by Coincidentally, today I’m going out to Long Island to visit the family of my brother, and my brother works for a well-known brokerage house. His daughter organized a benefit to raise money to put up a historical marker noting where Rachmaninoff once lived in Centerport. They’re putting on a concert of his music, so it should be good, I’ve always been a fan. But I found his music for the piano difficult to play! You need big hands, Rachmaninoff had very big hands.
Yesterday I bumped into the Wall Street protestors heading towards Union Square. Their message wasn’t very clear to me. But there are so many things wrong with so many things it’s almost like you could shout any words at all and still hit on an identifiable problem.
Clearly you have a great family.
As someone who was a young adult in the 60s, I must say that marches have taken on a different character.
I see the Wall Street march as kind of a combination of the harmonic convergence meets SDS through the vehicle of performance art. I noticed that they even announced participation in yoga and tai chi.
I think maybe today we have generations that have been taught ideology, but not the reality of things that are not ideological, like the financial markets. Sure, governments try to press in with their various ideological biases, but money does not have an ideology. If Greece falls off the planet, then the financial markets are going to go to hell irrespective of ideological biases.
I’d like to see more education time devoted to financial realities and less to whose version of idealism will run the galaxy.
It will be very interesting to watch these kids take on corporatism. I wonder if any real change will happen? Maybe we can hope for changes in a few finacial laws, but believe it or not, not enough American are hurting to affect any real change like we had in the 1930’s where FDR saved capitalism.
The media has been mocking these kids and I hope my post doesn’t come across as mocking.
Also, I need a financial education. I really know nothing about finance and economics.
Stacy, I could use a better financial education myself. Although I am in the financial field in my day job.
Wall Street has already been chastised. Lehman Brothers is dead, Bear-Stearns is dead, along with the others.
The thing is, let’s say you discover some corporation is poisoning the water of a river in the Amazon or they are sexist or racist. Then protesting outside their corporate headquarters makes some sense.
But Wall Street is primarily a gigantic marketplace.
So this protest is like someone deciding that Betty Crocker was doing something bad, and so they went into a gigantic supermarket yelling about the exchange of food for money. It would not even target Betty Crocker.
My advice would be to ask Finney what he thinks about it and see if his position is supported by Buddy. That’s what I would go with.
Stacy, No, I don’t think you were mocking at all. There are so many problem. I just wish I was more hopeful. These are not good times.
michael
I’ve been hear a lot of support for the protesters lately. This one cop, a deputy inspector no less, has been pepper spraying them. It’s insane.