Obama says: 'Consider the alternative' - but is there one?

But global family planning and reproductive health services took the biggest hit with a reduction of $85 million.   Obama's track record on women's reproductive rights is poor, his health secretary recently overruled a Federal Drug Administration regulation that would have allowed emergency contraception pills to be sold over the counter for girls younger than 17 (the U.S. has an avalanche of teenage pregnancies).

The U.S. has the highest maternal death rate of any industrialized nation according to the CIA Factbook. The Save the Children Fund notes that "an American woman is more than seven times as likely as one in Ireland to die from pregnancy-related causes and her maternal death risk is 15 times that in Greece. Only three developed countries - Albania, Russian and Moldova - had a worse maternal mortality rate."

And depressing stats mount: the Census Bureau reports the number of Americans in poverty jumped to 15.1 percent in 2010, a 17-year high. About 46.2 million people, or nearly one in six, were in poverty.   And 49.9 million were without health insurance in the country with among the most expensive health-care in the world.

  In October, the Congressional Budget Committee revealed that since 1979, the richest one percent had seen incomes rise 275%, while the middle class was 40% more comfortable and the lowest fifth of the nation had seen incomes rise only 18% - essentially, they got poorer. Yet in November, the so-called super-committee nominated by Obama to find ways out of the debt crisis failed to reach accord, one of the biggest stumbling blocks was a refusal by Republicans to increase taxes on the rich -- many of whom pay far lower tax than the lowest earning members of the country.   Billionaire Warren Buffet famously pointed out recently that his personal assistant pays more tax than he does.

Many of these issues Obama inherited, but with the mandate the electorate gave him he had the greatest capacity of any president in decades to make a real difference.  

  When he was elected Obama said: "Americans have sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of red states and blue states, we have been and always will be the United States of America."

  Under Obama the United has fallen off the States of America. History still has to reveal whether Barack Obama is a victim of racists in the Republican party who will do anything to stymie the first black president for the United States, or if he is merely incapable. Either way the United States is in serious trouble.

Next Page  1  |  2

(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).