Dear Editor,

We visited your beautiful city last week, enjoyed the river park, some Baskin-Robbins ice cream, and purchased a copy of your newspaper. The political cartoon on page 4A insinuated that the “downhill momentum” of our nation’s current economy will negatively affect the 2012 election. It did not clarify the fact that our current economic problems are obviously due to three bipartisan “free-trade” agreements. B. H. Guinn, myself and others predicted today’s economic dilemma repeatedly on the editorial pages of your newspaper after Bill Clinton signed NAFTA and GATT.

Despite witnessing the economic devastation these failed policies caused, George W. Bush signed CAFTA, driving the final nails into the coffin of our region’s textile industry. But the free-trade agreements failed America’s working taxpayers only; the U.S. corporations that abandoned their workers and our nation to exploit cheap foreign labor and U.S. markets simultaneously have prospered tremendously as a result. Now America’s special interests are successfully blaming the current president for the economic devastation we locals accurately predicted before we ever heard of Barack Obama.

Common sense evaluation reveals that President Obama inherited the worst U.S. economy since the Great Depression, and compounded interest on the war debt of the last administration. He faces the greatest opposition of any president in American history, while those who admit they want his policies to fail deliberately attempt to make them fail.

We can expect much more of the same now that special interests control our last bastion of political safety, the U.S. Supreme Court. The 527/super-pac decision now allows America’s special interest all but complete, yet anonymous control of political discourse, which will smother if not eliminate political debate, now won’t it?

Think about it, please!

Robert C. Currie Jr.

Laurinburg, N.C.