Fact Check: Keystone XL Tar Sands Pipeline Isn’t A Job Creator

By Brad Johnson on Nov 4, 2011 at 8:46 pm

Proponents of the dangerous Keystone XL project claim that construction of the 1700-mile tar sands pipeline from Canada to Texas will create tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of much-needed jobs across the country. “Jobs for the 99%!” proclaims a website funded by the American Petroleum Institute (API). The Wall Street Journal promises “13,000 union jobs.” On the House floor today, Rep. Alan Nunnelee (R-MS) claimed the pipeline will create “20,000 high-wage construction jobs.” Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL) says the pipeline will “create 14,600 jobs in Illinois.” The US Chamber of Commerce claims the project will create “more than 250,000 permanent jobs.” “U.S. jobs supported by Canadian oil sands development could grow from 21,000 jobs today to 465,000 jobs by 2035,” said API Executive Vice President Marty Durbin.

Accepting these figures, reporters like CNN’s Steve Hargreaves, NPR’s Ari Shapiro, and the New York Times’ Kirk Johnson have portrayed the battle over the tar sands pipeline as one of economic benefits versus environmental fears.

However, these tremendous-seeming jobs claims are based entirely on a report by the Perryman Group, commissioned by the pipeline’s owner TransCanada, whose results have been described as “dead wrong” and “meaningless” by Council on Foreign Relations fellow Michael Levi and environmental economist Andrew Leach, neither of whom oppose the construction of the pipeline.

The only independent analysis conducted of the American job-creation potential of the Keystone XL pipeline finds that between 500 and 1400 temporary construction jobs will be created, with a negative long-term economic impact as gas prices rise in the Midwest and environmental costs are borne:

Why this tremendous discrepancy? Examining TransCanada’s business operations, the Cornell Global Labor Institute report finds that TransCanada has already purchased most of the steel it intends to use for the pipeline from India; that most of the work will be conducted by people already employed by TransCanada; and that the Perryman Group included already-completed pipeline projects in its job-creation estimates.

“The operating costs for KXL are very minimal,” the Cornell Global Labor Institute report explains, “and based on the figures provided by TransCanada for the Canadian section of the pipeline, the new permanent US pipeline jobs in the US number as few as 50.”

Unlike the Perryman Group’s “opaque” methodology, the Cornell report explains its calculations with full transparency.

Alyssa

Louis C.K. On Anti-Immigrant Sentiments

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Nov 4, 2011 at 6:37 pm

In his most recent appearance on Conan O’Brien’s show, Louis C.K. tells an absolutely brutal anecdote about a radio appearance in Arizona where the person giving him a ride started complaining about “the Mexicans” and what happens when he told her about his experience coming to America after years of living in Mexico and speaking mostly Spanish:

We’ve talked some about C.K. and race, and the extent to which he does or doesn’t claim his Mexican heritage, so it’s nice to hear that he uses his powers of Mexicanness for good. I’m seeing C.K. in Baltimore tonight, so in keeping with this video, I promise not to tweet through the experience. Though I will take notes so I can give y’all a full report on Monday.

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Economy

Will The GOP Filibuster Tax Credits For Hiring Veterans?

By Pat Garofalo on Nov 4, 2011 at 6:15 pm

Senate Republicans have so far gone three for three when it comes to filibustering President Obama’s American Jobs Act, having successfully blocked the bill from moving in its entirety, and then prevented two of its components from advancing individually. The GOP’s obstruction comes as the economy continues to improve at a glacial pace, with just 80,000 jobs created last month.

Next week, Senate Democrats will try again, this time with the portion of Obama’s bill providing tax credits to businesses that hire veterans:

Senate Democrats plan to roll out the next piece of President Obama’s jobs creation legislation – this part on veterans – next week.

The bill is aimed at incentivizing companies to hire war veterans. It includes a tax credit to encourage companies to hire veterans as well as additional tax credits for hiring veterans with “service-connected disabilities.”

At the moment, unemployment for veterans stands at 7.7 percent, but is at a substantially worse 12.1 percent for post-9/11 vets (up from 10.6 percent a year ago). If nothing else, surely the GOP can see the wisdom in letting this particular bit of Obama’s jobs bill though. “It’s expected to pass. It should pass,” said Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI).

Of course, while they would be an undeniable help, tax credits for veterans are not enough to create all the jobs necessary to bring the unemployment rate down. As Center for American Progress chief economist Heather Boushey said today, “at this point in the recovery we should be seeing upwards of 300,000 jobs created per month, but the economy only added a paltry 80,000 jobs in October and the three-month pace of job creation is only 114,000…Washington has yet to pass the American Jobs Act, which economists across the board agree will generate new jobs.”

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NEWS FLASH

Marriage Equality Case Advances In New Jersey | A New Jersey judge has ruled a lawsuit challenging the state’s civil unions can proceed, but noted that the state does not guarantee a fundamental right for same-sex couples to marry. The lawsuit, filed by seven same-sex couples, argues that civil unions do not provide equal protection under the law. In 2006, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled in Lewis v. Harris that “every statutory right and benefit conferred to heterosexual couples through civil marriage must be made available to committed same-sex couples.” The New Jersey legislature responded to the decision by legalizing civil unions, but a 2008 review commission found that “the separate categorization established by the Civil Union Act invites and encourages unequal treatment of same-sex couples and their children.”

Special Topic

Occupy Philly Marches To Romney Fundraiser And Holds Its Own ‘Photo-Op’ With Picture Of Mitt

By Zaid Jilani on Nov 4, 2011 at 5:45 pm

Today, former Massachussetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) is holding a fundraiser at a swank hotel in downtown Philadelphia, offering $2,500 photo-ops to wealthy donors inside.

Responding to Romney’s fundraising with the city’s elite, Occupy Philly and allied groups marched to the hotel and rallied outside of it. Demonstrators propped up a large poster of Romney and staged their own photo-ops with him, joking that they don’t need to be super-wealthy to take a photograph with a fake version of the candidate.

Here’s some video of the protesters rallied outside the hotel from the CloutDailyNews YouTube account:

Here are some pictures from the demonstration, taken by local demonstrators and reporters:

“The fact that we were able to pull this off so quickly says a lot about how passionate people are here in Pennsylvania about tax cuts for the rich and corporate greed,” said Jamie Mondics from Keystone Progress, which joined the protests.

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NEWS FLASH

Freshman Republican: No More Pledges, Not Even Norquist’s | Freshman Rep. Reid Ribble (R-WI) is done with pledges tying the hands of lawmakers, especially the strict anti-tax pledge put out by American for Tax Reform’s Grover Norquist that most Republican lawmakers sign. “I want to be intellectually honest with the folks back home,” Ribble said today. “I’m no longer signing any pledges to anybody. I’m not going to sign it next year.” Ribble said the last straw came when Norquist wouldn’t let Republicans close tax loopholes that subsidize ethanol production.

Alyssa

‘Hell On Wheels’ Wants So Badly To Be Deadwood

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Nov 4, 2011 at 5:22 pm

I feel sort of guilty comparing Hell on Wheels, AMC’s new Western about the construction of the Trans-Continental Railroad, to Deadwood, but it’s sort of hard not to do when the show is trying as hard as it possibly can to ape as many Deadwood elements as it can transfer to a railroad camp. As I wrote in my review at the Atlantic:

The minister who’s set himself up in Hell on Wheels is a straightforward prairie minister (though one with a dark secret that ultimately reinforces the show’s sympathy for former slave-owners and advocates of slavery), rather than the tormented Union civil war veteran who ministered to Deadwood in its first season before succumbing to the brain tumor that was robbing him of his faith. And when the Hell on Wheels minister mildly asks “Haven’t we had our fill of war? Our fill of killing?” it’s no match for the anguished cries of Deadwood’s camp doctor raging at God: “What conceivable use was the screaming of those men? Did you need to hear them to know your omnipotence?”

Hell on Wheels doesn’t compete with Deadwood in the arts of cussing or whoring, either. Declaring of the Emancipation Proclamation, as Elam Ferguson does at one point, that “Ain’t nothing good coming from this either…Look what this got. I might as well wipe my ass with it,” or the sight of Doc Durant denouncing his own pitch to investors as “Twaddle and shite,” don’t remotely compare to Swearengen promising a crowd fired up by rumors of a massacre by Native Americans “I will offer a personal $50 bounty for every decapitated head of as many of these godless heathen cocksuckers as anyone can bring in. And God rest the souls of that poor family. And pussy’s half price, next 15 minutes.” Hell on Wheels’ prostitutes are hookers with hearts of gold—and in one case, tattoos from her time in Indian captivity—rather than full-fledged citizens in this rough new society, and their interactions with men are entirely predictable.

The one thing that Hell on Wheels has on Deadwood is the sight of Common in a jaunty hat, though of course that doesn’t make up for the show’s Confederate nostalgia. There’s a really interesting story to be told about the black experience in Westward expansion, or about the railroad and Manifest Destiny from the perspective of the Native Americans who are being displaced by it. But this isn’t it. Also, this is a reminder that I need to finish blogging Deadwood. That starts again tomorrow.

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Justice

Bowdoin College Republicans, Democrats Join Forces To Protect Voting Rights In Maine

By Scott Keyes on Nov 4, 2011 at 5:10 pm

This is the fourth installment in an ongoing series on voting rights leading up to Election Day 2011.

In June, the Maine legislature adopted a bill repealing the state’s 38-year-old law allowing citizens to register to vote on election day. LD 1376 narrowly passed along partisan lines, with a handful of Republicans joining every Democrat to oppose the measure.

Now, as Maine’s citizens prepare to vote on a veto referendum determining election day registration’s (EDR) fate, two surprising allies have joined forces to protect voting rights in the Pine Tree State: Bowdoin College Republicans and College Democrats.

Though Republican lawmakers were behind the effort to repeal EDR, Bowdoin College Republicans broke with their party to support Question 1 on Tuesday’s ballot and maintain a system that has done a great deal to boost turnout among students.

ThinkProgress spoke with the leaders of both the College Republicans and College Democrats to get their thoughts on what EDR means for students in Maine. Watch it:

Robert Flores, co-chairman of the campus Republicans, said the decision to support election day registration was an easy one for him. “[Republican Gov. Paul] LePage and several Republican higher-ups registered same-day,” noted Flores. “If it’s good enough for LePage, it’s good enough for everyone.” Flores said same day registration was a major asset when trying to turn out students on election day because he could tell them, “you still have an opportunity to vote, it’s not too late. Get out there.”

College Democrats co-president Judah Isseroff agreed, saying that EDR has “always been a boon to voting turnout” among students. Many students, he noted, changed dorms year to year without realizing they needed to update their voter registration file; EDR allowed them to do so without being disenfranchised. Isseroff estimated that hundreds of students on campus had benefited from same day registration.

Polls show young voters overwhelmingly support maintaining Maine’s election day registration law. Though voters as a whole are split – 48 percent in favor, 44 percent opposed – those under 30 side with EDR by a 61-39 margin.

Read ThinkProgress’ first dispatch on the Question 1 vote here.

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Health

Mississippi Personhood Bill Could Criminalize Doctors Who Perform An Abortion To Save A Woman’s Life

By Tanya Somanader on Nov 4, 2011 at 4:45 pm

Physicians and medical associations are now speaking out against Mississippi’s personhood amendment, warning that it is “a dangerous intrusion of criminal law into the provision of medical care.”

Specifically, by criminalizing abortion, the measure could “criminalize routine medical practice that intentionally or not terminates a pregnancy” because, according to the measure, any fertilized egg — regardless of if and where it implants — could be considered a “person.” And because the measure has no exceptions for health of the mother (let alone rape or incest), Mississippi physicians are worried that termination of such a life-threatening pregnancy could still be considered a form of homicide:

[Mississippi Medical Association President Dr. Tom] Joiner and other opponents of Initiative 26 are concerned that by attempting to criminalize abortion, the initiative will criminalize routine medical practice that intentionally or not terminates a pregnancy. There is no mention in the initiative of an exception for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest, nor for the health of the mother, as in the case of life-threatening conditions such as ectopic or molar pregnancies. (In an ectopic pregnancy the fertilized egg implants outside the uterus, most often in the fallopian tube; in a molar pregnancy the fertilized egg becomes an abnormal growth such as a tumor rather than a fetus.)

“These pregnancies were not meant to go on to be people and we don’t think calling them persons is going to do any good for the patients that carry them nor the pregnancies themselves,” said Tupelo obstetrician-gynecologist Dr. Wayne Slocum, vice chair of the Mississippi section of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

Slocum said because ectopic and molar pregnancies never result in live births, casting those fertilized eggs as “persons” does not make sense. “They just need to be treated either with medication or surgery,” he said. “If not the mother can bleed to death or have dire consequences.”

Ultimately, as the Mississippi State Medical Association warns, the bill “will place in jeopardy a physician who tries to save a mother’s life by performing procedures and employing techniques have used for years.” Even while some of the doctors belonging to the association oppose abortion, Dr. Joiner says “nearly all of the association’s members oppose Initiative 26.” Dr. Slocum considers himself “pro-life” but says, “we feel like passing this amendment to the state constitution would do more to harm our patients than it will do to stop abortion.”

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Climate Progress

The GOP Brain Explained: Why Cliff Stearns Wants to Subsidize Successful Companies

By Climate Guest Blogger on Nov 4, 2011 at 4:32 pm

JR: In Stephen Lacey’s original post, we noted that Stearns’ notion of subsidizing successful companies is how the 1% operate. The rich get richer. And that’s one reason inequality is growing in this country. Roberts takes the analysis one-step further to discuss the self-justifying rationalizations of the 1%.

by David Roberts, in a Grist cross-post

Yesterday I sketched the sort of personality type most likely to identify as conservative: those who prefer stability to change, order to complexity, familiarity to novelty, and conformity to creativity. This sort of personality type is drawn to clear lines separating in-groups from out-groups, highly aware of social hierarchies, suspicious of change, and strongly inclined toward system justification, i.e., seeing the prevailing socioeconomic regime as worthy and desirable

I often think that the actions and rhetoric of today’s conservative politicians are easier to make sense of at this level, the level of temperament and worldview, than at the level of stated principles and policy proposals. Seeing through this lens can help make sense of a lot of stuff that otherwise looks hypocritical or absurd. In particular, it can help make sense of the political fight over climate change and clean energy.

The other day, Stephen Lacey flagged some comments from Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.) that I found extremely revealing:

So what I’m trying to do is say, the government should not be picking winners and losers, let the private sector determine the winners and losers, and then … when somebody is successful, then you give them the subsidies and the tax credit.

This makes absolutely no sense relative to the small-government, fiscal conservative principles Stearns purports to hold. Nor does it make sense as energy policy. But it does make sense at a deeper level.

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