To the Editor:
I watched the most intelligent State of the Union address to a roomful of Republicans and listened to our
president, and watched the Speaker of the House looking totally evil. The one thing that was very clear
and so very true was about the Keystone XL pipeline that will go across 1,700 miles and over a large
aquifer. I needed to check why this congress was so supportive of this. Well, 87 percent of its 2014
campaign contribution was to the GOP, and Keystone expects to be rewarded for its support.
Mitch McConnell, the new Senate majority leader, is all about jobs. Really, where has he been for 15
years. It’s true, building Keystone XL could slightly increase almost 5 percent of the jobs America has
lost because of destructive cuts in federal spending, which were in turn the result of Republican
blackmail about the debt ceiling.
You can’t consistently claim that pipeline spending creates jobs while government spending doesn’t.
Republican leaders have insisted that we should slash public spending in the face of high unemployment.
And they’ve gotten their way. The years after 2010, when Republicans took control of the House, were
marked by an unprecedented decline in real government spending per person, which leveled off only in
2014.
The guilty parties here will never admit they were wrong.
Let us get to the jobs for this pipeline – 42,000 during construction phase (once completed, the pipeline
would only employ a few dozen workers). But government spending on roads, bridges and schools would do
the same thing. McConnell and his colleagues believe that we need more spending to create jobs. Why not
support a push in upgrading America’s crumbling infrastructure?
This is worst for our environment, and coming from people who have done all they can to destroy American
jobs. And those people are employing the very arguments they used to ridicule government job programs to
justify a big giveaway to their friends in the fossil fuel industry.
All you have to do is investigate and get the truth instead of listening to Joni the Republican who
talked after our president, telling us the same type of story that Paul Ryan gave about being so poor
and owning one pair of shoes. Totally amazing how desperate the GOP is. Hmmmm, trying to get women to
vote for them? Didn’t they learn from Palin?
Joann Schiavone
Walbridge