Obama's Six-month Moratorium on Deepwater Drilling is Destroying Thousands of Good-paying Jobs

The drive toward a 'green economy' (based on the man-made global warming hoax) is destroying many blue collar jobs in America; and what is emerging is an elitist class of very well paid federal workers who do not produce or manufacture anything (and like those accustomed to sucking off the government teat, they are perfectly primed to accept the communist state of the new world order). These federal workers are charged with enforcing rules and regulations that are killing the U.S. economy and depriving citizens of their civil rights, freedoms and liberties.

Oil Rig Workers Forced to Job Hunt After Drill Ban

June 17, 2010

Associated Press – Mr. Charlie has seen the up and downs over the years in the oil patch off Louisiana's coast, but this could be the toughest slump of all.

Earlier this week, the steel rig stationed on the Atchafalaya River graduated what could be one of its last classes of workers prepping for the rigors of offshore life.

President Barack Obama's six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf has sent shudders across the coast's offshore oil industry — where no one knows just how extensive or long-lasting the damage to jobs may be.

Louisiana has long been indebted to the oil industry. Its thousands of good-paying jobs — offshore workers frequently earn $50,000 a year or more — counterbalance the low-wage tourism industry in the state's southern tier of parishes. [Note that the average federal worker makes $75,419 a year, while the average in the private sector is $39,751.]

But that changed — at least temporarily — after the oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, spewing the black gold into the waters. Now, many of those who counted on making it in the oil patch are out stumping for jobs.

Rodney Phillips, a 38-year-old heavy equipment operator from Angie, La., was in a nine-day class when the moratorium was declared. His father made a good living from 20 years of offshore work with Texaco.

With the likelihood of quick offshore employment fading, Phillips was headed to the south Louisiana cities of Venice and Grand Isle in his Chevy truck in search of a job on one of the boats being hired to work the BP spill.

"There's jobs doing everything down there right now: Crewboats, tug boats, heavy equipment. Whatever best offer I get is where I will start off," he said.

Virgil Allen, a safety specialist who manages Mr. Charlie, owned by the International Petroleum Museum and Exposition in Morgan City, said one more training class was scheduled this week.

"The moratorium is stopping all the regular training," said Allen. The training rig, he said, is being turned into a clearinghouse for workers looking for oil spill response jobs, like the one Phillips hopes to get.

BP this week agreed to establish a $100 million fund to support oil rig workers idled by the six-month moratorium, separate from $20 billion it is setting aside for Gulf damages at the White House's insistence. No details have been released yet of how the rig worker money will be paid out. The administration also was to ask Congress for special unemployment insurance for the workers.

Still, almost no one is happy about the moratorium.

"Bringing drilling to a screeching halt will deal another blow to Louisiana workers and businesses that are already reeling from the impact of the oil disaster," said U.S. Rep. Charlie Melancon, D-La.

In the angst over drilling, perhaps no place in Louisiana will feel the economic ripple effects of the moratorium greater than Mr. Charlie, a landmark in the heart of Louisiana's offshore history.

The brainchild of Marksville, La., marine engineer Alden J. "Doc" Laborde, Mr. Charlie was the first U.S. submersible rig to drill for oil. On its first outing for the Shell Oil Co. in 1954, the rig struck oil in a well near the South Pass of the Mississippi River, not far from the blown-out BP-operated well.

"Shell Oil's South Pass 27 discovery loudly announced the arrival of offshore Louisiana as a major new producing area," writes Tyler Priest in "The Offshore Imperative," a history of Shell's oil and gas exploration. Priest is a historian at the Bauer College of Business at the University of Houston.

Mr. Charlie — a steel platform stuck on a submersible barge — cut quite a figure by 1950s standards and was celebrated with galas and a Life magazine article that called it a "singularly monstrous contraption."

After its retirement in 1984, it was anchored at Morgan City, a sleepy oil town of 12,000 where the offshore industry got its start in 1947. In short order the Mr. Charlie was turned into a training center for divers, grips, cooks and riggers looking for work in the Gulf.

It's been a great success. Until the Deepwater Horizon disaster, workers attracted by the offshore boom came from around the world for training.

Mr. Charlie has the feel of a well-worn, stately ship.

"The workers have to live on offshore time: They sleep here, eat their meals here. It's all done just like they'll find it offshore," said Allen on the narrow staircase to the Mr. Charlie's modular living quarters.

The last group to go through was a boisterous group of about 20 unemployed or semi-employed workers taking part in a state Labor Department retraining program.

Over a recent weekend, they sweated in the Louisiana sun as they got in and out of haz-mat suits and got drilled in basic rigging techniques, such as putting a pipe together.

"I need to pay my bills," said Rodney Hebert, who said he was between jobs.

Despite the temporary downturn in Louisiana's oil industry, the Mr. Charlie will likely survive. When classes aren't in, it still stays open as a museum. And after all, no one really expects the oil patch to ever rock like it did in the 1950s when company towns and wealth poured into the backwaters of Louisiana.

"The second largest helipad in the world was in Morgan City," Allen said. "The other was Di An, Vietnam."

Green Workers

February 19, 2009

Wall Street Journal - Presidents and politicians no longer talk about simply creating jobs -- now they are creating "green jobs." Just in the stimulus bill alone, there are said to be four million new green jobs. It's a great term -- it conjures up neatly dressed employees working under compact fluorescent lights, and factory workers in white and green helmets huddled over solar cells and wind turbines. These aren't boring office jobs or repetitive manufacturing plant jobs -- no, they're socially useful and rewarding jobs. And they'll save the planet, too.

Not so long ago, the buzzword was "new economy" jobs. Then as manufacturing jobs shrank and professional jobs mushroomed, this term became politically incorrect: it implied that America was going to abandon the manufacturing sector in favor of software coders, engineers and other geeks. Never mind that this absurdly assumed that these folks are somehow in a marginal niche. But what about the 1.4 million eBay entrepreneurs who owe their livelihood to the Internet? Or that we still don't produce enough software coders to meet our technology needs? But "green jobs" has a nice ring to it semantically, and the term will probably be around for a while.

Forget about huge, sweeping megaforces. The biggest trends today are micro: small, under-the-radar patterns of behavior which take on real power when propelled by modern communications and an increasingly independent-minded population. In the U.S., one percent of the nation, or three million people, can create new markets for a business, spark a social movement, or produce political change. This column is about identifying these important new niches, and acting on that knowledge.

Some green workers are not going to notice much difference. Employees assembling a hybrid car won't really notice anything different from assembling a purely gasoline fueled car, except they their jobs may be safer thanks to additional government subsidies. Others may in fact live the green dream and find themselves in new environmentally-friendly factories or offices -- or at least helping to make them.

Green is going to be the color of this century's WPA. In the 1930s, federally funded workers built highways and painted murals on government buildings. This time, they're going to fix air leaks in low-income homes and seal up government agencies' heating registers. The stimulus bill as passed will put more than $20 billion into energy investments -- including for some newfangled things like "modernizing the electric grid." But nearly $10 billion is going to go to energy-retrofitting and weatherizing federal buildings, HUD-assisted housing projects, and other low- and modest-income homes. Last year, the U.S. Department of Energy's Weatherization Assistance Program gave about $225 million to local governments and nonprofits to help seal people's drafty windows and plug up insulation in their roofs and walls.

The stimulus bill would increase that funding 20-fold. That means a huge crew of brand-new green workers, suddenly making a livelihood off saving fuel costs, energy consumption and the planet. Added to a couple of million existing green workers, that is a full-blown microtrend, and enough to turn upside down the cliché of the out-of-touch environmentalist -- the guy driving a $120,000 Lexus hybrid just for the cachet and added acceleration. Now environmentalists will be in the mainstream of America and at the forefront of the economic recovery. Joe the Insulator will be replacing Joe the Plumber.

The implications are vast. Just as police officers across America once switched to the Democratic Party because Bill Clinton funded 100,000 cops on the street, now small business owners and other green workers may support all kinds of pro-environment policies just because their livelihood depends on it.

Second, to the extent that pro-environment groups have historically gotten their passion from goading the government to Give a Hoot and Don't Pollute, they are about to become "the man" themselves. It's as if in the 1970s, the leaders of the budding vegetarian movement had been put in charge of USDA. It's not easy to go from moral high ground to government bureaucrat overnight. Will green groups lose their innovative edge -- and the sense of urgency that so inspired their funders -- when they're flush with government cash?

Third, green workers are going to want to share their experiences out there forging the frontier of a strong economy and a strong environment. Right now, the EPA and the Energy Department give out "energy stars" to washing machines, home repair strategies, and businesses that are energy-efficient. Why not give green workers an official designation, too? A lapel pin, or cufflinks for white-collar green jobs, that tells the world they are officially green, and proud of it? Corporations could have accreditation programs for jobs that are officially labeled as green and let job applicants know how many green jobs they have or have open.

We already have 1.6 million new quasi-government workers, who actually or essentially now work for the government because of federal takeovers and bailouts. Green workers coming down the pike will be also either government workers themselves, or dependent upon government programs for their jobs.

What are the implications of this? When you're abating asbestos all day, you're going to have formidable health risks that are suddenly the federal government's very big problem. When a federally funded weatherizer is traipsing through Mrs. Jones's house to plug up her windows, what is he supposed to do if he sees illegal drugs? And what about the executives of federally subsidized green companies -- will there soon be calls to cap their pay and benefits as well? It seems only fair that green executives should not profit excessively from these government-sponsored programs in a time of crisis. So jobs that used to be done for greenbacks may soon be done just for the green of it.

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The Coming Flood Of Government Jobs
As the job news grows ever darker--the Labor Department announced Friday that unemployment had hit a 26-year high of 9.7%--a ray of light is shining from an unexpected quarter: the federal government. By the fall of 2012, the federal government will hire 273,000 new workers, according to a report released last week by the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, a group in Washington that promotes government employment--and those are all jobs the group calls "mission critical," meaning they are considered crucial and therefore certain to be filled. That's a 41% increase from the three previous fiscal years. Here are the fields that will hire the most workers; the specific jobs mentioned can all be found at the government's official jobs Web site, www.usajobs.gov.