Douglas Rushkoff vs. Wall Street

[Michael Bailey]

>
> anyway, that's what I conceptualize Wall Street as - they're sellin' stuff
> and makin' money but it ain't any too great of stuff imho and there's like
> this mutual disinterest...
>
> now, a nice 4% tax free muni bond, that's another story!
>
'
I mean, the county builds a concert hall, the band has a place to play, they
pay a reasonable return and it's all good

contrast that with this other idea: you give somebody a chunk of money that
they spend right away and in return you supposedly own a piece of them
forever. absurd on the face of it.

so you're either out of the loop, which feels wrong, or else you become an
activist stockholder and a pain in everybody's butt that's trying to do the
job and still have a life worth enjoying, because if not why bother? and
they have to defend every little thing they do and there goes Fezziwig's
Christmas party

  then you allow somebody to persuade you that some absurdly high rate of
return which depends on unsustainable growth and miserly cost-cutting (ie,
crap wages, rush-rush quality degradation, predatory competition) is in fact
attainable and you expect that as strenuously as any of Reagan's fabled
welfare queens expected their government checks

just seems like a lot of grief

and then to achieve those absurdly high rates of return, or at least to seem
to, they do all this bundling and derivative stuff so you're buying Milo
Minderbinder's chocolate covered cotton - it's amazing there's so many
people so into it, imho
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