Lopeziana Manila

Google Doodle Celebrates the Great Mexican Artist Diego Rivera’s 125th Birthday! + “Diego Rivera and the One Percent”

From Inquirer.net:

Worlds away from and yet intimately related to downtown Manhattan’s Zucotti Park—epicenter of the Occupy Wall Street movement—is midtown’s modernist, sleek Museum of Modern Art, or MoMA, as most people refer to it. It was founded in 1929—the year of the Great Depression—by some of the richest people on the planet at the time, including Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. The Rockefeller clan continues to be part of the moneyed elite, old-guard members of the one percent that the 99 percenters (that’s you and me) regularly rail against.

Of the two-and-a-half-acre park, centrally located in the city’s financial district and a stone’s throw away from the World Trade Center site, one might say, as many are wont to do, that the park lies at the heart of Wall Street. If that’s true, then it might be the only heart Wall Street has—and one that very much wishes to paradoxically give it heart failure. Protesters, who come from all walks of life, will I am sure be quick to point out that Wall Street has no heart, for it responds not to claims on human sympathy nor to pleas for compassion or justice but simply and only to the demands of the market. God may be great, but as Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street would doubtless nod vigorously in affirmation, the market is even greater. Apart from uttering those memorable three words (“Greed is good”), Gekko had some choice lines to say, and they still ring true: “The richest one percent owns half our country’s wealth, five trillion dollars,” though the last aforementioned sum is today probably much greater.

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