Monday Morning Open Thread: President Biden, in His Element

I’m so glad that you are back Anne. It was a long, long week. The local news mentioned the formula shipment, but said it was not enough.
This is why we can’t have nice things.

It’s safe to say that Murdoch’s merry menials in Oz are not taking the election result well
https://twitter.com/MrKRudd/status/1528294370700455936?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1528294370700455936%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thepoke.co.uk%2F2022%2F05%2F23%2Fthis-sky-news-presenters-fury-at-labours-election-win-in-australia-is-unintentionally-hilarious%2F

“kalakal May 23, 2022 at 7:50 AM
It’s safe to say that Murdoch’s merry menials in Oz are not taking the election result well”

Ugh. “Woke identity politics”. Such a bore. Haven’t they beaten “woke” to death at this point? How long can this grift last where ranting about “wokeness” counts as some kind of analysis?
They’ve successfully beaten back the existential threat posed by overly earnest 20 year old undergrads. Isn’t it time they moved on?

@Soprano2, I wish the media would ask Jared about the 2 billion from Saudi.
The media is now busy talking about Stacey Abrams latest gaffe.

Soprano2 May 23, 2022 at 8:23 AM

It’s a real gift to Abbott. They managed to make the failure of that company’s management into a failure of Joe Biden.
Good job, everyone! Pass that accountability along to the person least responsible for it!
Abbott must be wondering how the fuck they managed to pull this PR coup off, where literally everyone is blamed except the company that makes baby formula. They could not have paid for better coverage. Insanity.

@ JPL; The press seems to have pretty much forgotten about Jared and Ivanka and Don Jr. and Eric, haven’t they? All the outrage about Hunter Biden profiting from his dad’s name is a lie, because they sure aren’t too outraged about Trump’s kids making billions of dollars off Daddy’s name.

@ Kay; Yep, Abbot’s extreme negligence (two babies died!!!!) was only a footnote to the coverage of “Why isn’t Biden DOING SOMETHING ABOUT THIS HORRENDOUS PROBLEM WE JUST DISCOVERED THE OTHER DAY!”. You’re right, Abbot couldn’t have hoped for better coverage from the press. This is an issue that didn’t have to be political, but of course they couldn’t resist making it political. They could have gone with “Abbot Labs’ negligence, which killed 2 infants and sickened several others, is the primary cause of the current baby formula shortage in America”, and then told that story, without any reference to politics at all. It’s a compelling story! – the big bad company killed babies because they’d rather spend $6 million giving their shareholders stock buybacks than fix their filthy plant – but they decided they’d rather go with “Biden administration finally addresses baby formula shortage”.

Has anyone else seen this yet? https://www.cjr.org/the_profile/nyt-pitchbot.php Doug is becoming famous for his prescience when it comes to NY Times headlines and stories.

Yep, Abbot’s extreme negligence (two babies died!!!!) was only a footnote to the coverage of “Why isn’t Biden DOING SOMETHING ABOUT THIS HORRENDOUS PROBLEM WE JUST DISCOVERED THE OTHER DAY!”.

They successfully lobbied government to limit competition and then couldn’t even supply the protected market they created. They didn’t have the capacity to absorb a single plant shutting down. One plant shuts down, the whole system fails. 100% private sector failure.

And all of media have decided this is solely the responsibility of Joe Biden, letting the BABY FORMULA COMPANY completely off the hook.

I guess they’re too big to fail. The response should be another baby formula supplier -one that can actually produce enough baby formula – is created by this market failure, but that won’t happen because we’ve all decided it’s up to the President to get baby formula on the shelves.

Ridiculous. These people aren’t capitalists. They’re some weird new variant that exists solely to protect failed management at existing companies.

I hope the European companies take a big chunk of their market share. They don’t deserve to keep it. They suck at their job, which is “producing enough baby formula to meet demand”. Not Joe Biden’s job. Their job.

Gin and Tonic:
That Strzok tweet is beautiful.

Soprano2 May 23, 2022 at 8:57 AM
“Abbot Labs’ negligence, which killed 2 infants and sickened several others, is the primary cause of the current baby formula shortage in America”

I guess Biden’s spokespeople and other Democrats should have been saying that the first time the story “broke,” possibly leaving out the “kill 2 infants and sickened others,” though I’d’ve left that in the story.

I’m sure someone will come along and tell me why that would be such a bad idea.

Similarly, Democrats could point out that this is a failure of unfettered capitalism, when the free market is actually not free but rather dominated by one company.

@WaterGirl

He’s said the same thing before. It’s definitely a strategy.

@Soprano2: great catch re the Columbia Journalism Review article on DougJ. With quotes from John Cole, and mentioning the blog. Wow.

@Baud: No, no. It’s because Biden’s senile. Fox and Fiends would never lie about that!

@WaterGirl I think this is the correct take.

Also note that the US’. One China Policy is not the same thing as China’s One China Principle.

The exclusion of Taiwan from the new Indo-Pacific Economic Framework is pretty bad optics, though.

@Soprano 2

Great article! And the Blog Father didn’t even give us a heads up about Doug’s and his own new found fame in the CJR!

@JWR

“There’s no way in Hell something that big can actually get off the ground!”

*cough* Saturn V *cough*

😉

Also too, Ekranoplan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8Nu94khHoo

Or if you have more than a few minutes, the Antonov 225 remains in service, flying Ukrainian colors. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsh2GSHM2TA

@Soprano2

Thanks for the link. Great article.

The link to the article is currently on the front page of memeorandum!

@Soprano2, @Elizabelle:

From the CJR Dougj pitchbot story:

Through the online donation platform ActBlue, he’s brought in more than $2.8
million to date.

Wow, that’s some serious moolah. Fun story, and glad it’s gonna be front paged!

Betty, isnt’ her and the young and oh so supple when properly oiled Jared being shunned by even the rich? Likely she is trying to buy her soul back so she doesn’t end up with Steve Bannon as her only friend.

Baud May 23, 2022 at 9:32 AM

I understand holding the President responsible for the economy although that’s also sort of facile, lazy bullshit, I’ll go along.
But he’s now responsible for each and every failure by any US company?
They’ve taken this out to a ludicrous level. I’m just not buying that Joe Biden is responsible for making baby formula. It’s not true.
I saw a clip where Buttigieg patiently explained how things are supposed to work in a (supposedly) market economy and I wanted to hug him.
If the 3 formula companies manipulated the market to protect their own share and then failed to meet demand, that’s on them. It’s not the FDA’s fault, it’s not Joe Biden’s fault, it’s their fault.
But why should they improve? Media has bent over backwards to hold them harmless. So now they get a guaranteed US market share and they aren’t capable of or even much interested in supplying it. They did absolutely nothing to fix the problem they created and they have no incentive to ever fix it. They fuck up and another plant shuts down and we’re right where we were. We’re hostages.
I look forward to Joe Biden’s “solution” to the next auto recall. My UPS parcel arrives late I expect CNN to demand Joe Biden deliver it to me personally.
They’re ridiculous people and their coverage is ridiculous. It’s anti-truth. They exist to protect bad managers and bad management.
One thing is for sure- no one will ever dare regulate another baby formula company. We can’t. They’ll punish us with shortages they created. My advice to parents is use German formula. US formula is now a crap shoot as far as safety because government has certainly learned their lesson. They shut a plant down because it’s not SAFE and all of media will blame government rather than the company. They could not have bought better coverage without purchasing a media company.
Has Abbott fired a single person in management over this, or are their jobs as protected as the market they lobbied for? There’s no accountability at all.

@Kay
(https://jackal-action.com/2022/05/23/monday-morning-open-thread-president-biden-in-his-element/#comment-1173)

Dems are presumptively communist so they are responsible for everything that happens in the economy.

@ Kay: Abbott’s CEO had an op ed in the WaPost yesterday. (Thanks, Jeff Bezos.). It starts out as an infomercial, of course. The WaPost reader commenters saw through the sham and savaged the guy and the company.

Robert Ford: Abbott CEO: We’re sorry about the formula shortage. Here’s what we’re doing to fix it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/21/abbott-ceo-robert-ford-formula-elevil/

I would really guess they were forced into a lot of their remedial actions by the feds, but you’ll not hear much on that from Robert Ford.

The most liked reader comment: “The company personally sat on making the necessary repairs to the factory and instead gave their board and CEOs huge bonuses. Cry me a river, you are just another person who puts profit before people or in this case, babies.”

And: two other WaPost commenters, who are not as innumerate as too many of our fine journalists:

“Setting up a $5 million fund, sounds like a joke when most CEO pay is many, many, many millions per year.”

“They spent over $5 Billion on stock buy backs instead of on plant improvements. How much do you want to bet that the.prices will go up? And stay up?”

Mmm, scrambled eggs and Spam. Folks were talking about Spam “back home” a couple weeks ago, but it’s always been camping food to me. I don’t generally like it much, but out in the woods, fried up in some scrambled eggs on a Coleman stove, it’s just somehow better.

And here we are, camped out at Jackal Action, roughing it. Spam and eggs, anyone?

Kay: Abbott’s CEO had an op ed in the WaPost yesterday. (Thanks, Jeff Bezos.). It starts out as an infomercial, of course. The WaPost reader commenters saw through the sham and savaged the guy and the company”

They should reimburse the government for the cost of the emergency formula program.
Pay us back.
It isn’t the job of the US military to deliver formula to cover the asses of these companies. They owe us whatever that cost.
And stop protecting them. They failed. Open it up and offer European brands. They probably have tighter regulatory schemes for safety anyway and now we’re in a position where if a federal agency shuts one plant down that administration has a political disaster on their hands. The next President will be very reluctant to regulate, which is all to the benefit of these companies. They fucked up, they win. That’s what they learned. It shouldn’t work like this. It’s dangerous, like, actually dangerous to infants.
They treat their US customers like garbage. They shouldn’t get the business. So there’s not going to be any accountability of any kind. They won’t even lose market share because idiot media has taken a private sector failure and made it a Joe Biden failure. US consumers are the chumps of this system. They pay the price, not just in the shortages, but in paying to alleviate the shortages. They’re billing us for their fuck up.

I heard Pete Buttigieg’s response to the formula question. He’s just a really good communicator especially on this since he’s got two infants who are totally dependent on formula. He really needs to be Biden’s explainer in chief

@Soprano2

Agree. If Bush or Trump had gotten military plans to fly in a bunch 9f formula, the media would be waiving the American flag and playing Lee Greenwood all the time.

On the subject of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, here is a reality check from Scott Kennedy of CSIS:

Bridging Differences with Friends on China
https://www.csis.org/blogs/trustee-china-hand/bridging-differences-friends-china

The most damn section:
“3. I have not met a single individual in the region who is enthusiastic about the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF). The lack of any market access benefits has left many disappointed. Although there is an awareness of IPEF’s four pillars – trade facilitation, supply-chain resilience, infrastructure and decarbonization, and taxes and anti-corruption – interlocutors had a hard time explaining the components beyond vague generalities; they are unsure if it will ever come to fruition, and if so, whether it will be durable. No companies I interviewed in any of the three economies could identify a specific tangible benefit they could derive from the arrangement. This skepticism was often tinged with resentment because IPEF is viewed as in some ways a competitor to the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CP-TPP), an agreement the United States helped create but then abandoned, and which would have collapsed had Japan not stepped into the breach to provide critical leadership. Countries have grudgingly expressed a willingness to join IPEF, but most people I met said they are only doing so because they want to keep the United States involved in the region’s economic architecture in the hope that it comes back to CP-TPP once it is more politically feasible to do so. (In Taiwan, there was substantial disappointment among various circles that the island apparently was not going to be invited to join IPEF because such a step would be unacceptable to other potential members wary of alienating Beijing.)

These differences are not about minor details; they are major points of contention that could potentially scupper the cooperation necessary among America and its allies to successfully prosecute strategic competition against China…”

Van Jackson (former Obama DOD official) has been much more cutting in his Twitter comments on the IPEF specifically, & the Biden team’s Indo-Pacific foreign policy in general.

Since the GWB administration, through Obama, Trump & now Biden, the US has been “competing” against China in the economic/trade sphere (in the Asia Pacific & the Global South) by trying to beat something w/ nothing. Unfortunately, the state of the US domestic politics precludes any discussion of opening market access in return for greater influence. The IPEF does not appear to offer any meaningful change. Meanwhile, China has worked w/ the ASEAN to complete the RCEP free trade agreement, which involves substantial market opening, & has applied to joint the CPTPP, which will entail even greater opening.

OTOH, below is the type deft of diplomacy that could allow the US to gain ground against China in the Global South, if sustained & accumulated over time:

‘Quad’ security group plans system to track illegal fishing by China
https://www.ft.com/content/4066cc72-119a-48e2-b55c-980c4e3f6c9a

The massive Chinese fishing fleets intruding into other national’s Exclusive Economic Zones & depleting the local stock has been a source of significant tension between China & other maritime nations, w/ the victims generally in the Global South. In doing so, Chinese fishing fleets are following the footsteps of the Japanese, South Koreans & Taiwanese fleets (them taking advantage of the anarchy in Somalia since the 90s to run wild in its EEZ helped precipitate the piracy problem), but China being so much larger & hands out so much more state subsidies, its negative effects has been so much greater. Such kind of pressure might actually embarrass China into changing policy, & is less likely to contribute to the death spiral of the Sino-US relations into a new cold war.

@Kay Saw on the Twitters that US Customs is still destroying baby formula from overseas upon arrival in the US. One woman was saying a $700 shipment was just thrown out. As someone responded, there has been a small underground market in European baby formulas and cracking down on those people, who have good sources and contacts, will just drive the emerging black market to criminal fraudsters and non-safe products.

Somebody around here was asking about finding your place in comments after refreshing the site. I realized, if on a laptop, I could copy a bit of the last comment (before refreshing) and then, after the refresh, using ‘ctrl + f’ (the ‘find’ function) and pasting the copied bit into the search window. Voila.