Let’s slip into our Louis Vuitton shoes and take a gilded stroll through Manhattan.  We begin downtown, where Goldman Sachs, that exemplar of 0.001 percent America, reaps a multimillion-dollar tax break for its office tower, a deal accompanied by a multimillion-dollar landscaping clause. (You expectedLloyd C. Blankfein to yank weeds, maybe?)

In Midtown, we can draw money from an A.T.M. in the richly subsidized Bank of America tower, and skip over to Ernst & Young, where public tax dollars have underwritten a smashing skyscraper.  Now off to Yankee Stadium, where parking, seats, grossly overpriced hot dogs and pitchers all owe a debt to hundreds of millions in tax subsidies.

Our tour complete, we loop back to City Hall, where with luck, we may hear our billionaire mayor declaim on a ruinous proposal that several thousand low-wage workers could receive a wage of $10 an hour if they labor in developments irrigated with city tax subsidies.

BRIDGEPORT ---- A significant new multi-faith organization, united to fight such social ills as unfair banking practices, high health insurance costs and abusive treatment of immigrants, got a rousing start Wednesday night as about 1,500 packed an East End church to incorporate CONECT.

The name stands for "Congregations Organized for a New Connecticut." It's a multi-faith amalgam of 25 houses of worship in Fairfield and New Haven counties, encompassing Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims and Unitarians. Organizers said that CONECT might eventually span the state. The event took place at the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit on Union Avenue, which was packed to the rafters with supporters.

As far as the District’s local political spectacle goes, it’s awful hard to beat a Washington Interfaith Network “action.”

It’s bully democracy in the best sense, with politicians forced to stand in front of huge swaths of voters and answer simple questions with a yes or no.

Such was the scene Monday night atMetropolitan AME Church, where WIN held what it called its  largest action to date, packing the historic downtown building to the rafters with an estimated 2,000 members representing dozens of churches, community groups and unions — perhaps the city’s best-organized political counterbalance to business interests.

When Shehlla Khan's husband became ill, it fell on her to take their three children to the pool. But for Khan, who is Muslim, the task was difficult.

The Columbia resident said she was concerned about people watching her swim in the conservative, cover-all dress required by Islamic dress codes, and thinking: "What's wrong? Why can't you take it off?"

So Khan, 39, brought the issue up with members of her Dar Al-Taqwa mosque in Ellicott City. The mosque, along with members of a faith-based county group, People Acting Together in Howard, met with the Columbia Association to create a twice-weekly, women-only swim time, a trial that is scheduled to be announced Tuesday.

More than two years ago, on a brilliant July morning, we were two of about 350 New Yorkers who took to Wall Street to decry what we called "the recent economic collapse and current depression... devastating scores of millions of Americans."

We were from every corner of the metropolitan area, African American, Hispanic and white. Our delegations visited each major Wall Street bank. At the same moment, organized citizens in Charlotte, Washington, Chicago, Boston and London were doing the same thing. It was a coordinated campaign led by the pastors, rabbis, imams and lay people in hundreds of religious and civic institutions associated with the Metro Industrial Areas Foundation.