XPost: soc.rights.human, talk.politics.misc, alt.politics.religion   
   XPost: alt.christnet.ethics   
   From: hayesstw@telkomsa.net   
      
   Noam Chomsky: We are racing madly towards total catastrophe under the   
   leadership of sociopathic fanatics   
   Published 2 days ago on July 31, 2020 By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!   
      
   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.   
      
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   AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, Democracynow.org, The Quarantine   
   Report. I’m Amy Goodman.   
      
   The U.S. coronavirus death toll has topped 150,000 on Wednesday, the   
   highest of any nation by far. The hardest hit states per capita are   
   Florida, Louisiana, Arizona, Mississippi, Alabama, Nevada, South   
   Carolina, Texas, Idaho, Tennessee and Georgia, a list that includes   
   all seven of the original Confederate states.   
      
   Today we talk about COVID and so much more as we spend the hour with   
   Noam Chomsky, the world-renowned political dissident, linguist and   
   author, Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of   
   Technology, where he taught for more than 50 years, now laureate   
   professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of   
   Arizona. Author of more than 100 books. Professor Chomsky spoke with   
   Democracy Now!’s Nermeen Shaikh and I on Thursday, from his home in   
   Tucson, Arizona about the coronavirus crisis.   
      
   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.   
      
   There are ways of dealing with it. After the SARS epidemic in 2003,   
   scientists knew that another one is very likely. They warned against   
   it. They presented policies that could be carried out. They weren’t   
   implemented, in part because of deep institutional pathologies. The   
   drug companies who are the obvious candidates for dealing with it   
   can’t, by straight capitalist logic. You don’t spend money to try to   
   prevent a catastrophe ten years from now. What you do is try to make   
   money tomorrow. That is the logic of the system. So the pharmaceutical   
   companies were ruled out by capitalist logic.   
      
   The government could step in. The government, in any event, does most   
   of the basic research for vaccines and drugs, almost all of them. So   
   they could have stepped in, create laboratories, and plenty of   
   unlimited resources. But they are blocked by the neoliberal plague.   
   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. Well, that blocks the government.   
      
   Nevertheless, there were things that the government could do. When the   
   Obama administration took office, in the first few days, Obama called   
   the presidential scientific advisory board, which had been established   
   by George H.W. Bush, the first Bush, who had some respect for science.   
   Obama called it. He requested that they put together a pandemic   
   reaction program, a way to deal with a pandemic if it comes. They came   
   up with a report a couple weeks later. It was implemented. It was in   
   place until January 2017.   
      
   Trump came into office, the first few days, dismantled the whole   
   system. Nothing. That’s part of the general wrecking ball. “We have to   
   destroy everything that Obama did. We have to wreck everything.”   
   Because it is the only way to look like you are doing something.   
   Happening all over. So that went.   
      
   There were programs of U.S. scientists working in China with Chinese   
   colleagues to try to detect and identify coronaviruses. Most of them   
   are deep in caves. It’s very dangerous work. Some have been killed,   
   Chinese scientists. But they were finding them and identifying them   
   and testing them. The Wuhan Institute of Virology is the main center   
   for investigating this. Trump canceled the program.   
      
   There were simulations run of a pandemic as late as October 2019   
   warning of what would happen. No attention. The Trump administration   
   isn’t interested. So when the epidemic finally hit, the United States   
   was singularly unprepared. After that comes a series of grotesque   
   inactions and actions. For a couple of months, Trump refused to admit   
   that it was happening.   
      
   Other countries were doing things. In Asia, Oceania, Australia, New   
   Zealand, they were reacting. Some of it, South Korea, which was one of   
   the first places hit, never had to go to a lockdown because they dealt   
   with it rationally. They identified the places that were hot spots,   
   controlled them, tested, traced people for contacts. Countries pretty   
   much functioned. Vietnam has reported zero deaths, and apparently that   
   is taken quite seriously by leading U.S. specialists. The Johns   
   Hopkins School of Public Health, which monitors the international   
   situation, records zero deaths from Vietnam, which has a 1,400-mile   
   border with China. South Korea, Taiwan, New Zealand, Australia are   
   doing quite well. And Europe, they delayed in quite a way, but they   
   did finally act. As you mentioned, the curve has sharply reduced since   
   March for most of Europe. Some of them, like Norway, Germany, doing   
      
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