Monday, July 29, 2019

ANS -- Reset: Investigations Post Mueller

This is Doug Muder's report on the Mueller Report and Mueller's testimony.  It's a nice sane review of the situation.  
--Kim


Reset: Investigations Post Mueller

Bob Mueller testified to two congressional committees Wednesday, the Judiciary Committee in the morning and the Intelligence Committee in the afternoon. [full transcript] For weeks it has felt as if everything related to impeachment and investigation has been on hold, waiting for Mueller's testimony. Now Mueller is done: He finished his investigation, wrote his report, and testified about it in public. Mueller time is over; those of us who want Trump to be investigated and/or impeached won't get any more help from him.

So let's think about where we are and what we know. There are two sides to the investigation: the Russia side and the Trump side.

What Russia did. The Russia side of the picture is becoming fairly clear: The Putin government was trying to get Trump elected, and it succeeded.

Russian operatives hacked the DNC and Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, and then used WikiLeaks to orchestrate the release of the stolen emails at a pace and in a manner designed to keep Clinton constantly on defense. In parallel, Russia ran a sophisticated disinformation operation on social media with two main purposes: suppressing the black vote and preventing Bernie Sanders' supporters from reconciling with Clinton. (Coincidentally, those were also goals of the Trump campaign.)

This was far more than the "couple of Facebook ads" in Jared Kushner's disparaging claim. For example, the Russians created the fake "Blacktivist" identity, which had half a million Facebook followers. At one point the fake @TEN_GOP Twitter account had ten times more Twitter followers than the actual Tennessee Republican Party. Altogether there were more than 470 such groups. They helped propagate fake news stories like "WikiLeaks confirms Hillary sold weapons to ISIS" and "FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide". (The Russians weren't responsible for the entire fake-news ecosystem, but they helped.) The impact of fake news [1] on the election was huge.

There is still no evidence that they actively reached into voting machines and changed vote totals, but that's not for lack of trying. Reportedly, Russia tried to penetrate election systems in all 50 states. According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, "Russian cyberactors were in a position to delete or change voter data" in the Illinois voter database. Whether they used that capability or not, the possibility has big implications for the future: If Russia wanted to, say, suppress the Hispanic vote in Florida, why not just delete the registrations of some or all voters with Hispanic names? They wouldn't have to be inside the voting machines to swing an election.

Did the Russian activities make a difference? Yeah, probably. Without them, it's likely Trump would not be president.

What Trump's people did. From the beginning of the Trump/Russia investigation, I've had two questions about the Trump campaign and Trump transition team:

  • Why did Trump's people have so many interactions with Russian officials, Russian oligarchs, and other people connected to Vladimir Putin?
  • When they were asked about those interactions, why did they all lie?

Those two questions have formed my standard of judgment ever since: If I ever felt like I could confidently answer them, I would believe we had gotten to the bottom of things.

I don't think we have good answers to those questions even now.

I can imagine a relatively innocent answer for the first one: The Russians were trying to infiltrate the campaign, so they repeatedly contacted Trump's people. But that answer just makes the second question more difficult, because then Trump's people could have given perfectly innocent answers, like: "I wondered about that at the time. It seemed so weird that these Russians kept wanting to talk to me." It would have been so easy to say: "Yeah, I talked to the guy, but I never figured out exactly what he wanted. I had a bad feeling about it, though, so I didn't see him again." Instead, they either made false denials, manufactured false cover stories, or developed a convenient amnesia around all things Russian.

Why? Innocent people don't act that way.

Trump and his defenders have not offered an answer of any kind about the lying, and instead have done everything possible to distract us the question. All the wild conspiracy theories about the Steele dossier, the "angry Democrats" in Mueller's office, Mueller's supposed "conflicts", the "witch hunt", and so forth — it all has nothing to do with the two basic questions: Why meet with so many Russians? Why lie about it?

We still don't know.

Obstruction of justice. One reason we don't know more about those questions is that President Trump obstructed the investigation. This is pretty clear if you read the Mueller report: Volume 2 examines ten instances that might be obstruction, and finds all three elements of the definition of obstruction in seven of them. [2]

Two of the seven instances stand out: telling White House Counsel Don McGahn to fire Mueller, and witness-tampering with Paul Manafort. The first stands out because it is the clearest: McGahn refused because he knew at the time he was being asked to obstruct justice. (Trump apparently knew also; why else would he order McGahn to lie about it later?)

The second stands out because it might have had the biggest impact: Manafort was Trump's campaign chairman, and was also feeding campaign information to a Russian intelligence operative. Honest testimony from Manafort might have told us exactly what Russia wanted to know, and maybe even what it did with that information. At one point, Manafort agreed to cooperate with Mueller's investigation, but ultimately he lied to investigators and may have spied on Mueller for Trump.

If Manafort did that out of love, that's one thing. But if he did it expecting that Trump will pardon him before leaving office, that's witness tampering. Whyever he did it, Manafort closed the door on our best chance to know what really happened. [3]

Mueller's report and testimony. Attorney General Barr did an amazing job of obfuscating Mueller's written report: He delayed releasing the redacted version for several weeks, and in the meantime left us with the impression that the investigation had found nothing significant. Trump started summarizing Mueller's conclusion as "No collusion, no obstruction" — which was false, but not provably false until later. "No collusion" was just a lie, and "no obstruction" was the conclusion Barr had been hired to announce; it was not Mueller's conclusion.

Mueller's actual conclusion about obstruction is subtle and easy to exaggerate in either direction. Department of Justice guidelines would not have allowed him to indict Trump while in office. Given that guidance, he concluded that it would be irresponsible to write a report saying that Trump obstructed justice, since there would be no trial in which Trump could dispute that claim. If, on the other hand, the facts allowed him to dismiss the obstruction claims, reporting that would be within his mandate.

Mueller was unable to dismiss the claims of obstruction, but he intentionally avoided making a charging decision. I read him as saying that someone who does have charging ability — either Congress now or a U.S. attorney after Trump leaves office — should look at the evidence he has assembled and make a charging decision. [4]

So it's possible to quote Mueller and imply either that he is asserting or denying that Trump obstructed justice. Neither is quite true.

Media response. That kind of nuance doesn't play well on TV, and so Mueller's testimony this week didn't produce the pivotal moment Democrats were looking for. He was asked to directly contradict several Trump talking points and did. (He testified that his investigation was not a witch hunt, Russian interference was not a hoax, his report did not exonerate Trump, etc. He also agreed that Trump's written testimony was "generally" incomplete and untruthful.) But he did not tell the Judiciary Committee to start impeachment proceedings, or explain clearly to the American public why they should.

In addition to Mueller's lawyerly reticence to exceed his role or speculate beyond what he could prove, he also appeared to have aged since the last time he had testified to Congress. He seemed tired and at times confused. He chose not to fight with Republican congressmen who put forward a variety of conspiracy theories that no one outside the Fox News bubble has heard of.

In short, he is not the man to rally the nation against its corrupt ruler.

For the most part, pundits judged Mueller's testimony like a reality TV show. Jennifer Rubin critiqued the response:

I worry that we — the media, voters, Congress — are dangerously unserious when it comes to preservation of our democracy. To spend hours of airtime and write hundreds of print and online reports pontificating about the "optics" of Mueller's performance — when he confirmed that President Trump accepted help from a hostile foreign power and lied about it, that he lied when he claimed exoneration, that he was not completely truthful in written answers, that he could be prosecuted after leaving office and that he misled Americans by calling the investigation a hoax — tells me that we have become untrustworthy guardians of democracy.

The "failure" is not of a prosecutor who found the facts but might be ill equipped to make the political case, but instead, of a country that won't read his report and a media obsessed with scoring contests rather than focusing on the damning facts at issue.

What now? The burden now rests in two places: on House Democrats and on the general public.

The Judiciary Committee is continuing to seek information, and the Trump administration is continuing to stonewall it. In a court filing Friday, the Committee asked to receive evidence collected by Mueller's grand jury. The filing implies that the Committee is already conducting a preliminary impeachment investigation.

the House must have access to all the relevant facts [regarding the president's conduct] and consider whether to exercise its full Article I powers, including a constitutional power of the utmost gravity—approvals of articles of impeachment.

Unfortunately, the mills are grinding very slowly. The Committee still has not filed suit to enforce its subpoena of Dan McGahn, for example. That case might take months to wind its way up to the Supreme Court, and then we'll see just how partisan this Court is: In numerous cases (like the Muslim ban) it has refused to look into possible illicit hidden motives of the executive branch. The case to block this subpoena is based on claims about the illicit hidden motives of the legislative branch. Will the Supremes rule that they are empowered to second-guess a Democratic Congress in ways that they can't second-guess Republican president? That would be a striking message that the rule of law is essentially dead.

The other way this progresses is if the people rise up and demand impeachment, the way that people have risen up in Puerto Rico or Hong Kong. But will we?

[1] This is "fake news" in the original sense: posts designed to resemble news sites, but based on pure flights of fantasy. Trump later stole the term and now uses it to refer to any report he doesn't like. But it once had an important meaning.

One striking feature of the Mueller report is how often a story that Trump labeled "fake news" was actually true.

[2] In addition, Trump refused to testify in person, and his lawyers threatened a subpoena fight that would have delayed the investigation for months or maybe years. Mueller eventually submitted a small number of tightly constrained questions, which Trump (or his lawyers) answered in writing. Nearly all his answers were some version of "I don't remember." Trump's testimony, then, was neither incriminating nor exculpatory, because there was no real information in it.

[3] This is the difference between Trump's "no collusion" mantra, and what Mueller really reported: that he could not assemble sufficient evidence to charge anyone in the Trump campaign with criminal conspiracy. Rather than "No collusion, no obstruction", the real story might be "insufficient evidence of conspiracy, because obstruction succeeded".

[4] About 700 former federal prosecutors have read Mueller's report and said that they would charge Trump with obstruction, based on the evidence Mueller cites.

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ANS -- I was a fast-food worker. Let me tell you about burnout.

This is about modern job stress.  It's a part of late-stage capitalism.  It's not necessary unless you think money is more important than people.  
--Kim


I was a fast-food worker. Let me tell you about burnout.

As technology ratchets up the stress, low-wage jobs have become some of the hardest in America.

By Emily Guendelsberger  Updated Jul 15, 2019, 9:07am EDT

If you had to make a rat depressed, how do you think you'd go about it?

(Okay, you can't technically make a rat "depressed" — a scientist would ask how to "create a model of depression" in rats. Actually being depressed is exclusive to humans. But the drugs used to treat depression in humans are developed and tested using rodents.)

So to test your new antidepressant, you need an efficient method of making a lot of rats exhibit anhedonia — that is, making them lose interest in things they used to enjoy, like sugar.

How do you think you'd do that?

It turns out you don't need to traumatize them. The most reliable protocol is "chronic mild stress." There are many methods of making the lives of experimental animals mildly but chronically miserable — a cage floor that administers random electric shocks; a deep swimming pool with no way to rest or climb out; a stronger "intruder" introduced into the same cage. One neuroscientist actually nicknamed his apparatus the Pit of Despair.

But they're all variations on the same theme: remove all predictability and control from the animal's life. Then take notes as they gradually lose interest in being alive.

The media mostly discusses job stress in the context of white-collar, educated professionals. We don't put nearly as much time and energy into exploring the stress of unskilled, low-wage service work — even though the jobs most Americans actually work could be mistaken for Pits of Despair.

Perhaps it's because as technology progresses, it tends to make life easier for the top of the labor market — those skilled, educated workers with decent salaries and benefits. Often overlooked is how those same technological advances have made it possible to control and monitor unskilled worker productivity down to the second. These technologies are also getting more powerful, and that makes a lot of people's lives inescapably, chronically stressful.

It can be hard to understand the stress of having someone constantly looking over your shoulder if you haven't recently — or have never — had to work a job like this. By definition, that's most everybody with power in this country.

Even former House Speaker Paul Ryan, who has often played up the summer he spent "flipping burgers" at McDonald's as a teenager, seems not to realize that it's much more difficult to work fast food in 2019 than it was in 1986.

I hadn't had a service job in a while either. But I was curious, especially after driving for Uber for a couple of months for an investigative piece fact-checking the claim that full-time drivers could expect to make $90,000 a year. When my newspaper closed a few months later, I decided to try working three jobs that serve as good examples of how technology will be used at work in the future — in an Amazon warehouse, at a call center, and at a McDonald's — with the vague idea of writing a book about what had changed. (I used my real name and job history when applying, and was hired nonetheless.)

Even having done a lot of research, I was shocked by how much more stressful low-wage work had become in the decade I've been working as a journalist.

Javier Zarracina/Vox

Take fast food, a sector that made up a huge chunk of the post-recession jobs recovery. It's far from the leisurely time implied by "flipping burgers." One of my coworkers put it best: "Fast food is intense! And it's stressful! You're always feeling rushed, you're on a time crunch for literally eight hours straight, you're never allowed to have one moment just to chill."

The factors a scientist would remove from a rat's life to make it depressed — predictability and control — are the exact things that have been removed from workers' lives in the name of corporate flexibility and increased productivity. There's little more relief for many low-wage workers than for those lab rats desperately trying to keep their heads above water.

For one thing, everything is timed and monitored digitally, second by second. If you're not keeping up, the system will notify a manager, and you will hear about it.

When I used to do service work, we still mostly used paper time cards; you could make your case to the manager if you were late, or maybe stay a few minutes beyond your shift to make up for it. At many modern service jobs, the digital time-clock system will automatically penalize you for clocking in a minute after the start of your shift or after a break. After getting yelled at for this twice early in the month I spent working at a McDonald's in downtown San Francisco, I started imitating my coworkers and aiming to arrive 20 minutes before my shift just in case the train was running weird that day. I came to resent how much time this ate up, particularly when comparing it to the trivial difference to McDonald's of having me clock in at 7:31 rather than 7:30. I've reached out to McDonald's for comment, and will update this story when I receive a response.

Computers and algorithms also have a much heavier hand in what a worker's schedule looks like. The scheduling systems used to staff most major retail and fast food chains have gotten extremely good at using past sales data to extrapolate how much business to expect every hour of the coming week. Stores are then staffed around the predicted busy and slow times, which means workers' schedules are often completely different week to week.

The more recent the data, the more accurate the prediction, which is why so many fast-food and retail workers don't get their schedule until a day or two before it starts. It leaves workers in these industries unable to plan their lives (or their budgets) more than a few days in advance.

McDonald's employee takes orders from customers in Vero Beach, Florida.A McDonald's employee takes orders from customers in Vero Beach, Florida. Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Algorithmic scheduling also results in bizarre things like the "clopen" — back-to-back shifts closing late and opening early the next morning with only a few hours to sleep in between — and unpaid quasi-shifts where workers are expected to be on call in case it's busier than predicted or sent home early if it's slower.

Technology has also made understaffing a science. At my McDonald's, we always seemed to be staffed at a level that maximized misery for workers and customers, as exemplified by the constant line and yells of "Open up another register!" Not only did this permanently strand us in the weeds, it meant that customers were often in a bad mood by the time they got to us.

Understaffing is a widespread tactic to cut down on labor costs. For what it looks like in fast food, check out the dozens of Occupational Safety and Health Administration complaints filed by McDonald's workers in 2015 about deliberate understaffing at stores in several cities. The workers claim the corporate-supplied scheduling system understaffs stores, then pressures the skeleton crew to work faster to make up for it, which leads to hazardous conditions and injuries like these:

"My managers kept pushing me to work faster, and while trying to meet their demands, I slipped on a wet floor, catching my arm on a hot grill," one worker, Brittney Berry, said in a statement when the complaints were filed. "The managers told me to put mustard on it."

Responding to the OSHA filings, the company wrote that "McDonald's and its independent franchisees are committed to providing safe working conditions for employees in the 14,000 McDonald's Brand U.S. restaurants. We will review these allegations."

The statement also made a reference to Fight for $15, the Service Employees International Union-funded campaign that had been involved in coordinating and publicizing the complaints: "It is important to note that these complaints are part of a larger strategy orchestrated by activists targeting our brand and designed to generate media coverage." (The cases have not been resolved.)

According to a 2015 survey of thousands of US fast-food employees by the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, 79 percent of industry workers had been burned on the job in the previous year — most more than once.

This would now include me. I worked on the now-notorious Szechuan Sauce Day, which was miserable for McDonald's workers across the country. We were more slammed than I'd ever seen, and as I hurriedly checked the coffee levels between orders, one pot's handle broke, slicing open my finger and dumping scalding coffee all over my pants.

The thing I found the most stressful at my three jobs was the small percentage of customers who will, for whatever reason, just scream stuff you wouldn't believe at you. This was mostly at the call center; at McDonald's, customers tended to be in a better mood. But in person, screamers can also do things like splatter you with honey mustard, which is a thing that actually happened in my third week on the job.

The woman I now refer to as Mustard Lady had already been screaming at me for a few minutes, but I was so surprised when she nailed me in the chest with a container of honey mustard dipping sauce that I instinctively screamed back, "Hey, fuck you, lady! What the fuck?" before removing myself from the situation.

I got written up for that.

Javier Zarracina/Vox

If you haven't had to do it for a while, it may seem like having to be completely submissive to customers shouldn't be that big of a deal. But believe me, there's a cost associated with continually swallowing your pride and apologizing to unreasonable jerks. "The customer is always right" policies may be good for business, but they're bad for humans, physically and mentally.

When Paul Ryan worked at McDonald's in the '80s, he might have been representative of a largely teenage sea of fast-food workers, a perception that persists today. But last time the National Employment Law Project checked, the average age of fast-food workers was 29, and more than a quarter of workers were supporting a child. These jobs are not just a source of teenage pocket money; they're something adults are trying to survive on.

USA - Fight for $15 Rally in BostonLow-wage workers protest to demand higher wages at a McDonald's restaurant in Boston in 2015. Rick Friedman/Corbis via Getty Images

The average pay for someone with the job I had is around $8 an hour — about half of what's needed to keep a family with two working parents and two kids afloat. (That is, each parent would need to work two fast-food jobs.)

American culture is full of lingering afterimages of Midwestern guys making cars and mining coal, but, to quote an excellent headline from the Chicago Tribune, The Entire Coal Industry Employs Fewer People Than Arby's. This is the modern working class — fast food, retail, warehousing, delivery, call centers. Service workers.

Everybody I talked to at my McDonald's — along with the many other fast-food workers I interviewed — had had food items thrown at them. I got the impression that I was the weird one for Mustard Lady being my first. They'd been hit by nearly everything in the store: wrapped burgers, unwrapped burgers, burger patties, McNuggets, smoothies, sodas, napkins, straws, sauces, fries, apple pies, ice cream cones, even a full cup of hot coffee.

Why do so many people choose to put up with this? Because some choices aren't really choices.

In my experience, most people are willing to make immense sacrifices to keep their children safe and happy. In a country with a moth-eaten social safety net, health care tied to employment, and few job quality differences between working at McDonald's, Burger King, or Walmart, corporations have long since figured out that workers will put up with nearly anything if it means keeping their jobs. This fulcrum is being used to leverage more and more out of workers — even, ironically, the ability to spend time with their families. Many of my coworkers were in the O'Henry-like position of providing for families they barely got to see because of their work schedule.

Free market capitalism doesn't assign a negative value to "how much stress workers are under." It just assumes that unhappy workers will leave their job for a better one, and things will find a natural balance. But when the technologies that make life miserable spread everywhere at the speed of globalization, finding something better isn't really an option anymore. And a system that runs by marinating a third or more of the workforce in chronic stress isn't sustainable.

Chronic stress will destroy your body like doing burnouts will destroy a rental car that someone else is paying for. It's a huge factor behind the epidemics of heart disease, obesity, autoimmune disorders, depression, anxiety, and drug misuse that afflict developed countries — the "diseases of civilization."

And right now, corporations kind of are treating the low-wage workforce like a rental car someone else is paying for. Because while American jobs have gotten safer in terms of limbs caught in machinery, individual companies are extremely unlikely to be held accountable for workers' long-term stress-related health problems. They're doing burnouts with the bodies and minds of millions of American workers, because either workers or taxpayers will pick up the bill.

Why? Because "hard work" as an undisputed moral good is a deep part of the American psyche. The idea of penalizing a company for making its employees work too hard can seem ridiculous if the work environment is safe. Plus, "flipping burgers" has been shorthand for an easy job for decades, so it can be hard to associate that with the constant monitoring, understaffing, and sub-living wage of modern service work. Chronically stressful work is different from hard work. And it's dangerous.

Should people be asked to sacrifice their physical and mental health — and their experience of life as something other than an exhausting, hopeless slog — for the survival of their families? Would a moral society ask them to make this choice?

A lot of people blithely advise the poor to work their way toward dignity and self-respect. I'd wager that none of them has been written up for having a natural reaction to being splattered with mustard, or had their schedule cut to 15 hours a week because they took a sick day, or been bawled out for being one minute late. Their mental image of work comes from the pre-internet era, and we need to stop taking them seriously and start listening to the people on the brutal front lines of the modern low-wage workforce. They're very easy to find.

At McDonald's, I asked the manager who wrote me up for losing my temper at Mustard Lady if anyone had ever thrown food at her, and, if so, how she'd kept it together. Was there ... a trick to it?

My manager looked at me as if I were oblivious, and responded that of course people had thrown food at her. "You have a family to support. You think about your family, and you walk away."

Emily Guendelsberger is the author of On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane.

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Wednesday, July 24, 2019

ANS -- about Universal Basic Income in 11 tweets

This is a series of 11 tweets.  It's about what would happen if we had UBI -- a universal Basic Income and no one HAD TO work.  It's very short -- read it.  
--Kim



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MadLori
@madlori
16 hours ago, 11 tweets, 2 min read  Read on Twitter
 
When discussing Universal Basic Income, inevitably the retort comes: "So you just want people to not have to work, is that it?" Accompanied by a smug smirk, expecting me to backpedal and hem and haw, say "Of course not, that's silly." Except...yes. Yes, I do. 1/11
People shouldn't HAVE to work. People should WANT to work. Sharing in the labor of building and maintaining a society because it benefits everyone should be desirable, not forced. It shouldn't be something we do because we'll die otherwise. 2/11
Imagine a society where survival didn't depend on a job. Imagine how that would alter the fabric of...everything. Imagine if you could leave a job without fearing the loss of income or health care. Imagine the power of the worker in that society. 3/11
If a person could survive without a job, imagine what employers would be like. They'd have to treat their workers fairly, and make themselves attractive to entice workers. They'd have to offer a better option than other employers, and make people want to participate. 4/11
Places that have offered UBI have seen the results: most people do want to work. The people who choose not to are generally young parents, students, people with disabilities and the elderly. people have a desire to contribute, for our lives to have purpose and to be useful. 5/11
And before you say it, yes, some people will take advantage. That is true for absolutely everything ever. You think people don't take advantage of the economy we have? Like, say, the 1% who grow wealthier while their employees have to work three jobs and use food stamps? 6/11
They can only do that, by the way, because people are so terrified of losing a job and the destruction that would follow that they tolerate mistreatment, disempowerment, the destruction of their unions, healthcare, retirements and even their bodies to avoid it. 7/11
That would not be the case if everyone were guaranteed a baseline survival income. Your boss couldn't treat you like shit because he knows you can't leave. You CAN leave, and you will. 8/11
What if desperation didn't motivate everything? Imagine the impact on health, relationships, parenting, well-being, crime, violence, progress. When you aren't desperately scrabbling for the rent, you can spare a neuron to contemplate long-term problems. 9/11
Imagine a society where terror of destitution wasn't a constant thrum underneath everyone's existence. Imagine the creative works that society could produce. Imagine the children it could raise, the elderly it could care for. Imagine the inventions it could produce. 10/11
Now, imagine knowing all this and thinking "NOPE. We can't have all that, because someone I don't like might benefit from it. So to avoid that, the rest of you can all hang." And there you have modern conservative thinking. 11/11
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ANS -- Column: This is what happens when you take Ayn Rand seriously

Here's a fairly short article on what happens when you do what Ayn Rand said was the right way to run a world.  Hint: she was wrong.  It's from 2016.
--Kim


Column: This is what happens when you take Ayn Rand seriously

Economy Feb 16, 2016 11:29 AM EDT

"Ayn Rand is my hero," yet another student tells me during office hours. "Her writings freed me. They taught me to rely on no one but myself."

As I look at the freshly scrubbed and very young face across my desk, I find myself wondering why Rand's popularity among the young continues to grow. Thirty years after her death, her book sales still number in the hundreds of thousands annually — having tripled since the 2008 economic meltdown. Among her devotees are highly influential celebrities, such as Brad Pitt and Eva Mendes, and politicos, such as current Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz.

The core of Rand's philosophy — which also constitutes the overarching theme of her novels — is that unfettered self-interest is good and altruism is destructive. This, she believed, is the ultimate expression of human nature, the guiding principle by which one ought to live one's life. In "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal," Rand put it this way:

Collectivism is the tribal premise of primordial savages who, unable to conceive of individual rights, believed that the tribe is a supreme, omnipotent ruler, that it owns the lives of its members and may sacrifice them whenever it pleases.

By this logic, religious and political controls that hinder individuals from pursuing self-interest should be removed. (It is perhaps worth noting here that the initial sex scene between the protagonists of Rand's book "The Fountainhead" is a rape in which "she fought like an animal.")

WATCH: Why do the rich get richer? French economist Piketty takes on inequality in 'Capital'

The fly in the ointment of Rand's philosophical "objectivism" is the plain fact that humans have a tendency to cooperate and to look out for each other, as noted by many anthropologists who study hunter-gatherers. These "prosocial tendencies" were problematic for Rand, because such behavior obviously mitigates against "natural" self-interest and therefore should not exist. She resolved this contradiction by claiming that humans are born as tabula rasa, a blank slate, (as many of her time believed) and prosocial tendencies, particularly altruism, are "diseases" imposed on us by society, insidious lies that cause us to betray biological reality. For example, in her journal entry dated May 9, 1934, Rand mused:

For instance, when discussing the social instinct — does it matter whether it had existed in the early savages? Supposing men were born social (and even that is a question) — does it mean that they have to remain so? If man started as a social animal — isn't all progress and civilization directed toward making him an individual? Isn't that the only possible progress? If men are the highest of animals, isn't man the next step?

The hero of her most popular novel, "Atlas Shrugged," personifies this "highest of animals": John Galt is a ruthless captain of industry who struggles against stifling government regulations that stand in the way of commerce and profit. In a revolt, he and other captains of industry each close down production of their factories, bringing the world economy to its knees. "You need us more than we need you" is their message.

To many of Rand's readers, a philosophy of supreme self-reliance devoted to the pursuit of supreme self-interest appears to be an idealized version of core American ideals: freedom from tyranny, hard work and individualism. It promises a better world if people are simply allowed to pursue their own self-interest without regard to the impact of their actions on others. After all, others are simply pursuing their own self-interest as well.

So what if people behaved according to Rand's philosophy of "objectivism"? What if we indeed allowed ourselves to be blinded to all but our own self-interest?

Modern economic theory is based on exactly these principles. A rational agent is defined as an individual who is self-interested. A market is a collection of such rational agents, each of whom is also self-interested. Fairness does not enter into it. In a recent Planet Money episode, David Blanchflower, a Dartmouth professor of economics and former member of the Central Bank of England, laughed out loud when one of the hosts asked, "Is that fair?"

"Economics is not about fairness," he said. "I'm not going there."

Economists alternately find alarming and amusing a large body of results from experimental studies showing that people don't behave according to the tenets of rational choice theory. We are far more cooperative and willing to trust than is predicted by the theory, and we retaliate vehemently when others behave selfishly. In fact, we are willing to pay a penalty for an opportunity to punish people who appear to be breaking implicit rules of fairness in economic transactions.

So what if people behaved according to Rand's philosophy of "objectivism"? What if we indeed allowed ourselves to be blinded to all but our own self-interest?

An example from industry

In 2008, Sears CEO Eddie Lampert decided to restructure the company according to Rand's principles.

Lampert broke the company into more than 30 individual units, each with its own management and each measured separately for profit and loss. The idea was to promote competition among the units, which Lampert assumed would lead to higher profits. Instead, this is what happened, as described by Mina Kimes, a reporter for Bloomberg Business:

An outspoken advocate of free-market economics and fan of the novelist Ayn Rand, he created the model because he expected the invisible hand of the market to drive better results. If the company's leaders were told to act selfishly, he argued, they would run their divisions in a rational manner, boosting overall performance.

Instead, the divisions turned against each other — and Sears and Kmart, the overarching brands, suffered. Interviews with more than 40 former executives, many of whom sat at the highest levels of the company, paint a picture of a business that's ravaged by infighting as its divisions battle over fewer resources.

A close-up of the debacle was described by Lynn Stuart Parramore in a Salon article from 2013:

It got crazy. Executives started undermining other units because they knew their bonuses were tied to individual unit performance. They began to focus solely on the economic performance of their unit at the expense of the overall Sears brand. One unit, Kenmore, started selling the products of other companies and placed them more prominently than Sears' own products. Units competed for ad space in Sears' circulars…Units were no longer incentivized to make sacrifices, like offering discounts, to get shoppers into the store.

Sears became a miserable place to work, rife with infighting and screaming matches. Employees, focused solely on making money in their own unit, ceased to have any loyalty to the company or stake in its survival.

We all know the end of the story: Sears share prices fell, and the company appears to be headed toward bankruptcy. The moral of the story, in Parramore's words:

What Lampert failed to see is that humans actually have a natural inclination to work for the mutual benefit of an organization. They like to cooperate and collaborate, and they often work more productively when they have shared goals. Take all of that away and you create a company that will destroy itself.

An example from Honduras

In 2009, Honduras experienced a coup d'état when the Honduran Army ousted President Manuel Zelaya on orders from the Honduran Supreme Court. What followed was succinctly summarized by Honduran attorney Oscar Cruz:

The coup in 2009 unleashed the voracity of the groups with real power in this country. It gave them free reins to take over everything. They started to reform the Constitution and many laws — the ZEDE comes in this context — and they made the Constitution into a tool for them to get rich.

As part of this process, the Honduran government passed a law in 2013 that created autonomous free-trade zones that are governed by corporations instead of the countries in which they exist. So what was the outcome? Writer Edwin Lyngar described vacationing in Honduras in 2015, an experience that turned him from Ayn Rand supporter to Ayn Rand debunker. In his words:

The greatest examples of libertarianism in action are the hundreds of men, women and children standing alongside the roads all over Honduras. The government won't fix the roads, so these desperate entrepreneurs fill in potholes with shovels of dirt or debris. They then stand next to the filled-in pothole soliciting tips from grateful motorists. That is the wet dream of libertarian private sector innovation.

He described the living conditions this way:

On the mainland, there are two kinds of neighborhoods, slums that seem to go on forever and middle-class neighborhoods where every house is its own citadel. In San Pedro Sula, most houses are surrounded by high stone walls topped with either concertina wire or electric fence at the top. As I strolled past these castle-like fortifications, all I could think about was how great this city would be during a zombie apocalypse.

Without collective effort, large infrastructure projects like road construction and repair languish. A resident "pointed out a place for a new airport that could be the biggest in Central America, if only it could get built, but there is no private sector upside."

A trip to a local pizzeria was described this way:

We walked through the gated walls and past a man in casual slacks with a pistol belt slung haphazardly around his waist.  Welcome to an Ayn Rand libertarian paradise, where your extra-large pepperoni pizza must also have an armed guard.

This is the inevitable outcome of unbridled self-interest set loose in unregulated markets.

Yet devotees of Ayn Rand still argue that unregulated self-interest is the American way, that government interference stifles individualism and free trade. One wonders whether these same people would champion the idea of removing all umpires and referees from sporting events. What would mixed martial arts or football or rugby be like, one wonders, without those pesky referees constantly getting in the way of competition and self-interest?

READ: Libertarian Charles Murray: The welfare state has denuded our civic culture

Perhaps another way to look at this is to ask why our species of hominid is the only one still in existence on the planet, despite there having been many other hominid species during the course of our own evolution. One explanation is that we were cleverer, more ruthless and more competitive than those who went extinct. But anthropological archaeology tells a different story. Our very survival as a species depended on cooperation, and humans excel at cooperative effort. Rather than keeping knowledge, skills and goods ourselves, early humans exchanged them freely across cultural groups.

When people behave in ways that violate the axioms of rational choice, they are not behaving foolishly. They are giving researchers a glimpse of the prosocial tendencies that made it possible for our species to survive and thrive… then and today.

Editor's note: This post has been updated to correct a previous statement that Sears went bankrupt. It has been updated to reflect that the retailer appears to be heading towards bankruptcy, as the company's earnings and share prices plummet.

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Left: The core of Rand's philosophy is that unfettered self-interest is good and altruism is destructive. "What if we indeed allowed ourselves to be blinded to all but our own self-interest?" asks columnist Denise Cummins. Photo by Dirk Knight via Flickr

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Denise Cummins

Dr. Denise D. Cummins is research psychologist, an author and a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science. Her most recent book is "Good Thinking: Seven Powerful Ideas That Influence the Way We Think." In her Psychology Today blog and PBS NewsHour articles, Cummins describes what she and other cognitive scientists are discovering about the way people think, solve problems and make decisions.

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