Noam Chomsky: We are racing madly towards total catastrophe under the leadership of sociopathic fanatics // Robert Reich: The painful truth about Covid and the economy
As the U.S. coronavirus death toll tops 150,000, we spend the hour with world-renowned political dissident, linguist and author Noam Chomsky, who says decades of neoliberal policies that shredded the social safety net and public institutions left the country ill-prepared for a major health crisis. “We should understand the roots of this pandemic,” he says... Remember Ronald Reagan - that government is
the problem, not the solution, which means we have to take decision-making and
action out of the hands of government, which has a flaw; it’s somewhat
responsive to the population. We have to shift it to unaccountable, private
tyrannies, which are totally unaccountable to the population. That is the
meaning of Reagan’s slogan. That is the fundamental principle of neoliberalism.
We’ve been suffering - the world has been suffering from it for 40 years, except
for the tiny percentage who have become super rich and extremely powerful
NOAM CHOMSKY We should understand the roots
of this pandemic. If we do not understand the roots and extirpate them, there
is going to be another and worse one coming. So far we have been kind of lucky.
The coronavirus, pandemics, epidemics are very serious, and there are many
possibilities. So far, all the ones that have happened in the last ten or 15
years, either the virus has been very deadly but not very contagious, like
Ebola, or very contagious but not very deadly, like COVID-19. What happens when
the next one comes along that is both very contagious and very deadly? We are
in deep trouble. Deep. Much worse than this. Much worse than the so-called
“Spanish flu,” which ought to be called the Kansas flu by Trump’s logic. It
originated in Kansas the century ago. We may be facing something much worse
than that....
The recovery has been
very strong,” Donald Trump said on
Monday. Then the commerce department reported the US economy contracted between
April and June at the fastest pace in nearly three-quarters of a century, which
is as long as economists have been keeping track. The drop wiped out five years
of economic growth. But pesky facts have
never stopped Trump. Having lied for five months about the coronavirus, he’s
now filling social media and the airwaves with untruths about the economy so he
can dupe his way to election day.
The comeback “won’t
take very long”, he reassured Americans
on Thursday. But every indicator shows that after a small uptick in June, the
US economy is tanking again. Restaurant reservations are down, traffic at
retail stores is dwindling, more small businesses are closing, the small rebound
in air travel is reversing. What’s Trump’s plan to
revive the economy? The same one he’s been pushing for months: just “reopen”
it....
President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Speech on the American Military Industrial Complex, January 17, 1961
Slavoj Žižek vs Noam Chomsky
