As oil keeps pouring into the Gulf of Mexico, oil giant BP continues to see its reputation dragged further and further through the muck. Across the Gulf Coast, anti-BP signs and calls for help are popping up. On Friday, people gathered at BP’s DC headquarters to protest the corporation and present a “prison jumpsuit” to CEO Tony Hayward. While no one came down to accept the gift, ThinkProgress was covering the event and saw several BP employees watching from the safety of their 7th floor offices.

Protests at the local level — even ones that are nothing more than symbolic in nature — are also picking up. The Brevard County Manatees, the minor league Class-A Advanced Florida State League affiliate of the Milwaukee Brewers, has officially changed the name of “batting practice” — known as “BP” for short — to “hitting rehearsal.” “We hope to send a message to the community that we are definitely worried with the pollution that is in the waters off the Gulf Coast and its potential impact on the beaches here in Brevard County,” said the team’s general manager.

Yesterday in Pensacola, FL — which is on the Gulf Coast close to the Alabama border and now has tar balls washing up on its beaches — about 30 protesters gathered outside of a local BP gas station for a two-hour demonstration, with signs and bumper stickers reading, “Boycott BP,” “BP Lies Pensacola Dies,” and Wake Up and Smell the Oil.” Some other protests at BP stations around the country:

– On May 30, more than 200 protesters “swarmed Jackson Square” in New Orleans to vent their frustration at BP, where speakers “lashed out” at the “slow effort to keep oil from hitting Louisiana’s coastline.” Many posters had “scathing messages” including “BP = $ over people” and “refuse to be LOSEiana anymore.”

– Over Memorial Day weekend, hundreds of protesters “covered in ‘oil’ or dressed like sea creatures” flocked to a New York City BP station to rally against the oil spill and “to keep motorists from filling up.” Protesters chanted “BP your heart is black, you can have your oil back.”

– On June 3, middle-school students from Illinois valley spent the day “on a stretch of public sidewalk” outside a BP station “shouting facts about the disaster” and chanting “agree with me, don’t buy from BP.”

– Fifteen students in St. Cloud, MN “circled in front” of a BP gas station on Friday holding “painted signs” to show that “young people are doing something and they have a voice.”

– Over Memorial Day weekend, more than 20 protesters demonstrated outside a local convenience store in Charlottesville, VA. One protester urged the need for clean energy sources with “a placard touting fuel from hemp.”

– Protests have also gone viral. Over 330,000 members have joined the Boycott BP Facebook group. Twitter’s BP Boycott has over 2,500 followers.

Many business owners are worried that these boycotts and protests may hurt their profits while not affecting the parent company. The vast majority of the 10,000 BP stations in the country and independently owned and operated.

While the company isn’t publicly addressing the boycott efforts, they may still end up affecting how BP operates. Consumers also boycotted Exxon stations after the 1989 spill in Alaska, and while the company ignored it publicly, Exxon has now “reduced its dependence on consumer sales, and the company is much more dependent on business-to-business sales than it was 20 years ago.” Eighty-one percent of Americans disapprove of BP’s response to the spill, and 64 percent believe the government should pursue criminal charges against those involved.

Last month, the House of Representatives passed the fiscal year 2011 defense authorization, which includes funding for a second engine for the F-35 fighter jet that the Department of Defense doesn’t want. In fact, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has recommended that President Obama veto the defense authorization if it includes money for the “costly and unnecessary” engine. But still, the House approved it, while voting the same day to axe programs helping laid off workers.

The Senate Armed Services Committee, to its credit, chose not to include the funding in its version of the bill, which the full Senate has yet to consider. Thus, a lobbying blitz has been launched to preserve the engine:

This year, 13 different lobbying firms, plus each contractor’s in-house lobbyists, are engaging lawmakers on the engine issue — focusing on the defense authorization and appropriations bills in which the engine debate will most likely be decided…This year, there are 75 lobbyists working on defense issues at the firms engaged in the second-engine showdown, of whom at least 56 — or 75 percent — are former congressional staffers or executive branch officials. Of those, at least 33 are registered to work on the engine issue specifically.

Gates has said that “every dollar additional to the budget that we have to put into the F-35 is a dollar taken from something else that the troops may need,” while Obama has added, “think about it: hundreds of millions of dollars for an alternate second engine for the Joint Strike Fighter when one reliable engine will do just fine.” Members of Congress from both parties have criticized the funding, with Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) saying “Republicans too often over the last couple of decades have said, ‘We want to limit spending but leave defense alone.’”

However, the defense industry successfully preserves these wasteful programs because far too many lawmakers pay lip service to cutting the deficit, but then balk when a specific program is on the chopping block. Take, for instance, Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN), who says that “if we are going to put our fiscal house in order, everything has to be on the table. We have to be willing to look at domestic spending, we have to be able to look at entitlements, and we have to look at defense.” But when push comes to shove, Pence supports the second engine.

As CAP’s Lawrence Korb, Sean Duggan, and Laura Conley wrote, Congress needs to stop simply talking a good game on defense spending and “replace platitudes with action”:

The long list of unnecessary platforms that were cut by the Defense Department only to be resurrected by Congress is emblematic of the enormous challenge the administration faces in paring down the defense budget…The now yearly struggle between the Defense Department and Congress over funding for unnecessary and unwanted, but politically advantageous programs must end. Both sides of the aisle agree that current trends in defense spending cannot continue, but rhetoric is not enough.

Hopefully, the Senate can hold the line here and provide fiscal sanity when it comes to the defense budget with at least a momentary victory.

Politico ran a long piece today on what it sees as the growing trend of lawmakers “focusing with increasing intensity on public workers and the unions that represent them, casting them as overpaid obstacles to good government and demanding cuts in their often-generous benefits.” This is, of course, nothing new, as lawmakers love to bash public sector employees in tough fiscal times, to justify cutting their pay.

Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA), for instance, said during his campaign that “it’s not right that lesser-paid private sector workers suffering through a recession have to pay for expensive government salaries.” Politico quoted Gov. Mitch Daniels (R-IN) saying that public employees are the “new privileged class,” who are “better paid than the people who pay their salaries”:

“We have a new privileged class in America,” said Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, who rescinded state workers’ collective bargaining power on his first day in office in 2006. “We used to think of government workers as underpaid public servants. Now they are better paid than the people who pay their salaries.”…“Who serves whom here? Is the public sector — as some of us have always thought — there to serve the rest of society? Or is it the other way around?”

Public employees, particularly when economic times are tough, are an easy target. But there’s little truth to Daniels’ blanket assertion that all public employees make more than their private counterparts.

There is a disparity between average pay in the public sector versus the private. But this is not a fair, straightforward comparison, for two reasons. First, public employees are more educated, with 45 percent holding a college degree, compared to 29 percent of the private sector. Second, far more private employees work in jobs earning less than $25,000 per year, with many not making enough to clear the poverty line, which drags down the average.

It makes sense that more educated workers will earn more, and I don’t think many people would agree with government jobs (or any job, for that matter) not paying enough to lift a worker above poverty. And once you get to the higher end of the pay scale, as Nancy Folbre, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, has pointed out, “federal employees are paid considerably less than comparable private workers.” In fact, according to research by Harvard economist George Borjas, at the top-end, private sector pay is so much better that the public sector has “found it increasingly more difficult to attract and retain high-skill workers.”

As Politico itself noted, states are facing huge budget shortfalls because of “the collapse in tax revenues that came with the 2008 Wall Street crash,” not because of public sector pay. Public employees may be a convenient bad guy for pinning budget woes onto, but the numbers show that the case against them doesn’t hold much water.

Embattled BP CEO Tony Hayward asserted that his company has paid “every claim” for damages caused by the offshore-drilling disaster that is flooding the Gulf of Mexico with millions of gallons of toxic oil. In an interview with BBC’s Andrew Marr on Sunday, Hayward lauded the BP claims processing procedure, claiming it only takes “48 hours” to get a check, instead of “what has taken 45 days traditionally in the United States.” He asserted unequivocally that “every claim” has been paid:

Well, you know, what we have done so far is to pay every claim that’s been presented to us, and we will continue to do that. You know, the most important thing in terms of claims today is to ensure that people who can’t fish today have the wherewithal to feed their families. And we’ve taken a claims process that has taken 45 days traditionally in the United States and shortened it to 48 hours. It takes 12 seconds when you phone the BP claims line to be put into the process, be given a number. If you turn up at the claims office, within 48 hours you’re given a cheque. You take it to a bank and you cash the cheque. We are going to continue to do that.

Watch it:

In fact, less than half of the claims have been paid. For the entire Gulf Coast, BP has paid 18,000 out of 37,000 claims, Darryl Willis, the BP vice president overseeing the claims process, said Sunday. BP has denied repeated requests from the state of Louisiana for access to its claims database, but did release a summary that showed the majority of claims in Louisiana, the hardest hit state, are still pending:

– As of May 29, only $22.5 million had been paid on 6,997 claims; 51 percent remain pending, at least one for as long as 33 days. The majority of paid claims are property damage.

– Only one of 118 bodily injury claims has been paid.

– Of $9.1 million in claims for loss of income in Louisiana, 54 percent were pending as of May 29. Of 7,469 claims filed by individuals and businesses for loss of income, BP has paid just 3,438 claims.

– Of 37 claims categories ranging from loss of income for shrimpers, crabbers, oyster processors and fishermen to loss of rental property income and damage to animals and property, 26 categories have 70 percent or more of unpaid claims. For commercial loss of income, 57 percent of claims are unpaid.

– Less than 25 percent of business interruption claims have been paid.

“Hardworking people should not be forced into poverty by the oil spill,” said Louisiana Workforce Commission Executive Director Curt Eysink. The more BP delays and dissembles, the harder it is for the foreign oil giant’s victims to get their lives back.