This election is the most important of our lifetime because America has reached a tipping point. Four years ago,we voted for hope, change and bipartisanship, but look what happened.
Although President Barack Obama inherited a horrendous crisis, he prevented our economic meltdown, saved the auto industry, stopped millions of public-servant layoffs, invested in infrastructure, reduced everyone’s taxes, cut small business taxes 18 times, reversed job losses and reduced high unemployment.
He drew down two devastating and unfunded wars, killed Osama Bin Laden, passed affordable health care for all Americans, saved $716 billion in Medicare waste and reinvested it in health care, passed Wall Street and credit-card reform, passed equal pay for women, strengthened college loans and submitted legislation to create millions of jobs, rebuild infrastructure and reduce the deficit.
Republicans, on the other hand, opposed virtually all of that and said defeating the president was their No. 1 priority. Blocking America’s critical recovery and crucial job growth for four years actually bordered on treason. Now they’ve nominated Mitt Romney to lead that same charge.
Romney is running on his business record as CEO of Bain Capital. Bain often looked for a sick company, bought it with a huge loan and special tax breaks, transferred the debt to that company, sold the assets to pay investors big dividends, walked away with millions stashed in the Cayman Islands to avoid U.S. taxes and left the hollow carcass to go bankrupt. Is that what we want for our country?
If so, the Bush administration already set us up with the huge debt. What’s left is to sell our assets, outsource defense jobs, outsource education, entrust health care to insurance companies again, undo Wall Street reforms, replace Medicare with vouchers, privatize social security, dismantle the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency, increase big-oil subsidies, ship jobs overseas and walk away.
Will we put our faith in a presidential candidate who doesn’t consistently stand for anything specifically and in a campaign of proven lies about the economy, foreign policy, government growth, job creation, tax reductions, health care, workfare, the deficit and credit downgrade? Are we comfortable with a party that rails against government intrusion, except in our bedrooms, bodies and churches?
Will we allow a party to buy the election with secret, unlimited, corporate funds or steal it by suppressing the votes of elderly, minorities and students? Do we really want an elitist corporate fox guarding the henhouse? Will he be working for the chickens, or is he just a pawn of global predators, loyal only to their corporate profits in a dog-eat-dog world of money?
Are we heading for an oligarchy like Russia, where only the rich and powerful rule?
Republican strategy is based on the assumption that Americans are too stupid to pay attention to barefaced efforts to steal our democracy. Will we succumb to distortions, lies, pageantry and false patriotism? Will we vote against our own interests, as the Romans did right before their fall? Are we really so dumb and complacent that “that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall (indeed) perish from the earth?”
Think it can’t happen here? Better convince your family and friends otherwise and make your voices heard because we may find out on Nov. 6.
David Estey is a fine-arts painter in Belfast and a retired IRS regional manager of public affairs for five Middle Atlantic states and Washington, D.C.
America is at a tipping point ! Obama has left us with staggering debt (16 trillion…that’s a lot !). The “Affordable Care Act” has proven itself anything but affordable. Food stamps are skyrocketing, Unemployment is skyrocketing, when it is accurately reported. Libya was a terrorist act, but was blamed on some video trailer…..corporate funds have bought President Obama (he went to Las Vegas for a fund raiser as the Libyan embassy was under attack)…..the list could go on and on……
VOTE for REAL CHANGE ! and vote President Obama to be a one term president.
Voting for Romney might make you feel better, but it isn’t going to make you any better off. America is way beyond the tipping point and we’ve lost. Just sit back and witness the irreversible decline of western civilization.
I will never give up on America as long as we have a chance to pull ourselves out of the abyss. No true American would give up, so why have you?
Obama is a failed President and needs to go back to Chicago where his buddies will welcome him with open arms.
President Obama is not a failed president. He is an American president and you have “given up” on the America he represents. The the white, reactionary protestant, male dominated country you think we ought to have is not only un-American it’s fascist.
He doesn’t represent America as the Founding Father’s intended this nation to be. He represents a socialist state where the people are dependent on and controlled by the government. If that’s the way you want things, then keep supporting him. But when this nation falls into despair, don’t you dare blame anyone but yourself for the demise of the greatest nation on earth.
What an incredibly ignorant answer. Define socialist state. Enumerate the number of people “dependent on and controlled by the government”
There is nothing ignorant in my comment. You just can’t handle the truth.
Obama been lowering the deficit every year, despite the un-paid-for debt he inherited from his predecessor.
The Affordable Care Act has proven not only to be affordable, but to actually reduce government spending as it makes basic, desperately-needed healthcare available for millions of Americans.
Unemployment and foodstamp use have skyrocketed thanks to conservative economic policies which allow corporations and the wealthy to enrich themselves at the expense of regular Americans, sending jobs overseas and paying employees less than enough to get by while CEOs make millions.
Unfortunately, the only way to make Obama look like the worse candidate is to twist the facts and misrepresent his record. Looking at their actual policies and records, it’s clear that Obama is by far the better choice to lead our country for the next four years.
“Obama been lowering the deficit every year…” by increasing the debt.
We have mastered part one of ‘living on our credit card’; part two may be a little trickier. Also, inflating the currency (AKA “quantitative easing”) is a hidden tax on everyone with fixed incomes, which is just about everyone these days. One of the reasons gas costs more dollars today is because each dollar is worth less.
But you just spent time to twist his record to make him look better. Nothing in your diatribe has any truth at all. Turn of MSNBC and get some education.
OK if it’s all twisted, how about you refuting it with facts, real facts, not just something you pull out of a reactionary hat as you usually do.
Obama has chalked up trillion dollar deficits every year, and the prediction is that they increase for the next 4 years based on what he has passed.
Obamacare has been evaluated by the CBO 4 times, and every time the price goes up. It is not going to save any money, nor is it going to lower the deficit.
The paragraph on unemployment and food stamps is pure drivel that can’t be backed up because it’s made up.
You need to stop listening to the blond bimbos on FAKE-News. Bush DOUBLED the debt when he put two wars, the Rx bill (donut hole and all), and tax cuts for the uber-rich on the credit card. He SQUANDERED the surplus left by Clinton. Then he and the TeaRadicals drove us straight into the Great Recession. There is now more debt because the TeaPublican Great Recession sent 8 million Americans out of work thus dramatically reducing our revenues. The TeaPublicans are the blame, and you know it. Obama stopped the TeaPublican Great Recession from becoming a Great Depression. He saved the auto industry that your silly boy wanted to let go bankrupt and whose bailout he opposed. He killed Bin Laden. He has brought the unemployment rate down below 8% from a high over over 10%. And what does the MittTwit want to do? Double down on FAILED TRICKLE DOWN and give away even more of our money to the ultra rich just so they can kill more American jobs and hide their money like MittTwit in Bermuda and the Cayman’s. The MittTwit and the TeaPublicans are SNAKE OIL SALESMAN of the most disgusting order, and MittTwit RobMe is going to LOSE next month.
A few things I LOVE about this piece:
I love how easy Mr. Estey makes it sound to run a (successful) business. Jeez, if it’s so simple, shouldn’t he do it himself and rake in the dough rather than be a fine-arts painter?
I love how his third paragraph is riddled with bullets – both politically and, in one instance, literally – and contain more fodder for talking points than anything else. LL Fairpay Act: a gift to tort lawyers. Extending college loans: subsidizing payments to universities, ergo making college more expensive for students and taxpayers. Affordable Care Act: a misnomer full of accounting gimmicks that guts current entitlements to establish a new system dependent upon care rationing.
I love how Mr. Estey attacks Gov. Romeny for his “proven lies,” and appears to believe that what we as voters have now is preferable to a growth agenda. Perhaps he even believes we are in a period of growth now. My favorite is when he says Gov. Romney wants to “outsource defense jobs,” as if an American Ambassador and three of his colleagues weren’t murdered a month ago due to outsourced and insufficient security.
I love how Mr. Estey brings up the Romans “voting against their self-interests,” yet he seems totally unaware of the visigoths. Thanks to his executive of choice, our interest payments on the debt will soon fund the entire (Chinese) Red Army. The Romans made a number of mistakes at the end of the empire, but they never funded the visigoth hoards.
Finally, I love how Mr. Estey was, in a former life, an IRS employee. Per the Affordable Care Act, 16,000 new IRS agents will be hired to enforce the new tax, er, “shared responsibility payment,” that will be required of folks who still wish to live by the antiquated freedom of not needing to purchase a product they do not want. Only in America does “health care” “reform” begin by adding 16K employees to the government payroll to enforce new regulations.
If Maine voters are proud of the record our current executive shies away from, please feel free to vote for him this November.
The one thing I love about this article is that, unlike your attempt at a rebuttal, it makes insightful and truthful claims in an accurate and coherent manner.
Hmm…I’ll agree that Mr. Estey makes claims, but to accuse me of not being accurate or coherent? Would you care to elaborate? I counter a few boilerplate liberal, er, “progressive” talking points, I mention a current event where the president has been hypocritical, and I made points citing history and statistics on the budget, tax policy and healthcare where the country has been put in an awful position because of the leadership or lack thereof over the past four years.
Again, I’m not telling you who to vote for, because if you look at the past three years of GDP “growth” declining from 2.8% in 2010 to 1.8% last year to an average of 1.5% this year, and if you realize that the average family is making $5,000 less than they did four years ago, and if you find 23 million people unemployed and almost 50 million individuals on foodstamps to be a successful record, then by all means I encourage you to vote for the incumbent.
Anyone who would vote for a JOKE like MittTwit RobMe who has endlessly morphed himself and twisted himself around on the issues like a soft pretzel all the while hiding his money in the Cayman’s, refusing to show his tax returns, and killing jobs at Bain Vulture Capital, AND slandering and tossing half the population right under the bus, needs to have his or her head seriously examined.
Thanks for your piece. I don’t have to answer Mr Estey’s repeating of President Obama’s campaign speech’s word for word. I would say he could be charged with plagairizing, a serious charge.
I would add that in “saving the auto industry” he broke the law by subjugating the bond holders. He broke the law in the Solyndra bankruptsy by subjugating the federal government loan to private interests. He “nationalized” the student loan industry in great Hugo Chavez style. I believe that is called Fascism. He created a new entitlement by taking $716 billion from Medicare, that is going broke, by not paying doctors and hospitals driving them away from treating Medicare patients. Some estimates say 10 to 20 percent of hospitals will have to declare bankruptsy.
What I hate most is his “you did not create that business” dismissing individual effort.
The end of all democracies comes when people realize they can vote for people that will give them benefits. We are not that far from Greece.
MittTwit RobMe and the radical TeaPublicans are going to have a bad night on November 6th.
David, Your political commentary is even worse than what you call art.
And you know that how? Everyone’s a critic …
It’s called Google. He has a website. I might use his so called “art” to paper an outhouse.
Andrew Wyeth. That is art…. You shouldn’t have to have the “artist”, (so-called), describe his art, vision, etc. for it to touch your soul or emotions.
Don’t quit your day job.
I’m not pretending to be an “artist”.
David, you’ve been reading my comments, right? Glad to know others think this way.
“Don’t let Romney undo what Obama did right,” you mean triple the national deficit? Have gas prices rise from 1.95per/gallon to 3.74/per gallon? Maintain a 8% unemployment rate? Also if I was a liberal I wouldn’t be bringing up candidates past history because Obama’s is a lot worse…anyone remember Jeremiah Wright, Louis Farrakhan? The fact is while Obama was goofing off as a community organizer, Romney was creating jobs and saving the Olympics. Obama rose out of the murky waters of Chicago Swamp politics (i.e. the Daley machine, Blagojevich…countless others). Romney in contrast built a good career as a businessman. Bain Capital created 1000s of American jobs. For example without Bain Capital there would be no Staples, just think of how many fewer job there would be without Staples.”Replace Medicare with vouchers” I also just love this lie that liberals keep repeating even though Romney/Ryan have said multiple times that they would keep traditional Medicare. There are countless other distortions in your piece but I’ll leave it at that, since I don’t have the time to go through and refute everything you say.
You R’s must have gone to a different school than I, the national deficit was 5.8 trillion as of 9/2001 it was 11.9 as of 9/2009 it is now approx. 16 trillion so your saying that 11.9 trillion times 3 equals 16. trillion. Rather than use Romney/Ryan math call you local school and talk with the math teacher concerning this math you are using they may have a different answer.
I somehow doubt Pres. Obama started the fires in two refineries and called the world and told them to increase the price of crude oil, we are producing more oil in this country than ever before but the world determines the price, supply and demand, remember that?
Romney saving the Olympics was great with all the money the government put into it, I think a rabbit could have done the same thing.
Jobs by Bain, do you remember losses such as 385 jobs cut at American Pad & Paper; 1,900 positions cut or relocated at Dade International; 2,100 workers laid off from DDI Corp.; 2,500 jobs lost at Clear Channel Communications; and 3,400 layoffs at KB Toys? Bain now, Romney owns a large amount of their stock, has decided to move jobs to China, from Freeport, Il., and Romney has large investments in China, not the best thing for our President.
Medicare and vouchers, which time did you hear that? Romney/Ryan have held various positions, the last one I heard was a choice either voucher or traditional Medicare but wait, they will tell us after they are elected the real truth.
Romney/Ryan are very good at “IF YOU CAN’T SELL THEM CONFUSE THEM”, I must say they are masters at it, that is why you can’t believe anything they say and why I am voting for OBAMA/BIDEN 2012
I think you are confusing debt and deficit. The national DEBT is 16 trillion, the DEFICIT is currently 1.4 trillion, when Obama took office the DEFICIT was 683 billion. So actually it’s about twice its original value. However, the only reason it is not higher is due to the Republican controlled House. Obama’s 2009 budget (when the Democrats controlled the House) was 1.7 trillion which is closer to three times the original deficit. Obama also had a chance to lower gas prices …it was called the ‘Keystone Pipeline’. Also Romney is currently not in charge of Bain Capital, he hasn’t been CEO in about 20 years, and had nothing to do with jobs being shipped overseas (a inconvenient fact that the Obama campaign likes to ignore).
The deficit under the last year of Bush was $1.41 trillion, the following 3yrs under Obama is as follows $1.29, $1.3 and $1.08 and projected to be $900 billion next year. So if we take Bush’s $1.41 trillion and multiply it by 3 equals $1.08 trillion which is the current deficit for 2012, again check the math it would need to be $4.2 trillion to fit into what you said. I did get debt and deficit confused but not as much as you got confused in your math. The deficit has gone down as a percentage of GDP and the taxes are lower than when Bush was President.
The figures I presented here are from http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/federal_deficit_chart.html.
The Keystone Pipeline is crude oil coming from Canada, now did I miss where the Canadian company is going to sell us the crude at a discounted price so we could produce gas at a lower cost? If this is not the reason would you please explain to me how this would lower gasoline prices. Prices for crude are determined by the world market.
I know Romney is not in charge of Bain but he owns a large percentage of the company so he must be condoning there methods of moving jobs to China. I know I don’t invest in companies that do things that I feel is wrong and Bain would be one of them.
Your losing the argument do you want to continue??
Wow! Talk about a spin job. Completely out of control and untrue. I wonder what planet you live on. This guy has done absolutely nothing right; he is a complete and total failure! What’s the first lie? He reduced unemployment. There is only one reason for the unemployment percentage going down, and that is that people have given up. It’s probably too deep for you to understand that if you change the divisor (number of people looking for work) downward, the resulting percentage goes down. Oh, why bother….
http://www.romneytaxplan.com/
Romney has released the details of his tax plan! Finally!
So, you do have a sense of humor. There is hope.
This little piece reads like nothing more than Democratic talking points with the usual buzz words and phrases, including the “public-SERVANT” [emphasis added] label for public employees, which is what we should expect from someone retired after a career as a make-work, federal government, “public affairs” employee.
I’d like to see Estey put his “public affairs” experience to work and try to explain something that demonstrates Obama’s true character: that is Obama’s cowardice in hiding under his Secretary of State’s skirts with regard to the Benghazi screw up.
David Estey has articulated our choice in this election accurately. Those who believe this analysis of the facts will vote for Obama. Those who believe in the analysis of the facts touted by Karl Rove’s Super PAC American Crossroads & Non-profit Corporation Crossroads GPS, like leaningRight and Beaverfood, will vote for Romney.
No matter which guy wins, we all should be screaming from the rooftops to remove corporations from legal status as citizens. Romney stated, “Corporations are citizens, my friend”. This is the worst threat to our democracy, no matter what political party you favor.