FReeper Book Club: Atlas Shrugged, Their Brothers Keepers

In California a copper wire breaks on a Taggart phone line. The last replacement wire has been sold to black marketeers with government connections, and no one will report anything because of possible repercussions from those with pull. An employee calls Dagny in New York to report the break, and Dagny asks Eddie to have their Montana people ship copper wire to California. Jim says cryptically that there soon won’t be any problems with copper.

Jim complains about an uncoordinated transportation policy. Dagny judges that the Rail Unification Plan has failed, but Jim sees it as an act of sabotage by the bankers who won’t carry their fair share. Dagny senses Jim is stalling her in his office, and she notes he has changed since Cherryl’s suicide, but not necessarily for the better.

Dagny knows that there are issues with a lack of transportation, but the friends of Cuffy Meigs don’t have this problem, nor the friends of Orren Boyle nor the friends of others with pull. Pull now has been compartmentalized into people with specific pull in specific areas. Dagny won’t give Jim the reassurance he wants; she said all she had to say three years ago. When Jim asks for a solution, Dagny tells him to get out of the way and let those who can fix the problems do so, but Jim wants her to accept the reality of the current system. He wants to be president of the railroad, and Dagny has an obligation to supply his wants; Jim has the right of weakness. Dagny walks out in revulsion, but Jim holds her back to hear a radio news broadcast; it’s the reason he’s been stalling her.

The legislature of the People’s State of Chile voted to nationalize d’Anconia Copper’s properties in cooperation with the People’s State of Argentina. This is what Jim expected to hear – but not what follows. As the vote was concluded, explosions were heard at the harbor. Not only were the d’Anconia properties in Chile blown up, but every d’Anconia property all over the world. Even the d’Anconia ore ships had been scuttled, while every employee had been paid a half hour before the destruction. All the key personnel of the company have disappeared – including Francisco.

Jim calls the Chilean ambassador and screams at him on one phone while he screams at Orren Boyle on another. Jim has lost his shirt. Dagny now perceives Jim’s game and the money he and his friends had committed to it.

Dagny and Hank dine out, and Hank understands that Francisco did in fact keep his oath to him: Francisco acted in the defense of his friends. He tells Dagny of his meeting with Ragnar, but she already knows. Hank now understands that Ragnar was an agent of The Destroyer, and Dagny makes it clear that so was Francisco. Now his talks with Francisco make sense: he was being recruited!

Hank is not going to be able to deliver much more to Dagny; he is selling black market Rearden Metal to various sections of the country to stave off total collapse. It’s all about saving the wheat crop in Minnesota, lest New York and other cities starve. Of course, whatever Hank saves this year, the looters will devour next year. Hank wishes he could go to Francisco and apologize.

At an adjoining table, a diner reacts violently to the d’Anconia Copper destruction, saying, “We can’t permit it to be true.” A government worker says it was just a series of accidents, all coincidental, and it is unpatriotic to believe otherwise. Then the calendar display on the office building flashes a message, “Brother, you asked for it!”, signed by Francisco with his full Spanish name. Hank cheers while the diners degenerate into hysterics.

In Montana a copper wire breaks, idling a copper mine adjoining a Taggart spur. The station agent strips out the station wiring and puts the mine back to work. Dagny tells Eddie to send Minnesota’s wire to Montana. Jim has procured every piece of government paperwork to get wire rationed to the railroad, but he hasn’t been able to get the actual wire.

California passes a confiscatory tax to help the unemployed, causing oil companies in the state to go out of business. Washington assures Hank that this legislative insurrection will be taken care of in short order, and Rearden Steel has absolute top priority in the rationing of oil. Hank can’t believe that the bureaucrats are actually trying to placate him.

Philip shows up at the mill asking again for a job because he needs one. He can’t perform any real tasks, but he is entitled to a livelihood. Hank throws him out.

Hank’s divorce from Lillian goes without a hitch. It’s too easy, and his lawyer thinks the Aristocracy of Pull wants something from him.

At the plant, the Wet Nurse asks for a job – a real job at the mill; he is tired of being a leech. Hank would happily offer him a job, but the Unification Board would never allow it. The Wet Nurse thinks that something is up: the government is bringing in goons to fill empty employment slots, and he thinks they are going to pull something.

In Minnesota a copper wire breaks at a grain elevator. Dagny has Eddie send the Taggart Terminal’s stock of wire to Minnesota – and nails, paint, light bulbs and tools. People are scavenging railroad hardware to sell on the black market.

Dagny gets a phone call from Minnesota. The rail cars set to haul that state’s wheat have not shown up, and the massive harvest will rot in its silos. People there are beginning to feel genuine terror. The caller says that once he hangs up, he is going to become a deserter. Dagny’s investigation within the railroad shows that every necessary form has been filled out, but the grain cars are not going to Minnesota. She finds that the paperwork has been falsified, and Cuffy Meigs is sending the cars to Louisiana to carry Emma Chalmers’ soybeans, now deemed more important to the government bureaucracy than wheat.

Minnesotans riot and burn down government and railroad buildings, while the Mainstream Media clamps a lid on the story. The railroad rounds up every kind of car imaginable and sends them all to Minnesota, and grain slowly begins to move. When Minnesotans take matters into their own hands, the State Chief Executive asks for the Army to intervene, and the Aristocracy of Pull finally gives Minnesota a higher priority than Emma Chalmers. But it’s too late; the cars are in California where the soybean processing plant is located. Minnesota degenerates into civil war as the wheat rots, and the soybeans turn out to be unfit for human consumption.

Dagny dines with Wesley Mouch, Eugene Lawson, Dr. Floyd Ferris, Clem Weatherby, her brother Jim, and Cuffy Meigs. The Aristocracy of Pull now wants to abandon the rest of America’s rail service to serve Minnesota. Dagny tries to bring reality into the discussion by asking that Taggart save the eastern US while other carriers handle their own areas. Let the Atlantic Southern handle transcontinental traffic. They don’t listen. California’s threat to secede has them flummoxed. Ferris and Lawson suggest abandoning America’s industrial plant and becoming more like India; it’s time for some serious privation. Meigs thinks it’s time for a North American Union by conquering Canada and Mexico; it’s time for some serious looting.

In the bowels of the Taggart Terminal a copper wire breaks, choking traffic. Dagny receives a call about the wire and leaves the meeting in relief. Her employees are clueless as to what to do, so Dagny calls her counterpart at the Atlantic Southern and asks to have their Chicago terminal signal engineer fly to New York. She sends out a crew to recover whatever copper is available on the Hudson Line despite not having the permission of the Unification Board to abandon it. She asks that all available laborers come to the terminal and operate the switches and signals manually. And one of the men who comes is John Galt! After giving the orders, Dagny walks down the tunnel near the vault where the motor is stored, knowing that John will follow her. He does, and they take each other brutally on a pile of sandbags. In the afterglow, Dagny discovers that John was the mysterious person who visited her at the John Galt Line’s offices that night. He tells her he knew about her affair with Hank, and he admits he has been an anonymous track worker at the terminal for the past twelve years, ever since leaving Twentieth Century Motors.

Dagny and John state their love for each other. She intends to stay because she thinks the looters are cracking. John knows they aren’t, but she needs to see that for herself. He asks her not to search him out, but when she is ready to leave for Galt’s Gulch, she should chalk a dollar sign on the pedestal of Nat Taggart’s statue. He will be there for her within 24 hours. John leaves to become a human lamppost in the warrens of the Taggart Terminal.

At an adjoining table, a diner reacts violently to the d’Anconia Copper destruction, saying, “We can’t permit it to be true.”

I have spoken with people like this. They're real. They say that it's not fair to have intelligence tests for voters, and I agree with them. It's not fair to people who think and produce if morons are allowed to infiltrate the government.

Where does this denial of reality have a parallel in today’s society?

Everywhere. I never finished college, and I never will. A modern degree is a disgusting parody of education and intelligence. Anyone can get one; actually knowing anything is optional. My mother inadvertently taught me about this game. She still believes the socialist bullshit from 1950s England - schools are bad if they make students memorize facts and good if they teach them "how to think."

It is not possible to teach someone how to think. It is innate. We can no more teach people to think than we can teach them to digest food. What we have instead done is produce idiots who have a piece of paper that says they're not idiots. A simple enough lie, but even an idiot can point at his worthless degree and reply, "But you're degree looks just like mine." When we tell everybody that they can have a college degree, a college degree becomes as significant as nice car or a big tv. If you can pay for it, you can have it.

Is it coincidence that astrologers have a larger audience than physicists? It is the real consequence of this practice.

"His opinion is just as valid as yours."

Every time I hear this, I want to strangle whoever said it. No, his opinion is not as valid as mine, nor is it valid at all. My opinion is based on the most scrupulous examination of facts that I can manage, and if I haven't got facts, my opinion is that I don't know. My opinion is not that I'll be a civil engineer today, I was a cardiologist yesterday, and I'll be a Supreme Court Justice tomorrow. Our education system does not teach the following extremely important lesson: "You don't know what you're talking about so shut up." It might hurt somebody's feelings. When one of these idiots does something stupid and kills somebody, we can take comfort in his self esteem. Kee McFarlane leaps to mind.

California threatens to secede. As things get worse, will the bonds of Union sunder due to a central government that cannot perform the tasks it has promised the people?

People don't much care for government in this country. Even when it hands them welfare checks, they lash out at 'the man.' Unintended Consequences is an interesting divergent argument to Atlas Shrugged. My opinion is that we would get Unintended Consequences somewhere on the way to Atlas Shrugged. We have been handed a pile of violations of common sense and humanity by our government, passing on 50 years now. We got it because of genuine wrongs that were redressed in improper fashion. IMO, Martin Luther King did more damage to this country than anyone in history. Imagine how the United States would be if, instead of whining to the courts, a few KKK members were found swinging from the same trees they used to torture blacks. You can fight your own battles or you can go whining to mommy and daddy. The second strategy will never work. Bill Cosby observed that adults aren't interested in justice, they want QUIET!

</rant>

Yes, I purposefully wrote 'you're' instead of 'your.'

The courts of the Fair Play men were often held at a place near what is now known as Chatham's Mill, in Clinton County. But it is doubtful if they had any regular place of meeting, or stated time for the transaction of business. The time of meeting was brought about by the exigencies that might arise. The court could be convened at any place within the territory over which it exercised jurisdiction, and on short notice, to try any case that might be on hand. '

In the ideal world, this is how things should be done. But we don't live in the ideal world, and a system like this lends itself to brutality more often than it does honesty. Parliamentary procedure forbids such acts in a modern organization. As soon as whoever is in charge decides that his ego is more important than his principles, we get the just causes listed in the Declaration of Independence:

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

The Constitution addresses these issues in Article III, Section 2:

The trial of all crimes, except in cases of impeachment, shall be by jury; and such trial shall be held in the state where the said crimes shall have been committed; but when not committed within any state, the trial shall be at such place or places as the Congress may by law have directed.

Section 3. Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.

Amendments IV, V, VI, VII, and VIII were written to restrict whims of courts. Habeas Corpus was never intended to allow an obviously guilty man to game the system. It was established as the right of noblemen to force the authorities to explain why he was, " . . .was immediately placed in a canoe and rowed to the mouth of Lycoming Creek, the boundary line of civilization, and there sent adrift down the river. '

It demands that authority produce records, and justify itself. Why? Because I don't trust them.

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