60 Plus Jim Martin: “The President is killing jobs, strangling U.S. energy independence, and ensuring that working families and especially seniors will pay more to heat their homes and fill-up their cars.”

(Alexandria, Virginia) – The Obama Administration announced today that it will reject the permit application to build the Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta, Canada to U.S. refineries on the Gulf Coast in Texas, a move that will kill thousands of high-paying jobs in the construction and energy sector, and make the U.S. more dependent on foreign oil from unstable nations in the Middle East.  This prompted a statement from Jim Martin, Chairman of the 60 Plus Association, the largest conservative seniors advocacy group in the nation.

“So much for focusing on job creation like a laser,” said Martin. “The President gives lip service to job creation and ending dependence on foreign oil from hostile nations, but we see now that the truth is what we expected all along. President Obama doesn’t care a whit about average Americans who would benefit greatly from this pipeline, and his hand-wringing over our economic plight is a phony con job for the benefit of his political supporters on the extreme far left who want everyone to ride bicycles.

“This is a decision only the mother of a far left environmental extremist could love.  Tens of thousands of Americans will remain out of work so that the President can energize his political base.  This is politics at its most cynical, because the President ignored the recommendations of his own jobs council in order to cater to his far-left political supporters. Meanwhile all Americans are now less safe, less secure, and financially more poor for this decision to strangle domestic energy supplies and force us to fork over more of our money to OPEC.

“Mr. President, listen to our friends up north in Canada, who will now sell this oil to China if we reject this reasonable and necessary pipeline. Have a look at the current state of our economy that you created, and honestly tell the American people that this project should be crushed and we should divert more economic assets to China. Decisions like this are exactly why we have the worst economy since the Great Depression and why America is now far and away the biggest debtor in the world.”

-30-