Oh, Tracey Ullman is totally fun-nutters and I didn't even get to print her recreation of introducing Perez Hilton to Karl Rove, which was a delight. Also I got to quote Bongwater. Also she asked after Emily Gould. Wacky all around!
In answer to your question: Nope! I really don't care if I have to march with misguided Libertarians and Trustafarians and other poorly-clad people who insanely think the World Bank is going to issue a new pan-North American coin or that Ayn Rand was right or that Lyndon LaRouche is anything but a wingnut moron or that beating on drums and playing hacky sack is an awesome thing to do. I do not really care about Leonard Peltier or the Kurds or the World Zionist Movement or whatever the hell the leftists are all lathered up about these days. I don't care if I have to be arm in arm with unwashed pronoun-averse gender separatists or weird so-right-they're-left and vice versa people from Vermont in clogs. I will wear a tie or maybe a kicky preppy polo shirt, weather depending, plus I have to stop by Christie's in the morning to see this fabulous Hockney painting first. The point is: the structure and the effects of the financial bailouts are entirely wrong. These mistakes are disgusting. There is very little benefit accruing to the working people either in the U.S. or the world, and I wonder if there will be much at all.
Apart from issues of housing and foreclosure and personal credit (which, remember those? People in America with mortgages and stuff?), the surrounding effects here in New York City, on an individual level, are terrible. For one, our poor mayor has been duped, and doesn't have the balls to deal with it—either that or he likes things this way. Companies like Goldman Sachs already receive tens of millions of dollars in incentives from the city—and hundreds of millions from federal programs—yet the city has no recourse or influence whatsoever as the company trims headcounts for what is, by my count, the fourth time now in a year. Companies like GS, and they are only one small example, are actually creating, through increasing unemployment, the recession that they claim to be battling, and at a time when they are making plenty of money—particularly as we keep giving them more. Now we have made sure, repeatedly, that AIG is able to pay off its insured trades, never mind that insurance companies sometimes get hosed, particularly when they are bottom-feeding off a market of financial instruments that should never have existed. (See also AIG's financial products unit chief in 2007: "there are some morbid questions we get about what happens if the world rolls off its axis and the world goes to hell in a hand basket." Oh?) And by stuffing AIG with cash, we have therefore kept happy companies like GS— companies with units that were too stupid, to be charitable, or too selfish, to recognize that they had divisions operating in an untenable fantasy market. Except they probably did recognize that! As it was an untenable fantasy market that they were going to make money from no matter what happened, because they're not stupid. Instead they made the money going and then coming. What's more, the world of fantasy markets may become exponentially worse quite soon.
And now, they have begun firing the receptionists. Job losses in New York City over the last year? 32,300 jobs in business services, centered in "administrative and support services," disappeared. That's a lot of unemployed ladies who are no longer taking the E train in from Queens in their white sneakers. The fratboys in the finance units tossed them under those tracks.
So don't be afraid of the unwashed masses. I don't really like them either! Bring a friend. Bring a baby. Bring a sandwich for me! It's in your best interests. Join us now, or join us in the Thunderdome bread line later.
The MTV biopic of Pedro Zamora airs tomorrow. Pedro came on The Real World in the late early 90s and used it to his own ends astoundingly well. And here is my sidebar on current Real World guy Chet Cannon, who is the Mormon one, and who is not being as successful in his social messaging as some of his current and past colleagues, because, well, now is not a great time to elect yourself a spokesfellow for the LDS Church just after it bankrolled the Prop 8 opposition and all, just saying!
Also, I wouldn't link to this out of shyness, but I need to say somewhere that I am willing to pay $25 and an acknowledgment to anyone who comes up with the right title for this.
I was never a Rage Against the Machine fan—too much adolescent boyness for me—but I found former member Tom Morello pleasingly dry for a leftist. (Also they cut most of my bitchy asides, which is surely the correct editorial policy, but the result is that I do sound a little fanboy or something.)
Last night's Battlestar Galactica event at the United Nations was bananas. Here's Eddie Olmos, who asked for U.N. intervention in Mexico (in fact? strongly agree!); here's the delightful Mary McDonnell, for you BSG geeks. The latter is not a spoiler but is definitely a good thing to read before the series finale airs on Friday.
This Friday. April 3. At 1 p.m. Wall Street and Broadway. You are cordially invited to join me at a civil demonstration against the failed bailout of failed (and the inexplicable bailout of not at all failed!) commercial institutions.
