Rubin Relents

Now he promotes capitalism

"Money and financial interests will capture the passion of the '80s." So predicts Jerry Rubin, the counterculture clown of the '60s ("Never trust any one over 30&"). Autres temps, autres moeurs. Thirteen years ago, in protest against American capitalism, Rubin threw dollar bills from the visitors' gallery of the New York Stock Exchange, causing an unseemly, trade-halting scramble on the floor below. As a leader of the Yippies, he mocked the U.S. political system in 1968 by trying to run a pig for President. As one of the Chicago Seven defendants, he was convicted of in citing the riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention; the conviction was over turned on appeal. In the '70s he ran the gauntlet of self-help exercises: Esalen to est, yoga to bioenergetics. Admits Rubin: "I'm very good at predicting trends."

Now, Rubin says, "I know that I can be more effective today wearing a suit and tie." And so, as he proclaimed last week on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times, "Welcome, Wall Street, here I come! Let's make millions of dollars together."

Still touchingly enthusiastic and naive at 42, Rubin is a $36,000-a-year securities analyst at John Muir & Co. He says that his task is investigating "companies of the future," such as solar-power firms, and "finding the financing for the socially aware risk takers who will become tomorrow's titans." But his boss, Research Director Ray Dirks, expects Rubin to provide the company with something else. Says Dirks: "A lot of people who were around in the '60s have matured, and some of them want to invest. We can use somebody like him."

Today Rubin talks a line that would cheer his generation's fathers. Confides he: "Money is power. Information is power. One of the reasons that the rich become richer and the poor poorer in America is that the wealthy can afford the financial information supplied by lawyers and accountants."

Expressing his conversion in words that would have been heartily applauded by delegates to the Republican National Convention in Detroit, he declares: "The challenge for American capitalism in the '80s is to bring back the entrepreneurial spirit. America needs a revitalization of the small-business spirit. Individual entrepreneurship can create the new work ethic that is so desperately needed. Let's make capitalism work for everybody." Autres temps...

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