Points to Ponder Index

The  City Circles the Drain

Wake up voters, take off the blinders and stop rationalizing that a one party town delivers the goods in a more efficient manner while providing quality of life to the most at the lowest cost.  Of course that has been the sell here since the late 1960s and now we have a voter registration that is about 88% to 12% in favor of the Democrats.  To make it worse the so called “opposition Republicans” sold out years ago under what is unofficially known as the proportional patronage program where a number of Republicans can hold no-show or no-performance jobs they cannot be fired from for any reason.  When this condition becomes that critical, then it is the obligation of the major news media to become the functional opposition party and challenge all that the corrupt machine doles out on a daily basis.  Now this  is where I tell you that machine actually funds the major newspaper in this city; the Inquirer, and so many of the other news sources are so in love with Mayor Nutter, David L. Cohen, and the others who run this city, that they often omit or back-page the more damaging information to those in elected leadership.

 

From the day Mayor Nutter took office we already were kicking the can of massive financial failure down the road with pension shortcomings, uncompleted union negotiations, funding a failing school system, losing millions in cozy contracts that a first year law student would reject, a tax system wholly out of balance, the city with the highest rate of poverty in the nation and now confirmed the murder capitol of the USA.

 

The political response to this is to install “frontier justice” where Mayor Nutter is taking on violent crime by offering a bounty upwards of $20,000 per conviction and other “fees for information” in order to stop the bloodshed.  I would call it “The best law East of the Pecos”.  Don’t get me wrong, we have allowed this city to deteriorate so far that martial law is around the corner for some neighborhoods. In that vein we have watched witnesses and their families executed with some regularity, including one last week.  Areas of Philadelphia are in effect run by druglords and gangs a la Mexican/Columbian cities.  Paying for information under conditions this bad is very dangerous territory, and may actually increase the bloodshed.

 

All of this of course continues to avoid admitting the obvious - - that we are the “Most Failed City” in the nation.  Horrible family structure deterioration, a collapsed educational system, and lack of tiered opportunity that began as far back as 1968 have now all converged into this “Clockwork Orange” environment.  For political insiders we build tax exempt and massively subsidized Comcast towers in the city to employ already comfortable suburbanites, while we drove most viable private blue and white collar businesses that employed folks at every level out of this city due to political shakedowns and one of the most oppressive tax policies for both businesses and individuals in the nation.

 

It is time we stopped rationalizing that manicuring around the edges and pumping more public money to insiders without transparency will do anything except make it worse.

 

Jim Foster, Editor/Publisher