Hedge Broker Goes Galt: Ann Barnhardt Shuts Down Firm With Chilling Letter

This is an absolute must-read.

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)
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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):

Video: Ann Barnhardt "Islamic Sexuality: A Survey of Evil" Part 1 of 4

Don’t know who Galt is?  If not you need to read: Atlas Shrugged or better yet get Ayn Rand’s Box Set including Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead

Also check out Schweizer’s and Abramhoff’s new books:  Throw Them All Out and Capitol Punishment

THE LARGEST DETENTION CAMP IN WORLD HISTORY IS ALMOST COMPLETE

THE LARGEST DETENTION CAMP IN WORLD HISTORY IS ALMOST COMPLETE  -  A Fascinating, creepy and scary perspective on the reasons for the new Passport Application etc… Definitely worth the read!!

By John Galt April 26, 2011

In the world of talk radio, the internet, and various other media outlets there have been legends of FEMA camps under construction throughout the United States, stories about U.N. troops training to round up United States citizens, and concoctions which make for fascinating fiction but little if any fact to support the various stories. In reality each of these stories unfortunately carry a kernel of truth within them, a factoid which stimulates the imagination but fails to capitalize on the big picture thus destroying the underlying credibility of the author. I loath the idea of a trip down Woo-Woo Lane but during a review of the news and a story forwarded to me by my friend in Ireland, a sudden and stark realization hit me as to how such a massive construct could be used by a government which has devious plans in place for its citizens in the future.

The logical place to begin with this project is to review the history of how the creation of the foundation occurred and the extreme ideals behind the construction of this camp. While  the conspiracy theorists and civil libertarians were all labeled insane nutcases when the Patriot Act was first proposed, their concerns have been substantially validated in the last nine years. The abuses of power via the Patriot Act which are documented throughout the internet and various legal websites are only the tip of the iceberg. The law itself was designed to massively increase powers beyond the scope of the Constitution which enable the government to selectively violate the rights of U.S. citizens at will. For the non-believers refer, for example, to Section 6001 and the various clauses allowing reviews and searches of personal financial records without obtaining a search warrant as outlined in the 4th Amendment. This foundation for the camp was a necessity because without the legal authority to bypass the judicial system, the implementation of other laws and regulations would not be possible.

Shortly after the Patriot Act became law, the Department of Homeland Security was created and in less than a decade it has become the largest non-Defense Department and Veterans Affair bureaucracy in the Federal Government (Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics 2008 Table 1). The department’s reach has become so massive and intrusive that the American people only notice the power they contain when they hear or witness the abuses via the Transportation Security Administration such as the video of the six year old girl recently being molested while attempting to board a flight with her parents. Often though, the American people miss the bigger picture that the tentacles of DHS have now stretched far beyond airport and border security, but into the realms of an apparent creation of a domestic paramilitary force to defend our nation against terrorism.

Over the years I too have been guilty of mocking the “black helicopter crowd” yet recent evidence has surfaced that perhaps I was in grave error and for that I apologize profusely. Until one sees the helicopters yourself, which I have seen flying over our beaches during V.I.P. visits to the area, or a video like this one, most individuals remain skeptical:

Video: Helicopters Over Brickell

That video from YouTube is validated by a story from the Miami Herald on April 20, 2011 titled ‘Military Choppers Startle Miami‘, where an exercise was executed until around one to two o’clock in the morning. In the story a revelation was disclosed by this statement from the newspaper article:

Turns out that it was a training exercise by the Southeast Regional Domestic Security Task Force. In other words, a Homeland Security operation, that few other authorities apparently knew about, including the U.S. Coast Guard.

The Department of Homeland Security has its own paramilitary security task force which uses night vision, black Blackhawk helicopters, and the ability to conduct military style exercises which apparently our own military a.k.a. the U.S. Coast Guard is not even aware of? The exercise appears to have been practice for dropping troops on high rise office buildings and extraction which is quite practical since the last terrorist attack where they occupied a high rise occurred in 1994 as documented in the movie True Lies; a work of fiction. This disturbing story did not escape my attention as one can not build a detention facility without the proper training of a guard force to contain and restrain the inmates.

I SPY ON YOU

Rewind to the numerous stories of our modern surveillance society in these pages and elsewhere. Way, way, way, back in 2007 USA Today noted this happy-happy joy-joy story that “Cameras Help Cities Reduce Crime” which in fact may be quite accurate. The problem is you have to begin to consider other aspects of our spy happy society starting with the working relationship of the world’s largest search engine with the National Security Agency (NSA). If one is shocked that I can tie Google snooping back into this story, allow me to take a second and review some of the stories on this subject over the recent past:

Welcome to 1984-Google “Mistakenly” Collected Data from Wi-Fi Networks of Individual Citizens

Google’s Wi-Fi Spying: What Were They Thinking? – PCWorld

Google Says It Mistakenly Collected Data on Web Usage – WSJ.com

Google spied on British emails and computer passwords – Telegraph

Google‘s spy case: Not the first, nor the last | InSecurity-CNet

That’s just a sampling of the news on the subject as there are literally hundreds of stories about this, yet shockingly no outrage from the masses. Why? The trade off of technological convenience for personal privacy was willingly offered up for the massive leaps forward on the internet and personal devices be they a car via On-Star or a smart phone. Thus the government naturally exploited this weakness and aligned themselves with the major telecommunications corporations, hardware manufacturers, software developers, and internet leaders to develop a web of information flow where information they desire can be extracted at the stroke of a key. The ability to instantaneously access an American citizen’s location, financial transactions completed seconds ago, emails, text conversations, audio conversations via cell or land line, and restrict their ability to travel via airline at will should have not just civil libertarians but average Americans outraged. These tools and the surveillance ability are necessary for “our safety” according to the government but they are also required when building a detention facility; think about it.

Instead or calls for action all we continue to hear is muted grumbling, willful submission, and crickets chirping.

DS-5513 THE ULTIMATE BUREAUCRATIC TRAP DOOR

Fast forward to the news of the last twenty-four hours from the U.S. Department of State and the brewing passport scandal. The documentation appears to be innocent enough right as we can not have terrorists and non-citizens obtaining passports to leave the U.S. right?  Thus the controversy over the new DS-5513 that I highlighted on my radio program last night. The first question that came to mind is why would there need to be a requirement for an alternative form for a passport when you see the standard application requirements (from the U.S. Department of State Application for a Passport Form DS-11):

I’ve highlighted the requirements from the current form which is in existence now and it seems quite logical that for a United States citizen, naturalized or born here, this form is a no-brainer with sufficient security requirements that would assure documentation for issuance of a passport. In fact the current application has the necessary checks and balances once the information is received in Washington, D.C. for the government to refer the data to DHS for further investigation and validation should the State Department deem the identification and other requirements suspect or too vague for processing.

Now review the supporting documentation for DS-5513 the proposed Biographical Questionnaire for a U.S. Passport starting with page one from the Office of Management and Budget:

Based on the controversy surrounding Obama’s birth certificate, anyone can have their own documentation questioned but there is a deeper problem when one analyzes the impetus behind the document above; the portion at the bottom which allows an innocent mistake such as forgetting an address of an employer or where your mother resided decades ago (if one is an old guy like me) or failing to list an employer could be considered perjury or worse based on the proposed program. The second page of the document above does nothing to reassure one that this will end well for new or renewal applicants for a passport based on the State Department’s justification:

I hate to break this to the government but I do not remember the name of the preacher who Baptized me, which church, or where it was located. This is a defined trap door where the American citizen can easily provide a false or erroneous statement, either deliberately or by accident, that opens the door to prosecution. Before anyone says that this is a reach, refer to the section above on the Patriot Act and the current administrations nefarious Regulatory Czar one Cass Sunstein. The application itself displays the land mines for the individual to step on and perjure themselves as one can see for themselves:

This form is filled with booby traps for the average person and as one can see, please try to ask your mother if you are in the fifty plus age span (provided she is still alive of course) if she remembers the appointments for post-natal care over a half century ago. Needless to say it only gets worse on the next page:

To be quite honest, I do not recall all twenty-five plus locations so I guess I can not get a passport when it is time to renew. Then again how many of my readers remember the address and name of their last supervisor for every job they have held in their lives:

Thankfully this form is voluntary just like your income tax returns so there are no penalties if you make a mistake, right? Uh, wrong if one wishes to travel or leave the country:

Guess it’s better to not chance it so everyone had best plan to stay put during the coming storm. In reality though, this has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with a universal identification card, controlling terrorism, insuring illegals do not obtain de facto citizenship by obtaining a passport, nor controlling the movement of the average American citizen from casual travel to and from Mexico, Canada, or via cruises, etc. This is much larger than that and it requires a trip to March 18, 2010.

THE HIRING INCENTIVES TO RESTORE EMPLOYMENT ACT OF MARCH 18, 2010

On March 18, 2010 President Barrack Obama signed the HIRE Act, a bungled effort stuffed with pork designed to help stem the perpetually bad employment news hitting the administration on an almost weekly basis. Buried deep within this act however was the gem of gems for those wishing to close the doors for Americans with wealth or talent from emigrating to another country which I highlighted as did Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge:

IF YOU CAN LEAVE THE UNITED STATES, I WOULD SUGGEST YOU GET OUT NOW

Within this act was a direct legislative action that instituted capital controls on American citizens:

Aw gee, that only impacts the really wealthy people and besides most people don’t have $50,000 to open an account overseas. That has been the standard reply that “this does not apply to me” yet think about the impact if one decides to retire in Ecuador, Costa Rica, or Canada. The key aspect of this particular act which the Republicons failed to read was this clause designed on the surface to catch tax cheats but in reality was designed to force repatriation of funds from overseas accounts back into the United States where the Patriot Act and I.R.S. have free reign to monitor those accounts and their activity without that pesky 4th Amendment thing to interfere with their “investigations.” The reality is much further from the truth as projected by the political parties and current administration.

The HIRE Act basically imposes capital controls on all American citizens of wealth. This same tactic has been initiated throughout history in other authoritarian regimes which force a large expatriation of wealthy citizens to renounce their citizenship and pay the required exit taxes or to repatriate funds home and endure the restrictions on their freedom. But knowing the Obamites as many of us do, there is a far more evil and devious plan behind the implementation of Section 1471. Note the huge rush and timing of the enacting of the HIRE Act; one week before the Obamacare bill was rammed through the House and Senate. What key portion of the health care legislation had to be passed to insure that the Obama socialized medical plan would succeed?

That’s right, section 1471 of the HIRE Act, designed not to ‘monitor’ foreign account holdings of American’s super wealthy but instead to keep medical practitioners and other citizens with talents and abilities necessary for the functioning of a nation trapped within its borders before far worse actions than the events post September 11th occur. Section 1471 was designed to insure that those Americans wishing to leave the country with their monies would be unable to, trapped either in the U.S. banking system and subjected to an extremely high taxation rate in the future, or forcing them to abdicate their citizenship and pay the extortion or exit tax as designed by Representative Charles Rangel several years ago.

If one thinks this is a myth, I simply remind my readers of a story I covered in great detail last year from eFinancial News from Dow Jones Newswires on March 9, 2011:

PRIVATE BANKS SHOW US CLIENTS THE DOOR

The final implementation of the law is December 31, 2012 but the first reporting requirements begin on January 1, 2012 and foreign banks have no desire to allow and offer unlimited access to financial records from a foreign government entity, aka, the Internal Revenue Service. Thus American account holders are finding their foreign money managers and institutions politely asking them to depart post haste. Once sentence from the article tells anyone with common sense why this is happening:

Krause said: “Although it will be difficult to ignore the US completely, some of the more bespoke wealth managers are entirely washing their hands of it. The administration involved with Fatca – the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act – is just too burdensome.”

The intrusiveness was designed within the U.S. Code and the HIRE Act to be just that; a burdensome requirement that violates many of the domestic laws and rights of banks and financial institutions overseas. This insures that anyone who attempts to leave the Untied States with more than $50,000 will face a bureaucratic series of obstacles in establishing an overseas residency, much less functioning within that nation’s financial system.

This is the danger of DS-5513, revealing that it may well be the final padlock on the gates of what will become the largest detention camp constructed in world history. The security is in place, the spying and surveillance network built, the management and expansion of financial controls extensive and now locked into place via Dodd-Frank and the HIRE Act, and the militarization of local law enforcement well under way with Predator drones being delivered to local police departments via DHS grants. Everything is being put into place but for what event? What crisis would justify domestic paramilitary units, the establishment of NORTHCOM which has been engaged in “practice” exercises in American cities, and the expansion of the IRS to manage and monitor citizen’s financial activities? The crisis does not have to be real, it can be created via a financial collapse or terrorist action “allowed” to occur; either way the infrastructure and now in place created should terrify every man, woman, and child with an ounce of common sense.

Related:

ALERT:  Please Act: State Department’s Ridiculously Invasive New Passport Application – Retaliation? – (Updated)

Building a Dictatorship or a Roll Up Into a Global World?

Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead - A Work That Endures…

Video:  The Fountainhead – Howard Roark Speech (Ayn Rand)

See full film The Fountainhead HERE

The Fountainhead

"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.

Source:  The CATO Institute

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