New Film Destroys TransCanada’s Sunny Keystone PR Campaign
TransCanada’s PR team offers dozens of videos featuring happy “straight talk” — in both English and French — about its Keystone XL pipeline.
In them you’ll meet the smiling TransCanada environmental specialist who says she grew up in Nebraska, and has nothing but “great respect for the people who live here.” They’ll introduce you to a multicultural group of hardworking men in hardhats who will tell you about how much pride they take in building the pipeline. And then there’s the weatherbeaten farmer who grins slyly as he recalls the hard bargain he drove before agreeing to sell the company a right-of-way across his land.
In one video, a narrator intones, “Next to your family, we know there’s nothing closer to your heart than your land. We’re TransCanada, and we understand how you feel about your land. We’ve worked with thousands of landowners in the US and Canada.”
But a new film that premiered at the South by Southwest film festival paints a portrait of a company that uses eminent domain — and the threat of exorbitant litigation costs – to bully landowners into giving way to the Keystone pipeline.
Above All Else, a documentary directed by John Fiege, follows the story of David Daniel, a man who ran away to join the circus in his youth and then, after a career working as a high-wire artist, settled down with his family on a quiet plot of land in Texas.
Daniel became an “accidental activist” when TransCanada chose his property to become part of the route of the southern leg of the Keystone pipeline.
http://billmoyers.com/2014/05/20/new-film-destroys-transcanadas-sunny-keystone-pr-campaign/
