We’re back to a familiar problem–and that’s partly a result of the lack of leadership in the country on the issue of jobs. The jobs crisis is so acute and people feel that political leaders aren’t responding so we get this:

The Obama administration’s environmental agenda, long a target of American business, is beginning to take fire from some of the Democratic Party’s most reliable supporters: Labor unions.

Several unions with strong influence in key states are demanding that the Environmental Protection Agency soften new regulations aimed at pollution associated with coal-fired power plants. Their contention: Roughly half a dozen rules expected to roll out within the next two years could put thousands of jobs in jeopardy and damage the party’s 2012 election prospects.

   Sigh. You want to know why this is happening? My view: don’t divorce this from the bigger failure…allowing the most powerful and richest forces in America to rob the people. If we stopped with the nonsense that we have no money to spend and that there is a debt "crisis" and we demanded that the richest one percent stop draining the wealth of the country, then, we would be able to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into creating new jobs–either via public money or from the $1 trillion and counting that private corporations are sitting on but don’t want to spend. And with people getting jobs, we might be able to also work on making sure our planet doesn’t choke to death.