As long as we are in a race to the bottom, there is no sense in one side quitting.

Is there anything untrue about this ad?

Reader RichardH sent me the link to The New York Times editorial, Mr. Romney Hits Bottom on Welfare, as a response to my previous post Romney’s welfare-to-work attack on Obama not quite accurate, experts say.

From The New York Times editorial:

Mitt Romney’s campaign has hit new depths of truth-twisting with its accusation that President Obama plans to “gut welfare reform” by ending federal work requirements. The claim is blatantly false, but it says a great deal about Mr. Romney’s increasingly desperate desire to define the president as something he is not.

My confirmation bias likes this editorial.

I do sometimes wonder how the media can say things are “not quite accurate”,  “depths of truth-twisting”, “claim is blatantly false”, and still not be able to simply say “it is a lie”.

The Boston Globe has the article Republicans assail Waltham battery maker’s deal with China.  The following are some quotes from the article:

A Chinese company’s preliminary agreement to invest in A123 Systems Inc. has ignited concerns that China could take control of the struggling Waltham battery maker’s advanced technology and spurred new criticisms by Republicans that the Obama administration squandered billions in stimulus money with investments in risky firms.
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“This is just another example of Barack Obama’s failure to follow through on his economic promises and the millions of taxpayer dollars he has wasted,” said Kirsten Kukowski, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee. “It’s unfortunate Obama borrowed from the Chinese to give taxpayer money to prop up green energy companies that the Chinese are now buying already.”
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A123’s agreement with Wanxiang comes as many US clean energy companies struggle to compete against Chinese rivals, which are bolstered by cheap labor and their government’s massive subsidies. US companies also complain that the Chinese government has done little to stop firms there from stealing their technology.
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US Representative Cliff Stearns, a Republican from Florida who serves on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said the A123 deal shows the Obama administration is not doing enough to protect US technology. Earlier this year, he said, a Russian citizen gained control of the assets of Ener1 of New York, another troubled battery maker supported by the US taxpayers.

Let me see if I have this straight.  The Chinese and the Russians see this battery technology as a strategic investment.  The Republicans see this technology as valuable enough to want to keep it out of the hands of the Chinese and Russians.

The Republicans think it was a mistake for Obama to see the technology as strategic enough to want to invest our money in it.  They also don’t propose that he invest any more in order to compete with the Chinese and Russian investments.  They do want to block the Chinese and Russians from getting the technology we paid for, but they don’t want to see us invest any more.  If we don’t invest more, the companies with the technology will go out of business and bury their knowledge with them.  Meanwhile the Russian has a company that will further the technology it has, and the Chinese will be forced to invest their money elsewhere to develop these technologies.

In a few years we will be buying these technological products from the Russians and the Chinese instead of selling products to the world that capitalized on our head start in developing them.

So a Democratic President can recognize a strategic opportunity when he sees it, but the Republicans want to block his every efforts.  The Republicans claim to be good business people.  They think they know more than President Obama, The Chinese, and the Russian.  If the Republicans  are so smart, why aren’t we the country that is getting ahead in the world?

As I remember it, a former boss at Digital Equipment Company, Duane Dickhut , used to say on hearing a too timid business proposal, “This isn’t a business plan, this is a going out of business plan.”  The Republicans seem to have a lot of “going out of business plans” these days.

WBUR aired this program Brown, Warren Offer Different Deficit-Reduction Approaches by Fred Thys.

This just goes to show you what happens when you let a reporter who knows nothing about economics report on economic matters.  I expect a public broadcasting station to educate me, not to dumb me down.

I won’t even put the audio on this blog,  You’ll have to click the link above to hear it.  However, I must warn you that your brain might rot if you listed to it.  If you aren’t careful, you will come away knowing less than you did before you listened.

My comment on their web site is as follows:

This has to be one of the silliest stories I have heard in a long time.  The commentator obviously knows nothing about economics.  He makes no comment about the fact that Brown’s prescriptions show a total lack of understanding of the economics of a national economy like the United States’ economy.  Brown goes on and on about how the first stimulus did not work, when it did.  Where is the money for the spending going to come from – the Fed of course.   We are sovereign in our own currency, so if the Fed says there is more money in the economy, they just make it so.  Private institutions that lend their depositors or investors money also create money.  The fact that these private entities are holding on to their money instead of investing it, takes money out of the economy.  That is what the idea of stimulus is all about.  The stimulus money puts money into the economy and also draws out the money being withheld by the private sector.

When the country lost trillions of dollars in stock value when the market crashed, do you think someone actually goes out and burns up a pile of money?  When the market recovers, as it has done quite well since 2009, do you think someone is actually putting the ashes back together?

Brown clearly understands nothing of this.  Or at least he pretends not to understand.  When other Republicans spout such nonsense, I can believe some of them are pretending.  In Brown’s case, I fear he may actually believe this stuff.

What this says about the WBUR commentator, I really have to wonder.

Please do not let your children listen to WBUR without your presence to offset anything they hear.

I should also point to some other sources for the money that I failed to mention in my comments on the WBUR web site.

The federal government can say to wealthy individuals, “If you aren’t going to put your money into the economy, then give it back to us, and we will put it into the economy.”

Getting the money back from the wealthy can take several forms. One form is to issue government bonds and notes, so that the wealthy lend us their idle cash, and we put it to good use in creating jobs and investing in the future of the economy.

The other way, is to raise the taxes on the wealthy, (or rescind tax cuts). If they aren’t investing that money in the economy, then giving them tax breaks to keep more money is obviously not helping. This method of raising money does not raise the government debt, and the new taxation rate will put us on a path to surpluses when the economy recovers.

Just think, a lot of the money that the wealthy are withholding from productive uses is going into non-productive financial derivatives. To put it another way, the wealthy have so much money, they don’t know what to do with it all. So they have taken to gambling in financial markets for fun and profits. If they lose a bet, they stop having fun, and we have to pay for it in the sick economy their losses bring on.

The Daily Show has the video clip Wizards of I.D..

See if you agree with Jon Stewart’s analysis,

Voter fraud doesn’t happen, legislation won’t stop it, so it’s clear why we have to do it now.

If the above video does not play for you click on this direct link to the video.

The White House has a web page about  Extending Middle-Class Tax Cuts. Here is the info-graphci form that article.

Elect Elizabeth Warren to the Senate and these kinds of tax cuts will be passed easily. Keep Scott Brown in the Senate and these tax cuts will be held hostage until billionaires get even bigger tax cuts. Do you see any reason why you should forgo your tax cuts, until the billionaires can get in line first and leave just crumbs for you?

If you would rather let the billionaires get in the line before you, what can you be thinking?

Of course Brown’s no vote will be bipartisan, he just can’t vote for this tax cut for some reason. I am sure he will find a reason when the time comes. He always does if it is something for the middle class.

The Real News has the story Netanyahu Bows to Popular Pressure on Austerity.

On Saturday Israelis once again poured onto the streets to protest austerity measures and demonstrate against the government. On Monday, the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu decided to cancel some of the tax increases, but only after taking a major hit in the polls. The Real News’ Lia Tarachansky reports spoke to Lital Bar, a leading activist in the J14 movement that began last summer and saw two deaths due to self-immolation, and Professor Yossi Yonah of the Ben Gurion University who Co-Edited the movement’s comprehensive report entitled Another Way is Possible

After watching this video it becomes clearer why Mitt Romney and Benjamin Netanyahu get along so well together.

If you need any clearer picture of what life would be like if Romney became President, then look at what these Romney-like policies have done to Israel.

If you aren’t troubled by the student loan debt load in this country, then you haven’t been paying attention.

Bipartisanship is nice, but students and former students can drown while a certain Senator pretends to make nice with the other side. I’d rather have a Senator who knows what the issues are, and can make nice too when the occasion presents itself.

McClatchy has the story Romney’s welfare-to-work attack on Obama not quite accurate, experts say. Quite a headline when in fact what Romney claims is the exact opposite of the truth.  One might even go so far as to say that the exact opposite of the truth is called a lie in many circles.  I don’t know about McClatchy.

The Republican presidential campaign aired a 30-second television spot leveling the charges, and Romney built on them at a campaign event in Illinois, extolling the 1996 welfare reform act as “one of the greatest bipartisan successes we’ve seen” and telling the crowd that Obama “has tried to reverse that accomplishment by taking the work requirement out of welfare.”

A former Republican staffer and staff director of the committee that helped draft the bill may make the most believable case against Romney.

Ron Haskins, co-director of the Brookings Institution Center on Children and Families and a former Republican congressional committee staff director, said he believes the administration erred in not reaching out to Congress before it made the change. But he called Romney’s assertion “clearly an overstatement.”

Haskins, who was staff director on the committee that helped draft the House bill that eventually resulted in the legislation Clinton signed, pointed out that contrary to the ad’s claim, the Obama administration’s offer of waivers “doesn’t do some broad overhaul.”

States would have to apply for the waiver and each state requesting a waiver would be required to show how the new approach would either “increase employment or lead to better employment,” Haskins said.

“If you just read the words (of the policy) it’s a reasonable kind of provision,” he said.

And Haskins noted that it would be to the states’ advantage to keep caseloads low, “so the idea that they’re going to use these waivers to bring all kinds of cases onto their rolls, it really doesn’t make sense.”

Then there is one former Governor of Massachusetts, coincidentally also called Mitt Romney.

Administration officials noted that in 2005, 29 Republican governors – including then-Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney – requested similar authority.

“Perhaps (Romney’s) argument is with his past self,” White House spokesman Jay Carney suggested.

How desperate is Romney to make charges against the administration that are almost instantly proven to be false?  I know there is a propaganda theory about the big lie, but this time the press seems to actually be awake.

He doesn’t treat horses well, either – see Romney’s Horse Heads To The Olympics.

Maybe we can’t really blame Romney for what happened at the steel mill. After all, when Mitt Romney found out how damaging this could be to his political career, he retroactively resigned from the company that did the damage and still made millions of dollars for the people doing the damage. I wonder if any of those millions could have saved Joe Soptic’s wife. Too bad Joe Soptic’s wife couldn’t be retroactively cured of cancer.