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Wisconsin's Uprising: It's Not Over |
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Tuesday, 12 June 2012 15:33 |
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Kroll writes: "The results of Tuesday's elections are being heralded as the death of public-employee unions, if not the death of organized labor itself. Tuesday's results are also seen as the final chapter in the story of the populist uprising that burst into life last year in the state capital of Madison."
Wisconsin protesters inside the State Capital. (photo: WP)
Wisconsin's Uprising: It's Not Over
By Andy Kroll, Yes! Magazine
12 June 12
The recall failed. So what's next for the Cheddar Revolution?
 he revelers watched in stunned disbelief, cocktails in hand, dressed for a night to remember. On the big-screen TV a headline screamed in crimson red: "Projected Winner: Scott Walker." It was 8:49 p.m. In parts of Milwaukee, people learned that news networks had declared Wisconsin’s governor the winner while still in line to cast their votes. At the election night party for Walker's opponent, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, supporters talked and cried and ordered more drinks. Barrett soon took the stage to concede, then waded into the crowd where a distraught woman slapped him in the face.
Walker is the first governor in American history to win a recall election. His lieutenant governor, Rebecca Kleefisch, dispatched her recall challenger no less decisively. So, too, did three Republican state senators in their recall elections. Democrats avoided a GOP sweep with a win in the sixth and final senate recall vote of the season, in Wisconsin's southeastern 21st district, but that was small consolation. Put simply, Democrats and labor unions got rolled.
The results of Tuesday's elections are being heralded as the death of public-employee unions, if not the death of organized labor itself. Tuesday's results are also seen as the final chapter in the story of the populist uprising that burst into life last year in the state capital of Madison. The Cheddar Revolution, so the argument goes, was buried in a mountain of ballots.
But that burial ceremony may prove premature. Most of the conclusions of the last few days, left and right, are likely wrong.
The energy of the Wisconsin uprising was never electoral. The movement's mistake: letting itself be channeled solely into traditional politics, into the usual box of uninspired candidates and the usual line-up of debates, primaries, and general elections. The uprising was too broad and diverse to fit electoral politics comfortably. You can't play a symphony with a single instrument. Nor can you funnel the energy and outrage of a popular movement into a single race, behind a single well-worn candidate, at a time when all the money in the world from corporate "individuals" and right-wing billionaires is pouring into races like the Walker recall.
Colin Millard, an organizer at the International Brotherhood of Bridge, Structural, Ornamental, and Reinforcing Iron Workers, admitted as much on the eve of the recall. We were standing inside his storefront office in the small town of Horicon, Wisconsin. It was night outside. "The moment you start a recall," he told me, "you're playing their game by their rules."
From Madison to Zuccotti Park and Beyond
A Recap is in Order.
The uprising began with Colin Millard. The date was February 11, 2011, when Walker "dropped the bomb," as he later put it, with his "budget repair" bill, which sought to gut collective bargaining rights for most public-employee unions, Later that day, a state Democratic Party staffer who knew Millard called him and pleaded with him to organize a protest. Millard agreed, even though other unions, including the AFL-CIO, urged him to back out. Don't make a fuss, they advised. Let's call some lawmakers and urge them to oppose Walker's bill. "Fuck off," was Millard's response.
On the Sunday after Walker unveiled his bill, Millard rounded up more than 200 people and marched down Lake Street, past the John Deere factory and Dannyboy's Bar, to the home of Republican Jeff Fitzgerald, the speaker of the state Assembly and a Walker ally. Fitzgerald lived a mile or two from Millard in Horicon. "I've got a message for Scott Walker," Millard told the crowd outside Fitzgerald's house. "This is my union card and you can pry it from my cold, dead hand."
As rumors spread of more protests, Walker threatened to call out the National Guard to deal with the protesting public workers. That's when popular outrage erupted. Students marched on the state capitol, and then a local teaching assistants union led the effort to take over the capitol rotunda, transforming intermittent protests into a round-the-clock occupation. Organizers provided food, shelter, health care, day care, education, and a sense of purpose for those who had taken up residence inside the capitol.
In support of the occupiers, the daily protests outside the capitol grew into crowds of 10,000, 25,000, then upward of 100,000. People marched in the snowy streets to challenge Walker, Wisconsin Republicans, and their political donors. Tractors circled the capitol in protest, as did firefighters and cops, even though their bargaining rights had been exempted from Walker's "reform" proposals. By now, Madison had captured the nation's attention.
A two-week occupation of the capitol and months of protests didn’t, however, deter Walker and Republican lawmakers. He signed his budget repair bill, known as Act 10, into law in March. But that doesn’t mean the Wisconsin uprising had no effect. For one thing, the "Walkerville" occupation of the grounds outside the state capitol helped inspire the "Bloombergville" protest in New York City targeting Mayor Michael Bloomberg. That, in turn, would be a precursor to the Occupy Wall Street events of the following September and later the Occupy movement nationwide. Without Wisconsin, without the knowledge that such things could still happen in America, there might never have been an Occupy.
Hijacking the Uprising
By the time Occupy Wall Street took off, the Wisconsin uprising had swapped its come-one-come-all organizing message for a far narrower and more traditional political mission. Over the summer of 2011, the decision was made that the energy and enthusiasm displayed in Madison should be channeled into recall elections to defeat six Republican state senators who had voted for Walker's anti-union Act 10. (Three Democratic senators would, in the end, face recall as well.) By that act, Democrats and unions hoped to wrestle control of the senate away from Walker and use that new power to block his agenda.
The Democrats won two of the 2011 recalls, one short of gaining control of the Senate, and so the Republicans clung to their majority.
What followed was more of the same, but with the ante upped. This time, the marquee race would be the recall of Walker himself. Launched last November, the grassroots campaign to recall the governor put the populist heart of the Wisconsin uprising on full display. Organizing under the United Wisconsin banner, 30,000 volunteers statewide gathered nearly one million signatures to trigger the election. The group’s people-powered operation recaptured some of the spirit of the Capitol occupation, but the decision had been made: recalling Walker at the ballot box was the way forward.
The Walker recall effort would, in fact, splinter the masses of anti-Walker protesters. Many progressives and most of the state's labor unions rallied behind former Dane County executive Kathleen Falk who, in January 2012, announced her intent to challenge Walker. Tom Barrett, who had lost the governor’s race to Walker in 2010, didn't announce his candidacy until late March, his entry pitting Democrat against Democrat, his handful of union endorsements pitting labor against labor. Unions pumped $4 million into helping Falk clinch the Democratic nomination. In the end, though, it wasn't close: Barrett stomped her in the May 8th primary by 24 percentage points.
By now, the Madison movement was the captive of ordinary Democratic politics in the state. After all, Barrett was hardly a candidate of the uprising. People who had protested in the streets and slept in the capitol groused about his uninspired record on workers' rights and public education. He never inspired or unified the movement that had made a recall possible - and it showed on Election Day: Walker beat Barrett by seven percentage points, almost his exact margin of victory in 2010. Democrats and their union allies needed to win over new voters and old enemies; by all accounts they failed.
And had Barrett by some miracle won, after a few days of celebration and self-congratulation, those in the Madison movement would have found themselves in the same box, in the same broken system, with little sense of what to do and, in a Barrett governorship, little hope. Win or lose, there was loss written all over the recall decision.
The Fate of the Uprising
The takeaway from Walker's decisive win on Tuesday is not that Wisconsin's new populist movement is dead. It's that such a movement does not fit comfortably into the present political/electoral system, stuffed as it is with corporate money, overflowing with bizarre ads and media horse-race-manship. Its members' beliefs are too diverse to be confined comfortably in what American electoral politics has become. It simply couldn’t be squeezed into a system that stifles and, in some cases, silences the kinds of voices and energies it possessed.
The post-election challenge for the members of Wisconsin's uprising is finding a new way to fight for and achieve needed change without simply pinning their hopes on a candidate or an election. After all, that's part of what absorbed the nation when a bunch of students first moved into the Wisconsin state capitol and wouldn’t go home, or when a ragtag crew of protesters camped out in lower Manhattan's Zuccotti Park and wouldn't leave either. In both cases, they had harnessed the outrage felt by so many Americans for a cause other than what’s usually called "politics" in this country.
And they were successful - even in the most traditional terms; that is, both movements affected traditional politics most strongly when they weren’t part of it. The Occupy movement, for all its flaws, moved even mainstream political discourse away from austerity and deficit slashing and toward the issues of income inequality and the hollowing out of the American middle and working classes.
Avoiding politics as we know it with an almost religious fervor, Occupy still managed to put its stamp on national political fights. Last October, for instance, Ohioans voted overwhelmingly to repeal SB 5, a law that curbed collective bargaining rights for all public-employee unions. Occupy's "We are the 99%" message reverberated through Ohio, and the volunteers who blitzed the state successfully drew on Occupy themes to make their case for the law's repeal. Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, which spent $500,000 in Ohio fighting SB 5, told me at the time, "Every conversation was in the context of the 99% and the 1%, this discussion sparked by Occupy Wall Street."
The money that flowed into Walker's recall fight speaks loudly to the disadvantages a Wisconsin-like movement faces within the walls of electoral politics and the need for it to resist being confined there. On the post-Citizens United playing field, the unlimited amounts of the money that rose to the top of this society in recent decades, as the 1% definitively separated itself from the 99%, can be reinvested in preserving the world as it is and electing those who will make it even more amenable. The advantage invariably goes corporate; it goes Republican.
Historically, the Republicans have long been the party of big business, of multinational corporations, of wealthy, union-hating donors like Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson and Amway heir Dick DeVos - and in recent decades the Democrats have followed in their wake sweeping up the crumbs (or worse). And here’s the reality of a deeply corrupt system: unless Congress and state legislators act to patch up their tattered campaign finance rulebooks, the same crew with the same money will continue to dominate the political wars. (And any movement that puts its own money on changing those rules is probably in deep trouble.)
In the wake of the recall losses, the people of Wisconsin's uprising must ask themselves: Where can they make an impact outside of politics? The power of nonviolent action to create social and economic change is well documented, most notably by Jonathan Schell in his classic book The Unconquerable World. The men and women in Schell's invaluable history - Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. and his civil rights fighters, the Czech dissident Vaclav Havel, and so many others - can serve as guides to a path to change that doesn't require recall elections. Already mainstays of the Madison protests have suggested campaigns to refuse to spend money with businesses that support Walker. "Hit 'em where it hurts. Pocketbooks," C.J. Terrell, one of the Capitol occupiers, recently wrote on Facebook.
Wisconsinites could also turn to one of their own: Robert "Fightin' Bob" La Follette. He created his own band of "insurgents" within the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Republican Party. Together they formed the Progressive Party, which fought for workers' rights, guarded civil liberties, and worked to squeeze corruption out of government.
Ultimately, however, the decision on what comes next rests in the hands of those who inspired and powered the Wisconsin uprising. And with an emboldened Governor Walker, there should be no shortage of reasons to fight back in the next two years. But success, as Tuesday's election made clear, isn’t likely to come the traditional way. It will, of course, involve unions; it might draw on state and local political parties. But in the end, it's in the hands of the people again, as it was in February 2011.
The future they want is theirs to decide.
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FOCUS: The Wisconsin Blues |
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Tuesday, 12 June 2012 11:56 |
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Lakoff writes: "The Wisconsin recall vote should be put in a larger context. What happened in Wisconsin started well before Scott Walker became governor and will continue as long as progressives let it continue."
Protest signs hang from the 'Forward' statue in front of the State Capitol. (photo: Getty Images)
The Wisconsin Blues
By George Lakoff and Elisabeth Wehling, Common Dreams
12 June 12
he Wisconsin recall vote should be put in a larger context. What happened in Wisconsin started well before Scott Walker became governor and will continue as long as progressives let it continue. The general issues transcend unions, teachers, pensions, deficits, and even wealthy conservatives and Citizens United.
Where progressives argued policy - the right to collective bargaining and the importance of public education - conservatives argued morality from their perspective, and many working people who shared their moral views voted with them and against their own interests. Why? Because morality is central to identity, and hence trumps policy.
Progressive morality fits a nurturant family: parents are equal, the values are empathy, responsibility for oneself and others, and cooperation. That is taught to children. Parents protect and empower their children, and listen to them. Authority comes through an ethic of excellence and living by what you say, rather than by enforcing rules.
Correspondingly in politics, democracy begins with citizens caring about one another and acting responsibly both for oneself and others. The mechanism by which this is achieved is The Public, through which the government provides resources that make private life and private enterprise possible: roads, bridges and sewers, public education, a justice system, clean water and air, pure food, systems for information, energy and transportation, and protection both for and from the corporate world. No one makes it on his or her own. Private life and private enterprise are not possible without The Public. Freedom does not exist without The Public.
Conservative morality fits the family of the strict father, who is the ultimate authority, defines right and wrong, and rules through punishment. Self-discipline to follow rules and avoid punishment makes one moral, which makes it a matter of individual responsibility alone. You are responsible for yourself and not anyone else, and no one else is responsible for you.
In conservative politics, democracy is seen as providing the maximal liberty to seek one’s self-interest without being responsible for the interests of others. The best people are those who are disciplined enough to be successful. Lack of success implies lack of discipline and character, which means you deserve your poverty. From this perspective, The Public is immoral, taking away incentives for greater discipline and personal success, and even standing in the way of maximizing private success. The truth that The Private depends upon The Public is hidden from this perspective. The Public is to be minimized or eliminated. To conservatives, it’s a moral issue.
These conservative ideas at the moral level have been pushed since Ronald Reagan via an extensive communication system of think tanks, framing specialists, training institutes, booking agencies and media, funded by wealthy conservatives. Wealthy progressives have not funded progressive communication in the same way to bring progressive moral values into everyday public discourse. The result is that conservatives have managed to get their moral frames to dominate public discourse on virtually every issue.
In Wisconsin, much if not most progressive messaging fed conservative morality centered around individual, not social, responsibility. Unions were presented as serving self-interest - the self-interests of working people. Pensions were not presented as delayed earnings for work already done, but as “benefits” given for free as a result of union bargaining power. “Bargaining” means trying to get the best deal for your own self-interest. “Collective” denies individual responsibility. The right wing use of “union thugs” suggests gangs and the underworld - an immoral use of force. Strikes, to conservatives, are a form of blackmail. Strikebreaking, like the strict father’s requirement to punish rebellious children, is seen as a moral necessity. The successful corporate managers, being successful, are seen as moral. And since many working men have a strict father morality both at home an in their working life, they can be led to support conservative moral positions, even against their own financial interests.
What about K-12 teachers? They are mostly women, and nurturers. They accepted delayed earnings as pensions, taking less pay as salary - provided their positions were secure, that is, they had tenure. In both their nurturance and their centrality to The Public, they constitute a threat to the dominance of conservative morality. Conservatives don't want nurturers teaching their children to be loyal to the “nanny state.”
The truth that The Public is necessary for the Private was not repeated over and over, but it needed to be at the center of the Wisconsin debate. Unions needed to be seen as serving The Public, because they promote better wages, working conditions, and pensions generally, not just for their members. The central role of teachers as working hard to maintain The Public, and hence The Private, also needed to be at the center of the debate. These can only be possible if the general basis of the need for The Public is focused on every day.
Scott Walker was just carrying out general conservative moral policies, taking the next step along a well-worn path.
What progressives need to do is clear. To people who have mixed values - partly progressive, partly conservative - talk progressive values in progressive language, thus strengthening progressive moral views in their brains. Never move to the right thinking you’ll get more cooperation that way.
Start telling deep truths out loud all day every day: Democracy is about citizens caring about each other. The Public is necessary for The Private. Pensions are delayed earnings for work already done; eliminating them is theft. Unions protect workers from corporate exploitation - low salaries, no job security, managerial threats, and inhumane working conditions. Public schools are essential to opportunity, and not just financially: they provide the opportunity to make the most of students’ skills and interests. They are also essential to democracy, since democracy requires an educated citizenry at large, as well as trained professionals in every community. Without education of the public, there can be no freedom.
At issue is the future of progressive morality, democracy, freedom, and every aspect of the Public - and hence the viability of private life and private enterprise in America on a mass scale. The conservative goal is to impose rule by conservative morality on the entire country, and beyond. Eliminating unions and public education are just steps along the way. Only progressive moral force can stop them.
The Little Blue Book is a guide to how to express your moral views and how to reveal hidden truths that undermine conservative claims. And it explains why this has to be done constantly, not just during election campaigns. It is the cumulative effect that matters, as conservatives well know.
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Elect Occupy Wall Street in 2014 |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=7118"><span class="small">Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Tuesday, 12 June 2012 09:40 |
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Carl Gibson writes: "I'm becoming more and more convinced that the left's collective crying out for strong, effective leadership is going to have to come from the leaderful (not leaderless) movement of young people across America."
The occupy movement will have to figure out how it participates in the 2012 election season. (photo: Mark Collier)
Elect Occupy Wall Street in 2014
Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News
12 June 12
Reader Supported News | Perspective
 'm becoming more and more convinced that the left's collective crying out for strong, effective leadership is going to have to come from the leaderful (not leaderless) movement of young people across America. The fellow Occupiers I've marched and protested with in Houston, Madison and Denver are all well-spoken, optimistic, visionary leaders in their own communities. None of us agree with those who represent us in office. We all agree government could work for the people if corporations were purged from the political process.
The Tea Party began as another leaderless movement that took to the streets to protest a lot of the same things we protest: A bought government, bailouts of the banks that put us in an economic freefall, and a government overly concerned with intruding into citizens' personal space and lives. Their massive rallies and marches attracted the media attention needed to change the narrative, then they proceeded to take over a major political party and make it bend to their every radical whim. OWS could do the same thing, and do it ten times better, even without the billions in corporate backing Tea Party ideologues like Scott Walker have at their disposal.
The 1 percent's source of power is the excessive, poverty-inducing wealth they've amassed for the last 30 years. They used to spend their wealth on racehorses and yachts. Now they spend it on buying elections. By taking away the 1 percent's excessive wealth, we take away their ability to buy elections. When we get corporate money out of politics, we weed out the politicians who were put in place by corporate money. By removing those politicians and putting in those who will work for us, we simultaneously scare those remaining in office to adhere to our agenda or lose their jobs, and we begin to fundamentally change the system for the better.
The 1 percent has always been in charge of government, but their unprecedented influence on our politics was largely brought about by the early 2010 Citizens United ruling and the Tea Party's electoral sweep of Congress, also in 2010. Since November 2010, obstruction has become a daily matter of course, and a radical agenda of deregulating the industries threatening the environment and the banks that caused our current depression is the only one those in power will accept. If the Tea Party continues their electoral successes the complete redistribution of wealth from the bottom 99% to the top 1% will be inevitable. The deficit will continue to rise as we continue to cut taxes for the 1% and wage endless war, and with a rising deficit will come an elimination of middle-class jobs and every existing social-welfare program and safety net for the 99%.
Democratic leaders in office are showing signs of caving on extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% of Americans, and putting the cap at $1 million instead of $250,000. Like many others, I'm disgusted by the cowardice of the Democratic Party and the great many Democrats who are blind servants of the status quo. The Occupy Wall Street movement represents the radical change needed in society, and could easily defeat corporate Democrats in primaries with a refreshing dose of economic populism that the establishment figureheads are too afraid to approach. And, once we take over one party, we can pave the way to taking over our government using all parties as our vehicle.
Occupy Wall Street's bold positions on civil rights, as seen in the demonstrations against the NDAA's indefinite detention policies and the invasive CISPA and SOPA legislation, could even be used against the Republican incumbents in primaries who voted for such authoritarian policies. Left-wing third parties, like the Working Families Party, are already gaining traction, taking over city councils and even putting candidates in state and federal offices. The Green Party is re-inventing itself as a populist force with a bold, sweeping vision for a new society with Dr. Jill Stein at its helm.
I agree with the OWS activists who say electoral politics isn't the solution. By itself, electing good candidates to office won't be enough to bring about all the changes necessary to make society sustainable for everyone. But kicking the worst offenders out of office and putting our people in is a hell of a start. The 2014 midterms are our year. If you don't like any of the candidates in office and don't feel represented by anyone running for office, run for office yourself. Don't let the proto-fascists run our government if you don't want them to. You can still vote: they haven't taken that away yet.
Carl Gibson, 25, is co-founder of US Uncut, a nationwide creative direct-action movement that mobilized tens of thousands of activists against corporate tax avoidance and budget cuts in the months leading up to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Carl and other US Uncut activists are featured in the documentary "We're Not Broke," which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. He currently lives in Old Lyme, Connecticut. You can contact Carl at
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, and listen to his online radio talk show, Swag The Dog, at blogtalkradio.com/swag-the-dog.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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FOCUS: Ayn Rand, Just Go Away |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=19204"><span class="small">Victoria Bekiempis, Guardian UK</span></a>
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Monday, 11 June 2012 11:54 |
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Bekiempis writes: "Ayn Rand is one of those people whom you just want to go away, but won't. I say this not with hate or ignorance, but with deep familiarity."
Ayn Rand, novelist and exponent of Objectivist philosophy. (photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Ayn Rand, Just Go Away
By Victoria Bekiempis, Guardian UK
11 June 12
For a time, I was a devotee of Ayn Rand's ideas. Now I see what a pernicious philosophy rational egoism is - and how dumb!
 yn Rand is one of those people whom you just want to go away, but won't.
I say this not with hate or ignorance, but with deep familiarity.
When, as a self-absorbed college freshman, I first came across the Russian emigre author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, she seemed like the coolest thinker ever - what selfish person doesn't want to hear that being selfish doesn't just feel good, but actually is good, too?
I quickly devoured nearly all of her atrocious tomes with a sort of blind hunger - that ferocious pseudo-intellectual reading you do only to confirm your beliefs, if you will. Indeed, I devotedly hung on her every word, even becoming an officer of my university's Objectivist club. At one point, I may even have been president.
Much to the lament of my philosophy classmates, I was that girl who frequently (and loudly!) argued in favor of Rand's illogical claims that altruism doesn't exist; that selfishness is a virtue; and that "rational egoism" is the only right way to live.
Thankfully, I grew out of that phase. Not surprisingly, but a few years of minimum-wage work cleaning up cat faeces, without benefits, and other thankless, unstable odd jobs made me question Objectivism's foundations and rekindled an earlier interest in anarcho-syndicalism.
Eventually, leaving Rand was no more different or difficult than, say, leaving a friend who had grown to annoy me over time - sure, I was very intimate with her ideas, but that just gave me more insight into their outright dysfunctionality, and the strength to say "sayonara!"
What's scary is that so many Americans have not grown out of that mentally puerile phase. Instead, this contingent - now largely comprised of Tea Party radicals - remains mired in her pop philosophy.
(Only now has Republican Congressman Paul Ryan, perhaps realizing that supporting an atheist adulterer might hurt his veep chances, changed his tune from Objectivist fanboy to follower of Thomas Aquinas.)
Granted, it's doubtful that any political group so suspicious of the intelligentsia would actually read Rand's 1,200 page magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, but her ideas are clearly being used to justify inequality, giving credence to institutionalized wealth-based elitism.
This has to stop, and stop now. But not just for the reasons that typically get brought up. Anti-Rand commentators have long pointed out both the pragmatic and personal problems with Rand. As evidenced by the Great Recession, for example, anything even remotely close to the unfettered capitalism advocated by Rand plainly does not work.
Also, as evidenced by her personal life, she was more a hypocritical, questionable character than a moral role model. As a teenager in Russia, "she watched her family nearly starve while she treated herself to the theater." She railed against government benefits but cheerfully collected social security and Medicare. She championed integrity, but bastardized Nietzsche's best ideas.
And her writing skills aren't just mediocre; if anything, her penchant for 200-page monologues and wooden characters suggests that they're non-existent. And she has this thing for rapey scenes; and her approach to BDSM goes for a Mad Men-esque chauvinist chic - not healthy sex positivism.
Of course, all that doesn't actually say anything about her "philosophy"; it just makes the case that she's a jerk and a hack. That said, her theory - and summarily, its corollaries - are belied by the abject sketchiness of their most basic premise: rational egoism. Far smarter, more articulate people than me have pointed this out, but what needs to be emphasized is that Rand conflates descriptive psychological egoism (people act in their self-interest) with normative ethical egoism (acting in self-interest is the right thing to do). Part of this "ought-from-an-is"-type assumption is that altruism does not exist - very much the backbone of her belief system.
West Valley College's Sandra LaFave does a great job following this line of thought and pointing out why it doesn't work. The basic claim of egoists, LaFave notes, is that people "always and invariably act in their self-interest". However, most moral codes call for altruism, which, in egoists' account, is "demanding the impossible". Moral codes, so egoists' thinking goes, should not demand "the impossible", so we should take up a "more realistic" system such as - ta-da! - ethical egoism.
To accept this conclusion, you have to accept the premise that psychological egoism is a given fact in the first place. To date, neither Rand nor anyone else has been able to prove definitively that the proverbial soldier who dives on a grenade acts selfishly, not altruistically.
Even if, for the sake of argument, we accepted that all acts were selfish, there certainly seem to be a great many unselfish-looking selfish acts (diving on the grenade to save your comrades), as well as selfish-seeming selfish acts (blowing your kid's college tuition money on a shopping spree.) LaFave points out that this "empirical distinction" renders across-the-board selfishness more of a semantic trick than something that meaningfully describes ethics. Go ahead and claim all human acts come from self-interest, fine. This seems kind of silly, however, when the morality of said selfish acts will still be measured by how altruistic they seem.
Another key concern is that psychological egoism might not be final stage of an individual's ethical development. We start off selfish, say some theorists, but we must move beyond convention and toward post-conventional social contract and conscience for true moral growth. Even if we were to concede that these foundational problems do not deal a death-blow to Objectivism - which would be very generous of us (yet generous in a selfish way, of course) - it still seems perverse to peg so much on so shaky a foundation.
The kernel of this belief system is nothing more than a philosophically hollow shell. It should absolutely not play a role in policy-making - especially when the end result would be disastrous. I outgrew Rand; now I wish America would, too.
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