The AFL-CIO, America’s largest organized-labor group, slammed socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-NY) Green New Deal in a letter to her and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA), stating that the far-left plan could “cause immediate harm to millions of our members and their families.”
“We welcome the call for labor rights and dialogue with labor, but the Green New Deal resolution is far too short on specific solutions that speak to the jobs of our members and the critical sections of our economy,” the letter from the AFL-CIO Energy Committee states. “It is not rooted in an engineering-based approach and makes promises that are not achievable or realistic.”
“We will not accept proposals that could cause immediate harm to millions of our members and their families,” the letter continued. “We will not stand by and allow threats to our members’ jobs and their families’ standard of living go unanswered.”
The Green New Deal is a massive government takeover of large portions of the U.S. economy, as Ocasio-Cortez admits, that has drawn criticism from many in her own party.
The Green New Deal has a projected price tag of up to $93 trillion over 10 years, which breaks down to over $650,000 per U.S. household.
The damaging report on the massive price tag on the Green New Deal comes after Dan Coats, the Director of National Intelligence, told lawmakers last month that the over $20 trillion in existing U.S. national debt represented the greatest internal threat to U.S. national security.
“The Green New Deal is clearly very expensive,” the American Action Forum wrote in an analysis of the Green New Deal. “Its further expansion of the federal government’s role in some of the most basic decisions of daily life, however, would likely have a more lasting and damaging impact than its enormous price tag.”
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), who is the ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, mocked Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal in an interview last month on CNN.
“Why aren’t you a fan of the Green New Deal?” CNN’s Chris Cuomo asked.
“Chris, first of all, the Green New Deal was a dream,” Manchin responded. “It’s not a deal. It’s a dream. And that’s fine. People should have dreams, in the perfect world what they would like to see.”
“I got to work with the realities, and I got to work the practical, what I have in front of me,” Manchin continued. “I got to make sure our country has affordable, dependable, reliable energy 24/7. But you can’t just be a denier and say, ‘Well, I’m not going to use coal. I’m not going to use natural gas. I’m not going to use oil.'”
“And you have to understand also the climate, we talk about global climate, Chris, it’s the globe. It’s not North American climate,” Manchin concluded. “It’s not the United States climate. It’s the globe. How do we bring on China and India and everybody else who are great users of carbon right now, and polluters of carbon, to be carbon-free also, by using technology.”