand built her Objectivist philosophy that permeates today’s Tea Party around individual self interest and  eliminating government run social welfare programs, but she herself was on Medicare and Social Security.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/02/27/ayn-rand-the-tea-partys-miscast-matriarch/

Call me a "collectivist" or a "parasite," I don't care which, Greenspan is still a hero on Wall Street and in Washington:

"Dear Mr. Greenspan, I think you're pretty terrific ... " -- Tim Geithner at the 2006 FOMC meeting

[banned from Kos]

1. Yes, Ayn Rand was a hypocrite

but she still campaigned against Reagan while still alive.

I give her credit for that.

[Octafish]

3. That is something very much in her favor. But she didn't vote for Carter in 1980, either.

From Dangerous Minds:

From The Ayn Rand Letter, Volume IV, Number 2, November-December 1975:

Now I want to give you a brief indication of the kinds of issues that are coming up, on which you might want to know my views.

1. The Presidential election of 1976. I urge you, as emphatically as I can, not to support the candidacy of Ronald Reagan. I urge you not to work for or advocate his nomination, and not to vote for him. My reasons are as follows: Mr. Reagan is not a champion of capitalism, but a conservative in the worst sense of that word—i.e., an advocate of a mixed economy with government controls slanted in favor of business rather than labor (which, philosophically, is as untenable a position as one could choose—see Fred Kinnan in Atlas Shrugged, pp. 541-2). This description applies in various degrees to most Republican politicians, but most of them preserve some respect for the rights of the individual. Mr. Reagan does not: he opposes the right to abortion.

From Rand’s final public speech, “Sanction of the Victims,” delivered November 21, 1981:

In conclusion, let me touch briefly on another question often asked me: What do I think of President Reagan? The best answer to give would be: But I don’t think of him—and the more I see, the less I think. I did not vote for him (or for anyone else) and events seem to justify me. The appalling disgrace of his administration is his connection with the so-called “Moral Majority” and sundry other TV religionists, who are struggling—apparently with his approval—to take us back to the Middle Ages, via the unconstitutional union of religion and politics.

The threat to the future of capitalism is the fact that Reagan might fail so badly that he will become another ghost, like Herbert Hoover, to be invoked as an example of capitalism’s failure for another fifty years.

Observe Reagan’s futile attempts to arouse the country by some sort of inspirational appeal. He is right in thinking that the country needs an inspirational element. But he will not find it in the God-Family-Tradition swamp.

[jsmirman]

2. She was a sad, creepy, miserable person

and to my mind, so clearly exposed for her ridiculousness in the Mike Wallace interview -

part I here:

(the clip will lead you to parts 2 and 3)

[Octafish]

4. 'Sad' is an apt word, as are the other qualifiers. Ms. Rand also was an excellent writer.

That "Anthem" was an excellent read that's stuck with me over the decades. Same for "The Fountainhead," which spelled out the oncoming twists and turns of existence and the benefits of being one's own captain.

So, I cannot tell where the real fault lies: It could be her choice of friends or the people who chose her around whom to build a movement.

Thank you for the videos, jsmirman. I will watch in the coming hours. More fuel for the pyre from the "Godfather of Modern Conservatism" himself, a hack who may've grokked her:

&feature=player_embedded

The economist-ambassador described them to a "T":

"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." -- John Kenneth Galbraith

[jsmirman]

5. Trust me, it's worth the watch

eventually, as the questioning wears on, in my opinion, she is revealed as a ninny.

If you can forgive me, I'm not sure I can stomach watching the video you linked tonight - but I will try on another night when I'm feeling more iron-sidey.

Oh, Galbraith's quotation makes me laugh, because without seeing it, I've always called it "lots of words used to describe being an asshole."