UPDATE: Turning Out America’s Lights

About a month ago I blogged about a phenomenon that suddenly was popping up in different parts of the country at about the same time:  the turning off of America’s lights.  In Rockford, Illinois the streetlights were being turned off.  The same thing was happening in Highland Park, Michigan.  And in Clintonville, Wisconsin.  And in Franklin Township, Indiana bus service to get children to and from school was no longer being provided.

All of these basic services are being slashed because local governments “just can’t afford” to provide those services anymore.  Of course, the reason lighting the streets and basic school bus service for children is no longer affordable is because – in an effort to please their Galtian Overlords – all of these local governments had slashed and/or refused to raise taxes.  A low tax base and a lack of basic public services, apparently, are the key to a roaring economy.

Now comes the latest report from New Paris, Ohio, which at the end of the month will be shutting off its streetlights – apparently permanently – in order to save money:  

Towns and cities across Ohio have felt the crunch from Gov. John Kasich’s (R) budget cuts, and decisions like the one New Paris made could have been avoided had Kasich and his Republican colleagues not preserved millions in benefits for the rich and corporations.  Ohio Republicans cut the state’s estate tax, lowered its income tax in a way that benefited those with incomes over $200,000, and preserved multiple special interest tax breaks to benefit corporation.

None of that, of course, has brought the job creation and prosperity Kasich promised upon taking office.

You’d think these Ayn Randroids would eventually buy themselves a clue.

What is truly maddening about all this is that I remember reading Atlas Shrugged when I was a teenager and too callow to avoid such tripe.  One of the things I remember is that her villains were constantly expressing the idea in one form or another that innovation, prosperity and material advances “just happened,” without thinking of the capitalist system that made all those things possible.

But it seems that these Randroids think the same way about government.  Public lighting, school bus service, sewers that work, clean water available on tap in your home, police service, qualified teachers . . . these things “just happen,” and there is never, never any reason to think about how they are to be paid for.

So the rich get their taxes cut, and the rest of us get to watch as across the nation the lights go out on America.

OWS Perspectives: Frank Miller

Frank Miller is a legend in the world of comic books.  His 1986 The Dark Knight Returns is arguably the most important comic story published in the past 30 years, beating out even Alan Moore's The Watchmen and Neil Gaiman's Sandman series.

To be sure, The Dark Knight Returns had the most significant impact on the industry.  These dense four issues basically ushered in the "grim 'n gritty" storytelling style that helped boost the industry and lead it to more mature themes.  (On a less happy note, the industry quickly went overboard in its depictions of ultraviolence and depressing tales - the 1990s are regarded as a low point for mainstream comic books).

Over the years, Miller has continued to push his bleak, neo-noirish style to new heights and has achieved some magnificent results, most notably with his Sin City series.  The brutal black-and-white style, coupled with bleak tales that only very rarely have anything that can be considered a truly happy ending (and, even then, one has to really stretch to find the happy), make those stories classics.

Ayn Rand: Getting it Completely Backwards

Saint Petersburg in revolt gave us Vladimir Nabokov, Isaiah Berlin, and Ayn Rand.  The first was a novelist, the second a philosopher.  The third was neither but thought she was both.

                                                --Corey Robin

                                                The Reactionary Mind

It’s been a long time since I read it – because it has been a long time since I was an idiot adolescent – but I recall that there is a scene toward the end of Atlas Shrugged in which Rand’s ragtag team of superhero industrialists, flying in a plane, look down and see the lights of New York begin to go out.

In Rand’s narrative, you see, the Mighty 1%™ had chosen to withdraw their creativity, their entrepreneur-based superpowers, their special genius . . . and now New York and the entire world would go dark.  That’d show the rest of us!

In the Real World, another narrative is shaping up.  The ending is similar, but the story is very, very different.

In the Real World, the narrative runs like this . . . .

Randian Republicans: God IS the Free Market

I saw an article yesterday that may help me to understand something about which I've been puzzled for years:  how it is so-called "Randian Republicans" (like Rand and Ron Paul, Paul Ryan, etc.) can simultaneously embrace Ayn Rand and profess to be faith-based, dyed-in-the-wool Christians.  Ayn Rand certainly made no bones about her disdain for all religion, and explicitly declared that "her followers had to choose between Jesus and her teachings."  The American Values Network is now trying to make this a wedge issue for the GOP.

But a recent study by Baylor University sheds an interesting light on this issue.

Ayn Rand, Eugenics, and "Lesser Breeds"

Something very weird and deeply unsettling was going on in 1920’s America.  During this decade Eugenics, the idea that the human race can be improved by proper breeding and – more significantly – by preventing “undesirables” from reproducing, really came into its own in American society.  At the same time the celebration of an amoral Superman, an idea derived from a flawed understanding of Nietzche’s Ubermensch concept, led to at least one horrible crime and – for one person – seems to have provided the basis for a horrible “philosophy.”

The problem is that the “one person” was Ayn Rand, and through her writings both of these rotten ideas continue to exert influence over many of the people who help shape our national conversation today.  Listen carefully to the leaders of the Conservative Movement and the rhetoric designed to further the Conservative Cause, and you can hear these terrible ideas, filtered through Ayn Rand’s awful rhetoric, thrust themselves into our current discourse.

Ayn Rand Was Very Silly, But Conservatives Are Just Evil

"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."

--John Rogers
Kung Fu Monkey


Johann Hari has a new column up over at the UK's The Independent that simply is a must-read. He excoriates today's Republican party for its crass insistence on promoting only the interests of the country's uberwealthy at the direct expense of the less fortunate 99% of Americans. For example, of the Ryan Budget plan he points out that "it halves taxes on the richest 1% and ends all taxes on corporate income, dividends and inheritance. It pays for it by slashing spending on food stamps, health care for the poor and elderly, and basic services. . . . Ryan says 'the reason I got involved in public service' was because he read the writings of Ayn Rand, who described the poor as 'parasites' who must 'perish', and are best summarized by the title of one of her books: The Virtue of Selfishness."

However, the vast majority of Hari's column devotes itself to Donald Trump and what it says about the modern Republican party that he is now the party's frontrunner in Presidential nominee polls. Describing Trump as "the Republican Id, finally entirely unleashed from all restraint and all reality," Hari offers up a few choice quotes from the Donald about how America should deal with the rest of the world. On Libya: "I would go in and I would take the oil . . . I would take the oil and stop this baby stuff." On Iraq: "We stay there and we take the oil. . . In the old days, when you have a war and you win, that nation's yours."

* * *

In the liberal blogosphere, which I frequent, there has been for a number of years now a good deal of focus on the new, ersatz Republican followers of Ayn Rand's writings. Alan Greenspan himself, the maestro of our current financial debacle, was one of Rand's most devoted followers -- he actually sat at her feet as a college student and was editor of one of her Objectivist publications. As a result, to this day he so objects to any government regulation of any business or financial activity that he once told Brooksley Born that he was not even in favor of prosecuting financial firms that committed fraud because that would only interfere in the market's ability to punish such firms itself. (He, Larry Summers and Bob Rubin were also instrumental in crushing Born's attempt to impose derivative regulations while she was with the CFTC; of course, given that unregulated derivatives trading is a large part - if not the largest part - of how the financial industry got into the mess it did, that decision seems in retrospect very, very stupid).

In Congress, of course, we have Rep. Paul Ryan and his plan to wage war against almost everyone in America for the benefit of his small number of rich paymasters, and we have newly elected Senator Rand Paul who makes no bones about the fact that he is an Ayn Rand devotee (although it is not true that he was named after Rand; my understanding is that his name is short for 'Randal').

And this constant reference to Ayn Rand's writings by our new Republican Overlords -- who, despite controlling only one chamber of Congress, somehow manage to decide what issues must be taken up by the government (abortion and the deficit, but not jobs or the economy) and how those issues must be framed -- and by bloviating Conservative pundits and TeeVee talking heads, has had an affect on the people who listen to such folk.

For example, about two years ago, shortly after Obama had been sworn into office and the first glimpses of Tea Party Madness were beginning to emerge among the nation's more conservative elderly, I was checking out a few books at my local library. A sizable percentage of the immediate population where I live consists of retirees. Whilst checking out my books I got into a brief conversation with the librarian, who told me that she had just started reading Atlas Shrugged as part of a local book club. She told me she thought it was important that as many people as possible read Ayn Rand's opus because the book is "so relevant, given what's happening in the world today."

Now, a couple of things about this statement struck me immediately. First, I could think of nothing that was "happening in the world" right then that would make Rand's so-called philosophy more relevant than before -- that is, unless you count the fact we now have a black man sitting in the White House. Second, the library doesn't sponsor book clubs; this apparently was something she had gotten into with some unspecified number of friends, and they all had suddenly decided they needed to read Ayn Rand. Third, I couldn't just let this statement go unchallenged, because the last thing we need is people interested in reading Ayn Rand for the lessons they think they can learn from her.

So I explained to the librarian, as gently as I could, that I had read Atlas Shrugged and nearly all of Rand's writings years and years ago, back when I was in High School, and that - like a lot of people who stumble across Rand - I had enjoyed them immensely. However, after I grew up some and gained a greater appreciation of how people work in the real world, I came to see Rand's writings as fairly juvenile. I told her (as nicely as I could) that I thought they were not writings anyone should ever make the mistake of taking seriously.