The Biden Administration (No Lago)

[Kaelik]

As the pandemic grows worse in India it is probably worth remembering that for over a month Joe Biden has been "thinking about" or "considering" or "investigating" the possibility of the US not continuing to block various countries (including India's) attempts to waive IP laws imposed by the WTO that prevent countries from producing vaccines. India itself has many factories that could be easily converted to mass produce vaccines. Everyone understands that if Joe Biden and the US supports the TRIPs Waiver, then the patents will quickly be released. Everyone understands this so much that Big Pharma and Bill Gates and various Gates funded organizations have been spending millions lobbying Biden to stop him, and every single organization that isn't funded by Bill Gates, including boring liberal ones that are basically never radical and often serve US interests like HRW and Doctors Without Borders are advocating for the waiver.

The mainstream news covered this campaign for the first time for 6 minutes on Chris Hayes show yesterday. Plenty of time to dunk of MAGA senators with very little real power over vaccine usage for being dumb anti vaxxers, but the media can't criticize JOE BIDEN (from the left) on any issue, so they just don't mention this at all, even though the us opposition to a TRIPs Waiver is anti vax science denialism that is causing millions of deaths and actually is under the control of one person who could do something about it and unlike Ron Johnson, could actually be shamed into doing the right thing.

The ask for the waiver was made 7 months ago, just to be clear. There is no possible reason anyone would need to be considering this in April. Biden was just 100% against it until a month ago when his admin started publicly saying they weren't sure and would get around to maybe deciding in the future. And here we are with a month more of time wasted and 300k more dead in India.

[Kaelik]

The NYT included a paragraph advocating for it in a message from the editorial board.

When the NYT editorial board is to your left, you are too far right:

Suspend patents. Nearly 60 nations have petitioned the World Trade Organization to allow countries to temporarily override intellectual property rights for coronavirus-related drugs and vaccines, but so far the measure is languishing. The Biden administration should support this waiver, nudge vaccine makers into voluntary licensing agreements and help build the public-private partnerships needed to bring those agreements to fruition. It should also press companies to offer better deals to the countries trying to secure doses — no more absurd indemnity clauses that protect company profits over human lives.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/24/opin ... tries.html

[Kaelik]

The pull-out unequivocally from Afghanistan, in September, is a win. Yes? Feels like a win, so, rhetorical.

Oh god. Because of unrelated things I had to look into the ongoing negotiations and this is so much worse than what I thought.

The US had agreed to leave by May 1st and the Taliban made clear they won't participate it any further talks until US forces depart. Biden's decision wasn't a decision to pull out, it was a decision NOT to pull out for several more months. To delay the existing pulling out.

The Taliban has threatened to begin attacks on any US troops that remain after the date the US already agreed to pull out by that Biden is ignoring.

So the most likely outcome is that Biden pushed back the pull out date because we love us some occupation and just had to get a few more months in, and then the Taliban will start attacking us in May, and we will then use that as justification for continuing military action.

Fuck literally everything. One potential future good thing is it turns out also just a terrible thing.

[Kaelik]

The prospect has put together from their day 1 agenda coverage before biden took office a list of 77 significant executive actions Biden could take without any legislation and set up a tracker.

https://prospect.org/day-one-agenda/exe ... on-tracker

Currently biden has taken full action on 7, partial on 5, one was effectively done by the courts before he took office, and has flatly refused to do 3.

So 61 he hasn't addressed at all.

All of these were in the executive action package put together by the Biden/Sanders unity commission that Biden was always going to ignore.

EDIT: lot of individual articles about Trump officials Biden should fire, including this one today. https://newrepublic.com/article/162203/ ... tage-biden

I thought there might be a tracking of all of these by the Revolving Door Project since they talk about it, but I can't seem to find any updated tracking.

[Kaelik]

Just because it is PARTICULARLY close to my own work, while most of Biden's DOJ appointments have been bad, local news is reporting that Biden is nominating former judge Keva Landrum-Johnson as US Attorney in New Orleans.

She was literally part of running a debtor's prison illegally jailing poor people for not being able to pay debts which a special collections department inside the court house, taking a cut from the profits to run the courts, so they were literally straight up in "get paid more to lock people up then let them go" shit.

https://www.civilrightscorps.org/work/c ... ors-prison

This is not someone who should be appointed to "enforce the law."

[tussock]

I saw a weird thing about people Biden won't fire, and it was someone cheering because he'd got a few confirmations through and it meant he could now fire someone, and ... that's not how that works. Like, forever, if someone was a useless hack, they'd be fired by new admin and a temporary head would be put in charge until a proper one, often the same person, was confirmed. That's why there's rules for temporary heads.

It feels like that thing where he said he'd stop the partisan plays, he's treating everything Trump did as if it's not partisan and going through the full official process in every way, even when he doesn't even remotely have to, to do anything at all. But that's not non-partisan. That's just partisan in favour of the Republicans.

Like, they're not even really trying to pass a new voting rights act, because one racist asshole democrat would actually rather black folk didn't get to vote, but you know, that's the sort of thing you drop all your political capital on pushing through anyway because if it's not there in a year it's all done anyway. They'll be lucky to pass the budgets, let alone anything else. Like, the turtle's still there and in charge and openly trying his best to block everything.

Like, what the fuck is the point in being president? So you can promise to maybe do something in six years time? It looks like, this time, it's just so the president is a "decent man", who still packs kids in cages because they're aren't white enough.

[Kaelik]

I saw a weird thing about people Biden won't fire, and it was someone cheering because he'd got a few confirmations through and it meant he could now fire someone, and ... that's not how that works. Like, forever, if someone was a useless hack, they'd be fired by new admin and a temporary head would be put in charge until a proper one, often the same person, was confirmed. That's why there's rules for temporary heads.

The article you saw is almost certainly about Biden getting post office board members confirmed so they can fire Louis Dejoy. Because in the 70s the post office was transformed from a governmental agency into a government run corporation, the actual head of the post office management, Louis Dejoy, cannot be fired by the President. He can instead only be fired by the Board of Directors. So appointing the board is how you get to the point of being able to fire DeJoy.

However, DeJoy will almost certainly be CEO for the entirety of the Biden admin, because one of Obama's directors who is one of the now democratic majority opposes firing DeJoy. Biden could fire republican and that democratic board member and replace them on the for cause grounds that they are failing their duty as directors, but he won't, so unless that democrat who supports Trump's Post Office gutting changes his mind, this isn't going to actually result in any change.

Obama appointed an entire slate of people who had previously advocated for Post Office privatization as directors, though most weren't confirmed, so the Obama appointee is fully on board with sabotaging the post office to then make arguments for privatization.

[Kaelik]

Biden admin still "considering" TRIPs Waiver more than a month since they started considering. Just an ongoing mass murder being committed by the Biden admin every day.

But apparently he does have time to support a Gates, Johnson & Johnson, and Comcast funded concert that exists for the explicit purpose of distracting from the TRIPs Waiver being pushed by most poor countries and 400+ Health organizations that aren't funded by Gates.

[Kaelik]

Tomorrow Joe Biden is going to wake up and make a decision that will kill more people from COVID then all of Trump's many bad decisions combined. Then he's going to wake up and make the same decision on Tuesday.

People think this is okay because most americans consider all non americans to be fake people who can be mass murdered by the US at will with no consequence.

This is one of the many bad consequences when you elect corporate democrats who fill their entire staff with people who were all taking Bill Gates, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Facebook, and Google money right before you hired them. (Also you keep supporting the KSA's ongoing genocide in Yemen because they were all taking KSA money too.)

[Kaelik]

Biden has raised the refugee cap to 62500 after people yelled at him a few weeks ago when he said 14k. So he's kept his promise from February which is about half of his promise from November.

[Kaelik]

Apparently biden literally promised ady barkan he would waive all patents to allow others to have the ability to make the vaccine when barkan asked.

So I guess put the ongoing mass murder of the biden regime in with all the other promises instantly broken when elected instead of in the pile of new good things he refuses to do.

Biden is an inhumane monster that is currently refusing to do the only humane thing. Just ask Joe Biden (October edition).

[tussock]

Oh, right, can only fire and appoint the guys who could fire and appoint the guy, fair enough. Seems like defending the post office, when they need those votes to keep fascism at bay a little longer, would be a smart thing to do, but ah well.

The vaccine thing is just weird. India makes a lot of the world's vaccines, up until this new group of them for covid, and Bill Gates just accepted that India couldn't possibly make vaccines and told everyone to block that, and he's just a fucking crook who stole everyone's code back a couple decades ago and funded a massive monopoly-fuel denial of market to all competitors off it. Successfully sued the companies he stole code from for finding out he stole code from them. Why the fuck would you ask him who can make a vaccine? It's the billions of dollars, right? It usually is.


https://www.independent.co.uk/news/worl ... 38313.html

According to reasonably moderate review, AFAICT, his first 100 days are mostly undoing Trump's everything. 19 orders to undo 62 of Trump's. 22 more mostly about vaccines. FDR had 99 in his first 100 days, so, well, he's no Roosevelt, but yeah, never gunna actually try and fix anything either. He's got one major spending bill passed, that pretty much would've been passed under Trump anyway, hell, Trump wrote bigger cheques to more people.

I guess, his election campaign was about not being exactly Trump, and stopping the pandemic, and ... surveys suggest 25% of US folk very hesitant to get vaccinated, and they're not doing the poor countries, so that's not gunna work anyway.

He wants infrastructure, which, that's what Trump kept calling for too, he also couldn't get it passed because racists hate public transport. Like, it's nice he might push a few green tech subsidies, but the fossil fuel subsidies are still everywhere, and he's explicitly said he won't do anything like the green new deal. Won't allow M4A because racists also hate universal healthcare, there's so much needs fixed in western countries, the current generation didn't get free houses, they're becoming the majority, and they will elect fascists like they did list time this market liberalism shit dragged out.

The US stopped fascism in the 30s, with the new deal, FDR kicking the asses of everyone who got it his way with the "endless bank holiday until his bill passes" gambit. And Biden, he's looking a lot more like a bog standard imperialist market-worshipping neolib. Like he said he was gunna be.

[Kaelik]

WOOOOOOOOOO FUCKING HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


Millions of people will not die now that Biden has finally made up his mind and will keep the promise he made to Ady Barkan.

Whomever found that clip and started broadcasting it probably deserves a lot of credit! (Maybe Barkan himself remembered it and is the source, but by the time I saw it everyone was saying it.)

"“This is a global health crisis, and the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic call for extraordinary measures. The Administration believes strongly in intellectual property protections, but in service of ending this pandemic, supports the waiver of those protections for COVID-19 vaccines,” United States Trade Representative Katherine Tai wrote in a statement"

And INSTANTLY WTO leaders started working on ironing out the language because it was always going to be decided by the US's approval. Seven months wasted, but we did it and millions of lives will be saved.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/05/us-back ... dwide.html

EDIT: Only 4 months wasted because Trump was never going to agree with this.



EDIT: Terrible news. Turns out they aren't supporting the existing Waiver and are trying to work out a new one. So more time wasted so they can do some more protection of Pfizer stock. Fuck.

Guess this is still in the wait and see category until we see the final proposal. (Now it gets to be argued about and something will probably happen though, so not as good as just supporting the existing seven month old proposal, but it's something and we will see what it is.)

[Stahlseele]

So, South Carolina has now opted to use a firing squad for their death sentences as the fourth state?
Are bullets that much cheaper than poison or electricity or a good old noose of hemp rope? More reliable?

[Omegonthesane]

Most of the places willing to sell shit to the USA don't want to sell it the components for lethal injections, so bullets are probably cheaper. And yes, they're more reliable than rope or electricity. More ethical too if death sentences are stuck on the table.

[Kaelik]

So, South Carolina has now opted to use a firing squad for their death sentences as the fourth state?
Are bullets that much cheaper than poison or electricity or a good old noose of hemp rope? More reliable?

Bullets are probably more reliable than the Noose? Faster? I'm not sure about that specific choice. Maybe they just realized that since 99% of their victims will be black men it would be giving the game away too much.

I don't really know about electric chairs, but I would believe it's more expensive to get one than to gather some guns. I think there were also problems with reliability.

But yes, basically no drug company wants to actually sell anesthetics to the state so it can murder people. They do all kinds of weird shit like hunt down the drugs on the black market in other countries and stuff (really, this happened) just to be able to murder people.

No death penalties should happen, but honestly, I think bullets to the face are less painful than the current procedures where they paralyze you so you can't scream and then slowly murder you over minutes of extreme torturous pain.

[Josh_Kablack]

So, South Carolina has now opted to use a firing squad for their death sentences as the fourth state?
Are bullets that much cheaper than poison or electricity or a good old noose of hemp rope? More reliable?

Bullet manufacturers have a pretty gung-ho lobbying group supporting them in the US.

[Kaelik]

There are about a billion horrible evil things the Joe Biden administration is doing to other countries right now, like the ongoing worst human rights crisis in the world in Yemen where we continue to support the KSA blockade and arm the countries doing the invasion/blockade/bombing/occupation.

But worth noting that as Israel continues to escalate to new levels of horrible, basically just doing mosque shootings like the white supremacists they are, that we continue to fund them and defend them and they would not be doing this if they didn't know that we will continue to pay for them to keep doing more breaking in and murdering people to clear them out to steal more land. Also they have said that if we do renter the Iran nuclear deal that we still haven't reentered, that they will "take matters into their own hands." which reminder, is a country not signed onto the NPT treaty with nuclear weapons threatening to go to war with a country that doesn't have nuclear weapons and has no nuclear weapons program and is an NPT signature.

Anyway, domestically Biden is just doing boring shit like threatening to take UI from you unless you work for 7.25 an hour and die from Covid unvaccinated.

EDIT: Also Biden apparently things Trump did a great job picking the FBI director, but also the IRS Commissioner. Because fuck it when has Donald Trump ever not been a pinnacle of appointing qualified non ideological people.

EDIT: Posted two soon as we've progressed to the mass murder stage of Israeli's playbook again. Can't wait to keep supplying them more bombs to drop.

[Kaelik]

Rahm Emmanuel finally rewarded by the Biden admin for all his hard work being the worst person in the world.

[Kaelik]

Democratic Majority For Israel spent millions of dollars attacking Sanders for "electability" and now their money is being paid back as Joe Biden uses US veto power at the UN to support Israel's ongoing genocide of the Palestinians. Because in fact, it does matter whether we elect the bad evil democrats or the actually kind of good ones, and the bad ones are really bad.

Everyone who told you that you couldn't tell the difference between democrats was telling you they can't tell the difference between supporting genocide and opposing it.

[PseudoStupidity]

The Biden switch to making low-wage workers work or die instead of live off the princely sum of unemployment + $300 a week was kind of a surprise to me. I should have known better, but wow.

[Kaelik]

The biden doj believes that every single decision the trump doj made is correct.

It will continue all the policies of the trump admin, even obviously racist and illegal ones.

https://therevolvingdoorproject.org/the ... its-cases/

[Kaelik]

The Biden admin keeps blocking the UN resolution to stop mass murder because the Biden Admin is pro mass murder. Also they sold them 700 million in weapons.

My favorite story about this is an insider baseball leaked source explaining to the journalists who happily write it up as praise for Biden that in 2010 when Netanyahu escalated ethnic cleansing in the west bank Obama wanted Biden to cancel his meeting and leave, sending a message of disapproval, but JOE BIDEN THE WISE POLITICIAN knew better, and instead he had the meeting and showed no outward sign of disapproval, but at the meeting he PRIVATELY expressed that he did not like it. From this we analogize to how currently the Biden admin is showing as many green lights as they can for Israel to keep bombing people to death, like UN veto protection and arms sales, but he's going to ask Netanyahu to stop, and this is the way SOPHISTICATED politicians get results.

HEY DUMB SHIT STENOGRAPHER! DID THE ETHNIC CLEANSING SETTLEMENTS BIDEN PRIVATELY ASKED TO STOP IN 2010 STOP? If not, maybe this should tell you something about the current sophisticated tactic of selling Israel weapons to blow up Palestinians, then using UN security veto to prevent UN resolutions that might lead to fewer dead Palestinians, but then saying no to Netanyahu in private where he can ignore you.

In what I will connect by "Sophisticated Politicians" but is otherwise almost completely unrelated, the IRS has released some estimates about the upcoming checks on the 1 year program Biden passed on child tax credits. They estimate they will be able to get checks to 88% all US households with children. 2% of households with children make too much money for the checks. 10% of US households, probably the 50% of households in deep poverty who don't file taxes, are also not getting checks. It was already a bad idea to do this through the tax system in the first place, when you were making 98% of people you (allegedly) wanted to give money to in order to exclude 2% instead of just giving everyone a check under the Social Security admin.

But now it turns out, we are in fact depriving 10% of the most in need in our pursuit of denying the benefits to the richest 2%.

GOOD FUN.

This is what happens when you elect "sophisticated politicians" instead of pie in the sky dreamers with absurd ideas like "universal child benefit."

[Kaelik]

Biden has now successfully negotiated a ceasefire.

You see, just like every other time, after Israel finished bombing every conceivable infrastructure target including every hospital and their one COVID vaccine storage location, we have progressed to.... there's nothing left to bomb, so might as well sign a ceasefire, and now the US that has been blocking a ceasefire resolution at the UN for 7 days can take the credit for Israel running out of things to bomb.

Fuck literally all these people.

EDIT: A different issue The fault of the Biden admin, but the Biden admin was always going to be evil, but this issue time to yell at someone else.

The Biden admin dumb "capital Hill safety" bill that gives the Capital Hill Police more military weapons, and more surveillance, and movable barricades that they will use for every BLM protest and not use the next time some white nationalists want to storm the capital passed by one vote because AOC, Rashida Tlaib, and Jamaal Bowman all backed off their previous opposition and voted present so it would pass.

This absolute garbage bill, that besides being all cops being bad and giving cops more weapons being bad, also gives the DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE more money and


Pressly, Omar, and Bush all voted against it, but if one of the other three voted against with them it would have stopped the bill. Now heres to hoping republicans are too busy posturing in the senate in support of the riot to get 10 votes together to give cops more money and power to attack black protestors.

[Kaelik]

Biden, Garland, and Betsy DeVos, an iconic trio, all working together, but got slapped down by the judge. For what good that will do.