The Sickness is the System with Richard Wolff

Upstream

Politics, News, Society & Culture

4.9 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 2 November 2020

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It won't come as a surprise to most to hear that the Trump administration has completely dropped the ball on their response to the covid pandemic. The misinformation campaign, lack of empathy, and outright failure of this administration to address the dangers and impacts of covid are jaw-dropping. But it's not just a matter of this particular administration. In his new book "The Sickness is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us from Pandemics or Itself," Richard Wolff, a professor of economics and founder of Democracy at Work, outlines how the root cause of the failure to adequately respond to this pandemic is rooted in our economic system itself — capitalism. We spoke with Richard Wolff about how the Trump administration and our current economic system are both responsible for the disastrous response that the United States has shown in the face of such a major disaster. We go over how other countries have responded, how the United States could have done things differently, why capitalism is doomed to fail us, and how restructuring our economic system towards one that is more collective and cooperative could address many of the issues that we are facing today.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	What fundamentally ails us, the disease we have, the sickness we have, is not a virus.
0:28.7	It's the economic system we live with, which has proven itself in the face of a virus to be
0:35.0	stupefyingly incompetent, failing at every turn, and the book kind of goes through to demonstrate exactly
0:43.2	what the failures were and exactly how they were rooted in the economic system, capitalism,
0:49.7	so that people begin to understand that the real illness we have to confront, not the symptom,
0:55.2	which is the failure to handle COVID, but the disease itself, and that's the system. That is now
1:01.6	no longer working for the vast majority of the people, which is its only justification for existence.
1:08.2	You're listening to upstream upstream upstream. I'm Della Duncan and I'm Robert Raymond.
1:16.8	You're listening to an upstream conversation with Richard Wolf, professor at the New School in
1:22.5	New York City, founder of the organization Democracy at Work, host of the show Economic Update,
1:29.2	and author of several books, including most recently, The Sickness is the System, when capitalism
1:36.3	fails to save us from pandemics or itself. Upstream is a labor of love. If you like what you hear and
1:44.5	want us to be able to produce more content, please consider donating at upstreampodcast.org
1:51.0	forward slash support. Thank you.
1:58.6	Welcome, Richard Wolf. Thank you for joining me on upstream again. It's wonderful to have you back.
2:04.3	Thank you very much for the invitation and I appreciate the opportunity to talk about the work.
2:10.0	Yes, so you just released a book, The Sickness is in the System,
2:15.2	when capitalism fails to save us from the pandemic or itself, and you've released this collection
2:22.2	of essays and articles still during the pandemic, quite incredible. So I want to ask you why?
2:28.0	Why did you write and release this book and what inspired you to get it out now?
2:32.8	Well, what inspired me to write the book was a mixture of excitement and frustration,
2:41.2	excitement that the kind of critical social analysis that I try to do
	...

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