you read it here first

--After protesters clashed violently with the police inside and outside the New Orleans City Council chambers on Thursday, the Council voted unanimously to allow the federal government to demolish 4500 apartments in the four biggest public housing projects here.-NYT A27----Old Line Families Escape Worst of Flood and Plot the Future. Mr. Reiss said he and other business leaders will no longer tolerate living in a dangerous city with bad schools and substandard municipal services. “Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way … “ The power elite of NOLA … insist the remade city won’t simply restore the old order. –WSJ, A-12 Sept. 12, 2005 [sic]

--In a 1963 essay for Ayn Rand’s newsletter, Alan Greenspan dismissed as a “collectivist” myth the idea that businessmen, left to their own devices, “would attempt to sell unsafe food and drugs and fraudulent securities, and shoddy buildings.” On the contrary, he declared, “it is in the self-interest of every businessman to have a reputation for honest dealings and a quality product.” NYT A31-- Gaitskill gives Granite/Rand the needling she deserves, and it would all be very funny except for the fact that people beyond Dorothy take Rand seriously. People like Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, and a number of other people on the Right who now enjoy positions of great power and influence in this country. Indeed, the rest of the people on the Right who might not seem inclined to share the religionless vision of Rand and Greenspan nevertheless seem to embrace the worldview summarized in The Gods Disdained excerpt given above. Again: The book was about the struggle of a few isolated, superior people to ward off the attacks of the mean-minded majority as they created all the beautiful important things in the world while having incredible sex with each other. It ended with almost all the inferior majority being blown up in chemical disasters, perishing in airplane wrecks or collapsing buildings, all more or less simultaneously, all as an indirect result of their own inferiority. (163) With some minor adjustments, the paragraph might well describe the essence of the Left Behind fantasies of the Christian Nazis who revel in their dreams of apocalypse. In short, it might be fine if these issues of power, abuse, and abasement were confined to the bedroom. Unfortunately they leak and pour into offices, schoolyards, workplaces, and politics. EXTREME PROUST, p. 337