Web Letters: Things Fall Apart

It is not a presidential job to offer firsthand condolences to the victims of the New Orleans levee and the Minneapolis bridge collapses. The presidential job is to act pre-emptively and secure the funds for timely rebuilding of the aging national infrastructure. But in order to finance the tax cuts, something else had to be cut short.

Unfortunately, the American infrastructure is voiceless and cannot get any attention at election time, so it is often forgotten until it crumbles under the heavy load. The problem is that a spike in infrastructural problems can be expected after the current President leaves the office in 2009, since we have wasted eight years in which we could have preventively replaced the critical links.

The whole GOP philosophy to relieve the federal government from any responsibility and trust the private sector to solve national problems has just showed up its ugly face. These days the citizens don't have enough money to pay for essential services, nor does the federal government have any disposable reserve.

Skyrocketing mortgage bankruptcies and dropping housing prices shook up the Dow Jones. Export of well-paid American jobs overseas, diminishing company-provided healthcare benefits, exploding medical costs of the working middle-class and falling wages of the newly created jobs due to impact of illegal immigrants have depleted the financial reserves of average Americans. The Dow Jones didn’t lose almost 1,000 points in a couple of weeks because the big companies are not well-positioned to be highly profitable. Stocks have dropped because investors realized there are not enough financially sound customers to buy all those services.

But it takes a mathematically illiterate President and equally incompetent strategists to be surprised by the newest developments.

If we are going to stay the current course, we might be better off to elect simultaneously four Presidents, so that every future surviving victim of Minneapolis-like catastrophes can get a Presidential handshake and a photo op.

Kenan Porobic

Charlotte, NC