What would Ayn Rand make of Lee Camp? Or of Johann Hari skewering Republicans and their new BFF the Donald?

Lee Camp's latest "Moment of Clarity" video: "Hedge Funds Make More in an Hour Than You Make in a Half Century"

What level of obscene does this need to reach before we stop respecting and supporting this system? . . .

We've created a cancer, and one of the hardest parts about defeating cancer is finding it. But we know where this one is, and as it grows larger, we seem to celebrate it. We admire these billionaires. As they grow, we think, "Man, if only I could be as cancerous as them. Man, if only I could suck up the resources of this country while others go hungry and homeless and live in tent cities, being lorded over by some bearded tent-city mayor with a mangy sheepdog and a divining rod like a smelly Moses. Then I would have the American dream."

Should it bother us that by obtaining a monstrous version of the American dream these people effectively destroy the American dream for so many others? Let's have a race for the cure for this. . . .

by Ken

Watching Lee Camp's latest "Moment of Clarity" video set me to rooting around my brain for something I just recently read. Finally I remembered: It was a column passed along by a colleague by The Independent's Johann Hari: "Donald Trump's lunacy reveals core truth about the Republicans."

ABOUT JOHANN HARI

Johann Hari has reported from Iraq, Israel/Palestine, the Congo, the Central African Republic, Venezuela, Peru and the US, and his journalism has appeared in The New York Times, Le Monde and others. He has won many of the most prestigious awards in British journalism, including the George Orwell prize (he is the youngest ever winner), the Martha Gellhorn Prize, the Amnesty International Journalist of the Year award twice, for his reporting from the war in Congo, and Dubai. At the British Press Awards in 2010 he became the youngest person ever to be shortlisted for the Journalist of the Year award.

-- bio on The Independent's website

"Every six months," Hari writes of U.S. Republicans since the election of Barack Obama, "the party venerates a new hero, and each time it is somebody further back on the evolutionary scale." After dispatching Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann, he writes (emphasis added),

I half-expected the next contender to be a lung-fish draped in the Stars and Stripes. But it wasn't anything so sophisticated. Enter stage (far) right Donald Trump, the bewigged billionaire who has filled America with phallic symbols and plastered his name across more surfaces than the average Central Asian dictator. CNN's polling suggests he is the most popular candidate among Republican voters. It's not hard to see why. Trump is every trend in Republican politics over the past 35 years taken to its logical conclusion. He is the Republican id, finally entirely unleashed from all restraint and all reality.

You'll have to read the column for three of the trends. The first is "towards naked imperialism," referencing the Donald's prescriptions for Libya ("I would take the oil and stop this baby stuff") and Iraq ("We stay there, and we take the oil"). The second is "towards dog-whistle prejudice – pitched just high enough for frightened white Republicans to hear it," referencing the Donald's gleeful embrace of birtherism. The fourth is "to insist that any fact inconvenient to your world view simply doesn't exist, or can be overcome by pure willpower," referencing the debt-ceiling follies (Trump: "What do economists know? Most of them aren't very smart," to which we might say yeah, but compared with you . . .), the problem of oil prices, and growing Chinese economic clout (Trump "will order them to stop manipulating their currency. . . . This is Trump's view. The whiny world simply needs to be bullied into submission by a more assertive America –- or the world can be fired and he'll find a better one").

But it's Hari's third trend -- "towards raw worship of wealth as an end in itself –- and exempting them from all social responsibility" -- that was rattling around my head as I watched Lee Camp's video. (Again, emphasis added.)

Trump is wealthy because his father left him a large business, and since then companies with his name on them have crashed into bankruptcy four times. In 1990, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston studied the Trump accounts and claimed that while Trump claimed to be worth $1.4bn, he actually owed $600m more than he owned and you and I were worth more than him. His current wealth is not known, but he claims he is worth more than $2.7bn.

Johnston says that in fact most of Trump's apparent fortune comes from "stiffing his creditors" and from government subsidies and favours for his projects –- which followed large donations to the campaigns of both parties, sometimes in the very same contest. Trump denies these charges and presents himself as an entrepreneur "of genius".

Yet for the Republican Party, the accumulation of money is proof in itself of virtue, however it was acquired. The richest 1 per cent pay for the party's campaigns, and the party in turn serves their interests entirely. The most glaring example is that they have simply exempted many of the rich from taxes. Johnston studied four of Trump's recent tax returns, and found he legally paid no taxes in two of them. In America today, a janitor can pay more income tax than Donald Trump –- and the Republicans regard that not as a source of shame, but of pride.

How are these tax exemptions for the super-rich paid for? Here's one example. The Republican budget that just passed through the Senate slashed funding to help premature babies to survive. The rich riot while the poor shrivel. Trump offers the ultimate symbol of this: he won't even shake hands with any ordinary Americans out on the stump, because "you catch all sorts of things" from them. Yes: the Republican front-runner is a billionaire who literally won't touch the poor or middle class.

Hari allows that "Trump probably won't become the Republican nominee,"

but not because most Republicans reject his premisses. No: it will be because he states these arguments too crudely for mass public consumption. He takes the whispered dogmas of the Reagan, Bush and Tea Party years and shrieks them through a megaphone. The nominee will share similar ideas, but express them more subtly.

He reminds readers that the party "has united behind the budget plan of Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan, which "halves taxes on the richest 1 percent and ends all taxes on corporate income, dividends, and inheritance" and "pays for it by slashing spending on food stamps, healthcare for the poor and the elderly, and basic services." Hari points to Ryan's declaration that he got involved in politics based on reading Ayn Rand.

"The tragedy," Hari writes,

is that Obama needs serious opposition –- but not from this direction. In reality, he is funded by similar destructive corporate interests, and has only been a few notches closer to sanity than these people. But faced with such overt lunacy, he seems like he is serving the bottom 99 per cent of Americans much more than he really is.

The Republican Party today isn't even dominated by market fundamentalism. This is a crude Nietzscheanism, dedicated to exalting the rich as an overclass and dismissing the rest. So who should be the Republican nominee? I hear the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were considering running –- but they are facing primary challenges from the Tea Party for being way too mild-mannered.

As we just heard Lee camp ask, "What level of obscene does this need to reach before we stop respecting and supporting this system?"

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