AS an economic historian who has been studying American capitalism for 35 years, I’m going to let you in on the best-kept secret of the last century: private investment — that is, using business profits to increase productivity and output — doesn’t actually drive economic growth. Consumer debt and government spending do. Private investment isn’t even necessary to promote growth.
This is, to put it mildly, a controversial claim. Economists will tell you that private business investment causes growth because it pays for the new plant or equipment that creates jobs, improves labor productivity and increases workers’ incomes. As a result, you’ll hear politicians insisting that more incentives for private investors — lower taxes on corporate profits — will lead to faster and better-balanced growth.
The general public seems to agree. According to a New York Times/CBS News poll in May, a majority of Americans believe that increased corporate taxes “would discourage American companies from creating jobs.”
But history shows that this is wrong.
Between 1900 and 2000, real gross domestic product per capita (the output of goods and services per person) grew more than 600 percent. Meanwhile, net business investment declined 70 percent as a share of G.D.P. What’s more, in 1900 almost all investment came from the private sector — from companies, not from government — whereas in 2000, most investment was either from government spending (out of tax revenues) or “residential investment,” which means consumer spending on housing, rather than business expenditure on plants, equipment and labor.
In other words, over the course of the last century, net business investment atrophied while G.D.P. per capita increased spectacularly. And the source of that growth? Increased consumer spending, coupled with and amplified by government outlays.
The architects of the Reagan revolution tried to reverse these trends as a cure for the stagflation of the 1970s, but couldn’t. In fact, private or business investment kept declining in the ’80s and after. Peter G. Peterson, a former commerce secretary, complained that real growth after 1982 — after President Ronald Reagan cut corporate tax rates — coincided with “by far the weakest net investment effort in our postwar history.”
President George W. Bush’s tax cuts had similar effects between 2001 and 2007: real growth in the absence of new investment. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, retained corporate earnings that remain uninvested are now close to 8 percent of G.D.P., a staggering sum in view of the unemployment crisis we face.
So corporate profits do not drive economic growth — they’re just restless sums of surplus capital, ready to flood speculative markets at home and abroad. In the 1920s, they inflated the stock market bubble, and then caused the Great Crash. Since the Reagan revolution, these superfluous profits have fed corporate mergers and takeovers, driven the dot-com craze, financed the “shadow banking” system of hedge funds and securitized investment vehicles, fueled monetary meltdowns in every hemisphere and inflated the housing bubble.
Why, then, do so many Americans support cutting taxes on corporate profits while insisting that thrift is the cure for what ails the rest of us, as individuals and a nation? Why have the 99 percent looked to the 1 percent for leadership when it comes to our economic future?
A big part of the problem is that we doubt the moral worth of consumer culture. Like the abstemious ant who scolds the feckless grasshopper as winter approaches, we think that saving is the right thing to do. Even as we shop with abandon, we feel that if only we could contain our unruly desires, we’d be committing ourselves to a better future. But we’re wrong.
Consumer spending is not only the key to economic recovery in the short term; it’s also necessary for balanced growth in the long term. If our goal is to repair our damaged economy, we should bank on consumer culture — and that entails a redistribution of income away from profits toward wages, enabled by tax policy and enforced by government spending. (The increased trade deficit that might result should not deter us, since a large portion of manufactured imports come from American-owned multinational corporations that operate overseas.)
We don’t need the traders and the C.E.O.’s and the analysts — the 1 percent — to collect and manage our savings. Instead, we consumers need to save less and spend more in the name of a better future. We don’t need to silence the ant, but we’d better start listening to the grasshopper.
James Livingston, a professor of history at Rutgers, is the author of “Against Thrift: Why Consumer Culture Is Good for the Economy, the Environment and Your Soul.”
SESSIONS: No program in our government has surged out of control more dramatically than food stamps. And nothing is being done about it. [...] Multimillion dollar lottery winners are getting food stamps because the money is considered to be an asset not an income. One of the fast and furious gun buyers –
HOST: But hold on, for ever lottery winner that has food stamps, there’s probably a lot more people who really need them who have them, right?
SESSIONS: Well look, do you think there are four times as many people who need food stamps today as in 2001. That answers itself. [...] We cannot do this. We do not have the money. Congress doesn’t understand that we can’t afford to double the program every three years.
It’s shockingly ignorant at best and dishonest at worst for Sessions — the ranking GOP member of the Senate Budget Committee — to completely ignore the role the economy has played on food stamp usage. The cost of the program has jumped because more Americans are out of work and wages are down, thus more people need assistance [ http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2010/1026/Recession-officially-over-use-of-food-stamps-stays-at-record-high ]. Food prices have also gone up, adding additional costs. But the cost of the program will come down on its own [ http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3450 ] as the economy recovers and more people can afford to feed themselves.
In fact, the food stamp program has been critical [id.] for reducing poverty and pumping money into local economies during the down economy, so cutting it now would not only take food out of peoples’ mouths, but could slow down the recovery. No one is trying to “double the program every three years” as Sessions claims. (Currently, nearly one in five [ http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2011/02/02/some-43-million-americans-use-food-stamps/ ] Alabamians is on Food Stamps.)
And while the senator suggests the program has grown due to fraud, in fact, errors in the food stamp program — the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) –are currently at an all-time low [ http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3450 ], accounting for less than three percent of the program’s cost. According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities:
To ensure that benefits are provided only to eligible households and in the proper amounts, SNAP has one of the most rigorous quality control systems of any public benefit program and, in recent years, has achieved its lowest error rates on record. In fiscal year 2009, even as caseloads were rising, states set new record lows for error rates. The net loss due to errors equaled only 2.7 percent of program costs in 2009. There is no evidence that program errors are driving up SNAP spending.
EU Banks Warn of Credit Drought Amid Push to Raise Capital
By Anne-Sylvaine Chassany and Simon Kennedy - Oct 25, 2011 6:00 PM CT
A top lobbyist for France’s largest bank says European lawmakers will have only themselves to blame if pressure to bolster capital too quickly results in more Boeing Co. planes at the expense of European rival Airbus SAS.
European banks say they have to cut assets to help satisfy a government push to boost capital faster than planned to insulate them against the sovereign debt crisis. That may trigger a credit crunch for companies and consumers throughout the 17-nation euro zone, helping to push its economy into recession, say Citigroup Inc. and Deutsche Bank AG analysts.
Leaders meet today in Brussels to approve a plan to increase lenders’ capital by about 100 billion euros ($139 billion). Banks say they will more likely achieve the new requirements by shrinking rather than raising cash from shareholders, a scenario they want to avoid partly because their share prices have fallen 30 percent this year.
Threats Are ‘Pernicious’
“Threatening there will be fewer loans for Airbus aircraft is pernicious,” said Christophe Nijdam, an AlphaValue bank analyst in Paris. “Aircraft leasing isn’t a big amount in BNP Paribas’s balance sheet, but imagine the impact of such a comment on German or French lawmakers with an Airbus plant in their constituencies. Banks have other ways to boost capital than reduce lending to businesses. They could cut their trading books for example.”
Banks are using the threat of lower lending to influence talks with regulators, just as demand for financing declines in a slower economy. Lenders reported a net decrease in loan applications by non-financial firms in the third quarter, the first drop in more than a year, according to the European Central Bank.
“This whole tune sounds familiar, and it’s always been the case ahead of major recapitalization exercises that we see these statements of banks,” said Christian Gattiker, head of research at Bank Julius Baer & Co. in Zurich.
Europe Versus U.S.
Banks are more important to the European economy than they are in the U.S., according Bank of America Corp. economist Laurence Boone. She calculates that loans to the private sector totaled 145 percent of gross domestic product in 2007, more than double that of the U.S., where companies rely more on stock and bond markets for capital.
James Ferguson, head of strategy at Arbuthnot Securities Ltd. in London, draws parallels between Europe’s current situation and the credit crunches suffered in recent decades by Japan, the U.S. and the U.K.
“History shows that bank recapitalizations provide the catalyst for the credit crunch,” he said in an Oct. 20 note. “Japan learned this in 1998, and the U.S. and the U.K. in 2008. Continental Europe’s lesson starts now.”
Banks across Europe have announced they will trim more than 775 billion euros from their balance sheets in the next two years to reduce short-term funding needs and achieve the 9 percent in regulatory capital required by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision ahead of schedule, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. They may be required by policy makers today to meet this ratio by the end of June, two people with knowledge of the talks said.
‘Incredibly Worrying’
So-called bank deleveraging could reach 5 trillion euros in the next three to five years, according to Alberto Gallo, head of European credit strategy at Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc in London.
“It is incredibly worrying that this wall of deleveraging will, in fact, continue to add additional pressure onto the European economies,” John Moran, head of bank restructuring at Ireland’s Finance Ministry, said in a speech in Dublin Oct. 12. There is “an absolute necessity to avoid excessively speedy deleveraging across the system.”
The ECB reported on Oct. 6 that the toughening of credit standards by euro-zone banks “picked up significantly” in the third quarter. A net 16 percent of banks said they tightened loan terms to non-financial firms, compared with 2 percent in the previous three months and predicted more constraint in the current quarter. Eighteen percent said they had done the same for consumers buying homes, double that of the second quarter.
Moving Toward Recession
The ECB’s third-quarter data show the biggest restriction of credit since the third quarter of 2009 and that loan officers are signaling it will get worse in the first quarter of next year, according to an analysis by Guillaume Menuet, a Citigroup economist.
Such constraint “will play a part” along with tighter fiscal policy in tipping the euro area into its second recession in three years, Menuet said. He estimates the economy will contract 0.3 percent in the current quarter before shrinking about 0.1 percent in each of the next three quarters. The economy expanded 0.2 percent in the second quarter from the previous three months, according to the most recent data.
“The recession has already started,” Eric Chaney, Axa SA’s chief economist, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television in Paris on Oct. 14. “There is a credit crunch. Banks are not lending as much as companies would like, especially in peripheral countries.”
Rates Rising
In Spain, one in four companies were rejected for loans in 2010, compared with 10 percent in 2007, according to a survey by the country’s national statistics institute published in May. The average interest rate on new company loans of as much as 1 million euros rose to 4.7 percent in July from 4.57 percent in June, and 3.88 percent in December, the Bank of Spain reported.
The EU proposals “will produce a contraction of credit since many institutions will opt to reduce their balances,” Banco Santander SA Chairman Emilio Botin said in a speech on Oct. 18 at the bank’s headquarters outside Madrid.
Santander expects lending at its Spanish branch network to drop 3 percent a year through 2013, it said in an analyst presentation in September.
Companies in countries at the heart of Europe, including France and Germany, are facing more selective banks demanding more expensive terms. A net 28 percent of French corporate treasurers judged it was “difficult” to get bank financing, according to an October survey by the French Association of Corporate Treasurers [ http://www.afte.com/files/afte/COE_AFTE_2011_10_0.pdf ]. In July, a net 1.4 percent of the respondents said it was “easy.”
“We’re seeing a similar trend as in 2008 when things suddenly and massively deteriorated,” Richard Cordero, the association’s head in Paris, said in an interview. “Banks are reducing their balance sheets, and it doesn’t bode well in terms of getting access to credit.”
Airbus said Sept. 19 it’s concerned the European debt crisis may hurt airlines’ ability to raise bank financing for aircraft purchases. Suppliers may also be hit, Airbus Chief Executive Officer Thomas Enders said at a conference last week.
“We see some troubling signs of lack of capital, especially with some of our smaller suppliers,” Enders, 52, said in Toulouse, France, on Oct. 18. “They’re the ones who get hit first when banks tighten up their capital.”
Financing Alternatives
French banks provide 15 percent to 20 percent of commercial aircraft financing, according to Bertrand Grabowski, managing director of DVB Bank SE, which is among the biggest aircraft financiers in Europe. On Sept. 22, European Aeronautic, Defence & Space Co., Airbus’s parent, sought to reassure investors that other lenders could fill the gap if European banks retrench.
“We have seen many new banks entering or re-entering the aviation market,” EADS Chief Financial Officer Hans Peter Ring said in an e-mailed statement then.
Regulators created a framework that makes businesses such as aircraft leasing harder, BNP Paribas CEO Baudouin Prot said in a Sept. 22 interview with French newspaper Les Echos.
“All the banks will have to adapt, notably in the markets that are far from their base,” Prot said. “We won’t, however, abandon the expertise accumulated over decades in businesses that are useful to the real economy.”
Societe Generale
Pascal Henisse, a spokesman for BNP Paribas in Paris, declined to comment further.
“We’re going to continue to finance the French economy,” Societe Generale CEO Frederic Oudea, 48, said in an interview with French channel BFM TV on Oct. 24. He pointed out that the volume of loans provided by the French banks to companies and households grew 6 percent annually through August.
“If you give banks 18 months time to reach a certain capital quota, then they’ll try to reach that through a reduction in business,” Commerzbank AG CEO Martin Blessing, 48, said in an interview with German newspaper Bild Zeitung on Oct. 21. “That would hamper lending to companies.”
His comment echoed Deutsche Bank CEO Josef Ackermann, 63, who said on Oct. 13 that banks may be forced to restrict lending “due to possible debt haircuts in the euro zone.”
Regulators say the risk of reduced lending is worth taking in light of a bigger concern about the banks’ ability to find short-term funding on the markets at a time when investors are questioning their sovereign debt holdings.
‘Excessive Fear’
“It’s a risk that exists,” French Central Bank Governor Christian Noyer said in an interview on French channel TV5 Monde on Oct. 16. “But the risk that’s more important today is that the banks are subject to excessive fear from investors making it hard for them to find funding.”
The chances of a credit crunch would also shift “higher than 50 percent” if banks don’t boost capital, Julius Baer’s Gattiker told Bloomberg Television’s “On the Move” with Francine Lacqua on Oct. 19.
Bank of America’s Boone says the threat of a credit contraction similar to 2008 remains small. Her banking-analyst colleagues expect loan growth to decrease to 2.6 percent next year from 3.3 percent in 2011. If that comes to pass, then ECB studies suggest the effect of such a decline on economic growth would be to reduce it from Bank of America’s 0.8 percent forecast next year to 0.77 percent or 0.63 percent, depending on the study, she said.
Hiring Constrained
Small and medium-sized companies say they are particularly vulnerable because they lack the cash and ability to issue bonds that larger companies have, according to strategists at Credit Suisse Group AG’s private-banking division.
Edward Hamilton, owner of Cheltenham, U.K.-based advertising agency Artful Ltd., said he can’t hire more staff and is missing contracts because his bank is seeking to reduce his company’s credit line. Hamilton, who employs half a dozen people, said his confidence in the future is at its lowest in 30 years of running the business.
“They are trying to reduce the overdraft facility so that they can stave off their losses on their loans to Greece,” he said in a phone interview. “I am not going to put myself in a position where I am paying twice as much for a loan from a bank. I will find the money elsewhere.”
More than 30 percent of small businesses say they have been missing opportunities because they were denied bank financing, Andrew Cave, head of the U.K.’s Federation of Small Businesses, said in an interview.
‘Money in the System’
“Banks have the money to be able to carry on businesses in more lucrative investment banking,” he said. “There’s still money in the system. It’s just a choice the banks make as to where they place that money.”
Maurizio Guidi, co-owner of EUSolar Srl, a builder of solar plants in northern Italy, said he has been losing contracts for three months because his clients, including farms and small companies, can’t get bank loans.
“Last month we lost a contract with an agriculture business because the company didn’t obtain a credit line to finance the plant,” Guidi said in an interview. “They were solvent and without particular problems, but the bank told them that they are not willing to lend money for more than 10 years. Banks only borrow money for short periods and at higher costs. I’m in the business since 2005, and I think that a new credit crunch period is around the corner.”
The banks’ lending argument may backfire, pushing politicians to press lenders to raise cash from shareholders, an option they want to avert because it would be dilutive and, if they were to use government money, lead to policy makers having more say in their operations.
“The banks need to deleverage, but if they choose to deleverage by cutting assets not by raising equity then it will have negative consequences for the economy,” Simon Maughan, head of sales at MF Global Holdings Ltd. in London. “It’s much better to force a deleveraging through more equity even if that means it has to be forcibly injected in the banks.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Anne-Sylvaine Chassany in London at achassany@bloomberg.net; Simon Kennedy in London at skennedy4@bloomberg.net To contact the editor responsible for this story: Edward Evans at eevans3@bloomberg.net; John Fraher in London at jfraher@bloomberg.net
MDL 2179 In re: Oil Spill by the Oil Rig "Deepwater Horizon" in Gulf of Mexico on April 20, 2010 – Official Court-Authorized Website.
Frequently Asked Questions
*These Frequently Asked Questions and Answers (FAQs) were prepared by the Parties and the Claims Administrator to assist claimants who might submit claims to the Court Supervised Settlement Program. The information contained in these FAQs is based on the Amended Settlement Agreement, which was granted Preliminary Approval on May 2, 2012. However, these FAQs are not a substitute for and do not constitute the official Class Notice, and they are not approved by the Court. Any term or information in these FAQs that is found in the Amended Settlement Agreement will have the meaning set forth in the Settlement Agreement. If there is any conflict between these FAQs and the Amended Settlement Agreement, the Amended Settlement Agreement controls.
I. GENERAL INFORMATION II. WHO IS INCLUDED IN THE SETTLEMENT? III. OPTING OUT OF THE SETTLEMENT IV. OBJECTING TO THE SETTLEMENT V. SUMMARY OF THE SETTLEMENT CLAIM CATEGORIES VI. ADMINISTRATION OF THE SETTLEMENT VII. QUESTIONS REGARDING HOW TO FILE A CLAIM VIII. ATTORNEY REPRESENTATION IX. INFORMATION ON SPECIFIC SETTLEMENT DAMAGE CATEGORIES X. ADDITIONAL FAQS
I. GENERAL INFORMATION
1. What is the Economic and Property Damages Settlement?
This Settlement resolves certain economic loss and property damage claims related to the Deepwater Horizon Incident, including claims for:
* Seafood Compensation * Business Economic Loss * Individual Economic Loss * Loss of Subsistence * Vessel Physical Damage * VoO Charter Payment * Coastal Real Property Damage * Wetlands Real Property Damage * Real Property Sales Loss
As part of the Settlement, a Court-Supervised Settlement Program has been established to review and pay qualified claims made by individuals and businesses that are members of the Economic Class and affected by the Deepwater Horizon Incident.
Click here .. to view the full text of the Economic and Property Damages Settlement Agreement.
"More of Obama’s regulations may cost more than $100 million as compared to previous administrations. But many of them help prevent outcomes that would cost exponentially more. For instance, the Department of Interior’s new controls on deep-water oil drilling may cost the industry $180 million, but one oil spill like that caused by Deepwater Horizon could cost the industry $16.3 billion. Some of the administration’s rules, like those governing coal ash, will actually help create thousands of jobs" [ http://thinkprogress.org/green/2011/10/11/341117/study-coal-ash-rules-will-create-28000-jobs-while-saving-lives/ ].
========
[ Brendan Trembath reported this story on Sunday, August 5, 2012 07:17:00 ]
Counting the cost of the Deepwater Horizon spill
ELIZABETH JACKSON: Environmentalists and fishing industry veterans say it could be years before they know the full impact of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico two years ago.
About 4.9 million barrels of oil spilled into the Gulf after an explosion on BP's Deepwater Horizon drilling rig.
Studies show there's a continuing impact on marine life from microorganisms to dolphins.
Brendan Trembath has this report from Louisiana.
(Sound of water birds)
BRENDAN TREMBATH: Grand Isle is a finger shaped island in the Gulf of Mexico.
Stephen Lebouf brings his family here for holidays as often as he can.
STEPHEN LEBOUF: We try to make it a few times a year.
BRENDAN TREMBATH: Had you been before the Deepwater Horizon spill to this area?
STEPHEN LEBOUF: Yes, I had.
BRENDAN TREMBATH: And do you notice a difference now?
STEPHEN LEBOUF: Well, last year was kind of rough but this year we've been catching a decent amount of fish. I don't know how the shrimpers are doing, how the commercial fishermen are doing; but last few trips we've done pretty good over here.
BRENDAN TREMBATH: Any concerns about eating the seafood from this area after that spill; it's two years ago, or awhile ago now?
STEPHEN LEBOUF: You know in the back of your mind there is some concern with it. We haven't noticed any taste or you know anything like that, anything visible. But you know everything tastes fine right now.
BRENDAN TREMBATH: The water washing up on the shores of Grand Isle is clear and there's no hint of oil.
Dolphins glide through the waves.
But Aaron Viles, the deputy director of the Gulf Restoration Network, says there is still oil in the Gulf.
AARON VILES: Every monitoring trip we take out to our barrier islands, out to our marsh areas in Louisiana, we find BP's oil; it's still in the ecosystem, it's still affecting the ecosystem. The research that we've seen is showing that throughout this amazing food chain in the Gulf of Mexico, every link is having some impact from the BP disaster.
So we know it in the kind of microbial level, very good research just came out showing that the oil and the dispersant killed off micro-communities in these beach areas. We know that at the kind of bait fish level, Gulf killifish are showing very significant gill damage and reproductive problems. These kind of sub-lethal impacts that are really significant accumulate through the food chain.
And to then so these deep water fish and these deepwater reefs have really been effected as well with the loss of biodiversity; very clear impacts of BP's oil and dispersant on the fish themselves, so lesions and tail rot and things that are at incredibly elevated levels compared to what was pre BP.
So, you know the oil's still here, it's still effecting the ecosystem. We haven't seen wide-scale collapses of any of our important fisheries certainly and that's a relief. But the warning signs I think are certainly out there that we're not out of the woods yet.
BRENDAN TREMBATH: He says recent research indicates dolphins are sick in hard hit areas.
AARON VILES: Dolphins are dying at about four to 10 times the background rates. So we're finding them throughout the BP impact zone. What's really odd though and has made people very confused is that the unusual mortality event actually began pre-BP; so there are some factors there that are affecting the dolphins that were existent in the ecosystem before BP.
What we expect is that BP then just kinda turned it up to 11 and we saw some pretty significant impacts. Studies that show that dolphins are very sick in some of the hard hit areas Like Barataria Bay.
BRENDAN TREMBATH: The bay is fringed by swampy bodies of water known as bayous.
Alligators are right at home here and fish and shrimp.
But the local fishermen and women notice their catches are not what they used to be.
Tracy Kuhns watches as a shrimp boat returns home earlier than expected.
(Sound of shrimp boat)
TRACY KUHNS: That boat just went out yesterday and they normally will stay out for four or five days, because they have stuff on the boat to be able to ice the shrimp and keep them fresh.
BRENDAN TREMBATH: She blames the Deepwater Horizon spill.
BP America says that as of the first of July it has paid more than $7 billion to individuals and businesses.
(Sound of birds and water)
BRENDAN TREMBATH: Back on Grand Isle several tourists are fishing with nets in the shallows.
Dolphins dive and surface near the shore.
On the horizon at least 10 oil rigs can be seen.
Workers and supplies are brought in by boats and helicopters.
The damage done by the Deepwater Horizon disaster will be studied for years to come.
This is Brendan Trembath in Louisiana for Correspondents Report.
SMALL trucks noisily patrol the beach behind Steve Fourrier's home in Grand Isle, Louisiana. From his deck he watches them dump sand into screening machines. Crews follow close by, dragging rakes along the beach.
Fourrier wonders when his grandson will be able to play in that sand again, and if he'll be able to put out his crab traps this northern summer. Most of all he wonders when, or if, Grand Isle will ever be the same again.
''The only answer you can have any certainty of,'' he says, ''is that absolutely nobody knows.''
Ten months after BP's Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and began spewing almost 800 million litres of oil into the gulf, and seven months after the well was capped, Elmers Island beach, like many, is still closed. Camardelle's Seafood, where President Barack Obama ate on his visit last June, has been closed since July. It has quietened down a lot since the height of the clean-up, ''when BP took over the world'', as Grand Isle ports commissioner Wayne Keller puts it, ''but we've still got oil in the sand and tarballs washing up on the beach''.
Michael Boatright, 53, has run an aquaculture and fish-farming business in New Orleans since 2004. ''I was on track for a great year,'' he says, ''but now all my customers are buying from Florida.'' He has sold everything from farm equipment to his watch to pay his bills. His phone has been cut off and his power will go next. ''Christmas was terrible,'' he says. ''I couldn't buy my grandson anything, and he was asking if Santa thought he'd misbehaved.''
Boatright has been diving in the gulf since he was 17. From last June to September, he dived as usual about once a week, in areas the federal government had declared safe and open for fishing. ''We didn't think there was much risk,'' he says. ''The water looked good, looked clean.''
In September he started experiencing dizziness and blurred vision, then vertigo and palpitations. By October he was passing blood and had severe nosebleeds. ''At first I was in denial,'' he says. ''I'm broke now, and like most fishermen don't have healthcare. But I was a paramedic for 25 years and I knew this was serious and abnormal.''
Last month he had his blood tested. The results showed extremely high levels of chemicals such as xylene and ethylbenzene, highly toxic carcinogens found in crude oil.
According to chemist Dr Wilma Subra, whose lab ran the test on Boatright and two of his diving partners, all three had the same results, and the mix of chemicals was an ''exact fingerprint'' for those identified when they tested samples of the BP crude erupting from the ocean floor.
Subra, a renowned environmental toxicologist with more than 30 years' experience, has been dubbed ''a modern-day Erin Brockovich'' by CNN. She and the Louisiana Environmental Action Network, which has been working locally since 1986 with more than 100 community organisations, have been conducting toxicity tests on clean-up workers, fishermen and coastal residents experiencing symptoms like Boatright's. Results like his are increasingly common, she says. One person had benzene levels 36 times higher than normal.
The National Institutes of Health are researching the spill's health effects, financed with $10 million each from the federal government and BP, but Subra says the study does not include the broader population, and more importantly, does not offer care to those being studied.
According to an economic impact report published by the Greater New Orleans Economic Alliance, ''the wave of self-reported health impacts of chemical exposure recalls the plight of the 9/11 first responders who also weren't required to wear respirators''.
''They won't be provided with insurance to cover the long-term effects that we'll see transpire,'' it says. ''We're also concerned at the lack of health facilities in coastal communities, and professionals trained and qualified to diagnose or treat chemical exposure.''
The worst-hit were the clean-up workers, says Subra: ''And when they got sick many were just laid off.''
Subra, who has met Obama administration officials and testified to Congress on the spill, worries about long-term genetic and reproductive problems associated with these chemicals. ''Would they even be attributed to the spill?'' she asks. ''I'm afraid we're just not going to know.''
Questions and fears like this loom over the gulf, but the more immediate problem for most is finding work. Louisiana has lost more than 25,000 jobs since the closure of federal fishing grounds began last May. Many who worked in the spill recovery effort are now unemployed again.
''Savings are gone and stress levels are rising,'' says Iray Nabatoff, director of the Community Centre of St Bernard. ''People don't have their lives back and there's no certainty as to when or if that will happen.''
The United Commercial Fisherman's Association president, George Barisich - unemployed himself for the first time - says this year's oyster catch is down 85 per cent. ''It's worse than Katrina,'' he says. ''Even if the seafood recovers, will people buy it?''
Subra's team has sampled soils and sea life throughout areas of the gulf deemed unaffected or ''cleaned'', and found dangerously high levels of petroleum hydrocarbons. ''What happened with the Valdez is what we have to look forward to here,'' she says. Herring populations, for example, didn't vanish until four years after the Exxon Valdez spilt more than 40 million litres of oil into Alaskan waters in 1989. They have not returned. ''The contamination, the die-off, then the accumulation up the food chain,'' she says. ''It's not a pretty picture.''
Some are more optimistic. Dr Chris Reddy is an oil spill expert and senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, which discovered the 35-kilometre ''plume'' last August. ''The gulf's like someone who's been in a bad car accident,'' he says, ''with lots of different wounds, small cuts to broken hips. A spectrum of injuries and recovery times. Some species, some places, may be fine in a year or two, but some will take much longer. We just don't know yet. The main thing is to diligently monitor how our patients are recovering.
''Potentially, the species impacted the most was the mental health of the people of the Gulf Coast.''
By January, New Orleans Catholic Charities' crisis counsellors had provided counselling, including suicide intervention, to more than 13,000 people. Issues with the BP claims process have compounded the problem. As of February 14, 489,000 claims had been filed for BP's $US20 billion compensation fund. According to the company's figures, fewer than 169,000 of those claims had been paid, totalling less than $3.4 billion.
And for those forgoing the courts in the hope of a quick payout to keep them afloat, ''the claims process is a card game,'' Barisich says, ''and we're playing some serious poker here''.
''Lots are in the paid column, but they haven't been paid right,'' he says. ''One of my deckhands - he has three kids - got a few cheques in June and nothing since. Another's been flat denied. They don't have to give a rejection reason.''
According to Emily Danielson of the Greater New Orleans Economic Alliance, ''the main problem is the number of legitimate claims being denied''.
''It's like going through an [Internal Revenue Service] audit,'' says Boatright, who has also been denied. ''I want to work, not rely on them, but I can't even meet their standards for a subsistence cheque.''
BP is paying the law firm of Kenneth Feinberg, the fund administrator, a flat fee of $850,000 a month, but neither will release the full compensation details. In February, the processing of claimants continued to slow and the rejection rate continued to rise, from under 5 per cent in October to 55 per cent.
Despite the onslaught of BP ads claiming it is ''making it right'' - it tripled its average monthly advertising outlay during the spill - the equivalent of five Valdez spills still remains in the gulf, according to government estimates, unaccounted for.
''There are still areas I wouldn't put my boat,'' says Barisich. Like many scientists, he has grave concerns about the unprecedented 7 million litres of chemical dispersants used. ''Why is it OK here if it's banned in Europe? Instead of sopping up the oil, they buried it, hid the evidence, and that exacerbated all the problems.''
According to BP spokeswoman Hejdi Feick, ''dispersants were only used under the approval and direction of the Coast Guard and the Environmental Protection Agency''.
In a study released on January 26, Woods Hole chemist Dr Elizabeth Kujawinski said: ''We found that the dispersant stayed in the deep ocean and did not degrade. And that was somewhat surprising.'' She says more research is needed. ''Does adding dispersants increase the toxicity of the crude itself? Will it have impacts on deep-water fish like tuna?''
A third of America's seafood comes from Louisiana, and much of the talk is about its safety. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which first tested gulf seafood by a ''sniff test'' and in September declared it safe, later modified its statement to say only that the level of toxins was below agency danger levels. But their guidelines established for the spill are based on consumption rates far below those of coastal communities, says a National Resources Defence Council study, which concluded gulf residents eat three to 12 times the NOAA estimates.
''Gulf seafood is the most tested in the US,'' says NOAA spokesman Ben Sherman. ''We're monitoring all points from fishing boats to loading docks to restaurants.''
But Subra's team has tested oysters, shrimp, crabs and fish that did not look or smell oiled, and found toxins consistent with crude oil. Some oysters had petroleum hydrocarbon levels as high as 1.25 per cent. ''The wetlands are the nursery for all the seafood in the gulf,'' she says, ''and with all the oil in them now, it could be generations before they recover.''
The President's National Oil Spill Commission, testifying before Congress this month, recommended the EPA establish more thorough protocols to monitor health effects of major spills. It also urged Congress to devote 80 per cent of the Clean Water Act penalties - which could be as high as $20 billion if gross negligence is established - to restoring the delicate wetlands lining the Gulf Coast, already vanishing at the rate of a football field every 38 minutes. Commission co-chairman William Reilly says ''they are likely to continue silently washing away unless decisive action is taken''.
It also warns that unless industry practices and government regulation improve, another disaster is inevitable.
Reddy, who testified to the commission and Congress, says ''they did a good job''. ''But what's important is - what happens with the recommendations in the report now?''
Back in Grand Isle, Fourrier laments the disappearance of media coverage since July. ''They think 'it's capped, it's over','' he says. ''But it's clear here that it's far, far from done. At least with Katrina you could see the damage. With this we have no idea what's hit us yet, and won't, for years to come.''
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