Atlas Shrugged (2011)

This is NOT a movie review of the recent film, which I have no desire whatsoever to bother with. This is so much more informative and useful…

Ayn Rand: the Tea Party’s Miscast Matriarch
by PAM MARTENS

Gary Weiss, long time Wall Street reporter and author, has written a new book, due out this week from St. Martin’s Press, on the rising influence of Ayn Rand in modern politics. Titled Ayn Rand Nation: The Hidden Struggle for America’s Soul, the book removes the propaganda mask that has been so adroitly affixed to Alan Greenspan’s page-boy coiffed goddess of laissez-faire capitalism and the Tea Party’s mother ship.

While lecturing others for most of her life on the meaning of morality, Rand had extramarital sex for more than a decade with a younger man who worked for her. His wife was among her inner circle of friends and Rand herself was married. A believer in acquiescence to selfish desires, Rand published a 1964 collection of essays with Nathaniel Branden titled The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism. Adding particular poignancy to the title, Branden was the young subordinate with whom she was sleeping.

Rand, and her supporters, including Alan Greenspan, viewed altruism as evil: altruism is evil, selfishness is good. And tens of millions of dollars of corporate money is backing that philosophy today in America, no doubt to give obscenely paid CEOs a sip of Rand’s guilt-free narcissism while stoking the fires for more deregulation of a country just crawling back from the crippling effects of deregulation. This is the mindless irrationality of Rand’s brand of rationality.

Continued at Counterpunch

The Corporation, The Yes Men Fix the World, Capitalism – A Love Story

DVD: The Corporation

Move Over Congress, Here Comes Achbar, Moore and the Yes Men
The Filmmakers vs. the Capitalists

By Pam Martens
Article originally published at CounterPunch.org.

Did you ever expect a corporation to have a conscience, when it has no soul to be damned and no body to be kicked?

— Edward, First Baron Thurlow

We’re about to find out if the filmmakers can succeed where Congressional hearings and mainstream media have failed. Will the film documentaries examining insatiable corporate greed and Wall Street malfeasance provide the American people with the necessary foundation of understanding and activist tools to seriously tackle the problem head on?

The embryo of a breakthrough idea is emerging amidst the smell of popcorn and Raisinets in theatres around the globe: the mega corporate structure is no longer facilitating product innovation as much as it is spawning audacious crime innovation. So big and bulky it can’t get out of its own way, let alone innovate, the bloated behemoth resorts to crime for profits. Unless we think there is a future for our nation in patenting, securitizing and exporting felonious acts, we need to change course and fast.

Three films are standouts as a combined curriculum for leading Americans out of the darkness. Together, they provide a compelling argument that the seeds of today’s financial calamity were planted in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in 1886 to effectively grant corporations the same protections as humans.