Tell It To Al

Father’s Day can be a real downer for millions of unemployed dads.

“Many children would undoubtedly like to simply give an out-of-work dad a new job,” said job-search expert and father of five John Challenger. “Unfortunately, that’s simply not realistic.”

Challenger of outplacement firm Challenger Gray & Christmas in Chicago said the number of jobless men over age 20 reached nearly 8.4 million in October 2009. And despite lauded improvements in the job market since then, the job market recovery has been slow.

“While men are seeing solid job gains, it will take several months, if not years, for male employment to return to pre-recession levels,” he says.

The nation’s unemployment rate was 9.7% in May, down from 9.9% in April, but still nauseatingly high. On Friday, the Labor Department reported declines in the unemployment rate in 37 states. Unfortunately, they came on the backs of people who have given up looking for work. Click here to read about that.

Challenger notes it’s been called the “man-cession” for the extreme toll it’s taken on male-dominated jobs, such as financial services, construction and manufacturing.

Meanwhile, dad may feel that time is running out, especially as U.S. Senate Republicans have blocked a bill to extend unemployment benefits once again. Click here to read about that.

So what can anyone do for the unemployed dad?

Challenger suggests perhaps converting business cards that dad amasses in his job search to digital files for his computer and phone.

Shining his shoes, pressing his shirts, and keeping him looking his best for interviews. Or how about a new pair of shoes to replace the rubber and leather he’s worn away on the job hunt?

“The best gift is probably much needed moral support,” Challenger said.

It’s sad but true, but a lot of dads define themselves by what they do. And when they’re unemployed they may feel they are doing nothing.

Doing nothing. Being nothing. That’s a heavy toll on a dad who tries to be everything to his family.

And add to that the constant barrage of rejection, and worse, having resumes and job applications ignored altogether.

The best thing may be just to reassure dad that he is going through an economic cycle that is largely out of his control. That his anguished search for a new job is noble, even heroic, at a time when they’re just aren’t enough jobs to go around.

That, in the end, he is not defined by his job or lack thereof. He is defined as dad.

BP was getting away with an estimate of 5,000 barrels a day on its Gulf spill until a mechanical engineering professor from Indiana analyzed a video of BP’s spewing pipe and told the world it was many times that amount.

Click here to read my column on Purdue University professor Steve Wereley.

The pace of tragedies has been dizzying in 2010, and it’s been especially hard on SpaghettiOs, the kid-friendly canned pasta from Campbell Soup Co. that’s been a kitchen staple since its launch in 1965.

First, the Daddy-O of the SpaghettiO, Donald Goerke, died in January. Click here to read about him in the New York Times. And now SpaghettiOs faces its first-ever recall after company officials admitted the processed food may have been under-processed. Click here to read more in the New York Daily News.

We’re talking 35,000 cases that could cause nausea and vomiting. Uh-Oh! Indeed.

Check out this trailer on the upcoming movie, “Minkow,” based on the fraud of Barry Minkow and ZZZZ Best Carpet Cleaning.

Minkow became a case study for Ponzi schemes in the 1980s,  long before Bernie Madoff and the rash of schemers getting indicted today.

At age 16, he started a carpet-cleaning outfit called ZZZZ Best Co. in his parents’ garage in Inglewood, Calif. and took it public in a few short years. He once claimed a net worth of $90 million, drove a red Ferrari with a “ZZZZ BEST” license plate and appeared on Oprah’s show as a Wall Street whiz kid.

But Minkow was booking as revenue the money he had borrowed from the mob, so he could borrow millions more from banks and investors. He forged thousands of documents and leased buildings that he staged as work sites when auditors wanted to check his work.

By age 23, he had been convicted of 57 counts of fraud involving securities, credit cards and the U.S. mail.

Minkow has appeared in my column many times. Click here to read a profile I wrote on him last year.

Today, he’s a pastor of a church, the head of an organization that roots out fraud, and soon, a Hollywood star. The Minkow film stars  James Caan, Ving Rahmes, Justin Baldoni, Talia Shire and Mark Hamill.

Almost everything that is wrong with the airline industry seems to have started with Spirit Airlines.

It was the first airline to charge customers for their bags. It was the first airline to charge for carry-on bags. It has taken the low-fare battle for market share – which always seems to bankrupt airlines in the end – to $9 one-way fares. But those $9 fares come with fees that can jack the price of a trip to even more than a flight on a real airline.

Spirit has also long resorted to advertising over the Internet with cheap, sexually explicit ads to attract attention. Some of the ads are so filthy, my editors won’t allow me to describe them.

Click here to read my column on Spirit stranding thousands of customers amid a pilot strike.

Got a complaint about Spirit? Spirit doesn’t care. Click here to read this piece the New York Times did last year, called “Don’t Come Crying To This Airline.”

Beyond kicking around the Taliban, killing poppy fields, and searching aimlessly for Osama Bin Laden, it’s never really been clear why we’re in Afghanistan.

Now it’s clear: $1 trillion worth of minerals.

We’re talking gold, copper,  cobalt, iron. The New York Times quoted a Pentagon memo saying Afghanistan could be “the Saudi Arabia of lithium.”

This isn’t a war for oil. It’s a war for lithium. You want laptops and cell phones, right?

Click here to read more from the Associated Press.

Afghanistan’s resources are vast enough to bring its economy into at least the 19th century and it will all be greaty booty for the lucky corporations that get their hands on it.

So was the war for lithium worth it? Depends on how long it goes on, and how much of Afghanistan’s resources are actually exploited. You’ll notice, for instance, we’re not getting a lot of oil out of Iran. You’ll also notice that the spoils of war do not often go back to the taxpayers who fund it.

The war in Afghanistan has cost us about $300 billion, and you can add another $70 billion a year on to that as it lingers on, according to 2009 U.S. Congressional figures. Since 2001, more than 1,100 Americans and 1,800 foreign troops have died in Afghanistan, and it remains a bloody cesspool.

The Taliban are still Talibanning and even getting support from Pakistan. Click here to read more about that from Reuters.

I was once snorkeling in Hawaii and grabbed a sea turtle whose shell was about the size of a manhole cover.

It kept diving, deeper and deeper and deeper, until my ears could no longer take the pressure, and I let go. The sea turtle got the last laugh on me as I rose to the surface trying to clear my ears. But often, when I tell this story, I’m confronted with “man, you shouldn’t be harrassing the wild life like that.”

Geez, all I did was grab on to its shell for a cheap thrill ride. It’s not like I own BP stock.

Sea turtles have been swimming around for more than 100 million years, are slowly being brought to extinction by people like me, and now face more imminent harm from BP’s oil spill.

Oceana, the world’s largest international ocean conservation organization, wants offshore drilling bannned to save the sea turtles.

Between, April 20 when BPs well blew out, and June 9, Oceana counts 32 oiled sea turtles in the Gulf of Mexico and more than 320 sea turtles dead or injured.

Click here to read the report.

Is American business over-regulated or under-regulated?

Ideologues, AM radio talk show hosts, politicians, and even columnists have been beating this question back and forth like a tennis ball for years. But what do Americans think now?

At this point in history – after Wall Street has run amuck and BP is still spewing muck – more Americans favor tightening regulations than loosening them, according to an online poll released by Harris Interactive this week.

The Poll revealed 40% of the public favors stricter regulation, 19% want looser regulation, 27% want neither more nor less strict regulation, and 14% aren’t sure. (Why does anyone agree to be polled and then say, “Um, um, um. I don’t know”?)

The survey of 2,503 U.S. adults between May 10 and 17 found the following majorities in favor of tighter regulation for the following areas:

* 73%, Food safety.
* 70% Executive pay and bonuses.
* 70% Pharmaceuticals safety.
* 69% Banks and financial services.
* 68% Air and water pollution.
* 67% Consumer product safety.
* 66% Environmental safety.
* 65% Advertising claims.
* 64% Big business.
* 54% Health and safety in the workplace.

Predictably, Democrats are more likely to support tighter regulations than Republicans and the Independents are in the middle. But the poll also identified what majorities of Republicans would like to more heavily regulate:

* 64% Food safety.
* 57% Executive compensation.
* 61% Pharmaceuticals safety
* 56% Banks and financial services.
* 52% Air and water pollution.
* 56% Consumer product safety.
* 56% Advertising claims.

Most regulations, however, do not come about because of what liberals vs. conservatives or even the American people think. Regulation is usually what one business does to another. Big business floods Washington D.C. with armies of lobbists every year to tilt the free market in their favor, too often at the expense of their competitors and the taxpayers.

The people, however, are growing weary of picking up the tab for the abuses and excesses of big business.

“Politicians, business leaders and trade associations often attack government regulation,” Harris said in a news release on the survey. “They may be surprised to learn from this Harris Poll the regulation of business enjoys much public support.”

Click here to read more about the survey from Harris Interactive

We are nearly three years into the worst recession of our lives, and the job cuts keep coming.

We keep hearing the recession is over – although not yet officially – and that what we are in now is a long, hard slog.

That slog, unforntunately, has not included very many new jobs in the private sector. And the economic damage of nearly 10% unemployment over a long period of time is not something economists often talk about.

Meanwhile, improvments in technology, outsourcing, the search for new efficiencies and consolidating companies continue to eliminate jobs, on top of what the economy is doing to the workforce. If you are one of the more than 1,200 people laid off at Solo Cup Co. this week, the last thing you want to hear is that the cup is half full.

Click here to read my column on MarketWatch.

Suddenly, Helicopter Ben Bernanke is worried about a federal deficit about to eclipse $19 trillion in about five years.

“The federal budget appears to be on an unsustainable path,” he warned today before the House Committee on the Budget.

His critics call him Helicopter Ben because with all the money he’s flushed through the system trying to stop the U.S. from succumbing to another Great Depression, he might as well have just dumped dollars from helicopters. And now he’s complaining about the tab?

And for all that, even by Bernanke’s assessment, the U.S. recovery remains fragile.

He expects “only a slow reduction in the unemployment rate over time.” He also adds “underlying housing activity appears to have firmed only a little since mid-2009.”

So except for our homes and our jobs remaining in peril, everything is fine, until we get smacked down by that burgeoning national debt.

Click here to read Bernanke’s prepared remarks.