America: Going Out of Business July 9, 2008
Posted by voolavex in war.Tags: Ayn Rand, China, Depression, GDP, Iraq, jobs, oil, overseas, politics, retirement, United States of America
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Have you ever read Alan Greenspan’s favorite author? Ayn Rand tells a good story – but she clearly was a right wing nut when it came to money and how you get it and who is entitled to it. She was a consummate corporate shill from the jump and cleverly coined the term objectivism for her personal credo. I think her choice of words was brilliant. Who doesn’t want to be “objective”? It’s the highest form of accolade – juries are advised to be objective in the dispensing of equal justice. But read the philosophy she invented and you will ask yourself “Who is John Galt” and why do we want to find him anyway? He was a greedy bastard. Ayn basically, sort of thought, in a way, that it was every man for himself, get as much money as possible and for God’s sake don’t give any thought to anyone who doesn’t or can’t do the same because they don’t really count. It could be summed up by saying the rich get and stay rich and the poor don’t exist and therefore deserve nothing at all. Read Atlas Shrugged and tell me you don’t see terrifying parallels. Except hers was a work of fiction.
With this in mind, I do believe The United States of America is going out of business. If I thought the current resident of the White House could actually read, I would suspect he read Atlas Shrugged and loved it. Let’s assume Greenspan gave him the Cliff Notes. Shall I blame our current administration for putting personal gain before the welfare of the country? Shall I call the current administration a sackful of greedy bastards who sold the populace down the river without a paddle, a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of? Shall I name the river “The Shitz”. At this point, the question is moot. We are engaged in an economic maelstrom that has spun so far out of control we need no longer curse the Decider because he doesn’t give a Texas damn. Never did.
Gas is almost $5 dollars a gallon – something to do with back room politics and oil profiteering, I suppose. There is no offset in wages to make this an equitable situation. Since the damn country loves it some oil, I suspect this is a long term condition.
We got the Bejesus bombed out of NYC 7 years ago. The space left behind is still out of business. The perpetrator eludes capture (if in fact he is even alive anymore – they do great stuff with holograms at Disney). Over 3,000 people died in that ugly event and it was hideous. Apparently the best and smartest way to thump our chest to send a message is to: send Americans into a country that was not implicated in the 9/11 attacks, run a religious, civil war that does not concern us and in the process, rack up 4,000 US souls as a way of showing somebody (not sure who) that we know how to fight a war and someone better pay attention. How many of you actually feared Saddam Hussein? Nightmare afraid? Do you sigh with relief every day that he is gone for good – hanged by the neck until dead. This feel good charade costs $5K a minute to buy into everyday. The lost American lives in Iraq exceed the loss of lives on 9/11 and so instead of limiting our losses we doubled them and we show no sign of stopping. Makes me think of Vietnam. I don’t like to think of that illegal war either.
There are fewer and fewer jobs available in this country because we send all our ideas and business to China. I spend more time trying to find a product NOT made in China than an Orthodox Jewish housewife does hunting for the OU. If I recall a while back Red China was not a country we found very democratic. Tiananmen Square showed us how it goes in China if you speak out and it is an image that will not fade from my psyche anytime soon. Since damn near everything China stands for politically is the antithesis of our Constitution I have yet to figure out why we owe them so much money and why we send our specs over for the creation of cheap, crappy products made by oppressed workers. Think about really pricey shoes and bags – anything over $500. You only have to research where they are made to find out that some high ticket designer has gone to the East and paid very little to charge very much for “factory made in China shoes” and other items. The old silk purse out of a sow’s ear – but it is actually happening. Gets my goat. Plus they poison us now and then by being just as greedy as the rest of the consumer driven world.. Killer pet food, deathly children’s meds and that old standby – lead paint. God knows what else that we don’t know about.
Retirement has become the next season of Survivor for all of us over 55. Health care – get ready to die in despair. Big Pharma – yummy – let’s suck as much as we can from the poor health consumer and get rich. My hat is off to the Gay community for making HIV/AIDS a political issue and finding a way to treat people with the virus no matter what their financial situation. But it took work and still does. It happened because that community and others with AIDS in their demographic refused to take no for an answer. When we discovered it wasn’t a “gay” disease – the infrastructure was already in place for the health care. Pension plans – soon to be missing from your future. Employer paid medical benefits – in no time flat you will get a cheap first aid kit, made (of course) in China and they will still take it out of your paycheck every month. And that will be healthcare. This country – conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are equal and entitled to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness, in eight sickening years has effectively sold out the population and in the current climate – it won’t be the New Deal that will fix it. We have run out of New Deals. There are no deals left. We have no GDP – we have 70 year olds working to put Ensure on the table; we have “American” companies leaving the work force unemployed because it’s cheaper to do it overseas. And yet we are still urged to buy, rent, upgrade and improve our condition by going shopping. Who thought this up?
The housing crisis – who got that ball rolling? And how could anyone be suckered so completely by a scheme that didn’t make a lick of sense and still doesn’t. It is very difficult to find any employment without a fixed address – living in a car parked in someone’s driveway is not considered a fixed address. Empty, ugly McMansions glut the market and sit, unoccupied, while families are being raised in homeless shelters.
The economists may not consider it a depression, but I am depressed. And sad and ashamed of what has been done right before our eyes. We have been hijacked by the government in power and no one seems as angry as they did when our last Chief of State got some from an intern. I just do not get it. I am angry and I am still very depressed.
www.Wikipedia.org – check out recession and Ayn Rand and obfuscation
http://usliberals.about.com/od/homelandsecurit1/a/IraqNumbers.htm
Voolavex 
[…] America: Going Out of Business Since damn near everything China stands for politically is the antithesis of our Constitution I have yet to figure out why we owe them so much… […]
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I disagree with you. I read Atlas Shrugged and I can say with confidence that I understand the message of the book. The book tells its reader who deserve to live on earth. The administration of george bush depicts the Thompson administration in the world of Atlas Shrugged. That is the parallelism. There is recession in America because of the obvious oligarchic tendency of Bush administration. The spirit of free trade is now a thing of the past in the US of A. Only those Bush’s cronies have access to multi-billion dollar contract in America. I see that you really don’t understrand the story of Atlash Shrugged.
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My comment is for anyone reading this blog: the representation of Ayn Rand’s philosophy here is non-existent. What the author does is, at best, misrepresent her political ideals, ignore the extensive moral philosophy, which her politics is an antecedent of.
The author then claims that the Alan Greenspan was consistent with her ideas (note: she openly and explicitly denounced him) and that the current administration bears any resemblance to her ideas – at best, Bush Jnrs administration is conisistent insofar as to anything it has NOT done, any political freedoms it has NOT yet touched. The economic policies, Iraq, religious issues, abortion, etc, are all refuted by Objectivists, and the policies are just variants of the kinds of policies Ayn Rand rejected when she was alive.
If you are interested in the ideas of Ayn Rand, I suggest you read some articles at http://www.aynrand.org, or pick up a copy of Atlas Shrugged for yourself.
I won’t address every single claim you make and address why all the lls affecting the US are the result of government intervention in the economy, but will summarise by quoting the only accurate thing you said:
“This country – conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are equal and entitled to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness”
Yes. A man is entitled to his life, to the liberty to live his life free from persecution and to pursue his own happiness. Notice it was ‘pursuit’. Not ‘the attainment of’ nor ‘the right to his’. The corolloary of the freedom to live your life free from coercion, is that you don’t get to coerce other people to sustain your life, you don’t have the right to happiness, but the right to choose to take the actions fitting to attaining your happiness.
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Furthermore, you try to make some pithy little comment, as if to speculate into why she name her philosophy ‘Objectivism’. In fact, it was NOT some decision so that people like you would make some shallow assessment of her philosophy. She originally wanted to name it ‘Existentialism’, since it takes as its fundamental principle the Primacy of Existence.
However, existentialism is something entirely different altogether and so she chose the next best thing: Objectivism, since it is based on the idea that, since Existence is the widest of all concepts and the most fundamental, objectivity means being able to reduce your concepts back to basic sense perception of existence.
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The reason the U.S. is so in bed with China today is because both countries (in spite of their supposedly different forms of government) have something important in common: greed.
Re: Ayn Rand–I read Atlas Shrugged years ago and loved it–the story that is. Well written and compelling. The only problem with Rand’s philosophy (free market, laissez-faire, etc.) is that it’s only good in theory. In practice, a tiny percentage prosper while the rest work hard to stay afloat. Why does this happen? Greed. Now we’re back to China…
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American are very resourceful and will never go out of business and speaking of health care, it looks as if O has the powers falling into line to improves the costs and efficiency associated with the problem. Time will tell..
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Wow – I had not been to my blog for a while and these comments are very fascinating. Some support Ayn and others don’t (FYI _ I cannot imagine what she thought or how she thought – even Greenspan jumped her yacht in the end). I am grateful and very flattered by the positive posts and I thank oyu. Thing about blogs is they are the blogger own POV and message. Not everyone will love ’em and not everyone with hate ’em. I welcome both viewpoints.
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Your point. It is a blog – and my own observations. Thank you for taking the time to school me. School’s out.
Read: ‘The Unwinding’ by George Packer.
I was four years ahead of him. This is an informative and succinct series of vignettes that illustrate my post.
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