John Galt Wept

This. Quoted in full.

This just can’t be true:

Three days after receiving $25 billion in federal bailout funds, Bank of America Corp. hosted a conference call with conservative activists and business officials to organize opposition to the U.S. labor community’s top legislative priority.

Participants on the October 17 call—including at least one representative from another bailout recipient, AIG —were urged to persuade their clients to send “large contributions” to groups working against the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), as well as to vulnerable Senate Republicans, who could help block passage of the bill.

If this is true, not another damned dime. Let everyone of them fail. Not one more tax cut to businesses with over 50 people, and in fact, raise their damned taxes. Send the money to unemployment benefits funds, because corporate America simply can not be trusted with anything. In the most serious economic crisis in decades, and these folks are spending the money to organize to crush labor.

Seriously, if this is accurate, these people are sick.

We gave them money. All of us gave them money. A great big heaping crapload of money. They begged for it. They plead for it. They crawled on hands and knees over deep-pile carpeting and broken-glass tales of woe. And this is how they want to do things? Beg and plead for financial assistance and then play politics as usual immediately afterwards?

Yeah. Right. I personally say this.

From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

And now, we the American people are no longer able.

Then there's this little gem from the original article:

"This is the demise of a civilization," said Marcus. "This is how a civilization disappears. I am sitting here as an elder statesman and I'm watching this happen and I don't believe it."

...

"This bill may be one of the worst things I have ever seen in my life," he said, explaining that he could have been on "a 350-foot boat out in the Mediterranean," but felt it was more important to engage on this fight.

Preserve us from retail magnates with Darcy Taggart complexes, excessive ego inflation, and one of the most overbearing and insensate self-martyrdoms in recorded history. Abandoning his personal Atlantis to try and salvage his civilization...

Not even Ayn Rand would have supported this double-standard existence.

Even if it winds up tossing us further into a depression, Atlas has got to shrug.