Comments on: This Is Becoming A Tragic Farce

By: Bryan

Bryan — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 04:20:05 +0000

Everyone is laying off down here, but they are doing it by cutting hours, rather than anything that would be picked up by financial analysts. The system has become that you get hired as a part-timer, then you don’t know from one week to the next if you will get any work.

Some of the normal summer businesses just aren’t opening. The word is that some might open for the Fourth of July, if things improve, but there’s no point in air conditioning a building without customers.

If we have a hurricane, I can see people taking the insurance and not rebuilding. You can’t keep a business running on some sort of payment from BP.

It looks like BP may be setting up a separate entity to deal with the well. If things get sticky, the entity will go bankrupt without affecting the rest of the corporation. Frankly, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to have Hayward, the CEO of the entire corporation, involved. They should have already had a local entity for the Gulf, and a separate entity for Alaska. BP staff cuts left them exposed.

Hayward isn’t going to resign, he wants to get a big severance bonus like his predecessor, Lord Browne, who was forced out after their Texas refinery blew up. Management always takes care of its own, no matter what happens to customers, workers, or stockholders.

By: Kryten42

Kryten42 — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 02:35:16 +0000

I couldn’t agree more Juanita, sadly. 🙁

And yeah, you can guarantee Hayward (and all the others) will get their bonuses.

By: JuanitaM

JuanitaM — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 01:43:43 +0000

P.S. Bryan, I just read that Hayward is being relieved of day-to-day responsibilities at BP. I bet he still gets to keep his bonuses.

By: JuanitaM

JuanitaM — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 01:25:26 +0000

At this point everyone who is supposed to be helping us above the county level, is just getting in the way of our efforts to protect the coastline.

Yep, this reminds me of one of our prior conversations. You know, all you “little people” will be the only ones doing anything constructive. The “big people” are too busy contemplating their navels.

I had not seen that Moody’s projection, Kryten. Thanks for posting it. It just adds one more loose screw to the cast of thousands piling up out there. There’s no way under God’s green earth that this will not affect the national economy.

And I would submit that there will be more than 16,000 jobs PER COUNTY that will be affected by this. When small businesses have no tourism, and they start letting people go, Moody’s will once again make an “after the facts” adjustment and contend that they just couldn’t have predicted this.

Are they really this stupid, or are they shills for the corporations? That is the question. It can only be one or the other.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 02:33:01 +0000

It would appear that Moody’s is limiting itself to a subset of those actually affected, as several Florida economists are talking about nearly 200K jobs and over $10 billion in losses in this state alone.

The price of seafood is spiking all over the country because the people who bought Gulf seafood are now bidding for seafood from other places.

The Intercoastal Waterway is shut because it uses local waterways that are now blocked by booms, so the barges that carry bulk cargoes from all of the ports in the Gulf states can’t move. That means that as long as the oil is lapping our shores, bulk gasoline and diesel shipments can’t be made, and there is no coal for several power plants. There will be back-ups at ports that will affect coffee and bananas from the Caribbean and Central America. There is a lot of bulk cargo that still moves by sea, and that is going to be blocked.

Moody’s should go back to telling people how safe those mortgage bonds and derivatives are.

By: Kryten42

Kryten42 — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 14:25:15 +0000

Moody’s is projecting that the best case scenario following BP’s oil disaster will “cost the Gulf region’s five states more than 16,000 jobs and $1.15 billion from the area’s gross domestic product.” Moody’s chief economist, Mark Zandi told The Hill, “It’s not going to affect the national economy. But it is going to have a very long impact on the regional economy.”

I fail to see how that would not impact the National economy! They really do live in a bubble. With any luck, the air will run out!