How will Joe Biden GOVERN? General Biden Administration F**kery Thread

[Arithmetic]

 

[Tony D'Amato]

Susan Rice shoulda headed cia. Why would u want thst guy at cia?

 

[88m3]

across the board it seems like we ended up in a better place than a lot of people on the board thought we would be

 

[OfTheCross]

What Joe Biden’s Cabinet picks say about how he plans to govern

Joe Biden promised that his presidency would mean a return to normalcy. His Cabinet picks help demonstrate how he plans to deliver.

The president-elect announced his final nominees this past week, completing a diverse team of two dozen people. He noted Friday that this will be the “first Cabinet ever” to reach gender parity and include a majority of people of color, notable given earlier concerns that he was leaning largely on white men.

Some nominees have decades of experience in their respective agencies. Many held prominent roles in the Obama administration. Many have already begun meeting with interest groups and advocacy organizations, and his transition team has had what’s been described as an “open-door policy” toward advocacy groups for months.

It’s a sharp contrast to President Donald Trump’s Cabinet, which was dominated largely by white men with little experience in Washington. Biden’s aides say that was one of the goals he set in filling out his Cabinet: to signal that his presidency means a return to competent, stable leadership government.

That’s especially important, Democrats say, as the pandemic and economic turmoil rage and the country navigates through the aftermath of last week’s violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.


“Joe Biden is taking office under the most challenging circumstances in a century,” said Dan Pfeiffer, a former Obama White House senior adviser. “There is no time for on the job training. He needs people who can hit the ground running because what happens in the first six months of his presidency will likely determine the trajectory of all four years.”

Biden’s Cabinet is unlikely to be in place when he assumes the presidency on Jan. 20. The Senate, which must confirm the nominees, hasn’t scheduled hearings for many of the picks. One exception is Lloyd Austin, Biden’s nominee for defense secretary, who is expected to appear before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Jan. 19.

Some nominees faced early questions about their confirmation prospects, particularly Neera Tanden, Biden’s pick to lead the Office of Management and Budget. Tanden has angered Republicans with her outspoken criticism of them on Twitter.

But the confirmation process for many of the nominees may be smoother after Democrats picked up two Senate seats in Georgia last week, leaving the chamber evenly divided. Vice President-elect Kamala Harris will be the tie-breaking vote, giving Democrats the edge.

Biden spokesman Andrew Bates said that the president-elect is “working in good faith with both parties in Congress toward swift confirmation because with so much at stake, with our national security on the line and lives and jobs being lost every day, our nation cannot afford to waste any time.”


But many nominees may face unprecedented levels of scrutiny as they work to dig their departments out of both the erosion in public trust in government and an erosion of morale from within. Many department budgets and staff were gutted during the Trump administration.

That hollowing out is part of why it’s so important for Biden to choose seasoned veterans for his Cabinet, according to Eric Schultz, a former senior White House adviser.

“One of the problems that Biden faces that Obama did not in 2009 is how the Trump administration has treated federal agencies and departments,” he said. “Rebuilding — just, operationally — these agencies, to get that back up and running, is going to take a lot of work. So it wouldn’t make sense to put in a bunch of newbies.”

They’ll also have to navigate demands from progressives looking for major changes from leaders at agencies ranging from the the Department of Homeland Security to the Environmental Protection Agency and the Justice Department. Many of them will be on the front lines of addressing a pandemic that’s killed more than 371,000 people in the United States, while taking action on the issues of race and inequality and climate change that have prompted national movements for change in recent years.

To get ahead of those problems, Biden’s transition team has spent months meeting with trade, advocacy and interest groups across Washington and beyond, looking to reestablish relationships that had atrophied during the Trump administration. Now that his team has been named, his nominees have begun their own meetings with key groups as they prepare to take office.

Some meetings are aimed at assuaging concerns among critics, such as when Tom Vilsack, Biden’s pick for agriculture secretary, met with Black farm advocates. Vilsack has faced questions about what critics say was his failure to address discrimination against Black farmers within the agency while he was Obama’s agriculture chief.

But still others have included representatives from areas not typically seen as pet Democratic constituencies. Three of Biden’s top picks for health adviser positions met with interfaith leaders on Thursday, and the next day Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden’s pick at Homeland Security, met with 20 leaders who share his Jewish faith.

The Rev. Gabriel Salguero, a Florida-based pastor who founded the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, said the Biden transition has made a “very robust and very intentional” effort to build relationships with faith leaders. Salguero recalled other faith-specific calls with Susan Rice, chosen as Biden’s domestic policy adviser, and Tanden.

While Salguero recalled meetings with the Trump administration on key issues, he said the Biden transition team’s outreach already has gone further.

Even those groups that may be more aligned with Trump and Republicans on their issues are already pleased with Biden’s approach to governing. Democratic lobbyist Steve Elmendorf said that the reaction from his business clients and other Washington lobbyists has been, he said, “very positive” because “business likes certainly.”

“Business likes a plan,” Elmendorf said. “And while some of the outcomes under Donald Trump, people liked, they really didn’t like the government by tweet and Fox News.”

Even those who don’t agree with all of Biden’s policies, Elmendorf said, are relieved at the return to normal working order because “they believe that there will be a process that is know, and is transparent, and where stakeholders will have an opportunity to make their views known.”

 

[MoneyTron]

across the board it seems like we ended up in a better place than a lot of people on the board thought we would be

Come on now, 95% of this board are overexaggerating reactionaries especially when it comes to regular Democrats.

 

[King Static X]

Susan Rice shoulda headed cia. Why would u want thst guy at cia?

 

[88m3]

Come on now, 95% of this board are overexaggerating reactionaries especially when it comes to regular Democrats.

Yeah, that is pretty weird

 

[FAH1223]

The Problem Lies in Policy
If we recognize that a major short-term cause in creating this paranoid cult is social media models based on addiction, monopolization and surveillance, and a long-term cause is systemic cheating in our economy and culture, we can break down our problems in manageable chunks. These problems originate from laws and regulations guiding commerce.

And that’s why I think the solution lies in part at the agency set up to regulate commerce - the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC is a potentially economy-reshaping institution. It has broad jurisdiction over privacy, consumer protection, and antitrust laws, meaning it can reorient how virtually every corporation in the country functions. It can write rules against ‘unfair methods of competition,’ which can include prohibiting anything from discriminatory pricing in industrial gas markets to addictive or deceptive user interfaces to certain kinds of targeted ads. As a small example, the commission took action earlier this year against corporations engaging in ‘merchant cash advances,’ precisely the predatory lending that trapped Babbitt.

So why doesn’t anyone pay attention to the FTC as a way to solve any social problems? Well, the FTC has been effectively dormant for forty years, a playpen of elite well-paid lawyers who come up with elaborate reasons to whitewash lawbreaking by the powerful. The latest example is when the $100B+ video conference call giant Zoom was caught lying about its security practices. The FTC didn’t fine the corporation, merely requiring the company to implement an internal compliance program. Such “no money no consequence” settlements encapsulate how enforcers condone serial lawlessness. Still, strong legal authority remains at the FTC, waiting to be used precisely to stop the systemic cheating that inflames protesters across the spectrum.

If we can restore the FTC and get it to do its original job, one it did reasonably well for decades, we can begin to rebuild our trust in our institutions.

“FTC orders are not suggestions”
In fact, the FTC has begun to get a bit more aggressive under Trump. The most obvious sign is the massive antitrust suit filed by the FTC to break up Facebook. This suit is not the result of Trump or the Republicans, who have been in charge of the commission, but a result of one of the most energetic, hard-charging, and creative regulators in government, who has for years been prodding the commission to do more. His name is Rohit Chopra, and he’s a Democrat who may become the Chair of the FTC, if Joe Biden so chooses.

The FTC is a commission, which means it has five members making decisions, three of the majority party and two of the minority party. Chopra was confirmed as a minority member of the commission in 2018, and has spent his time sketching out how a more vigorous FTC can restructure the American economy and end the elite lawlessness that is creating so much desperation and anger.

To understand what that might look like, it helps to go over Chopra’s vision of how to govern, because it is something we see nowhere else in American government. The very first thing that Chopra did after he was confirmed into office was to send a commission-wide memo titled Repeat Offenders, in which he argued, very simply, that big corporations who repeatedly violate the law should face serious penalties, like break-ups, firing of senior managers and board members, and clawbacks of executive pay. Or as he put it, “FTC orders are not suggestions.”

This memo immediately upset the FTC staff and fellow commissioners, because it disrupted the agency’s genteel and bipartisan culture of deference to large corporations. What is important to recognize about large scale popular anger at inchoate social forces is that there really is a conspiracy of elites against them, but it comes not in the form of weird paranoid fantasies, but in the form of genteel wealthy lawyers who make intimidating frowny faces at antitrust conferences when someone brings up using public authority to enforce the rule of law against the powerful. These people tut-tut at riots and protests, not recognizing their own role in creating an environment of lawlessness. The painful work of institutional reform to deal with the chaotic social forces in play requires officials like Chopra, who are not afraid to upset social niceties, but are able to do so with analytical and legal rigor.

In retrospective, Chopra’s memo was exactly the kick in ass the slothful commission needed, because it showed that the FTC had authority and power to secure justice, and was simply not using it. At the time Chopra issued it, the FTC was working on just such a repeat offender: Facebook. The FTC had an order against Facebook in 2011 over deceptive practices, which the corporation as part of the order had pledged to stop. In 2018, the Guardian revealed that Facebook was in violation by allowing Cambridge Analytica to violate user privacy.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal was a tragic moment for America, a pivot point where the FTC had leverage to restructure a dysfunctional market. The FTC could have attacked the addictiveness of Facebook’s products, which were organized to sell more targeted advertising based on data gathered via the privacy violations it settled over. But the FTC, over Chopra’s objection, let the opportunity pass.

In fact, the responsibility for the market structure of big tech lies with the FTC. The FTC shut down a Google antitrust investigation in 2013 with a 5-0 vote, and it approved an endless number of mergers, including Facebook’s purchase of Instagram and WhatsApp. It did not take any meaningful action in the 2010s to address data gathering or targeted advertising, and did not even bother to study the massive industrial shift under way, meaning Congress until late last year had to rely on foreign investigations of social media to make policy. The social media environment that fostered these riots, in other words, occurred because of the policy framework for Google, Facebook, Twitter, and so forth that the FTC organized. Chopra’s assertive approach, from the get-go upset the consensus enabling this toxic framework.

Aside from problems with social media, Chopra has also attacked systemic corruption in the economy. There are too many Chopra dissents and statements to go through, so I’ll pick three. In 2018, two of the largest industrial gas companies in the world, Linde and Praxair, merged in a complex international transaction. For a procedural reason involving German financial rules, the FTC could have blocked this merger easily, without even having to go to court. But the FTC, with four commissioners (including Chopra’s fellow Democrat, Rebecca Kelly Slaughter), voted to let it go through, arguing that the $80 billion resulting corporation would be efficient and wouldn’t increase prices. Chopra dissented. Sure enough, with its new market power, the company soon announced a massive price hike, proving Chopra right, and the other four - Christine Wilson, Joe Simons, Noah Phillips, and Slaughter - wrong.

Two other transactions Chopra opposed were the merger of AbbVie Inc. and Allergan, and the merger of Bristol-Myers Squibb Company and Celgene Corporation. These mergers involved giant pharmaceutical corporations who use their monopoly patents to gain more bargaining leverage against everyone in the medical supply chain, raising prices on consumers and reducing medical innovation. The FTC has a long history of letting pharma companies merge, which has led to higher prices. Sure enough, the House Oversight Committee soon showed that Celgene had been plotting to keep prices high and continue to raise them. Meanwhile, a few days ago, AbbVie jacked up the price of top-selling drug Humira by 7.4%. Once again, Chopra was right, and the FTC bureaucracy and the majority of the commission was wrong.

But that’s not all. Chopra has a long track record of restructuring industries. Before he went to the FTC, he served as the ‘student debt ombudsman’ at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where he parlayed a role without much legal authority into a vehicle to restructure private student lending. Here’s the Wall Street Journal in 2014, noting that Chopra’s style of “applying pressure through public means—a big departure from the more measured style of other financial regulators—is causing friction.” As one lobbyist for student lenders put it, “There’s more tension between banks and those in the CFPB’s student-lending division than in all other areas of the CFPB combined.”

The goal for Chopra wasn’t to upset financial villains, but to change policy. And he did. Large student lenders began lowering interest rates on borrowers and extending repayment plans. What Chopra did wasn’t enough to take on the whole crisis - student debt was a driver of the Occupy Wall Street protests - but he was a minor regulatory official without much leverage, and what leverage he did have he used with creativity and aggressiveness. That’s the kind of public official you want to promote.

Chopra has used this same strategy of combining analytical rigor with public pressure at the FTC. Early on, he pressured his fellow commissioners on behalf of worker rights, in a case called Your Therapy Source. A businessman had been cheating workers by fixing wages with competitors, and was caught red-handed in text messages doing so. Chopra dissented from the settlement, which imposed no meaningful penalties. Once again, this was a 4-1 vote, meaning that he stood against three Republicans and a Democrat. And once again, he was proved right, as the Department of Justice later returned a criminal indictment against the owner of Your Therapy Source.

Chopra has spearheaded successful efforts to block scams around Made in USA corporations (once again with initial opposition from both the Rs and his fellow Democrat). He led the FTC in taking on the problem of merchant cash advances, as well as an endless array of consumer rights problems (like debt collection and credit reporting). He has been a leader in working with regulators globally to address privacy problems. And he and his staff have uncovered significant dormant regulatory tools that would allow the FTC to expand its ability to regulate unfair commerce. This is exactly the kind of creative and aggressive public official Democrats need to put in a position to address the problem of social media, and then to take on the culture of elite lawlessness in American corporations.

And we don’t need to guess whether Chopra will succeed. He already has. Last month, his pressure campaign culminated in the FTC’s historic antitrust case against Facebook. The FTC rejected its own legacy of approving bad mergers, and set a goal of unwinding the Instagram and WhatsApp purchases by Facebook that it had enabled years earlier. Chopra had finally brought his fellow Democratic member, and the Republican Chairman, Joe Simons, to his side (though two libertarian Republicans, Noah Phillips and Christine Wilson, voted not to take action against Facebook). Now just imagine what Chopra can do if he’s actually in charge of the commission.

Redressing Institutional Failure
Chopra is the kind of leader one needs to deal with the current crisis of social media. He’ll use every lever possible, he has international credibility to work with enforcers all over the world, and he isn’t afraid of confrontation or of antitrust elite lawyer frowny faces at conferences. He also will enable Joe Biden to accomplish his agenda, to restructure these social media giants, and to ensure that the massive pandemic and infrastructure spending happens with minimal cheating and monopolization, and a maximum of domestic production.

The day before the riots, the Democrats won two Senate seats in Georgia, which means that Joe Biden doesn’t need to beg and wheedle his opposition to appoint people to agencies. Now he can just put Chopra as Chair of the FTC. He should. It won’t solve everything. But Chopra knows how to restructure social media, and he understands how to use regulatory levers to restore the political legitimacy we desperately need. Hopefully he’ll become our new FTC Chair.

 

[Arithmetic]

Susan Rice shoulda headed cia. Why would u want thst guy at cia?

He warned against Iraq war, was apart of the secret meetings with Iran in Oman, and was US Ambassador to Russia. Only the second career diplomat to have reached Deputy Secretary of State. Was also in the room watching Osama raid.

 

[Payday23]

 

[Arithmetic]

Bill Burns on Hillary:

Lunch with the FT: Bill Burns

While there is just a hint of scepticism in Burns’s remarks about John Kerry, his admiration for Hillary Clinton seems unfeigned. He says that, along with Jim Baker, she was the most professional secretary of state he worked for. “Perhaps it was something to do with them both being lawyers but it was very rare to go into a room with them and find somebody who was better briefed.”

 

[FAH1223]

Speaking of Joe Biden
The Senate victories in Georgia have opened up possibilities for Biden, particularly on additional COVID relief. On Friday he promised rapid action on what would be a third relief bill. Even before the plan comes out—and that’s been promised this week—Biden said he would use executive action to continue freezing student loan payments, though he stopped short of using his own authority to cancel student debt. (He said he would ask Congress to cancel the first $10,000 of borrowers’ loan obligations; that might be part of the relief package.)

The very good news here is that Biden is announcing very early that the price tag would be in the “trillions” of dollars and he doesn’t particularly care about the deficit implications. “It is necessary to spend money now,” Biden said. “With conditions like the crisis today, especially with such low interest rates, taking immediate action—even with deficit financing—is going to help the economy.” Biden is simply not taking the bait out of the austerity trap.


So what’s going to be in this package? First and foremost there are the $2,000 checks. Biden has made a point of continuing the populist messaging on the checks from the Georgia runoffs, that $600 was too small. He recognizes that something 80 percent of the country or more will qualify for will simply overshadow the rest of the package, and he’s leading with it.

I’m aware of Joe Manchin rejecting the idea of $2,000 checks, though his office walked that back pretty quickly and on Sunday said he prefers targeting without dismissing the concept entirely. The pound of flesh Manchin may extract is more means testing, but Biden wouldn’t be leading with this very popular measure if it couldn’t pass.

Other parts of this package likely include extending the unemployment insurance boosts beyond March, more money for the vaccine rollout, and state and local aid, the major missing piece on the fiscal side from the last bill. There’s also likely to be more rental assistance, small business help, and funding to allow schools to reopen.

This is a broad package, not just an “immediate” run of checks, as Biden promised in Georgia. It’ll take some time. The inclusion of state and local aid in particular, meanwhile, virtually ensures that the bill would have to be carried out through budget reconciliation, the process by which the Senate can pass budget-related items with a simple majority. Everything in this package would be almost certain to qualify. Senate Republicans are unlikely to support anything with state and local funding in enough numbers to avoid the filibuster.

It’s likely that Biden gets three budget reconciliation bills before the 2022 midterms. There’s one available per fiscal year, and none have been used for the current one. The plan that appears to be taking shape is: a COVID relief bill for Fiscal Year 2021, a broad infrastructure package funded through tax hikes on the rich for FY 2022, and a package to be named later for FY 2023.

The administration should be concerned that the complexities of budget reconciliation, and their impulse to at least test regular order and give Republicans a chance to pass another relief package, will bog down what was a signature campaign promise. It’s my belief that $2,000 checks, an 80-20 issue in the country, has a super-majority in Congress. It could probably carry upon it some things, like vaccine relief, but not everything, and particularly not municipal funding.

The checks can serve as a trust-building exercise. A significant portion of the left is skeptical that the Biden team is committed to making a difference in the lives of ordinary people. Checks have become somewhat totemic in this sense, and can be used to dispel that skepticism. Reconciliation is always available later if Republicans decide to be on the wrong side of an 80-20 issue. Plus, you want to save the reconciliation bills to maximize what can pass on a simple majority. (If we didn’t have a filibuster we could just have the novel concept of majority rule, but some Democratic Senators would rather preen than enable the popular will.)

Number of Vaccine Doses Given
8.02 million, with a total of 1.8 million since last checking in on Friday. The percentage of allocated shots administered has jumped to 36 percent. West Virginia is up to 72 percent of its supply, and one major reason is that it rejected the federal plan to partner with CVS and Walgreens to vaccinate long-term care facilities. Instead the state relied on independent pharmacies with existing relationships with nursing homes, and they’re running laps around the big chains. North Dakota, another state with significant local pharmacy ownership, is also doing well, and Oklahoma just stripped CVS of responsibility for vaccines at veteran’s centers. The fifty layers of corporate middlemen appear to be the problem for the chains, relative to the flexibility of local practitioners.

Monopolies create hidden harms beyond price: who wrote a book about that?

 

[NY's #1 Draft Pick]

Could have picked someone tough like Sally Yates. Could have picked someone black leaders wanted like Doug Jones. Nah let me pick the old soft white centrist man who won't do shyt

Dems can't do anything right. Almost as bad as the Villsack pick.

Man shut yo negative ass up

they just swept GA and got a black senator elected. You always in here complaining!

 

[Worthless Loser]

Man shut yo negative ass up

they just swept GA and got a black senator elected. You always in here complaining!

I'm sorry for recognizing the weakness of Merrick Garland and wanting someone better after 2 far right AG's.

 

[FAH1223]