Leadership failure made the U.S. pandemic worse (with Ronald Klain)

Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer

Civic Ventures

Business, Government, News, Politics

4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 28 April 2020

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Pathogens are inevitable—but the scale of disaster accompanying this pandemic was not. Ronald Klain, President Obama’s Ebola czar, joins Nick and Goldy to discuss why the extent of economic collapse and deaths we’ve seen from COVID-19 is borne of government unpreparedness and leadership failure, not fate. Ronald Klain is a lawyer who served as the White House Ebola response coordinator for President Obama. He has held a wide variety of legal and policy positions in government, including his service as chief of staff to VPs Biden and Gore, chief of staff to the attorney general, associate counsel to the president, and chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee. He is currently an advisor to the Biden 2020 campaign. Twitter: @RonaldKlain Further reading: Confronting the Pandemic Threat: https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/40/confronting-the-pandemic-threat/ We’re past ‘if’ on the coronavirus. We’re on to ‘how bad will it be?’: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-coronavirus-has-landed-in-the-us-heres-how-we-can-reduce-the-risk/2020/01/22/afebe9ee-3d53-11ea-baca-eb7ace0a3455_story.html Trump says US has coronavirus ‘completely under control’ as Washington state confirms first case outside of Asia: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/trump-coronavirus-china-wuhan-disease-outbreak-airport-screening-travel-a9296926.html Obama’s ebola czar on what strong federal response looks like: https://www.wired.com/story/ebola-czar-ron-klain-federal-coronavirus-response/ The huge cost of waiting to contain the pandemic: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/14/opinion/covid-social-distancing.html Website: http://pitchforkeconomics.com/ Twitter: @PitchforkEcon Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics Nick’s twitter: @NickHanauer

Transcript

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0:00.0	The difference between Korea and the United States can be attributed to the difference between good governance and bad governance.
0:08.0	You know, leadership matters. There's no question about when we look at what's gone wrong in America, we should not blame the WHO, we should blame our leaders in Washington.
0:17.0	If we had been prepared for the pandemic, the damage it would have done to the country would have been much, much lower.
0:24.0	Pathogens are inevitable, but pandemics are not. From the offices of Civic Ventures in downtown Seattle, this is Pitch Fork Economics with
0:38.3	Nick Hanauer.
0:40.0	One American capitalist's desperate attempt to save us from ourselves.
0:44.0	I'm Nick Hanauer, founder of Civic Ventures.
0:52.0	I'm David Goldstein, Senior Fellow at Civic Ventures.
0:57.0	So Goldie today, we're going to talk to Ron Klein, who was President Obama's Ebola's
1:08.0	and coordinated the response to Ebola. And Pitch Fork Economics, of course, is a it's a podcast devoted to economics
1:16.0	and not pandemic response but we thought it you know I thought it would be appropriate
1:20.9	to have someone come talk to our listeners about what you can do with
1:27.6	government if your main goal isn't to give tax cuts to rich people.
1:31.8	I also think it's appropriate, Nick, because, you know, this is an economics podcast, but we like to talk about
1:39.2	having cause and effect right.
1:41.9	You know, this is a big theme over the course of our
1:44.0	podcast, you know, let's understand what creates growth, which is, you know, a
1:50.8	broad and prosperous middle classes is the source of growth not its consequence and so
1:57.3	we've been focusing a lot in the past few episodes on the
2:05.0	economic impact of the pandemic, but of course the cause of that economic crisis,
2:08.0	the cause of the pandemic recession, is the pandemic
2:12.0	and the pandemic had actual causes.
	...

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