UPDATE: April 24, 2011, 5:19 PM
Jonathan Chait sums up Rand’s moral philosophy, “The core of the Randian worldview, as absorbed by the modern GOP, is a belief that the natural market distribution of income is inherently moral, and the central struggle of politics is to free the successful from having the fruits of their superiority redistributed by looters and moochers.”
For Ayn Rand charity is not only unwelcome; it is evil.
"Do not confuse altruism with kindness, good will or respect for the rights of others…The irreducible primary of altruism, the basic absolute, is self-sacrifice—which means; self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-denial, self-destruction—which means: the self as a standard of evil, the selfless as a standard of the good.
Do not hide behind such superficialities as whether you should or should not give a dime to a beggar. That is not the issue. The issue is whether you do or do not have the right to exist without giving him that dime. We're #1 -- Ten Depressing Ways America Is Exceptional America is exceptional in the advantages we’ve had over other nations, not what we’ve done with those advantages.David Morris at Alternet.org ,April 20, 2011
In the article quoted above the author David Morris argues that America's so called success is not a matter of providence or that it can be merely attributed to hard work and ambition .
He argues that those who settle in America were in many ways lucky because of the abundance of natural resources and a vast amount of free land.
He attacks the notion that the average American as opposed to the citizens of other industrialized societies have an easier time or more opportunity in moving from the lowest rungs of society to the upper rungs.
In fact he says that statistics show that this notion just part of the American mythos of superiority and exceptionalism.
Sunday Sermon One Nation Under Ayn Rand & The Philosophy Of Selfishness and Greed
America though it claims to be a Christian Nation its overarching fundamental belief system is in contradiction to the teachings of Jesus .
America is a society of selfish individuals who deride any notion of altruism .
America's operational principles are those based upon material success and a "winners take all" mindset.
Americans have put materialism and success at the core of their beliefs and their idolatry.
Americans have been taught over the last couple of centuries that they are an exceptional people who are blessed by divine providence and are therefore superior to all other nations or peoples.
One Nation under Ayn Rand not one nation under God since Americans in general reject the message given by Jesus in the sermon on the mount.
To a vast majority of Christians outside the United States believe that the Sermon on the mount is at the core of their belief system as Christians.
But in America selfishness, avarice winners take all prosperiety gospel is at odds with the sermon on the mount-instead Americans are told that the philosophy of Ayn Rand is at the root of Americas self-image.
Belonging to a cmmunity in which all members feel the need to cooperate and help those in need goes against the grain of American exceptionalism.
It is this view of humanity of being selfish and abiding by the rule of winners take all that much of the world rejects.
As Cain after murdering his own brother answers God defiantly "am I my brothers keeper" the question is meant to show Cain's willfullness ,hubris , lack of guilt or conscience.
The answer to Cain's question is not to be debated but is supposed to be obvious that yes you are your brothers keeper. His attempt to draw God as it were into a debate fails because God already knows that Cain has murdered Able . The only answer God wants is one in which Cain admits to his action and that he now regrets it instead he defies God .
Cain appears to have come to the conclusion that even God has no right to judge his actions ie murdering his brother Abel.
We're #1 -- Ten Depressing Ways America Is Exceptional America is exceptional in the advantages we’ve had over other nations, not what we’ve done with those advantages.April 20, 2011
Recent research contradicts the fundamental tenet of American exceptionalism. A Brookings Institution report comparing economic mobility in the United States and other countries concludes, “…“Starting at the bottom of the earnings ladder is more of a handicap in the United States than it is in other countries.”
For Republican presidential candidates the phrase American Exceptionalism has taken on almost talismanic qualities. Newt Gingrich’s new book is titled, A Nation Like No Other: Why American Exceptionalism Matters. “American the Exceptional” is the title of a chapter in Sarah Palin’s book America by Heart.
And woe be to those who take issue with the phrase. 2008 Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee declares, “To deny American exceptionalism is in essence to deny the heart and soul of this nation.” 2012 Presidential candidate Mitt Romney insists, “The reorientation away from a celebration of American exceptionalism is misguided and bankrupt.”
...Strikingly, Americans are not exceptional in our attitudes toward government. In a survey of 27 countries, two thirds of the respondents on both sides of the Atlantic answered yes to the following question, “Does the government control too much of your daily life? Is it usually inefficient and wasteful?”
What makes us exceptional is our response to the next question. “It is the responsibility of the government to reduce the difference in income”. Less than a third of Americans agreed while in 26 other countries more than two thirds did.
Far more than other peoples, Americans believe that skill and hard work are the keys to success and wealth is a measure of how hard you work or how skilled you are. Which leads us to believe that people should have the right to amass as much wealth as they can and view a graduated income tax as a punitive penalty on success and a sturdy social safety net an invitation to slothfulness, reduced productivity and an overall slowdown in economic growth.
...The new influence of Tea Party conservatives has taken this anti-social attitude a step further best reflected in the speeches of Representative Paul Ryan, Chairman of the House Budget Committee and made concrete in his recent budget. Ryan believes that helping the poor represents a “collectivist” philosophy. His heroine is Ayn Rand, the God of libertarians. He requires his staffers to read Rand’s novel, Atlas Shrugged and calls Rand “the reason I got involved in public service.”
Jonathan Chait sums up Rand’s moral philosophy, “The core of the Randian worldview, as absorbed by the modern GOP, is a belief that the natural market distribution of income is inherently moral, and the central struggle of politics is to free the successful from having the fruits of their superiority redistributed by looters and moochers.”
For Ayn Rand charity is not only unwelcome; it is evil.
"Do not confuse altruism with kindness, good will or respect for the rights of others…The irreducible primary of altruism, the basic absolute, is self-sacrifice—which means; self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-denial, self-destruction—which means: the self as a standard of evil, the selfless as a standard of the good. Do not hide behind such superficialities as whether you should or should not give a dime to a beggar. That is not the issue. The issue is whether you do or do not have the right to exist without giving him that dime.
That value system is made explicit in Paul Ryan’s much publicized budget which would slash taxes on the rich by almost $3 trillion while cutting spending on the needy by almost that much."
The United States is also exceptional among industrialized nations not only in having by far the world’s most unequal income distribution but in believing that this inequality benefits us all, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary.
The data is crystal clear. Since 1980, the income share of the upper 1 percent of Americans has doubled. The share going to the top 0.1 percent, those earning more than $1.2 million a year, has quadrupled. Meanwhile the average worker’s wages have declined. In 2004 a full-time worker’s wage was 11 percent lower than in 1973, adjusting for inflation, even though productivity had risen 78 percent between 1973 and 2004
In the last decade, while the top 1 percent of Americans saw their incomes rise, on average, by more than a quarter of a million dollars each, the average income of the bottom 90 percent of all working Americans actually declined.
Tom Englehardt writes that Americans like the citizens of previous empires are so caught up in their belief that America is an exceptional nation and Empire which is therefore not governed by the same historical pressures which in the past spelt the decay and death of an empire. He argues in the real world moving beyond America's arrogance and hubris this empire too shall fall and may be already experiencing its last days as an empire.
Imperial Decline: How Does It Feel to Be Inside a Dying Empire? Could this be what it’s like to watch, paralyzed, as a country on autopilot begins to come apart at the seams while still proclaiming itself “the greatest nation on Earth”? Tomdispatch.com by Tom Engelhardt via Alternet.org,April 19, 2011
This can't end well.
But then, how often do empires end well, really? They live vampirically by feeding off others until, sooner or later, they begin to feed on themselves, to suck their own blood, to hollow themselves out. Sooner or later, they find themselves, as in our case, economically stressed and militarily extended in wars they can’t afford to win or lose.
Historians have certainly written about the dangers of overextended empires and of endless war as a way of life, but there’s something distant and abstract about the patterns of history. It’s quite another thing to take it in when you’re part of it; when, as they used to say in the overheated 1960s, you’re in the belly of the beast.
...The United States is, of course, an imperial power, however much we might prefer not to utter the word. We still have our globe-spanning array of semi-client states; our military continues to garrison much of the planet; and we are waging war abroad more continuously than at any time in memory. Yet who doesn’t sense that the sun is now setting on us?
Not so many years ago, we were proud enough of our global strength to regularly refer to ourselves as the Earth’s “sole superpower.” In those years, our president and his top officials dreamed of establishing a worldwide Pax Americana, while making speeches and issuing official documents proclaiming that the United States would be militarily “beyond challenge” by any and all powers for eons to come. So little time has passed and yet who speaks like that today? Who could?
And as for equality of opportunity it appears that the top 1% of American income earners(?) have 100 times the political clout as an average US citizen.
Meanwhile even Obama peddles the nonsense that all Americans are born as equals and that the economic and political system are geared towards giving each citizen whatever their economic status at birth an equal opportunity for economic and political success.
The only real guarantee in America is that those born into wealth will be far more successful than those Americans born int the lower classes.
"The Public Overwhelmingly Wants It: Why Is Taxing the Rich So Hard?
The obvious answer is that rich people have political clout—but can it really be so simple? " by Alyssa Battistoni Alternet .org, April 23, 2011
When even the New York Times, the supposed bleeding heart of the liberal media, is asking whether it’s more “perilous politically” to accept tax increases for 3 percent of households or benefit cuts for everyone, you’d assume that even Americans who aren’t rich are are opposed to raising taxes on those who are. But you’d be wrong: nearly three-quarters of Americans support raising taxes on the wealthy. So why is raising taxes on the wealthy so hard—or why do we think it is?
The obvious answer is that rich people have political clout—but can it really be so simple? A growing mound of evidence suggests that while wealthy people’s preferences may not be the only factor in political decision-making, it’s a worrisomely important one. In a recent study, Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels found that senators outright ignored the views of their least advantaged constituents while catering to the preferences of the wealthy.
Princeton’s Martin Gilens has also found that policy changes reflect the preferences of the most affluent, while the preferences of poor and middle-income Americans have almost no bearing.
Politicial scientists Lawrence Jacobs and Benjamin Page have found that the preferences of foreign policymakers correspond more to the preferences of executives of multinational companies than to the general public. Page and Jeffrey Winters estimate that the top 10 percent of income earners hold about 90 percent of materially based political power, and that “each member of the top 1 percent averaged more than 100 times the power of a member of the bottom 90 percent; about 200 times if the index is calculated in terms of the more politically relevant non-home wealth.”
These numbers are staggering, and should be seriously troubling to anyone who thinks political equality worth defending. Indeed, by Page and Winter’s definition of oligarchy as “the extreme political inequalities that necessarily accompany extreme material inequalities,” it’s pretty hard to argue that the United States isn’t an oligarchic society.
As for the American Empire losing control over the nations it occupies or uses to pursue its own agenda we see in Pakistan an uncooperative government and a public increasingly anti-American while in Iraq both the government propped up by the Americans and the American forces are increasingly hated.
The US seems incapable of forcing or persuading Pakistan to go after Taliban affiliated groups or other terrorist groups operating within Pakistan's borders.
Pakistan-US Feud Boils Over CIA Drone Strikes by: Jonathan S. Landay, McClatchy Newspapers
Washington - Even as it publicly demands an end to U.S. drone attacks on militants in its tribal area, Pakistan is allowing the CIA to launch the missile-firing robot aircraft from an airbase in its province of Baluchistan, U.S. officials said Friday. April 23, 2011
Some experts and U.S. officials say that the Pakistani army, which oversees national security policies, is angry that in addition to hitting al Qaida operatives, the Obama administration has intensified drone attacks against the Haqqani network and other Afghan militants closely tied to the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, or ISI.And meanwhile in Iraq there are protests taking place across the country . The protesters include Shiite, Sunni and Kurds and all classes of society who are protesting against the regime in power and against the American occupation.
...Islamabad denies that the ISI maintains ties with the Haqqani network, but it has refused to move against the group's North Waziristan stronghold. It contends that Pakistani troops are overstretched by operations elsewhere, and that the group should be part of any negotiated settlement of the Afghan war.
U.S. officials and many experts believe that the ISI considers the Haqqani network and the Afghan Taliban its ultimate tools for preventing Pakistan's longtime foe, India, from gaining influence in Afghanistan after American troops leave.
...U.S. strategy that has awarded Pakistan billions in aid and military hardware in a bid — which up until now has failed — to convince the Pakistani army to close Afghan insurgent strongholds on its side of the border.
The drone feud is one of a litany of issues that have sent U.S.-Pakistani ties into a tailspin. They also include the January arrest of a CIA contractor after he killed two alleged thieves in an incident that led to the uncovering of CIA operations against another militant group with which the ISI is suspected of maintaining links.
Asma Al Haidari writes that the Maliki government of Iraq is trying to portray the uprising in Iraq as a sectarian dispute which Haidari insists it is not .
But Iraqis are troubled by the fact that the mainstream media in Iraq and the USA are not covering the story of Iraq's own uprising and demonstrations being held in Iraq's own Tahrir Square in Baghdad.
And most disturbing if true is that American soldiers in helicopter gunships have dropped bags of garbage on the protesters in Baghdad.
From Baghdad's Own Tahrir Square to Mosul: the Friday of the Free by: Lieven De Cauter, Foreign Policy in Focus, Via Truthout, April 24, 2011
Lieven De Cauter presents a letter from his colleague in Iraq, Asma Al Haidari:
April 15th. What am I to write to you about today? It is the Friday of the Free! For this is what our young revolutionaries have called it. I will start with the demonstrations on Tahrir Square in Baghdad. Of course all the bridges and streets leading to Tahrir were cut off but people came all the same and are still there. They are chanting that Maliki is a liar and a thief. They are chanting that whoever does not say Tahrir, “Liberation”, his life is a loss. They are daring the security forces who are there in great numbers to detain them. I have always known and told you what we are made of, how could the Americans have ever thought that they can colonize us? You can feel the atmosphere of Tahrir. You can see and feel the life that is Tahrir. Tahrir belongs to the People.and so it goes,
...Ah, the scenes in Tahrir were phenomenal, because Maliki and his henchmen yesterday ordered people to demonstrate in two football grounds, again on a sectarian basis, can you imagine? But he is a stupid man and so are his advisors. The Iraqis are much too intelligent and clever for all of this and proved that they are now at the point of no return in their rebellion and revolt. They assembled in Tahrir and told Maliki and his parliamentarians to go and play football in the stadiums he has assigned.
...But what is most amusing is that today the American Occupation's helicopters made a great entrance on the stage demonstrating that the American Administration really does believe the democracy it alleges it brought to Iraq is in fact equal to garbage… literally! It was funny and it is all on film: daily, since the vigil and demonstration started in Mosul, American helicopters buzzed the demonstrators and the demonstrators answered back by throwing their shoes at them in disdain! Today, the helicopters performed what they considered their coup de grace, by flying very low over their heads and throwing down bags of garbage. When the people were asked for comments they answered that the Americans throw garbage every day since the occupation: all the depleted uranium, all the white phosphorous, all the drugs, all the disease, tyranny, oppression, plunder, theft, lies and illiteracy they brought with them. So we, Iraqis, know everything and we will have justice at the end of the day, when a new dawn comes. The feeling is that it is going to be quite soon.
GORD.
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