John Galt, Ayn Rand, mega-corporations, mega-government

John Galt, Ayn Rand, mega-corporations, mega-government

By Jon Rappoport

“Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it’s yours.” (John Galt, Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand)

Ayn Rand, the most hated and adored novelist of the 20th century.

Her 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged, proposes a radical effort by inventor John Galt, and his assembled creative colleagues, to withdraw from society and take their inventions with them.

Civilization is already crumbling, owing to the federal government and its cronies installing a socialism based on top-down domination and the theft of material and intellectual private property.

Galt decides that a head-on struggle with the government would be futile. Instead, he wants to apply the coup de grace: remove the authentic creators from the scene and let the system implode.

Here are key Galt quotes from the novel:

“You propose to establish a social order based on the following tenets: that you’re incompetent to run your own life, but competent to run the lives of others—that you’re unfit to exist in freedom, but fit to become an omnipotent ruler…”

“Why is it immoral to produce a value and keep it, but moral to give it away?”

“The doctrine that ‘human rights’ are superior to ‘property rights’ simply means that some human beings have the right to make property out of others…”

“You called it selfish and cruel that men should trade value for value—you have now established an unselfish society where they trade extortion for extortion. Your system is a legal civil war, where men gang up on one another and struggle for possession of the law, which they use as a club over rivals, till another gang wrests it from their clutch and clubs them with it in their turn, all of them clamoring protestations of service to an unnamed public’s unspecified good…”

Galt is the inventor of a revolutionary engine that can provide energy to the whole planet. He created the engine. He owns it. The government, on the verge of an economic collapse, wants to take Galt’s engine from him and use it for “the greater good.”

Galt refuses.

The engine is his. He knows, of course, that the government could do unpredictable things with that engine—they could, in fact, put it in a vault and bury it.

On the other hand, he could maintain control over his invention and sell the abundant energy—not with the objective of becoming a king or an oligarch—at a price he sets. And eventually, the world would be swimming in energy.

Agents of the government (who resemble CIA types) kidnap him and prepare to torture him, MKULTRA style, to get their hands on his engine—but at the last minute his friends rescue him, and they vanish to Galt Gulch, a hidden valley, where they wait for the government to cave in, collapse, thereby ushering in, by necessity, a truly free market.

Rand focuses on the creative individual and his private property, his own inventions.

This is one reason why leaders of collectivism and their addled followers hate her and her work. They scream that every good thing in this world must be given away, which means that every good thing will be taken over by men who hate life and freedom and the individual, while pretending to be messianic altruists.

Among the addled followers of collectivism are people who believe they themselves are unable to earn a living, and therefore insist that “everything should be free.”

For decades now, an operation has been underway to convince more and more people (especially the young) to see themselves as dependent. As if that status were righteous, as if that status were a badge of honor.

This is an intense rejection of the free and independent individual.

“You didn’t build that” and “we’re all in this together” and other such inanities are sparks shot by weapons of degraded thought. They intend to encircle humanity in a wretched fume of pretended helplessness.

Indeed, there is no intention to raise up the individual. Instead, there is a goal of sinking to the lowest common denominator—as if at the bottom of a stagnant lake lies some magic clue to the resurrection of the human species.

There, at last, beyond desperation, is the “sharing and caring” everyone has been seeking. This is the core of a Church of Failure.

Because at the bottom, there is nothing but sludge. And in this case, the fishermen of souls are casting their nets for participants in a half-light dystopia of abject need.

Endless need, never to be satisfied—the ultimate spiritual drug.

In Atlas Shrugged, John Galt wins. Rand wrote about the ultimate victory of the individual, and that is why she is a silver bullet aimed at vampires.

She is called an extreme fantasist, because now we know that society is composed of groups, and each group has special needs and demands, and government exists to satisfy them. Now we know that the individual is a delusional construction, an outmoded prop in a drama that was played out a long time ago. The bright new world is collective.

Yes, isn’t it pleasant?

The present-day oligarchs are actually messiahs, and they head up huge organizations. They no longer wander in the desert. They own castles. They collude with each other to manufacture rainbows for the masses.

Behind their masks, they plot greater and greater control of the population. They even finance and stage protests against…whom? Against any power that isn’t their own. Against any power that isn’t the machine of government. Because the government, you see, is the bringer of help for all who are suffering.

How does that work?

It doesn’t.

It promotes the most profound dependence ever seen on the face of the planet.

Control through “satisfying needs.”

And it’s “free.”

In your dreams.

This “free” is where the individual goes to surrender.

And because she saw that and so much more, and because she wrote about it in incendiary novels, she was hated. Ayn Rand, 1905-1982. Atlas Shrugged; The Fountainhead.

And now, as a backgrounder, I want to describe a point that Rand didn’t make with any force—a prime reason for the collapse of the free market she championed.

Government power and corporate power—the false dichotomy

For decades, people on the Left and Right have been arguing about where the real power is.

Corporations? Government?

Some of these people even cite President’s Eisenhower’s famous warning about the excesses of the “military-industrial complex.” Well, let’s see. “Industrial” means corporations. “Military” means government, since the last time I looked the Pentagon was part of the Executive Branch. So Eisenhower was talking about an ongoing partnership between the public and private sectors.

The federal government isn’t the helpless victim of corporations. And corporations aren’t wilting under the dominating government. They’re in it together.

When people on the Left promote their programs for “a better world,” they invoke a convenient case of amnesia about central government and its chronic collusion with mega-corporations. It is the government, these Lefties believe, that will carry us forward into a more equitable future. Really? The same government that has been willingly carving up the country with corporations at its side?

The same government which, for decades, has been signing Globalist treaties and looking the other way, as millions of jobs have gone overseas? That is the kinder, gentler force that wants only good things for the American people? Perhaps that means good things for expanding Welfare recipients—but not for Americans who are looking for work and want to work.

Here is just one example of collusion, which occurred under a president many people believed finally understood the “helper” and “better world” role of government. Barack Obama.

Who makes the huge number of drones and bombs and planes and supplies them to the military (government)? Defense contractors, otherwise known as corporations. It’s a comfortable marriage.

Buckle up.

The leftist Guardian (1/9/17): “In 2016 [under Obama], US special [military] operators could be found in 70% of the world’s nations, 138 countries – a staggering jump of 130% since the days of the Bush administration.”

“…in 2016 alone, the Obama administration dropped at least 26,171 bombs. This means that every day last year, the US military blasted combatants or civilians overseas with 72 bombs; that’s three bombs every hour, 24 hours a day.”

“As drone-warrior-in-chief, he [Obama] spread the use of drones outside the declared battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, mainly to Pakistan and Yemen. Obama authorized over 10 times more drone strikes than George W Bush, and automatically painted all males of military age in these regions as combatants, making them fair game for remote controlled killing.”

Obama. The champ of bombing.

But of course he was the prophet of a better world, a coming glorious revolution in which the downtrodden would be given their due, and past crimes and offenses would be healed.

Sure.

And if Trump had lost and Hillary had ascended to the Oval Office, we would be closer to that “good revolution.” Hillary, who along with Obama, destroyed the nation of Libya and turned it into a hellhole of chaos. The weapons of that mass killing were manufactured by corporations. Vast profits ensued.

Let’s look at one more example of government-corporate collusion, under that same president who best personified “a prophet for a better world and a new age.”

“Let folks know when their food is genetically modified, because Americans have a right to know what they’re buying.” (Barack Obama, 2007, on the campaign trail)

Really?

In the last eight years, the global outcry against toxic Monsanto and the other biotech giants has accelerated—but not a significant peep emerged from the Obama White House.

And then Obama signed the bill dubbed The Dark Act. It made GMO labels on food an exclusively federal matter—and those labels will be confusing, weak, and therefore meaningless for the majority of Americans. The Dark Act is basically a free pass for the Monsanto Corporation and the other biotech giants.

After his victory in the 2008 election, Obama filled key posts with Monsanto people, in federal agencies that wield tremendous force in GMO food/pesticide issues—the USDA and the FDA:

At the USDA, as the director of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Roger Beachy, former director of the Monsanto Danforth Center.

As deputy commissioner of the FDA, the new food-safety-issues czar, the infamous Michael Taylor, former vice-president for public policy for Monsanto. Taylor had been instrumental in getting approval for Monsanto’s genetically engineered bovine growth hormone.

As commissioner of the USDA, Iowa governor, Tom Vilsack. Vilsack had set up a national group, the Governors’ Biotechnology Partnership, and had been given a Governor of the Year Award by the Biotechnology Industry Organization, whose members include Monsanto.

As the Agriculture Trade Representative, who would push GMOs for export, Islam Siddiqui, a former Monsanto lobbyist.

As the counsel for the USDA, Ramona Romero, who had been corporate counsel for another biotech giant, DuPont.

As the head of the USAID, Rajiv Shah, who had previously worked in key positions for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a major funder of GMO agriculture.

We should also remember that Obama’s Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, once worked for the Rose law firm. That firm was counsel to Monsanto.

Obama nominated Elena Kagan to the US Supreme Court. Kagan, as federal solicitor general, had previously argued for Monsanto in the Monsanto v. Geertson seed case before the Supreme Court.

The deck was stacked. Obama hadn’t simply made honest mistakes. Obama hadn’t just failed to exercise proper oversight in selecting appointees. He was staking out territory on behalf of Monsanto and other GMO corporate giants.

And now let us look at what key Obama appointees have wrought for their true partners. Let’s see what GMO crops walked through the open door of the Obama presidency.

Monsanto GMO alfalfa.

Monsanto GMO sugar beets.

Monsanto GMO Bt soybean.

Syngenta GMO corn for ethanol.

Syngenta GMO stacked corn.

Pioneer GMO soybean.

Syngenta GMO Bt cotton.

Bayer GMO cotton.

ATryn, an anti-clotting agent from the milk of transgenic goats.

A GMO papaya strain.

Genetically engineered salmon.

This is an extraordinary parade.

Obama was, all along, a stealth operative working with Monsanto, biotech, GMOs, for corporate control of the future of agriculture.

He didn’t make that many key political appointments and allow that many new GMO crops to enter the food chain through a lack of oversight.

Nor is it coincidental that two of the Obama’s biggest supporters, Bill Gates and George Soros, purchased 900,000 and 500,000 shares of Monsanto, respectively, in 2010.

Obama had been a covert Monsanto partner since the beginning.

Imposter. Charlatan. These words fit Obama. He doesn’t care that GMO food, with their rivers of toxic pesticides, are taking over the country and the world. He obviously wants it to happen.

Government-corporate collusion and partnership. Not one. Not the other. Both. Together.

The dichotomy of government vs. mega-corporation is false.

Free market?

In your dreams.

Jon Rappoport has worked as a free-lance investigative reporter for over 30 years. http://nomorefakenews.com/