To the editor:

A few facts about the upcoming election to counter the fiction that is being sold so hard by the Tea Partiers and their corporate backers.

1. Whether you love it or hate it, the fact is that the “bailout” designed by the Bush administration and carried out by Obama prevented the economy from sliding into a full-blown depression. The ultimate cost to taxpayers will turn out to be a relatively paltry $50 billion or less.

2. Obama’s stimulus was not, repeat not, a huge expansion of government spending. About 40 percent of it consisted of tax cuts, and most of the rest only helped to offset drastic reductions in state and local budgets. Overall spending hardly increased at all. The stimulus created or saved many jobs, and would have worked better if it had been bigger.

3. The Republican-dominated Supreme Court decided that corporations could secretly spend unlimited money to buy our elections. Incredibly, they declared that this would not result in corruption, or make citizens lose faith in the electoral process. Are you feeling reassured? Democrats tried to pass a law requiring that contributors at least be made public. Republicans blocked it. (How much more do you need to know about which party is on your side?). And now the good old U.S. Chamber of Commerce is collecting money from foreign corporations and using it to run attack ads against Democrats. Many of their foreign donors are openly trying to steal U.S. jobs, and the Chamber is supporting these “outsourcing” efforts!

Just about everyone is disappointed in how the Democrats have handled things the last two years.

But the answer is not to return power to the people who wrecked the economy in the first place. Who claim to be worried about deficits but gave us the largest expansion of federal debt in history. Who want to cut your Social Security so they can give bigger tax breaks to the rich (who already have a historically large share of our total wealth). Who care much more about Wall Street banksters and their multimillion-dollar bonuses than about whether you can find a job and keep your home, and whose solution to our energy and climate crises is “drill, baby, drill.”

We tried that for eight years under Bush. Look what we have to show for it. It simply doesn’t work. The politicians who want to go back there don’t deserve our votes.

Rob Lewis

Langley