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Fraud at State? Taxpayers Take Pipeline |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=20877"><span class="small">William Boardman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Wednesday, 13 March 2013 14:35 |
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Boardman writes: "So it turns out that friends of the oil industry wrote the environmental impact statement issued by the State Department about the Keystone XL pipeline on March 1."
There has been controversy over a State Department report on the Keystone XL oil pipeline. (photo: Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Blog)
Fraud at State? Taxpayers Take Pipeline
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
13 March 13
Keystone pipeline: U.S. pays foxes to assess henhouse as delicious
 o it turns out that friends of the oil industry wrote the environmental impact statement issued by the State Department about the Keystone XL pipeline on March 1. That's the report that assured people tar sands oil was going to be developed no matter what, and anyway, climate change wouldn't hurt the pipeline.
And it turns out that at least one of the several oil-friendly corporate authors was apparently paid by Trans-Canada, the corporate applicant for - and the owner of - the Keystone pipeline.
And it also turns out that the State Department, while noting (on page 1.5-1) that as "the lead agency, the Department directed the preparation" of the impact statement, the title page lists only one person, Genevieve Walker, as "Project Manager," along with more than 14 cooperating and assisting government agencies - and no reference to any other possible direct or indirect report authors.
And it further turns out that the State Department, without giving credit to specific contributors for specific sections, does include - at the end of volume 2 of the 4-volume, 2,000-page report - a "list of preparers," 58 of them, almost all from three private oil industry consulting firms.
And it finally turns out that little if any of this has appeared in mainstream media, which may be less of a surprise than it should be, since cynicism about government integrity is so widespread. One might be tempted to ask why the State Department made even this much effort at deception just to hide a fundamental conflict of interest that hardly seems unusual. And news media might cynically ask, what's the news here?
When the Conclusion Is Predictable, Who Cares Who Wrote It?
While environmentalists and others promptly characterized the report's analysis as fraudulent or worse as soon as it came out, mainstream coverage was more like Fox News’s headlining of an Associated Press story the next day: "No major objections to Keystone XL oil pipeline, State Department says."
On March 4, three days after the Friday release of the report, the Heritage Foundation complained that "Obama Administration Buries Good News on Keystone Pipeline" - basing its claim on the choice of a Friday release. Based on the same fact of a late Friday release, the Sierra Club made the opposite claim, that the administration was trying to bury bad environmental news. But Heritage went on to push discredited job-creation numbers, along with the false assertion that the "Keystone pipeline has passed its environmental reviews."
The current review is not complete. The March 1 report will be held at least until mid-April, when the 45-day public comment period ends. Comments on the Draft SEIS [Supplementary Environmental Impact Statement] can be submitted via email to:
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
for the next several weeks, or from the State Department web site.
Lisa Song of Inside Climate News was apparently the first to write about the State Department's use of highly conflicted providers when State decided not to do the work itself, for whatever reason. Her March 6 article concentrates on the three main contractors in the report's list of preparers:
1. EnSys Energy (3 preparers) - the company's president, Martin Tallett said "We don't do advocacy." EnSys clients have included the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Energy, and State, as well as the World Bank, ExxonMobil, BP, Koch Industries, and the American Petroleum Institute. Tallett refused to discuss the Keystone pipeline.
2. ICF International (7 preparers) - the company's web site client list is generic, and all categories are within the oil and gas industry. ICF recently won an award for its work in "Climate Risk Management and Adaptation" for such clients as coastal cities, the World Bank, and the U.S. Agency for International Development. ICF has more than 60 offices worldwide, employing more than 4,500 people. The company refused to talk to a reporter.
3. ERM, Environmental Resources Management (45 preparers) - the company lists clients from a wide variety of fields, including the oil industry (Chevron, Shell, Statoil, and Total). ERM's clients include more than half of all Global Fortune 500 companies. The company has over 4,700 people working more than 140 offices in 39 different countries.
Wait, TransCanada Assessed the Impact of Its Own Pipeline?
Also on March 6, Brad Johnson at Grist moved the story from obvious conflict of interest to something that begins to smack of fraud, at least where ERM is involved. Under the headline "'State Department' Keystone XL Report Actually Written by TransCanada Contractor," Johnson links to the contract and supporting documents that led him to conclude:
The "sustainability consultancy" Environmental Resources Management (ERM) was paid an undisclosed amount under contract to TransCanada to write the [environmental impact] statement, which is now an official government document. The statement estimates, and then dismisses, the pipeline's massive carbon footprint and other environmental impacts, because, it asserts, the mining and burning of the tar sands is unstoppable….
The documents from the ERM-TransCanada agreement are on the State Department's web site, but payment amounts and other clients and past work of ERM are redacted. In the contract documents, ERM partner Steven J. Koster certifies that his company has no conflicts of interest. He also certifies that ERM has no business relationship with TransCanada or "any business entity that could be affected in any way by the proposed work" (notwithstanding the impact statement contract itself)….
On March 7, ThinkProgress summarized the stories by Song and Johnson, adding a detail indicating that this kind of deception was not a new pattern for TransCanada or the State Department: "Several years ago, Cardno Entrix, another private consultancy, was contracted by TransCanada to handle the State Department's initial draft of the environmental impact statement, the Department's hearings on the pipeline, and even its Keystone XL web site.
N.Y. Times Favors Climate Over Pipeline
Without mentioning the State Department report's shady underpinnings, the New York Times took two strong shots against approval of the Keystone pipeline - first in a column by Thomas Friedman on March 9, "No to Keystone. Yes to Crazy." Friedman uncharacteristically urged protestors to "go crazy" -
I'm talking chain-themselves-to-the-White-House-fence-stop-traffic-at-the-Capitol kind of crazy, because I think if we all make enough noise about this, we might be able to trade a lousy Keystone pipeline for some really good systemic responses to climate change.
The next day, the Times struck again, this time with an editorial urging President Obama to deny a permit to Keystone:
He should say no, and for one overriding reason: A president who has repeatedly identified climate change as one of humanity's most pressing dangers cannot in good conscience approve a project that - even by the State Department's most cautious calculations - can only add to the problem.
Add the likelihood that the State Department report is likely a collusive fraud doesn't really improve the pipeline's case.
And guess what? The State Department position today is the same position officially expressed some 18 months ago during a press briefing related to an earlier Keystone report, when Assistant Secretary Kerri-Ann Jones told reporters:
I think that the sense we have is that this oil sands is going to be developed and therefore there's not going to be any dramatic change in greenhouse gas from this pipeline, or if the pipeline was to go forward or without the pipeline, because the oil sands will continue to be developed and there are alternatives to pipelines to moving that fuel or potential crude around.
In other words, the government just spent however many million dollars to get oil industry consultants to come to the same conclusion the government already held in August 2011. No wonder this story is beginning to get some traction.
To have a conflict of interest, you don't actually have to do anything wrong.
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Getting Kicked While the Richest Get Richer |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6907"><span class="small">Jim Hightower, Creators Syndicate</span></a>
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Wednesday, 13 March 2013 14:15 |
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BLHightower writes: "'Hallelujah,' shout the devout. 'All praise the Dow!' Unless, of course, your wealth is dependent not on stock prices, but on wages."URB
Texas' progressive political curmudgeon, Jim Hightower. (photo: JimHightower.com)
Getting Kicked While the Richest Get Richer
By Jim Hightower, Creators Syndicate
13 March 13
  t's a sign," exclaims a February Associated Press story - a sign that our economy is "healing." "It signals that things are getting back to normal," added a delighted market analyst. And a March 4 New York Times report heralded it as "a golden age."
The "it" they're hailing is the Dow, that mystical force believed by faithful Dowists to be "The Way" - the provider of good fortune, often bestowing its magical beneficence by magical means. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is the holy measure of corporate stock prices, and it is now smiling warmly on its acolytes.
Last week, the Dow Jones Average reached a new high, having regained every dime of the $11 trillion that Wall Street investors had lost in the 2007 crash. "Hallelujah," shout the devout. "All praise the Dow!"
Unless, of course, your wealth is dependent not on stock prices, but on wages. In that case, you're among the majority of Americans who're more concerned about the Doug Jones Average. Forget the buzz about "a golden age" - Doug, Darcy, Diego, Deewanna and all the other Joneses can't even afford to enter the Golden Arches, for they're still mired in the Great Job Depression that Wall Street's crash caused.
Washington rushed to the rescue of the financial elites, but the Joneses are still getting double-stiffed by Washington policymakers and by the very elites Washington continues to coddle. The GOP House refuses to talk about a minimal tax hike on the superrich, but members had no qualms about jacking up the payroll taxes on millions of workaday people.
Meanwhile, even as corporate profits have rocketed up by 20 percent a year since the end of 2008, the chieftains are still refusing to increase hiring and are holding down wages. As a result, the share of America's total income that goes to workers has now tumbled to the lowest level in nearly half a century.
United Technologies (one of the 30 corporations whose financial performances are measured to calculate the Dow Jones Averages) is a force in that knockdown. This industrial giant, fed a regular diet of fat government contracts, has enjoyed annual revenue increases of some $2 billion a year since 2005, yet rather than increasing its workforce?, CEO Louis Chenevert is shedding workers.
Last month, only four days after announcing that United Tech's stock price had leaped to a record high, the corporation revealed that it will fire 3,000 employees this year, on top of the 4,000 dumped in 2012.
That is the harsh math behind such recent smiley-face headlines as this one: "Household wealth back at pre-recession levels." Oh, joy - we're all rich again!
Or not. The article attributes the gain in household wealth to "surging stock prices." But before you start ripping up your floorboards in hopes of finding your share of this bounty, read deeper into the article to learn that the Dow doesn't do much at all for the Doug. In fact, the wealthiest 10 percent of households own 80 percent of all corporate stocks.
Harsher yet is the way the corporate powers are treating those financially stretched Americans who're looking not for a bundle of wealth, but just a decent job. Today's massive backlog of unemployed and underemployed workers allows corporations to bring in hoards of top-quality applicants and literally toy with them. It's now common for a job-seeker to return five, seven, nine or more times to the same company hiring hall for senseless rounds of interviews - only to have the company whimsically decide not to fill the opening at all.
From Google to Starbucks, major corporations have roughly doubled the duration of their interview process in the last two years. The New York Times noted that one fellow seeking a video-editing job was run through a gauntlet of nine interviews and made to undergo a ridiculous battery of psychological and personality exams, along with a math quiz and a spelling test - after which the company simply closed the opening.
Insulting, yes, but expensive, too. The out-of-work interviewee has to pay for producing work samples and cover the cost of everything from dry cleaning to parking fees. The job-dangling corporation, on the other hand, can simply force existing employees to shoulder a heavier load, while it trifles with applicants looking for what is laughingly referred to in CorporateSpeak as "the purple squirrel" - an applicant too qualified to exist.
Even a dog knows the difference between being tripped over ... and kicked. The way workaday Americans are being kicked around today is revolting - both in the sense of being abhorrent and inevitably inducing a revolt.
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'The World According to Dick Cheney': A Too-Polite Form of Interrogation |
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Wednesday, 13 March 2013 08:23 |
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Stuever writes : "R.J. Cutler's new documentary, "The World According to Dick Cheney," finds the former vice president as resolute and indifferent as ever to his critics. What else did you expect - that the heart transplant would have magical effects? That he would have newfound doubts about his role in going to war against Iraq? That a little time and perspective would lead him to see the world any way other than the way he already sees it? If so, the joke's still on you."
Former Vice President, Dick Cheney. (photo: AP)
‘The World According to Dick Cheney': A Too-Polite Form of Interrogation
By Hank Stuever, Washington Post
13 March 13
 .J. Cutler's new documentary, "The World According to Dick Cheney," finds the former vice president as resolute and indifferent as ever to his critics. What else did you expect - that the heart transplant would have magical effects? That he would have newfound doubts about his role in going to war against Iraq? That a little time and perspective would lead him to see the world any way other than the way he already sees it? If so, the joke's still on you.
"I don't go around thinking, ‘Gee, I wish we'd done this, or I wish I'd done that,'..." Cheney says. "The world is as you find it, and you've got to deal with that…. You don't get do-overs." No regrets, no wishy-washiness. No duh. "I did what I did," he says later, "and it's all part of the public record and I feel very good about it. If I had it to do over again, I'd do it in a minute."
The film, fresh from Sundance and having its television premiere Friday night on Showtime, is a sturdy but ultimately stifled exercise in the most polite methods of interrogation - to which its subject is entirely immovable and not prepared to surrender anything, even a smile. The lone artistic move in "The World According to Dick Cheney" is to hire actor Dennis Haysbert as narrator - the voice of Allstate insurance, presently, but, more important, the fictional president of the earliest seasons of Fox's "24," a show that absorbed some of our culture's excess panic attacks about counterterrorism, torture and general millennial doom. Here, Haysbert's voice is a nostalgic touch in a film that badly needs any help it can get to keep the viewer engaged.
Cutler, whose previous work includes co-producing "The War Room" (an unforgettable look at the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign) and directing "The September Issue" (a fascinating trip into Vogue magazine's editorial process), patiently waited and wheedled for many months until Cheney agreed to sit for several hours of interviews. Cheney even let the crew come along on a Wyoming fishing trip, his first since a heart transplant last year. It's a good get, but the results are probably not what anyone hoped.
So what are we doing here, for nearly two hours?
Mainly we are reciting large chunks of an unfinished Wikipedia entry on the 2000s, particularly the George W. Bush administration's response to the Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaeda attacks on the United States. This is a subject about which a number of questions and a lot of acrimony remain; in many ways, we are still living through (and very much in) a world according to Dick Cheney.
"Tell me what terrorist acts you would let go forward because you didn't want to be a mean and nasty fella?" Cheney responds when Cutler gently questions how the administration pushed for war, altered privacy rights and tortured detainees.
Cutler's impulse is easy to understand: Like all men and women who've had a front seat to history, it's important to get Cheney to talk about what he's seen and learned while he's still around to share it. He's 72 and noticeably aged since 2009, but he's looking healthier and certainly slimmer than he did during his time as veep.
At first, "The World According to Dick Cheney" behaves like a biography, taking us to Wyoming in the 1950s, where young Dick grows up in an idyllic West. He flunks out of Yale, returns home to blue-collar jobs and a couple of drunken-driving arrests. His fiancee, Lynne Vincent, issues a straighten-up-and-fly-right ultimatum (not unlike the one Laura Bush once issued to her husband), and this seems to propel Cheney to larger ambitions.
A remarkable turnaround follows over the next decade or so in which Cheney earns a PhD in political science (while deferring the Vietnam draft until he ages out of it, which goes unmentioned here), moves to Washington, works for and befriends Donald Rumsfeld, survives the Nixon White House and becomes President Gerald R. Ford's chief of staff while still in his early 30s. Cheney then spends a decade in Congress; President George H.W. Bush appoints him defense secretary in 1989; then there's the Persian Gulf War in 1991....
I know most of you know all this, but it seems Cutler doesn't know that most of you know all this. As it loses steam, "The World According to Dick Cheney" forgets that it's supposed to be a movie and not the bullet points in a man's resume. Lynne Cheney is hardly anywhere to be found (a real loss in terms of humanizing backstory and an engaging talker), and there is no mention of Cheney as the father who bucked GOP tradition to publicly support his daughter Mary's same-sex relationship rights. The fishing trip we see is purely for the camera's benefit, and there is no color or candidness to be had here, no narrative flow, and nothing to learn that we can't look up or recall on our own. Cutler doesn't even ask about the 2006 hunting incident.
Like all documentaries that are essentially contemporary biographies, there is a small industry of journalists, book writers, think-tankers and former associates who supply a drop or two of the necessary sauce. Together, they sketch a portrait we've seen before, that of the obstinate master manipulator holed away in the undisclosed location. Nothing says that better than the carefully selected news clips and Sunday-morning talk show sequences - plenty to go around - in which Cheney and company assert broader power and insist that Saddam Hussein is manufacturing weapons of mass destruction.
None of this looks old enough yet to entice us to take a short trip in the time machine. It's hard to imagine who will watch "The World According to Dick Cheney" and come away satisfied or newly informed; even those prone to froth angrily at the mere mention of Cheney's name will have to work extra hard to get outraged all over again. That era is still cooking - and still raw in the center. Cutler indeed got his interview, but he's serving it at least a decade too soon.
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FOCUS | Jeb Bush Will Never Be President |
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Monday, 11 March 2013 11:04 |
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Breinart writes: "The younger Bush may be flirting with a run, but for a Republican to seriously compete in 2016, he must publicly distance himself from George W. Bush."
Beinart: 'On five talk shows Sunday morning, Jeb Bush reminded America why he'll never be president: it's hard to distance yourself from your own last name.' (photo: NY Daily News)
Jeb Bush Will Never Be President
By Peter Beinart, The Daily Beast
11 March 13
The younger Bush may be flirting with a run, but for a Republican to seriously compete in 2016, he must publicly distance himself from George W. Bush-and in five interviews Sunday, Jeb showed he wouldn't do that if he could.
 n five talk shows Sunday morning, Jeb Bush reminded America why he'll never be president: it's hard to distance yourself from your own last name.
"I don't think there's any Bush baggage at all," the former Florida governor said on Fox News Sunday. "I love my brother. I'm proud of his accomplishments." On Meet the Press, he added that "history will be kind to George W. Bush."
Unfortunately for Jeb, history is written by historians. Three times since 2009, pollsters have asked them to rank American presidents, and in those rankings, W. has come in 36th, 39th, and 31st. Only Millard Fillmore, Warren Harding, William Henry Harrison, Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson, and James Buchanan rank lower. Ordinary Americans agree. Three times since George W. Bush left office, pollsters have asked the public to rank recent presidents. And three times, W. has ended up second to last, ahead of only Richard Nixon.
It's no exaggeration to say George W. Bush is more responsible than any other single individual for the Republican Party's current dismal standing. When Bush took office, about as many Americans identified as Republicans as identified as Democrats. By the time he left, Democrats enjoyed a roughly 10-point lead. When Bush took office, Americans ages 18 to 29 were split evenly between the two major parties. By the time he left, Democrats enjoyed an advantage of 19 points. To grasp how excited Democrats would be to run a Clinton against a Bush in 2016, you need only remember that Bill Clinton gave the strongest speech at the 2012 Democratic convention, while at the 2012 Republican convention, George W. Bush didn't speak at all.
That's why Jeb Bush will never seriously challenge for the presidency-because to seriously challenge for the presidency, a Republican will have to pointedly distance himself from Jeb's older brother. No Republican will enjoy credibility as a deficit hawk unless he or she acknowledges that George W. Bush squandered the budget surplus he inherited. No Republican will be able to promise foreign-policy competence unless he or she acknowledges the Bush administration's disastrous mismanagement in Afghanistan and Iraq. It won't be enough for a candidate merely to keep his or her distance from W. John McCain and Mitt Romney tried that, and they failed because the Obama campaign hung Bush around their neck every chance it got. To seriously compete, the next Republican candidate for president will have to preempt that Democratic line of attack by repudiating key aspects of Bush's legacy. Jeb Bush would find that excruciatingly hard even if he wanted to. And as his interviews Sunday make clear, he doesn't event want to try.
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enedict XVI gave us words of great comfort and encouragement in
