Three Points to Ponder

Beginning with this issue, and recognizing we are on a glide path to what is likely to be the most fractured election in 150 years that will drill down to the local level, we will offer three opinions that will reflect concerns at the national, state, and local level.

Gross Negligence

The amount of debt generated through government spending this year has exceeded the total gross dollars produced by our economy for the first time; except during a world war.  This shameless disregard for responsibility to the citizenry rests on the shoulders of every legislator and the President.  The congress is obligated to prepare a budget and has the ultimate responsibility to submit it for approval and it has not done that. The President has done little to pressure his majority party to work with the minority in the senate to deal with the message the voters sent in the last election.  The House Republicans, who were told by the citizens to stop spending, sidestepped their responsibility by approving a trillion dollar increase in the federal debt this week.  Foolishly we are mortgaging our country to Chinese and world bankers while they put on a dog and pony show in an election year.  An excellent antidote to negligence of the national media to do investigative journalism on behalf of the American people would be four very recent Bill Moyers’ interviews on Crony Capitalism and Wall Street control of our federal government that continues into this administration  with the same intensity it had in the last.  His interviews with David Stockman, Gretchen Morgenson, John Reed, and Byron Dorgan are a must see before you consider how you will vote in November.

Gov. Gorbett’s WAM

If you are from Philadelphia you know that “WAM” is the abbreviation for “Walking around money” that ward leaders and politicians of all stripes have passed out in cash for years on Election Day to guarantee outcomes.  But this kind of WAM pales in comparison to the public dollars doled out without proper compliance through elected leaders to what appear on the surface to be legitimate developments that claim public interest and community rebuilding as their primary objective.  For years the compliance portion of this distribution process has been sidestepped and much of the funding only goes to insiders and those developers who recycle large portions of those public dollars back to the very politicians who approved them.  This process is known as “Pay-to-play” and is accepted practice by both parties and, sad to say, most voters; who feel the day may come when it works for them.

 

So it should be no surprise when Governor Corbett’s reform administration went back on a campaign promise to review and refuse state funding to projects started in the previous administration but were not yet funded and look for failures to comply in a timely manner with all required provisions.  The plan was to cut off loosely crafted deals and help balance the state budget in the process.

 

Well, it did not quite work out that way.  To his credit, Governor Corbett broke with tradition and presented a budget on time, but with the astounding deficit at $4 billion.  Bear in mind that unlike the federal government, states cannot print money and must balance their budgets annually.

 

At the llth hour as the books were being closed in late December 2011, the Republican-dominated Senate and House, with the support of the governor, rammed through $1.6 billion in state funding RACP projects with $460 million of that targeted for Philadelphia area projects.  Review and oversight with selective approval as promised vanished and the legislators were informed to “vote for all of it in one package or you may get nothing” we are told.

 

According to reliable sources as many as 90% of those applications for funding were deficient in some manner and the majority of them so much so that they should never have been approved. One would think with a $4 billion deficit facing them that a reform administration that had full control of both houses would have made those decisions as promised.  I guess there must have been just as many “loose deals” in Republican districts as those in Democratic districts, so they took the easy road out and all those that applied the appropriate grease were rewarded.

 

Comcast alone got $30 million.

After all, the election is over.

 

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