Courtesy of Pam Martens.
John Allison (With Cato Lapel Pin)
On December 4 the Wall Street Journal reported that President-elect Donald Trump was considering the following three individuals for Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve for Bank Supervision: John Allison, the long serving head of BB&T bank and a Board Member of the right-wing Cato Institute which was half owned by the Koch brothers for decades; Paul Atkins, a consultant, former member of the Securities and Exchange Commission and a Visiting Scholar at the right-wing think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, which has heavy ties and financial backing from the Koch brothers. Also under consideration, and as far removed as one could possibly get from the other two, Thomas Hoenig, Vice Chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the former President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.
Thomas Hoenig would deliver America from the stranglehold of the Ayn Rand lunatic fringe and the libertarian propaganda swamp that the Federal Reserve’s been thrashing about in since Ayn Rand’s devoted disciple, Alan Greenspan, chaired the Fed for a staggering 18 years, through four Presidents, from 1987 to 2006. Atkins would dig the Ayn Rand swamp deeper while Allison would try to elevate it to become the formal creed of every college and university in America – something he and the Koch brothers are well on their way to doing already.
Charles Koch and his related foundations have famously funneled tens of millions of dollars into the economic programs at public universities, frequently mandating the approval of faculty hires and curriculum to push free markets and deregulation. In partnership with that effort, the bank that Allison formerly headed from 1989 to 2008, BB&T, was providing lavish gifts to the schools while mandating that Ayn Rand’s book, Atlas Shrugged, be taught and distributed to students.
So who exactly was Ayn Rand? The book that best connects all the pieces of Ayn Rand’s philosophy to today’s right wing free markets mantra, is Ayn Rand Nation: The Hidden Struggle for America’s Soul by Gary Weiss.
Weiss describes the “Collective” that Rand presided over in New York City as follows: “For much of its existence the Collective was for all intents and purposes a cult. It had an unquestioned leader, it demanded absolute loyalty, it intruded into the personal lives of its members, it had its own rote expressions and catchphrases, it expelled transgressors for deviation from accepted norms, and expellees were ‘fair game’ for vicious personal attacks.”
…
