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

[Dusty Bake Activate]

Innocent civilians including children. And we have the nerve to criticize terrorist groups like we are the heroes


Kabul attack: Nine family members killed in US airstrike targeting suspected ISIS-K suicide bomber, relative says - CNN

That’s just “collateral damage.”

Crazy how permanently occupying and bombing civilians has been completely normalized as benign and inevitable my entire lifetime.

 

[FAH1223]

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

last this this was on the table Saudi Arabia damn near started another war

 

[Json]

That’s why the law is insane. That shyt is straight out of the handmaid’s take.

In Afghanistan, citizens there would turn in neighbors they had a dispute with and call them Taliban for a reward. The provisions in that law are the same thing.

Cause they want certain deep pocket organizations to sue abortion providers into oblivion with long winding process and accusations that it doesn’t matter if it’s true since the funding for the clinic would be drained.

There’s no penalty for being wrong

 

[ADevilYouKhow]

Nearly 1 in 3 Americans experienced a weather disaster this summer — The Washington Post
do something !

 

[ADevilYouKhow]

last this this was on the table Saudi Arabia damn near started another war

Good

 

[FAH1223]

How Ron Wyden Wants to Weaken Taxes on Multinationals

His proposal keeps Trump loopholes and bears the fingerprints of corporate lobbyists.
BY REUVEN AVI-YONAH
SEPTEMBER 2, 2021

Multinationals evade a lot of U.S. taxes by taking advantage of loopholes that allow them to book profits in tax havens and otherwise avoid taxation. A recent estimate has put the revenue lost to the U.S. from such profit-shifting before the 2017 Trump tax law at $100 billion per year. Trump’s tax changes only made this worse, because they actually encouraged multinationals to shift not just profits, but actual jobs, offshore.

The Biden administration came out with a proposed reform in March that would reverse the Trump changes and add other significant improvements. Now, Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the chair of the Senate Finance Committee, is out with a proposal much weaker than the administration’s.

Last April, I wrote in these pages about Wyden’s initial proposal. Last week, Wyden unveiled further details of his plan. This time, he enlisted Sens. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Mark Warner of Virginia as co-sponsors. Unfortunately, it is clear that between April and August the lobbyists for corporate America have succeeded in making the Wyden proposal even worse.

The biggest difference between the administration proposal and Wyden’s is that the administration jettisons most of the 2017 Trump tax law. The Wyden proposal, on the other hand, keeps most of the Trump tax provisions, such as the Foreign-Derived Intangible Income (FDII) regime, which is an unjustified export subsidy for large multinationals, and the Base Erosion and Anti-Abuse Tax (BEAT), a completely ineffective and loophole-ridden provision.

According to Sen. Wyden, these provisions should be retained because they make life easier for the multinationals (“making taxpayer compliance and administration simpler,” as his release puts it). But is it the role of Democrats to make life easier for large multinationals? The Biden administration proposal eliminates both Trump inventions, FDII and BEAT.

Even on the most important revenue-raiser derived from the Trump tax law, a minimum tax device called the Global Intangible Low-Taxed Income (GILTI) rule, there are crucial differences between the administration proposal and the Wyden proposal. GILTI is intended to tax the offshore profits of American multinationals, but under the Trump tax law only profits that exceeded a fixed 10 percent return on physical assets are taxed. This created a strong incentive to move factories and jobs overseas. Both the administration proposal and the Wyden proposal eliminate this exemption. But there is still a crucial difference between them.

It is clear that between April and August the lobbyists for corporate America have succeeded in making the Wyden proposal even worse.

The administration proposal taxes all GILTI income at a 21 percent rate with no exemptions. The Wyden proposal, on the other hand, does not specify a rate, but only imposes tax if the foreign tax is below the GILTI rate. If the foreign tax is at or above the GILTI rate, then the income remains exempt even when repatriated, just as under the Trump tax law.

In principle, since the multinational has to pay tax either to the foreign country or to the U.S., there is no incentive to shift profits offshore. But with clever tax planning, a multinational can manipulate where expenses and profits are booked for purposes of evading the GILTI 21 percent rate, and pay at the lower foreign rate. For instance, a multinational could borrow in the U.S., but allocate the interest expense to another country. Under Wyden’s bill, the company could end up paying all taxes owed, at a lower rate, to a foreign country and nothing to the U.S. (For readers who want a more technical discussion, here are some additional details.) Under the administration proposal, such shenanigans are not possible because the foreign country tax rate does not matter and there are no exempt amounts under GILTI.

The idea of excluding income subject to high foreign tax from the GILTI floor comes directly from the corporate lobbyists who persuaded the Trump Treasury in 2019–2020 to adopt such an exclusion even though it had no basis in the statutory text (as the Wyden proposal states, it applies GILTI “through a high-tax exclusion modeled on regulations issued by the Treasury Department in 2019 and 2020”). Presumably, the reason for doing so is that the multinationals are concerned that the Biden Treasury may reverse this regulatory giveaway and therefore are seeking to enshrine it in the tax law. But why should Democratic senators go along?

A seat on the Finance Committee is a major political plum because it attracts so many corporate campaign contributions. It is a pity that in this case the contributors seem to have gotten what they paid for. Progressive Democrats like Sens. Warren and Whitehouse, who are also on Finance, should tell their chair to go back to the Biden administration proposal.

 

[Payday23]

How Ron Wyden Wants to Weaken Taxes on Multinationals

His proposal keeps Trump loopholes and bears the fingerprints of corporate lobbyists.
BY REUVEN AVI-YONAH
SEPTEMBER 2, 2021

Multinationals evade a lot of U.S. taxes by taking advantage of loopholes that allow them to book profits in tax havens and otherwise avoid taxation. A recent estimate has put the revenue lost to the U.S. from such profit-shifting before the 2017 Trump tax law at $100 billion per year. Trump’s tax changes only made this worse, because they actually encouraged multinationals to shift not just profits, but actual jobs, offshore.

The Biden administration came out with a proposed reform in March that would reverse the Trump changes and add other significant improvements. Now, Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the chair of the Senate Finance Committee, is out with a proposal much weaker than the administration’s.

Last April, I wrote in these pages about Wyden’s initial proposal. Last week, Wyden unveiled further details of his plan. This time, he enlisted Sens. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Mark Warner of Virginia as co-sponsors. Unfortunately, it is clear that between April and August the lobbyists for corporate America have succeeded in making the Wyden proposal even worse.

The biggest difference between the administration proposal and Wyden’s is that the administration jettisons most of the 2017 Trump tax law. The Wyden proposal, on the other hand, keeps most of the Trump tax provisions, such as the Foreign-Derived Intangible Income (FDII) regime, which is an unjustified export subsidy for large multinationals, and the Base Erosion and Anti-Abuse Tax (BEAT), a completely ineffective and loophole-ridden provision.

According to Sen. Wyden, these provisions should be retained because they make life easier for the multinationals (“making taxpayer compliance and administration simpler,” as his release puts it). But is it the role of Democrats to make life easier for large multinationals? The Biden administration proposal eliminates both Trump inventions, FDII and BEAT.

Even on the most important revenue-raiser derived from the Trump tax law, a minimum tax device called the Global Intangible Low-Taxed Income (GILTI) rule, there are crucial differences between the administration proposal and the Wyden proposal. GILTI is intended to tax the offshore profits of American multinationals, but under the Trump tax law only profits that exceeded a fixed 10 percent return on physical assets are taxed. This created a strong incentive to move factories and jobs overseas. Both the administration proposal and the Wyden proposal eliminate this exemption. But there is still a crucial difference between them.

It is clear that between April and August the lobbyists for corporate America have succeeded in making the Wyden proposal even worse.

The administration proposal taxes all GILTI income at a 21 percent rate with no exemptions. The Wyden proposal, on the other hand, does not specify a rate, but only imposes tax if the foreign tax is below the GILTI rate. If the foreign tax is at or above the GILTI rate, then the income remains exempt even when repatriated, just as under the Trump tax law.

In principle, since the multinational has to pay tax either to the foreign country or to the U.S., there is no incentive to shift profits offshore. But with clever tax planning, a multinational can manipulate where expenses and profits are booked for purposes of evading the GILTI 21 percent rate, and pay at the lower foreign rate. For instance, a multinational could borrow in the U.S., but allocate the interest expense to another country. Under Wyden’s bill, the company could end up paying all taxes owed, at a lower rate, to a foreign country and nothing to the U.S. (For readers who want a more technical discussion, here are some additional details.) Under the administration proposal, such shenanigans are not possible because the foreign country tax rate does not matter and there are no exempt amounts under GILTI.

The idea of excluding income subject to high foreign tax from the GILTI floor comes directly from the corporate lobbyists who persuaded the Trump Treasury in 2019–2020 to adopt such an exclusion even though it had no basis in the statutory text (as the Wyden proposal states, it applies GILTI “through a high-tax exclusion modeled on regulations issued by the Treasury Department in 2019 and 2020”). Presumably, the reason for doing so is that the multinationals are concerned that the Biden Treasury may reverse this regulatory giveaway and therefore are seeking to enshrine it in the tax law. But why should Democratic senators go along?

A seat on the Finance Committee is a major political plum because it attracts so many corporate campaign contributions. It is a pity that in this case the contributors seem to have gotten what they paid for. Progressive Democrats like Sens. Warren and Whitehouse, who are also on Finance, should tell their chair to go back to the Biden administration proposal.

At this point the only way to win in America is to create a company. They have better rights/perks than actual people

 

[Payday23]

Even Chait is sounding the alarm

. Biden brought it in himself trying to say he wanted bipartisanship

 

[Payday23]

I think if we see red states begin a copycat campaign, he'll end up hitting the button. I don't think he's afraid to do it, I do think he's trying to avoid it if all possible. Long-term it could be looked at as extremely brave or extremely stupid and I can see how that it would weigh on him even though realistically, he most likely won't live to see its long term effects.

He absolutely should do it though. lol

If he isn't going to kill it for police reform, voting rights etc. He ain't killing it for women's rights. All they're going to do is say there is nothing that can be done except to vote blue in 22. Dems don't ever go on offense. They are masters at playing the victim card while the GOP takes action. Democrats neglected the courts while the GOP played for power.

 

[Pressure]

If he isn't going to kill it for police reform, voting rights etc. He ain't killing it for women's rights. All they're going to do is say there is nothing that can be done except to vote blue in 22. Dems don't ever go on offense. They are masters at playing the victim card while the GOP takes action. Democrats neglected the courts while the GOP played for power.

The GOP did very little under Trump.


In fact, they didn't do the two things he campaigned on.

1.) ending obamacare
2.) building a wall that Mexico would pay for.

 

[storyteller]

That’s just “collateral damage.”

Crazy how permanently occupying and bombing civilians has been completely normalized as benign and inevitable my entire lifetime.

For Two Decades, Americans Told One Lie After Another About What They Were Doing in Afghanistan

It's a long article but here's the first portion with some relevant bits.

IN THE IMMEDIATE aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, U.S.-backed Afghan warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum’s forces murdered hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Taliban prisoners by jamming them into metal shipping containers and letting them suffocate. At the time, Dostum was on the CIA’s payroll and had been working with U.S. special forces to oust the Taliban from power.

The Bush administration blocked subsequent efforts to investigate the mass murder, even after the FBI interviewed witnesses among the surviving Afghans who had been moved to the U.S. prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and after human rights officials publicly identified the mass grave site where Dostum’s forces had disposed of bodies. Later, President Barack Obama promised to investigate, and then took no action.

Instead, Hollywood stepped in and turned Dostum into a hero. The 2018 movie, “12 Strong,” a jingoistic account of the partnership between U.S. special forces and Dostum in the 2001 invasion, whitewashed Dostum — even as his crimes continued to pile up in the years after the prisoner massacre. At the time of the movie’s January 2018 release, Dostum was in exile, hiding from criminal charges in Afghanistan for having ordered his bodyguards to rape a political opponent, including with an assault rifle. The movie (filmed in New Mexico, not Afghanistan) was based on a book that a New York Times reviewer called “a rousing, uplifting, Toby Keith-singing piece of work.”

For two decades, Americans have told each other one lie after another about the war in Afghanistan. The lies have come from the White House, Congress, the State Department, the Pentagon, and the CIA, as well as from Hollywood, cable news pundits, journalists, and the broader culture.

Americans have hungered for a simple storyline, with heroes and villains, to make sense of the longest war in U.S. history. They have wanted stories like “12 Strong” to make them feel good. But at the very edge of the American empire, the war was nasty and brutish, and brought out in Americans the same imperial arrogance that doomed the U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

This month, as the Taliban swiftly took control of Kabul and the American-backed government collapsed, the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, the government’s watchdog over the Afghan experience, issued his final report. The assessment includes remarkably candid interviews with former American officials involved in shaping U.S. policy in Afghanistan that, collectively, offer perhaps the most biting critique of the 20-year American enterprise ever published in an official U.S. government report.

“The extraordinary costs were meant to serve a purpose,” the report notes, “though the definition of that purpose evolved over time.”

Released in the days after Kabul fell, the report reads like an epitaph for America’s involvement in Afghanistan.

ONE OF THE first things the U.S. did after gaining effective control over Afghanistan following the Taliban’s ouster in 2001 was to set up secret torture chambers. Beginning in 2002, the CIA tortured both Afghans and foreign prisoners flown to these torture rooms from all over Central Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The worst torture chamber was nicknamed “The Darkness” by the prisoners sent there, who suffered such complete sensory deprivation that they did not even know they were in Afghanistan. They were chained in solitary confinement with no light and music blaring constantly. They were hung by their arms for as long as two days, slammed against walls, forced to lie naked on tarps while gallons of ice water were poured over their bodies. At least one prisoner died in CIA custody after being left shackled in frigid temperatures.

No one was ever held to account for the American torture regime in Afghanistan.

American drone strikes also started early in Afghanistan. The CIA killed Al Qaeda operative Mohammed Atef and others with a drone there in November 2001, just two months after 9/11. Afghanistan soon became the beta test site for high-tech drone warfare, leading to countless civilian casualties and deep resentment among the Afghan people, who felt helpless against the unseen threat circling overhead.

America’s early adoption of drone warfare in Afghanistan helped make a fortune for Neal Blue, the chair of General Atomics; the Southern California energy and defense corporation manufactured the Predator, the first armed drone to fly over Afghanistan. (General Atomics subsequently produced the Predator’s follow-on model, the Reaper.) Blue and his brother, Linden Blue, vice chair of General Atomics, maintained low public profiles throughout the war, but as owners of privately held General Atomics, they were among the first — but hardly the last — American contractors to enrich themselves as blood spilled in Afghanistan.

Before long, the CIA’s drone campaign shifted from going after the few Al Qaeda operatives it could find in Afghanistan to targeting the Taliban — thus placing the drone campaign squarely in the midst of the Afghan domestic insurgency.

The U.S. launched more than 13,000 drone strikes in Afghanistan between 2015 and 2020, killing up to 10,000 people, according to statistics kept by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. The CIA, relying on cellphone numbers to find, fix, and finish its alleged enemies, often launched its Hellfire missiles at the wrong targets or at targets standing amid groups of civilians.

The practice devastated Afghan villages, yet the U.S. refused to keep track of civilian casualties from drone strikes. Instead, officials insisted that each strike had hit its intended target, while ignoring the claims of villagers that the missiles had killed a tribal chief or decimated a meeting of village elders.

Former Marine infantry officer Ian Cameron, who oversaw drone targeting in Afghanistan for nine months in 2018 and 2019, wrote in the Washington Post of the “sterility of this type of warfare, which allowed me to kill Taliban fighters in one moment and finish a half-eaten hamburger lunch the next.” It seemed to him a “Sisyphean exercise (since the Taliban never ran out of replacement fighters).”

Along with drone strikes came “night raids,” in which U.S. and Afghan forces would burst into a home in the middle of the night and kill or capture those inside, breeding further resentment. The raids were so deeply unpopular that they sometimes led an entire village to switch its allegiance to the Taliban. What was worse, the U.S. military and the CIA failed for years to fully grasp the degree to which their airstrikes and night raids were being manipulated by Afghans who fed them false information to convince the Americans to launch raids against their local rivals or have those rivals carted off to Guantánamo.

 

[MoneyTron]

If he isn't going to kill it for police reform, voting rights etc. He ain't killing it for women's rights. All they're going to do is say there is nothing that can be done except to vote blue in 22. Dems don't ever go on offense. They are masters at playing the victim card while the GOP takes action. Democrats neglected the courts while the GOP played for power.

Considering women compromise a majority of the party, I don't agree.

And what exactly did they do from 2016-2018?

 

[Spidey Man]

Considering women compromise a majority of the party, I don't agree.

And what exactly did they do from 2016-2018?

They are a majority of the country much less the party.