Post 726 - March 4, 2025

When they first announced that George Clooney would appear on Broadway in a stage adaptation of the film, Good Night, and Good Luck, I, without even thinking about it, just knew that it was never going to be something that I would get to see. It has money-grab written all over it.

Mind you, if there was ever a time to present this play it is right now. If it follows the movie, and I can’t imagine why it wouldn’t, it’s the story of the journalist Edward R. Murrow standing up to the threats and the spread of disinformation back in the 1950s from and by Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Yesterday, I walked past the Winter Garden Theatre whose marquee is emblazoned with Clooney’s shadowy profile and the play’s title. The Winter Garden is where Barbra Streisand did Funny Girl. It isn’t the kind of theatre in which you want to do a contained, thoughtful play. It does, however, have fifteen hundred seats so, given Clooney’s popularity, the producers and, I presume, Clooney, himself, stand to rake in a fortune. I looked at the billboard and realized how completely I’d put it in the “not for me” category. Strictly, of course, because of what I imagined the price of tickets would be.

A block or two later, as I was approaching Times Square, I decided that I was being unfair. I went onto the Ticketmaster website to see for myself what a ticket to a preview performance would actually cost. Maybe I was judging them all too harshly.

There were still seats available for the Wednesday night show in the second week of previews. Ticketmaster will often make it look as if a performance is selling out by withholding blocks of tickets. This forces buyers to buy into the less desirable sections of the orchestra rather than having them grab all the good seats in the middle. When tickets become scarce, the producers can then jack up the prices even more.

I discovered that during the second week of performances, I could get an orchestra seat near the back on that Wednesday for $799.00. If Michael and I both went, that night out would cost us $1600.00. The total listed is less than that. Its only $1598.00 but those two dollars off seem absurdly inconsequential. We would have to get down there, after all, and also get something for dinner. By the time we headed home, we would have had to spend closer to two thousand dollars than I would ever consider spending for a night out.

There are plenty of things that flash across my awareness during any given day that I don’t take in because I know I can’t afford them. Advertisements for luxury apartments and homes is a perfect example. The pictures of vast skylit living rooms look like fairy tales to me. I have no burning desire to live in one of them, so I don’t dwell on them. I see the pictures but they don’t settle into my brain.

Theatre, however, is the medium I have devoted decades of my life to. That it has started to get pixelated out in my consciousness as something so far out of my price range that I don’t even consider it as an option, I find alarming.

When will eggs start to disappear from my consciousness?

Today is the day that the Republicans get the tariffs against Mexico, Canada, and China they all voted for. Here’s a brief list of where we are likely to see price increases.

In 2023, we imported 67% of all the vegetables we consumed in the United States from Mexico. We also imported 47% percent of the fruits and nuts we all eat. You might say that because of the current administration’s cancellation of US Aid overseas the food that we were exporting we could now keep for ourselves. All well and good, but we aren’t talking about the same stuff. Because of climate change, much of what we have been bringing in doesn’t grow as well here as it does down south. Mexico is a wetter place than here.

Also in 2023, we brought in 20% of our vegetables from Canada. Potatoes lead that list. 1.39 billion pounds of them came across our northern border. We also bring in tons of cucumbers, berries, tomatoes, and peppers.

From China, we get consumer electronics. Cellphones, televisions, laptops, video game consoles, monitors, and all the bits and bobs that power them or add components to them.

Here’s a somewhat staggering statistic. 99% of all footwear bought in the United States is imported. 56% of our shoes, boots, and slippers come from China.

Michael and I don’t own a car. In New York City, we don’t need one. Most of our cars are made in North America, but not only in the United States. Canada and Mexico make many of their parts. A Michigan-based think tank called the Anderson Group estimates that the newly imposed tariffs will eventually raise the cost of car production by $3500.00 to $12.000.00 each.

Car components must often cross borders several times before they wind up inside a working automobile. For example, powdered aluminum is sent from Tennessee to Pennsylvania where it is formed into rods. The rods are then sent to Canada where they are shaped and polished. On their trip up there, they will now face a 25% tax levied against them.

Once the rods are completed, they are sent to Mexico where they are incorporated into pistons. The pistons then get sent to Michigan, after getting taxed another 25% at the Mexican border. In Michigan, they are assembled into engines, put into cars, and sold to the consumer.

Eventually, production of all these things could begin to develop here in our country. Before that happens, though, we will need to build more factories and train more people. That will take years. It will also take a lot of capital. Where will that initial outlay of money come from?

Us.

Whatever way you parse these tariffs, and whatever benefits they might eventually add to our country’s overall domestic manufacturing output, the cost of these changes is going to be borne by the American consumer. We are going to wind up paying more for just about everything.

At the same time, these tariffs are being implemented, the Republicans are gunning for Medicaid and Social Security payments. The Social Security Administration is in the DOGE team’s crosshairs. They have announced that they plan to cut about seven thousand people from their workforce.

Seventy million citizens of the United States of America rely on their monthly checks just to get by.

Martin O’Malley, who was a former SSA commissioner told CNBC yesterday, "Ultimately, you're going to see the system collapse and an interruption of benefits, I believe you will see that within the next 30 to 90 days." He warned those who receive benefits currently to “start saving now.”

Start saving now? With what? Many people are barely making enough from these checks to get by as it is. When the price of their food starts to rise, they will have even less than they have now on which to survive. Save?

We have all paid money into the Social Security system our entire working lives. The money that is sent out by the agencies isn’t a handout. It is all our money – money we worked hard for which the government promised to hold for us, so we’d have it when we needed it after retirement. Cutting these payments is nothing more than outright theft.

Canada, in retaliation for these new tariffs, has now imposed tariffs of its own against goods it imports from the United States. Canada could lose as many as a million jobs if consumers stop being able to buy what will soon come to be known as luxury products.

The Premier of Ontario Doug Ford has posited the possibility of cutting off exports of nickel to the United States as well as the electricity they currently provide to over six million Americans. In his own words, "If they want to try to annihilate Ontario, I will do anything, including cutting off their energy, with a smile on my face."

China has now also imposed taxes on all US imports to their country.

I cannot see how all this makes the billionaires behind it richer. Tesla’s stock has taken a nosedive. They just had their worst month in three years. Most of Musk’s worth is on paper. In late December, Bloomberg estimated Musk’s worth at $486 billion. He is now, by the same estimate worth only $351 billion. That is a loss of $135 billion in just two months.

If this is about retaliation against the federal agencies that have gotten in his way in the past, he seems to be cutting off his nose to spite his face.

A guy named Shane Almgren wrote a piece explaining the connection between Elon Musk, the Vice President, Peter Thiel, and a guy named Curtis Yarvin.

I posted a much longer extract of this on my Facebook page yesterday, but it may have been too painful and horrifying for most people to get through. In a nutshell, back in the 1990s, Musk started an online website that allowed people to make financial transactions with each other outside of established banks. Peter Thiel was trying to do the same thing. Musk and Thiel decided not to compete, but rather to join and together they created PayPal.

Thiel once gave a talk at Yale. There he met the Vice President who was, at the time, attending law school. They fell in love and Thiel eventually helped the Vice President form his own finance company.

Early on the Vice President was a harsh critic of the President. Thiel brought the Vice President down to Mar-a-Lago, had him kiss the ring, and all was forgiven. Thiel then bankrolled the Vice President’s Senate run and, in the process, bought himself a United States Senator who would do his bidding.

Curtis Yarvin is a tech guy who founded a philosophical movement called Dark Enlightenment. He, and they, believe that the solution to society’s current woes is for us, as a nation, to commit suicide. Yarvin believes the nation’s universities and media have conspired to brainwash us all. He advocates the leader of our country operating like an all-powerful CEO-monarch.

Yarvin, Thiel, Musk, and the Vice President have been friends since 2009.

Billionaires don’t care about the price of vegetables. They certainly don’t care about paying two thousand bucks for a night out the theatre. I cannot imagine any of them would have any interest in seeing a play with George Clooney, though, let alone one advocating against the suppression of free speech. Democracy is in their way.

The President is just along for the ride with these guys. He is this quartet’s useful idiot. For the moment, anyway. Nothing will surprise me less than to see him disappear and get out of their way.

Lord have mercy. We are in it.

It’s a shame that tickets for Good Night, and Good Luck are so expensive because it is probably something all of us should be able to see. Luckily, the movie version is still available. David Strathairn got an Oscar nomination for the role that Clooney is now playing. It’s available to stream on Apple TV, Amazon Prime, and a couple others. It looks as if you might have to pay $3.99, but compared to the two grand you would need to pay to see it at the Winter Garden, it’s a bargain.

I may curl up on the couch with some cut veggies and hummus and do just that.

While I still can.