Spill Baby Spill

I was supposed to go back to Detroit this week. Looks like I’ll be heading to Gary instead. I don’t think that’s an upgrade.

Last week, the Governor of Arizona signed into law the most stringent immigration bill in the nation. Among the changes is a provision requiring state and local police to stop anyone of whom they have a “reasonable suspicion” of being in the United States illegally and ask them for proof of citizenship. If any Arizona resident then feels the police are not demanding proof of citizenship from enough “reasonably suspicious” people, that resident will have the right to sue the police department.

There is nothing I can say about this bill that hasn’t already been said. So, I will revert to reiterating the obvious. This is the most ridiculous piece of legislation to come out of Arizona since the “birther bill” requiring anyone running for president to submit a birth certificate—about three days prior to the passage of this bill. I know it gets hot in the desert, and sometime the heat makes people do stupid things. But it’s not THAT hot. Not yet. Setting aside the material fact that the bill is clearly unconstitutional, (since immigration is the sole jurisdiction of the federal government, per Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution), is there a single honest human being on the face of this earth who could look me in the eye and tell me, with a straight face, that the phrase “reasonable suspicion of being in the United States illegally” is not simply thinly veiled Orwellian newspeak for, “Let’s pull over some brown people and send ‘em back to Mexico.” Seriously. It’s like they’re not even trying anymore. In order to be “suspicious” of whether or not an individual is a U.S. citizen, one would have to have some idea, or standard of what an “American” might look and/or act like. How many white Anglo-Saxon women do you suppose will be pulled over in Phoenix this summer and asked for their birth certificates? And don’t tell me white Anglo-Saxon women don’t enter and/or remain in this country illegally. I attended one of the most internationally diverse universities in the nation, I know for a fact that it happens. It just doesn’t matter to anyone in Arizona. White people are American. Brown people aren’t.

Seeking to score points with angry Republican primary voters in his home state, a now depressingly pathetic Arizona Senator John McCain voiced his support for the law this week, saying that since President Obama had “refused to protect the border,” the people of Arizona had been forced to take action to protect themselves. Last I checked, Obama has been in Washington barely three years, and President only 15 months. McCain has been tottering around the Capitol building for 28 years now, and has so far managed to “protect the border” by…. Yeeeaaah. In her column for the Daily Beast this week disagreeing with the content of the bill, Meghan McCain asked her readers to hate the law, not Arizonans. Ordinarily I would agree with her. The actions of a small group of people do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the larger body. However, in this case, that small group of people, the Arizona legislature, was elected by and to represent a much larger constituency—the Arizona voters, who have been shown to support the paranoid xenophobia of their elected representatives by more than 60%. Makes it difficult to separate Arizonians from this law. There’s something in the water down there. Must be the lawn chemical run-off from all those golf courses.

On Tuesday afternoon, representatives of Goldman Sachs lined up for a tongue-lashing before a Senate committee. In my favorite exchange of the day, when Michigan Senator Carl Levin asked Goldman CFO David Viniar if he felt anything when he read Goldman traders describing several of the company’s security products as crap, Viniar responded, and I quote, “I think that’s very unfortunate to have on e-mail.” That’s right. He’s not sorry he sold gold-painted lead to his clients and ripped them—and the taxpayer off on the other end. He’s sorry somebody was stupid enough to write it down.

In a related story, the government released documents last Friday detailing what was going on at the Securities and Exchange Commission leading up to the financial crisis. Turns out that several top officials, in addition to more than a few underlings, were spending far more time watching porn at work than they spent watching Wall Street. One regulator spent up to eight hours a day visiting triple-X websites, filling the taxpayers’ hard drives with lonely housewives and naughty college co-eds, then transferring them to DVDs to make room for more once the hard drives filled up. If we assume nobody at the SEC was working overtime leading up to the crisis, then it becomes painfully obvious that if this genius was spending eight hours—of an eight-hour workday, surfing for porn, he certainly wasn’t doing any work. And for this recreational privilege he was paid over $200,000 a year. Not a bad racket.

The oil spill that began with the sinking of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig last week now covers more than 600 square miles of the Gulf of Mexico, and is seeping dangerously close to the Louisiana coastline. Eleven crewmembers are still missing and presumed dead. After initial reports indicated the actual drill segment of the rig might be intact, it has since been confirmed that the rig is leaking crude at a rate of about 42,000 gallons a day. Geologists involved in trying to contain the spill have indicated that in addition to blackened beaches and birds, the slick is likely to wipe out the oyster farming industry in that area of the Gulf for years to come. This may be overly simplistic, but when a windmill malfunctions, the worst thing to happen is the rotor fails to spin the turbine. When a solar cell malfunctions, it becomes a useless sliver of silicon. When fossil fuel production malfunctions, all hell breaks loose. At some point, the human and environmental costs of our addiction to fossil fuels must be taken into account in the cost benefit analysis of our energy matrix.

Finally, in a feat of wordsmithery that would make Frank Luntz proud, Spirit Airlines is introducing “pre-reclined seats” on all of its flights. And buy “pre-reclined,” they mean fixed, and upright. No word yet on whether the “upgrade” extends to the pricing, but Spirit could be poised to change the way we think of air travel in this country. Your plane didn’t crash. It merely landed pre-assembly.