The Senate passed the Keystone XL pipeline bill on Thursday and will send that bill to President Obama's desk, where it will almost certainly be vetoed. The leader of the Republican, majority party in The Senate knows that, and he continues to jawbone against the veto...without mentioning why he wants it other than to cite a preliminary State Department report that estimates creation of 42,000 jobs over the course of the construction of the XL section of the Keystone system. He never mentions that none of those 42,000 jobs will be permanent except for the 35 (that's 35, not 3,500 and certainly not 35,000) that are required to run that section of the system. Nor does he mention that the figure he is quoting refers to the ripple effect from the real, 2,500 to 6,000 jobs that will be created for the purpose of construction. In other words, it includes the people who work on the food trucks that sell the workers sandwiches and the people who make the trucks from which the sandwiches are sold. There's a lot of minimum wage stuff mixed in with the few real jobs that pipeline construction will create over the course of the two year process, and none of those jobs will last even as long as the duration of the construction. As the process moves south from Alberta, Canada, the jobs will move with it, and they will disappear where they have moved from. And the misinformation isn't coming just from Mitch McConnell.
I was listening to All Things Considered on NPR last night when the passage of the bill was reported, and the reporter said that the bill passed the continuation of the Keystone pipeline to the Gulf Coast, but it does no such thing, and the news that NPR has reported in the past about the resistance to the project in Nebraska makes that clear, so what's their excuse for disseminating myths about the Keystone XL? The fact is that the XL section of the pipeline...the thing that is behind all the partisan bickering...runs only from Alberta to the Oklahoma-Nebraska border. At that point, it joins preexisting pipelines that run east to refineries in Illinois and south to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico that are already receiving oil from elsewhere by the section through which the oil from the XL will have to flow. This is disturbing not because the XL segment of the Keystone pipeline is particularly significant, nor is it a profound issue simply because something between 70 and 120 million gallons of petroleum products refined on the Gulf of Mexico's shores get shipped to other countries. It is a profound issue though because it is so easy to proliferate bogus ideas if you are in politics, and even NPR can't be trusted to debunk them.
It reminds me of when reform of Social Security was the burning topic before the 2010 elections. There was all this talk about reducing benefits paid by increasing the retirement age or using a reduction in COLA increases as a function of the formula by which they are calculated as if those things would reduce the national deficit and the debt. But the reality is...and was...that Social Security has enough money in trust to carry it well into the 2030's, and the only way reductions in benefits effect the deficit is that the treasury has to borrow from others what it has borrowed from the Social Security trust because benefits paid out now exceed premiums paid in by about $100 billion a year. True, at some point a better balance of income and benefits paid must be accomplished, but it isn't any emergency. And besides, the less the treasury pays back to the Social Security trust now, the more has to be paid back by "future generations," which are the people that the Republicans claim to be concerned about burdening. It is obvious to anyone who examines the issues closely, yet NPR proliferated the Republican myth about Social Security's solvency almost without change until they finally did one analysis on one evening that lasted no more than three minutes--hardly enough time to disabuse listeners of the erroneous notions that NPR had helped proliferate for months before. To whom should we turn for the information we need to determine our own positions on the issues?
Well, I've said this before--many times, in fact--there isn't anyone that a thinking person can trust for trenchant analysis or disclosure of the fact. The information is available, but each of us has to get it for himself or herself. The internet is dangerous because you can read arguments and elliptical statements of fact all over it, so even if you do your own research you have to be careful. I happened upon a site that is run for apologists for the XL pipeline for example, and the few subtle facts they left out of what they said--they didn't lie, mind you, but they didn't tell the whole truth--were enough to allow for what looked like some pretty good arguments for the pipeline. I won't go into detail about that, but it makes the point I have tried to make many times in the past. You are responsible to inform yourself, and to analyze what you find out so as to reach your own conclusions. So, if you want to vote based on how your congressman or senator voted on the XL, or if Social Security is important to you and you want to know if your representative or senator is on your side, listen to what he or she says, and then look it up to see if he is telling you the truth. Find the fact for yourself...and then think with your own head, not someone else's.
Your friend,
Mike
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