Fallout, good and bad, from the economic elites' tanking the economy, then getting their butts bailed out, then profiteering amid the wreckage

"Now here's the interesting part: During the half-hour when everyone thinks the hoax is true, the company's stock tumbles like crazy. GE lost billions. Dow lost billions. This means we've created a system where companies get massively punished for doing good things for humanity."

-- funnyman Lee Camp, riffing on the hoaxes in which Dow and GE were, shockingly, purported to be acting responsibly

by Ken

And Lee continues:

Our financial market actively rewards being a giant cunt, like a radioactive Ann Coulter who's grown to Godzilla proportions. Does that not freak anyone out? So if a corporation announces it will hostilely take over a 50-year-old locally owned company and fire all the employees, it's given the financial equivalent of a high five and a reach-around. If on the other hand it announces it will give free AIDS medication to the dying people of Ghana, then Wall Street knocks it unconscious and draws the word "queer" on its forehead.

Now this is hardly surprising coming from a wild-eyed leftie like Lee Camp. What strikes me as new is that -- coincidentally or not, just as the American middle class has discovered that it no longer figures in the economic elites' plans for cutting up the American economic pie -- unkind words are being heard spoken about a once-sacred buzzword.

FALLOUT, PART 1: IN SOME MAINSTREAM PRECINCTS, IT'S
NOW OK TO SAY NAUGHTY THINGS ABOUT (GASP) CAPITALISM

Here's Chrystia Freeland blogging on the Reuters website:

Chrystia Freeland

Capitalism is failing the middle class

Global capitalism isn’t working for the American middle class. That isn’t a headline from the left-leaning Huffington Post, or a comment on Glenn Beck’s right-wing populist blackboard. It is, instead, the conclusion of a rigorous analysis bearing the imprimatur of the U.S. establishment: the paper’s lead author is Michael Spence, recipient of the Nobel Prize in economic sciences, and it was published by the Council on Foreign Relations.

Spence and his co-author, Sandile Hlatshwayo, examined the changes in the structure of the U.S. economy, particularly employment trends, over the past 20 years. They found that value added per U.S. worker increased sharply during that period -- 21 per cent for the economy as a whole, and 44 per cent in the “tradable” sector, which is geek-speak for those businesses integrated into the global economy. But even as productivity soared, wages and job opportunities stagnated.

The take-away is this: Globalization is making U.S. companies more productive, but the benefits are mostly being enjoyed by the C-suite. The middle class, meanwhile, is struggling to find work, and many of the jobs available are poorly paid. . . .

PART 2: WHEREAS IN OTHER PRECINCTS, THE FLIGHT
FROM REALITY SOARS INTO THE OUTER AYNRANDOSPHERE

Now it can be argued whether what we have here is any species of capitalism, except perhaps, for the sake of convenience, hallowed crony capitalism. And pretty much the last thing the American elites want is any sort of "free market," which for them would be a wildly unacceptable stepdown from the paradise of megacorporate welfare they've created, in which profits are "capitalized" and losses "socialized." However, the right-wing deep-space flight from reality is zooming into goofier and goofier corners of the universe.

Today's ThinkProgressReport focuses on a favorite subject of Howie's: "The Truth About GOP Hero Ayn Rand," possibly the stupidest person ever to wangle her way into print. Here's just a bit of it (with lots of links onsite):

RAND'S INFLUENCE ON GOP: "For over half a century," says Jennifer Burns, a recent biographer of the novelist, "Rand has been the ultimate gateway drug to life on the right." And with good reason. Besides her prominence in the Tea Party's intellectual and cultural lexicon, some of the Republican Party's leading lights have cited Rand by name as an inspiration. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) said she was the reason he entered public service. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) called Atlas Shrugged "his foundational book." Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is an avowed fan and quotes extensively from Rand's novels at Congressional hearings. His father Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) told listeners that readers ate up Rand's Alas Shrugged because "it was telling the truth," and even conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas references her work as influence in his autobiography -- and apparently has his law clerks watch the film adaptation of The Fountainhead. The phenomenon holds amidst the right-wing media as well: Rush Limbaugh called her "brilliant," Glenn Beck's panel on Rand featured the president of the Ayn Rand Institute Yaroom Brook, and Andrew Napolitano enthusiastically recounted a story in which his college-age self introduces his mother to Rand's The Virtue of Selfishness. John Stossel and Sean Hannity have name-dropped her as well. Going further back, Alan Greenspan -- former chairman of the Federal Reserve and a fierce advocate of free-market ideology -- is an acolyte of Rand's thinking and knew her personally, and Rand was also dubbed the unofficial "novelist laureate" of the Reagan Administration by Maureen Dowd. Indeed, the most remarkable thing about Ayn Rand's reach on the right is how unremarked-upon it most often is.

If there's anyone reading this who doesn't know just what a total nutjob Ayn Rand was, the ThinkProgressReport continues with a neat section on "Rand's Philosophy" (using the word "philosophy" in the broadest imaginable sense, describing nothing more than "stuff somebody believes"), before going on to describe "Paul Ryan's Ayn Rand Budget."

Hilarious stuff. Or it would be if any of it was meant to be funny.

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