President Barack Obama has squandered opportunities to create jobs, says Karl Rove, former senior adviser for President George W. Bush.
“The Obama administration has made a mess of important opportunities that would provide more jobs and greater prosperity,” Rove writes on
Politico. He offers two examples: the Keystone XL oil pipeline and LightSquared, a mobile telecommunications company for which he is a consultant.
Keystone would have transported oil from Canada and North Dakota to the Gulf Coast. “This would have created tens of thousands of private-sector jobs and reduced U.S. dependence on Middle Eastern oil,” Rove writes. But Obama bowed to extreme environmentalists in blocking the full pipeline, Rove says.
As for LightSquared, it seeks to build a nationwide cell phone network using satellite and terrestrial cellular technology. “The new network would have required as much as $14 billion in private capital — and tens of thousands of people to build it,” Rove writes.
The Federal Communications Commission, under chairmen appointed by both Bush and Obama, gave a go-ahead to the project. And the company invested almost $4 billion to meet FCC rules.
“But then, after nearly a decade of regulatory ‘green lights,’ the Obama administration reversed itself and started proceedings to kill LightSquared’s ambitious plan,” Rove writes. The concern is that the network could interfere with GPS devices, because they use the same spectrum that LightSquared does.
There are fixes to the problem, and LightSquared is willing to help, Rove says. “But rather than solving this issue in a reasonable way, the Obama administration is now proposing to shut down LightSquared’s operations before the network can even be launched.”
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