By Pam Martens: February 27, 2012
Tomorrow, St. Martin’s Press releases the new book by Wall Street writer, Gary Weiss: Ayn Rand Nation: The Hidden Struggle for America’s Soul.
This book is critical to understanding the dangerous nexus of corporate financing of radical capitalism (deregulation and privatization) and nonprofit front groups. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the fate of this country hangs in the balance.
Consider this excerpt from the book, quoting Yaron Brook, the head of the corporate financed Ayn Rand Institute. (The Associate General Counsel of Goldman, Sachs & Co., Arline Mann, co-chairs the Institute.)
“I think in fifteen years, Ayn Rand will be everywhere…She’ll be taught, her standards, in many universities. She’ll be in a significant proportion of high school English classes. Her ideas will be debated on television, in classrooms, and in the public forums. It will be hard to escape, not so much her, but her ideas.
“Fifty years from now, I think Objectivism will be viewed as the primary challenge to whatever the status quo is.
“A hundred years from now, I think Objectivism will be the dominant secular philosophy in the United States.”
What is Objectivism? It’s the worship of selfishness, of laissez-faire capitalism with no regulatory restraints, of “rational” thinking that codifies self-interest as the moral good and altruism as an evil. (That’s right, helping one’s fellow human being is an evil.) And this dreck is being pumped into the minds of millions of students at hundreds of high schools and universities today, courtesy of the deep pockets of hedge fund operators, the oil billionaire, Charles G. Koch, and the southern banking giant, BB&T.
This book is so important to deprogramming today’s youth from the mindless rhetoric of Rand that the sponsors of this web site (Russ Martens and myself) have spent a month researching the money trail behind Rand’s resurrection. A two-part series on the Weiss book and the dangerous money cartel is linked below.
Read the Series:
Ayn Rand: The Tea Party’s Miscast Matriarch
Resurrecting Ayn Rand: Hedge Fund Money Teams Up With Koch and BB&T
