By Lynn Parramore, AlterNet

Many of the values that make people good citizens, like sympathy and mutual support, are antithetical to the goals of sports teams. Programs receive millions of dollars of public funds, very often at the expense of education.”

The silence. The lack of accountability. The blind loyalty. The case of Penn State’s Jerry Sandusky (who waived his right to a hearing on Tuesday) and similar horrors have shown us that under certain circumstances, otherwise normal people will stand by in the face of crimes as heinous as systemic child abuse and child rape. How could it happen that a university would protect a football program over the lives of innocent children?

The real question is: How could it be otherwise?

The Church of Football

Big Sports in America, along with the corporate religion of CEO-worship, exhibits cult-like features that make the tolerance of criminal activity something we should expect. When cults collide, conditions emerge that are poisonous to healthy, law-abiding, open societies. Read more…

By Bruce E. Levine

Thanks in part to Rand, the United States is one of the most uncaring nations in the industrialized world.

Ayn Rand’s “philosophy” is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society….To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.— Gore Vidal, 1961

Only rarely in U.S. history do writers transform us to become a more caring or less caring nation. In the 1850s, Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) was a strong force in making the United States a more humane nation, one that would abolish slavery of African Americans. A century later, Ayn Rand (1905-1982) helped make the United States into one of the most uncaring nations in the industrialized world, a neo-Dickensian society where healthcare is only for those who can afford it, and where young people are coerced into huge student-loan debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.  

Rand’s impact has been widespread and deep. At the iceberg’s visible tip is the influence she’s had over major political figures who have shaped American society. In the 1950s, Ayn Rand read aloud drafts of what was later to become Atlas Shrugged to her “Collective,” Rand’s ironic nickname for her inner circle of young individualists, which included Alan Greenspan, who would serve as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board from 1987 to 2006. Read more…