Obama Kills Another 20,000 Jobs

Clueless Leader Barack Obama just can't seem to decide which radical faction of his core constituency to support on any given day. He babbles on about creating jobs, meaning government jobs or government-funded jobs. But when it comes to creating real jobs in the private sector with no real need for deep government involvement, his record is a bust.

Obama had appeared to be in favor of the Keystone XL Canada-to-Texas oil pipeline. The pipeline had gone through three years of rigorous environmental impact reports and was found to be safe and of no danger to the environment. Some changes had been made to satisfy the concerns of certain state residents, particularly those in Nebraska. So the proposed pipeline route was altered somewhat, putting it next to the old Keystone Pipeline which has been operating safely for years.

The US was about to enter into an oil-producing project with an ally on our border instead of continuing to rely solely on oil from Middle East "partners." Construction and oil companies were gearing up for a project expected to put an estimated 20,000 Americans to work. But then the ecofreaks started manning the barricades. Protests from green weenie and anti-oil radicals broke out all over. Significantly, the more organized groups threatened to withhold support for Obama if he didn't stop the pipeline.

These groups are an important leftist Obama constituency. Suddenly, The Jobs President proclaimed "I support the State Department's announcement today regarding the need to seek additional information about the Keystone XL Pipeline proposal." Could this man be any more obvious? The project wasn't scrubbed, but magically its actual implementation would be put off until after the 2012 elections. And I'll bet you thought the State Department was supposed to be dealing with foreign nations, not setting policy in Nebraska.

Says Obama: "Because this permit decision could affect the health and safety of the American people as well as the environment we should take the time to ensure that all questions are properly addressed and all the potential impacts are properly understood. The final decision should be guided by an open, transparent process that is informed by the best available science and the voices of the American people." What does this fool think was done in the process that already wasted two years? The "new" study will find nothing different from what the previous study concluded, but the ecofreaks won't see any ground broken before the Jobs President has been reelected (or so he hopes).

The controversy, if it can be called that, is over the pipeline passing through the Nebraska sandhills and the Ogallala Aquifer. The ecofreaks say that the pipeline will damage the pristine sandhills and pollute the aquifer which provides much of the water for Nebraska and adjacent states. Of course nothing of the kind has come even close to happening with the old pipeline which runs nearly parallel to the proposed new pipeline. These people are the descendants and contemporaries of the ecofreaks who told anyone who would listen that the Alaska oil pipeline would destroy the trees, kill off the local wildlife, destroy the groundwater, and cause the extinction of the caribou by cutting off their annual migration. None of which actually happened.

The pipeline would meander through about 1700 miles of American land, running through Montana, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas and portions of Illinois and Missouri. It is estimated to produce about a million barrels of oil daily from Canada's Alberta tar-sands to Texas refineries. The project would produce about 13,000 American construction jobs and another 7,000 manufacturing jobs, none of them government jobs. That's a genuine stimulus rather than a government handout.

Here's something to ponder. A spokesman for the State Department declared that the Obama administration had no influence on the decision to delay. Say what? Isn't the State Department the premier department within any administration? The Secretary of State serves at the will of the president and is expected to carry out the president's policies. The State Department is far more intimately intertwined with the presidency politically than the [theoretically] politically-independent Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) which would seem to be the far more logical bureaucracy to be making this decision in the first place.

Another important job for the State Department is establishing good relations with our allies. Canadians, and particularly the Province of Alberta, are furious. They thought they had a deal. They were already gearing up for the project, put millions of dollars into its development, and were looking forward to the thousands of jobs the project would create in their nation. In fact, it now looks like the Canadian backers of the project will continue to go full-bore with the project. Except that the pipeline will now run west to other Canadian provinces instead of south to the United States.

The same people who are trying to kill the project are the ones who have also time and again killed projects within US borders or US control that would produce oil from our own resources rather than importing it. The same oil sand that exists in Alberta also exists in abundance in the Dakotas, but those projects were killed years ago by the ecofreaks without needing the assistance of the State Department.

Republican House Speaker John Boehner says of the decision: "By punting on this project, the President has made clear campaign politics are driving US policy decisions--at the expense of American jobs. More than 20,000 new American jobs have just been sacrificed in the name of political expediency."

Proving that politics make strange bedfellows, Boehner's announcement was made at the same time as that of Terry O'Sullivan, president of the Laborers' International Union of North America. O'Sullivan said: "We are disappointed that a jobs decision was made on the basis of a political calculation." And president Russ Girling of TransCanada (the major contractor in the project) says: "This is a decision to kill 'shovel-ready' jobs." I never knew the Canadians were that good at ironic humor.

Obama may have made a serious miscalculation. The ecofreaks may see his delay as inadequate. They want the project permanently killed, not merely stalled. The unions that would have benefited may find their enthusiasm for the Jobs President dampened, and that means less money in the Obama reelection coffers. On the other side, this could create previously non-existent political activism among those who didn't realize just how many jobs and how much oil could be brought to America without having to kiss the hem of a Middle East tyrant's robes.

In Obama's own words, this is a jobs project which could have been accomplished "right away." The infrastructure was already in place. The workers were waiting for the phone calls to come to work. The companies were ready to invest and hire. Now, thanks to Obama's love for his destructive leftist base, none of that is going to happen in the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, the oil sheikhs are rubbing their hands with glee.