Resurrecting Ayn Rand: Hedge Fund Money Teams Up With Koch & BB&T - By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 28, 2012 Gary Weiss, the Wall Street writer who was ahead of his time with his comprehensive chronicle of Wall Street corruption in 2006 (Wall Street Versus America) charts a bold new course this week with the release of Ayn Rand Nation: The Hidden Struggle for America’s Soul.
Thanks to Weiss, the nation might just escape the next wave of Ayn Rand’s radical capitalism and student brainwashing by corporate money vultures fanning out across U.S. campuses. 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. Ayn Rand: the Tea Party’s Miscast Matriarch. Alan Greenspan’s Cult Years and the Corporate Money Planning for a New Cult Today Gary Weiss, long time Wall Street reporter and author, has written a new book, due out this week from St.
BBC Two - All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. A Manifesto for Psychopaths. Ayn Rand’s ideas have become the Marxism of the new right.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 6th March 2012. It has a fair claim to be the ugliest philosophy the post-war world has produced. Selfishness, it contends, is good, altruism evil, empathy and compassion are irrational and destructive. The poor deserve to die; the rich deserve unmediated power. It has already been tested, and has failed spectacularly and catastrophically. Rand was a Russian from a prosperous family who emigrated to the United States. Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957, depicts a United States crippled by government intervention, in which heroic millionaires struggle against a nation of spongers.
Ayn Rand is for children. With this week’s news that Glenn Beck and others are preparing to build libertarian communes and “Going Galt,” I figure now is the time to finally refine my theory about those who claim to be Ayn Rand acolytes or who brag that their favorite book is “Fountainhead Shrugged” (they are the same book written twice in order to double Rand’s profit, so for brevity, let’s just use one name).
Out of these three groups, the third is probably the most prominent in this, the era defined by the politics of “makers versus takers.” After all, these folks purport to adore the free-market triumphalism of “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged,” haughtily imagine themselves as rugged up-from-the-bootstraps individualists like Howard Roark and John Galt, tell themselves that their greed is patriotic, and thus demonize government and taxation.
Yet, most of these same people tend to live their lives in ways that belie their personal mythology. The Bitch is Back: Books. My Books - Gary Weiss, author of AYN RAND NATION. Ayn Rand Assholes. Andrew Corsello’s The Bitch is Back article from GQ on the boorish subject of Ayn Rand Assholes is probably the best takedown of Ayn Rand’s followers (and Alan Greenspan and Wall Street) I’ve yet seen and certainly the funniest (other than Stephen Colbert’s).
It was about time for an article like this to appear and I am glad it was Corsello who wrote it. I myself became an unabashed Ayn Rand fanatic when I was in 7th or 8th grade. I’d been reading the works of Victor Hugo and so I was totally primed for discovering another “Romantic” (note capital “r”) writer like Ayn Rand next, but it wasn’t via her well-known fiction that I discovered the Russian-born novelist and philosopher, but rather a more obscure volume called Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, which I read extremely slowly so I could take in the complexity of the thought.
It’s a very dry, technical book, but made a huge impression on me (more on this below, it merits special mention). Ayn Rand: The Boring Bitch is Back. There is a substantial take-down of pedantic bore Ayn Rand in GQ.
They tease it thusly: 2009′s most influential author is a mirthless Russian-American who loves money, hates God, and swings a gigantic dick. She died in 1982, but her spawn soldier on. And the Great Recession is all their fault. I love that because it is both funny and touches upon so many subtle truths; Here is a longer, funnier excerpt: “This is because there are boys and girls among us who have never overcome the Randian infection. Brilliant. Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature. Ayn Rand Railed Against Government Benefits, But Grabbed Social Security and Medicare When She Needed Them. January 28, 2011 | Like this article?
Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. QOTD: Two Novels That Can Change Your Life. A Fitting Muse for the Tyranny of the Self. Romancing the Stone-Cold Killer: Ayn Rand and William Hickman by Michael PrescottIn her journal circa 1928 Rand quoted the statement, "What is good for me is right," a credo attributed to a prominent figure of the day, William Edward Hickman.
Her response was enthusiastic. "The best and strongest expression of a real man's psychology I have heard," she exulted. (Quoted in Ryan, citing Journals of Ayn Rand, pp. 21-22.)At the time, she was planning a novel that was to be titled The Little Street, the projected hero of which was named Danny Renahan. According to Rand scholar Chris Matthew Sciabarra, she deliberately modeled Renahan - intended to be her first sketch of her ideal man - after this same William Edward Hickman. Renahan, she enthuses in another journal entry, "is born with a wonderful, free, light consciousness -- [resulting from] the absolute lack of social instinct or herd feeling.