Thanks Ed,
I don't make the distinction between reasons for choices. What matters to me is the effect of those choices on the rest of us. My comments about both Taitz and Rand included yours. I agree and I think there is more. Rand was a failed film writer and so she went to books exorcising her personal demons and misreading the America I grew up in and have a history with from before 1776. None of my teachers bare any resemblance to her cartoon characters. Certainly Roark is no stand in for any artist I know or have known including Frank Lloyd Wright. Her processes are pure outsider speculation. Amateurish. When sophisticated people like the late Concert Pianist Samuel Lipman and his Juilliard faculty wife Jeanine Dowis hook on to these simple minded stories, there has to be another reason and there was. I was there. The right wing intellectual journal the New Criterion made a lot of money for Sam when his piano career didn't and they didn't have to struggle the way the rest of us do. They told me this. I know that its second hand but it was first hand to me and my conflicting with them made me persona non grata in those circles. As for Safire? He wrote about in the New York Times. I don't consider them crazy or haunted by the past so much as it was a simple decision of self interest in the same way that the current conservatives have learned to think. Sam told me that he started it all at a demonstration in which he confronted several billionaires with the reality of what they called a Liberal Press. He set up a table with all of the journals and newspapers that the American "Liberals" working for the CIA had used in Europe to sway Europe towards a Socialist Democracy rather than Soviet Communist Socialism. These guys got the American government to fund left wing American writings for European consumption. When they came home, they believed themselves authorities on it and became Neo-Conservatives. Francis Stoner Saunders has written a book documenting all of this. I've lived through it on the periphery but that was plenty close enough. I also observed the contracts with the Fundamentalists in New York City and Los Angeles. The CIA where Bill Buckley and the others had worked evidently agreed that American Socialists were uncontrollable and so they paid for half of the start up fees for Buckley's National Review. When Lipman set up that table he put all of those American inspired Socialist books and journals on one table and the National Review on the other. He said to the billionaires. That one table has all of the people who are against your wealth and want to re-distribute it. The other table has those who do not. One magazine, the Buckley's National Review. Lipman funded the New Criterion on that day as the right wing intellectual journal. Also flowing from that was the Heritage Foundation and later the Federalist Society that infiltrated the judiciary. If you want to get a feel for what it was like being around those people at that time. Look at the way Newt Gingrich ran his campaign as a way to make money. He sounded just like them. It was an interesting time. Someday I will write a book about it. In two words I would call it the "Venal class. REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ed Weick Sent: Monday, September 10, 2012 9:50 AM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION Subject: Re: [Futurework] Godamn Gummint!! Interesting stuff, Ray. One thing you appear to be arguing is that people choose to hold a particular political or ideological point of view because it is advantageous to do so and not out of a deep inner conviction. If that really is what you're saying, I'd disagree. I'd argue that Ayn Rand, for example, held the views she did because she grew up in Russia at a very turbulent time. She had at least two strikes against her in Russia: she was Jewish and her family was well-to-do. She would have cherished the relative freedom and security she found in the US when she emigrated there as a young woman. I don't know very much about the other people you mention. I know that Orly Taitz, another Russian Jew by birth, argues that Obama shouldn't be President because he wasn't born in the US. As for Leo Strauss, I recall that he had a founding influence on the Chicago School of Economics, which some people say (Naomi Klein for example) promoted the interests of corporate capitalism with rather disastrous results. I'll leave the Osage alone for the time being. I'm sure you know far more about them than I ever could. Ed ----- Original Message ----- From: Ray Harrell <mailto:[email protected]> To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION,EDUCATION' <mailto:[email protected]> Sent: Sunday, September 09, 2012 6:45 PM Subject: Re: [Futurework] Godamn Gummint!! Considering that the Osage were stolen blind by the European American "Sooner" Oklahomans and that the "Sooners" were the group that formed the foundations for the current energy billionaires in America, Rand's "Government" property protection applied to Indians would have created a vastly different society with American Indian billionaires. The last rich Indian to espouse these things was VP Curtis that was Herbert Hoover's VP. We've paid for his faith and belief in the Yonega for the last 70 plus years. There are a lot more African Americans today than there have been Indians since the 1800. You can read the racial angst in Ryan and the GOP today with Obama. Imagine what it was in 1930 when the Osage were the equivalent of today's Dubai. The state appointed white guardians for every full blood and then the full bloods died like sheep amongst wolves or Hindus during the early days of the British governments in India. It seems that the problem of protecting private property depends a lot more who how that is defined and what group is currently in power. Consider the way Tom Delay tried to divide up Texas because of the coming whirlwind of Blacks and Hispanics in the next eight years. "Rand" was a first generation naturalized American, like "Birther" Orly Taitz who is also Soviet Russian trained in the Soviet education system with its prejudice towards Jews. Occasionally first time immigrants confronting America make an awful mess of what they believe English really says. Although Taitz is widely traveled and speaks five languages her wretched background, from two generations of holocaust and pogroms, is not enough to make her understand English or American culture. Her paranoid application to American culture with experience no older than my daughter, resembles nothing more than a terrible PTSD from a mind that has the tools to be less foolish than she appears. I remember when "Rand" was the current version of Taitz and her followers were as simple minded as the "Birthers." Sort of "atheist Baptists" in their attitudes. Now we have Ryan and Gingrich. One born and the other converted to the Catholicism that all of those mid westerners feared might exist in John Kennedy. That Czarist taught Russian Alice Rosenbaum recast as Ayn Rand was incompetent as a film writer. In the hyper naturalism of the Hollywood films, of her day her English was Russian. The only people who spoke like Rand wrote were in the crime and heroic cartoons. Did she learn it there? I've known Jewish scientists who learned their English in the all night movies of Times Square. They went on to become world class scientists. But Rand wanted to create movies in her own image which was inadequate. The problem was that everyone else in the live actor movies had to speak English that was seven layers deep or they seemed like a cross between Donald Duck and Prince Valiant. Can you imagine either of them making love? With each other? That was Rand's problem with her writing. There is nothing really "objective" about Ayn Rand. Just simple minded fundamentalist cartoon black and white thinking. Even that is too much for Ryan when it comes to women. I don't know what his Oklahoma wife, child of liberal Democrats, saw in him unless it was the only way she could "separate and individuate." Or maybe she's just a shallow pretty face. I've known a number of conservative children of socialists since I moved to New York. For some it was the only way to discover their individualism and leave home. For others like William Safire, it was an economic decision. When he left the NYTimes he said that had he been graduating now he would have chosen being a Liberal Democrat because that was where the opportunities for advancement lay in the current future. Leo Strauss had anger management problems with the Liberal New York college establishments which he vented about constantly and took revenge when he moved to Chicago. When I moved to New York, there were failed artists who believed in themselves and chose the conservative cause as the best opportunities for success available to them even when it was outside their family "brand" and culture. I guess it all depends upon what you are objective about. REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ed Weick Sent: Friday, September 07, 2012 5:02 PM To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION'; [email protected] Subject: [Futurework] Godamn Gummint!! We've been hearing a lot about Ayn Rand and 'objectivism' now that Paul Ryan is Romney's choice for VP in the forthcoming US election, so I decided to find out what I could about Rand and her philosophy. I thought of reading "Atlas Shrugged" or "The Fountainhead", but when I looked at them at a local bookstore I found them far too thick and the print far to small. So I picked up a cheap little book of columns and comments that Rand and other Objectivist's had written a few decades ago. Interestingly, though not surprisingly, Alan Greenspan is one of the contributors to the book. The sections that I've read so far, written by Rand herself, deal with the role and purposes of government in an objectivist society. As Rand sees it, government's only role is to ensure the freedom of the citizen and to protect his property. That is why you need cops within the country and an army to keep out foreigners who might infringe on the citizen's freedom. Beyond these simple roles, government has no responsibilities. If people are inadequately housed, getting decent housing is up to them; if they are hungry, they should make some money and get some food; if they are ill, it's up to them to find and pay a doctor; and of course getting an education is up to them too; etc. Everyone should strive to rise to the top, but of course only the cleverest and most committed will. Above all, people should not depend on government, whose only role is to ensure that they are free to do the things they want to do. I could read on, but I may not. From an ideological point of view, It's interesting stuff, but using it as a basis for how government should operate in this complex, changing and globalized world could lead to massive mistakes such as budgetary restraints where stimulus may be needed, cutting back on important government programs or not initiating them, and catering to entrenched corporate interests. It's a rather extreme ideology which appears to have no place for common purposes or the reality that people really do care for one another. I find it scary that politicians could look upon it as a set of principles on which their programs should be based. Ed _____ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
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