Blog: Ayn Rand, Alan Greenspan & Matt Taibbi’s Griftopia

 

Ayn Rand, Alan Greenspan & Matt Taibbi’s Griftopia

 

 

As I mentioned in my most recent prior post, we’re currently examining Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi’s breakout 2010 non-fiction work “Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History“ – you can find the first and second image blogs from Griftopia here and here, respectively.

This quotation comes from Gritopia’s second chapter, devoted entirely to the role of Alan Greenspan in helping to create and finance what Taibbi calls “the Grifter Archipelago – and appropriately titled “the Biggest Asshole in the Universe.” Truthfully, if I had planned this series of posts out a little better we probably should have started with this passage, especially since it ties in nicely to our previously-discussed quotation from Owen Jones’ “The Establishment and how they get away with it.” The simple truth is that understanding the fraud economy and the 2008 global financial meltdown requires understanding the now-sacrosanct ideology that inspired all this open criminality and theft.

So just who is Ayn Rand, how did her philosophy affect Alan Greenspan and why does any of this still matter today?

Interpreted charitably, Ayn Rand was a libertarian author and philosopher of dubious quality and questionable ideological consistency; you can find a more detailed examination of Taibbi’s critique of her work here. I’m not really interested in wasting a lot of time dissecting Rand’s “ideology” such as it is, but I think it’s fair to say that calling it “Objectivism” and releasing a book entitled “The Virtue of Selfishness” says a lot about how absolutely full of sh*t her movement is.

Despite this, or perhaps rather because of it, the works of Ayn Rand (who died in 1982, while receiving meager U.S. government assistance) have formed the “ethical” background behind the hyper-capitalist, right wing libertarian movement that has come to define establishment ideology (on both sides of the political divide) in much of the western world. When soon-to-be former Congressman Paul Ryan takes on new staffers, he infamously gives each of them a copy of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” and Friedrich Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom”  – two of the foundational texts of the surprisingly dodgy libertarian, market-worshiping, deregulated capitalist “insurgency” that represents the idealized ethos behind our modern rule-by-the-rich system in “the West.”

I say “idealized” because as both Taibbi and Jones explore in their respective books, these dashing laissez faire economic idealists are more than happy to throw away the “free market” when it comes time to give the rich and powerful another handout, or in the case of 2008 – prevent the ruling class from destroying itself and taking the global economy with it. In simpler terms, it’s socialism for the rich and powerful, backed by harsh capitalist realities for everyone else, especially the poor.

This “Randian” ideology then represents the front-end picture fed to the public by well spoken media propagandists, while on the back end the real “Masters of the Universe” are looting the public coffers like there’s no tomorrow – perhaps because there might not be one at the rate we’re going ecologically.

Understanding this discrepancy between what the elite establishment claims to believe, and how it behaves in practice is pretty important in this case because this inherent contradiction seemed to embody itself in the form of Alan Greenspan; a former friend and disciple of Rand who nevertheless found himself working in government and eventually became Chairman of the Federal Reserve in 1987. You can find more about Greenspan’s effect on the 2008 Financial Crisis in my previous “Griftopia” post but needless to say, Taibbi didn’t call him “the biggest asshole in the universe” because he was great at his job. In practice, Greenspan was a free-market, anti-regulation zealot when it came to refusing to restrict the behavior of investment bankers and rich speculators in any way, and a neoliberal stimulus messiah when it came time for those same gamblers to pay the price for their reckless behavior.

All of which brings us to the simple question, “why does this still matter today?”

Truthfully of course, it shouldn’t; after nearly four decades of increasingly rigid adherence to supply-side economics in the United States, and decades worth of Austerity in Europe, it’s more than fair to say that deregulated globalized capitalism has been a complete and utter failure for the vast majority of people in the west – a failure that literally represents an imminent threat to all life on earth. Of course, the “vast majority” of people does not mean “all” of the people and this ideology/economic policy has allowed a very small number of plutocrats to accumulate wealth beyond the wildest dreams of any Sultan, Czar or Emperor in human history and therein, lies the problem.

The very same ethics, ideology and economic policies that lead to the 2008 worldwide financial crisis remain in place primarily because they were quite effective for the rich and powerful elites who now completely dominate our politics, media and societal discourse. What’s more, these same elites are now rumbling about the possibility of yet another global financial crisis on the very-near horizon and already the “usual suspects” are lining up for public money to solve the banking/financial sector’s very private problems.

Those who do not learn from history, are indeed doomed to repeat it; and as a society, it would seem that the so-called western world has learned very little from the 2008 financial crisis.

 

– Nina Illingworth