Don't Believe Everything Mitt Romney Says

   We can all look forward to seven months of negative demagoguery on the GOP campaign trail, now that Mitt Romney has finally put some delegate-distance between himself and his three primary opponents. Romney and campaign manager Eric Fehrnstrom’s modus operandi in the general election’s early going seems to be to spend each and every day lying right and left about the record of success of President Barack Obama’s administration over the past three years, while at the same time engaging in the belittling of every piece of good news, economic and otherwise, that regularly greets our country.                      

   This extends over every subject imaginable, from the killing of Osama bin Laden, the nearly 500,000 manufacturing jobs created across America over the past 26 months, the fact that our nation’s economy has actually GROWN for 10 straight quarters, the end of the Iraq War four months ago, et al. All of these accomplishments and more have merely served as fodder for Romney to denigrate Obama and Democrats in general, hoping that voters will forget that it was his own party that drove the United States into the quagmire that we are now successfully pulling out of.

   As our economic comeback gains steam, and we leave the tattered mess left to us by the two George W. Bush terms and embrace a renewed America, it might be instructive to look at some of the major accomplishments of the past three years wrought by the Obama administration, keeping in mind that all of these financial betterments received virtually no assistance from the Republican congress in Washington, a cabal whose four-year plan was to hold the United States in legislative limbo and then blame the White House for not fixing the prior eight-year train wreck. Fortunately, they didn’t succeed. Here’s a bunch of facts you won’t hear Mitt Romney nor any Republican mention over the next seven months :

   1. A total of 4 million private sector jobs have been created since January 2010, and that number has been added to EVERY MONTH for the past two years. And this is despite the fact that the Republican congress prevented Obama’s more ambitious jobs bill from passing in 2010, instead allowing the stripped-down, $17.5 billion fragment to be signed into law. As Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis stated, "To an economy that was bleeding almost 800,000 jobs in a single month when Obama took office, the U.S. job growth over the past six months has been the strongest since before the recession began in 2006." Remember that the next time you hear Romney yammering about Obama being a "job destroyer", and also don’t forget that it was the Bush/Cheney principles of huge corporation tax cuts and rampant deregulation of laws governing them that directly caused America’s economic/job downturn in the first place.

   2. General Motors is now once again the Number One automobile maker in the world as of last January, with Chrysler not far behind. The Big Three (including Ford) are all profitable for the first time since 2005, helped along by the 210,000 new hires over the past 2 years enabled by the 2009 Obama industry bailout. This after the GOP, led by Mitt Romney, blasted the president for the successful $60 billion plan, which saved the corporations from the bankruptcy vehemently recommended for them then by Romney. And all borrowed money has been paid back to the Treasury with interest. The "savvy businessman" would sure like us to forget THAT.

3. While Romney and the right wing keep complaining about Obama’s proposed ending of the aforementioned Bush tax cuts on Big Business and the rich (long overdue), the Obama administration has lowered taxes a total of EIGHTEEN TIMES for our SMALL businesses, aiding the hard-working people who weren’t enriched by the earlier Bush policies.

   And we also have the Wall Street Reform Act, which will help prevent the business abuses of the past decade, the Affordable Care Act, which is already working against the spiraling cost of health care in America, the 2009 Credit Card Reform Act , the doubling of student loan and scholarship monies, and so much more.

   All of these citizen-friendly policies have been enacted by the Democratic party over continuous GOP resistance, and despite the House Republican majority. Contrast this with the Mitt Romney proposed scheme if elected of slashing Medicare and Medicaid, weakening the Environmental Protection Agency, broadening tax cuts for the wealthy while increasing middle-class taxes, ending many entitlement programs depended upon by the poor, and continuing the GOP war on women and union workers. And these scenarios are even now being played out in many of our conservative states like Wisconsin, Arizona and even here in New Hampshire.

   Mitt Romney, along with the rest of the Republican Party’s spinmeisters, will be in overdrive through the November 6 election with an endless welter of anti-Obama lies and negativity. Don’t let them fool you. Get your information from accredited sources, including the straight press, both paper and online. Check out the CBO (Congressional Budget Office) for both good and bad economic news and statistics. And take everything that this least-genuine of presidential candidates says with a very large grain of salt.