Capitalism Versus Coronavirus

Deconstructed

The Intercept

News

4.8 • 4.7K Ratings

🗓️ 12 March 2020

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

From just a handful of cases a few weeks ago, the COVID-19 outbreak in the US has ballooned to over a thousand cases nationwide. The Trump administration’s public response has ranged from incoherent to incomprehensible: denialism about the scale of the problem, failure to test in sufficient numbers, a reluctance to take coordinated, large-scale government action. It’s also raised questions about the US healthcare system’s capacity to respond effectively to a health crisis on this scale. Columbia professor and economist Jeffrey Sachs joins Mehdi Hasan to discuss American capitalism’s failure to deal effectively with the coronavirus.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	With this pandemic, this government has to be judged on its incompetence, its venality,
0:07.6	its ignorance, and it will add to our costs and our dangers, absolutely, enormously depressing
0:16.6	and significant way.
0:24.5	Welcome to Deconstructed, I'm Mehdi Hassan.
0:27.2	In the midst of a corona crisis and we have a president who can't or won't lead and
0:32.3	an economic system that's just not fit for purpose.
0:36.4	When this pandemic started, our Secretary of Health and Human Services was talking about
0:42.2	how the private markets would organize the response.
0:46.5	Unbelievable.
0:47.8	That's my guest, a well-famous economist and author, Professor Jeffrey Sachs.
0:51.7	So on Today's Deconstructed, its capitalism versus the coronavirus.
0:58.7	254 people die from coronavirus in China on the deadliest day of the outbreak so far.
1:06.2	If millions of people contract the coronavirus, the death toll could still run into the hundreds
1:11.0	of thousands.
1:12.0	The coronavirus outbreak is worse than any terror attack.
1:15.0	The terror of the virus is increasing every moment.
1:17.8	Some people are predicting the apocalypse.
1:21.3	It is difficult to describe, summarize or express with sufficient outrage.
1:27.3	The many myriad ways in which the Trump administration has screwed up beyond belief in response
1:33.8	to the coronavirus pandemic as the World Health Organization officially classified it on Wednesday.
1:39.6	Remember, lots of countries are dealing with the political, economic, public health fallout
1:45.0	from this virus.
	...

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