Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Vice Presidential Candidate Paul Ryan
Forty-one days before a Presidential election that billionaire Charles Koch promised would be the “mother of all wars,” the battle is focusing on the ideas spun out of the decades old Koch corporate front groups. Namely – Ayn Rand’s brand of capitalism.
The uproar has yet to fade on Mitt Romney’s video tell-all, marking 47 percent of Americans as government moochers — “my job is not to worry about those people” — a view that would have warmed the heart of author Ayn Rand, an icon of the far right who was regularly repulsed by government parasites, unless she was doing the mooching. (In later life, Rand received both Social Security and Medicare benefits.)
Now, multiple media outlets are calling attention to an audio tape of a speech Republican Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan delivered to the Atlas Society in 2005, praising the influence of Ayn Rand on his life and parroting her vocabularly with phrases like “check my premises.”
The speech could draw unwelcome attention to the fact that Wall Street is massively funding the Romney/Ryan ticket because it believes Ryan will deliver on his plan to privatize Social Security. The web site set up by Ryan, A Roadmap for America’s Future, lays out how he would end Social Security and Medicare as we know it.
In his speech to the Atlas Society (the full transcript and link to the audio appears below), Ryan had this to say about Social Security:
…
