Realities*

Above: TAG newsletter masthead, circa 1993, by Comrade Tom Sito, worker hero of the most glorious socialist cartoon revolution. (Click on it to make it BIGGER.)

Of a Sunday evening, I take various comment threads and weave them into one terrific Trotskyite tapestry:

I'm curious what happens to the people that don't agree to go on call. Sure they can't make ya do it -wink wink- because they are a union shop after all and if they made you work OT with out paying you..then that would be bad.

It's simple, really. If you have the leverage, you can safely refuse to go "on call" and management won't make a peep. And if not, not.

In the mid-nineties, Disney Feature Animation abandoned "on call" because the crew hated it (and experienced talent was scarce.)

Today, there are few leads at the Mouse House who have declined to work on call ... times have changed! (Because of labor regulation changes by the Bush Administration, more employees now fall into the "exempt from overtime" categories and are therefore eligible to be on call. Such a deal.) ...

If Warren [Buffett} was so right, and Disney so right in buying Pixar et alia, why is the stock price today under $28 when it was over $33 in 1998?

That's minus 15% or so in more than a decade - one hell of business.

The entire stock market has been relatively flat and/or negative for over a decade. But as for Disney specifically, Eisner and Jeffrey K. roared in during 1984 and put the place on steroids: jacking up admissions to Disneyland and disney World (big profits there) reaching out to mainstream Hollywood filmmakers. (The early live-action films were made on strict budgets; Disney Television Animation was started, with high-margin results.)

Growth and profits leveled off in the late nineties; Eisner left early in the new century. Disney's problem now is it's a "mature business" and there are few un-mined veins of riches (the parks, the animation library) left to exploit. So Disney is doing what every entertainment conglomerate is doing: buying up franchises and working to control costs. If it gets on a roll making better pictures, so much the better. But Surrogates doesn't seem to be it.

I'd support Democrats if they were Kennedy Democrats, that's John Kennedy Democrats, not Teddy.. .

Jack Kennedy, in his time, was denounced by the hard right as a communist appeaser and a traitor (this sound familiar?) Today, of course, he's praised by some conservatives as a tax cutter, and Joe Leiberman cites him as the reason he got into politics.

Kennedy wasn't far left, but he was "liberal," with a wide streak of pragmatism borne of classical cynicism. (See Richard Reeves' clear-eyed biography, "President Kennedy: Profile of Power," published by Simon and Schuster in 1993.).

Geez, how did the world of animation that I love attract so many socialist? Sigh..

That's an easy one. You visited a union blog. You know, The Animation Guild? One of those nasty, labor organizations that advocates socialistic type things like health care, overtime after eight hours, higher wages, better working conditions?

You come to a commie, redistributionist web site, what do you expect?

* Realities as Comrade Hulett sees them. You, of course, might think that Tom Delay holds the bright torch of Truth. Have a fine and productive workweek, capitalist wage slaves!