Keystone’s XL Pipeline is not good for working people

OPINION

By: Deborah Burger, RN, NNU Co-President

As pressure from the fossil-fuel industry, conservative Canadian and US politicians, and some construction unions mounts on President Obama to greenlight the controversial Keystone XL Pipeline project, a growing coalition has a different message.

On February 17, tens of thousands rallied against the pipeline in cities across the US, including San Francisco — a testament to the climate movement, ranchers and farmers, First Nations leaders, most Canadian unions, some US unions (including my nurses’ organization), transport and domestic workers, and young people who are rightfully alarmed over the global impact of Keystone XL.

For nurses, who already see patients sickened by the adverse effects of pollution and infectious diseases linked to air pollutants and the spread of water and food borne pathogens associated with environmental contaminants, Keystone XL presents a clear and present danger.

First, extracting tar sands is more complex than conventional oil drilling, requiring vast amounts of water and chemicals. The discharge accumulates in highly toxic waste ponds and risks entering water sources that may end up in drinking water, as is already occurring.

Second, the corrosive liquefied bitumen form of crude the pipeline would carry is especially susceptible to leaks that can spill into farmland, water aquifers and rivers on route, threatening an array of adverse health outcomes.

Public health costs from fossil-fuel production in the US through contaminants in our air, rivers, lakes, oceans, and food supply are already pegged at more than $120 billion every year by the National Academy of Sciences. The Environmental Protection Agency warns that exposure to particulate matter emitted from fossil fuel plants is a cause of heart attacks, long term respiratory illness including asthma, cancer, developmental delays and reproductive problems. Global-warming inducted higher air temperatures can also increase bacteria-related food poisoning, such as salmonella, and animal-borne diseases like the West Nile virus.

That’s just the tip of the melting iceberg given the planet altering consequences of rising sea levels, intensified weather events including droughts, floods and super storms already in evidence, and mass dislocation of coastal populations and starvation that may well follow our failing to stem climate change.

Far more jobs would be created by converting to a green economy. As economist Robert Pollin put it in his book Back to Full Employment, every $1 million spent on renewable clean energy sources creates 16.8 jobs, compared to just 5.2 jobs created by the same spending on fossil-fuel production.

And, as one person acerbically commented on a recent New York Times article, there are no jobs on a dead planet.

Further, stumping for the pipeline puts labor in league with the many of the most anti-union, far right corporate interests in the U.S., such as the oil billionaire Koch Brothers and energy corporations, abetted by the politicians who carry their agenda.

The future for labor should not be scrambling for elusive crumbs thrown down by corporate partners, but advocating for the larger public interest, as unions practiced in the 1930s and 1940s, the period of labor’s greatest growth and the resulting emergence of a more egalitarian society.

Deborah Burger is a registered nurse and co-president of National Nurses United, the nation’s largest organization of nurses.

We’ve seen this picture before, and the U.S. is not about to get an Oscar.

Just last month, a study by the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine found that the U.S. ranks last among 17 affluent countries in life expectancy (all the others have national healthcare systems, unlike our dysfunctional insurance model). 

Now we’re losing ground in another arena – making the financial speculators pay their fair share for revenue needed for economic recovery.

The contrast was brought into sharp focus Monday in conflicting statements from Jack Lew, the Obama administration’s incoming Treasury Secretary, and European Union Tax Commissioner Algirdas Semeta. 

In a Washington speech, Semeta described the rapid movement of 11 EU nations, including such giants as Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, to implement a financial transaction tax. The same day Bloomberg news was reporting a dismissive statement by Lew on an FTT for the U.S.that even went beyond public statements about an FTT from the outgoing Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who was well known as a champion of Wall Street.

The irony of Lew’s position could not be greater in a week in which Washington is frantic with the oncoming sequestration and the obvious need for new revenue sources to protect Main Street communities.

A major answer is staring us in the face – the Robin Hood tax.

The Inclusive Prosperity Act, authored by Rep. Keith Ellison, and expected to be reintroduced soon, would infuse up to $350 billion every year. The revenue would be used for such critical needs as jobs, healthcare, housing and fighting climate change and AIDS, by setting a small tax of just 50 cents on every $100 of stock trades and less on other financial instruments. 

Virtually every other major market has already figured this out, as Semeta pointed out.

“The financial sector is under taxed compared to other sectors,” said Semeta. “We (the EU) are ready to lead the way.” Other EU countries signing on include Portugal, Belgium, Austria, Greece, Estonia, Slovenia, and Slovakia, joining with the fastest growing markets in Asia and other major world exchanges, some 40 nations in all.

“The tax also has supporters here which I want to encourage,” said Semeta. That would be the growing Robin Hood movement, which has held multiple actions promoting the tax, most recently during Lew’s confirmation hearing earlier this month.

This is not a hard sell for nurses who daily see the worsening health consequences of persistent economic crisis facing many families and know our communities need the help a tax on Wall Street can provide.

So why do we have a Treasury nominee who is showing more loyalty to Wall Street than to Main Street?

In a statement by Lew to written questions by Senator Orrin Hatch, top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, Lew even made the outlandish objection that an FTT “would be vulnerable to evasion.” That hasn’t spurred our government to crack down on the legion of corporate tax evaders, including some of the world’s biggest banks and oil companies who regularly avoid paying taxes and even get rebates.

But, in fact, an FTT would be simpler to enforce since trading is highly automated and more than 70 percent of trades go through computerized central clearing houses, making it easy to monitor and extremely difficult to evade. 

An FTT would also serve to stabilize markets by limiting high-speed, high-volume trades and by constraining price spikes in essentials, like food and gas, tied to speculative trading. In his Washington speech, Semeta noted that high-frequency trading has led to transactions that “do not have any social value,” adding the tax would “reorient the financial sector” around the real economy.

Deborah Burger is a registered nurse and a co-president of National Nurses United

Associate Editor John Nichols has been with The Capital Times since 1993 and has become one of Wisconsin’s best-known progressive voices. He is the author of seven books on politics and the media and he also writes about electoral politics and public policy for The Nation magazine.

Sequestration threatens to cut vital public services and undermines the economy in order to achieve budget priorities that benefit Wall Street while damaging Main Street.

And, of course, sequestration asks nothing of Wall Street.

That’s austerity, just as it has been practiced in Europe.

That’s austerity, just as it has failed in Europe.

Worse yet, the Simpson-Bowles “Fix the Debt” campaign seeks more austerity. They’re already trying to exploit the sequester mess that will play out this week to achieve the ultimate goals of Wall Street: the acceptance of the “principle” that the only way to balance budgets is by undermining Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid – with schemes like “chained CPI” cuts in cost-of-living increases for seniors, and an upping of the eligibility age for programs to qualify for earned benefits.

This is a critical moment for the proponents of austerity. They’ve lost at the polls, but they want to win in a moment of supposed crisis: using a new variation on the “disaster capitalism” strategies outlined in Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine.”

But savvy unions are pushing back, with a message challenging the austerity lie that says there is no alternative to the painful cuts that could cause a new recession. Their message is precisely right: If the CEOs who claim to be so concerned about debts and deficits really want to do something to balance the books, they can start by paying their fair share of taxes.

“Wall Street CEOs, part of the misnamed ‘Fix the Debt’ group, are pushing for cuts in lifeline benefits like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid to reduce our national debt. But a big part of our debt comes from their refusal to pay their fair share in taxes—and they want to keep the loopholes in place so they can keep right on doing it,” argue members of National Nurses United, the union that has taken the lead in promoting implementation of a “Robin Hood tax” that, by collecting a small fee on high-stakes financial transactions, could steer hundreds of billions into the U.S. Treasury.

NNU members are taking their message to the streets in cities such as Detroit, where the Michigan Nurses Association has organized protests outside banks, arguing: “We can save money — and protect critical social insurance programs — by taking … common-sense steps to close loopholes that cost our country, threaten the middle class and enrich the already wealthy.”

This is smart economics that bets on growth rather than the fantasy that America can cut its way to prosperity. And it ought to get an equal hearing in the debate over how to address debt and deficit issues.

NNU and other unions have “found the money” where too many politicians and pundits refuse to look: on Wall Street. They propose a fair-tax strategy that raises money for the U.S. Treasury while encouraging investment in the United States. To wit:

• Eliminate the tax benefit corporations receive from sending jobs overseas ($583 billion).

• Close other corporate tax loopholes so Wall Street starts paying its fair share of taxes (hundreds of billions of dollars over 10 years).

• Tax the income of Wall Street hedge fund and private equity managers at the same rate as wage income ($21 billion).

• Collect a surtax of at least 5.6 percent on income greater than $1 million ($453 billion over 10 years) so fewer millionaires can avoid paying their fair share of taxes.

• Implement a “Buffett rule” to ensure millionaires pay an effective tax rate of at least 30 percent on all their income ($47 billion).

• Limit the extra benefit of tax deductions for the richest 2 percent of Americans ($293 billion).

• Collect that small “Robin Hood tax” on Wall Street trading of foreign currencies, derivatives, bonds and stocks to discourage harmful speculation (raising more than $350 billion).

There are members of Congress who have picked up on key elements of the NNU plan. Congressional Progressive Caucus Co-chair Keith Ellison, D-Minn., endorsed a version of the Robin Hood tax and joined other progressives — including Michigan Congressman John Conyers, Illinois Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky and Arizona Congressman Raul Grijalva — in advancing a “Balancing Act” proposal that rejects the austerity agenda in favor of new revenue and growth.

Ellison and his co-sponsors are right to recognize that there are alternatives that can fix the debt and renew the U.S. economy. Those alternatives aren’t being proposed by the billionaire-funded “Fix the Debt” campaign. They’re being proposed by nurses in Detroit and cities across the country, as they seek to “heal the United States” rather than to cut it apart with austerity.

John Nichols is associate editor of The Capital Times. jnichols@madison.com

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