Hitting the Bricks

There's an oncoming visual effects protest planned for the Oscars:

Daniel Lay, who runs the VFX Soldier blog, and others are hammering out details for a demonstration

Visual effects workers are planning a demonstration in Los Angeles next month to protest foreign tax subsidies they argue are destroying their industry, TheWrap has learned.

The event is being billed as the March in March and will be tied to the Oscars. It comes after a similar grass-roots protest drew more than 400 people at last year’s Academy Awards.

“We’re trying to focus on the destructive impact of the subsidies race,” Daniel Lay, who writes the influential blog VFXSoldier, told TheWrap. “We want to broaden it to include musicians and grips and others who are being drastically effected. It’s great that there’s an Oscar party going on, but a lot of us are being hurt by this subsidy.” ...

The thing about subsidies, they help a Chosen Few. And those few are (mostly) Sony, the Disney Co., Viacom, News Corp., and Time-Warner, Inc.

Canada, New Zealand, New York, Georgia, North Carolina, Great Britain and scattered others wave free money at our fine, entertainment conglomerates and those corporations come running the way hogs run to slop. (Free enterprise, fuck yeah!) And visual effects workers, animators, modelers, riggers and assorted employees are gifted with sub-par wages for which their corporate masters are reimbursed. Sadly, the jobs usually don't last a hell of a long time, but that's small price to pay if Hollywood can be bribed lured to your geographic locality.

Such a deal.

In most cases, the math doesn't really work out for taxpayers, but large corporations are happy to take the generous doles being handed out. For they are people, you know, and have their needs*.

* Higher profit margins.