I/III. http://www.indystar.com/article/20100719/BUSINESS/7190316
<http://www.indystar.com/article/20100719/BUSINESS/7190316>July 19, 2010 Senate is close to restoring jobless benefits After Byrd's replacement is sworn in Tuesday, chamber will take up the bill * Star news services* WASHINGTON -- More than 2 million workers who have been laid off for long stretches could get their unemployment benefits restored as early as this week. The Senate plans to take up a measure Tuesday to restore the extended benefits, right after a new Democratic senator from West Virginia is sworn in, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Thursday. With the death of Sen. Robert Byrd, Senate Democrats had been a vote short of the 60 needed to overcome a GOP filibuster. On Friday, West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin named Carte Goodwin, 36, as a temporary replacement to fill Byrd's seat. A special election in November decides who will hold the seat until 2013. The House has passed a bill to extend the benefits through November, at a cost of about $34 billion. The money would be borrowed, adding to the national debt. About 2.5 million people -- including more than 45,000 in Indiana -- have lost their benefits since the last extension ran out at the end of May. The bill would add up to 73 weeks of benefits, paid for by the federal government, on top of the 26 weeks typically provided by states. Reid, D-Nev., said Goodwin will be sworn in Tuesday afternoon, and a bill to extend the jobless benefits will be up for a vote immediately after. Lawmakers have been sparring for weeks about extending the benefits. Some Democrats have argued that lawmakers have a moral obligation to extend the benefits while the unemployment rate hovers above 9 percent. Many Democrats also see the benefits as insurance against the economy sliding back into recession because laid-off workers typically spend their payments quickly, stimulating the economy. Republicans, tapping into voter anger about the growing national debt, said they would support extending benefits if the bill was paid for. They have proposed using unspent money from President Barack Obama's massive 2009 economic recovery package, a plan Democrats oppose. II. http://politics.usnews.com/opinion/mzuckerman/articles/2010/07/16/obamas-anti-business-policies-are-our-economic-katrina.html Obama's Anti-Business Policies Are Our Economic KatrinaHis gratuitous and overstated demonization of business is exactly the wrong approach By MORTIMER B. ZUCKERMAN<http://politics.usnews.com/Topics/tag/Author/z/mortimer_zuckerman/index.html> Posted: July 16, 2010 The growing divide and tension between the Obama administration and the business world is a cause for national concern. As Clive Crook wrote in the *Financial Times*, Obama is "a president under business attack." He is certainly under sharp criticism and for good reason: He has lost the confidence of much of the business community, whose worries over taxes, the dramatically increased costs of new regulation, and a general perception that the administration is hostile toward them and may take yet harsher steps, are holding back investment and growth. In the midst of a weak economy accompanied by levels of unemployment unprecedented since the Great Depression, it is critical that the government in Washington appreciate that confidence is an imperative if the business community is to invest, take risks with start-ups, and altogether get the economy going again to put the millions of unemployed back to productive work. [image: Click here to find out more!]<http://ad.doubleclick.net/click;h=v8/39dc/0/0/%2a/g;44306;0-0;0;48719702;32414-468/648;0/0/0;;~okv=;kw=mortimerzuckerman;kw=edit;kw=sec;kw=housingmarket;kw=congress;kw=recession;kw=economy;kw=hurricanekatrina;kw=obama;kw=barack;~aopt=2/1/45/0;~sscs=%3f> This is what businessmen do when they are free to conduct business. For example, in the two decades of the 1980s and 1990s, the United States created 73 million new private sector jobs—while simultaneously losing some 44 million jobs in the process of adjusting its economy to international competition. That was a net gain of some 29 million jobs. A stunning 55 percent of the total workforce at the end of these two decades was in a new job, some two-thirds of them in industries that paid more than the average wage. By contrast, continental Europe, with a larger economy and workforce, created an estimated 4 million jobs in the same period, most of which were in the public sector (and the cost of which they are beginning to regret). How could America achieve this? It is because of the get-up-and-go culture that reflects individualism, courageous entrepreneurialism, pragmatism, adaptability, and innovation. This adventurous spirit outlived the passing of the frontier and still inspires and nourishes millions, including our young and our newcomers. No other country has a population so habituated to self-help, self-improvement, and even self-renovation in a manner that carries over into business life. The unique historical conditions of America encouraged a remarkable management culture. The anthropologist, Lionel Tiger, showed that the style of American corporate management was a response to the opportunities of a huge internal market, but also the obstacles presented by vast distances and diverse populations. We created a monetized market economy inspired by a belief in technology and scientific management, governed not by kinship and custom but by contracts freely agreed upon and law passed by assent. Over the years, the transformation of American industry has been nothing short of phenomenal. U.S. companies replaced large, mass-produced consumer products with sophisticated goods derived from intellectual output and knowledge-based interests, the fastest-growing segment of the world's economy. Management was assisted by a level of labor flexibility that is the envy of both Europe and Asia. Europe struggles with the legacy of the steam age in the form of craft, union, and management demarcations that limit management's role. In Asia, management is often stifled by large, oligopolistic networks and government mandates. American managers consistently led the world in investing in new technologies and providing high-tech training to exploit them. We were the first to realize the importance of computers and information technologies and invested massively in them, spending twice as much per capita on info-tech as Western European firms and more than six times the global average. In fact, U.S. companies are the major suppliers of the information age's silicon, brains, and sinews. No other country has met the requirements of an emerging economic system that needed people to be mobile both physically and psychologically. No other country shares America's belief in numbers and statistics as a basis for rational decision-making. No other country invests so much in business training and the retraining of its people—on top of having the world's best graduate and undergraduate business schools. No other country forms as many small companies year after year that compete with flexibility, rapid response, openness, innovation, and the ability to attract the best people. And as new products and services are developed, American businesses' unique marketing and advertising skills establish their success at home and abroad. Our system, in which ideas freely percolate at all levels, is tantamount to a giant information-processing machine. It enhances our capacity to absorb, adapt, and manage ongoing revolutions in technology, information, and logistics, which are too dynamic and complex to be handled by a top-down system. The energy in business is matched by a unique and remarkable world of finance capital that over decades has identified the multiple sources of entrepreneurial funding. For example, our IPO process provides capital to service a merit-based, diversified financial environment and to fund young talent, new ideas, and the risks associated with high-tech, high-growth, high-concept companies. Further, we enjoy a public policy framework that articulates not just what the government does, but what the government does not do. Our government is not involved in the formulation of industrial policy or in mandating funding or other support to specific industries and companies. It is the private sector that makes the overwhelming majority of strategic and tactical business decisions and thus makes the best decisions for allocating resources. So it is no surprise that America's economy is even better suited for today's rapidly changing, knowledge-based world than it was for the mass-production industrial economy. But—and here's the heart of the current concern—the Great Recession has resulted in great damage to this superb record. Having expanded economically at a healthy clip for most of the last 70 years, generating higher incomes and wealth for American households, our country has in the last several years faced a stall and then a decline in prosperity. It is tantamount to a lost decade: chronic high unemployment, zero net job creation, and middle-income households slammed by a drop in their net worth and their incomes, adjusted for inflation. It's the first decline of median incomes and net worth since figures have been compiled starting some 50 years ago. The unique danger today is the possibility that we may face longer-term stagnation as a consequence of relying too heavily on borrowed money. When the housing and credit bubbles burst in 2007 and 2008, the unemployment rate soared to double digits and caused a cascade of shock throughout the credit markets and the banking system. Washington's ability to initiate a resurgence is now limited by the long-term dangers of our deficits and our debts. But one unfortunate pattern that has emerged in the last 18 months is to lay all the blame for our difficulties only on the business community and the financial world. This quite ignores the role of Congress<http://politics.usnews.com/congress> in many areas, but most glaringly in forcing Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Federal Housing Administration to back loans to people who could not afford them. And not to mention the role of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which in 2004 sanctioned higher levels of leverage for financial firms, from 12 times equity to over 30 times equity. This predilection to blame business is manifest in the unnecessary and provocative anti-business sentiment revealed by President Obama in a recent speech that was supposed to be seeking the support of the business community for a doubling of exports over the next five years. "In the absence of sound oversight," he said, "responsible businesses are forced to compete against unscrupulous and underhanded businesses, who are unencumbered by any restrictions on activities that might harm the environment, or take advantage of middle-class families, or threaten to bring down the entire financial system." This kind of gratuitous and overstated demonization of business is exactly the wrong approach. It ignores the disappointment of a stimulus program that was ill-designed to produce the jobs the president promised—that famous 8 percent unemployment ceiling. But it's not just the rhetoric that undermines the confidence the business community needs to find if it is to invest. Consider the new generation of regulatory rules, increased bureaucracy, and higher taxes created by the Obama administration. For example, the new financial regulation bill includes nearly 500 "rule-makings," studies, and reports, compared with just 14 in total for the controversial Sarbanes-Oxley bill, passed after the financial scandals of Enron and WorldCom. The disillusionment has spread to the Business Roundtable, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), which represents small businesses that normally account for roughly 60 percent of job creation. The chief economist of the NFIB, William Dunkelberg, put it clearly: Small business owners "do not trust the economic policies in place or proposed." He also said, "The U.S. economy faces hurricane force headwinds and the government is at the center of the storm, making an economic recovery very difficult." Our economic Katrina, in short. III. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-oil-spill-20100719,0,1562603.story Seep near capped well worries U.S.Concerns prompt a stern warning to BP from Washington's point man on the gulf oil spill. By Richard Fausset, Los Angeles Times 8:58 PM PDT, July 18, 2010 Reporting From Atlanta advertisement Worried about a substance seeping near BP's sealed oil well, the federal government demanded late Sunday that the company intensely monitor the seabed and be prepared to reopen the well immediately if new oil leaks spring up around the wellhead. At the same time, the government is allowing BP to keep the well sealed, which means the Gulf of Mexico will continue to be spared vast plumes of oil — at least for now. The demands were included in a letter written by Thad Allen, the federal oil-spill response chief, to BP Chief Managing Director Bob Dudley late Sunday evening. Allen gave the company until 9 p.m. EDT to respond. The letter does not identify the substance seeping near the well. BP and federal officials were unavailable for comment. But the letter's sharp tone suggests the government is unhappy with BP's response to previous demands that it vigorously check for potential problems associated with the plan to keep the well bottled up at the top. "When seeps are detected, you are directed to marshal resources, quickly investigate, and report findings to the government in no more than four hours," Allen wrote. "I direct you to provide me a written procedure for opening the choke valve as quickly as possible without damaging the well should hydrocarbon seepage near the wellhead be confirmed." The seal atop BP's well was applied Thursday, and it appeared to stop all of the oil from leaking into the gulf for the first time in 85 days. But the federal government is worried that the seal could create problems of its own. Specifically, if the well's underground pipes are cracked, the seal could exacerbate the flow of oil through them and up to the seafloor, creating a potentially unmanageable multitude of leaks. Allen's letter refers to a "detected seep a distance from the well and undetermined anomalies at the well head." Allen did not say what those anomalies were. During a morning conference call with reporters Sunday, BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles said that "a few bubbles" had been found near the well, but that they had been tested and found not to consist of hydrocarbons. A test of the well's integrity was supposed to end Sunday afternoon, but in a press statement earlier Sunday, Allen said the government may extend the well test – and, by extension, the seal of the well -- in 24-hour increments. BP officials have been cautiously optimistic about the state of the well since the tests began. The company has said the well was most likely to be in good shape if the pressure readings inside the pipes were 7,500 pounds per square inch or greater. Suttles said the pressure Sunday morning was 6,778 psi. BP officials suspect the low readings are not due to leaks in the well, but to a loss of pressure from the reservoir because so much oil has escaped. An estimated 60,000 barrels of oil a day had been gushing out for nearly three months. "We're not seeing any problems, at this point, of any issues with the shut-in," Suttles said. He added that if "encouraging signs continue," the company hoped to keep the well sealed at the top until a relief well could permanently plug it with mud and concrete – which may not be achieved until mid-August. The federal government has struck a more anxious tone. In recent days, Allen has stressed that experts were worried about new leaks on the seafloor. "While we are pleased that no oil is currently being released into the Gulf of Mexico and want to take all appropriate action to keep it that way, it is important that all decisions are driven by the science," Allen said in his prepared statement earlier Sunday. "Ultimately, we must ensure no irreversible damage is done which could cause uncontrolled leakage from numerous points on the sea floor." Allen's letter late Sunday seemed to repeat the demands the government has made of BP of late, rather than introduce new ones. Its sharp tone suggested that he may be frustrated with BP's level of compliance. In a statement, BP said it was "complying with all measures and protocols" Allen requested. "We appreciate the government's support and leadership as we work side by side with federal scientists as the test continues, with agreed criteria that would determine the end of the test and the re-opening of the well," the statement said. The back-and-forth between BP and the government made for a confusing weekend as observers attempted to decipher the status of one of the nation's worst environmental disasters. On Sunday, Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), chairman of a House subcommittee on energy and the environment, wrote Allen asking for "clarification," particularly because Allen, in a statement Saturday, seemed to indicate that the well would have to be reopened. Markey said it might be better to open the well again, sparing additional damage to the well and allowing ships to haul away the crude. BP said it can have ships in place by the end of July to take up all of the oil that had been leaking. But the plan involves numerous moving parts, and on Sunday Allen demanded that BP provide him with a detailed timeline. In the Gulf of Mexico, meanwhile, three days without a gusher have had an obvious effect on the surrounding waters. From a cargo plane above the gulf Sunday, long trails of oil sheen remained visible. Some looked like clear streaks of white, as if someone had clawed the water. Others were an oily orange. But that's a vast improvement from the weeks immediately after the spill, said Lt. Jamison Ferriel, who has flown over the islands dotted with booms and skimming boats countless times for the Coast Guard. "Two weeks after, there was a kind of rainbow sheen as far as you could see," he said. "Now, it's nowhere near that." In a New Orleans suburb on Monday, the focus will return to the cause of the April 20 rig blowout that killed 11 people and started the spill. A hearing is scheduled to resume, promising a highly technical analysis of what went wrong in the sophisticated drilling equipment that was boring deep below the seafloor. The weeklong proceedings — conducted by the Coast Guard and the newly constituted Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement — will include sworn testimony that will result in a report later in the year. [email protected] Times staff writers Alana Semuels in Houma, La., and Julie Cart in New Orleans contributed to this report. -- Peace Is Doable -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/greenyouth?hl=en-GB.
