Who Benefits From Building The Keystone XL Pipeline ?

(This image of the Koch brothers is from the website mediamatters.org.)

The Republican right-wingers have been loudly beating the drum in support of building the Keystone XL pipeline. Their argument is that the pipeline will benefit the people of the United States -- by creating new jobs and by lowering the amount of oil the United States would need to import. Is that argument true?

Let's first take the jobs argument. While it's true that a few thousand jobs would be created to build the pipeline, those are only temporary jobs. The State Department has admitted that only about 35 permanent jobs would result from building the pipeline. In short, the job creation argument is a false one -- and even if you add the few temporary jobs to the extremely small amount of permanent jobs, it would not significantly affect the unemployment crisis in this country.

But even though the pipeline won't create jobs, it would be beneficial if it significantly lowered the amount of foreign oil the United States needed to import. Unfortunately, that is a bogus argument also. First, the oil flowing through the pipeline would be foreign oil, and not oil that originated in this country. The oil would come from Canada. Even if we set that aside, recognizing that Canada is a much friendlier nation than much of our other imported oil comes from, the argument still doesn't hold water.

The amount of oil that would flow through the pipeline is only a tiny fraction of the oil this country imports, and would not significantly reduce America's consumption of foreign oil -- even if all of that oil stayed in this country. But it's not going to stay in the United States. The companies receiving and refining that oil have refused to promise to keep it in the United States, and they refused because they intend to ship most (or all) of it to other countries (where they can get a higher price).

So the pipeline will not create a significant number of new jobs, and it will not significantly reduce American dependence on foreign oil. Add to this the fact that the pipeline is environmentally dangerous (since pipeline leaks are not rare, but a common occurrence that happens almost daily in this country), and it's easy to see that the people of the United States will NOT be benefitted by the building of the pipeline.

So who will the pipeline benefit? It turns out that the biggest supporters of right-wing policies and candidates (to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars) -- the Koch brothers -- would be the only Americans (outside of the big oil refiners on the Gulf Coast) to benefit. That's because the Koch brothers, through a subsidiary of Koch Industries, holds leases on at least 1.1 million acres of the tar sands oil in Canada. The pipeline would give them a much cheaper and easier way to get that oil to a refinery (so it can be refined and then sold overseas).

This shouldn't really surprise anyone. The Koch brothers fill the campaign coffers of right-wing candidates, and those candidates pay them back by campaigning for a pipeline that will fatten the already bulging bank accounts of the Koch brothers. It's exactly the kind of quid pro quo politics that shouldn't exist in a democracy. But then right-wingers aren't too enamored with democracy anyway -- much preferring a plutocracy that would benefit their rich friends.