Nothing to 'chuckle' about: Despite what Obama says, Keystone jobs no laughing matter [Video]

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n an interview with the New York Times on Saturday, U.S. President Barack Obama ?chuckled? ? that?s what the Times called his reaction ? when he was asked about the number of jobs that would be created by the proposed Keystone XL pipeline.

?Republicans have said that this would be a big jobs generator. There is no evidence that that?s true,? said Obama. ?The most realistic estimates are this might create maybe 2,000 jobs during the construction of the pipeline ? which might take a year or two ? and then after that we?re talking about somewhere between 50 and 100 (chuckles) jobs in a economy of 150 million working people.? The Times actually added the word ?chuckles? to their report.

But it?s hard to find the humour. Five years after the Great Recession began, the U.S. unemployment rate has not returned to pre-recession levels. Worse, millions of Americans have dropped out of the workforce, giving up looking for jobs at all. The real youth unemployment rate ? including those who have stopped looking for a job ? is a staggering 23%.

Those young Americans might want one of those 2,000 construction jobs. TransCanada says it will be 20,000 construction jobs ? which sounds plausible, given that it?s a $7.6 billion dollar infrastructure project.

Obama?s own State Department conducted an exhaustive study on the pipeline ? several studies, actually, comprising more than 12,000 pages ? and they estimate building the pipe would create 42,000 jobs.

It?s surely true that the pipeline?s construction jobs would end once it?s constructed. That?s the nature of construction. Carpenters don?t stick around after a family has moved in to a house, either. But for 42,000 construction workers, the Keystone XL is the ?next? job they?ve been waiting for since it was first proposed by TransCanada back in 2008. They?re still waiting. Those who haven?t given up yet.

The U.S. government has been reviewing the project for close to five years. Which is longer than it took the U.S. to win the Second World War, after Pearl Harbor was attacked.

Perhaps Obama is unfamiliar or uncomfortable with jobs that are created by the private sector, jobs for which he cannot take political credit, jobs in red states, in the Republican heartland. His own life?s work, and his wife?s too, has been a series of public sector jobs from ?community organizer? to professor to politician. His own $26-billion green jobs plan ? including half a billion to the now-bankrupt solar panel company, Solyndra ? created less than 2,300 permanent jobs, or about $11 million a pop. And then there was his failed bailout of Detroit.

It isn?t the president?s job to approve or disapprove of pipelines; it?s not in the U.S. Constitution. The only reason Obama has any say in this pipeline is because it crosses the Canada-U.S. border.

There are more than 80 pipelines that cross the border. But this president is the first to make an international incident out of regular commerce ? and to hold thousands of U.S. jobs hostage

to wealthy environmental activists.

The Keystone XL pipeline will be approved one day. Perhaps politically bundled with a proposed new carbon tax; perhaps after the 2014 mid-term elections, once Obama wrings tens of millions more out of his eco-donors; perhaps in the final days of his administration in 2016. But every day that goes by, thousands of American workers sit on their hands. And OPEC princes laugh and laugh.

Source: http://www.winnipegsun.com/2013/07/29/nothing-to-chuckle-about-despite-what-obama-says-keystone-jobs-no-laughing-matter

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