Stickybuffalo.com

I check Yahoo mail a couple of times a day, and their splash screen links five or so AP headlines that seem to change throughout the day. For the last several days, there has always been at least one story up about the grad student who was murdered at Yale. Yesterday, there was also a story about a criminally insane murderer who escaped from his asylum day-trip to a county fair, and that he’s still at large. In a normal world, that would be fucking huge news, since an actual danger exists (he was believed to be heading toward his family, who were uniformly puzzled why he was allowed to go on the trip), and since it seems so much like a horror movie. Instead, the focus of the story was procedural: how such a person could end up at a county fair in the first place. The AP’s story, in other words, wasn’t that a crazy murderer was on the loose, but that the gubmint has failed yet again.

And, of course, that story is already down the memory hole, and there’s nothing about it on Yahoo today. After all, the woman the escapee killed was elderly, and we all know that it’s not news unless the victim was young and pretty.

so i do this thing sometimes, for perverse reasons i don’t fully understand, where i email spammers back. i doubt anybody ever reads them, but i get some jollies out of it.

i think this is the first time i’ve written one of these emails back to a list that i willingly signed up for.

stimulus:

from Mitch Stewart, BarackObama.com info@barackobama.com
reply-to info@barackobama.com
to josh@stickybuffalo.com
date Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 11:05 AM
subject Now, it’s our turn

On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 11:05 AM, Mitch Stewart, BarackObama.com wrote:

>
> Joshua –
>
> Last night, President Obama called on our representatives to pass health reform that brings stability and security to Americans who have insurance, affordable coverage to those who don’t, and reins in the cost of care.
>
> Now, it’s our turn. After last night’s speech, members of Congress have no doubt about where the President stands. But to win this fight, we must show that Americans from every state and every background support his plan — and we need Congress to do the same.
>
> Click here to call your representatives, and then tell us how it went. According to our records, you live in Iowa’s 2nd congressional district. Please call:
>
> Sen. Chuck Grassley’s Cedar Rapids office at (319) 363-6832
> Sen. Tom Harkin’s Cedar Rapids office at (319) 365-4504
> Rep. Dave Loebsack’s Iowa City office at (319) 351-0789
>
>
> (Not your representatives? Click here to look yours up.)
>
> Call your representatives, and tell whoever answers where you are from and that you watched the President’s address.
>
> Then tell them that you want your representatives to support the President’s plan, ask them where they stand — and thank them if they already clearly support it.
>
> Don’t forget to click here to let us know what they said.
>
> Hundreds of thousands of folks will be calling, so please try again if you get a busy signal.
>
> This movement has brought us to a historic moment where reform is within reach. Now your energy and commitment are needed to get us the rest of the way.
>
> Please call today:
>
> http://my.barackobama.com/CongressCall
>
> Mitch
>
> Mitch Stewart
> Director
> Organizing for America
>
>Donate
>
>
> Paid for by Organizing for America, a project of the Democratic National Committee — 430 South Capitol Street SE, Washington, D.C. 20003. This communication is not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.
>
> This email was sent to: josh@stickybuffalo.com
>
> To unsubscribe, go to: http://my.barackobama.com/unsubscribe

response:

From: josh@stickybuffalo.com
Date: Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 12:39 PM
Subject: No, it’s still HIS turn
To: info@barackobama.com

Mitch,

You guys have some solid brass cojones on you. You follow up the defining capitulation of Obama’s first (only?) term by trying to rally the faithful, mindless beasts of burden that we are, once more unto the breach. For what? You just punted on the one proposal that had a snowball’s chance in hell of addressing the problem he so eloquently outlined last night, a proposal he campaigned and won on — which, by the way, still has broad majority support among the public, despite the summer’s barrage of insane demagoguery that you guys utterly failed to anticipate or respond to.

If the President isn’t willing to fight, or even put up the pretense of willingness to fight, for the public option, where does that leave us? Where does he get off asking “us” to sacrifice more time and energy to help America swallow whatever nuggets of “reform” might be coaxed from the suppurating, campaign-contribution-lubricated asshole of Max Baucus? Maybe if we work real hard we can get ourselves mandated into buying private insurance with no provision for making it affordable — that’s one big bowl of shit I can’t wait to dig into! I’ll be sure to call my congressman right away.

Brass fucking balls. If only you’d show the same testicular fortitude in confronting the insurance lobby and the shrieking idiots, instead of pissing on the people who worked to get you elected, maybe we’d get some real reform. Until that day comes, good luck with this turd of a presidency — I’m sitting out 2012.

Josh

P.S. My favorite touch is how you remembered to include the “Donate” link at the bottom of the email. You guys are friggin’ adorable! Sorry, I need that money to pay my exponentially increasing health insurance premiums.

I stumbled into a really interesting presentation recently on the intertrons while researching the idea of “Cradle to Cradle” design. Among other things, it takes issue with the idea of recycling, in its current form, which is really just slowing down the process of waste production as goods are “downcycled” into lower-quality products. Wending my way to the video below led me past something I’d seen before, the “Eco roof” at Ford’s Dearborn, Michigan Truck Plant. As you’ll see in the presentation, installing a 10-acre grass roof saved Ford nearly 40 million dollars in the construction of an equally effective water treatment plant. Perhaps a good intro is the following quote from the presentation, on why McDonough’s book is printed on a fully recyclable polymer that can be recycled into another book made of the same polymer.

as Margaret Atwood pointed out, “we write our history on the skin of fish with the blood of bears.” And with so much polymer, what we really need is technical nutrition, and to use something as elegant as a tree — imagine this design assignment: Design something that makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water, accrues solar energy as fuel, makes complex sugars and food, creates microclimates, changes colors with the seasons and self-replicates. Well, why don’t we knock that down and write on it?

-William McDonough on why his book, Cradle to Cradle, isn’t printed on paper.

Here’s a juicy quote from some corporate tax lawyer from a recent AP story on how Senate Republicans are blocking efforts to tax the AIG bonuses (surprise, surprise). It appears in the context of a discussion of the possibility that legislation preventing bonuses will lead to corporations raising salaries to match what employees lose in bonuses.

Here it is:

“‘If the vast majority of bonuses become fixed salaries that would harm the institutions because they would have higher fixed costs,’ Willens said. ‘What happens if the bank suffers through a poor year? It has all these fixed obligations they have to meet. That’s the beauty of the bonuses.’”

Um, I’d say the bank has suffered through a pretty poor year. A year so poor that it needed to accept billions of dollars of government bailout money to stop it from utterly collapsing. And yet it still felt obligated to pay out these ludicrous bonuses. How is that ANY DIFFERENT from what he’s talking about?

Seriously, how does this guy have a job?

So, John McCain’s campaign has been in trouble for the last week or so, as Palin’s popularity has plummeted, his bestest buddy turns out to be (surprise, surprise) collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars for nothing other than assuring that investment banks will have inside access to a McCain White House, and he and pretty much everyone around him have been vomiting gaffes as if their common sense had been up all night shotgunning ipecac. The economic situation others here have been covering well (and I’ve been avoiding, out of sheer terror) is turning into McCain’s worst enemy.

And now, he’s suspending his campaign until some sort of bandaid is signed into law. Nobody appears to be fooled by this gambit.

So now, I ask, with all due sincerity, is there any way in the world for McCain to win this election?

like me, you may still be unclear on a lot of the details of the current economic clusterfuck. but here’s one fact you can easily wrap your head around, even if its implications are nothing short of mind-boggling:

at $700 billion, the bailout so far has exceeded the cost of the entire iraq war. 

did you get that? in one week, we’ve spent more money buying bad debt from wall street than we have in five years of all-out adventurist profligacy in the middle east. remember all those no-bid reconstruction contracts? remember the pallette-loads of cash that simply disappeared into thin air? the millions spent blowing up infrastructure and then rebuilding it? the bribes doled out to tribal leaders in anbar to ensure that “the surge worked”? chump change. drops in the bucket compared to last week’s emergency measures in the financial sector, a move the treasury secretary isn’t even willing to say will work.

it gets worse:

Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), the ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, thought the $700 billion estimate … was not realistic. “It’s going to be about $1 trillion at least.” 

at least a trillion. is that even a real number? how many gajillions is that, exactly? 

something very strange is happening to me. my outrage is evolving into something transcendent: a kind of awestruck giddiness, mixed with what i can only describe as dazed, grudging respect for the psychotics who pulled this off. a sum of money so vast exceeds the capacity of my conceptual and moral vocabulary to describe it. this is more than a fuckup or an ambitious plan gone horribly wrong. it is trans-historical; we have entered the territory of the sublime.

around the middle of last week, i was still shrugging and making the observation that this is what happens when you put a cokehead in charge of your economy. but now i see that i haven’t given george bush and his corporatist gang-rape squad nearly enough credit. the magnificent mess we are witnessing could not have resulted from simple irresponsibility and corruption; you or i couldn’t pull it off if we tried. these people are evil geniuses in the fullest sense of the term, with all the obsessive, grandiose and amoral connotations one associates with comic book supervillains. they have turned our country into a vast nihilist art installation right under our noses, while we debated whether they merely corrupt or simply incompetent.

bravo, i say! my hat is off. i simply don’t know how else to react.

There’s flip-flopping, and then there’s this. Pheeew.

But in all fairness to John McCain, the disconnect runs deeper in the GOP. How do you premise your entire economic platform on keeping government’s dirty mitts off our sacred financial institutions, then insist the government bail them out when they inevitably succumb to the too-predictable consequences of unchecked, boneheaded, myopic greed? How to reconcile the yawning discrepancy between these two postures? Let me give it a shot…

Everybody knows that free markets are identical with freedom and state planned economies are evil. Taking over an entire industry is about the most evil thing a government can do, but only when that industry is successful. See, when a foreign government dares to nationalize a critical economic resource — let’s say oil — because its private owners — who, just for fun, let’s postulate have their home offices on Wall Street — have failed to handle that national resource in a way that sustains that nation’s economy or benefits its people… well, that’s bad. Real bad. We go to war over stuff like that when other people do it.

But when our own financial institutions get into trouble, the government has to take control in order to right the ship. Otherwise, the economy would suffer! It may seem unfair to expect taxpayers to bail out companies that do stupid, evil things that ultimately lead to their own undoing. But things will be even worse if we don’t. It’s all about the public good!

And so you see, it’s not that Republicans are against government oversight of private enterprise. On the contrary, when the shit happens they advocate the same policies as guys like Hugo Chavez. It’s just that they draw a key distinction between assets and liabilities: when a business is successful, hands off! As long as somebody somewhere can theoretically be making money off it, any form of government intervention would be oppressive. BUT, the moment that moneymaking enterprise ceases to make money and instead creates problems, it’s on the rest of us to dig the moneymakers out of the hole they have dug for us all.

I hope that clears up any confusion. You may now resume voting Republican on the principle that they’re good with money.