Bath Iron Works getting great reviews. “They’re a lot of fun to drive.” That’s not what you’d expect to hear about a 9,000 ton, 500 plus foot long, 346 crew ship, but that’s how Lt. Cmdr. Robert J. Brooks, executive officer of USS Wayne E. Meyer, a Bath-built destroyer, described it. They can move at 34 mph in open ocean. The Arleigh Burke Class Guided Missile Destroyers have been getting great reviews on how well they stand up – they’ve been documented as surviving outrageous weather. The USS Cole (a BIW ship) also survived a terrorist bombing. According to an AP report, “The destroyer’s production run has outlasted every other battleship, cruiser, destroyer and frigate in U.S. Navy history.” BIW is working on three more right now, with talk of more orders on the way.
Lining the cloud. Unemployment has certainly been a major cloud over economic recovery. The best we can say is that it’s not getting any worse. But let’s review the promising news. Stability trumps deterioration any day. This country was losing three quarters of a million jobs a month only a year ago. The first two months of 2009, the U.S. lost 1.4 million jobs, while in the last two months, it lost 81,000. Jobs actually went up in November. Temporary jobs have grown faster in the last five months than ever in history. New jobless claims are now back to where they were in August 2008. Payrolls have increased more in the last three months than they did when we started our recovery from the recessions of ’91 and ’01. December would have been much better, likely positive, if hadn’t snowed across the south ( Washington DC caught two feet). Bloomberg says that we lost 241,000 jobs in December just because people couldn’t make it to work. That’s a bigger weather impact on jobs than we’ve seen in December in over two decades.
