Digby: Vulgar Randism

[Elidor]

The cult of John Galt is stronger than ever.
Here's one example --- Bob Nardelli former CEO of GE, which is like being Business Jesus. Then, despite having no retail experience, he went to Home Depot, where the stock price stayed flat despite a bull market and :

... his $240 million compensation eventually earned the ire of investors. His blunt, critical and autocratic management style turned off employees and the public. While the board strongly stood by him for most of his tenure, questions about his leadership mounted in 2006, and in an ominous portent of the near future, he was the only director present at the annual meeting; he only allowed shareholders to speak for a minute each. When the board reportedly ousted him in January 2007, Nardelli's severance package was estimated at $210 million.


Naturally, Chrysler immediately hired him.

This is the culture that has brought the economy to the brink --- vastly overvalued masters of the universe, swallowing fire hoses of money as they failed up over and over again. And now that the system if finally crushing under the weight of all this profligacy and bad management, the brainwashed conservative Randians are blaming the "parasites" <referring to the UAW> for the failure, just as they've been programmed to do.

I don't believe in banning books or censoring curriculum, but just because Atlas Shrugged is a nauseatingly puerile exercise in hot capitalist fantasy doesn't mean it doesn't contain some dangerous and powerful ideas that need to be taken seriously and countered systematically. It's very bad for our culture for that piece of trash to be so influential. The Randians are donating millions of books to high schools and endowing chairs at universities to sell this pernicious protection racket for the malefactors of great wealth. Far more people have been exposed to this received conservative wisdom than have even a bare knowledge of Karl Marx (or Adam Smith.) It's not just another bad romance novel.

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/vulgar-randism-by-digby-its-heating-up.html

As Atrios would say, this has been another edition of 'What Digby said.'

[kenny blankenship]

1. Is there any other kind?

[Usrename]

2. What you said.

:thumbsup:

[loudsue]

3. Ayn Rand is the devil.

I'll give a big ole rec for this one!

:kick:

[snot]

4. i.m.h.o., Randism cannot finally be discredited without two things:

1) an exhaustive intellectual critique; and

2) a heart-wrenching narrative (such as, perhaps, the story of our current financial holocaust, told in simple, retrospective terms).

[elleng]

5. How's this?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/22/business/22citi.html?_r=1&hp

[Jack Rabbit]

6. Objectivism (definition)

A moralistic defense of greed and selfishness based on a poor reading of Aristotle's Organon.