Letters to the Editor
The fact that Michael Joyce was allowed to resign from his position as public safety director for the Delaware River Port Authority is a disgraceful example of the culture of casual corruption that clearly exists there ("DRPA safety chief resigns," Wednesday). That he was not immediately fired after giving his daughter a DRPA E-ZPass was discovered is another.
Proof of DRPA corruption
The fact that Michael Joyce was allowed to resign from his position as public safety director for the Delaware River Port Authority is a disgraceful example of the culture of casual corruption that clearly exists there ("DRPA safety chief resigns," Wednesday). That he was not immediately fired after giving his daughter a DRPA E-ZPass was discovered is another.
What thief is given the opportunity to repay what he has stolen, is not prosecuted, and is allowed to keep his job at the place from which he stole?
No mention of his pension situation was made. Will he get one? And how much? Was his daughter not a guilty party, too?
I. Milton Karabell
Philadelphia
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Republicans are in denial on warming
Senators, mainly Republicans, have dropped the ball on mitigating climate change ("Senate wilts on warming," Friday). They ignore the science data at their peril (which I don't care about), but they also put my children at risk. The deniers are partying, but the Earth still warms, the oceans continue to become more acidic, sea levels continue to rise, prolonged heat waves are showing themselves, and soon, crop failures and more violent storms will occur.
Climate change has loaded the dice so that bad events will happen much more frequently. I will urge my children to drive up to northern Minnesota or Canada and look for a "summer" home - otherwise known as a refuge, to be used in 25 years. Maybe the permafrost won't melt too fast.
Bill Haaf
Kennett Square
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Misleading numbers on DROP
Ralph Cipriano's misleading commentary on the DROP program ("No stopping city's runaway gravy train," Tuesday) conveniently overlooks a basic fact:
Cipriano misleadingly claims that "6,638 employees have walked out the door with DROP bonuses worth an average of $109,277, costing the city $725 million." In fact, the cost to the city for the average employee (i.e., not a City Council politician) has been $0.
When an average employee goes on DROP, he begins collecting his pension in an escrow account. He has essentially retired, and been replaced. However, for the four years he is on DROP, his replacement is himself, instead of a second party. Had DROP not existed, he would have retired and begun collecting his pension immediately, and been replaced by a second party.
Thus, the DROP bonus he eventually collects would have been paid by the city anyway, as would the salary of his replacement. The math yields a cost to the city of $0, not the inflated $725 million cited by Cipriano. In fact, the retention of an experienced individual over an inexperienced one for up to four years is a benefit to the city, not a cost.
Josef Bobick
Philadelphia
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Filling jobs Americans won't
Federal Judge Susan Bolton got it exactly right in nullifying certain aspects of Arizona's harsh immigration laws. There is little reason to doubt the intentions of this law, however; one should consider the merits before systematically rounding up these workers to deport back to Mexico.
These workers are breaking into our country to pick our grapes and lettuce, pick our weeds, mow our lawns, vacuum our carpets, wash our dishes, and trim our hedges. Few Americans are standing in line to perform these duties for no more than minimum wage, at best. I say bring them all into our country to work and pay taxes and provide for businesses that need these jobs done.
Larry A. Wernick
Fort Washington
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Tea party is its own parody
I torture myself almost nightly as I channel-surf between the leftist screed that is MSNBC and the tea- party echo chamber of FOX News in a vain attempt to hear the American political discourse. I grow weary of both, but these days especially, with the wall-to-wall parodying of the tea-party movement on MSNBC. Don't they see that this political farce warrants no parody? That the reality is more ironically funny than any of their attempts to poke fun at it?
Case in point is a letter Thursday, "Left has overplayed the race card," arguing that the overuse is in reaction to leftists' fear of "the awakening of black consciousness from the government-induced drug dependency." Does this riotously absurd racist sentiment really need parodying? If so, let it come from the writer's own words. She concludes that, once sobered from their welfare high, African Americans will rush en masse to join the tea parties in the "fight for the soul of the republic."
Instead of parody, such sentiments require fervent prayer that the writer and her racist ilk may never represent the end goal of the spiritual struggle of our republic.
Jeffrey Allegretti
Philadelphia
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What's in a name?
The CoreStates, First Union, Wachovia, Wells Fargo arena. So we won't have to change the sign again, perhaps we should just call it the Insert Name Here Center.
Chris Tobin
Aston