Letters To The Editor

It has been difficult to place a label on Mr. Obama but now after opening pages of a book written by Dinesh D’Souza entitled “The Roots of Obama’s Rage,” I believe the author has correctly identified this man and it is this:  Obama views the United States, Britain and France as Neo-Colonists who during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries stole riches, enslaved people and denied the sovereignty of the African and Middle East Countries.  And he has adopted his father Barack Obama Sr.’s rage directed towards the two European former empires and the United States for also taking advantage of those poor nations.

Obama means to even the score, even at the cost of destroying his own Presidency; he is determined to bring down the U.S. economy and tax big corporations and the wealthy who he believes got their wealth on the backs of those exploited nations.

Once you accept and understand this premise you will realize the danger that this man poses to this nation’s economic well being.

           His defeat can not happen soon enough!

Bob Reichert, Punta Gorda

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A battle royal erupted over the proposed health care reform legislation as Democrats went about the task of delivering on the promised goals. The virulence of the opposition over health care reform was often manifested in unruly "town hall meetings" and protests across the country.

The tea party movement, which originated out of these protests took a life of its own while Democrats tried to understand its ideological foundations and make sense of its followers. Indeed,the tea party movement took us by surprise.

The surprise turned into disbelief, and eventually alarm, as Tea Party folks vowed to "take America back" and engineered a hostile takeover of the Republican Party. They promoted their own slate of candidates with platforms designed to undo all the great social achievements of the 20th century.

Their professed devotion to the U.S. Constitution was a crucial selling point for those who saw the federal government as an enemy.They proclaimed that the federal government only has powers specifically enumerated in the Constitution. Obviously, universal health care and for that matter Social Security and Medicare are not mentioned in the Constitution.

This pseudo "constitutionalist" ideology, which served the tea party to gain followers after the health care reform bill and was signed into law., ended up entangling Republicans themselves in an endless political gamesmanship taking up on issues such as of immigration, taxes, the economy and last, but not least, the anti-Islam sentiment on the eve of the 9/11 ninth anniversary.Mainstream Republicans know that the tea party followers are dividing the party and could cost them the mid-term elections.

These contradictions often tend to dwell on issues like President Obama's constitutional eligibility to hold office. Why waste our time and demean ourselves and the president about where he was born, or what is his religion? They also bring about the tiresome rhetoric about Obama administration's employing socialist measures.

The tea party movement is riding on a wave of nostalgia which is entangled in a myriad of contradictions and loose ends. On patriotic grounds, it is trying to recreate a country that is already in the history books, and intellectually it seems to lack basic understanding of American civics and modern social and political culture. Technology, internet, globalization of commerce as well as the relentless demographic shifts that are changing the character of much of the Western world cannot be reversed.

Challenges? Yes, but all these challenges really play to our strengths, not to our weaknesses. We need to summon our collective genius, seize on the spirit of the Revolution, and together think on how to rebuild our economic vitality.

The Taxation Without Representation cry that fueled the original Tea Party movement resonates here at home. Have you looked at how Florida has been carved out by self serving politicians? District boundaries have been drawn so that they can choose the voters,rather than the other way around. Professionals politicians like to die in office. This egregious perversion of democracy encourages corruption and pork barreling, and stifles our competitiveness.

"We the Voters" are being ignored. Can we join hands to banish gerrymandering by promoting proposed Constitutional Amendments 5and 6? Can we work together and start by taking Florida back?

.Mattesich is the chairman of the Charlotte County Democratic Party.

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Following is the full response from Bill Bigelow, Treasurer of the Punta Gorda Tea Party. His shortened version (550 words allowed by the Sun), was printed Friday, October 15, 2010 - under the headline "Where the Tea Party wants to take the country"in the Our Town section of the paper.

YOU WANT TO TAKE THE COUNTRY WHERE? THE ANSWER

Written by:Bill Bigelow, Treasurer of PGTP Posted 10/1/2010

In a recent opinion piece, Charlotte County Democratic Party’s Chairman disparaged the national Tea Party movement. Certain tactics espoused by Saul Alinsky in “Rules for Radicals” were inherent in his attack: (1) “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon”;(2) “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it”;(3) “If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will breakthrough into its counter side”. Translation: “a lie told often to the uninformed will be eventually believed.” This godless radical dedicated this book to Lucifer (whom he described as "the very first radical") and the book is universal reading by the Left. For example, The NEA’s website recommends the book to its teachers as one of three must reads and they describe Alinski’s writings as the“Mother’s Milk of the Left”.

Following is some of the verbiage in the Chairman’s piece used to describe the millions of patriotic, dedicated Tea Party participants: “virulent”, “unruly”, “hostile”, “professed”devotion, and “pseudo”. Using Saul Alinsky’s tactics described above, the Chairman seeks to marginalize and destroy the character of the Tea Parties, which represent strong opposition to the Left’s economic and socialistic govern- mental structure objectives.

Tea Parties proudly and strongly oppose the Progressive’s/Left’sagenda, which is on track to: (1) cripple/eliminate the U.S.capitalistic system, which has made this country the envy of the world and delivered prosperity to its citizens unmatched by any other country in any era; and (2) bankrupt the country. We thank the Chairman for not imitating his allies in their extensive use of other self-serving words being used against us such as “racists”,“homo- phobes”, “xenophobes/nativists” and lately “Islamophobes”.These erroneous descriptions of Tea Parties have no convincing,factual proof to back up their use when describing our movement,but that is not the Left’s intention, the real intention being to convince the uninformed that they are true. The Left fully knows that bombastic words hung around the necks of their targets, even though unjustified and unsubstantiated, can have the desired negative impact if said in unending mantra tones.

As mid-term elections draw near and polls show Democrats in deep trouble with the electorate, Tea Parties, which represent their arch enemy, are being constantly attacked by the Democrat Party’s Far Left/Progressive leadership, Major Media, Unions, Far Left Blogs, NAACP and Country Club Republicans, for each, in their own way, sees our vast grassroots power as a major threat to their special interest positions, which have brought them riches and political power via long-standing, close Big Government relationships.

Detailed below, is a resume’ of the vastly different philosophies of the Left and the Tea Parties:

The Left espouses Big Government by an Elite Political Class and bureaucratic cadre, armed with confiscatory taxation to fund expensive social programs THEY believe will make everyone’s life wonderful, in other words the Good Shepard State taking care of its adoring flock from cradle to grave. Such philosophy cherishes elitism, altruism, utopian dreams, controlled markets, failure bailout, and deluding people that their rights come from the State.Such philosophy is demeaning, costly, anti freedom and grounded in delusion.

The Tea Party movement espouses principles solely steeped in freedom: (1) Individual responsibility for one’s life experiences/successes/setbacks; (2) Our unalienable rights,including Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness being from our Creator and protected under our Constitution by the Peoples’ Government, deriving its power from Consent of the Governed; (3)Free market solutions meeting all citizen needs with a robust,loose knit private sector/church based charitable organizations providing for the needy; (4) Low taxes, leaving the preponderance of the fruit’s of one’s labor for one’s exclusive use; (5)Constitutionally Limited Government; (6) Fiscal Responsibility/Balanced Budgets; (7) Unfettered Free Markets where our proven collective superior ingenuity and business skills continue to perpetuate the U.S. capitalistic system which, with restrained governmental interference, will continue to create wealth for our citizens and ably assist in solving the country’s huge financial challenges. This is a pro-individual, pro-freedom,pro-free markets, pro-growth, and anti-Big Government philosophy,exemplifying economic reality, not dwelling in dreams.

Our movement’s prime objective is to expel all big spending politicians, no matter what their political stripe, replacing each with people who espouse our above listed principles. Failed custodians of our hard, earned money have created a situation where taxpayers are responsible for an estimated $138T including debt and future liabilities for entitlement payment promises. These figures are detailed as follows: (1) $13.5T of outstanding debt; (2)estimated $110T actuarially computed, unfunded net liabilities to cover commitments under future entitlement programs; (3) Obama budget deficits over the next 10 years average about $1T/per annum,which will increase debt to $23T+; (4) $1.1T+ of foreign financing commitments (to the IMF through the Treasury/FRS) to fund any EU financial shortfalls [read EU Bailouts]; (5) a probable $4T for  additional U.S. financial agency bailouts. This situation is currently compounded by bad economic policy of the Obama Administration, which is resulting in a current unemployment rate near 10% [under employment rate” is 17.6%] and an economy barely showing any growth. These numbers vividly show our politicians have/are put the country on the fast track to bankruptcy.

The Chairman admits the Tea Party Movement totally caught the Left by “surprise”. As our loose knit movement grew at a rate so rapid that the entire country was stunned, the Chairman said their surprise turned to “disbelief” and then “alarm”, as the Tea Party concept was adopted by and championed in thousands of communities across America, universally  espousing the motto of “Taking America Back”. Tea Parties seek to force our employees, the Politicians, to return to/obey the specific limits on central government as imposed by the greatest political document ever written in the history of the world, the Constitution of the United States. Tea Party members believe the country has been straying for 90 years, with activist judiciary help, from the Constitutional limits imposed by our founding document. As a consequence, we all are now witnessing a profusion of Big Government tactics by the Left who, via ultra Congressional chicanery and Cornhusker-type payoffs, are seeking to take over and permanently change: (1) the U.S. economy [as of this writing over an estimated 60% of our economy is government controlled by either government direct investment, TARP bailouts or via the prohibitive Financial Institutions and the Healthcare Acts;and (2) total control of the great institutions of this Country established over the past 200 years by the most successful nation in the history of the world.

The Chairman takes umbrage with what he labels our “virulent”opposition against the poorly worded Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act. We say the costs and savings projected by the Democrats for this program are contrived and bogus; that major cuts in senior health care will occur as resources are transferred to enable 30M of new insured parties; millions of people will ultimately lose their existing doctor/patient relationship when they experience any modification to their policies; and policy premiums will increase substantially as coverage for millions more newly insured kick in. Over the past six months, confirmation of all of these predictions has occurred as details of the Act are slowly revealed. This week, word on the street is that McDonald’s will cancel all employee health coverage unless they get a waiver under the Act for a certain requirement of the Act making the company’s health plan too expensive.Additionally, nineteen states, including Florida, are suing the Federal Government charging the bill’s individual mandate is unconstitutional and the government has no Constitutional power to make citizens buy a product/ service they do not want. Finally, a9-20-10 Rasmussen poll shows 61% of Americans want the Act repealed with over 50% strongly favoring such action. Given such facts, our opposition to Obamacare is not “virulent”. Our opposition is justified.

We are further being charged by the Chairman with having“pseudo” constitutional ideology because we believe that the government did not have the constitutional authority to pass Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid and the recent healthcare bill which mandates every American obtain a health policy incorporating the government’s version of health overage or face fines to be administered by 16,000 new IRS agents. Social Security and Medicare/ Medicaid are all facing future bankruptcy (as required tax cash flows to fund such programs are/will be inadequate to fund payments under such programs and there are no non-government investments backing up the government’s commitments), as are many other government sponsored entities such as FNMA, Freddie Mac, FHA,the post office, and Amtrak. The Chairman says the objective of Tea Parties is “to undo all the great social achievements of the 20thcentury. We say the social achievements the Chairman loves, as constructed by the Left, are all bankrupt and have been poorly conceived and constructed for each have been constructed by government and not the free market supply and demand parameters.Free market based products/ services constructed under the laws of free markets always provide the best return and service to its end users and are devoid of the huge waste and fraud associated with all government constructed programs. We, therefore say the pseudo thought process in the political arena is that of the Chairman, not our positions.

The Chairman acknowledges the country has many challenges in a changing world. However, the Left’s proposed remedies are totally based on government programs/actions. Tea Parties look to private sector/free market principles to provide needed answers, for we believe our businessmen, our entrepreneurs, our inventors, and our financial markets are the best in the world; and decisions by billions of people in a free market are better any day of the week when compared to decisions by a few bureaucrats, who think their opinion is supreme. The Chairman’s ideas of greatness, and how to achieve success, are so diametrically opposed to our principles that a workable middle ground between the two positions is improbable. In other words, let the best ideas win.

The article asserts the Tea Parties are trying to fight change by recreating a country and society, which are “already in the history books” and we “lack basic understanding of American civics and modern social and political culture.” This is typical talk from an elitist of the Left. Those on the Left possess an attitude they are the educated class and therefore are the only people smart enough to understand the country’s needs and to govern the country successfully. The wild social spending binges under the administrations of FDR, LBJ, Jimmy Carter, George W. Bush and, now, Barack Obama, vividly shows us that this ideology is patently fallacious. As served up by the Left, we are against their proposed changes to the economy and the structure of the country they are constructing. We will not cease our unified effort to stop their socialistic utopian ideas, which subjugate the ambitions of the people to the ambitions of the State. Such ideology has never been successful in the history of the world, although attempted many, many times.

As charged, we are not the ignorant boobs the Chairman wants to depict us as being and we resent such insinuations. I have a Masters Degree in Economics, an undergraduate degree in Business and Finance and an associate degree in banking, an industry in which I spent 23 years including an 8-year stretch as a Commercial Loan Manager responsible for over $1B of outstanding loans. I owned two corporate financial consulting companies, which I successfully operated for 13 years. All my fellow officers and directors at the Punta Gorda Tea Party LLC have extensive business and governmental experience and many have advanced degrees in varied specialized disciplines, such as Medical and Science. Tea Party members and supporters are well read on politics, finance and economics and we know the Constitution and the background of its creation and adoption. We also know government at all levels needs to be returned to financial conservatism, for liberal ideas of government have put us at the edge of the financial cliff.

We vehemently excoriate the Left’s constant use of class warfare, pitting classes of American people against one another for their political gain. Most contemptible is the Left’s constant trashing, demonizing and mislabeling many good, successful American industries and scores of business executives (the employers of millions of American and the issuers of securities bought by retirement funds) as being evil greed mongers, when they are simply operating on the defective playing fields legally constructed by an anti-free market political class. People are quickly waking up to the Alinsky tactics of the Left and the destructive nature of those tactics. We are opposed to politicians who constantly ignore the will of the majority of the people on big issues, which, if enacted into law, will negatively affect the country’s economic future and the livelihood and the financial stability of the citizenry. NO elected politicians have any license ever to dramatically change the social and financial fabric of this country without a major mandate from their bosses, the people of the country. The current President has no such mandate and the majority are totally against where the Democratic Party is attempting to take us. Real Politics shows the average Right/Wrong Direction of September polling results shows an average of 61% saying the country is on the wrong track.

I am grateful for the opportunity to respond to the falsehoods and innuendos of the Chairman’s anti Tea Party article recently printed in the Sun Newspaper. The article was bombastic and produced no factual backup to prove any of the assumptions made,for all assertions made were subjective and emotional in nature.

The American people now must determine what type of country they want to live in: As proposed by the Left, the cradle to grave Big Government assistance society ruled by the Political Elite, closely controlling our economic markets and the citizenry; or a society espoused by the Tea Parties where Americans are free, self-governed and have the benefits of free choice and free markets to pursue their individual happiness/ambitions, with their talents/commonsense being rewarded without undo confiscation of their labors via exorbitant taxation; plus the size of the government being scaled down to free up huge amounts of capital for the private sector to use to develop new innovations and new businesses which, in turn,will create millions of new jobs. Each philosophy is 180 degrees from the other.

The people are now awake and are angry with what they have witnessed from Washington D. C. in the past 20 months, as they believe the direction the Progressives/Left are taking this country is a recipe for financial disaster and mediocrity. Polls indicate the voters will make the required political changes in the next two elections to return this country to sanity and greatness.

I will end with a quote from Thomas Sowell, a noted economist and historian: “Indeed, freedom in general cramps the government’s style. Those on the left may not be against freedom in general. But, at every turn, they find the freedoms granted by the Constitution of the United States hampering the left’s agenda of imposing their superior wisdom and virtue on the rest of us.” This charade will not be allowed to continue.