Bury the Story Instead of the Pipeline
Energy is the backbone of every economy – without the former the latter is nonexistent. It doesn’t matter if you raise cattle, rebuild cars or run a country. If a political action would have translated into a $9.6 billion dollar economic boom for a nation, created 59,000 jobs, but instigated a tremendous hike in consumer costs, should the public be made aware of that action?
Yet the partisan legacy media is quieter than an unspoken thought.
According to a study released by the United States Department of Energy (DOE), the statistics in the first paragraph politically departed the nation, as a result of the shutdown and abandonment of the Keystone XL Pipeline. The release of the announcement and report by the DOE was done like the Fred Parris and Satins 1955 hit, “In the Still of the Night”.
There would be no report had it not been for a codified insertion into the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that made such reports congregationally mandatory. Despite that, the report was a year late. The administration will likely espouse their pledge of greater openness and transparency for the report, but the mandate was crafted by Republican Senators Steve Daines of Montana and Jim Risch of Idaho.
Further, the shutdown triggered a significant downturn in the gas and oil markets excessively elevating the price of gases and oil and as a result the escalation in the price of essentially everything else. I suspect none of that was taken into consideration by the DOE report.
Biden’s executive order to enact the revocation of the XL Keystone Pipeline was signed on January 21, 2021, his first day in office. Most executive orders on that day were ratified as a reversal of those executed by Donald Trump. In fairness, Trump reversed executive orders signed by Barrack Obama, but in the case of the pipeline, not many had such immediate and damaging consequences.
Is this conscience over commerce? Close. It’s con-science over commerce as well as politics over people. In an effort to intimate that anthropogenic climate change is real, one must be making an attempt to create a cure.
A contributor to the Guardian Newspaper as well as an environmental and political activist, Britain’s George Monbiot wrote, “Most national journalists are embedded: immersed in the society, beliefs, and culture of the people they are meant to hold to account. They are fascinated by power struggles among the elite but have little interest in the conflict between the elite and those they dominate.” This is exactly correct, except, in this writing, Monbiot exclusively accuses the right, but the reality extends to both sides, and judging from the disclosures of censorship and suppression released by Twitter in the past few months, the left dominates.
The vast majority of people in media today do not take a journalist’s Hippocratic Oath which affirms that they are on the side of people by becoming their informants. Trust in the news is at an all-time low. A Knight-Gallup survey, “of more than 19,000 U.S. adults shows that Americans believe that the media have an important role to play in our democracy — yet they don’t see that role being fulfilled.”
As this article implies, the negligence of newsworthy items, especially important news, such as the pipeline cancellation and the detrimental consequences, is the exact same as censorship. Relative to censorship Wikipedia states, “This may be done on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or ‘inconvenient’.” The final adjective seems to be the most proliferate – but inconvenient for who – certainly not the public.
The linked story covers this sad state of pipeline affairs. Since the liberal media, in the vast majority, did not cover the story, it simply creates further division, estrangement, and rivalry in society between left and right.