In Mich. Cleanup, a Missed Opportunity for Local Workers and Abuse of Undocumented Ones

“The turnaround has been insufficient,” Christina Romer, the exiting chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, said this week. The economy “is growing, but not fast enough to create the hundreds of thousands of jobs each month needed to return employment to its pre-crisis level.”

FEMA trailers, once concentrated around New Orleans, now blanket the country, uncounted and mislabeled in dealers’ lots, back lawns and sites for oil spill cleanup.

“I’ve given them everything you could possibly want, pay stubs, tax returns, everything,” says one engineer. “It’s not that I don’t have supporting documents. It’s that nobody has even looked at my documents.”

“New Orleans is a city that recognizes that day laborers did participate and did come to the rescue in terms of reconstruction,” says Jacinta Gonzales of the Congress of Day Laborers.

Photographs show undocumented workers, who were paid in cash and bused in from Texas, covered in oil and mud while receiving food and water.

The total number of claims to date is 31,225. Of those claims, only 1,935 — just over 6 percent — have been paid.

“We’re dealing with local contractors on a daily basis and they’re not getting the work,” says Barry Kaufman of the Construction and General Laborers Union Local 689. “There are more out-of-state contractors in here than holes in cheese.”

“The capacity to find a facility is not tied to school performance,” says one New Orleans school principal. “I understand that, but I really wish there was a clearer path.”

“We should have learned from Hurricane Betsy with Agriculture Street and we didn’t,” says Darryl Malek-Wiley, a field organizer for the Sierra Club. “We should have learned from Katrina and we didn’t. Now we’re doing it again with the Gulf oil spill.”

“We can disagree on politics,” Glenn Beck told a crowd of thousands, but all agree “God is the answer.”

Asked why Democrats should support him rather than Meek, Gov. Charlie Crist replied, “I can win.”

The hardship of raising the retirement age falls disproportionately on low-income workers who work in physically demanding professions, and have not shared in life-expectancy gains.

The commission should call for a “comprehensive overhaul” of offshore drilling regulations that improves communication within MMS, requires “double and triple checking” of drilling activities, and updates standards for environmental review, Birnbaum said.

Scott, who has never held elected office, ran on his business experience as a former health care executive despite the fact that he was forced out after his company paid $1.7 billion to the U.S. government for Medicare and Medicaid fraud.

Meek faces an uphill battle in the general election as polls consistently put him behind Republican candidate Marco Rubio and independent candidate Gov. Charlie Crist.

For the average worker who has lost her job since May 31, the cost of COBRA has tripled. And that’s likely to mean hundreds of thousands of families dropping out of health plans altogether.

“There will certainly be cases, it seems to me, where the Feinberg claims process will not pay,” says law professor Ed Sherman. “A seafood restaurant in Idaho that didn’t get Gulf oysters for a period of time faces an uphill battle.”