When AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka visited the Occupy Wall Street encampment last month, he said: “The Occupy Wall Street movement has elevated the national conversation by shining overdue attention on the struggles of the 99 percent for whom the economy is broken. When people can’t raise their voices … there is a fundamental problem with how we’re functioning as a nation.”
But, once their voices are raised, what do the “99 percent” have to say? To answer that question, Trumka created jobsforthe99.com, which warns readers that “celebrities are taking over D.C.” and suggests that “Hollywood’s elite 1 percent should stop flying to D.C. and speaking out against jobs that help the other 99 percent of America!”
But why are Hollywood’s richest 1 percent flying to D.C. to destroy “jobs that help the other 99 percent of America?” Trumka’s website doesn’t ever really say, but it does urge visitors to call the White House “and tell President Obama to support the Keystone XL project.”
The Keystone XL pipeline would carry about 700,000 barrels of oil a day — or 255.5 million barrels a year — from Alberta, Canada, across the U.S. border, and then south all the way to the Gulf Coast.
Jobsforthe99.com claims Keystone would immediately create 20,000 “private sector jobs that do not rely on any government funding,” inject “more than $20 billion in new spending for the U.S. economy,” and add “more than $585 million in state and local taxes in the states along the pipeline route.”
And it won’t cost the taxpayers a dime. The private sector will pay for the whole project. All Obama has to do is tell the State Department to give the project the thumbs up.
Why on earth would anyone, even elitist 1 percent Hollywood celebrities, oppose such a project? It turns out the oil in Alberta is trapped in bituminous sands, or what Hollywood elitist call “tar sands.”
Friends of the Earth, one of the environmentalist advocacy organizations where many Hollywood elitists get their information, claims that tar sands oil production emits three times more greenhouse gas than the average barrel of oil consumed in the United States.
So the AFL-CIO wants to assure the 99 percent that even if the United States does not build the Keystone pipeline, all those greenhouse gasses will contribute to global warming anyway when Canada sells its tar sand oil to China.
But others in the Occupy movement aren’t amused. Especially when the AFL-CIO began advertising jobsforthe99.com on a number of liberal new media sites.
Jane Hamsher, who runs firedoglake and was one of more than a hundred arrested outside the White House protesting the pipeline this summer, had some choice words for Trumka when a jobsforthe99.com ad appeared on her site:
“Yes, it was incredibly tacky of AFL-CIO unions to go around to occupations throughout the Midwest with us all last week, and ask us for help when Rahm was arresting their nurses in Chicago, and not tell us they were launching a pointed attack at us for being … what is it? ‘Hollywood elites,’ the ‘one percent’ who oppose the benevolent Keystone Pipeline. Thanks for that, Rich Trumka.”
But, while big labor and liberal bloggers fight over what the Occupy movement should stand for, we learn that far fewer than 99 percent of Americans actually support the movement.
According to the latest Quinnipiac poll, the overwhelming majority of Americans (69 percent) either don’t view the Occupy protesters favorably (39 percent), or have never heard of them (30 percent).
Those numbers will only get worse as the Occupy movement gets increasingly violent, as has been seen in Oakland where the anarchist elements trashed downtown stores, set fires and temporarily shut down the ocean port.
Conn Carroll is a senior editorial writer for The Washington Examiner. He can be reached at [email protected].
