GOP came to work, went on strike

      It may be historically inaccurate to say that the 112th U.S. Congress is on track to do less than any Congress in history. But, let's face it. Less than zero is a bar under which not even a snake could slither.

     When John Boehner became U.S. House speaker last January, he said he was all about promoting jobs for Americans. Dial up this up — whenarethejobs.com — to see how many jobs his labors have created.

      The number is highlighted in red.

      In September, after President Obama proposed a jobs bill which contained several components that Republicans have supported in the past, Boehner shrugged, sighed, and said, well you know: Tough nuts. 

      Actually, what he said was, "Job creators in America are essentially on strike."

       Or was he speaking of the House under his leadership?

       What a pitiful bunch these "leaders" have become. And if you are thinking President Obama hasn't performed much better, let's compare. He's preparing to end one armed conflict launched by his predecessor. He's drawing down another. In the process he ordered the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. He ordered U.S. forces to participate in the NATO action that brought down Moammar Gadhafi.

       Meanwhile the Republicans under Boehner's leadership have done?

       Everything in their power to bring down Barack Obama.

       In September, Boehner and his buddies assaulted America's golf courses after the deathly deadlock on the debt ceiling. A divided government had dragged down the economy, America's global standing and its credit rating.

      Obama was still in Washington, where he called on Congress to do something about, you know, jobs. Pass a bill with many GOP-style components and features supported by Democrats. In golf parlance, Mr. Speaker, after your horrific hacking during the debt-limit debacle, the president was offering you a mulligan. 

     Truly, if a record exists for a Congress that does nothing, this Congress is gunning for it. So frustrated was the administration over Congress' inaction over the untenable No Child Left Behind law that it enacted key changes by executive order. Over at the Capitol, folks were incensed. But guess what? Last week angry senators finally were talking up their own revision, and with bipartisan participation. Is this what it takes? For the administrative branch simply to ignore the branch that used to pass legislation?

     Obama said this week he would resort to other executive decrees to achieve some of the regulatory relief he's asked of Congress under his jobs bill. He also said he would issue executive orders to ease the burden on college students facing crushing debt and to help some stretched homeowners keep their homes.

     Members of Congress say that such things are their job. Well, it would be, if they were doing their jobs.

     Speaking of jobs — you know, the thing John Boehner said he was all about — recently because of federal budget cuts, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Boulder, Colo., announced it would be losing 100 to 150 positions — roughly 10 percent of its staff. Smart policy, that. Here we have efforts to help this nation do what the Republicans say we must — reduce our dependence on overseas sultans — and this great country can't afford to fully staff the enterprise.

     Well, of course we can. We have the resources. We can do what great nations do, what a great nation has done. But when Congress goes on strike, well, watch greatness wane.

     The party of Boehner is making this happen in the quest to obtain one job: Barack Obama's. If that's not true, blink those golf-tanned eyelids once.

     Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Toward closing the doodad gap

Here’s what’s amazing about events in New York City, and Austin, and Denver, and Miami, and 62 other locations so far.

We were thinking that young people were off soaking their brains in social media ooze — overly expressive chipmunks, angry birds, double rainbows.

Instead, what do you know? They were paying attention to stuff that matters.

They were watching an unaccountable finance industry take the economy down, then get rescued while millions of Americans are gasping and grasping for floating debris.

These protesters were watching as corporations gained more power over our government and our political parties — impossible, right? Wasn’t big business's power absolute already? Not quite. But leave it to the Supreme Court, gutting key campaign finance reforms, to bring corporate power even closer to absolute.

These young people were watching while TV talking heads blamed consumers for accepting low-cost loans that weren’t worth the low-grade paper on which they were penned. Yes, blame homeowners for bad lending practices.

Since word of, and participation in, the Occupy Wall Street movement started to spread like information ought to in the information age — initially ignored as it was by mainstream media — a lot of people have sought to discredit it. Points taken: The protesters are unbathed and unorganized. They lack position papers and people in suits to take media questions.

Say this for the participants, however: They have locked in on the fundamental issue afflicting America: corporate control of our government. The secondary issue is “bigness” itself, as in “too big to fail” — whether it is big-box stores gobbling up America’s retail landscape, or multinational goliaths taking America’s wealth overseas (and avoiding tax liability), whether it is banks turning the screws on the very taxpayers who rescued them.

This is it. This is the issue of our time. This is why America is hurting so, and why the nation finds it so hard to climb out of the current recession.

While renewed attention has been drawn to the fact that 5 percent of Americans hold more than half of the nation's wealth, it is time to examine the massive share of commerce monopolized by so very few corporations.

The nation is well served by protesters who voice alarm about these issues. Unorganized? Lacking a coherent theme? That sounds like most movements derived from powerlessness.

Listen closely and hear a counterpoint to the strain of discussion that paralyzed the government recently. Here the nation was in the depths of one of its worst economic droughts in its history, when an activist government was of the essence. Instead of aggressively addressing those problems, it crawled inside an anti-government, anti-spending shell.

In Occupy Wall Street we have the populist counterpoint to the congressional do-nothing chorus. Do something, say these protesters. Get moving. Now.

Some of the Occupy proposals are truly radical, like debt relief, even debt forgiveness, for American consumers.

Realistic or not, it addresses a matter too rarely discussed: that consumers’ situations mirror the nation’s own — with consumer debt representing 90 percent of Gross Domestic Product. The big banks in this case are like the money men of the People’s Republic of China, holding the fate of each debtor in their hands. Any sort of debt relief sounds fantastical, but America’s taxpayers footed $4.7 trillion of relief for over leveraged banks and trading houses. Just whose idea is radical?

If nothing else, say the Occupy protesters, government needs to make Wall Street its servant, and not the other way around.

How many times can deregulation of the financial sector be discredited? We have seen over and over again that big business, unchecked, will fall victim to its own excess and the nation will pay dearly.

Observe, however, the voices on the right who say that bigness is not the problem, that regulations are the enemy. They seem to say that all benefit when the big get bigger.

The country is now making note of people who have taken to the streets to say that’s baloney.

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Taking to streets vs. Wall Street

Here’s what’s amazing about events in New York City, and Austin, and Denver, and Miami, and 62 other locations so far.

We were thinking that young people were off soaking their brains in social media ooze — overly expressive chipmunks, angry birds, double rainbows.

Instead, what do you know? They were paying attention to stuff that matters.

They were watching an unaccountable finance industry take the economy down, then get rescued while millions of Americans are gasping and grasping for floating debris.

These protesters were watching as corporations gained more power over our government and our political parties — impossible, right? Wasn’t big business's power absolute already? Not quite. But leave it to the Supreme Court, gutting key campaign finance reforms, to bring corporate power even closer to absolute.

These young people were watching while TV talking heads blamed consumers for accepting low-cost loans that weren’t worth the low-grade paper on which they were penned. Yes, blame homeowners for bad lending practices.

Since word of, and participation in, the Occupy Wall Street movement started to spread like information ought to in the information age — initially ignored as it was by mainstream media — a lot of people have sought to discredit it. Points taken: The protesters are unbathed and unorganized. They lack position papers and people in suits to take media questions.

Say this for the participants, however: They have locked in on the fundamental issue afflicting America: corporate control of our government. The secondary issue is “bigness” itself, as in “too big to fail” — whether it is big-box stores gobbling up America’s retail landscape, or multinational goliaths taking America’s wealth overseas (and avoiding tax liability), whether it is banks turning the screws on the very taxpayers who rescued them.

This is it. This is the issue of our time. This is why America is hurting so, and why the nation finds it so hard to climb out of the current recession.

While renewed attention has been drawn to the fact that 5 percent of Americans hold more than half of the nation's wealth, it is time to examine the massive share of commerce monopolized by so very few corporations.

The nation is well served by protesters who voice alarm about these issues. Unorganized? Lacking a coherent theme? That sounds like most movements derived from powerlessness.

Listen closely and hear a counterpoint to the strain of discussion that paralyzed the government recently. Here the nation was in the depths of one of its worst economic droughts in its history, when an activist government was of the essence. Instead of aggressively addressing those problems, it crawled inside an anti-government, anti-spending shell.

In Occupy Wall Street we have the populist counterpoint to the congressional do-nothing chorus. Do something, say these protesters. Get moving. Now.

Some of the Occupy proposals are truly radical, like debt relief, even debt forgiveness, for American consumers.

Realistic or not, it addresses a matter too rarely discussed: that consumers’ situations mirror the nation’s own — with consumer debt representing 90 percent of Gross Domestic Product. The big banks in this case are like the money men of the People’s Republic of China, holding the fate of each debtor in their hands. Any sort of debt relief sounds fantastical, but America’s taxpayers footed $4.7 trillion of relief for over leveraged banks and trading houses. Just whose idea is radical?

If nothing else, say the Occupy protesters, government needs to make Wall Street its servant, and not the other way around.

How many times can deregulation of the financial sector be discredited? We have seen over and over again that big business, unchecked, will fall victim to its own excess and the nation will pay dearly.

Observe, however, the voices on the right who say that bigness is not the problem, that regulations are the enemy. They seem to say that all benefit when the big get bigger.

The country is now making note of people who have taken to the streets to say that’s baloney.

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Great Wall of Arizona

Hey, we get it. The state of Arizona pleads almost frantically on its "Build the Border Fence" web site that walls work.

Take the triple-layer fence America's tax dollars built to buffet the southern flank of Yuma, Ariz., under the Bush administration. The state calls it "extraordinarily successful," thwarting "95 percent of illegal crossings in that area."

Of course, it simply shunted border crossers 20 miles north or south of the triple-layer barrier supreme. It worked there, though.

Now, to complete this vision across all 388 miles of its border with Mexico, Arizona is asking for your help, just not as a federal taxpayer this time. This time it wants your charitable donation.

In fact, if you have $50 million in change, you can relieve this idea's architects of their burden immediately, and Arizona can spend that money as God intended it.

The state that loves walls above almost anything else invokes the almighty in thanking you in advance for your tax-deductible contribution.

Visit suburban Phoenix and wonder about its love affair with walls. One resident calls it "ground zero for gated communities," and calls vertical cinderblock contrivances "the defining feature of the sterile, transient nature" of the place.

Then again, with the rifts, rips and tears since hard-right Republicans made brown-skinned Arizonans collateral victims of a go-it-alone border war, "community" must be seen as a quaint contrivance. It is hardly necessary anyway with good walls.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry got hammered by his presumed core national constituency when he revealed himself to be a relative softy on immigration, and spoke of the folly of walling Texas' rocks-and-river border.

Aside from challenges of building a barrier where only cougars and coyotes dare reside, Perry knows how dependent his state is on labor that blows in from Mexico.

Illegal immigration is the sunburned cousin of the outsourcing that so readily draws a wink from free-market fundamentalists. They know money knows no borders. And in so many states, labor knows none, either.

Last week Alabama lawmakers were trying to soothe agricultural interests after a new law roped public schools into recording students' citizenship status. Families that provided cheap labor for perishable farm commodities there are fleeing.

Back in Arizona, state officials want to sell you on the idea that a border wall is good for the environment. The claim employs the kind of Mr. Magoo sleuthing that John McCain conducted recently in blaming, sans a shred of evidence, catastrophic Arizona wildfires on illegal immigrants. Arizona has to go all the way to the sometimes-credible Washington Times to legitimize this claim. Oddly, few journalistic takers this side of Fox News have signed on.

The truth: Border contrivances built with your tax dollars are a joint eco-catastrophe. They blunt the migration of wildlife and subdivide habitat. They cause soil erosion, flooding, and everything that happens when bulldozers and jackhammers rule the land (which is God's plan, by the way).

And then there's the matter of money. The Government Accountability Office said in 2009 that every mile of border fence cost from $1 million to $3 million, whether it actually fenced anyone out or not. When the Obama administration said "no mas" to this specious squandering of tax dollars, the projected cost of a U.S.-Mexico border wall was approaching $10 billion. We can guess that an actual end-to-end border barrier would overshoot that by proportions that only Halliburton could appreciate.

Arizona says it will get more mileage for its $50 million investment — pending your charitable gift — by using inmate labor.

Rest assured, neither Arizona nor any other public interest could possibly find anything better to do with $50 million, or that $10 billion that was headed to the pipeline until Obama stopped it.

Would either dollar figure keep unwanted elements out? Well, who knows? But anywhere you install three layers of fence you'll feel like you did.

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.