<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" Nice administration you&amp;#039;ve got there, Mr. President. Be a shame if anything happened to it. (Marginally Relevant Aside: the other day, I heard a brief item on AP Radio News about the spike in gas prices. The only person they spoke to was an analyst for...wait for it...the American Petroleum Institute. Millions of people get their only news this way, and that kind of journalism sort of sucks.) This kind of journalism isn&amp;#039;t exactly terrific, either: While the pipeline has not been a focus of the GOP race for president, Gerard said the issue has the potential to become a major factor in the general election. (Are you kidding? The Republicans never shut up about it. It comes up in every damn debate. Michele Bachmann was ready to start digging the trench herself, and we know that Herman Cain was all in favor of laying pipe.) And: TransCanada says the pipeline could create as many as 20,000 jobs over two years, a figure opponents say is inflated. A State Department report last summer said the pipeline would create up to 6,000 jobs during construction. (Actually, &amp;quot;opponents&amp;quot; are not the only ones who say that number is primarily made of helium. Trans-Canada backed off this inflated number on the grounds that it was, well, inflated. It even backed off its slightly less inflated total of 13,000 jobs. Girling said Friday that the 13,000 figure was &amp;quot;one person, one year,&amp;quot; meaning that if the construction jobs lasted two years, the number of people employed in each of the two years would be 6,500. That brings the company&amp;#039;s number closer to the State Department&amp;#039;s; State says the project would create 5,000 to 6,000 construction jobs, a figure that was calculated by its contractor Cardno Entrix. As for the 7,000 indirect supply chain jobs, the $1.9 billion already spent by TransCanada would reduce the number of jobs that would be created in the future. The Brixton Group, a firm working with opponents of the project, has argued that many of the indirect supply jobs would be outside the United States because about $1.7 billion worth of steel will be purchased from a Russian-owned mill in Canada. (This was last November. We really can do better than this.) The basic point of the story, of course, is the extraction industry joining up with Big Labor to knuckle the White House based on transparently phony numbers. This is now one of those decisions that&amp;#039;s really about five or six other things besides the building of a environmentally risky pipeline through one of the most environmentally fragile parts of the country in order to transport some of the most environmentally destructive fuels we can find. Its also about flexing and about who really rules the country. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a12879/xl-pipeline-white-house-6863752/>