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The weekly report of Initial Unemployment Claims is out today (via Reuters):

Initial claims for state unemployment benefits dropped 24,000 to a seasonally adjusted 398,000, the Labor Department said.

Economists polled by Reuters had forecast claims falling to 415,000. The prior week’s figure was revised up to 422,000 from the previously reported 418,000.

I do hope the Beltway Village Idiots Pundits, Politicians, and Courtiers don’t make too much of this news however. The 400K figure does seem to be a magic line for most but my guess/prediction is that after revision (which may or may not be reported), it will wind up back over 400K for the week. The upward revision of the numbers from the week before has seemingly become a staple on the reporting of this metric.

While the DeeCee folks do their Debt Ceiling/Deficit/Austerity Danse Macabre, there have been a few reports in the TradMed to remind the clueless of the realities being faced by millions of people who are not cocooned within the fog of life in the Beltway. Not that these articles penetrate the consciousness of most Villagers, given how they seem to always like to double down on the policy while “improving the messaging,” but we can still hope they might see the light at some point, if only to protect their careers.

First up is this from the NY Times’ Catherine Rampell from Tuesday (July 26), pointing out once again that many employers refuse to hire the unemployed, serving only to make things that much worse for the millions of long term un and underemployed:

A recent review of job vacancy postings on popular sites like Monster.com, CareerBuilder and Craigslist revealed hundreds that said employers would consider (or at least “strongly prefer”) only people currently employed or just recently laid off.

…snip…

Legal experts say that the practice probably does not violate discrimination laws because unemployment is not a protected status, like age or race. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission recently held a hearing, though, on whether discriminating against the jobless might be illegal because it disproportionately hurts older people and blacks.

…snip…

Government incentives for companies to hire unemployed workers have met with limited success. One such tax incentive from last year was poorly publicized, so most employers did not know about it. Better publicity may not suffice, either. An experiment from the 1980s found that telling companies that the unemployed were eligible for generous wage subsidies actually made employers less likely to hire such workers.

I’m not sure if this blog post from Rampell at the NY Times Economix from Monday (July 25) was intended as a companion to the Tuesday article, but there is some reinforcement of the themes:

One of many reasons blamed for (Western) Europe’s stagnant growth in recent decades has been that so many European adults are not working, and are effectively not employable because they have been out of jobs for so long. The United States, on the other hand, has had a much higher share of its population in gainful employment. In fact, between 1980 and 2000, the percent of adults working was on average about 10 percentage points higher in the United States than in Europe.

…snip…

It’s not clear whether the gap between employment-population ratios in the United States and Europe will continue to shrink. Certainly it does not help that the United States has been accumulating a huge underclass of long-term unemployed workers. As we’ve noted before, the longer people are out of work, the harder it is to find them a new job.

Which is exactly the experience Europe had seen, and that the United States hadn’t learned from, in decades past.

Amazing! US politicians not learning from all the previous economic problems across the world. Hoocoudanode? Of course, one glaringly large difference between Western Europe and the US is that Western Europe has a far more robust social safety net protecting its citizens.

Tuesday’s Washington Post had this article on polling showing dissatisfaction with President Obama’s handling of the economy. Of course, in a slightly buried lede, the polling shows even more dissatisfaction with Congressional Republicans:

More than a third of Americans now believe that President Obama’s policies are hurting the economy, and confidence in his ability to create jobs is sharply eroding among his base, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

But Americans’ discontent does not stop there. The survey also found that Americans harbor negative feelings toward congressional Republicans. Roughly as many people blame Republican policies for the poor economy as they do Obama. But 65 percent disapprove of the GOP’s handling of jobs, compared to 52 percent for the president.

Now whatever could the elected officials do that could improve their standing with their nominal constituents? Well, this article from the Washington Post just might offer a small clue:

As Congress debates how to meet the nation’s long-term transportation needs, decaying roads, bridges, railroads and transit systems are costing the United States $129 billion a year, according to a report issued Wednesday by a professional group whose members are responsible for designing and building such infrastructure.

Complex calculations done for the American Society of Civil Engineers indicate that infrastructure deficiencies add $97  billion a year to the cost of operating vehicles and result in travel delays that cost $32 billion.

…snip…

Thomas J. Donohue, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said the necessary spending was “not just transportation for transportation’s sake.”

“Without more robust economic growth, the U.S. will not create the 20 million jobs needed in the next decade to replace those lost during the recession and to keep up with a growing workforce,” he said.

Ultimately, Americans would get paid less, the ASCE report says. The economy would lose jobs, and the paychecks of those who are able to find work would be cut by nearly 30 percent.

It is not often that I find myself even remotely close to agreeing with Mr Donohue but in this instance he is correct. I’m sure we would not be remotely close on how to go about fixing things but still, it’s a start. And in reality, it’s not as if this should be coming as a surprise to people. The collapse of the I35 bridge in Minneapolis a few years ago brought the infrastructure issue to the fore but as seems to be the norm these days, even if there is agreement on an issue, the solution(s) seem to defy agreement.

It does seem to me though that an investment in repairing the US infrastructure (bridges, roads, dams, sewers, etc) could go a long way to repairing the US economy. Yes, it would require a $2T – $3T investment by governments at all levels. But this investment would start to be recouped immediately by the taxes paid by the newly hired workers and by the further economic ripple of jobs throughout local economies all over the country. Not to mention the savings of the $129B in not having to cover vehicle repairs and lost time from the decaying infrastructure.

It is such a simple solution isn’t it? So very simple that we can pretty much guarantee that nothing like it will be done since it would benefit millions of people without necessarily bringing immediate partisan benefit to one party or the other.

And because I can:

Cross posted from Just A Small Town Country Boy

Ben Bernanke, Vampire Chairman by DonkeyHotey

Author’s Note: Please take a few minutes and Join the Firedoglake Membership Program today. FDL provides the tools that help me and others extend our reach with our rants so we need to support FDL when we can.

Yesterday (Wednesday July 13), Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke was once again before Congress, testifying on the economy. Buried way down in the Reuters coverage of the hearing was this little nugget:

After recovering from the steepest recession in generations beginning in the summer of 2009, the U.S. economy has lost momentum in recent months. Gross domestic product expanded just 1.9 percent in the first three months of the year, and the second quarter does not look to have been much better. 

Bernanke held to the view that recent weakness was due in part to temporary factors like energy costs and the effects on global industry from Japan’s earthquake and tsunami.

But he acknowledged the labor market remains weaker than the Fed would like.

The labor market also remains weaker than the 14M unemployed and the 25M – 30M un and underemployed would like as well. While part of the stated Fed mission is “pursuit of maximum employment,” the actions of the Fed over these last few years seem to have been more along the lines of “we’ll pretend to do something and maybe the miracle will occur.” As far as Bernanke’s “…view that recent weakness was due in part to temporary factors…,” as I’ve stated before, there are always “temporary factors” that are going to have an effect on life. It is part of life and should be part of his work to be anticipating and dealing with those “temporary factors” as they occur rather than using them as an excuse.
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OPINION: You Can Put Lipstick On The Economy, But It's Still A Pig by AMERICAN ARTIST BEN MURPHY, on Flick

I’ve been a bit distracted this past week or so, what with moving into a new place and getting things settled in, but it sure does look like things are going on pretty much as they have been with the economy. Of course, the Economists are surprised at the figures being reported. Economists are always surprised by the figures reported.

First up is the private sector jobs report from payroll processor ADP that came out Wednesday, May 4. Via the NY Times:

Private employers in the United States added 179,000 jobs in April, while the pace of growth in the services sector unexpectedly eased in April to its lowest level since August 2010, according to economic reports released on Wednesday.

In the jobs report, the ADP Employer Services report fell short of economists’ expectations for a gain of 198,000, according to a Reuters survey. March private payrolls were revised up to an increase of 207,000 from a previously reported 201,000.

Then the economists were really surprised when the Initial Unemployment Claims report for last week that came out yesterday showed another big job in claims. Via Reuters:

While the surprise jump in initial claims for unemployment benefits was blamed on factors ranging from spring break layoffs to the introduction of an emergency benefits program, economists said it corroborated reports this week indicating a loss of momentum in job creation.

New claims for state jobless benefits rose 43,000 to 474,000, the highest since mid-August, the Labor Department said on Thursday. Economists had expected claims to fall.

…snip…

“We do not think that the entire rise in claims over the last month can be explained by special factors alone,” said Harm Bandholz, chief U.S. economist at UniCredit Research in New York. “It seems instead as if the improvement in the labor market slowed a bit.”

The data, a day before the U.S. government’s comprehensive employment report for April, was the latest to suggest a softening in the jobs market.

Doncha just love the phrase “…softening in the jobs market”? As if the jobs market for the last few years hasn’t already been closely resembling a marshmallow in strength.
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I would like to start today by pointing out an error I made yesterday. I assumed that since March was not finished with us, that the ADP jobs report for March would not be issued until next Wednesday. I guess ADP figures the last few days of the month don’t matter so long as they get a report out two days prior to the BLS report for the overall economy issued on the first Friday of the new month.

From Reuters on today’s (Wednesday, March 30) ADP report:

(Reuters) – Private employers added 201,000 jobs in March, while February’s figure was revised down slightly, a report by a payrolls processor showed on Wednesday.

The data was largely in line with expectations. Economists surveyed by Reuters had forecast the ADP Employer Services report would show a gain of 203,000 jobs. The report is jointly developed with Macroeconomic Advisers LLC.

February’s figure was revised down to 208,000 from 217,000.

“Basically the number was very much in line with expectations and shows that the labor recovery continues at a reasonable pace,” said David Katz, chief investment officer at Matrix Asset Advisors in New York.

Of course, Mr Katz is not accounting for the loss of jobs in the public sector. And there have been job losses in the public sector this past month.

But there have been a few articles I’ve seen during my daily surfing of the toobz, from today and earlier, that tell us a bit more about the state of the economy than the ADP report and the words of Mr Katz can tell us.

First up is this article from today’s Hartford Courant on New London, CT schools that are now providing free suppers (to go with free breakfasts and lunches) for students from low income families. From the article:

While many schools across Connecticut provide free or reduced lunch and breakfast to students from low-income homes, New London was the first to provide supper, too. Bridgeport recently launched a similar program, and Norwich is considering it.
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Bread and Circus by TRiver, on Flickr

While I was surfing through the various news sites this morning (Friday, March 18), I came across this story from the Los Angeles Times about the apparent suicide of a maintenance worker for Costa Mesa, CA. It seems that Costa Mesa is laying off nearly half of its employees and intending to outsource the work. Of course, the layoff notices have gone out, even though the city is still trying to figure out exactly what they are doing.

Costa Mesa has sent layoff notices to nearly half of its employees in a dramatic austerity program being closely watched by other cities struggling with ballooning pension obligations.

The move was sharply criticized by union leaders, and it stunned city employees, one of whom apparently committed suicide by jumping off Costa Mesa City Hall hours after layoff notices went out Thursday.

City officials said the cuts were the first step in a plan to outsource many services to the private sector and significantly reduce the number of workers at City Hall.

…snip…

The man reported to have committed suicide, a 29-year-old maintenance worker, was expecting to receive a layoff notice, authorities said. His identity has not been released pending notification of relatives.

Employees were shell-shocked upon receiving the notices Thursday, even before news of the suicide spread.

This article is on the heels of this one from Wednesday’s NY Times on the unemployment rate in El Centro, CA:

For two years, El Centro has struggled with the highest unemployment rate in the country. The latest official figures put it at 28 percent, an improvement from the peak of 32 percent last summer. At unemployment centers, often the most bustling places in town, it is something of a competition to talk about how long a job search has lasted.

…snip…

California’s agricultural heartland has been hit particularly hard in the downturn — 8 of the 10 metro areas with the highest jobless rates are in the state, in central inland cities like Fresno, Modesto and Merced. But the only area that comes close to El Centro’s unemployment rate is Yuma, Ariz., another border town about 55 miles east of here.

…snip…

For some people, the unemployment numbers are more of a nuisance than anything. Some relatively well-heeled residents say they do not know anyone without a job. If anyone is not working, they say, it must be because they are not really looking. They point to the large hiring banner in front of the International House of Pancakes.

There has long been a promise that the heat and sunshine will provide work. Local leaders speak excitedly about geothermal plants and solar projects bringing more jobs. Several training programs offer courses to develop skills for that kind of work. But Jesse Aguilar, who completed such a class last year, said that of the 30 in his class, only two have found jobs. Both of them are at fast food outlets.

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Back in December ’08 I wrote a couple of diaries (here and here) comparing the pensions received by retiring Members of Congress compared to the pensions of union member auto workers. Well, today (Tuesday, March 15) McClatchy once again is reporting that for all the sturm und drang from Congress about the costs of state pensions, it seems they rarely manage to speak up about the excesses of their own pensions. From the McClatchy article:

Since 1984, members of Congress have enjoyed both a defined-benefit plan and a defined-contribution plan. The defined-benefit plan gives them a fixed pension in retirement that’s scaled to their number of years in office.

By McClatchy’s calculation, 13 sitting senators and 31 members of the House of Representatives — about 8 percent of the Congress — have served at least 25 years and accrued annual pensions worth at least $50,000. By comparison, for average U.S. former workers 65 or older who receive private pension payments, the median annual amount is $8,016, according to the nonpartisan Employee Benefits Research Institute.

As long as they’ve served five years, lawmakers can collect their pensions starting at age 62; if they’ve served 20 years, they can collect them at age 50; and if they’ve served 25 years, they can collect them no matter how old they are. Their annual pension annuities cannot exceed 80 percent of their final salaries.

Only 30 percent of active workers in the country had defined-benefit plans last year like the one available to lawmakers, according to the Employee Benefits Research Institute.

Now, this is coming on the heels of this article from Saturday’s NY Times “decrying” the pension burden on the states. Although once again, the Times manages to bury pertinent information near the end of the article:

Workers in Wisconsin point out that their payments in retirement are hardly a king’s ransom. Their average annual benefit is about $26,500, and they believe they have been wrongly portrayed as greedy chiselers who game the system and walk away with six-figure pensions.

But it can be a huge burden for states and municipalities to provide even a modest, $26,000-a-year pension to hundreds of thousands of people, at least in today’s economic environment, and especially if those people are able to retire well before 65 and collect that money for many years.

“When interest rates are low, these plans are really expensive to run,” said Gordon Latter, an actuary at RBC Global Asset Management (U.S.) Inc., (formerly Voyageur Asset Management) whose clients include both corporate and public pension funds.

Despite the furor in Wisconsin, collective bargaining does not appear to be the main factor driving pension costs higher.

My bold. Now where have we heard of this type of situation before? Oh right. Social Security for example. Last Friday, MSNBC’s Tom Curry offered up a standard Beltway Village Idiot Pundit rationale for “reforming” Social Security:

According to the latest Social Security trustees report, about 14 years from now, the interest earned on the bonds won’t be sufficient to cover the annual difference between benefits and tax revenues.

At that point, the trust funds will be drawn down — the bonds will be cashed in — until the bonds are gone in 2037. If Congress does nothing before 2037, benefits would need to be cut by 22 percent to keep the system in balance.

“What often confuses people is that they see these securities as assets for the government,” the CRS report said. They aren’t really assets, but liabilities.

Or as the Congressional Budget Office explained in a report to Congress, “The balances in the trust funds (in the form of government securities) are assets to the individual programs (such as Social Security) but liabilities to the rest of the government.”

“When an individual buys a government bond, he or she has established a financial claim against the government,” the CRS said. But “when the government issues a security to one of its own accounts, it hasn’t purchased anything or established a claim against some other person or entity. It is simply creating an IOU from one of its accounts to another.”

The bonds are a promise to pay benefits in the future — but not the ability to pay those benefits.

Charles Krauthammer also chimed in with his weekly op-ed in the Washington Post:

Back-of-an-envelope solvable: Raise the retirement age, tweak the indexing formula (from wage inflation to price inflation) and means-test so that Warren Buffett’s check gets redirected to a senior in need.

The relative ease of the fix is what makes the Obama administration’s Social Security strategy so shocking. The new line from the White House is: no need to fix it because there is no problem. As Office of Management and Budget Director Jack Lew wrote in USA Today just a few weeks ago, the trust fund is solvent until 2037. Therefore, Social Security is now off the table in debt-reduction talks.

…snip…

Here’s why. When your FICA tax is taken out of your paycheck, it does not get squirreled away in some lockbox in West Virginia where it’s kept until you and your contemporaries retire. Most goes out immediately to pay current retirees, and the rest (say, $100) goes to the U.S. Treasury – and is spent. On roads, bridges, national defense, public television, whatever – spent, gone.

In return for that $100, the Treasury sends the Social Security Administration a piece of paper that says: IOU $100. There are countless such pieces of paper in the lockbox. They are called “special issue” bonds.

Special they are: They are worthless. As the OMB explained, they are nothing more than “claims on the Treasury [i.e., promises] that, when redeemed [when you retire and are awaiting your check], will have to be financed by raising taxes, borrowing from the public, or reducing benefits or other expenditures.” That’s what it means to have a so-called trust fund with no “real economic assets.” When you retire, the “trust fund” will have to go to the Treasury for the money for your Social Security check.

Bottom line? The OMB again: “The existence of large trust fund balances, therefore, does not, by itself, have any impact on the government’s ability to pay benefits.” No impact: The lockbox, the balances, the little pieces of paper, amount to nothing.

Basically, Krauthammer is advocating that the US Government default on Social Security. And he misses the easiest option of all – remove the cap on Social Security earnings (currently capped at $106K per annum).

So folks like Curry and Krauthammer want to see the government default on the Treasury bonds backed by the full faith and credit of the US rather than raise taxes while Congress and TradMed mostly whine about public sector pensions and unions, even while they keep their own Cadillac (Beemer? Porsche? Ferrari?) pensions.

Oh, and this blog post from Forbes points out that in Wisconsin at least, those public pensions cost the taxpayers nothing as they are deferred compensation for the workers.

It is real easy to demonize public sector workers, teachers, and unions at all levels. Too bad that the real thieves are still stealing from the rest of us via Wall St and their pet politicians.

(/Rant)

And because I can:

Today is a full moon (exact at 7:30AM EDT) and it is accompanied by a partial Lunar eclipse. Scientists and researchers tell us that there is no correlation between a full moon and people behaving in a crazy fashion. I’m willing to wager that if you ask cops, emergency personnel, ER staff, bar owners and so on they will agree that however statistically insignificant the raw number of bad acts on a full moon versus the rest of the time may be, that the level of bad acts during the full moon has just that much more of an edge of the nuckin’ futz than during non-full moon days and nights.

What the full moon can’t explain though is the level of basic nuckin’ futz we see happening every day with our supposed elected representatives, not only in DeeCee but all around the world.

I found this article over at MSNBC earlier this week and it may offer one "excuse." It seems to me that a lot of politicians are probably vain enough to use botox in an attempt to think they are stopping the aging process.

A well-known side effect of Botox is the inability to fully express emotions. Now research reveals another side effect: the inability to fully feel emotions.

Botox, a popular cosmetic injection used to fight facial wrinkles, is made of an extremely toxic protein called Botulinum toxin. Botox works by temporarily paralyzing muscles that cause wrinkles.

Yep, nothing like injecting your face with a poison to get rid of wrinkles then having that poison seep into the brain to destroy empathy and other areas of the thought process.

Cancer survivors have long noted (and the medical community has begun to recognize) a phenomenon called chemo brain.

For many years cancer survivors have worried about, joked about, and been frustrated with the mental cloudiness they notice before, during, and after chemotherapy. We don’t know its exact cause, but this mental fog is commonly called chemo brain. Patients have noticed chemo brain for some time, but only recently have studies been done that could start to explain it.

Given the identified effects of chemo brain, I find it not at all surprising that there could also be a corresponding botox brain effect. Just as I can believe that there is an affect on the body from the pull of the moon during the full moon, so can I accept that poisons injected into the body, whether for vanity or for curative, can have unintended side consequences that change the brain.

As I’ve said on other topics, it makes as much sense as other reasons to explain (without delving into conspiracies) why our elected officials seem so intent on destroying the social safety net, the environment, and Mother Earth. What they miss is that Mother Earth will be fine in the end. Humans, animals and current plant life though, not so much.

There’s a song by Guy Clark titled Ramblin’ Jack and Mahan that I like to quote that probably shows my feelings for the Botox brigades:

Now a Ramblin’ Jack Elliot said:
I got these lines in my face
Tryin’ to straighten out the wrinkles in my life
When I think of all the fools I’ve been
It’s a wonder that I’ve sailed this many miles

Cross posted from Just A Small Town Country Boy

I am here today to offer a modest proposal to the shareholders of British Petroleum.

I’m sure you are aware of the "performance" yesterday of your current Executive Director/CEO Tony Hayward, as he testified before Congress on BP’s actions before and since the start of the Oil Gusher in the Gulf of Mexico now 59 days ago.

For the record, I did not watch his performance directly as I tend to avoid watching things that are pretty much guaranteed to make me want to throw a shoe through the telly. I did, however, follow along with the live-blogging at FireDogLake.com (here, here, and here.)

That being said, after following the live-blogging and reading news stories today such as this from the New York Times, I would like to present myself as a candidate for your new ED/CEO.

My qualifications are very similar in many ways to those of Mr Hayward. Like Mr Hayward,

“I had no prior knowledge of the drilling of this well, none whatsoever,” he said.

Like Mr Hayward,

“I’m not stonewalling,” said Mr. Hayward, the 53-year-old Englishman. “I simply wasn’t involved in the decision-making.”

Like Mr Hayward, I can claim to have no knowledge of any of the actions taken by BP leading up to this disaster. However, unlike Mr Hayward, I can make these claims without appearing to be a clueless buffoon.

Unlike Mr Hayward, I can actually feel empathy and show it for those folks on the Gulf Coast who are seeing the destruction of their life-styles and livelihoods. I can understand the need to capture and present actual problems with the use of the dispersants and the affects on workers of breathing toxic air. And I can do so without whining about "wanting my life back."

Unlike Mr Hayward, my work experience has been that it is far better to be upfront with all involved about the problems being faced rather than trying to minimize and down play the problems.

I think that attribute is called honesty here in the US.

Another area where my presence would be beneficial is that I would not be subject to any type of criminal investigations. Bringing me in to replace Mr Hayward though could be seen as a sign that BP and shareholders recognize the need for a complete and thorough housecleaning of all levels of management.

A little research leads me to Forbes Magazine which shows that Mr Hayward received compensation totaling more than 3 Million pounds for 2009. As a good faith gesture, I will work for a salary of $500K per annum with an additional bonus level of another $500k. You’ll save money and I will be able to pay my bills! A true "win-win" for both sides.

I would be remiss not to mention the areas where Mr Hayward is a better candidate. Unlike Mr Hayward, I’m not even six feet tall and do not have a full head of hair so may not be the ideal appearing person for televised Congressional hearings. But I think you will agree that after Mr Hayward’s performance yesterday, the image thing might not be as important going forward.

So if you feel the need, there’s an old time Quality Assurance professional available; guaranteed to be a PITA in the important areas. As a guaranteed PITA, the job WILL be done and done correctly or you can fire my a** after a year, no hard feelings.

And because I can:

Cross Posted from Just A Small Town Country Boy

Have I mentioned today that I NEED a FREAKIN’ JOB?

Well I do and as I search for employment sometimes it’s all I can do to stop myself from just curling up in a fetal position, cursing the fates and furies/Gods and Goddesses or any other entities or "supreme beings" that I can blame.

But now that I’ve gotten the obligatory whine out of the way, I’m going to talk about some of the folks who are in far worse straits than I am, as difficult to believe as that may be.

If you want to have your heart torn out, watch the video with this Seminal Diary from Michael Whitney. Or read this diary where Michael talks with some of the fishermen effected by BP’s environmental catastrophe (it seems Tony Hayward decided to upgrade it from the moderate environmental impact he first called it).

I’m only without a job. The folks in the Gulf of Mexico that are dealing with this disaster are out of a life style. As Michael reports in the second linked diary above:

Now he has nothing but oil. Raleigh estimates that, since the oil sinks into the soil where the oysters grow, it will be at least 10 years before Grand Isle fishermen can harvest oysters again.

Ten years can flash by in an instant it seems, but not when you are waiting for the return of your livelihood. I’m six years into my unemployment/underemployment life now and can’t imagine facing another four years of this. I never anticipated I could go this long; yet as I say, I’m blessed compared to what these folks are looking at. And there are thousands more who lived and worked along the Gulf who are looking at years and years of lost wages, lost lives.

I could never do this type of work. Nor could I do the work on the oil rigs. A few years ago I tracked down a high school classmate who has worked oil rigs in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico and tug boats plying the Intracoastal Waterway and was visiting him on Tybee Island, GA. After I had gotten motion sickness while we were standing on floating docks, Joe told a story about how he’d been on a rig in the Gulf when a storm came up. He said there was an accountant visiting the rig the night of the storm who got deathly ill from the motion. I told Joe, that was me.

But it’s not just the motion. All these people in the Gulf affected by this disaster are used to hard work. Now they are watching their lives be smeared by the actions of the "Drill Baby Drill" crowd who can’t seem to connect the fact that all those regulations they decry and worked to avoid, were in place for a reason. As Steven Pearlstein noted in a column at the Washington Post the other day,

The biggest oil spill ever. The biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression. The deadliest mine disaster in 25 years. One recall after another of toys from China, of vehicles from Toyota, of hamburgers from roach-infested processing plants. The whole Vioxx fiasco. And let’s not forget the biggest climate threat since the Ice Age.

Even if you’re not into conspiracy theories, it’s hard to ignore the common thread running through these recent crises: the glaring failure of government regulators to protect the public. Regulators who were cowed by industry or intimidated by politicians. Regulators who were compromised by favors or prospects of industry employment. Regulators who were better at calculating the costs of oversight than the benefits. And regulators who were blinded by their ideological bias against government interference and their faith that industries could police themselves.

I’m only without a job but I still have my family and friends, most of whom are, if not OK, at least available for support. The folks affected by this disaster are looking at all their families, friends, neighbors and they are all in the same horrendous situation. I can not begin to fathom the pain they are in as they watch their oil fouled lives begin and see the mealy mouthed promises and word parsing from BP and their elected officials.

Please visit the Firedoglake BP Oil Disaster Page for their on-going coverage.

And because I can:

Cross posted from Just A Small Town Country Boy

Today’s McClatchy News DC has an article on the Cadillac pensions that Elizabeth Dole and Robin Hayes will soon be receiving as former members of Congress. Both were defeated in their recent bids for re-elections, Hayes by Blue America’s Larry Kissell.

WASHINGTON — When Sen. Elizabeth Dole and Rep. Robin Hayes leave office next month, they won’t leave empty-handed.

The North Carolina Republicans, both multimillionaires and among the richest in Congress, will be eligible immediately for congressional pensions.

Dole, who served a six-year term, is eligible for about $15,000 a year for life. Hayes, who served five two-year terms, would get about $25,500 a year, according to the National Taxpayers Union, a government watchdog group that’s been estimating congressional pensions for years.

Unlike some fixed pensions, the amounts will change with the cost of living adjustment.

That’s a pretty good deal, huh? Now normally, I wouldn’t get too awfully bent out of shape about this and would consider it a cost of doing business. But there’s this trouble in the auto industry that has been in the news lately that comes into play here. Today’s NY Times has an article explaining where the $70 to $77 Read the rest of this entry →