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 . . . .

Bank Transfer Day

If you're not already aware, last Saturday was "Bank Transfer Day," on which everybody is urged to pull their money out of the Too Big to Fail Banks -- Wells Fargo, Bank of America, CitiBank -- and put those funds else. Most people are choosing to transfer their money to local, nonprofit Credit Unions.

I actually pulled my money out of Bank of America some time ago, and it now appears that a lot of people are doing the same. Something like $60 Billion was deposited into credit union accounts last month alone -- more than was deposited in credit union accounts for all of 2010.

And it may be that the banks have started to take notice. Just this afternoon I received a call from a local bank wondering if I was happy with their customer service and thanking me for being a customer. This vastly amused me, since I don't have an account with this bank (I sometimes do refinancings for them, so I think that I somehow got on their customer list by mistake).

And, of course, I have no way of knowing if the weird phone call I received had anything to do with people all over the nation pulling money out of their bank accounts. But I've never received a call like that from a bank before -- not even a bank that actually had any of my money -- and I'd certainly like to think that the banks are finally recognizing that the American people are putting them on notice.

Book Review: The Reactionary Mind

So over the weekend I read Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind:  Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin.  I finished it Sunday morning and have allowed a few days to go by to get my thoughts about it in order.

So as not to spoil the book for anyone thinking about reading it for oneself, those thoughts are below the fold.

Oh! The Stupid Things I Hear! No. 3

Goddammit.

So I’m listening to the Diane Rehm “Friday News Roundup” (the BBC’s Katty Kay filling in for Diane) this morning and the initial topic is the new jobs report, which shows that 80,000 jobs were added last month:  104,000 new private sector jobs, offset by a loss of about 24,000 public sector jobs.

First I hear Ron Elving, senior Washington editor for NPR News, make the incredibly stupid claim “that’s not bad, but it’s not great either.”  No, that’s friggin terrible.  Look . . .  the United States needs to add about 150,000 new jobs every month just to stay even with population growth.  So a jobs report showing that we created about ½ that amount last month means that October was utterly horrible.  Telling the American public that “we added 80,000 jobs” without putting that figure into context is just journalistic malpractice.

But far, far worse was what Elving said next. 

Sam Vimes, Stallone, and Superman

Since I am apparently discussing fiction this morning, I thought I’d write a little something about Terry Pratchett’s latest Discworld novel, Snuff.  The novel stars my favorite Pratchett character, Sir Samuel Vimes, and it is – as Pratchett’s novels consistently are – very entertaining.  But the pacing seems a little off and there is one problem with the treatment of Vimes that I thought I’d get off of my chest. 

What’s below the fold isn’t a review, really, but more a discussion of a certain problem that tends to creep into any serialized fiction.  I don’t believe it contains any real spoilers.  But I understand that there are those for whom fan favorite fiction – as the Discworld novels tend to be – often prefer to read the material without the slightest intimation of what to expect from the latest installment.

Which is why, of course, what follows is below the fold.

Time for a Butlerian Jihad

A central part of the back-story to Frank Herbert’s science-fiction masterpiece Dune is the “Butlerian Jihad,” which occurred 10,000 years before the Dune story.  As Herbert explained, the Butlerian Jihad  had been a “crusade against computers, thinking machines, and conscious robots . . . .  Its chief commandment [was] ‘Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.’”

I flashed on that early this morning whilst reading about the constitutional amendment recently introduced by six senators (all Dems, naturally) to overturn the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision.  Essentially, the amendment would allow the federal government and the states to regulate the amount of money that may be poured into campaign donations made directly to candidates for office.

Which is great and all, but does not go nearly far enough.  What would really be helpful would be a constitutional amendment making it clear:  No, Corporations Are Not People.

Of course, no one thinks the actual, limited amendment proposed by these six senators will go really ever even get close to being adopted, in large part because of the vast power corporations themselves can bring to bear to prevent its adoption.  So it is even more unlikely that an amendment could ever be adopted that would strip away from these legal fictions the rights and protections – but not the liabilities, never the liabilities – that are accorded to them as “people.”  Under our political system, corporations are now de facto “super people” whose political clout renders the ability of “people people” to in any way restrain corporations vanishingly small.

I then had a brief, happy, science-fictiony thought of a point sometime in the not-too-distant future when – our corporate overlords having taken things too far – the actual “people people” rose up and had a jihad much like the one imagined by Frank Herbert.  Except this time the chief commandment would be:  “Thou shalt not create a legal fiction in the likeness of a person.”

Well, as always . . . I can dream.

The Over/Under on Further Police Brutality

Charlie Pierce writes about the Occupy Wall Street backlash that’s brewing as a result of the nationwide protests beginning to actively inconvenience – not the banks – but the individual people who run the banks and who bear direct responsibility for our current mess.  Pierce writes: 

It was only a matter of time before the human emotions of guilt and shame began to demonstrate their power.  And guilt and shame do not necessarily manifest themselves in contrition and a resolve to amend oneself.  Sometimes, they manifest themselves in anger and violence, and sometimes, the people who are overcome by the power of guilt and shame have police forces at their disposal.  They lash out, or they subcontract the job.  That seems to be part of what’s happening now.

The future belongs to the country beyond Zuccotti Park and the docks in Oakland.  If the country decides it would rather have order than justice, then what’s coming next could be very dark and very terrible.  If the country decides that, yes, this whole thing has been a nuisance, but a minor nuisance compared to an ongoing recession, near double-digit unemployment, a wave of foreclosures, and the continued corruption of the democratic institutions by the money powers, then somebody outside the park is going to have to stand up and lead the next phase.

I think this is mostly correct.  I have argued before that it is the terror that they may finally be called to account that has the banksters now traveling with bodyguards and L’il Mikey Bloomberg overreacting.  In a way this is a good thing, because it drives sympathy for OWS and keeps media attention on a movement that will suffocate unless the nation is reminded over and over again that nothing forces us to meekly accept what has been done to us in the name of the 1%.

Where I think Pierce goes astray is when he suggests that it is the opinion of “the country beyond Zuccotti Park” that will determine what form the inevitable backlash takes.  This is incorrect, and it is incorrect very much for the reason OWS is necessary in the first place:  The people who decide such things don’t care about the opinions of anyone other than the 1%.

L’il Mikey Bloomberg isn’t judiciously weighing how to respond to an increasingly inconvenient protest movement based on how he thinks it will go over with “the nation” – at least, not “the nation” as you, I and Charlie Pierce conceive it to be.  L’il Mikey is part of the 1%, answers to the 1%, and is concerned only about the 1% -- that is his “nation.”  Anyone having any doubts about this should click over and read Matt Taibbi’s takedown of Mike Bloomberg’s Marie Antoinette Moment, in which he excoriates L’il Mikey for peddling once again the oft-debunked, zombie lie that it was Congress and Fannie and Freddie that cause the housing crisis.  L’il Mikey is going to react in precisely the manner the 1% – out of their own guilt, shame, arrogance and terror – tell him to react.  Badly.

For what it’s worth, I think that would be a political miscalculation on his part.  OWS’s success at drawing attention to itself has always proceeded from its mistreatment by authority figures, whether that manifests as pepper spraying peaceful protesters, firing tear gas canisters at the head of a war veteran, or tossing flash-bang grenades at people attempting to help that veteran after his skull was fractured.  Opening up on these protesters with truncheons and rubber bullets will – I think – only strengthen the nation’s general support for the cause.

But if we’re weighing the likelihood of only two possible scenarios – further police brutality or a diffident ignoring of the protest – I’d say the odds favor the former.