Obama having his ass Played with, then, with God as my Witness, I will play with his Ass.

 On the first anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill that killed 11 workers, oil giant BP revealed via mandatory disclosure forms that it spent at least $2 million on federal lobbying in the first quarter of 2011 on a wide range of issues, from advocating for an end to the offshore drilling moratorium imposed by President Barack Obama in the wake of the spill to caps on its contributions to the restoration of the Gulf Coast.

BP tapped five well-connected lobbying firms -- Alpine Group; Fierce, Isakowitz & Blalock; the Podesta Group; Stuntz Davis & Staffier; and the Duberstein Group -- to ply their influence on Capitol Hill and at federal agencies in the wake of the four-month-long spill, which devastated the environment and leaked more than 205 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Executive-branch agencies targeted by the beleaguered oil behemoth, which faces a criminal probe by the Justice Department, included the Environmental Protection Agency and the State and Treasury departments.

In addition to the drilling moratorium and coastal restoration contributions, BP lobbied heavily regarding implementation of the presidential oil spill commission's recommendations, which included stricter oversight of offshore drilling.

BP also lobbied Congress on the Put the Gulf Back to Work Act, the legislation passed last week by the House Natural Resources Committee under the leadership of chairman Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) which speeds up the approval process for new drilling permits. That bill prompted Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to accuse House Republicans of having "amnesia" about the oil spill.

Among other issues of interest to BP: the Restoring American Offshore Leasing Now Act, which requires Salazar to conduct certain offshore oil and gas lease sales; financial reform legislation and proposed rules; and liability protection for producing and retailing motor fuel that contains 15 percent ethanol. In addition, the oil company lobbied on several proposed EPA rules relating to greenhouse gas emissions and ambient air quality standards, and lobbied Congress on energy tax issues, corporate tax reform and the export of Caspian gas into European markets.

Earlier this week, it was revealed that BP broke its self-imposed moratorium on political donations in the wake of the spill. The oil giant gave $5,000 contributions to House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), and House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.), among others. On March 1, BP's political action committee also doled out $5,000 to both the National Republican Congressional Committee and the National Republican Senatorial Committee, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

, The Huffington Post published a story documenting a disturbing post-recession trend: for many unemployed workers, finding a new job can mean a significant step down the professional ladder. For those lucky enough to find new work -- any work -- their old careers and lives often remain out of reach.

More than 8.84 million private sector jobs were lost during the downturn. Despite steady job creation this year, there are still more than four unemployed workers for every job opening. The job recovery has also been cruelly uneven. A full 40 percent of the jobs lost during the downturn came from high-wage industries -- yet high-wage industries accounted for only 14 percent of the new positions created in the first year of the recovery, according to a report released in February by the National Employment Law Project.

We asked HuffPost readers to answer basic questions: have you had to take a lower-paying job because of the financial crisis? Have you had to switch industries, accept a big change in quality of life, relocate or cut back?

The response was overwhelming. More than a year into the recovery, our readers' responses offer a sharp counterweight to newspaper headlines proclaiming the labor market recovery is "gaining traction."

One response described a reader's path from making $90,000 a year as an executive for an entertainment company to making minimum wage at a sewing store. After several months, she received a job offer as the office manager for a one-person law firm, making $50,000 a year. "Ironically, this was nearly the same job I had when I was putting myself through college to earn my bachelor's degree. So, I've come round circle career-wise," she wrote.

Many readers described the shock they felt when the industry they spent their life working in was decimated and the uncertainty they felt when trying to start over in an unfamiliar field.

"Started out as tech writer, industry disappeared, went through 2nd grad program to become licensed counselor, jobs required to become licensed have disappeared, have been walking dogs," reader elljayo wrote, tracking a downgrade from $80,000 a year, to $10,000. "Can't afford to pay off loans...Surviving-but that's all."

Echoed through many replies is the feeling of loss -- not just of a decent paycheck -- but of the sense of security, purpose and direction that a career provides.

"[I]t is hard at the age of 45, after more than a dozen years of success, to feel like you are starting at the bottom again," wrote reader RBB05, who was making $150,00 as a radio manager but is now making half that at his new position. "At least back then, it was just me. Now it is my wife and 12-year-old daughter going along for the ride. When I do go to work in the morning there are days when I wake up invigorated and glad to be doing anything. Then there are days when I pray for a call, any call, that lifts me anywhere close to the world I used to be in."

Disturbingly, many HuffPost readers said they were barely hanging on and struggling to make ends meet.

"Depending on where they started on the economic ladder," said Carl van Horn, a labor economist at Rutgers University who studies the effects of long-term unemployment and trading down in the workplace, "that downward mobility can be somewhere from inconvenient to actually pushing them into poverty.

by Max H. Bazerman and Anne E. Tenbrunsel*

Published: April 20, 2011

IT’S easy to look at big names like Warren E. Buffett, and big companies like Ernst and Young, and be judgmental. Of course they overlooked ethical lapses. Why wouldn’t they? That’s business.

Regulators, prosecutors and journalists tend to focus on corruption caused by willful actions or ignorance. But in our research, and in the work of other scholars who study the psychology ofbehavioral ethics, we have found that much unethical conduct that goes on, whether in social life or work life, happens because people are unconsciously fooling themselves. They overlook transgressions — bending a rule to help a colleague, overlooking information that might damage the reputation of a client — because it is in their interest to do so.

When we are busy focused on common organizational goals, like quarterly earnings or sales quotas, the ethical implications of important decisions can fade from our minds. Through this ethical fading, we end up engaging in or condoning behavior that we would condemn if we were consciously aware of it.

The underlying psychology helps explain why ethical lapses in the corporate world seem so pervasive and intractable. It also explains why sanctions, like fines and penalties, can have the perverse effect of increasing the undesirable behaviors they are designed to discourage.

In one study, published in 1999, participants were asked to play the role of a manufacturer in an industry known for emitting toxic gas. The participants were told that their industry was under pressure from environmentalists. To ward off potential legislation, the manufacturers had reached a voluntary but costly agreement to run equipment that would limit the toxic emissions. Some participants were told they would face modest financial sanctions if they broke the agreement; others were told they would face no sanctions if they did.

An economic analysis would predict that the threat of sanctions would increase compliance with the agreement. Instead, participants who faced a potential fine cheated more, not less, than those who faced no sanctions. With no penalty, the situation was construed as an ethical dilemma; the penalty caused individuals to view the decision as a financial one.

When we fail to notice that a decision has an ethical component, we are able to behave unethically while maintaining a positive self-image. No wonder, then, that our research shows that people consistently believe themselves to be more ethical than they are.

In addition to preventing us from noticing our own unethical conduct, ethical fading causes us to overlook the unethical behavior of others. In the run-up to the financial crisis, corporate boards, auditing firms,credit-rating agencies and other parties had easy access to damning data that they should have noticed and reported. Yet they didn’t do so, at least in part because of “motivated blindness” — the tendency to overlook information that works against one’s best interest. Ample research shows that people who have a vested self-interest, even the most honest among us, have difficulty being objective. Worse yet, they fail to recognize their lack of objectivity.

In one experiment for a study published last year, student participants were asked to estimate a fictitious company’s value. They were assigned one of four roles: buyer, seller, buyer’s auditor or seller’s auditor. All participants read the same information, including an array of data to help them estimate the firm’s worth. Not surprisingly, sellers provided higher estimates of the company’s worth than buyers did. More interestingly, the auditors, who were advising either a buyer or a seller, were also strongly biased toward the interests of their clients.

Rather than making a conscious decision to favor their clients, the auditors incorporated information about the company in a biased way — with the sellers’ auditors providing estimates that were 30 percent higher, on average, than the estimates of auditors who served buyers. The study was replicated, with actual auditors from one of the “Big Four” accounting firms, and with similar results.

A solution often advocated for this lack of objectivity is to increase transparency through disclosure of conflicts of interest. But a 2005 study by Daylian M. Cain, George Loewenstein and Don A. Moore found that disclosure can exacerbate such conflicts by causing people to feel absolved of their duty to be objective. Moreover, such disclosure causes its “victims” to be even more trusting, to their detriment.

Our legal system often focuses on whether unethical behavior represents “willful misconduct” or “gross negligence.” Typically people are only held accountable if their unethical decisions appear to have been intentional — and of course, if they consciously make such decisions, they should be. But unintentional influences on unethical behavior can have equally damaging outcomes.

Our confidence in our own integrity is frequently overrated. Good people unknowingly contribute to unethical actions, so reforms need to address the often hidden influences on our behavior. Auditors should only audit; they should not be allowed to sell other services or profit from pleasing their customers. Similarly, if we want credit-rating agencies to be objective, they need to keep an appropriate distance from the issuers of the securities they assess. True reform needs to go beyond fines and disclosures; if we are to truly eliminate conflicts of interest we must understand the psychology behind them.

Max H. Bazerman, a professor of business administration at Harvard, and Ann E. Tenbrunsel, a professor of management at the University of Notre Dame, are the authors of “Blind Spots: Why We Fail to Do What’s Right and What to Do About It.”

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on April 21, 2011, on page A27 of theNew York edition with the headline: Stumbling Into Bad Behavior.