The media is truly amazing. I’m sitting in my office watching Meet The Press where Mike Murphy, a GOP strategist and David Stockman, a hack economist who takes his cues from Wall Street are trying to convince the audience that the only answer to the economy is to give the go ahead to the Keystone pipeline, while down in Mayflower, Arkansas, a cute little town is being inundated by Canadian tar sands oil gushing from the Pegasus Exxon pipeline. All this is going on and David Gregory doesn’t bother to tell Murphy and his neo com economist that they are full of crap.
It’s perfectly safe, say the butt boys of the oil industry. It’ll create sixty thousand jobs at $60,000 per year apiece, screams the Meet the Press, oil industry economic shill as Murphy nods enthusiastically. No one on the panel stands up on their hind legs and brands this asshole the liar that he is. Keystone could lay pipe from here to Russia and it wouldn’t create anything like that number of jobs. And whatever jobs it does create will be first for Canadians who already work for the company and then temporary because as soon as the construction is done the jobs will end.
I was on site as CL&P laid a gas pipeline in north west Connecticut about eight or nine years ago. They had a six man crew laying about forty miles of pipe over a four month period. The entire length of the Keystone will be around two thousand miles. Do the math.
But let’s get back to Mayflower, Arkansas and the latest example of the oil industry’s ability to run safe pipe. A very interesting fact has emerged from the scramble to see who’s going to pay for this mess. Well, you might think, Exxon’s responsible. Maybe, maybe not. If the Pegasus pipeline is a separate corporation and the spill is big enough, it might just go bankrupt, leaving the people of Mayflower to fend for themselves, or go through decades of court cases and litigation expenses.
If Exxon doesn’t pay the bill, you may say, it will surely go to The Oil Cleanup Fund, into which Exxon pays eight cents per barrel of oil pumped. You think so, do you? Well, tar sands oil, like the Wabasca Heavy, currently being pumped through the Exxon pipeline, is, according to a law written by Congress and interpreted by the IRS, not oil. So its pumpers are exempt from contributing to the Oil Cleanup Fund. This despite the fact that tar sands oil is much more difficult to clean up than ordinary oil.
How do you suppose, such a law got passed by congress? Probably the same way the oil subsidies, got into the tax code and have stayed there. It’s called crooked congressmen. It’s called felons on the take. It’s called lobbyists.
This is, if Exxon is to be believed, a minor spill, unless, of course, you happen to live in Mayflower and have a basement full of oil. What happens when the Keystone pipeline starts pumping full time and inevitably starts to spring leaks all the way along its two thousand mile length?
Keystone will eventually, after years of court fights and millions in legal fees to those who have been wronged, pay something, but what happens to the people whose homes and land have been destroyed by the poison these greedy pigs are pumping across our country and even more important what happens to the water from the Oglala Aquifer that irrigates a huge portion of the great plains in these times of draught?
Oh yeah, about that math problem up above. We’re really talking about around 300 jobs for four months, not 60,000, only a slight difference in oil speak. Most of those 300 jobs will go to Canadians already working for Keystone. Of course there will also be a couple of flag guys on each job, just to keep traffic around the work moving. Those are the American jobs and they will all be at or below minimum wage. Yeah, it will be a real boon to American labor and will surely solve the unemployment problem as seen by the Right, Wall Street, and the oil industry.
What it won’t solve is our unemployment problem of people needing real jobs, our environmental problem, with the most poisonous oil in the world spilled all over the Oglala Aquifer, or our energy problem because all this poisonous crap is going to China, right after it ruins our country.
If anyone out there who doesn’t work for an oil company thinks that this is good for the USA, they’re nuts.