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

[Spidey Man]

I'm really looking forward to that Vegas to LA in 2 hours. It's a pain to drive it and now I can spend less money on Vegas dispensary weed and get better quality Cali bud. It'll also make going to see the Mets easier.

That Scranton to NYC would have been great back when I was on the East Coast. I hope eventually we get something like Seattle to Phoenix and it hits every major city in between

 

[88m3]

this is what real infrastructure looks like under an actual president and administration

also goes to show how stupid the people are that bytch about Ukraine and other fp initiatives

 

[bnew]

https://archive.is/U25R7

 

[bnew]

https://archive.is/XlQyz

https://archive.is/CbTgl

https://archive.is/mZaXV

 

[phcitywarrior]

https://archive.is/XlQyz

https://archive.is/CbTgl

https://archive.is/mZaXV

Great policy but IMO, they missed the mark on the most critical corridors that need the high speed rail (HSR) infrastructure.

1. Boston to DC/Richmond (NE Corridor) needs dedicated high speed passenger trains that run on their own lines.

2. SF - LA - This is much better IMO than LA to Vegas. SF - LA is already one of the most traveled airline routes in the US. I suspect the airline lobby might have influenced taking this route out of the bill. Idk how I feel about the HSR coming from NoCal, through CV, to get to SoCal. Seems “unfocused” and trying to serve two masters.

Still very good policy. I’m one of the biggest advocates of rail infrastructure. For some corridors like SF-LA or DC-NYC, it’s probably only 45 more mins in travel time compared to flying, but a far more comfortable experience and if built well, is actually more convenient as you’ll be going from city center to city center, whereas with flying, airports tend to be outside the city/urban areas.

 

[bnew]

Biden campaign says jobs report shows he is ‘cleaning up the economic disaster’ Trump left

President Biden’s reelection campaign said the president is cleaning up the economic disaster left behind by former President Trump, hailing the strong jobs report released Friday. Labor Department…

thehill.com

Biden campaign says jobs report shows he is ‘cleaning up the economic disaster’ Trump left​

BY ALEX GANGITANO - 12/08/23 9:31 AM ET

President Biden’s reelection campaign said the president is cleaning up the economic disaster left behind by former President Trump, hailing the strong jobs report released Friday.

Labor Department data showed the U.S. economy added 199,000 jobs in November, and the unemployment rate fell to 3.7 percent, which was above economists’ expectations.

“Joe Biden has now created more jobs in less than three years than any president created in four, cleaning up the economic disaster [Trump] left behind,” Biden-Harris 2024 spokesperson Seth Schuster said in a statement.

“There’s more work to be done, but his record shows Americans can’t trust Trump to do it. Instead of standing up to corporate greed to lower costs and raise wages for working people, Trump would double down on the same failed policies that gave massive tax cuts to the rich and big corporations, while creating incentives to ship American jobs overseas,” he added.

The campaign also claimed Trump, who is leading the GOP field for the presidential nomination, put the economy “in ruin” as president.

Biden often points to low unemployment as a clear indicator the economy is improving. While polling has shown Americans largely feel the price of goods is too high, the president has consistently argued his economic plan, dubbed “Bidenomics,” is working.

Last year, there were widespread predictions the U.S. economy would tip into a recession, but it has remained surprisingly resilient. But Republicans are quick to hit Biden on the economy, arguing Americans are worse off since he took office.

The White House, meanwhile, is bracing for more economic news next week when the Federal Reserve will hold its final meeting of the year. The central bank is widely expected to hold interest rates steady at a range of 5.25 percent to 5.5 percent after keeping rates flat at its past two meetings.

 

[bnew]

Biden to Big Pharma: Gouge Prices and We’ll Snatch Your Patents

Under a 43-year-old law, the feds can revoke drug patents if the company acts against the public interest. Will Biden be the first to try?

newrepublic.com

Biden to Big Pharma: Gouge Prices and We’ll Snatch Your Patents​

Under a 43-year-old law, the feds can revoke drug patents if the company acts against the public interest. Will Biden be the first to try?​

DAN KITWOOD/WPA POOL/GETTY IMAGES

When Joe Biden was elected president, Medicare was barred by law from negotiating the prices it paid for the drugs it purchased with taxpayer dollars. For a generation, presidential candidates of both parties had pledged to kill the “noninterference clause” that was the price Big Pharma extracted in 2003 from President George W. Bush to extend Medicare coverage to drugs (“Medicare Part D”). Last year, Biden finally got rid of the noninterference clause as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, and in October, the Health and Human Services Department announced that negotiations had begun on prices for 10 drugs that represent about 20 percent of all drugs covered under Medicare Part D. Changing the law to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices was, as Biden would say, a Big fukking Deal. If you’re one of those people who tells pollsters that Biden has done a poor job managing the economy, Medicare price negotiation is one of the better examples that prove you wrong.

Now, Politico’s Adam Cancryn reported Wednesday, the Biden administration is in the early stages of curbing excessive prices for drugs purchased not only by government programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare but also in the private market. This time, Biden doesn’t need to pass a law because Congress gave the executive branch that power way back in December 1980, in legislation co-sponsored by Senators Robert Dole, Republican of Kansas, and Birch Bayh, Democrat of Indiana. It was a swan song of sorts for Bayh, whose distinguished 18-year term as a leading light of American liberalism had been cut short one month earlier by the November election, which gave Republicans their first Senate majority since 1955. In one of modern U.S. political history’s unkindest cuts, Bayh lost to Dan Quayle. That election also installed Ronald Reagan in the White House and initiated an era of political reaction from which Biden has been struggling to break free.

The post–New Deal shift toward conservatism, people tend to forget, actually began under President Jimmy Carter, who boosted defense spending, lowered the capital gains tax, and initiated (in collaboration with Ted Kennedy and Ralph Nader) deregulation of the airline and trucking industries. Carter’s course correction became, under Reagan, a violent pendulum swing to the right. The Bayh-Dole Act was one of the Carter era’s more judicious market-friendly policies. Since World War II, the federal government, following recommendations from Vannevar Bush’s July 1945 report Science, the Endless Frontier, had created the National Science Foundation, expanded the National Institutes of Health, and ramped up investment in research and development. But much of this research was bottled up in national laboratories and universities; fewer than 5 percent of the federal government’s 28,000 patents were licensed to private companies. The Bayh-Dole Act addressed this bottleneck by allowing universities, nonprofits, and small businesses to patent federally funded inventions; President Ronald Reagan later extended the same rights, by presidential memorandum, to all federal contractors. The law also allowed federal agencies to grant businesses exclusive licenses to technology developed by the government. The result was an explosion in innovation that, by one estimate, helped increase the gross domestic product over the past generation by $333 billion to $1 trillion.

Bayh-Dole was never intended, though, to write industry a blank check. The government retained “march-in” rights to seize back a license or patent if warranted by circumstances that included health and safety but were otherwise defined only vaguely in the legislation. This being the dawn of the Reagan era, however, those march-in rights were never exercised. For the first 17 years after enactment nobody bothered to file a petition to march in; the first, in 1997, was filed by Bayh himself (on behalf of a lobby client). It alleged that “unreasonably high royalties” were being charged by the patent holder of a medical device used to assist in bone marrow transplants. Since then, about a dozen petitions have been filed, nearly all concerning drugs. The petitions typically complain that a patent holder is either not manufacturing a sufficient quantity of a drug or charging an excessive price. None of these petitions has ever been granted. As recently as March, NIH rejected a march-in petition to seize the patent for Xtandi, a Pfizer drug for the treatment of prostate cancer. The petition alleged that the drug, which retails for $150,000 per year, was priced too high.

Drug prices, you may have noticed, are going through the roof. Even as the consumer price index, or CPI, settles down to a congenial 3.2 percent, prescription drug prices rocket upward. According to a November analysis by the Center for American Progress, those drugs whose prices are rising are doing so at a rate that exceeds the CPI, on average, by 30 percent. For some drugs, price increases exceeded the CPI by a factor of five. How many of these drugs were developed using federal dollars? Very likely all of them. The Food and Drug Administration approved 210 new drugs between 2010 and 2016; NIH funding contributed to research underlying every last one of them.

Why didn’t the government use Bayh-Dole to rein in drug prices before? A major obstacle was uncertainty about whether price gouging was ever intended to be one of the conditions permitting the government to snatch back a patent. In 2002, Peter Arno, professor of epidemiology and social medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and Michael Davis, professor of law at Cleveland State University in Ohio, argued in a Washington Post op-ed that of course Congress intended pricing to be taken into account. Dole and Bayh then replied, in a Washington Post op-ed of their own, that

Bayh-Dole did not intend that government set prices on resulting products. The law makes no reference to a reasonable price that should be dictated by the government. This omission was intentional.

Big Pharma cites this as a conversation-ender, sort of like Woody Allen’s Marshall McLuhan triumph in Annie Hall (“You know nothing of my work”). But Bayh and Dole’s op-ed had already been contradicted by Bayh himself filing a march-in petition five years earlier based, as noted above, on pricing (“unreasonably high royalties”). If Bayh really believed, along with Dole, that pricing was irrelevant to Bayh-Dole, he had a funny way of showing it.

On Thursday, the Biden administration announced that a review initiated last March by the Departments of Health and Human Services and Commerce concluded that, contrary to a rule proposed by the Trump administration but never finalized by the Biden administration, “price can be a factor in determining that a drug or other taxpayer-funded invention is not accessible to the public.” (Italics mine.) According to Politico, the Biden administration isn’t targeting any particular drug, and it isn’t expected to; so far, the policy seems intended mainly to put drug companies on notice that if they price drugs derived from federal research too prohibitively, they’ll risk the feds finally imposing the punishment Bayh and Dole authorized 43 years ago.

An August poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that three in 10 adults said they took less medicine than prescribed in order to save on costs. Twenty-one percent said they didn’t fill the prescription at all, and 12 percent said they cut the pills in half. More affluent adults reported doing this less, but even in households earning $90,000 or more, about one-quarter said they cut corners one way or another to save money. Taxpayers have spent literally hundreds of billions to develop these drugs, and they didn’t do it to make drug companies rich. They did it to help sick people get the medications they need to get well, and sometimes just to stay alive. With his more aggressive new policy, Biden is reminding Big Pharma of this fact, and warning that if it pushes its luck he will lower the boom. It’s a shame neither Bayh nor Dole lived to see this proud moment.

 

[88m3]

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

https://compactmag.com/article/the-left-s-foolish-attack-on-bidenomics

 

[bnew]

Biden announces proposal to replace all lead water service lines in US within 10 years

President Biden has announced a plan to “strengthen its Lead and Copper Rule that would require water systems to replace lead service lines within 10 years."

abcnews.go.com

Biden announces proposal to replace all lead water service lines in US within 10 years​

More than 9.2 million American households connect to water through lead pipes.

ByJon Haworth
Video byJade Lawson

November 30, 2023, 6:44 AM

How lead service lines became a modern-day public health crisis

Millions of Americans don't have clean drinking water. With over 9 million lead pipes still running underg...


The Biden administration has announced a proposal to “strengthen its Lead and Copper Rule that would require water systems to replace lead service lines within 10 years,” the White House said in a statement on Thursday.

According to the White House, more than 9.2 million American households connect to water through lead pipes and lead service lines and, due to “decades of inequitable infrastructure development and underinvestment,” many Americans are at risk of lead exposure.

MORE: New details on Biden's private apology to Muslim Americans for rhetoric on Palestinian civilians​

“There is no safe level of exposure to lead, particularly for children, and eliminating lead exposure from the air, water, and homes is a crucial component of the Biden-Harris Administration’s historic commitment to advancing environmental justice,” the Biden administration said.

“The President’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law invests over $50 billion for the largest upgrade to the nation’s water infrastructure in history, and today’s action builds on these historic levels of funding from President Biden’s Investing in America agenda, a key pillar of Bidenomics, to replace lead service lines across the nation,” the statement continued.

US President Joe Biden speaks to reporters before boarding Air Force One at Pueblo Memorial Airport in Pueblo, Colorado, on November 29, 2023, as he travels back to the White House in Washington, DC. (Photo by...Show more

Andrew Caballero-reynolds/AFP via Getty Images

The proposal would also aim to increase tap water sampling requirements, require water systems to complete comprehensive and publicly available lead service line inventories and strengthen and streamline requirements for water systems to take additional actions to reduce lead health risks to communities.

“This proposal advances the Biden-Harris Administration’s Lead Pipe and Paint Action Plan, a whole-of-government approach to reduce all sources of lead exposure,” the White House said.

MORE: Will Biden's handling of the Israel-Hamas war turn off young and Muslim voters in 2024?​

During the 2023 fiscal year alone, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) completed 49 cleanup projects that addressed lead contamination where it posed risks to people’s health around the country.

Lead is the environmental contaminant most commonly reported to the EPA, according to the White House.

“The Biden-Harris Administration is working to ensure a future where every child and family can live safely in their communities without the fear and harmful effects of lead exposure,” said the White House.

 

[ADevilYouKhow]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/07/uaw-volkswagen-chattanooga-tennesse

Solid

 

[ADevilYouKhow]

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/timeshare-exit-company-sues-westgate-vacation-property-operator-2023-12-08/

Fingers crossed. The John Oliver episode about this was crazy

 

[ADevilYouKhow]

The Guns Were Said to Be Destroyed. Instead, They Were Reborn.

Communities across the U.S. are fueling a secondary arms market by giving seized and surrendered guns to disposal services that destroy one part and resell the rest.

www.nytimes.com

Really disturbing

The Guns Were Said to Be Destroyed. Instead, They Were Reborn.​

Communities across the U.S. are fueling a secondary arms market by giving seized and surrendered guns to disposal services that destroy one part and resell the rest

 

[BigMoneyGrip]

The Guns Were Said to Be Destroyed. Instead, They Were Reborn.

Communities across the U.S. are fueling a secondary arms market by giving seized and surrendered guns to disposal services that destroy one part and resell the rest.

www.nytimes.com

Really disturbing

The Guns Were Said to Be Destroyed. Instead, They Were Reborn.​

Communities across the U.S. are fueling a secondary arms market by giving seized and surrendered guns to disposal services that destroy one part and resell the rest

Smh

 

[the cac mamba]

govern, brehs