I like the headline NBC News releases full Obama ‘redistribution’ video, Romney campaign in trouble from the Examiner article.

At MSNBC the headline is In rest of ’98 clip, Obama speaks of ‘competition’ and ‘the marketplace’.

Thanks to Tangelia Sinclair-Moore for posting all of this on her Facebook page. This is where I first heard about the full video.

My reaction to Tangelia’s post was:

It’s beautiful the way the Republicans are getting sucked into a debate that they cannot win. It is about time we have a discussion about whether we should redistribute wealth upward by awarding lower tax rates for passive income over earned income, or we should keep the income where it was earned by having the same tax rate structure for all kinds of income.

If you are worried about the poor people who depend on income from investments that they made with their earned income, then we can keep the capital gains rate for capital gains and dividends for all those families earning less than $250,000 a year. This would confine the tax break to where it is really deserved and needed.

Here is an excerpt from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

If you would like to see this without the commercial, try this link.

In the 48 hours since the Romney video first gained wide exposure, turd containment crews at Faux Noise have been working overtime on Bulls**t Mountain.

I am so glad that Jon Stewart takes the pain out of watching Faux Noise by doing the hard work of watching it and digesting it for us.

The McClatchy article Campaigns’ debate of redistribution of wealth fuels parties’ biggest divide is rather naively written, but it provides me a jumping off place for a good rant.

“Mitt Romney and I are not running to redistribute the wealth, Mitt Romney and I are running to help Americans create wealth,” Ryan said at a rally in Danville, Va.

Ok, let’s have a debate about redistribution of wealth.  Obama believes that some of the money earned by your hard labor should be redistributed to you by applying equal tax rates to all income.  Romney believes that money ought to be redistributed upward to the wealthy via lower tax rates for passive income than for earned income.

The article itself contributed the following:

By one measure, 49.1 percent of Americans lived last year in a household that received some government benefits, according to a study of census data by the Wall Street Journal. That was up from 30 percent in the 1980s and even from the 44.4 percent in the third quarter of 2008.

By one measure 100% of Americans lived last year in a household that received some government benefits,

The wealthy Americans received the most benefits.  They get lower tax rates on the incomes they get by stealing from the poor.  They get court protection to enforce the tricky contracts that their armies of lawyers foisted on the unsuspecting poor.

This is exactly the chicanery that Elizabeth Warren, candidate for Senator for Massachusetts, wants to put a stop to.  Her invention, The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, is already working to punish the corporations that practice these scams.

And another gem from the article:

Some get checks from programs such as Social Security and Medicare, which are financially supported by payroll taxes from younger Americans.

I paid my money to buy Social Security and Medicare insurance.  Why is it an issue of how the insurer decides to fund the bought and paid for benefits?  In the wisdom of Congress they have decided that the Social Security and Medicare trust funds will give the government loans at below market rates so that the Government could give tax cuts for the wealthy.  In return they have to use money coming in from younger workers to pay the benefits bought by older workers.  And somehow, this newspaper wants to turn this into a dig at the non-wealthy for receiving benefits that they paid for.  How about we stop making gifts of our Social Security and Medicare payments to the rich and make them pay their fair share of taxes?

Somehow, the wealthy always find a way to claim that the government is redistributing wealth to the poor, while they grab all the big bennies from the government for themselves.  It is about time for the media to stop promoting this fantasy.  If it weren’t for the fact that the media are owned by the wealthy, we might actually get my own personal fantasy fulfilled.

Truth Out has the story French Study Finds Tumors and Organ Damage in Rats Fed Monsanto Corn.

Rats fed a lifetime diet of Monsanto’s genetically engineered corn or exposed to the company’s popular Roundup herbicide developed tumors and suffered severe organ damage, according to a French study released on Wednesday.

The study, published in a reputable American journal, links varying levels of both the Roundup herbicide and the transgenes in Monsanto’s patented NK603 corn to mammary tumors and severe liver and kidney damage.

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A spokesperson for Monsanto told Truthout that the company will thoroughly review the data, but pointed out that scientific claims made by Séralini in regards to previous studies on rats have been refuted by a European food regulatory agency.

If you click on the above link to the study, you will find that the publisher of the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology is Elsevier.  This is a for profit publisher that publishes many technical books and journals including in my field of electrical engineering and computers.  I do not know if their peer review process in their journals is as rigorous as you find in the journals of the not-for-profit technical societies.  In my field that would be the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers).

Given that this is published by Elsevier and that Monsanto has tried to discredit the study, I am not sure how excited one should get over this report.  Eventually the technical community will figure out if the authors of this paper or if Monsanto is correct.  Remember that Monsanto has a huge financial stake in proving this report to be false.

If you go to the Elsevier web site, you will find:

Who we are: A global company headquartered in Amsterdam, employing more than 7,000 people in 24 countries.

So I don’t know about the Truth Out claim about the journal being American.  It’s not that being American would make the journal any more respectable, but it is about Truth Out getting all its facts straight.

Here is the video clip of Mitt Romney talking about the 47% who pay no income taxes.

Let me give a little tax advice to people, but first I must admit I am totally unqualified to be giving such advice to anyone.

I am retired and have no income other than what my investments bring me plus Social Security and a miniscule pension.

I have investments in taxable accounts and in tax deferred accounts. After the stock market crash in about the 2008 to 2009 period, I decided to sell some of my investments in my taxable accounts in order to realize huge losses. In my tax deferred accounts, I took free cash and invested in stocks to compensate for what I sold in the taxable accounts. I did not invest in the same stocks so I would not run afoul of the wash rule. In effect these sales and purchases left my investment allocation at exactly the same place it was before making the trades.

This let me shift some of my income into the tax deferred accounts and out of the taxable accounts while realizing tax deductible losses and not realizing non-deductible losses.

For several years I paid zero income taxes at both the state and federal levels.

Unfortunately President Obama has reigned over huge increases in the stock market. It has gotten so bad that I eventually ran out of tax losses to compensate for my taxable earnings so that I have had to pay income taxes again. I don’t know why, but somehow this situation does not make me angry at President Obama. In fact it makes me want to vote for him again.

I also don’t understand about being retired and having to live on a fixed income. I invest in companies who pay increasing dividends every year. So my income is also increasing every year. I may even be getting bigger percentage raises now than when I was working.

This one is for my daughter, Shelah, the accountant. My cousin, Michael, the CPA, ought to appreciate this too.

Jane Gleeson-White, author of a new book about the genesis of double-entry book-keeping, discusses the little known roots of the practice in Renaissance Venice

ABC News has the story Carter Grandson Arranged Romney Video’s Release.

“I’ve gotten a lot of Twitter messages from people supporting me and saying that it’s poetic justice that it was a Carter that uncovered this, considering the way that the Romney campaign has been talking about my grandfather,” Carter said. “I agree with that sentiment wholeheartedly.”

Maybe Romney has learned a lesson here.  Old former Presidents are not defenseless.

I hope Scott Brown doesn’t take to crying when he sees this ad. After all, he is a very sensitive fellow. Maybe Elizabeth Warren is trying to soften the blow by saying “Scott Brown’s not a bad guy, he doesn’t always vote the wrong way.” Could she be any nicer?

Like a lot of you, I came up in a family that worked hard and I’ve spent years fighting for working people. I wasn’t looking to run for office but I see how Washington’s rigged for the big guys: oil companies, billionaires, and I can’t stand by. My fight’s for our families, for a level playing field. Scott Brown’s not a bad guy, he doesn’t always vote the wrong way. But too often, on things that really matter, he’s not with you. With almost a quarter of a million people out of work in Massachusetts, Scott Brown voted against three of President Obama’s jobs bills. He voted against making millionaires pay the same tax rate as working families. And he voted to give more than 20 billion dollars in subsidies to the big oil companies. Kids are drowning in student loans, roads need repair, the deficit is sky high, and Scott Brown’s voting for giveaways to big oil? I wouldn’t do that. I’m Elizabeth Warren and I approve this message. I’d be in there fighting for you, not some of the time — all of the time.

It’s too bad that YouTube only has like or dislike buttons. If they had a love button, I would click it for this ad.

My dislike of John Keller prevented me from getting the message originally.  At the end he gives credit to the Elizabeth Warren campaign field workers (volunteers and staff) for starting to turn this campaign around.

The Warren campaign made sure that we volunteers got the message. It is both a statement of appreciation and a request to keep up the effort until election day and beyond.

The Kansas City Star has the article Commentary: Our economy has recovered when…

The long and staggering recovery has made a distant memory of what a normal economy on two feet looks like.

There is one thing, however, we should know by now: It’s really hard for government to light the fires of an organic recovery that leads to self-sustaining growth.

My response to that article was:

It is hard  for the government to get the economy moving because of politics, not because of lack of economic theory about how to do it.

You mention in the article that a large enough stimulus for a long enough time would do it.  Obama’s stimulus was too small, it ended too soon, and Congress would not allow him to do more.

The government debt level is trivial compared to the contraction of private debt for which it was trying to compensate.  So that is not an issue.

The concentration of wealth that is aided by such things as the Bush tax cut for the wealthy is also a large stumbling block.   Congress would not allow Obama to rescind this.

As long as the wealthy can make money by investing in unregulated  financial trickery instead of having to find something productive to invest in, they will continue to suck money out of the economy instead of putting people to work.  The Congress prevented Obama from getting all the regulations that are needed.

When Bush stopped the ongoing negotiations to harmonize tax policy across nations, he prevented the only mechanism that would allow the taxation of the wealthy without inducing the flight of money to foreign tax havens.

Insisting on trade treaties that could not include any rules about labor unions, environmental protection, or product safety, the Congress has hamstrung any administration from negotiating treaties that enhance the economy instead of ruining it.

The Republicans and their big campaign donors have done an excellent job of seeing to it that we are exactly in the position we are now in.

It takes a lot of concerted effort to screw things up as badly as they are.

I was typing so fast and furiously, I forgot to add the budget busting soaring of health care costs.  If Congress had not forced President Obama to water down the Affordable Care Act in order to continue big money giveaways to the big drug companies and the big insurance companies, we would have started to control the problem much sooner.