[The Soup Nazi]

(...cont'd)

At least one of the network’s paid commentators went public with his objections before the Trump special aired. Michael Fanone, a U.S. Capitol Police officer who was injured while defending the Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, riot, wrote an essay published by Rolling Stone that indicted the programming decision.

“Putting him onstage, having him answer questions like a normal candidate who didn’t get people killed in the process of trying to end the democracy he’s attempting to once again run, normalizes what Trump did,” Fanone wrote. “It sends a message that attempting a coup is just part of the process; that accepting election results is a choice; and that there are no consequences, in the media or in politics or anywhere else, for rejecting them.”

In an interview last week, CNN political director David Chalian justified the event by noting that Trump is the front-runner for the 2024 Republican nomination, and that his “unique” status as a twice-impeached, criminally indicted former president who incited the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, didn’t change the network’s journalism mission.

“You’d be hard-pressed to say [the format] is less revealing than a one-on-one interview,” he said.

Chalian did not respond to a request for comment Thursday. CNN spokesman Matt Dornic said in an email, “I think Chris captured our position well in this morning’s [editorial] meeting.”

Trump, for one, expressed satisfaction with the event. “Hope everyone enjoyed CNN tonight,” he wrote on his social media platform Truth Social. “The New Hampshire audience was AMAZING. Thank you!”

But inside CNN, the mood was dark.

“I can’t believe anyone thought this was a good idea,” said one staffer, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid career repercussions. “I’ve been a CNN journalist for many years. I’ve always been so proud to say that. I’ve never, ever been ashamed of CNN until tonight.”

[The Soup Nazi]

Wrongump

[The Soup Nazi]

Publicly at least, Licht has had the backing of his boss, Warner Bros. Discovery chief executive David Zaslav. Asked for comment Thursday, a company spokesperson pointed to Zaslav’s interview on CNBC last week in which he stood by his lieutenant and brushed off some of the criticism that erupted after the town hall was announced. (“We have a divided government. Right? We need to hear both voices,” Zaslav said at the time. “All voices should be heard.”)

Bothsidesism like this ("but her emails...") was a big part of what got Fascist Rapist Fatso elected in 2016. Motherfuckers have learned NOTHING, or, more likely, are perfectly and shamelessly willing to unlearn it for ratings' sakes. "Democracy" this, "democracy" that - words words words. I am fucking PISSED.

Michael Fanone doesn't give a flying fuck if bitch-ass CNN execs let him go for telling it like it is, and that makes him the one TRUE voice of integrity over there, as opposed to "spoke on the condition of anonymity" horseshit.

[Skuj]

I'm hearing unconfirmed reports that Trump's team actually dictated the audience, and certain other conditions, like who can ask questions?

If this is true, and CNN acquiesced to all that, then FUCK CNN even more.

[The Soup Nazi]

Anderson Cooper justified the shitshow with the argument that it was a reminder of what a lying dangerous piece of shit the motherfucker still is. Rather unconvincing, because during the 2015-2016 horror campaign the jizzbucket stepped on every single third rail you can think of and enough mooks dug it so much they made him president.

[The Soup Nazi]

Brian Tyler Cohen's excellent take:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1_qcYfe2gg

[The Soup Nazi]

From The New York Times:

Attack of the Pharma Phantoms

The case of the incredible, disappearing pharma profits

By Paul Krugman
Opinion Columnist

On Thursday, Brad Setser of the Council of Foreign Relations — esteemed by cognoscenti for his forensic analyses of balance of payments data — testified to a Senate committee about global tax avoidance by pharmaceutical companies. This issue may not have loomed large on many people’s radar screens, and with everything else going on you may wonder why you should care. But there are at least two reasons you should.

First, at a time when people are once again angsting about budget deficits — much of the angst is insincere, but still — it’s surely relevant that the U.S. government is losing a lot of revenue because multinational corporations are using accounting tricks to avoid paying taxes on profits earned here.

Second, now that it’s looking increasingly likely that Donald Trump will be the Republican presidential nominee, it seems relevant to note that his one major legislative success — the 2017 tax cut, which was supposed to bring corporate investment back to America — was, in practice, an “America last” bill that encouraged corporations to move even more of their reported profits, and to some extent their actual production, overseas.

About pharma: The U.S. health care system, unlike health systems in other countries, isn’t set up to bargain with drug companies for lower prices. In fact, until the Biden administration passed the Inflation Reduction Act, even Medicare was specifically prohibited from negotiating over drug prices. As a result, the U.S. market has long been pharma’s cash cow: On average, prescription drugs cost 2.56 times — 2.56 times — as much here as they do in other countries.

Strange to say, however, pharmaceutical companies report earning hardly any profits on their U.S. sales. Setser offered a striking chart comparing 2022 revenue and profit for six major pharma companies:

 

As he noted, 2022 was an exceptionally profitable year for these companies, but the pattern — large revenue in the U.S. market, with very low reported profits — has been consistent over time.

How do the pharma giants do that? Mainly by assigning patents and other forms of intellectual property to overseas subsidiaries located in low-tax jurisdictions. Their U.S. operations then pay large fees to these overseas subsidiaries for the use of this intellectual property, magically causing profits to disappear here and reappear someplace else, where they go largely untaxed.

The pharmaceutical industry, where patents rather than manufacturing facilities are companies’ principal assets, is exceptionally well suited to this kind of tax gaming. But it’s not unique. Over time we have increasingly become a knowledge economy, in which a large share of business investment involves spending on intellectual property rather than on plant and equipment:

 

And whereas factories and office buildings have specific locations, intellectual property pretty much resides wherever a corporation says it resides. If Apple decides to assign a lot of its intellectual property to its Irish subsidiary, causing a huge surge in Ireland’s reported gross domestic product, nobody is currently in a position to say it can’t.

How do we know that big overseas profits mainly reflect tax avoidance rather than economic reality? That’s easy: Look at where the profits are being reported. As Setser also pointed out, following up on the work of Gabriel Zucman (who just won the American Economic Association’s prestigious John Bates Clark medal; congratulations, Gabriel!), the great bulk of U.S. corporations’ reported overseas profits are in tiny economies that can’t possibly be major profit centers but do offer low taxes on reported earnings:

 

Which brings us to the Trump tax cut. The core of that tax cut was a reduction in profit taxes, based on the premise that America’s relatively high official corporate tax rate was causing large scale movement of capital overseas. But that corporate capital flight, it turns out, wasn’t real; it was a statistical illusion created by tax avoidance.

By the way, this isn’t just a U.S. problem. The International Monetary Fund estimates that about 40 percent of global foreign direct investment — investment that involves control of foreign subsidiaries, as opposed to portfolio investment, like purchases of stocks and bonds — is actually “phantom” investment driven by tax avoidance that doesn’t correspond to anything real.

It’s not surprising, then, that the Trump tax cut never delivered the promised investment boom. As it happens, right now we actually are seeing a boom in manufacturing investment — but that’s being driven by the Biden administration’s green industrial policy rather than across-the-board tax cuts.

But wait, it gets worse. One particularly ill-drafted feature of the 2017 tax law, with the acronym GILTI (I am not making this up), ended up giving corporations an incentive to shift actual production as well as reported profits overseas. As Setser points out, GILTI is probably a major factor in a recent surge in U.S. imports of pharmaceuticals:

 

Now, there are some very well thought-out proposals to address corporate tax avoidance. Unfortunately, they’re almost surely moot as long as the House is controlled by a party that wants to deny the I.R.S. the resources it needs to go after tax evasion.

But you should still bear in mind that cracking down on tax avoidance could significantly reduce budget deficits. And you should also bear in mind that the Trump administration’s only major domestic policy initiative was a flop.

[Skuj]

I used to enjoy listening to Cooper.

Basically, Team Trump dictated/controlled this whole thing, and CNN let them! CNN basically allowed a Trump rally, with lies, crowd, cheering, and no real opposition.

Fuck CNN.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by Skuj

I used to enjoy listening to Cooper.

Basically, Team Trump dictated/controlled this whole thing, and CNN let them! CNN basically allowed a Trump rally, with lies, crowd, cheering, and no real opposition.

Fuck CNN.

tv will tv

 

not quite accurate but close enough

[The Soup Nazi]

 

[The Soup Nazi]

From The New York Times:

How Biden blew it on debt

Biden didn’t want to believe Republicans were this unreasonable. His mistake.

By Paul Krugman
Opinion Columnist

As soon as Republicans took control of the House last November, it was obvious that they would try to take the economy hostage by refusing to raise the federal debt limit. After all, that’s what they did in 2011 — and hard as it may be to believe, the Tea Party Republicans were sober and sane compared to the MAGA crew. So it was also obvious that the Biden administration needed a strategy to head off the looming crisis.

More and more, however, it looks as if there never was a strategy beyond wishful thinking. I hope that I’m wrong about this — that President Biden will, at the last minute, unveil an effective counter to G.O.P. blackmail. He may even be forced to do so, as I’ll explain in a bit. But right now I have a sick feeling about all of this. What were they thinking? How can they have been caught so off-guard by something that everyone who’s paying attention saw coming?

For those somehow new to this, the United States has a weird and dysfunctional system in which Congress enacts legislation that determines federal spending and revenue, but then, if this legislation leads to a budget deficit, must vote a second time to authorize borrowing to cover the deficit. If even one house of Congress refuses to raise the debt limit, the U.S. government will go into default, with possibly catastrophic financial and economic effects.

This weird aspect of budgeting allows a party that is sufficiently ruthless, sufficiently indifferent to the havoc it might wreak, to attempt to impose through extortion policies it would never be able to enact through the normal legislative process.

What, then, should Biden & Co. have done once Republicans took the House? They could have tried to raise the debt ceiling during the lame-duck session. This would have been hard given an evenly divided Senate. If it was possible at all, it probably would have required making big concessions to those Democratic senators least supportive of Biden’s agenda. Still, better to have a hostage negotiation with Joe Manchin than with Marjorie Taylor Greene.

So unless there was a plan to deal with the coming confrontation, there should have been a major effort to raise the debt ceiling. The fact that there was no such effort suggested that maybe there was such a plan.

But all we’ve seen from Biden officials since the House changed hands has been a combination of assertions that a U.S. default would be catastrophic — which may well be true — and denigration of any and all possible end runs around the debt ceiling. My heart sank, for example, when Janet Yellen, the Treasury secretary, repeatedly rejected the idea of minting a platinum coin — one of several possible ways to bypass the debt limit — as a “gimmick.” Yes, it would be a gimmick, but it would also be harmless. As I explained the other day, it would not mean printing money to cover the deficit; in practice, it would amount to carrying out normal borrowing through a back door.

The problem is that Yellen was in effect saying that the administration wasn’t open to any strategies that sounded silly or unorthodox; yet every strategy that avoids the debt limit must, in fact, be unorthodox, and will probably sound silly if taken out of context.

The economic merits of various unconventional financing strategies aside, think about how the White House was positioning itself politically. On one side, it signaled that it was terrified of the consequences of default; on the other, it made it clear that it was unwilling even to consider any alternatives to an increase in the debt limit. The administration might as well have put a sign on its back saying “Kick Me.”

Maybe the administration expected moderate Republicans or business groups or supposedly nonpartisan advocacy groups to somehow step in and pressure the G.O.P. to produce a clean debt ceiling bill. But I don’t see how anyone who has been awake for the past 15 years could have believed that was a real possibility.

And sure enough, after months of asserting that it would never engage in negotiations over the debt ceiling, that it would accept nothing less than a clean increase, the administration is now … negotiating over the debt ceiling.

Many people have pointed out that this sets a terrible precedent, that having seen that extortion works, Republicans will engage in it again and again. Even these concerns, however, seem to me to be taking too long a view. Now that Republicans see what seems to be an administration on the run, there’s every reason to expect them to keep escalating their immediate demands — quite possibly to the point where no deal is possible.

There’s a precedent from the Obama years. Back in 2011, President Obama and John Boehner, who was then the speaker of the House, came very close to a so-called Grand Bargain on debt that would have been objectively terrible — it would, for example, have raised the age of eligibility for Medicare, even though life expectancy for working-class Americans had risen very little — and would probably have been politically disastrous for Democrats. But the deal fell through because Republicans were unwilling to accept even small tax increases as part of a deficit-reduction plan.

Sure enough, Republicans have reportedly rejected every proposal to make a debt ceiling deal more acceptable to the Democratic base by closing tax loopholes.

I have no idea what happens next. I think there’s a real possibility that Biden officials will in the end be forced by sheer Republican intransigence to adopt unconventional methods after all — a task that will be made much harder by the fact that those same officials have spent months trash-talking the approaches they may need to follow.

But I don’t see any way to regard this whole episode as anything but a disastrous failure to face up to the reality of an opposition party controlled by extremists.


Quick Hits

Raising the debt ceiling would have been hard.

Is underlying inflation cooling?

When prophecy fails, crypto edition.

Crypto runs.

[The Soup Nazi]

An email I got from Gavin Newsom/Democracy PAC:

"pro-criminal"

It's getting close to election season, so you're already hearing Republicans talk a lot about "crime" and "reducing crime" and even some Republicans calling Democrats "pro-criminal."

But let's get the facts straight with a little help from Senator Chris Murphy educating Ron DeSantis:

 

But let's have a look at how California stacks up where we have strong gun laws vs. states with weaker gun laws...

Florida's firearm death rate: 56% higher than California.
Texas's firearm death rate: 73% higher than California.
Tennessee's firearm death rate: 153% higher than California.

Someone should tell Governor Bill Lee since he is such a fan of "evidence-based crime prevention methods."

 

How about Arkansas? Sarah Huckabee Sanders talks a lot about Democrats being soft on crime.

 

Arkansas's firearm death rate: 158% higher than California.

Point is, everyone knows the steps we can take to make our communities safer from gun violence.

Strong gun laws save lives. It’s true in states across this country and countries around the world.

So when you hear Republicans talk about "crime reduction" or call Democrats "pro-criminal," please know that's all they are doing: talking.

[The Soup Nazi]

Originally Posted by Skuj

Basically, Team Trump dictated/controlled this whole thing, and CNN let them! CNN basically allowed a Trump rally, with lies, crowd, cheering, and no real opposition.

Fuck CNN.

This Is TNN

[The Soup Nazi]

 

Skynet maker Cyberdine Systems calls for AI regulation, warning of ‘existential risk’

[The Soup Nazi]

From Fareed Zakaria's newsletter:

The World Of Wagner

The video (which merits a warning to viewers) is ghoulish, intense, and jaw-droppingly macabre. In it, Yevgeny Prigozhin—the Russian businessman who leads the infamous Wagner Group mercenary army now fighting in Ukraine—points to rows upon rows of dead Wagner mercenaries and growls invective at the Russian military brass, for allegedly failing to provide ammunition for Wagner’s assault on the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut. In another video, Prigozhin threatens the same military leaders: Unless ammunition is delivered, his men will stop fighting and leave.

For casual observers of Russian politics and President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine, this has all been stunning. In such a tightly controlled political system, where dissent can mean languishing in a prison colony, how is this man allowed to rail against the ruling order so menacingly?

As Putin’s war stalls—and as Wagner has devastated Bakhmut—analysts are dissecting what it all means. Their consensus: nothing good.

Prigozhin “has turned the war in Ukraine into his own show since early May,” Mikhail Fishman writes for The Atlantic. Having gained the right to recruit prisoners to serve as effective cannon fodder on the front lines in eastern Ukraine, Prigozhin has filled a battlefield need for Moscow. But Fishman sees Prigozhin as “playing with fire. Putin might well tolerate Prigozhin’s attacks on the military command, but as soon as he considers them an assault on the state itself, he will crush him.”

Appearing on Sunday’s GPS, the American Enterprise Institute’s Kori Schake suggested Prigozhin may be allowed to insult leaders in Moscow because Putin can no longer control the network of elites beneath him. That might be encouraging to Putin’s critics, but Schake reminds us: Whoever or whatever comes after Putin, at the top of Russia’s leadership hierarchy, “may actually be worse.”

Some of those conclusions are shared by Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., who writes in a Wall Street Journal column that such bickering and extreme hawkishness reflect “a universal elite consensus (in Russia) that the war has been a disaster and a blame game is coming.” Prigozhin and others, Jenkins argues, are looking ahead to their own postwar futures. While some observers meditate on internecine Russian politics, Colin P. Clarke of the Foreign Policy Research Institute argues that Prigozhin likely has another goal: returning his focus to Wagner’s empire of mercenary operations—and contracts for gold and other lucrative extractions—in Africa.

At Der Spiegel, eight coauthors detail Wagner’s use of an estimated tens of thousands of mercenaries (many said to have been recruited from prisons, the Der Spiegel coauthors write) who allegedly would advance into Ukrainian fire—or be executed by their own commanders. But Prigozhin and Wagner play a much bigger role in Russia’s global ambitions, the Der Spiegel coauthors write: returning it to a place of power and influence in Africa (and Syria), where struggling dictators have needed deadly force.

Of Prigozhin and his current feud with military leaders, they write: “He takes care of the dirty work for Putin—but he has decided to highlight that filth instead of doing his work in the shadows. He has given a face to the brutalization of the Putin regime. Many, though, have been left to wonder: Is this man powerful? Is he a megalomaniac? Desperate? All of the above?”

[The Soup Nazi]

Originally Posted by The Soup Nazi

 

Skynet maker Cyberdine Systems calls for AI regulation, warning of ‘existential risk’

Oh, COME ON, no replies to this? I thought it was pretty good...

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by The Soup Nazi

Oh, COME ON, no replies to this? I thought it was pretty good...

i would have replied, but you wouldn't have enjoyed what i found about this in yesterday's washington post. too weird a coincidence and best not.

[The Soup Nazi]

 

[The Soup Nazi]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

i would have replied, but you wouldn't have enjoyed what i found about this in yesterday's washington post. too weird a coincidence and best not.

Uhhh... OK then. But Jesus CHRIST how about this:

AI poses 'risk of extinction' on par with nukes, tech leaders say

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by The Soup Nazi

Uhhh... OK then. But Jesus CHRIST how about this:

AI poses 'risk of extinction' on par with nukes, tech leaders say

[emotes](

i have a cynical idea about this

not paranoid/conspiracy, just cynical

first, i think ai is very stupid

second, there is an ai gold rush with investors trying to chase stonks into some ai promised land. ai is the new crypto! (and look where crypto ended).

so, in my opinion... this is just marketing stagecraft.

"oooh look at our mighty product, so mighty"

fuck these guys. i've looked behind the scenes at what feeds ai, shit like amazon turk.

it's garbage.

john searle's chinese room still applies. the rest is a bunch of hype. in my opinion.

of course if we put "ai" in charge of nukes it's our own stupidity that will kill us all.

(then again maybe the earth will do great without us hahahhahaahahahah)

i don't know. i really mistrust the ai hype. "as" more like it.

meanwhile, let's all read cipolla:

 

or in english...