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Update:
And this is no satire:
As the New Republican Congress gets ready to vote on a bill to approve construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, the White House is sending signals that President Obama would veto such legislation.
While the bill is all but guaranteed to pass the Senate, it is not clear whether there will be enough votes to override a presidential veto.
In the meantime, an article in The Hill states most clearly, in my opinion, why it is a very bad idea for
…majorities in the U.S. Congress [to] try to force approval of an oil pipeline that would carry the planet’s dirtiest oil from Canada through the heartland of America to be refined and mostly shipped overseas. Oil companies that want to pipe tar sands through Canada haven’t yet been able to win approval to ship the oil out through a closer port in their own country because Canadian citizens think the pipeline would be too dangerous, and the crude oil too dirty.
The piece continues, “We should be asking our lawmakers why something that’s too awful for Canada is somehow good enough for us. Those who support the Keystone XL pipeline say it would provide new jobs and promote energy independence, but let’s review the facts.”
Read those facts here, under the headings:
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• It won’t provide many jobs.
• It won’t improve American energy security.
• It threatens the American breadbasket.
• Canadian tar sands oil is an environmental disaster.
• Canadian tar sands oil is a climate disaster.
Original Post:
As the 114th Congress convenes this week with a Republican “working” majority, one of their top priorities — the GOP says — is to create jobs.
And in order to create those millions of jobs, the GOP will make it a first order of business….no, not to fix our crumbling infrastructure. Because repairing our failing infrastructure would create a measly “2.7 million jobs across the economy and [only] increase the national Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by $377 billion while reducing carbon pollution and other greenhouse gas emissions and better protecting communities from the impacts of climate change. “
No, the first order of business will be to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, a project that will create a gargantuan 2,500 to 4,650 temporary direct construction jobs for two years.
But wait, there is more, once the project is completed, the State Department estimates that the pipeline would create an immense number of full time jobs: 35 of them — count them — well worth the potential environmental damage created by the fact that “Canadian tar sands oil is more carbon intensive than other types of oil, and harder than conventional oil to clean up when it spills,” according to thinkprogress.org
Fortunately, in his latest jobs report, Andy Borowitz tells us that there is light at the end of the jobs tunnel.
Even if President Obama nixes the 35 full-time jobs the Keystone XL project would create, almost twice as many workers — 64 of them — will start new jobs in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday “as part of a federal jobs program that provides employment for people unable to find productive work elsewhere.”
Borowitz:
The new hires, who have no talents or abilities that would make them employable in most workplaces, will be earning a first-year salary of $174,000.
.For that sum, the new employees will be expected to work a hundred and thirty-seven days a year, leaving them with two hundred and twenty-eight days of vacation.
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Some critics have blasted the federal jobs program as too expensive, noting that the workers were chosen last November in a bloated and wasteful selection process that cost the nation nearly four billion dollars.
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But Davis Logsdon, a University of Minnesota economics professor who specializes in labor issues, said that the program is necessary to provide work “for people who honestly cannot find employment anywhere else.”
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“Expensive as this program is, it is much better to have these people in jobs than out on the street,” he said.
You guessed it, these 64 new unskilled workers are our brand new legislators in the 114th Congress.
But just think, these new hires will join the rest of their pals in providing a tremendous boost to the economy — 35 new full-time jobs — when they pass that pipeline project.
Lead photo: Mykhaylo Palinchak / Shutterstock.com
