But even as he became the toast of Britain’s business world and was made a knight and member of the House of Lords, Mr. Browne was ruthlessly slashing costs. He outsourced many operations and fired tens of thousands of employees, including many engineers.

Tom Kirchmaier, a lecturer in strategy at the Manchester Business School, said that Mr. Browne tried to run BP like a financial company, rotating managers into new jobs with tough profit targets and then moving them before they had to deal with the consequences. The troubled Texas City refinery, for example, had five managers in six years.

This New York Times article on BP’s safety disasters highlights the need for enforceable regulation. Instead, we continue to believe the myth of laissez faire excellence. As we’ve seen with the oil school in the Gulf, it’s disastrous when companies attempt to profit at the margins of recklessness.

Benjamin Kunkel has an interesting article in N+1 examining the influence of employment policy on economic growth. He ends by presenting his vision of full employment.

I’m sure Rush Limbaugh and all the other bottom dwellers who blame poor, minority home-owners for the economic implosion will get right on this one (from the New York Times).

Biggest Defaulters on Mortgages are the Rich
Whether it is their residence, a second home or a house bought as an investment, the rich have stopped paying the mortgage at a rate that greatly exceeds the rest of the population.

Of course, rich people defaulting isn’t what caused the downturn either, but it’s a sweet rebuttal to remoras whose economic platform is to rub the sub-90th percentile’s faces in the dirt.

For months now the Noble-prize winning economist has been decrying the conventional wisdom that governments need to cut deficit spending, arguing that continuing stimulus is what’s needed to boost a still-shaky economy. Now the on-the-ground situation in Ireland seems to bolster his argument. Two years after the country imposed deep austerity measures, the country’s economy is in worse shape because of it.

Despite its strenuous efforts, Ireland has been thrust into the same ignominious category as Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain. It now pays a hefty three percentage points more than Germany on its benchmark bonds, in part because investors fear that the austerity program, by retarding growth and so far failing to reduce borrowing, will make it harder for Dublin to pay its bills rather than easier.

As Krugman interprets:

That’s why the Irish debacle is so important. All that savage austerity was supposed to bring rewards; the conventional wisdom that this would happen is so strong that one often reads news reports claiming that it has, in fact, happened, that Ireland’s resolve has impressed and reassured the financial markets. But the reality is that nothing of the sort has taken place: virtuous, suffering Ireland is gaining nothing.

Unfortunately, as the New York Times reports, the leaders of the G-20 nations are continuing the “cut and ye shall be rewarded mania.” Hopefully we don’t all end up paying far more than whatever deficits would have been incurred.

The New York Times has an informative article on how Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal is trying to claim the federal government’s response to the Gulf oil spill is being undermined by bureaucratic dithering. Problems aside, in reality, the state is responsible for much of the relief planning, and their planning – thanks in part to funding cuts – was incomplete and unready.

As a result of this lack of planning, Jindal et al. want to rush forward with an emergency engineering response that will take months to complete and cost hundreds of millions of dollars…even as experts think it won’t work.

If the White House were proposing this plan, Jindal would ridicule it as undercooked pork, a la volcano monitoring. But apparently asking the experts to weigh in before committing to throwing hundreds of millions of dollars into this crude pit is the height of nanny-state incompetence.