Generalities and other lies:

               Does BP really stand for Bullshit                    Propaganda?

   

     British Petroleum is currently running a series of ads trumpeting the "fact" that oil and gas from Alaska creates jobs all over America. This would seem to be part of their continued efforts to atone for the Gulf Deepwater Horizon disaster of years past. A significant part of the commercial is the  shot of a ship being constructed, from  CAD drawing to the completed hull in a slipway. The obvious message here is that BP is good for American shipbuilders. That is a blatant lie. All of (every last one of!!!) BP's tanker fleet, oil, gas, lubricants, KY jelly, you name it, is/was built and overhauled by either Japanese or, increasingly, Korean shipyards! Topping it all off, the port of registry on essentially the whole fleet is Douglas, Isle of Man, which with its semi-autonomous economy, means that even Great Britain doesn't realize much if any income  (port fees, registry fees, etc) from the fleet.

                      Skeletor Scott and the Blame Game 

    Florida governor Rick Scott's campaign is running a series of scurrilous ads citing economic numbers aimed at making it appear that former governor Charlie Crist was personally responsible for significant drops in state revenues and jobs while he served from 2007 to 2011. Of course this is phrased as "Charlie Crist 'lost'  X number of jobs, whole Rick Scott 'created' X number of jobs." Is anyone interested in the facts?  well, you won't get them from Scott, so here they are. It should be noted that I am not a huge Crist fan, but I hate liars.  

     Governor Crist  took office at the same time as the Former governor's brother, George W. Bush was leaving - a time of national recession, triggered, in part, by a nationwide housing bubble collapse, which in turn spread throughout the banking world, introducing us to the term "too big to fail."  the problem in Florida to a large extent is that the state's economic structural house of cards , a slave to sales tax and high real estate fees, suffered disproportionately,   causing many home buyers who had been encouraged by reckless lending practices to buy homes they couldn't afford with payments they couldn't make if unemployed.  This perfect storm triggered a shortfall in tourism, again disproportionately affecting Florida.

    The next paragraphs cite data from the Graph below

     Ignoring national trends, and focusing on Florida, Governor Crist faced a drop in state revenues , symptomatic of job losses and decreased tourism, domestic and international, of from $150 billion in 2007, the last year of the Jeb Bush administration,  to $125 billion in 2008, to $95 billion in 2009, which just happens to be the data set the Scott campaign is using, as it was the low point. Summarizing, Charlie Crist inherited a 40% drop in state revenues. did this require state budget cuts? Of course. Was it Governor Crists's fault, and could he have avoided it? Hardly, with a Republican controlled state House and Senate. are those Republican lawmakers taking any responsibility? Of course not, nor should they.  

     According to Scott, he has "created" some hundred thousands of jobs and we are to ignore the fact that the decrease in  unemployment reflects an upswing in the national economy and huge jump in tourism spurring hiring in Florida's booming "attractions" economy. The current year's direct revenue is almost exactly the same as the year Crist left office, numbers, by the way, which Scott won't cite, since jobs and revenues had gradually improved from the 2008 nadir. What Scott also won't point out  is the revenue drop in the two years after he took office. Much of Scott's job creation has come at a price - the loss of corporate tax revenue, as he rewards his, already rich,  social peers with even more tax breaks and incentives. We now have a Governor (who narrowly escaped conviction for massive Medicare fraud by "taking the fifth" numerous times in his trial regarding billions in  fraudulent  billing) who is trying to convince us he's honest and trustworthy, while he signs gas pipeline authorization for a company in which his "blind" (wanna bet?) trust holds large interest!    

     As an afterthought, while Crist and the legislature were dealing with the 40% decrease in revenues in 2009, State Medicaid spending zoomed up by 7.4%, reflecting the loss of health care insurance accompanying job losses. By the way, an examination of national unemployment trends over the same span (2007-2014) shows that Florida has mirrored the nation almost exactly. In simplest terms, Rick Scott has done nothing more than would have happened if he had done nothing! 

     Meanwhile Scott has said nothing of the Republican controlled legislatures (all 4 years of Crist's term) who submitted the budgets which Crist approved! Blaming Crist for education cuts necessitated by this double whammy is, like Rick Scott's campaign ads and the man himself, specious, devious and mean spirited.