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    If Biden wins what would the first 100 days of his presidency look like?

    If Joe Biden wins the 2020 US election against Donald Trump next week, the new president-elect will face enormous pressures to implement a laundry list of priorities on a range of issues from foreign policy to the climate crisis, reversing many of the stark changes implemented by his predecessor.
    But Biden’s first and most pressing task for his first 100 days in the White House would be to roll out a new nationwide plan to fight the coronavirus crisis, which has claimed more than 220,000 lives in the US and infected millions – more than any other country in the world – as well as taking steps to fix the disastrous economic fallout.
    And, while the new president might be fresh from victory, the moderate Biden will also have to wrangle with his own side – a Democratic party with an increasingly influential liberal wing, hungry for major institutional changes to try to answer some of the most urgent questions over the country’s future.
    “He basically has to do something historic,” said Saikat Chakrabarti, a Democratic activist and former chief of staff to the progressive New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “He’s being handed a depression, a pandemic, and he’s being elected on a mandate to actually solve this stuff and do something big.”
    In the best-case scenario for Biden, he would be elected in a landslide, and the Democrats would flip the Senate, taking control of both chambers of Congress. If that happens, Biden and his team could enact their most ambitious plans for a presidency with the same feel as Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s, which saw the sweeping New Deal recovery and relief programs in response to the economic crisis of the 1930s.
    “In many ways, they’re going to be stepping in the same situation that we stepped in in 2009. But in some ways worse,” said the former Obama administration deputy labor secretary Chris Lu, who ran the 44th president’s transition team in 2008. “We came in during the Great Recession, they’re going to be taking over within a recession as well. They have the added and much more difficult challenge of dealing with a public health crisis as well.”
    By the time of the inauguration in January 2021, more than 350,000 Americans could have died from coronavirus, according to projections that assume current policies and trajectories are maintained.
    Biden’s “first order of business” in office would probably be aimed at containing the death toll and addressing the economic damage, said Neera Tanden, who was director of domestic policy for the Obama-Biden presidential campaign, and went on to be senior adviser at the Department of Health and Human Services (DHS). More

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    Trump says Covid numbers 'way down' as US passes 226,000 deaths – video

    President Donald Trump says Covid-19 cases in the US are ‘way down’ despite nearly half a million people contracting the virus in the country over the last seven days, according to a Reuters tally. Speaking one week out from the election at a campaign rally in Wisconsin, Trump made a baseless prediction that the media would say the country was doing ‘extremely well’ one day after the election
    Voter participation poised to soar as more than 70m vote early – live More

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    US coronavirus cases surge in midwest as Trump heads there in campaign push

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    A surge in new cases of coronavirus in the midwest continues, as Donald Trump plans multiple rallies in the region and presidential rival Joe Biden heads out to campaign in Georgia.
    Researchers at Johns Hopkins University recorded 60,789 new cases in the US on Monday, not far off all-time highs reached at the weekend. Total cases have surpassed 8.6m, with more than 225,000 deaths.
    Trump continues to bleed political support from the perception that he does not take the virus seriously. Despite that, on Monday night he held a ceremony at the White House for supreme court justice Amy Coney Barrett, which was reminiscent of an earlier event linked to an outbreak of Covid-19 that infected the president himself.
    Trump, Barrett, her husband Jesse Barrett, and supreme court justice Clarence Thomas appeared outside the White House without masks for a ceremonial swearing-in.
    On Tuesday, Trump traveled to a rally in Michigan and planned to go on to events in Wisconsin and Nebraska the same day, on a pre-election blitz across three states where cases are rising most steeply. New daily cases in Michigan have more than doubled in the last week, while Nebraska has one of the highest rates of test positivity in the nation at 21.5% over the last week, according to Johns Hopkins.
    Wisconsin, one of the most important electoral prizes, where the Democratic governor has asked Trump previously not to hold rallies that could spread coronavirus, broke one-day state records on Tuesday in Covid-19 deaths and cases as state officials told residents to stay home, wear a mask, and implored them to cancel travel and social gatherings.
    The state had 64 deaths due to the virus and 5,262 new cases over the last 24 hours, state officials said during an afternoon news conference.
    Thousands of supporters attended a Trump rally last week in Waukesha, Wisconsin, for which a local rural activist group rented out a billboard reading “Trump Covid Superspreader Event”, with an arrow.
    Local doctors urged the president not to hold a rally on Tuesday evening in western Wisconsin.
    “Returning to Wisconsin, repeating a reckless, risky event like a packed campaign rally is just asking for trouble,” said Robert Freedland, an ophthalmologist in La Crosse and state representative for the Committee to Protect Medicare, according to a local media report.
    “In all likelihood, my colleagues in La Crosse will be putting on their N95 masks and dealing with the impacts of Trump’s super-spreader event long after he leaves. It is dangerous and it’s unacceptable,” Freedland said.
    But the plea was likely to fall on unsympathetic ears in the Trump campaign, just as similar pleas did when the president held a rally in Janesville in the state earlier this month.
    Meanwhile Joe Biden delivered speeches with social distancing measures in place in Georgia, which has recorded fewer than 1,000 cases a day over the last seven days and where test positivity is at 7.2%.
    While Covid-19 hotspots are proliferating across the US, the states undergoing the most serious increases are Illinois, Texas, Wisconsin, Tennessee and California, according to Johns Hopkins.
    Vice-President Mike Pence, who continues to campaign despite having been in close contact with confirmed Covid-19 cases including his chief of staff, planned to speak in North Carolina and South Carolina on Tuesday.
    Biden’s running mate, Kamala Harris, planned to speak in Nevada, where most voters vote early and Democrats are in a tough fight to keep the state blue.
    Elections officials across the country have issued health safety guidelines for voters planning to visit polling sites in person.
    The city of Green Bay, Wisconsin, advised voters to wear a mask, wash hands and maintain 6ft distance. In Michigan, the secretary of state issued personal protective equipment to all poll workers. More than half the teams in the National Basketball Association have taken steps to convert their facilities into safe polling places.
    In states such as Texas that do not have a mask mandate, officials advised voters to take extra precautions.
    “To prevent becoming infected from someone who has Covid and is not wearing a mask, be sure to wear a mask to the polling site that is of sufficient quality to protect not only others, but also yourself,” Erin Carlson, director of graduate public health programs at the University of Texas at Arlington, told Mirage News.
    “Also, remember to carry your own black pen, stylus and hand sanitizer. If you don’t have a stylus, bring a wipe to wipe down the polling booth touchscreen before you use it.”
    Residents in the border city of El Paso have been urged to stay home for two weeks as coronavirus cases threaten to overwhelm some hospitals, potentially keeping some voters away from polls.
    “We are in a crisis stage,” said El Paso county judge Ricardo Samaniego. More

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    Obama mocks Trump: 'He’s jealous of Covid’s media coverage' – video

    Former US president Barack Obama mocked Donald Trump at an election rally for Joe Biden in Florida. Obama criticised his successor’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, noting that Trump had complained about the amount of news coverage it had received even as the US death toll continues to climb. ‘He’s jealous of Covid’s media coverage,’ Obama said.
    The former president also criticised Trump for his personal lack of coronavirus safety, saying that he had turned the White House into a ‘hot zone’ in the wake of two coronavirus outbreaks among the president and his senior staff. ‘Florida, we can’t afford four more years of this,’ Obama added. ‘We cannot afford this kind of incompetence and disinterest.’ More

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    The Perils of Federalism in Time of Pandemic

    Germany is a federation, and so are Belgium, Spain and Austria. Switzerland is a confederation — something of a federation plus. Federations consist of relatively autonomous entities, like states in the US, states and territories in Australia, provinces in Canada, Länder in Germany and Austria, cantons in Switzerland. Until recently, these institutional arrangements posed relatively few problems. With COVID-19, this has very much changed.

    Take the case of Switzerland, which is composed of 26 cantons, 20 of them so-called full cantons and six half-cantons (for historical, particularly religious reasons). In the west of the country, people speak predominantly French, in parts of the south, Italian, and the rest, German. Cantons differ not only in terms of language spoken but also in territorial size and the size of their populations.

    A New Social Contract Amid a Crisis

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    Zürich and Bern have relatively large populations, while some of the cantons in the center of the country — what in German is called Innerschweiz, or inner Switzerland — have populations equivalent to small or medium-size cities. Yet no matter the size, they all jealously guard their autonomous position within the confederation, particularly with regard to the federal government.

    Proud Heritage

    The Swiss are proud of their political heritage and treasure their independence, particularly with respect to the European Union. They insist that Switzerland represents an idiosyncratic case in Western Europe, whose particularities, above all its system of direct democracy, does not jibe well with the rest of Europe. This largely explains why the Swiss have repeatedly rejected membership in the European Union even if they have agreed to adopt a large part of EU regulations — a logical consequence of the fact that the EU represents Switzerland’s most important market.

    Until a few days ago, COVID-19 appeared to have been contained in Switzerland. And then, suddenly, the number of daily infection rates skyrocketed, a surge “as steep as the Alps” as the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel put it. At the beginning of the pandemic, infection rates were particularly dramatic in the Italian-speaking canton of Ticino and in the French-speaking cantons of Geneva and Vaud. All of these cantons have a large number of daily commuters from neighboring Italy and France. This time, it is the German-speaking cantons that are most dramatically affected — and not because of German commuters. The sudden upsurge in infections has primarily been the result of the way different cantons have dealt with the COVID-19 crisis.

    I speak from experience. We live in the canton of Vaud in the southwestern part of Switzerland. Here, the cantonal authorities mandated the wearing of masks in stores, supermarkets and enclosed public spaces in early summer. It took the canton of Geneva a few more weeks to follow suit, but it did. A few weeks ago, when I had to go to Switzerland’s capital, Bern, I thought I was in a different world. Most people appeared not to have heard that there was a pandemic. At the train station, in supermarkets and in other public spaces I was among the few customers to wear a mask.

    The situation was similar in other German-speaking cantons, including Zürich, Switzerland’s largest city. The reason: Different cantons had different security regulations, and these regulations were considerably laxer in Bern than in Geneva. It was not until the dramatic upsurge in infections a few days ago that the federal government issued new directives, making it mandatory to wear masks throughout the country. Too little, too late. In the meantime, the German government has declared all of Switzerland a risk zone, dissuading German tourists from visiting the country.

    This, of course, is highly ironic. In recent days, Germany has gone from one record to the next when it comes to new infections. As has been the case in Switzerland, the second wave is sweeping over Germany, setting off alarm bells. And, once again, federalism has proven to be a serious impediment to confronting the challenges posed by the pandemic. Already in early September, a report by Germany’s foreign broadcasting service Deutsche Welle noted that every state was “doing its own thing.” It went even further, raising the question of whether or not federalism was impeding “sweeping measures in the pandemic.”

    The answer was a tentative yes, which by now has been fully confirmed, given the massive increase in new infections. A few days ago, a text on the website of Die Tagesschau, Germany’s premier TV news broadcaster, raised the question of whether or not federalism had reached its limits. Ironically enough, it was Bavaria’s strongman, Markus Söder, who came out in favor of strengthening the position of the federal government. Bavaria has traditionally been most adamant in defending its autonomy within the federal republic. With COVID-19, taboos are no longer taboo, or so it seems.

    Borderless Autonomy

    The reality is that, in a federation, the constituent entities maintain a significant amount of autonomy, just like any sovereign state, but, at the same time, there are no borders between the units. People are free to travel from a lax unit to a strict one without controls, in the process potentially infecting people. This seems to have been the case in Switzerland in the wake of a yodeling musical staged before 600 spectators in the canton of Schwyz, which turned into a superspreader event. As a result, Schwyz, one of these miniature cantons in Innerschweiz, experienced a huge surge in infections that threatened to overburden the local health services. The spectators carried the virus to other cantons in the region, contributing to the upsurge in infections.

    Australia has shown that there is an alternative, even if a draconian one. In March, Tasmania closed its borders to the mainland, requiring “all non-essential travellers arriving in the island state … to self-isolate for 14 days, with penalties for those who did not comply of up to six months in jail or a fine of up to $16,800.” A prominent victim of these drastic measures was Australia’s leading radical right-wing populist, Pauline Hanson, who was unable to join her daughter who she suspected had caught the virus.

    In July, Victoria and New South Wales, Australia’s two most populous states, closed the border between them, following a dramatic outbreak of COVID-19 in Melbourne, Victoria’s capital. Until today, the border is closed to most people entering from Victoria, with severe penalties for those illegally into New South Wales without a permit, with fines up to $11,000 or jail time for up to six months, or both.

    Embed from Getty Images

    So far, such drastic measures seem inconceivable in Western Europe. Closing the borders with neighboring states, as happened in the spring, poses no problem, even among EU members. Closing the border between different Länder or cantons is an entirely different thing. The only alternative is binding measures issued by the federal government to be followed throughout the federation. This is what the Swiss federal government belatedly did. But in Germany, there is still great hesitation. Given the seriousness of the situation, this seems rather odd, to put it mildly.

    Yet the Germans might have a point. After all, things are hardly any better in France. And France is a unitary state where the government exercises a large measure of control over the country’s subordinate regions and departments. At the same time, however, the French government has been in a position to introduce drastic measures such as a curfew throughout France to curb the advance of the virus. In Germany and Switzerland, at least for the moment, this is unthinkable.

    There is, of course, a third alternative where people actually learn to act responsibly. It is ultimately up to the individual to reduce the risk of infection as much as possible. Unfortunately these days, individual responsibility and a sense of the common good beyond narrow self-interest appears to be in short supply. Blame it on the deleterious influence of neo-liberalism that has drilled into all of us that everybody is on their own, that there is no such thing as a society, as Margaret Thatcher told us, and that we have to learn to live with risks. COVID-19 has exposed the dark side of this ethos without, as it appears so far, having taught us a lesson.

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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    Trump insists US ‘rounding the corner’ as Covid cases surge across country

    Cases are rising rapidly, with more than 8.5m cases and a death toll of 225,000, as battleground states see surging case numbersUS politics – live coverageA day after his own chief of staff said the US had effectively surrendered to the coronavirus, Donald Trump told reporters his opponent in next Tuesday’s presidential election, Joe Biden, had “waved the white flag on life”. Related: ‘The system is broken’: Americans cast their vote for better healthcare Continue reading… More

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    'The system is broken': Americans cast their vote for better healthcare

    Ramae Hamrin was a high school math teacher in rural northern Minnesota, in a small town with a Paul Bunyan statue and snow on the ground by October.
    Hamrin, 50, instructed low-income students in calculus. It was not an easy job, but it provided health insurance for her and her three children. When it came to voting, like many Americans, she was put off by the two-party system. She voted third-party and often libertarian.
    Then, Hamrin slipped, fell and broke her hip. She went to hospital, doctors discovered a 9-centimetre (3.5-inch) lesion on her femur, and within weeks was diagnosed with cancer: multiple myeloma. Within two years, she was unable to work, permanently disabled by the ravages of cancer treatment.
    “Before I got diagnosed, I would have never thought about healthcare or drug prices,” as a voting issue, said Hamrin. “Now, really that’s my only issue.”
    This year, she said, she is voting one way: “strictly Democratic”.
    With the US election just over a week away, Hamrin is one of millions of Americans who’s been heading to the polls this fall with healthcare and drug prices as their top voting issue.
    The United States’ massive, largely private and very expensive health industry has ranked as a top voter concern for years, and helped drive Democrats to victory in the midterm elections of 2018, when the party took control of the House of Representatives.
    But over the last six months of the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 220,000 Americans, Covid-19 eclipsed healthcare as the top issue of the election, though health voters like Hamrin argue the two are inseparable. Her daughter, an accomplished cross-country runner in college, was diagnosed with Covid-19 and now needs an inhaler.
    “I do trust the Democrats more than I trust the Republicans to get anything done on this issue,” said Hamrin. Although, she added: “It’s hard to know who to trust these days.”
    Although healthcare reform elicits concern across parties, it’s one in which Democrats hold a huge advantage. Biden has a 20-point lead over Trump on issues ranging from how to lower Americans’ health costs and to how to protect people from loathed insurance industry practices.
    “Covid has made us all healthcare voters,” said David Mitchell, founder of Patients for Affordable Drugs, one of a handful of advocacy groups which does not take money from pharmaceutical companies. More