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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

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      US sees record 184,000 new daily Covid cases as Trump politicises vaccine effort

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      The US set yet another daily record for new coronavirus cases on Friday, topping 184,000, while Donald Trump promised imminent distribution of a vaccine – except to New York, which he threatened to leave out for political reasons – and the president-elect, Joe Biden, pleaded with Americans to follow basic mitigation measures.
      According to Johns Hopkins University, 184,514 new cases were recorded on Friday, up from 153,496 on Thursday. More than 10.7 million cases have been recorded in total and more than 244,000 have died. Deaths are also increasing: 1,431 were reported on Friday, the highest toll in 10 days if more than a thousand less than the highest such toll, from April.
      At the White House, in his first remarks since losing the election to Biden, Trump said he expected a vaccine developed by Pfizer to receive emergency use authorisation “extremely soon”, and to be available to the general population by April.
      He also 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 clashed frequently during the pandemic.
      Cuomo told MSNBC: “None of what he said is true, surprise surprise. We’re all excited about the possibilities about a vaccine.”
      Trump also took a shot at Pfizer, saying its statement that it was not part of Operation Warp Speed, the federal vaccine effort, was “an unfortunate misrepresentation”. Pfizer did not receive support for research or manufacturing, but has agreed to sell its vaccine to the federal government. A spokeswoman said the company was proud to be part of Operation Warp Speed “as a supplier of a potential Covid-19 vaccine”.
      If Trump’s timeline for the vaccine holds, he will be out of power by the time it is distributed to the general population. Trump has not conceded defeat and is mounting legal challenges in battleground states. But he has little to no chance of success and Biden will be inaugurated as the 46th president in Washington on 20 January.
      Preparing for government from Wilmington, Delaware, Biden has named his own Covid taskforce. On Friday one member, Dr Celine Grounder, alluded to delays in providing national security briefings to Biden caused by Trump’s refusal to concede when she told CNN the virus was now “essentially a national security threat [because] Americans are getting infected and sickened by coronavirus, dying from coronavirus, and how the economy is being impacted by the coronavirus”.
      Shortly before Trump spoke, Biden issued a statement with a conspicuously presidential tone.
      “The crisis does not respect dates on the calendar,” he said. “It is accelerating right now. I renew my call for every American, regardless of where they live or who they voted for, to step up and do their part on social distancing, hand washing, and mask wearing.”
      With winter closing in, socialising moving indoors and case numbers reaching levels regularly warned of by Dr Anthony Fauci, a widely trusted expert with whom Trump has regularly clashed, states across the Republican midwest are struggling. Hospital resources are stretched and governors have appealed for help.
      “It’s on fire,” Mike DeWine, the governor of Ohio, told the Wall Street Journal. “We’ve never seen anything like this. Our spring surge and summer surge were nowhere like this.”
      Another Republican, Doug Bergum of North Dakota, ordered a mask mandate and imposed business restrictions. In Nevada, Democratic governor Steve Sisolak tested positive.
      The governors of New Mexico and Oregon have ordered strict social limitations. Imposing a two-week stay-at-home order, Michelle Lujan Grisham, the Democratic governor of New Mexico, said: “We are in a life-or-death situation, and if we don’t act right now, we cannot preserve the lives, we can’t keep saving lives, and we will absolutely crush our current healthcare system and infrastructure.”
      Oregon governor Kate Brown, also a Democrat, said: “This situation is dangerous, and our hospitals have been sounding the alarm. I know this is hard, and we are weary. But we are trying to stop this ferocious virus from quickly spreading far and wide.”
      In Idaho, Governor Brad Little, a Republican, has enlisted the state national guard to assist in pandemic response and slowed reopening plans.
      On the east coast, Ned Lamont, the governor of Connecticut, entered quarantine after an aide tested positive. In New York, public schools could close on Monday while New York City’s courthouses, which may be the busiest in the US, are imposing restrictions on in-person proceedings, after positive tests were recorded among court employees.

      Cuomo said he would meet with leaders of six north-eastern states, to figure out supplemental steps.
      On the national stage, Trump said: “Ideally we won’t go to a lockdown. I will not go – this administration will not be going to a lockdown. Hopefully the – whatever happens in the future, who knows which administration will be.
      “I guess time will tell. But I can tell you this administration will not go to a lockdown.”
      Biden has promised to follow advice from scientists about new social restrictions, although he walked back an initial statement that he would go back into widespread lockdown if so advised. He supports a national mask mandate.
      Several dozen US Secret Service agents have contracted the virus, likely as a result of staffing events at the White House and on the campaign trail at which mitigation measures were not enforced. Trump, members of his family, cabinet members and senior aides and top Republicans have tested positive. In October, the president spent three days in hospital.
      One scientific model predicts more than 400,000 deaths by March. Two weeks ago, in an interview with the Washington Post, Fauci warned of a winter of more than 100,000 new cases a day and said the country was in for “a whole lot of hurt”. The US has now recorded more than 100,000 cases a day for 10 days running. More

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      'A whole lot of hurt': Fauci angers Trump White House with dark Covid outlook

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      Top expert says Biden taking pandemic ‘seriously’Spokesman for president accuses doctor of political biasSwing-state health workers organize in bid to beat TrumpThe US should prepare for “a whole lot of hurt” under the coronavirus pandemic, senior public health expert Anthony Fauci said, predicting a winter of 100,000 or more cases a day and a rising death toll. Related: Wisconsin battles rapid rise in Covid cases amid partisan disputes over safety Continue reading… More

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

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      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