This idea was both hatched by the big rats in power calling out the little low and uninformed rats to turn on their neighbors and fellow Americans for a few pieces of silver. Is any of this sounding familiar? Whether it is Judas Iscariot betraying Jesus and turning him over to the Romans, informants turning on their neighbors and turning in Jews to the Nazis or the low informed and Kool-Aid drinkers in New York (in America… who would ever have believed it?) turning in their neighbors for $500, it all adds up to the same in the end… tragedy!!
The JPFO (Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership) said:
The State of New York has resorted to a "turn in your neighbor" program, for enforcement. Knowing that people will not willingly comply, the state has resorted to a tried and true tactic of turning the citizens upon each other to aggrandize the power of the state. Does this strike a responsive historical cord, in anyone???
The Daily Caller: For more than a year, New York state has maintained a tip line allowing people to report illegal gun owners and collect a $500 reward.
CBS-6 news reported the existence of the tip line on Wednesday. It was previously a “well-kept secret” that received little promotion from state officials or fanfare in the media, according to the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association.
A February 2012 press release from Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s office first publicly announced the tip line, saying it was designed to “encourage citizens to report illegal firearm possession.”
The press release explained that reward amounts would be based on the usefulness of the information tipsters provide, but did not spell out explicit reward tiers.
Information leading to an arrest can earn callers up to $500, according to an operator who answered the line when The Daily Caller called. The number is 1-855-GUNSNYS.
Earlier this week, authorities discussed “reviving” the tip line by generating publicity for it, according to John Grebert, executive director of the New York State Association of Chiefs of Police.
“In our most recent meeting on Monday afternoon we talked about reviving this tip line and informing our members about it by sending out a message and scheduling a conference call to discuss it,” he wrote in a statement. “The Association partners with the State on a regular basis to provide local law enforcement with additional resources to help them in their efforts to reduce gun-related and violent crimes in their jurisdictions.”
On the Facebook page for The Record’s story, several users criticized the tip line for apparently encouraging New Yorkers to spy on each other.
But a spokesperson for the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services defended the program.
“This program has been in place for more than a year and is aimed only at getting illegal crime guns off the streets: a goal that every New Yorker can agree with,” wrote Janine Kava, director of public information at NYS DCJS.
Authorities did not respond to questions about how much reward money had been paid out through the program.
This is how it begins… For anyone, especially Jews, who lived through the Nazi Era, this should frighten you!!
“This initiative seeks to turn neighbor against neighbor and use their own tax dollars to pay for the $500 reward,” Republican Assemblyman Steve McLaughlin told the station.
This article and video is an excellent description of what they've been doing; it lays it out really clearly!
Agenda 21 explained very well. Including implications it will have on humanity. Opinions within the video come in some cases from those that were in on the negotiations. Truly an interesting watch.
The Four Part Process Leading to Sustainable Development
So how is this wrenching transformation being put into place? There are four very specific routes being used. In the rural areas it’s called the Wildlands Project. In the cities it’s called smart growth. In business it’s called Public/Private Partnerships. And in government it’s called stakeholder councils and non-elected boards and regional government.
The Wildlands Project was the brainchild of Earth First’s Dave Foreman and it literally calls for the “re-wilding” of 50% of all the land in every state – back to the way it was before Christopher Columbus set foot on this land. It is a diabolical plan to herd humans off the rural lands and into human settlements. Crazy you say! Yes. Impossible? Not so fast. From the demented mind of Foreman, the plan became the blueprint for the UN’s Biodiversity Treaty. So now the scheme is international in scope. But how do you remove people from the land? One step at a time. Let’s begin with a biosphere reserve. A national park will do. A huge place where there is no human activity. How about Yellowstone National Park? Then you establish a buffer zone around the reserve. Inside the buffer only limited human activity is allowed. Slowly, you squeeze until you squash that human activity. Once accomplished, you extend the area of the biosphere to the limits of the former buffer area – and then you create a new buffer zone around the now larger biosphere and start the process over again. In that way, the Biosphere Reserve acts like a cancer cell, ever expanding, until all human activity is stopped. And there are many tools in place to stop human activity and grow the reserve. Push back livestock’s access to riverbanks on ranches; 300 feet ought to do it.
When the cattle can’t reach the stream, the rancher can’t water them — he goes out of business. Lock away natural resources by creating national parks. It shuts down the mines — and they go out of business. Invent a Spotted Owl shortage and pretend it can’t live in a forest where timber is cut. Shut off the forest. Then, when no trees are cut, there’s nothing to feed the mills and then there are no jobs, and — they go out of business. Locking away land cuts the tax base. Eventually the town dies. Keep it up and there is nothing to keep the people on the land – so they head to the cities. The wilderness grows – just like Dave Foreman planned.
It comes in many names and many programs. Heritage areas, land management, wolf and bear reintroduction, rails to trails, conservation easements, open space, and many more. Each of these programs is designed to make it just a little harder to live on the land – a little more expensive – a little more hopeless. Now tell me how they can deny that the process is herding people into human habitat areas?
In the West, where vast areas of open space make it easy to impose such policies there are several programs underway to remove humans from the land. Today, there are at least 31 Wildlands projects underway, locking away more than 40 percent of the nation’s land. The Alaska Wildlands Project seeks to lock away and control almost the entire state. In Washington State, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, parts of North and South Dakota, parts of California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Wyoming, Texas, Utah, and more there are at least 22
Wildlands Projects underway. For example, one project called Yukon to Yellowstone (Y2Y) – creates a 2000 mile no-man’s land corridor from the Arctic to Yellowstone. East of the Mississippi, there are at least nine Wildlands projects, covering Maine, Pennsylvania, New York, West Virginia, Ohio,Virginia, Tennessee, North and South Carolina, Georgia and Florida. Watch for names of Wildlands Projects like Chesapeake Bay Watershed, Appalachian Restoration Project and Piedmont Wildlands Project.
The second path is called Smart Growth. After they herd you into the city, they have more plans for you in regimented and dense urban communities. They put a line around the city and tell you no growth can take place outside that line. Urban sprawl, they say disdainfully. They refuse to build more roads as a ploy to get you out of your car into public transportation, restricting mobility.
Because there is a restriction on space inside the controlled city limits there is a shortage of houses, so prices go up. That means populations will have to be controlled, because now there is a shortage of land.
Cities are now passing “green” regulations, forcing homeowners to meet strict guidelines for making their homes environmentally compliant, using specific building materials, forcing roof replacements, demanding replacement of appliances, and more. In Oakland, California, such restrictions with compliance demanded in just a matter of a few years will cost each homeowner an estimated $36,000. The Cap-N-Trade bill contains a whole section on such restrictions for the nation.
Third, inside the human habitat areas, government is controlled by an elite ruling class called stake holder councils.
These are mostly nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, who, like thieves in the night, just show up to stake their claim to enforce their own private agendas. The function of legitimate government within the system will be simply to enforce the dictates of the councils.
The councils are unelected, but all powerful. They are controlled by a small minority in the community, but they are all powerful. They will make you ask permission (usually denied) for anything necessary to live in the community. They destroy business. They dictate the number of outlets a business may have in a community, no matter what the population demands. For example, in San Francisco there can only be seven McDonalds. Period.
They can dictate the kind of building materials you can use in your home – or whether you can build on your property at all. Then, if they do grant a permit for building, they might not decide to let you acquire water and electricity for your new home – and they may or may not give you a reason for being turned down.
They can dictate that you get the proper exercise – as determined by the government. Again, San Francisco is building a new federal building – the greenest ever built. The elevators will only stop on every third floor so riders are forced to use stairs – for their own health, of course.
These councils fit almost perfectly the definition of a State Soviet; a system of councils that report to an apex council and then implement a predetermined outcome. Soviets are the operating mechanism of a government-controlled economy.
The fourth path is Public/Private Partnerships. Today, many freedom organizations are presenting PPPs as free enterprise and a private answer for keeping taxes down by using business to make a better society. In truth, many PPPs are nothing more than government-sanctioned monopolies in which a few businesses are granted special favors like tax breaks, the power of eminent domain, non-compete clauses and specific guarantees for return on their investments.
That means they can charge what they want and they can use the power of government to put competition out of business. That is not free enterprise.
And it is these global corporations that are pushing the green agenda.
For example, using government to ban its own product, General Electric is forcing the mercury-laden green light bulb on you, costing 5 times the price of incandescent bulbs. Such is the reality of green industry. PPPs are building the Trans Texas Corridor, using eminent domain to take more than 580,000 acres of private land – sanctioned by the partnership with the Texas government. And PPPs are taking over highways and local water treatment plants in communities across the nation. PPPs controlling the water can control water consumption – a major part of the Sustainable Development blueprint.
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is the root of the “Free Trade” process and the fuel for PPPs between international corporations and government, thereby creating an “elite” class of “connected” businesses – or what Ayn Rand called “the power of pull.” Success in the PPP world is not based on quality of product and service, but on who you know in high places. To play ball in the PPP game means accepting the mantra of Sustainable Development and helping to implement it, even if it means going against your own product. That’s why Home Depot uses its commercials to oppose cutting down trees and British Petroleum advocates reducing the use of oil. It is not free enterprise, but a Mussolini-type fascism that will only lead to tyranny. And it’s all driven by the Agenda 21 blueprint of Sustainable Development.
Ineptocracy (in-ep-toc’-ra-cy) - a system of government where the least capable to lead are elected by the least capable of producing, and where the members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed are rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a diminishing number of producers.
If you haven't yet read this letter, due to the recommendation of Rush Limbaugh yesterday, you really need to. This lady, Ann Barnhardt, tells it like it is.
She speaks without fear, holding to the truth, in a manner that would shock most in the business world. Needless to say, she's a Bible-believing Christian. She simply doesn't care about the consequences of telling the truth, and letting the chips fall where they may. This lady rocks!
Here's the story, from The Blaze:
Posted on November 18, 2011 at 8:45am by Jonathon M. Seidl Ann Barnhardt describes herself as a an “an old-school commercial hedge broker specializing in CATTLE and GRAIN.” And she just shut down her business by delivering a passionate and chilling open letter posted on her website. “I could no longer tell my clients that their monies and positions were safe in the futures and options markets – because they are not,” she writes. And then she unloads:
Everything changed just a few short weeks ago. A firm, led by a crony of the Obama regime, stole all of the non-margined cash held by customers of his firm. Let’s not sugar-coat this or make this crime seem “complex” and “abstract” by drowning ourselves in six-dollar words and uber-technical jargon. Jon Corzine STOLE the customer cash at MF Global. Knowing Jon Corzine, and knowing the abject lawlessness and contempt for humanity of the Marxist Obama regime and its cronies, this is not really a surprise. What was a surprise was the reaction of the exchanges and regulators. Their reaction has been to take a bad situation and make it orders of magnitude worse. Specifically, they froze customers out of their accounts WHILE THE MARKETS CONTINUED TO TRADE, refusing to even allow them to liquidate. This is unfathomable. The risk exposure precedent that has been set is completely intolerable and has destroyed the entire industry paradigm. No informed person can continue to engage these markets, and no moral person can continue to broker or facilitate customer engagement in what is now a massive game of Russian Roulette. [Emphasis added]
The letter caught the attention of Rush Limbaugh on Thursday.
“The letter from the hedge fund guy sounds particularly filled with vitriol, but he’s right about something,” Limbaugh said after reading an excerpt. “Corzine was that firm, and the customers’ money is gone, and it’s like $600 million of it, and it’s gone, and they’re trying to get it back, it’s a miniature Madoff in that sense. And somebody did steal that money. Somebody at that firm, which is now bankrupt and 1,100 people or thereabouts have been laid off, somebody stole the clients’ money. It is a big deal to a lot of people.” We’ve included the entire letter (originally presented in two parts) below (courtesy of Zero Hedge):
BCM Has Ceased Operations (source) Posted by Ann Barnhardt – November 17, AD 2011 10:27 AM MST
Dear Clients, Industry Colleagues and Friends of Barnhardt Capital Management,
It is with regret and unflinching moral certainty that I announce that Barnhardt Capital Management has ceased operations. After six years of operating as an independent introducing brokerage, and eight years of employment as a broker before that, I found myself, this morning, for the first time since I was 20 years old, watching the futures and options markets open not as a participant, but as a mere spectator.
The reason for my decision to pull the plug was excruciatingly simple: I could no longer tell my clients that their monies and positions were safe in the futures and options markets – because they are not. And this goes not just for my clients, but for every futures and options account in the United States. The entire system has been utterly destroyed by the MF Global collapse. Given this sad reality, I could not in good conscience take one more step as a commodity broker, soliciting trades that I knew were unsafe or holding funds that I knew to be in jeopardy.
The futures markets are very highly-leveraged and thus require an exceptionally firm base upon which to function. That base was the sacrosanct segregation of customer funds from clearing firm capital, with additional emergency financial backing provided by the exchanges themselves. Up until a few weeks ago, that base existed, and had worked flawlessly. Firms came and went, with some imploding in spectacular fashion. Whenever a firm failure happened, the customer funds were intact and the exchanges would step in to backstop everything and keep customers 100% liquid – even as their clearing firm collapsed and was quickly replaced by another firm within the system.
Everything changed just a few short weeks ago. A firm, led by a crony of the Obama regime, stole all of the non-margined cash held by customers of his firm. Let’s not sugar-coat this or make this crime seem “complex” and “abstract” by drowning ourselves in six-dollar words and uber-technical jargon. Jon Corzine STOLE the customer cash at MF Global. Knowing Jon Corzine, and knowing the abject lawlessness and contempt for humanity of the Marxist Obama regime and its cronies, this is not really a surprise. What was a surprise was the reaction of the exchanges and regulators. Their reaction has been to take a bad situation and make it orders of magnitude worse. Specifically, they froze customers out of their accounts WHILE THE MARKETS CONTINUED TO TRADE, refusing to even allow them to liquidate. This is unfathomable. The risk exposure precedent that has been set is completely intolerable and has destroyed the entire industry paradigm. No informed person can continue to engage these markets, and no moral person can continue to broker or facilitate customer engagement in what is now a massive game of Russian Roulette.
I have learned over the last week that MF Global is almost certainly the mere tip of the iceberg. There is massive industry-wide exposure to European sovereign junk debt. While other firms may not be as heavily leveraged as Corzine had MFG leveraged, and it is now thought that MFG’s leverage may have been in excess of 100:1, they are still suicidally leveraged and will likely stand massive, unmeetable collateral calls in the coming days and weeks as Europe inevitably collapses. I now suspect that the reason the Chicago Mercantile Exchange did not immediately step in to backstop the MFG implosion was because they knew and know that if they backstopped MFG, they would then be expected to backstop all of the other firms in the system when the failures began to cascade – and there simply isn’t that much money in the entire system. In short, the problem is a SYSTEMIC problem, not merely isolated to one firm.
Perhaps the most ominous dynamic that I have yet heard of in regards to this mess is that of the risk of potential CLAWBACK actions. For those who do not know, “clawback” is the process by which a bankruptcy trustee is legally permitted to re-seize assets that left a bankrupt entity in the time period immediately preceding the entity’s collapse. So, using the MF Global customers as an example, any funds that were withdrawn from MFG accounts in the run-up to the collapse, either because of suspicions the customer may have had about MFG from, say, watching the company’s bond yields rise sharply, or from purely organic day-to-day withdrawls, the bankruptcy trustee COULD initiate action to “clawback” those funds. As a hedge broker, this makes my blood run cold. Generally, as the markets move in favor of a hedge position and equity builds in a client’s account, that excess equity is sent back to the customer who then uses that equity to offset cash market transactions OR to pay down a revolving line of credit. Even the possibility that a customer could be penalized and additionally raped AGAIN via a clawback action after already having their customer funds stolen is simply villainous. While there has been no open indication of clawback actions being initiated by the MF Global trustee, I have been told that it is a possibility.
And so, to the very unpleasant crux of the matter. The futures and options markets are no longer viable. It is my recommendation that ALL customers withdraw from all of the markets as soon as possible so that they have the best chance of protecting themselves and their equity. The system is no longer functioning with integrity and is suicidally risk-laden. The rule of law is non-existent, instead replaced with godless, criminal political cronyism.
Remember, derivatives contracts are NOT NECESSARY in the commodities markets. The cash commodity itself is the underlying reality and is not dependent on the futures or options markets. Many people seem to have gotten that backwards over the past decades. From Abel the animal husbandman up until the year 1964, there were no cattle futures contracts at all, and no options contracts until 1984, and yet the cash cattle markets got along just fine.
Finally, I will not, under any circumstance, consider reforming and re-opening Barnhardt Capital Management, or any other iteration of a brokerage business, until Barack Obama has been removed from office AND the government of the United States has been sufficiently reformed and repopulated so as to engender my total and complete confidence in the government, its adherence to and enforcement of the rule of law, and in its competent and just regulatory oversight of any commodities markets that may reform. So long as the government remains criminal, it would serve no purpose whatsoever to attempt to rebuild the futures industry or my firm, because in a lawless environment, the same thievery and fraud would simply happen again, and the criminals would go unpunished, sheltered by the criminal oligarchy.
To my clients, who literally TO THE MAN agreed with my assessment of the situation, and were relieved to be exiting the markets, and many whom I now suspect stayed in the markets as long as they did only out of personal loyalty to me, I can only say thank you for the honor and pleasure of serving you over these last years, with some of my clients having been with me for over twelve years. I will continue to blog at Barnhardt.biz, which will be subtly re-skinned soon, and will continue my cattle marketing consultation business. I will still be here in the office, answering my phones, with the same phone numbers. Alas, my retirement came a few years earlier than I had anticipated, but there was no possible way to continue given the inevitability of the collapse of the global financial markets, the overthrow of our government, and the resulting collapse in the rule of law.
As for me, I can only echo the words of David:
“This is the Lord’s doing; and it is wonderful in our eyes.” With Best Regards- Ann Barnhardt
“I am going to head out of town for a few days, but will be checking email and messages,” Barnhardt wrote, after describing her letter as “going Galt” — a reference to Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.” “Thanks to one and all for the kind support and prayers. Please be assured of mine in return, for all of us.” Read more about MF Global here and here. UPDATE: It turns out Barnhardt has a history of being quite outspoken. She regularly posts videos to a YouTube channel and has a history of making controversial statements about Islam. She’s also come under fire for her thoughts on the bin Laden raid.
Despite some of her baggage, though, she is grabbing headlines. Besides catching the attention of Zero Hedge and Limbaugh, her story was also featured in an article on Bloomberg Business Week’s website today.
Could it be that despite her past, her present story is still compelling? (H/T: Andrea Shea King) -------- And if you think that was bold, just watch her video clip where she dares to criticize Islam, in very candid terms (she's not happy about the pro-Islamic propaganda in the media, and she goes after Islam itself, for being a TOTALITARIAN POLITICAL SYSTEM, not a religion, and she goes after Mohammed's sexual perversions [CONTENT WARNING: Graphic Descriptions of Mohammed's Sexual Perversion]), so don't watch it if you're uncomfortable with harsh criticism, including criticism of sexual perversion.
While I don't agree with every word she says in the video (and elsewhere; I disagree with many, but not all, of her thoughts on the Bin Laden Raid in Pakistan, for example), she is largely correct. And it's definitely worth a watch, unless you're defensive of Islam, or you don't wish to watch criticism of sexual perversion, or you're a Muslim (In the last instance, you'll be quite upset), you'll definitely have your eyes opened if you haven't studied the Qu'ran. This is as politically incorrect as it gets. If you don't want to see hardcore (yet factual) criticism of Islam, DO NOT WATCH THIS. Ann pulls no punches. She simply speaks without fear, questioning with boldness (this is part 1 of 4, so if you liked it, go to her YouTube channel and watch the rest):
"Howard Roark laughed." So begins Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, the improbable bestseller that established Rand's fame and reputation as a novelist-philosopher.
Rejected by twelve publishers, The Fountainhead was finally accepted by Bobbs-Merrill when a young editor taken with the book threatened to quit if it were not. "If this is not the book for you," he wired the publisher's head office, "then I am not the editor for you." His confidence was justified: to date, The Fountainhead has sold some six million copies all told, and continues to sell over 100,000 copies each year. At the time of its publication, Lorine Pruette wrote in the New York Times that "it was the only novel of ideas written by an American woman that I can recall," with characters who are "amazingly literate, romanticized as larger-than-life representatives of good and evil." However, it was not critical adulation, but the incredible word of mouth that spread about the book that made it a bestseller.
From its memorable opening line, Rand's prose camera pans out to reveal Howard Roark, a young student of architecture, poised nude on a cliff's edge and preparing to dive into the lake below. The scene sets the tone for the book, and hints at the "sense of life" that animated Rand's fiction: Roark has just been expelled from architecture school for refusing to ape the styles of past masters in his designs. His response is not despair, but an indifference grounded in a supreme confidence in his own artistic vision. Explaining that vision to the school's dean several scenes later, Roark says:
Here are my rules: what can be done with one substance must never be done with another. No two materials are alike. No two sites on earth are alike. No two buildings have the same purpose. The purpose, the site, the materials determine the shape. Nothing can be reasonable or beautiful unless it's made by one central idea, and the idea sets ever detail. A building is alive, like a man. Its integrity is to follow its own truth, its one single theme, and to serve its own single purpose. A man doesn't borrow hunks of its soul. Its maker gives it the soul and every wall, window and stairway to express it.
Like Pruette, Rand saw her characters as ideal types, embodied principles. She always denied that her protagonists were modeled on any actual people, and in particular was adamant that Roark was not a fictionalized Frank Lloyd Wright. Still, it is hard not to hear in Roark's own theories of architecture echoes of Wright, especially his 1930–31 lectures at Princeton, which Rand had read. Wright had said of his own buildings: "Consistency from first to last will give you the result you seek and consistency alone." Even their biographies overlap: Roark's mentor Henry Cameron, a brilliant innovator whose star had faded, evokes Wright's own, Louis Sullivan.
Rand sought unsuccessfully to interview Wright as a source for The Fountainhead. (Instead, she gathered source material for the book by working without pay as a typist for New York architect Ely Jacques Kahn.) In her letter to Wright, Rand described her project as a "story of human integrity. That is what I am writing. That is what you have lived. And to my knowledge you are the only one among the men of this century who has lived it." She wanted to interview Wright, not for information, but for "the inspiration of seeing before me a living miracle." The two later became acquainted, and Wright even began designing a house for Rand, though it was never built.
The reference to "integrity" must be taken to refer not only to the internal coherence of Wright's architectural philosophy, but also his famous stubbornness with clients when it came to seeing his plans realized as he had intended. Roark's fidelity to his own vision makes it difficult for him to find work, despite his genius, and the conflicts this creates drive the book's plot.
Roark's own approach is thrown into relief by a parallel portrayal of the career of his classmate Peter Keating. A thorough mediocrity, Keating's sense of self is as derivative as his building designs. While Roark toils in obscurity, Keating rises through the ranks of the prestigious New York firm Francon & Heyer. But on major commissions, Keating's lack of inspiration forces him to seek help from Roark, who is the unacknowledged designer of Keating's most renowned buildings.
The contrast between the two is meant to illustrate what Rand would later call "the virtue of selfishness." A conventional story would have set up Roark's "selfless devotion to his art" against Keating's "grasping, selfish careerism." Rand reverses this expectation. Keating's pathology, Rand shows, is precisely the result of selflessness. Lacking a strong identity of his own, he seeks to construct one second-hand by absorbing the opinions of others. Lacking self-respect, he struggles to do whatever will please others and win him their adulation. Roark's apparent "sacrifice," on the other hand, is nothing of the sort. If he insists on his own methods and designs, it is because they arehis own. The true sacrifice, Rand makes clear, would be to compromise his artistic integrity for mere popular approval, or even material comfort.
That integrity makes it impossible for Roark to fit in with conventional architecture firms, and equally difficult to secure commissions when he opens his own office. Eventually, he leaves the city to work as a manual laborer at a granite quarry owned by Guy Francon of Francon & Heyer—which by now has become Francon & Keating. There, he meets Francon's fiercely independent daughter Dominique. Recognizing Roark as a kindred spirit, she begins to pursue him, and in what has become the book's most famous scene, they make violent, passionate love that, while consensual, seems on the surface like an act of rape. But Francon, unsure she is prepared for a serious romantic affair with Roark, pulls back. Soon, a businessman who admires the buildings Roark managed to have built finds him at the quarry and brings him back to New York to work on an apartment building. There, he finds growing success—and a new enemy.
While Keating is Roark's professional rival, he is not quite Roark's adversary: by turns contemptible and pathetic, Peter Keating is not up to the role of archenemy. That is left to journalist and architecture critic Ellsworth Toohey. Toohey is something of an aberration in Rand's fiction, in that he is perhaps her only really memorable villain.
In Rand's Objectivist philosophy, intelligence, rationality, and achievement are all associated with her own ethics, and therefore with her protagonists. Typically, these are opposed by bland, bromide-mouthing mobs who evoke nothing so much as Hannah Arendt's phrase "the banality of evil." Toohey is the exception: he is the one character in Rand's work who fully comprehends the difference between good and evil, between individualism and collectivism, and consciously chooses evil. Incapable of Roark's form of creative achievement, which he despises, Toohey has made his own goal power over the opinions of others. A clue to his motive is provided by his childhood reaction to the famous Biblical query: "What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" Toohey asks in response: "Then in order to be truly wealthy, a man should collect souls?" His adult life has been devoted to precisely that end, through the formation of a series of organizations across many different fields, including a collective of fashionable second-rate writers who promote each other's work ceaselessly.
Determined to crush Roark, Toohey manipulates a spiritually inclined pawn, Hopton Stoddard, to commission an ecumenical temple from the atheistic architect. Stoddard, on Toohey's advice, convinces Roark to take the job by telling him: "But you're a profoundly religious man, Mr. Roark—in your own way. I can see that in your buildings." Toohey has detected, not religious reverence in the ordinary sense, but the reverence for the best in the human spirit that permeates Roark's designs. Once the temple—a masterpiece, of course—is complete, Toohey denounces it as blasphemous, and pushes Stoddard to sue Roark for breach of contract. Roark's defense is merely to offer the jury photographs of the temple—but swayed by the testimony of an architectural expert (Toohey, of course) they vote against him, destroying his reputation.
The verdict comes as a blow to Dominique Francon, who more than ever despairs that individual achievement and integrity have little chance of surviving in the world as it is. She resolves to purge herself of the capacity to appreciate heroic achievement—and to destroy Roark, who is a constant reminder of the individualism society cannot tolerate. Attempting to drown herself in inanity, she marries Peter Keating, only to leave him for newspaper tycoon Gail Wynand, publisher of the Banner, where Toohey's column appears. Like Roark in many ways, Wynand differs from the architect in having decided that the only way to survive and flourish is to pander to the public, which he does on a daily basis in his widely read newspaper. Wynand, though, cannot help but respond with admiration to Roark's work... and to Roark himself when they meet. Through Wynand's influence, Roark once again begins to work.
Keating's fortunes, in the meantime, have soured. Lacking his own creative voice, he is at a loss when the architectural trends he has spent his career emulating cease to be fashionable. Desperate to salvage his career, he begs Roark to design one last building for him: a low-income housing project to be called Cortland Homes. Roark, knowing that the project is under Toohey's control, and that a plan under his own name would never be accepted, agrees, on the condition that his plan be built precisely as designed.
When Toohey has some frivolous ornamentation added at the last moment, spoiling the integrity of the building, Roark dynamites it, with help from Dominique. Wynand believes he can use his media empire to sway public opinion in Roark's favor as the trial approaches, but he discovers that power over others is ephemeral. Once he is no longer telling the people what they want to hear, his papers stop selling. In a bid to take over the Banner, Toohey engineers a strike. Finally, Wynand caves and reverses his editorial position on Roark. At the trial, however, Roark offers an eloquent defense of his right to destroy his creation, whose integrity had already been destroyed in violation of his agreement with Keating. He tells the jury:
Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. Animals obtain food by force. Man has no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength of muscle. He must plant his food or hunt it. To plant, he needs a process of thought. To hunt, he needs weapons, and to make weapons—a process of thought. From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute of man—the function of his reasoning mind. But the mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought. An agreement reached by a group of men is only a compromise or an average drawn upon many individual thoughts. It is a secondary consequence. The primary act—the process of reason—must be performed by each man alone. We can divide a meal among many men. We cannot digest it in a collective stomach. No man can use his brain to think for another. All the functions of body and spirit are private. They cannot be shared or transferred.
Roark is acquitted. Wynand, realizing at last the necessity of integrity, shuts down the Banner rather than allow Toohey to control it in the wake of the strike. Roark is commissioned to rebuild the Cortland Homes by a private businessman, and Wynand decides the time has come to build his Wynand Building, which will be the city's tallest skyscraper. The book closes with Roark standing triumphant atop his work in progress, alongside an admiring Dominique.
The book's surprising success led to the production of a 1949 movie version of The Fountainhead starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal, and directed by King Vidor. Warner Brothers had sought to have Wright himself design the film's sets, but that plan was scrapped when Wright demanded 10 percent of the film's gross profits on top of his $250,000 fee. The screenplay was, of course, penned by Ayn Rand. It is safe to assume that Warner Brothers didn't dare change the dialogue.
Are you ready to stand up and be counted? It's not who's going to let us open on the 15th... it's who's going to stop us.
Tonight, our friend, JOHN STOSSEL, is on Hannity at 9pm ET on Fox . . . and the topic . . . “New Movie Hated by Hollywood?!”
Are the liberal elite trying to stop you from seeing an American classic brought to life on the silver screen? John Stossel has “reel” insight on the new movie “Atlas Shrugged.”
Why is there a mad rush to pass legislation by a lame-duck Congress? While it appears that they are merely accelerating the pace to ensure that the programs they so vehemently believe in are securely engraved into legislation before their terms are up, in actual fact there is much more to the "rush to legislate." It is fear that drives them, but what exactly are they afraid of?
In two words: TEA PARTY. To a significant extent, the Tea Party is the political manifestation of Ayn Rand's (In the book Atlas Shrugged) all-out "labor" strike by the "Producers" against the "looters," i.e., the socialists. In Rand's book the strike basically turns off the spigot of support by industrialists and other producers, and initiates the collapse of the looters, since they cannot on their own produce anything, except, of course, looting.
While I understand this is a shallow and very basic reference to Ayn Rand's philosophical treatise, nevertheless, the Tea Party is about to carry out what amounts to turning off the spigot upon which today's looters depend for nourishment for their political aims.
The Democrat Socialists' worst nightmare is the cutting off of the funds collected from PRODUCERS in order to fund the socialist agenda and their wide range of programs that are geared to expand government and increase their power.
While the Democrat Socialists want to ensure that the bankrupting of the nation progresses, they wish to maintain the taxing and spending ability of their Socialist government entities in order to continue to govern and to continue their incessant quest to seize even more power.
An entire list of programs will be put into effect by Presidential Executive Decree, or Executive Orders, via existing regulations already on the books, in order to ensure that the balance of power remains in their favor, if any of their legislation happens to fail before the current Congress' term expires.
But essentially the next Congress will have the ability, albeit somewhat limited by the measured wins in the 2010 elections, to shut off the faucets upon which the Socialists so critically depend. Too often our well-meaning electorate overlooks or ignores that the government they so avidly complain about is to a very great extent, funded by them.
Granted, they are doing so at the point of a gun, through mandated taxes, but as the recent elections have shown, and as the even more recent defeat of the Omnibus Bill so aptly demonstrates, if the Producers/financiers of government, i.e., the Conservative electorate decides to flex its muscle and close its wallet, it can and will do so.
Already the Ayn Rand strike is creating a major upheaval in government. So much so that the old school Republicans are pretending to be "snookered" by a crafty, conniving President into compromising on key legislation. The deals are being brokered, and the Rino's are selling out, and there is the business-as-usual back-scratching and nod-and-wink attempts to co-opt and derail the Tea Party electoral mandates.
Be assured: There is no need to compromise with the looters of your hard earned money, which they have taken at gun-point, by force, under penalty of prison or worse, if you do not comply with handing over your treasure. Instead, the order of the day should continue to religiously and meticulously turn off the spigot, continue with tax cuts, initiate and expand incentives for production, and initiate the return of commerce, business, trade, entrepreneurship, with the commensurate dismantling of any Socialist vestiges that remain in government.
Moreover the continued fight to systematically eradicate the grasp on American culture by the Socialist parasites should be expanded, with resources created to advance their demise here in the U.S., as well as the demise of the foreign enablers that are so obviously in collusion with the traitors to our nation.
It is, at this point, very significantly this: If the Socialist looters do not have your money with which to oppress you, they are less likely to be able to obtain the means and the power to do so. And by the way, in case you did not realize it, you can make it illegal for them to borrow from the Fed, from China, or from anyone, and you would be very prudent to make it so.
(We can also get rid of the Income Tax. Those pushing the Progressive Agenda realize that time works against them but chaos and created deadlines backed by fear works for them!!)
Mix Video! Top 20 Pro-Socialism Sound Bites of Obama, Advisors & Allies
Ann Barnhardt 
describes herself
