Louisiana Asks BP For $10 Million In Mental Health Funding .. First Request DENIED

The Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals is again requesting $10 million from BP to fund ongoing mental health services in communities affected by the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, after a request made on May 28 failed to spur any action.

In a second letter to Doug Suttles, BP America's chief operating officer, Louisiana DHH Secretary Alan Levine asked the company Monday to set aside $10 million to support outreach efforts by the department's Louisiana Spirit teams and pay for "a needed spectrum of therapeutic and psychiatric services" offered through local districts and community organizations.

Just more evidence that BP is all talk and little action.

Levine's letter explained his concerns over an "emerging behavioral health crisis" -- Louisiana Spirit counselors embedded in the impacted communities have already begun to report increased anxiety, depression, and alcohol consumption in their patients, an observation that community-based organizations have corroborated.

It is time to be proactive and stop another crisis!!  "We don't have the luxury of time. We've got to provide services and support now," Levine said.

House Approves $37B for Wars - Unemployment Rate 9.5 Percent

Sometimes I wonder our priorities.  The Senate has yet to pass a bill to extend unemployment benefits, yet we approve $37B for wars.  I am tired of these wars.  Let's get the hell out and take care of our own!

The unemployment rate fell to 9.5 percent in June from 9.8 percent a month earlier, according to statistics released by the Department of Labor Friday morning. But the economic news was still disappointing: The jobless rate fell because 652,000 people gave up on their job searches and left the labor force. People who have given up looking for work aren't counted in the data. And payrolls declined by 125,000 as the government cut 225,000 temporary workers conducting the 2010 census. In initial reactions, economists saw the numbers as a sign that America's job-loss recovery is years away.

The House of Representatives approved a bill to reauthorize expired unemployment benefits for the long-term jobless on Thursday, after a similar measure failed for the fourth time in the Senate the previous night due to a Republican filibuster.


The House measure, sponsored by Reps. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) and Sander Levin (D-Mich.), is essentially moot until the Senate is able to pass a bill of its own, which, because of the Independence Day recess, won't happen until July 12 at the earliest. The Republican party, along with Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson, is objecting to the bill because it would add $33 billion to the federal budget deficit.

Democrats are increasingly showing their frustration with President Obama’s strategy for the war in Afghanistan. They stalled for weeks before narrowly approving a further $37 billion to fund the United States’ two wars—which must also be voted on by the Senate—and, even then, made sure their overall disapproval with the war was known. Along with nine Republicans, 153 House Democrats voted for an amendment to the bill, which would require Obama to offer a plan next April for the "safe, orderly and expeditious redeployment of U.S. troops" and make a provision a vote in Congress to block additional funding if withdrawal does not begin by next July. Ninety-three Democrats also supported an amendment that would allow the war funds to be spent exclusively on withdrawal. Neither amendment passed, but it was enough to make the point. “There is a growing level of concern,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said. “The vote reflected it.”

What do you think?  And what do our politicians really care about?  Getting reelected.  McDermott echoed other Democrats who've said the Republicans will benefit politically if they can stop the legislation (Sen. Debbie Stabenow said last week the GOP wants to "create as much pain as possible" to foster anti-incumbency in November). "It's all about making the Democrats look weak, therefore we can take back the House, we can take back the Senate, and we'll also take back the presidency, because we've made the Democrats look weak," he said. "It has nothing to do with deficits. They don't care about deficits."

Getting reelected and wars are more important than people.

Gov. Schwarzenegger puts 200,000 workers on $7.25/hour

AP is reporting that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Thursday ordered about 200,000 state workers to be paid the federal minimum wage this month because the state Legislature has not passed a budget, but the state controller is refusing to comply.

Schwarzenegger spokesman Aaron McLear said the change should be reflected in state employees' next paycheck. Workers will be paid in full retroactively once a budget is passed.


It raises so many interesting questions.  Could you live on minimum wage?  How do you pay your expenses?  At the same time, what is a state to do which in as dire a situation as California?

Schwarzenegger's order, if implemented, could cost the state billions of dollars because the action would violate employment law, Roper said. He cited the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, which he says entitles a worker to "double damages" if an employer cuts pay to minimum wage.

Salaried managers who are not paid on an hourly basis would see their pay cut to $455 per week.

Some of the state's roughly 250,000 employees would be exempt, including doctors and attorneys, because
minimum wage laws do not apply to those professions. Under the order, they would not get paid at all until a budget deal is struck, said Lynelle Jolley, spokeswoman for the Department of Personnel Administration.

Not paid at all, minimum wage, it is all a very terrible situation only to get worse.

If It Doesn't Work At First, Try, Try Again.

This latest story from the New York Times - Banned Trailers Return for Latest Gulf Disaster - show you can try, try again, for better or worse.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, they became a symbol of the government’s inept response to that disaster: the 120,000 or so trailers provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to people who had lost their homes.

The trailers were discovered to have such high levels of formaldehyde that the government banned them from ever being used for long-term housing again.

Some of the trailers, though, are getting a second life amid the latest disaster here — as living quarters for workers involved with the cleanup of the oil spill.

They have been showing up in mobile-home parks, open fields and local boatyards as thousands of cleanup workers have scrambled to find housing.

People have to sleep, right?

Federal officials ... discovered that formaldehyde — an industrial chemical that can cause nasal cancer, aggravates respiratory problems and may be linked to leukemia — was present in many of these housing units in amounts that exceeded federal limits. Scientists have since concluded that the high levels of formaldehyde found in the trailers probably resulted from cheap wood and poor ventilation. FEMA has produced other models and later batches of the trailers that do not have the health risks that the trailers built for Hurricane Katrina victims did.

The trailers are “not intended to be used as housing,” said David Garratt, FEMA’s associate administrator for mission support. “Subsequent owners must continue to similarly inform subsequent buyers for the life of the unit.”


These rules are not being followed in many cases, however. Officials with the inspector general’s office of the General Services Administration said Wednesday that they had opened at least seven cases concerning buyers who might not have posted the certification and formaldehyde warnings on trailers they sold.

Avertible Catastrophe - A Story That Will Leave You Confused and Mad.

I had previously read a story that had said we could be skimming a lot more oil but that the EPA didn't allow certain skimmers because those skimmers removed most of the oil but the water which would be returned into the Gulf still had too high a level of oil for EPS standards.  Crazy!!!  Oil was being removed from the Gulf but because it didn't take "enough" oil out of the water, the water had to be carried away and cleaned more.

Sometimes rules don't make sense and should be broken.  Who is in charge here and why can't they see that the application of this rule makes no sense at all???  Now a story from the Financial Post:

Some are attuned to the possibility of looming catastrophe and know how to head it off. Others are unprepared for risk and even unable to get their priorities straight when risk turns to reality.

The Dutch fall into the first group. Three days after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico began on April 20, the Netherlands offered the U.S. government ships equipped to handle a major spill, one much larger than the BP spill that then appeared to be underway. "Our system can handle 400 cubic metres per hour," Weird Koops, the chairman of Spill Response Group Holland, told Radio Netherlands Worldwide, giving each Dutch ship more cleanup capacity than all the ships that the U.S. was then employing in the Gulf to combat the spill.

To protect against the possibility that its equipment wouldn't capture all the oil gushing from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, the Dutch also offered to prepare for the U.S. a contingency plan to protect Louisiana's marshlands with sand barriers. One Dutch research institute specializing in deltas, coastal areas and rivers, in fact, developed a strategy to begin building 60-mile-long sand dikes within three weeks.

The Dutch know how to handle maritime emergencies. In the event of an oil spill, The Netherlands government, which owns its own ships and high-tech skimmers, gives an oil company 12 hours to demonstrate it has the spill in hand. If the company shows signs of unpreparedness, the government dispatches its own ships at the oil company's expense. "If there's a country that's experienced with building dikes and managing water, it's the Netherlands," says Geert Visser, the Dutch consul general in Houston.

In sharp contrast to Dutch preparedness before the fact and the Dutch instinct to dive into action once an emergency becomes apparent, witness the American reaction to the Dutch offer of help. The U.S. government responded with "Thanks but no thanks," remarked Visser, despite BP's desire to bring in the Dutch equipment and despite the no-lose nature of the Dutch offer --the Dutch government offered the use of its equipment at no charge. Even after the U.S. refused, the Dutch kept their vessels on standby, hoping the Americans would come round. By May 5, the U.S. had not come round. To the contrary, the U.S. had also turned down offers of help from 12 other governments, most of them with superior expertise and equipment --unlike the U.S., Europe has robust fleets of Oil Spill Response Vessels that sail circles around their make-shift U.S. counterparts.

Why does neither the U.S. government nor U.S. energy companies have on hand the cleanup technology available in Europe? Ironically, the superior European technology runs afoul of U.S. environmental rules. The voracious Dutch vessels, for example, continuously suck up vast quantities of oily water, extract most of the oil and then spit overboard vast quantities of nearly oil-free water. Nearly oil-free isn't good enough for the U.S. regulators, who have a standard of 15 parts per million -- if water isn't at least 99.9985% pure, it may not be returned to the Gulf of Mexico.

When ships in U.S. waters take in oil-contaminated water, they are forced to store it. As U.S. Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, the official in charge of the clean-up operation, explained in a press briefing on June 11, "We have skimmed, to date, about 18 million gallons of oily water--the oil has to be decanted from that [and] our yield is usually somewhere around 10% or 15% on that." In other words, U.S. ships have mostly been removing water from the Gulf, requiring them to make up to 10 times as many trips to storage facilities where they off-load their oil-water mixture, an approach Koops calls "crazy."

The Americans, overwhelmed by the catastrophic consequences of the BP spill, finally relented and took the Dutch up on their offer -- but only partly. Because the U.S. didn't want Dutch ships working the Gulf, the U.S. airlifted the Dutch equipment to the Gulf and then retrofitted it to U.S. vessels. And rather than have experienced Dutch crews immediately operate the oil-skimming equipment, to appease labour unions the U.S. postponed the clean-up operation to allow U.S. crews to be trained.

A catastrophe that could have been averted is now playing out. With oil increasingly reaching the Gulf coast, the emergency construction of sand berns to minimize the damage is imperative. Again, the U.S. government priority is on U.S. jobs, with the Dutch asked to train American workers rather than to build the berns. According to Floris Van Hovell, a spokesman for the Dutch embassy in Washington, Dutch dredging ships could complete the berms in Louisiana twice as fast as the U.S. companies awarded the work. "Given the fact that there is so much oil on a daily basis coming in, you do not have that much time to protect the marshlands," he says, perplexed that the U.S. government could be so focussed on side issues with the entire Gulf Coast hanging in the balance.

Then again, perhaps he should not be all that perplexed at the American tolerance for turning an accident into a catastrophe. When the Exxon Valdez oil tanker accident occurred off the coast of Alaska in 1989, a Dutch team with clean-up equipment flew in to Anchorage airport to offer their help. To their amazement, they were rebuffed and told to go home with their equipment. The Exxon Valdez became the biggest oil spill disaster in U.S. history--until the BP Gulf spill.

- Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and author of The Deniers.

Weekly Initial Unemployment Claims increase to 472,000

Please someone tell Sharron Angle that there are a lot more lazy people running around this week than last (see my prior post if you are confused, Sharron is so you will not be alone).

The DOL reports on weekly unemployment insurance claims:

In the week ending June 26, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 472,000, an increase of 13,000 from the previous week's revised figure of 459,000. The 4-week moving average was 466,500, an increase of 3,250 from the previous week's revised average of 463,250.

The advance number for seasonally adjusted insured unemployment during the week ending June 19 was 4,616,000, an increase of 43,000 from the preceding week's revised level of 4,573,000.

Idiot of the Day - Sharron Angle - Tea Party Insanity

Please let me know which rock these people crawled out from under so we can put them back.  In the best blame the victim attitude, Sharron Angle says the unemployed are just lazy.  It is too bad she wasn't alive during the Great Depression, she could have saved us all from that too.

If you've been following the ongoing Senate campaign of Nevada hopeful Sharron Angle, you know that she's sick and tired of the long-term unemployed taking home all of those cushy unemployment benefits. Angle's angle is that these millions of Americans are just living large on the dole and need to have their unemployment benefits terminated so that they will be motivated to go out and get a job -- one of the millions of magical jobs that exist in Sharron Angle's mind!


Last night, Angle discussed this matter with Nevada political reporter and host par-excellence John Ralston, on his "Face To Face" show. There, Angle attempted to clarify her remarks. But she continued to hold that America is just brimming with jobs, for everyone.

RALSTON: How would you have voted on that bill to extend unemployment benefits?

ANGLE: I would have voted no, because the truth about it is that they keep extending these unemployment benefits to the point where people are afraid to go out and get a job because the job doesn't pay as much as the unemployment benefit does. And what we really need to do is put people back to work. So if you want to ease people back into work, what we need is an unemployment benefit that pays part. You know, you go to work, you have something of a safety net, in unemployment. But just to give them full unemployment benefits and then extend those for two years or more gets them not only out of the working class but it also depreciates their skills, so they're not actually able to go out and compete in that workforce, so what we really want, is we want something that stimulates a group of people to go back into what we know as that free market.

Ralston then played a clip of Angle, explaining her position thusly: "You can make more money on unemployment than you can going down and getting one of those jobs that is an honest job but it doesn't pay as much. We've put in so much entitlement into our government that we really have spoiled our citizenry."

You know, "our citizenry" are like children or dogs, we just keep spoiling them.  If they had to work harder then all of our problems would just magically go away.  As she famously said, "As your US Senator, I'm not in the business of creating jobs."  Really??  I thought that our representatives were trying to help.  Guess not.