Alan Minsky is back for an update on the state of play in passing the Build Back Better Reconciliation and Infrastructure Bills. The progressives are using their leverage because the BBB bill is connected to the so-called bipartisan infrastructure bill the centrists favor but want to whittle down. Media coverage has mischaracterized this as a split in the Democratic Party rather than as the LA Times did Saturday, getting it right: there are two holdouts while the rest of the Dems are behind Biden’s agenda. It’s all riveting and we get Alan’s analysis of what lies underneath, which players have more weight, the tactics employed, and what he sees as the possible outcome.

Meleiza Figueroa is the lead author on the new dispatch from Pandemic Research for the People called "To Live and Die in Los Angeles: COVID-19, Structural Stress, and the Path to a More Resilient Public Health." The dispatch identifies the ways COVID merged with and reinforced existing crises generated by a neoliberalized economy with labor precarity, housing instability, homelessness, psychosocial stress, lack of healthcare and social safety net access, contributing to the tenacity of the pandemic – and pointing to the social vulnerability to future pandemics and natural disasters. It’s a comprehensive analysis focusing on what LA County has done right and what more has to be done.

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