CatherineRhodes.com

I thought I was unshockable regarding the whole financial meltdown. I’ve read the books, watched the movies and truly lived the nightmare — but nothing prepared me for this article in the New York Times.  It describes an office Halloween party at one of the “foreclosure mills” used by the big banks, where staffers dressed up as homeless people, mocking those they were about to evict from their homes. Truly one of those gasping in horror moments. PLEASE read the article.

Why Wall Street (and the world) is being occupied

Then, we get the other side in a series of “postcards from the edge.” These are the 99 percent — young people with crushing student loan debt, families bankrupted by medical bills, the evicted, the unemployed — those occupying Wall Street.

These signs broke my heart

The reason why the government needs to impose strict regulations on business is because corporations are inherently amoral. Not immoral, as in lacking in morals or evil. But amoral, as in ethically neutral. The job of the corporation is to earn money for its shareholders. If it has an enlightened agenda, like offering part-time workers benefits, that is not because it is benevolent, but because such largess allows it to attract better talent, make superior goods and create bigger profits for shareholders.

The originator of this idea about corporations being amoral was Milton Friedman, founder of the famed Chicago School of economic thought. They believed in laissez-faire capitalism, but ironically created a body of thought that justified strong federal oversight.

Accidents can be prevented

Yes, if it is profitable for a corporation to do so, it will dispose of chemicals in the river, hire child workers overseas or cut corners on the safety backup system of a deepsea oil rig.

We recently interviewed a nurse from the Burn Unit of a Los Angeles area hospital for my magazine Working Nurse. The article was about her career path, but she said something that caught my attention regarding the concept of corporation regulation. She was discussing the full-body burns that require a nurse to spend three or four hours a day debriding, which is removing dead tissue, and changing dressings — and mentioned why it’s becoming rare to see these patients.

“Fortunately, burns of this magnitude are decreasing, thanks to smoke detectors, prevention programs and OSHA safety standards in the workplace,” she said.

This brilliant piece of writing from Joe Klein over at Time.com.

Sean Hannity called the spill “Obama’s Katrina,” but it was actually George W. Bush’s second Katrina. Vice President Dick Cheney, fresh from his days at Halliburton, had presided over the weakening of drilling regulations, including the exclusion of remote-shut-off switches (commonly used in the North Sea oil fields), which might have prevented the disaster.

The Bush Administration’s petro-bias and antigovernment sensibility soiled the Minerals Management Service (MMS), the agency charged with regulating offshore drilling. Indeed, the MMS soon emerged as a caricature of bureaucratic lassitude and corruption. A 2008 report found that the agency’s regulators were taking gifts from, and having sex with the employees of, the companies they were supposed to be monitoring.

Another report, about MMS activities from 2005 to 2007, will show, among many other things, that MMS staffers allowed oil companies to fill out their own inspection reports in pencil, which were then committed to ink by stenographic MMS regulators. Other studies found that the MMS was remarkably, perhaps criminally, lax in collecting the royalties due the government for the right to extract oil from public lands, nor was it fulfilling its rig-inspection responsibilities. The encyclopedic catalog of the agency’s sleaziness boggles the mind.

They have 131,427 followers

Faced with a travesty of these proportions, the best volley back is always a satirical Twitter page. Behold, the power of 140 characters. Sample posts from @BPGlobal_PR:

Safety is our primary concern. Well, profits, then safety. Oh, no- profits, image, then safety, but still- it’s right up there.

Words can not express how sorry we are. So we are going to stop apologizing and just give our investors 10 billion dollars.