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      Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi homes vandalised in Covid protests

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      The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, decried what he called a “radical tantrum” on Saturday after his home in Kentucky was vandalised with messages apparently protesting against his refusal to increase Covid aid payments from $600 to $2,000.
      The attack followed a similar one on the home of Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic House speaker, in San Francisco.
      Democrats under Pelosi supported the move to increase payments but McConnell blocked it, despite its origin in a demand from Donald Trump.

      According to local media reports, on Saturday morning the majority leader’s home in Louisville was spray-painted with slogans including “Weres [sic] my money?” and “Mitch kills the poor”.
      Police reported minor damage. It was not immediately known if McConnell and his wife, the transportation secretary, Elaine Chao, were home at the time.
      In California, Pelosi’s home was graced by a pig’s head, red paint and messages including “cancel rent” and “We want everything”.
      In a statement on Saturday, McConnell said: “I’ve spent my career fighting for the first amendment [which protects free speech] and defending peaceful protest. I appreciate every Kentuckian who has engaged in the democratic process whether they agree with me or not.
      “This is different. Vandalism and the politics of fear have no place in our society. My wife and I have never been intimidated by this toxic playbook. We just hope our neighbours in Louisville aren’t too inconvenienced by this radical tantrum.”
      The state Republican party demanded Democrats denounce the vandalism. In a tweet, Democratic governor Andy Beshear called the vandalism “unacceptable”.
      “While the first amendment protects our freedom of speech,” he wrote, “vandalism is reprehensible and never acceptable for any reason.”
      Protesters both against McConnell and for Trump in his attempts to hold on to power – which McConnell has opposed – gathered outside the majority leader’s home.
      “We all know that Trump supporters and what everyone wants to call Black Lives Matter has their differences,” one protester said, in footage broadcast on social media.
      “But collectively we are here because Mitch is a bitch and he owes the American people money … we are here together to protest because the government, the system, has been ripping us all off in many different ways.” More

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      Trump claims to be 'working tirelessly' but leaves Covid relief in disarray

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      Donald Trump went to his golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida on Thursday, after claiming to be “working tirelessly for the American people” with a schedule that included “many meetings and calls”. Back in Washington, a Democratic proposal to increase direct payments to Americans under the Covid relief bill, from $600 to $2,000, was blocked.The increase was Trump’s own demand in a surprise video address on Tuesday night but it was shot down by Republicans who opposed greater spending throughout stimulus talks.Should the relief bill fail, millions of Americans will be without desperately needed relief at least until President-elect Joe Biden takes office in January. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Democrats would try again on Monday. “To vote against this bill is to deny the financial hardship that families face,” she said, “and to deny them the relief they need.”The White House did not immediately confirm if Trump was playing golf. Either way, official guidance to reporters about his “tireless” schedule contrasted with recent examples notably light on commitments, which have left Trump free to make baseless claims of electoral fraud and meet with conspiracy theorists and cronies about attempts to subvert the constitution and stay in power.From Florida, on Wednesday night, the president issued the latest batch of pardons and acts of clemency for political allies.Before Trump intervened, the Covid relief bill was agreed at $900bn and tied to huge spending legislation to keep the government open until September next year. The relief package was set to be the second-biggest in US history, after the $2.3tn Cares Act at the beginning of the pandemic.“Just when you think you have seen it all,” Pelosi wrote to colleagues about Trump’s gambit. “The entire country knows that it is urgent for the president to sign this bill, both to provide the coronavirus relief and to keep government open.”Pelosi offered the president’s proposal for increased payments on Thursday under a procedure that allowed just one lawmaker to object and in a so-called pro forma session, with few lawmakers in attendance. It duly failed.Trump has not expressly threatened to veto the Covid package but on Wednesday he did veto the annual National Defense Authorization Act, worth $740bn, over objections to renaming military bases honouring Confederate leaders, to telecoms provisions and more.Congress has not failed to pass the defence bill in 60 years. The House will return on Monday and the Senate on Tuesday, to override Trump’s veto.The president’s extraordinary behaviour has presented his party with a painful political test, not least for Georgia senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, fighting to retain their seats in 5 January runoffs that will decide control of the Senate.Senior Republicans were mostly silent after Trump’s intervention on Covid relief, neither Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell nor Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, speaking publicly. On a conference call, House Republicans complained that Trump had thrown them under the bus, one told the Associated Press. Most had voted for the package and urged leaders to use the TV to explain its benefits, the person said.McCarthy sent a letter to colleagues suggesting Republicans would offer their own proposal, picking up on Trump’s complaints about foreign aid to “re-examine how our tax dollars are spent overseas”. Democrats took advantage of Republican disarray. Jon Ossoff, Perdue’s opponent, tweeted simply: “$2,000 checks now.”The relief package represents a hard-fought compromise, a 5,000-page bill that includes $1.4tn to fund government through September 2021. The relief bill would establish a temporary $300 per week supplemental jobless benefit, along with new subsidies for businesses, schools, healthcare providers and renters facing eviction.Even though treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin represented the White House in talks, Trump railed against provisions in the broader funding package, including foreign aid included each year, and called the bill a “disgrace”. He did not specifically vow to use his veto power, and there may be enough support in Congress to override him if he does. The Senate cleared the relief package by 92-6, the House by 359-53.The bill is expected to be sent for Trump’s signature on Thursday or Friday, a congressional aide told the AP. Trump could also allow it to expire with a “pocket veto” at the end of the year.The consequences of failure would be severe. It would mean no aid to struggling Americans and small businesses, and no additional resources to help with vaccine distribution in a pandemic in which nearly 19 million have been infected and almost 326,000 have died.Furthermore, because lawmakers linked pandemic relief to funding, the government would shut down on 29 December. A resolution could therefore be forced on Monday, when a stopgap funding bill expires. Democrats are reportedly considering another stopgap to keep government running until Biden is sworn in.Biden insisted to newspaper columnists on Wednesday that “there are enough Republicans prepared to meet him in the middle that he can get things done in an evenly divided Congress”. He applauded lawmakers and said the relief package “provides vital relief at a critical time”. He also said more would be needed.Arriving at Mar-a-Lago, Trump was greeted by hundreds of supporters. Few wore masks or socially distanced to mitigate Covid transmission as they waved flags and signs and chanted “Four more years!”One small boy had a sign that said “We’re going to miss you”. But there were a few Trump opponents too. One held a sign that said: “Go Away.” More

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      Trump pardons debase the presidency further – and he can and will go lower | Lloyd Green

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      With hours to spare before Christmas, Donald Trump has delivered pardons to Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Charlie Kushner, a passel of war criminals and a bent congressman or two. There is no reason to believe our “law and order” president’s pardon binge is over. Too many people in his immediate orbit remain exposed to future prosecution, including the president himself.Come noon on 20 January 2021, Trump and his inner circle will be private citizens again. Devoid of legal immunity, stripped of the air of invincibility, they become fair game for federal and local law enforcement alike. The potential for prison hovers over them like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.Cyrus Vance, Manhattan’s district attorney, is circling Trump and his business. Eric Trump has testified at a court-ordered deposition conducted by New York’s attorney general. As for federal prosecutors in the southern district of New York, they labeled Trump an unindicted co-conspirator in the case of Michael Cohen. The statute of limitations has not expired.And then there is Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer. According to reports, he remains on the radar of federal law enforcement in connection with possible election law violations, and doesn’t like it one bit. On Wednesday Giuliani lashed out, calling investigators “secret police” and accusing them of toadying to Joe Biden, the president-elect. Trump has gone so far as to unequivocally claim authority to pardon himself, something Nixon refused to doIn case anyone needs reminding, once upon a time Giuliani was the No3 lawyer at the justice department and US attorney for the southern district. Back then, he was viewed as one of the good guys. As it happens, he prosecuted Marc Rich, the recipient of an infamous pardon from Bill Clinton. But as the Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson repeatedly remarks, everything Trump touches dies.The list doesn’t end with Rudy. The justice department and the Federal Election Commission may soon want to talk to Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, about his role in the Trump re-election campaign.Reportedly, Kushner was a driving force in establishing a shell company, American Made Media Consultants, which made shrouded payments to Trump family members and friends. Indeed, Kushner purportedly directed Lara Trump, the wife of Eric Trump, John Pence, the vice-president’s nephew, and the campaign’s chief financial officer to serve on the shell company board.Think of it as the Trump Organization 2.0. Or the deep campaign.In the end, AMMC spent nearly half of the campaign’s war chest, with payments going to Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr’s girlfriend, and Lara Trump, who is now contemplating a Senate run in North Carolina. Suffice to say, the legality of this opaque arrangement is unclear.Three House Democrats have requested investigations by the Department of Justice and the FEC. Without a pardon, Jared’s fate will rest in the hands of a Biden DoJ. Said differently, Hunter Biden is not the only person with a troubled road ahead.The constitution confers the pardon power upon the president, and the circumstances of its use speak volumes about the occupant of the Oval Office. Whether a president may pardon himself has yet to be legally tested.Richard Nixon resigned rather than face impeachment by the House and almost certain conviction in the Senate. In August 1974, he left office without pardoning himself or those convicted in the Watergate scandal. Instead, Gerald Ford issued a pardon to his former boss.Trump is no Nixon. In so many ways. The 45th president has gone so far as to unequivocally claim authority to pardon himself, something Nixon refused to do.By any measure, Trump has set a new standard for debasing the presidency. As he stares at an ignominious exit, the ex-reality show host has even managed to make Clinton’s pardon of Rich look quaint. And that takes effort.Yet unlike the Clinton pardon of Rich, a fugitive financier, which sparked a review by James Comey and a barrage of Republican condemnation, among the GOP in Congress Trump’s pardons have elicited little more than a yawn. With the exception of Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska, who called the pardons “rotten to the core”, they have been met with a collective shrug. None of this should come as a surprise. Trump has recreated the GOP in his image. Republicans know he commands the party’s base, and they stand one primary away from oblivion. In the end, what’s a pardon between friends? More

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      Environmental groups hail Covid relief bill – but more needs to be done

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      Joe Biden’s pledge to make the climate emergency a top priority of his administration from day one has received a major boost from the $900bn Covid-19 relief bill that cleared Congress this week and now awaits Donald Trump’s signature.
      The president has demanded changes but nonetheless the package has been hailed by environmental groups as an important move towards re-engaging the US with international efforts to tackle the climate crisis and move towards a clean energy future.
      “The bill contains some truly historic provisions that represent the most significant climate legislation passed by Congress in over a decade,” said Sam Ricketts, co-founder of Evergreen Action.
      The Sierra Club, an environmental group which operates in all 50 states, expressed a sigh of relief that Republican intransigence, led by the president and Mitch McConnell in the Senate, had finally been overcome. Kirin Kennedy, the group’s deputy legislative director, expressed confidence that the bill would contribute towards “addressing major sources of pollution, growing clean energy, and making progress across government agencies to advance climate action”.
      But she added that the Biden administration had a lot of work still to do to, in the president-elect’s phrase, “build back better”. Kennedy said that meant “investing in clean, renewable energy that can power communities, not saddling them with false solutions or pollution for decades to come”.
      Set against the time-critical nature of the climate crisis and the need for immediate action to curb pollution and switch to renewable energies, the relief bill falls short both in the scale and ambition of its commitments.
      “Is this enough to meet the urgency of the moment? The short answer is plainly no – the package is smaller than we’ve called for and certainly smaller than the science demands,” Ricketts said.
      But contained in the bill are a number of provisions that represent a clear advance in the US stance on the climate crisis, at the end of four years of Trump administration attacks on environmental protections.
      By the far the most significant of those advances is the commitment to phase out hydrofluorocarbons, HFCs, which are widely used as coolants in air conditioners, fridges and cars.
      Under the terms of the relief bill, most HFC use would end by 2035. The overall global impact of such a firm gesture by the US could lead to 0.5C of avoided warming this century.
      Ricketts said that the move was not only important in its own right in the climate fight, but it also made a statement that the US was prepared to work with world partners. That was all the more poignant coming just a month after Trump took the US formally out of the Paris climate agreement.
      “This is a timely way of showing that we can still play on the international stage and meet our commitments,” he said.
      Among other measures in the bill that have received praise from environmental groups are extensions to tax credits for renewable energy technologies. Offshore wind could enjoy a particular boost with the incentives lasting five years.
      “This is an industry that is just starting to drive down the runway for take-off in the US,” Ricketts said. “There’s an enormous potential, especially in the north east, and the five-year tax incentive is critical.”
      A further area of significant reform is the pot of $35bn provided for research and development in a range of innovations designed to confront the climate crisis. They include the creation of more efficient batteries, carbon capture, and advanced nuclear reactor technology.
      Katherine Egland, environment and climate justice chair for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People national board of directors, said that for African American and other low-income communities the relief bill would impact lives. She lives in Gulfport, Mississippi, on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, and this year has experienced firsthand the confluence of the coronavirus pandemic, the climate crisis and racial injustice.
      “We have been confronted by a syndemic in 2020,” she told the Guardian. “We have had to cope with the disproportionate impacts of Covid and climate, during an unprecedented storm season and a year rife with racial unrest.”
      Egland said congressional action was welcome “after four years of climate denial. It is a positive step in the right direction”.
      But she said that the country would need to do much more to meet the scale of the crisis: “There is no vaccine to inoculate us against climate change.” More

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      Walmart sued by US over alleged role in fuelling America's opioid crisis

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      The US Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Walmart on Tuesday, alleging that the retail giant filled “thousands of invalid prescriptions” for powerful painkillers, helping fuel America’s opioid crisis.Walmart runs more than 5,000 pharmacies across the country. Until 2018, the chain was a wholesale distributor of controlled substances for its own pharmacies, giving it extensive reach into many communities.The civil complaint points to the role Walmart’s pharmacies may have played in the crisis by filling opioid prescriptions and by unlawfully distributing controlled substances to the pharmacies during the height of the opioid crisis.“As a nationwide dispenser and distributor of opioids, and given the sheer number of pharmacies it operates, Walmart was uniquely well positioned to prevent the illegal diversion of opioids,” the 160-page civil suit, filed in Delaware federal court, said.“Yet, for years, as the prescription drug abuse epidemic ravaged the country, Walmart abdicated those responsibilities,” the suit added.In response, Walmart said the suit was “riddled with factual inaccuracies”.The DoJ document said the company “knowingly violated well established rules requiring it to scrutinize controlled-substance prescriptions to ensure that they were valid – that is, issued by prescribers in a legitimate manner for legitimate purposes, not for purposes of abuse or other diversion,” the suit continued. While Walmart was legally required to check potential red flags, it “made little effort to ensure that it complied with them”.Instead, Walmart made it hard for pharmacists to abide by these regulations. Managers pressured pharmacists to fill high volumes of prescriptions as quickly as possible “while at the same time denying them the authority to categorically refuse to fill prescriptions issued by prescribers the pharmacists knew were continually issuing invalid prescriptions”, the complaint charged.Even though Walmart’s compliance arm had amassed extensive information showing that people were repeatedly trying to get invalid narcotic prescriptions filled, the unit kept that data from pharmacists, authorities also said.Walmart filled prescriptions from prescribers who its own pharmacists had “repeatedly reported were acting as egregious ‘pill mills’ – even when Walmart was alerted that other pharmacies were not filling prescriptions for those prescribers. In fact, some of those pill-mill prescribers specifically told their patients to fill their prescriptions at Walmart.”So intense were the pressures on pharmacists that managers told them to “[h]ustle to the customer, hustle from station to station” because completing prescriptions “is a battle of seconds”, federal authorities alleged.As early as 2013, Walmart adopted a plan that used the number of prescriptions processed by an employee’s store as a factor in determining if the pharmacy staffer “was entitled to monetary incentive awards”.The DoJ contends that Walmart has committed “hundreds of thousands of violations” of the Controlled Substances Act. If Walmart is found liable for violating this act, each unlawfully filled prescription could result in a $67,627 penalty. Each suspicious order that was not reported to authorities could result in a penalty of up to $15,691. Civil penalties could reach “billions”, the DoJ said.More than 232,000 people died in the US from opioid-involved overdoses between 1999 and 2018, according to the DoJ.In a statement, Walmart said that the DoJ’s investigation was “tainted by historical ethics violations, and this lawsuit invents a legal theory that unlawfully forces pharmacists to come between patients and their doctors, and is riddled with factual inaccuracies and cherry-picked documents taken out of context”.“Blaming pharmacists for not second-guessing the very doctors the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) approved to prescribe opioids is a transparent attempt to shift blame from DEA’s well-documented failures in keeping bad doctors from prescribing opioids in the first place,” the company said.Walmart recently sued the DoJ and DEA, alleging that authorities wrongly ascribed blame to the company. The retailer’s suit wants a federal judge to determine that the government doesn’t have grounds to pursue civil damages, according to the Associated Press. More

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      Trickle-down economics doesn't work but build-up does – is Biden listening? | Robert Reich

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      How should the huge financial costs of the pandemic be paid for, as well as the other deferred needs of society after this annus horribilis?Politicians rarely want to raise taxes on the rich. Joe Biden promised to do so but a closely divided Congress is already balking.That’s because they’ve bought into one of the most dangerous of all economic ideas: that economic growth requires the rich to become even richer. Rubbish.Economist John Kenneth Galbraith once dubbed it the “horse and sparrow” theory: “If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.”We know it as trickle-down economics.In a new study, David Hope of the London School of Economics and Julian Limberg of King’s College London lay waste to the theory. They reviewed data over the last half-century in advanced economies and found that tax cuts for the rich widened inequality without having any significant effect on jobs or growth. Nothing trickled down.Meanwhile, the rich have become far richer. Since the start of the pandemic, just 651 American billionaires have gained $1tn of wealth. With this windfall they could send a $3,000 check to every person in America and still be as rich as they were before the pandemic. Don’t hold your breath.You don’t need a doctorate in ethical philosophy to think that now might be a good time to redistribute some of richesStock markets have been hitting record highs. More initial public stock offerings have been launched this year than in over two decades. A wave of hi-tech IPOs has delivered gushers of money to Silicon Valley investors, founders and employees.Oh, and tax rates are historically low.Yet at the same time, more than 20 million Americans are jobless, 8 million have fallen into poverty, 19 million are at risk of eviction and 26 million are going hungry. Mainstream economists are already talking about a “K-shaped” recovery – the better-off reaping most gains while the bottom half continue to slide.You don’t need a doctorate in ethical philosophy to think that now might be a good time to tax and redistribute some of the top’s riches to the hard-hit below. The UK is already considering an emergency tax on wealth.The president-elect has rejected a wealth tax, but maybe he should be even more ambitious and seek to change economic thinking altogether.The practical alternative to trickle-down economics might be called build-up economics. Not only should the rich pay for today’s devastating crisis but they should also invest in the public’s long-term wellbeing. The rich themselves would benefit from doing so, as would everyone else.At one time, America’s major political parties were on the way to embodying these two theories. Speaking to the Democratic national convention in 1896, populist William Jennings Bryan noted: “There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them.”Build-up economics reached its zenith in the decades after the second world war, when the richest Americans paid a marginal income tax rate of between 70% and 90%. That revenue helped fund massive investment in infrastructure, education, health and basic research – creating the largest and most productive middle class the world had ever seen.But starting in the 1980s, America retreated from public investment. The result is crumbling infrastructure, inadequate schools, wildly dysfunctional healthcare and public health systems and a shrinking core of basic research. Productivity has plummeted.Yet we know public investment pays off. Studies show an average return on infrastructure investment of $1.92 for every public dollar invested, and a return on early childhood education of between 10% and 16% – with 80% of the benefits going to the general public.The Covid vaccine reveals the importance of investments in public health, and the pandemic shows how everyone’s health affects everyone else’s. Yet 37 million Americans still have no health insurance. A study in the Lancet estimates Medicare for All would prevent 68,000 unnecessary deaths each year, while saving money.If we don’t launch something as bold as a Green New Deal, we’ll spend trillions coping with ever more damaging hurricanes, wildfires, floods and rising sea levels.The returns from these and other public investments are huge. The costs of not making them are astronomical.Trickle-down economics is a cruel hoax, while the benefits of build-up economics are real. At this juncture, between a global pandemic and the promise of a post-pandemic world, and between the administrations of Trump and Biden, we would be well-served by changing the economic paradigm from trickle down to build up. More

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      Joe Biden's economic team beats Trump's goon squad – but it faces a steep challenge | Robert Reich

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      “It’s time we address the structural inequalities in our economy that the pandemic has laid bare,” President-elect Joe Biden said this week, as he introduced his economic team.It’s a good team. They’re competent and they care, in sharp contrast to Trump’s goon squad. Many of them were in the trenches with Biden and Barack Obama in 2009, when the economy last needed rescuing.But reversing “structural inequalities” is a fundamentally different challenge from reversing economic downturns. They may overlap – last week the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit a record high at the same time Americans experienced the highest rate of hunger in 22 years. Yet the problem of widening inequality is distinct from the problem of recession.Recessions are caused by sudden drops in demand for goods and services, as occurred in February and March when the pandemic began. Pulling out of a recession usually requires low interest rates and enough government spending to jump-start private spending. This one will also necessitate the successful inoculation of millions against Covid-19.By contrast, structural inequalities are caused by a lopsided allocation of power. Wealth and power are inseparable – wealth flows from power and power from wealth. That means reversing structural inequalities requires altering the distribution of power.Franklin D Roosevelt did this in the 1930s, when he enacted legislation requiring employers to bargain with unionized employees. Lyndon Johnson did it in the 1960s with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, which increased the political power of Black people.Since then, though, not even Democratic presidents have tried to alter the distribution of power in America. They and their economic teams have focused instead on jobs and growth. In consequence, inequality has continued to widen – during both recessions and expansions.For the last 40 years, hourly wages have stagnated and almost all economic gains have gone to the top. The stock market’s meteoric rise has benefited the wealthy at the expense of wage earners. The richest 1% of US households now own 50% of the value of stocks held by Americans. The richest 10%, 92%.Why have recent Democratic presidents been reluctant to take on structural inequality?First, because they have taken office during deep recessions, which posed a more immediate challenge. The initial task facing Biden will be to restore jobs, requiring that his administration contain Covid-19 and get a major stimulus bill through Congress. Biden has said any stimulus bill passed in the lame-duck session will be “just the start”.Second, it’s because politicians’ time horizons rarely extend beyond the next election. Reallocating power can take years. Union membership didn’t expand significantly until more than a decade after FDR’s Wagner Act. Black voters didn’t emerge as a major force in American politics until a half-century after LBJ’s landmark legislation.Third, reallocating power is hugely difficult. Economic expansions can be a positive-sum game because growth enables those at the bottom to do somewhat better even if those at the top do far better. But power is a zero-sum game. The more of it held by those at the top, the less held by others. And those at the top won’t relinquish it without a fight. Both FDR and LBJ won at significant political cost.Today’s corporate leaders are happy to support stimulus bills, not because they give a fig about unemployment but because more jobs mean higher profits.“Is it $2.2tn, $1.5tn?” JP Morgan chief executive Jamie Dimon said recently in support of congressional action. “Just split the baby and move on.”But Dimon and his ilk will doubtless continue to fight any encroachments on their power and wealth. They will battle antitrust enforcement against their giant corporations, including Dimon’s “too big to fail” bank. They’re dead set against stronger unions and will resist attempts to put workers on their boards.They will oppose substantial tax hikes to finance trillions of dollars of spending on education, infrastructure and a Green New Deal. And they don’t want campaign finance reforms or any other measures that would dampen the influence of big money in politics.Even if the Senate flips to the Democrats on 5 January, therefore, these three impediments may discourage Biden from tackling structural inequality.This doesn’t make the objective any less important or even less feasible. It means only that, as a practical matter, the responsibility for summoning the political will to reverse inequality will fall to lower-income Americans of whatever race, progressives and their political allies. They will need to organize, mobilize and put sufficient pressure on Biden and other elected leaders to act. As it was in the time of FDR and LBJ, power is redistributed only when those without it demand it. More

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      US records 166,000 new Covid cases as states implement new restrictions

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      The US recorded 166,555 new coronavirus cases on Saturday, down from more than 184,000 on Friday but still its second-highest daily total and a 12th day in a row above 100,000.According to Johns Hopkins University, the overall US caseload is now nearly 10.9m and more than 245,000 have died. On Saturday, 1,266 people died. Hospitalisations are rising.Dr Anthony Fauci, the top US infectious diseases expert, said it was “possible” the country would see 200,000 deaths in the next four months, which would put the toll of the pandemic above 400,000 in slightly more than a year.In Washington DC on Saturday, thousands attended the “Million Maga March”, a gathering of supporters of Donald Trump, who lost the presidential election to Joe Biden but has refused to concede. The president has heralded news of an imminent Pfizer vaccine but he and members of his family, top aides and senior Republicans have all tested positive for Covid-19.At campaign and White House events, Trump has refused to enforce mitigation measures such as mask-wearing and social distancing. On Saturday, local media reported that around the White House, where Trump waved to supporters from his motorcade, “it seemed a majority of the protesters gathered were not wearing masks”. Washington DC has a mask mandate.A pandemic is raging. Left unchecked, it will assuredly result in grossly overburdened hospitals and morguesTrump has said his administration will not implement any further social lockdowns. He has also refused to participate in the Biden transition, meaning information on Covid-19 is not being shared with the president-elect. Biden, who has appointed his own Covid-19 advisory group, supports a national mask mandate.Across the country, particularly in the hard-hit midwest, states are implementing tighter controls. On Saturday, California, Minnesota and Maryland were among states reporting rapidly rising case numbers and healthcare systems under serious strain. Oregon and New Mexico implemented new social restrictions, while North Dakota introduced a mask mandate and Arkansas established a Covid taskforce. From Monday, the Navajo Nation will enter a three-week stay-at-home advisory period.In Washington state, Governor Jay Inslee ordered sweeping restrictions and shutdowns starting at 11.59pm on Monday. Restaurants and bars were ordered to stop indoor service and keep outdoor service to groups of five or less. Gyms, movie theaters, museums and bowling alleys were ordered closed, the Seattle Times reported.Indoor gatherings involving multiple households are barred, unless those present have quarantined for two weeks. Alternatively, participants can quarantine for one week and test negative within two days of the get-together. Inslee’s mandates will be enacted for a minimum of four weeks.“Today, Sunday 15 November 2020, is the most dangerous public health day in the last 100 years of our state’s history,” Inslee said. “A pandemic is raging. Left unchecked, it will assuredly result in grossly overburdened hospitals and morgues and keep people from obtaining routine but necessary medical treatment for non-Covid conditions.”On CNN’s State of the Union, Fauci was asked what the Trump administration should do other than advising the wearing of masks, hand-washing and social distancing.“Well, what we’ve got to do is make what you just said uniform, not spotty,” he said. “Everybody’s got to do it. There’s no excuse not to do that right now, because we know that can turn things around. I mean, that’s the tool we have. We have good news with regard to the vaccines, so there is light at the end of the tunnel. Help is coming.“It’s going to be a gradual accrual of more normality as the weeks and the months go by, as we get well into 2021,” he added.Asked about his recent statement that a national lockdown is not necessary, he said: “We’re not going to get a national lockdown. I think that’s very clear, but I think what we’re going to start seeing in the local levels, be they governors or mayors or people at the local level … very surgical type of restrictions, which are the functional equivalent of a local lockdown.“We’re not going to have a national lockdown. But if things really get bad and you put your foot on the pedal and yet still you have the surge, you may need to take the extra step that you’re talking about.”Asked about Trump’s refusal to participate in the transition, Fauci said it was “almost like passing a baton in a race, you don’t want to stop and then give it to somebody, you want to just essentially keep going and that’s what transition is … Of course it would be better if we could start working with them.”Leaders of the Trump taskforce have promised swift distribution of the Pfizer vaccine to the vulnerable and frontline health workers, once emergency use authorisation is obtained from the US Food and Drug Administration, expected by the end of November.But Trump’s resistance to cooperation is not limited to Biden. On Friday, he said the federal government would not deliver the vaccine to New York, because its governor, Andrew Cuomo, “doesn’t trust where the vaccine is coming from”.Trump and Cuomo have fought repeatedly. Cuomo has said federal distribution plans rely too heavily on hospitals, clinics and drug stores, a problem for communities which do not have easy access to the healthcare system. On Sunday, he said he would sue if the administration made it difficult for minorities to get vaccinations.“If the Trump administration does not change this plan and does not provide an equitable vaccine process, we will enforce our legal rights,” Cuomo was reported as saying. “We will bring legal action to protect New Yorkers.”From Ohio, Governor Mike DeWine told CNN coronavirus “fatigue” was a serious problem. Speaking to CNN on Saturday, Dr James Phillips, chief of disaster medicine at George Washington University Hospital, said he was “terrified” about the imminent holiday season.“We’re going to see an unprecedented surge of cases following Thanksgiving this year, and if people don’t learn from Thanksgiving, we’re going to see it after Christmas as well,” Phillips said. More