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Covid-19 Sentry

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Daily-Dose

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Contents

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From New Yorker

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From Vox

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+A new stimulus package now hinges on a Fed lending program most people haven’t heard of. +

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+Just as it seemed Congress might finally reach a deal on a new stimulus package, there was a new and unexpected wrinkle: Some Republicans have suddenly discovered they’re really worried about a handful of emergency lending programs from the Federal Reserve that most Americans have probably never even heard of. And they have told Democrats that unless these programs are wound down, there’ll be no deal. +

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+The hitch comes after months of back-and-forth, and amid great time pressure. Republicans and Democrats this week have been inching toward a $900 billion agreement to help boost the economy as the Covid-19 pandemic rages on, and they made plans to attach the deal to government spending legislation that must be passed by Sunday night to avoid a government shutdown. +

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+Both sides made some concessions in the bill — Democrats let go of aid for state and local governments, and Republicans dropped their ask for liability shields for corporations (which would ensure companies couldn’t be sued for coronavirus-related issues). But while there were still some issues to be ironed out — what to do on unemployment aid and stimulus checks, for example — it seemed like there might finally be a breakthrough. And yet. +

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+Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) is leading a push by Republicans to try to rein in some of the Fed’s capabilities to intervene in the economy through lending programs aimed at small businesses and state and local governments. Specifically, Toomey says he wants to wind down emergency lending programs that were created by the CARES Act back in March; and, on top of that, include provisions in this new legislation that would stop the Fed from being able to restart those programs — or create similar ones. +

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+Toomey’s argument is that the Fed, which has taken extraordinary actions to try to boost the economy during the pandemic, risks becoming a lender of “first resort” instead of “last resort,” as it is meant to be, if its powers are extended. +

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+Democrats, on the other hand, are crying foul and argue that this has nothing to do with when businesses and governments turn to the Fed, and that the effort actually represents an effort from Republicans to limit the economic tools available to President-elect Joe Biden before he even takes office. +

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+“After weeks of refusing to acknowledge Biden’s victory, some Republicans have now decided that sabotaging his presidency is more important than helping our economy recover,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) said in a statement on Friday. “Proposals to sabotage President Biden and our nation’s economy are reckless, they’re wrong, and they have no place in this legislation.” +

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+And Democrats are also concerned that if the language on new Fed limits is too broad in the final legislation, this would severely weaken the Fed’s ability to do emergency lending in times of economic stress. Toomey insists that the language is targeted and that concerns about its broader impact — both with respect to future crises and Biden’s presidency — are overblown. +

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+The situation is a bit of an odd one. Republicans have been dead set against support for state and local governments throughout the pandemic, and this appears, in part, to be a way to make sure the Biden administration doesn’t find a workaround to get them money through the Fed. +

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+At the same time, the CARES Act programs in question haven’t worked very well so far — localities weren’t really picking up what the Fed was putting down. Democrats say that the programs could be improved to work better under a Biden administration and therefore be used by more potential borrowers: Essentially that they may not be a panacea, but they’re not not worth trying. +

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+Still, according to former Federal Reserve economist Claudia Sahm, Democrats may be overly optimistic about how effective the programs might be in the future. +

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+“Those programs had the potential to at least work better in a Biden administration than Trump,” Sahm told me, “but they were never going to do, without more Congressional authority, what Democrats wanted.” +

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+The Fed is supposed to be there when things are really bad +

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+In the midst of the Great Depression in 1932, Congress authorized the Federal Reserve to make direct loans in emergencies. That basically means that in big moments of economic crisis, you want the central bank to be there to make sure markets don’t go too haywire. +

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+The Fed makes those loans under section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act. In the wake of the 2008-2009 financial crisis, Congress put some restrictions around the Fed’s emergency lending powers in the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, which, among other things, required the central bank to go through Treasury to make loans. +

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+So when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Congress, through the CARES Act, directed $454 billion toward the Treasury Department to backstop emergency lending programs, including one aimed at mid-sized businesses and another aimed at municipalities. +

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+A lot of that money wasn’t used, and in November, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin asked the Fed to return it at the end of the year. Fed Chair Jerome Powell agreed to return the money, albeit begrudgingly. +

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+As Politico’s Victoria Guida laid out on Twitter, Toomey, a longtime skeptic of the Fed’s power, wants to make sure the CARES Act-related lending programs are permanently ended, because he and other Republicans worry Democrats will give “overly generous loans” to businesses, cities, and states. Republicans want to make sure the programs are ended now to block incoming Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen (assuming she’s confirmed) from using other funds to restart the programs. +

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+The rub here is exactly what the language Toomey is describing would do. If it blocks new emergency lending programs for small businesses and municipalities, that’s bad for those potential loan recipients, but would just leave them in a fairly similar position to where they are now. The terms of the loans haven’t been generous enough that many states and businesses were willing to try to take them on, though Democrats argue that under Biden that could be fixed. +

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+Still, the larger concern is that it might hamstring the Fed’s ability to exercise its broad emergency powers and do real, lasting damage to the central bank and its role in fighting economic downturns. +

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+Former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke issued a statement over the weekend warning about the potential implications of the GOP’s proposal. He stressed that it is “vital” that the Fed be able to “respond promptly to damaging disruptions in credit markets” and that such ability not be curtailed. “The relief act should ensure, at least, that the Federal Reserve’s emergency lending authorities, as they stood before the CARES Act, remain fully intact and available to respond to future crises.” +

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+The concern is that if Toomey’s proposals are too sweeping, the Fed might have to ask Congress every time it wants to act on emergency lending during times of crisis. +

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+A spokesperson for Toomey said in an email that the senator doesn’t want to change how the Fed operates generally — but that what he is seeking is to ensure that lending facilities set up under the CARES Act are wound down at the end of 2020, and that no copycat facilities can be created. The spokesperson said that a speech the Pennsylvania Republican delivered on the Senate floor on Saturday “makes clear that the intent of this language is narrow and is not a sweeping rewrite of section 13(3), as some have suggested.” +

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+As Jordan Weissmann at Slate points out, however, Republicans want to block the Fed from restarting lending programs that are “similar” to the ones from the CARES Act. What exactly “similar” means is where the problem is. +

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+“If your language is very squishy, that can either mean you have a very expansive interpretation of it, or you have a very narrow interpretation of it,” Sahm said. And if the definition of “similiar” is too expansive, that could dangerously kneecap the Fed. +

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+“These emergency facilities, that power to do emergency lending, that is more important than monetary policy, than bank regulations. This is the thing that the Fed does, it’s the thing we absolutely have to have,” she said. “These are core powers of the Fed, and so if you’re taking this away, you’re really crippling the Fed.” +

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+“The risk is that it greatly diminishes the ability of the Fed to exercise its emergency powers and support the economy in the next crisis,” Roberto Perli a partner at Cornerstone Macro, told Bloomberg. “If I were the Fed, I would strenuously oppose this.” +

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+This is a bit of a hostage situation using the Fed +

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+The American people need help, and they need help now. Millions are at risk of eviction in January, millions are out of work, and millions are hungry. Congress has the power to change this, and it needs to do it. It’s not clear what the really good-faith argument is for why curbing the Fed’s emergency lending programs mid-pandemic is worth mass homelessness or stopping people from accessing basic necessities. +

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+But on its face, this is an effort by Republicans to limit what Biden can do on the economy when he takes office. Especially in the event where Congress won’t take action — which it’s failed to do, basically, since March — you want the Fed to have all the tools in the toolbox available. And it’s reasonable to assume congressional inaction will continue into the Biden administration, making the Fed an even important part of recovery. +

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+It is true that a lot of states and businesses weren’t falling over themselves to get loans from the Fed, but there’s an argument to be made that that’s not really the point: Just the knowledge that the Fed is there as a last-resort lender is meaningful in shoring up confidence in the economy and keeping financial markets moving. The Fed just saying it would buy corporate bonds kept the corporate bond market moving in the spring. +

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+The fear that the Fed would help Biden get money to state and local governments is weird. Many in the GOP seem to believe that budget shortfalls are only a blue state problem and therefore have little desire to do anything to help, or, in this case, seem hell bent on blocking any potential aid. States run by Democrats are absolutely not the only ones facing tax revenue declines, but also, the point of lawmakers is to care about all Americans, not just the ones who align with them politically. +

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+“It is clear that Republicans in Congress and the administration do not want to give money to state and local governments,” Sahm said. Why Republicans would be willing to hurt their own states in order to also hurt Democratic ones is far less clear. +

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+The argument that the Fed should need to rely more on Congress to get the go-ahead on emergency lending programs is tough to swallow, given the events of this year. It was good back in March that Treasury and the Fed could quickly work together to really turn on emergency facilities and enact other market-stabilizing measures. Imagine them having to go through Congress, which is right now getting by on a two-day bill to fund the government, because it couldn’t meet a deadline that comes at the same time every year. +

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+And if Republicans really do want to reform 13(3) powers, like lawmakers did for Dodd-Frank, doing so hastily seems not ideal. “To rewrite 13(3) lending law like that on the fly seems pretty disturbing,” Bharat Ramamurti, a member of the Congressional Oversight Commission that oversees the CARES Act funds, told Slate. He pointed out on Twitter that the GOP’s current position seems like a radical evolution of their earlier stance: In stimulus negotiations in the fall, Republicans were trying to end the current the CARES Act’s current lending programs, not permanently strip the Fed of those powers. +

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+Of course, there’s no way to know intentions here. Maybe this is another GOP-led effort to tank stimulus. Maybe Republicans just cannot stand the idea of states getting help. Maybe they really want to tie Biden’s hands. Or maybe Toomey really thinks this is his one shot at getting reforms at the Fed and he’s taking it. +

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+But time is running out — a deal (or an extension) has to be passed before midnight Sunday to avoid a government shutdown — and a haphazard fix to supposed problem that a couple of weeks ago wasn’t even on the radar is a roadblock the American people don’t need. +

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+Amid rising cases, Prime Minister Boris Johnson banned nonessential travel and ordered business closures for much of southeast England. +

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+Facing a new, and potentially more contagious, variant of the coronavirus, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson is implementing lockdown measures in London and throughout southeast England that include a ban on holiday gatherings outside immediate households. +

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+Coming after months of a patchwork response to the pandemic from Johnson’s administration — and a week after assurances that Christmas celebrations with up to three separate households would be permitted — his critics are pointing to this latest response as further evidence of shaky leadership amid a crisis that has led to nearly 2 million Britons infected with Covid-19, and has killed more than 67,000. +

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+Johnson announced the measures on Saturday following an emergency cabinet meeting in which top government officials discussed a new strain of the coronavirus that the prime minister said is 70 percent more transmissible than previous versions. Some experts have cautioned that more study must be done to prove whether the mutation is actually more transmissible. +

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+“When the virus changes its method of attack, we must change our method of defense,” Johnson said. “We have to act on information as we have it, because this is now spreading very fast.” +

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+The announcement follows a week in which Covid-19 case rates in London almost doubled, and government officials said more than 60 percent of cases in the city are attributable to the new strain, known as VUI-202012/01. +

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+This strain is not believed to be deadlier than previous variants, the nation’s chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, said. +

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+“There is no current evidence to suggest the new strain causes a higher mortality rate or that it affects vaccines and treatments, although urgent work is underway to confirm this,” Whitty said. +

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+The latest lockdown is the country’s strictest since March, and will go into effect on Sunday. It will be reviewed again on December 30, and is an attempt to stop the spread of the new strain beyond England’s southeastern region and its center, London, Johnson said on Saturday. +

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+The new restrictions dictate that nonessential travel — defined as travel for work, education, or health care — in the region is banned. Nonessential shops and businesses, including gyms, salons, and movie theaters, are ordered closed. The area has been placed in the newly created Tier 4 on England’s tier system of risk, with areas designated Tier 1 considered to be places where Covid-19 is more under control. +

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+For weeks, Johnson has struggled to balance a strong public health response to rapidly growing case numbers with pressure not to further damage the economy. As the Christmas holiday period approached, he pledged to loosen restrictions to allow five days of subdued merriment. +

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+“Have yourself a merry little Christmas, but this year, alas, preferably a very little Christmas,” he said last week. +

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+The British Medical Journal and Health Service Journal published a joint editorial this week, criticizing the government’s response to date, and saying that allowing even small holiday gatherings could lead to a spate of new infections that would overwhelm the National Health Service. +

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+“The government was too slow to introduce restrictions in the spring and again in the autumn. It should now reverse its rash decision to allow household mixing,” the editorial read. +

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+Now, however, Johnson appears to have taken that advice, up to a point: Areas outside of the Tier 4 zone will be allowed to have gatherings on Christmas — although for one day, rather than the multiple-day gatherings Johnson recently promised. +

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+And overall, he said, the lockdown is part of an effort to slow the spread and flatten the curve, in order to prevent strain on hospitals. +

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+“Without action the evidence suggests infections would soar, hospitals would become overwhelmed and many thousands more would lose their lives,” Johnson said Saturday. +

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+Johnson has been criticized for acting too slowly throughout the pandemic +

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+Other countries, including Italy, Austria, and Germany, have also tightened restrictions in response to the holiday season. In France, bars and restaurants are ordered closed and a curfew is in place; on Thursday, President Emmanuel Macron announced that he had tested positive for the virus. +

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+Notably, however, the US — which has one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in the world — has not tightened restrictions on the national level. And Johnson’s decision received pushback from his American counterpart, President Donald Trump, Saturday afternoon, with Trump writing on Twitter, “The cure cannot be worse than the problem itself!” +

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+Trump has been staunchly anti-lockdown in the US, ceding decisions on efforts to control the spread to state-level leaders. The US response has been haphazard at best, and about 300,000 Americans have died of the coronavirus this year. Both the UK and the US are in the top 10 of countries for per-capita deaths from Covid-19. +

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+Johnson’s opponent in Parliament, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, also criticized the lockdown, but on the grounds that Johnson’s rapid changes of policy were confusing. +

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+“I think the British public is entitled to more decisive leadership than that,” he said. +

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+As Joanne Silberner has reported for Vox, Covid-19 cases have been steadily increasing across the UK since September. Johnson’s critics, Starmer among them, have accused the prime minister of a series of missteps that led to the country’s current crisis. +

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+Among these missteps, Silberner describes poor handling of distributing PPE and implementing testing and contract tracing programs early on in the pandemic. NHS staffers faced a severe shortage of masks and other equipment in the spring, and hundreds of health care workers died. Testing efforts fell short in the spring, while a contact-tracing app faced challenges in the summer, and again during a second attempted roll-out in September. +

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+Silberner also described an attempt to prioritize in-person dining over the summer, by subsidizing meals in August, a move that public health officials largely condemned. +

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+“In a word, it’s nuts,” said Lawrence Gostin, director of the WHO Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, about the dining subsidies. “In the midst of a pandemic, it’s actually directly opposite to what the public health evidence suggests.” +

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+In spite of these missteps, Silberner describes a government that does not seem capable of learning from its own mistakes. This now appears to be playing out in Johnson’s endorsement of inter-household visits during the Christmas holidays. +

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+People were likely to want some semblance of the traditions they were accustomed to. But Johnson’s efforts to preserve tradition have failed due to choices made weeks ago — and now the UK must face extreme measures as the government struggles to deal with significant spikes in caseloads. +

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+The largest coal plant in the western US has come down. Now cleanup begins. +

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+The three 775-foot smokestacks of the 2,250-megawatt Navajo Generating Station (NGS) — the West’s largest coal plant — were demolished December 18, symbolically marking the end of coal’s dominance in a region where renewable energy sources like wind and solar have become far cheaper. +

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+The Salt River Project (SRP), majority owners and operators of NGS, decided to close the plant in 2017 due to rising operating costs. Scott Harelson, a spokesperson for SRP, told me, “Natural gas prices had been low for a long period of time and are much lower than coal. So the plant was out of market, essentially.” +

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+The move to close the coal plant is a part of a broader shift to renewable energy taking place across the US and around the world. According to a report by the International Energy Agency, electricity-generating renewables will have grown roughly 7 percent in 2020, despite the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic. This shift has been driven in part by concerns over climate change — but also by increasing questions about the potential health impacts of fossil fuels. +

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+For more than four decades, the station on the Arizona-Utah border had been a critical local employer, providing more than 800 Native people with jobs that paid much higher than the area average. Harelson said 90 percent of the plant’s employees were Navajo. +

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+The station officially shut down in November of 2019 once its remaining supply of coal had burned. The Kayenta mine, which fed the plant, closed in August of 2019 because it didn’t have any other customers besides NGS. Jobs there also paid well: The average salary per worker was $117,000. +

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+But for many members of the region’s Navajo and Hopi tribes, those high wages also came with a high price. Critics of the facility point to its environmental costs as problematic — at one point it released more greenhouse gases at an hourly rate than almost any other facility in the US — and argued it polluted land and water used by Navajo ranchers and farmers. +

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+In a statement Friday, members from organizations representing the Navajo and Hopi tribes welcomed the razing, while acknowledging that the plant brought some financial benefits to their communities. +

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+“The demolition of the smokestacks at NGS is a solemn event,” said Nicole Horseherder, executive director of the Navajo environmental grassroots group Tó Nizhóní Ání. “It’s a reminder of decades of exploitation subsidized by cheap coal and water from the Navajo and Hopi.” +

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+In particular, Horseherder argued that the economic benefits were outweighed by coal miners suffering respiratory ailments and the land being contaminated by polluted water. The statement also said that many Navajo and Hopi had not been able to partake of the electricity and water the plant produced — that most of it went to nearby Phoenix, Arizona. +

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+But now that the station has been demolished, some Navajo and Hopi members have high hopes for a strong future without the coal plant. +

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+Carol Davis, executive director of the Navajo grassroots group Diné CARE, said in the statement, “We’re hopeful that this marks the continuation of our transformation into a sustainable economy that is built on fundamental Navajo and Hopi respect for air, land and water and that will have direct, measurable benefits for our communities, not exploit them.” +

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+A massive cleanup operation has begun +

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+Now that the smokestacks are gone, the land occupied by the facility will be turned over to the Navajo Nation — but first, SRP will be required to complete the complicated and expensive process of clearing the plant’s remaining infrastructure and returning the land to its original state. +

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+“All told, it’s about a $150 million effort to remove all the infrastructure that the Navajo Nation does not want to keep,” Harelson said. “The warehouse, admin building, railroad, lake pump, those facilities, will remain and become property of the Navajo Nation.” +

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+There is also chemical cleanup to do — toxic compounds like coal ash need to be removed. “All of the hazardous chemicals have to be removed and disposed of properly. And there’s an extensive reclamation project to bring the project back to its original state,” Harelson said. +

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+SRP has promised to do this “according to regulations and safety,” but some activists are concerned that there has been too little transparency as to what standards the company is following. +

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+“We need to tell the communities about the toxins that are there,” Diné citizen scientist Kim Smith said. “Just because the smokestacks are going down there’s this mirage that everything is going to be okay, that we’re going to get what we’re owed, that the land is going back to what it was.” +

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+Smith’s comments are a reminder that trust in SRP isn’t universal, as the company has broken promises to the Native community before. +

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+Cassie Scott, for instance, told the Associated Press that her grandmother had allowed part of her land to be used to build the plant in exchange for electricity. However, Scott said, that power never came, and she died without it in 2013. +

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+“The plant generated massive amounts of electricity, yet many homes on the Navajo reservation lacked electricity despite the proximity of the plant,” Michael Hiatt, a staff attorney at environmental law organization Earthjustice, told me. In 2019, NPR estimated that 10 percent of people in the Navajo reservation live without electricity. +

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+Activists have said they plan to carefully watch the restoration process. +

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+“If the utilities don’t follow the letter of the law and don’t clean up or remediate, we’ll make sure that we do bring whatever legal challenges or pressure necessary to make sure it is cleaned up,” Hiatt said. +

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+The plant’s cleanup is scheduled to be completed by 2023 — and the mine will need reclamation as well. That work could employ several hundred of those no longer working in energy generation, according to the Western Organization of Resource Councils, an environmental advocacy group, but has yet to begin. +

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From The Hindu: Sports

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From The Hindu: National News

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From BBC: Europe

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From Ars Technica

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From Jokes Subreddit

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