Ayn Rand Conservatism at Work -- Firefighters Let Family's House Burn Down Because Owner Didn't Pay $75 Fee | News & Politics. October 4, 2010 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. Thanks to 30 years of right-wing demagoguery about the evils of “collectivism” and the perfidy of “big government” -- and a bruising recession that’s devastated state and local budgets -- we’re getting a peek at a dystopian nightmare that may be in our not-too-distant future. Call it Ayn Rand’s stark, anti-governmental dream come true, a vision that last week turned into a nightmare for Gene Cranick, a rurual homeowner in Obion County, Tennessee. The fire chief could have made an exception on the spot, but refused to do so. Ironically, Obion County describes itself as a “progressive community.”
We continue to recruit new industry .... But last December, a county commission on which every member is a Republican voted to rescind a resolution passed years earlier that would have established a countywide fire department. It was a libertarian wet dream, but it was utterly disastrous. New Economics Institute. The Shocking, Graphic Data That Shows Exactly What Motivates the Occupy Movement | Occupy Wall Street. October 23, 2011 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email.
What are the Occupy Wall Street protesters angry about? Now is not the time for wonky policy solutions, as the media meatheads are calling for. 1. (click for larger version) The productivity/wage chart says it all. 2. (click for larger version) Actually the top tenth of one percent. 3. (click for larger version) As women entered the workforce, family income made up for some of the wage stagnation. 4. (click for larger version) To add financial insult to injury, the richest of the rich pay less and less each year as a percentage of their monstrous incomes. 5.
(click for larger version) When the rich become astronomically rich, they gamble with their excess money. 6. (click for larger version) We bailed out the big Wall Street banks and protected the billionaires from ruin. CEPR. Real Economy Project. The people's shareholders This spring, in coordinated actions across the country, retirees who lost their pensions, families whose homes are underwater, students with impossible debt, the unemployed and underemployed, family farmers, immigrants, vets and more will be knocking on the doors of corporate boardrooms, holding CEOs of major American firms responsible for crashing the economy then turning their backs on their fellow Americans.
With hundreds of shareholders on the inside and thousands of folks on the outside, the largest shareholder demonstrations in U.S. history are underway and spreading across the land. Their goal is nothing short of transformational: to wrest control of our democracy back from the robber barons and CEOs that systematically block any effort to create an economy and a body politic that serves the needs of the vast majority of Americans and not the elite few.