 Hi, this is Joe Laurier. Before you watch our latest episode of CN Live, I just wanted to thank you, the viewers and readers of Consortium News for your past generosity in funding our unique website. It was begun 25 years ago in November 1995 by Bob Perry, one of the best investigative reporters in American journalistic history. Bob depended on readers as well for the independence that Consortium News has always had. And during these days of crisis and pandemic the crisis in journalism with Julian Assange languishing in prison, we ask you to support us through these tough times so that we can continue to bring you these special stories, a unique perspective on news that you won't find in corporate media. Thank you. Welcome to episode eight, season two of CN Live, Pandemic America. I'm Joe Laurier, editor-in-chief of Consortium News. And I'm Elizabeth Loss. There's still plenty we don't know about the coronavirus. We don't know for sure where it came from, how it always behaves, whether you get immunity if you've had it or how to treat or prevent it. What we do know is that communities are being devastated around the world. Frontline and essential workers in the elderly and some young are getting sick and dying in alarming numbers. We know that virtually every government in the world was unprepared for this crisis despite being warned. Many governments such as the United States prefer to prepare for wars they can't really fight against enemies that really don't exist rather than against a real enemy. Because of government's lack of preparedness, they've had to turn to draconian and even authoritarian measures such as enforced lockdowns and social isolation, measures that were used during the 14th century black death in Europe. We also know that these measures are leading to what might well become the greatest depression since the great one of the 1930s. With the disease still raging, nations and regions are itching to get back to normal economic life while medical experts warn that might trigger another deadly wave. With us to discuss this critical situation are Jill Stein, a medical doctor, political leader, former Green Party candidate for president, and Professor Richard Wolff, an economist, emeritus at University of Massachusetts Amherst and now teaching at the New School in Manhattan. Welcome both of you to CN Live. Thank you for joining us. I'd like to ask both of you with Jill answering first to give us just your overview of this of this extraordinary crisis. Yeah it really is an extraordinary crisis. You know my sense is that the empire has been teetering at the brink for decades with a predatory rapacious oligarchy, endless wars, austerity, the war abroad and the war at home, which has really been devastating. People especially, people of color, people of low income. Now with the pandemic the empire has gone from teetering at the brink really into a free fall and it's hard to see where this is going to stop. As I see it, COVID-19 is not only a disease, it's a symptom, a symptom of a deeper sickness, a sick economic and political system at the heart of empire and I think Martin Luther King summed it up when he said that the problem is the triple evil of militarism, racism, and extreme materialism, aka capitalism, now in a state really of explosive perhaps terminal decline. We're not just in a shutdown, I think we're in a meltdown and it's been horrifically mismanaged both the health dimension of it and the economic dimension of it and everyday people are being massively hurt. I think the response is really muted right now because it's not being covered and because we're in something of a lockdown of necessity but I think upheaval is inevitable and this is really a time for transformative change for people, planet and peace. Richard, your thoughts? Okay, Jill has said many things that saved me the trouble of having to save them again so let me pick up with at least a couple of points that are crucial for me. I want to focus on the economic system that brought this in my judgment and that has now failed to manage it and let me get at it this way. Pandemics including viral pandemics are nothing new, they're part of human nature or the nature around us, they have plagued the human race on countless times, we all know or should about the great Spanish flu, it was called back at right after World War One, that devastated if I remember the number six or seven hundred thousand Americans died in that flu way ahead of what we have now, it may be worse this time but we're not there yet and more recently we've had the SARS and the MERS and the Ebola and we know that viruses are around, we know that they mutate, we know that they can be dangerous, we know that once they emerge the crucial issue is to prevent the spread of them and focus on dealing with those who already had it. None of this is new, it's well known across many scientific, medical and other disciplines, so the only really interesting question is why were we not prepared? What's going on? Why, I'll just take the United States, why weren't the masks, the gloves, the ventilators, the beds, the ICUs, all of it, why were they not A, produced and B, properly stockpiled around the country where population is concentrated so they could be brought to bear if and when a virus comes and the answer for me is capitalism in a very practical way. It doesn't make profit and remember capitalism is a system whose leaders, the capitalists are proud to tell you that profit is the bottom line, that they're in business to make a profit. I see that, I understand what they're telling me, they're telling me how they participate in this system. It is not profitable to produce and stockpile masks, gloves, ventilate, that's not profitable to produce them and have them sit in a warehouse all over the country gathering rust and dust, I mean what, that's not going to happen, they're not going to do that and they're not going to do it for no mystical reason, it's not profitable, it is not profitable for capitalists to do, to produce and stockpile what we need to handle a viral pandemic. Okay, that's step one. Step two, the government could of course step in and say the private capitalist sector is incompetent to do this thing which is called maintain public health but that would require a government able to say to get its head around the idea that the private capitalist sector stinks at this particular important function, it can't perform, it doesn't work but of course no capitalist in their right mind are going to put into power people who might think like that, say like Jill, right, they're not going to do that and they're going to fight real hard against Jill or Bernie or anybody who even smells like they might go in that direction so we have a government that can't step in and you know the point was made earlier there is an example of when the government does step in because you know it isn't profitable to produce a battleship that sits in the water, it's not profitable to produce large numbers of weapons that sit in a warehouse, the only reason that's done is because the government comes in and makes the payment for these things whereupon they become profitable, the government could have done the same thing for everything needed to deal with corona but it didn't because that's not the way they think, they don't see that as a priority, that's a consequence of capitalism, of capitalism not just in terms of why the companies don't make the stuff but also the mentality of the officials that become political leaders who can't get their heads around the idea that over and over again, because this is only one example, the government has to come in to compensate for the failures of the capitalist private system, a government that said that would be seen as the enemy of the private capitalist system and that would be correct, it would be, which is why it isn't done. So for me, this is all a kind of lesson if you like, a lesson in the inadequacy of the capitalist system, it is a way I think to teach the American people, bitter though the lesson is given its human costs, that the capitalist system isn't capable in this case of doing something so fundamental as guaranteeing that you don't die from a disease from which you could be protected, that you don't get sick, that you don't risk infecting the people closest to you because that's how the infections, that's the worst way the infections move from people who are close, who live together or are intimate in one way or another and so a system that can't do this is a system that has lost its claim on the loyalty of the people. Last point, nothing is so horrific in this tableau that I've tried to sketch than the last two or three days in which first the president of the United States orders the meat packers in this country, tens of thousands of men and women who make their living, basically preparing the meat that we buy in the supermarket. Those people work under conditions in which this virus spreads very quickly. They have had thousands of people test positive and they've lost I believe several hundred people who have died, people who worked in the meat packing industry. The government is now acting in such a way as to basically force or try to force those workers back. The same government hasn't even thought of ordering that the employers of those slaughterhouses take any one of 20 steps that we all know about to make the workplace safe. In other words, they could have reduced the risk so that what they're ordering on these workers is still questionable but this is beyond words. Ordering them to bear the entire medical risk when you haven't asked, I mean it's beyond words, you haven't ordered the capitalists to spend the money. Now we know capitalists don't like to spend money on making workplaces safe. That's why we have OSHA. That's why we have the endless history that Upton Sinclair a hundred years ago wrote beautiful novels about how the workers are always in danger because capitalists don't make money by making workplaces safe. Another lesson in capitalism but I do take heart that there are a series of May Day events being scheduled for this Friday that the union representing the meat workers has told the president where he can put it in no uncertain terms etc. We're beginning to see the long slow return from slumber of a backbone for the labor movement and a popular uprising and if those two things can get together then next time Jill runs we will really show what can be done. Thank you for that Richard. We're going to get at the end of this broadcast. We're going to talk a little bit about the future and where it leads us to. You mentioned, it's funny how you mentioned Upton Sinclair because you were of course the jungle which was about a meatpacking plant in Chicago so we're right back there again. You know this isn't just a threat to working class people because very wealthy and popular people have gotten this sickness as well so it's in their own self-interest to have prepared for this and they didn't even have that working for them but this lack of preparedness that you discussed has this inevitably led to these kinds of draconian or authoritarian measures that we first saw in China they weren't exactly prepared as well it seemed so they had to turn to those measures was that inevitable and it seems people we just have to accept it don't we no matter how police state like it might seem. Well I think there were I don't want a monopoly I think there were examples of a number of governments which are capitalist and which were held back in various ways by that but in which the government was able for all kinds of particular reasons to be able to say what our government in this country cannot which is we represent a need of the population which is sometimes in conflict with the needs of private capitalism and when that happens the the public interest the government has to prevail I mean that's a cultural thing you know my family is French if you go over to France if I go over there as I have all my life my father was born in France it's a different thing I speak the language all French people understand that the government is a powerful necessary force it's a counter force to private capitalism so when the go even when they have a right-wing or left-wing government that stuff is very deep in the French population and the state is significant and powerful and a capitalist who goes against the state or makes comments about how the state is incompetent and who needs it is looked upon by most French people as more or less out of their mind it's a little bit like having a leader in France say which an American leader can that he or she has has conversations with a deity in France that to be the end of your political career you're done because everybody would look at you as if you had lost your mind so there's a commitment to the government I look at what Adurn I don't know how pronounce her name the the leader in New Zealand what she's been able to accomplish there it is she was powerful she was very popular she came out of a place where the state gets a certain respect she was able to mobilize even the Chinese who had their problems are still a society in which the state is very powerful and can mobilize both public and private resources to go after a prioritized objective you can't do that July 20 to weigh in on that and also take into consideration even in France and certainly in Britain with the NHS there's been this erosion of the state run health system and deprivatization gradually of it and that has also had an impact as well yes I think neoliberalism is a very dangerous and dominant paradigm right now and even in the states that have maintained you know a sort of social welfare infrastructure it's been deeply deeply eroded in the same way that our minimal institutions Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security have really been cut back our public health infrastructure the CDC the EPA you know and this isn't just with the Trump administration this has been going on really for decades I don't think we can say enough how outrageous this is it's it's both the run up to it and then it's what's happened since and note that you know leading billionaires have increased their wealth by hundreds of billions of dollars in this catastrophe so this is a system that is designed to work like this it's not being negligent it's doing what it's supposed to do which is you know to really exploit and wring the blood out of a stone here and and it really just drives home I think what Richard and I um you know have been saying since uh since the start of this and long before that that we really have a dysfunctional system right now which is uh hopefully you know uh hopefully about to transition to something else and it really depends on us to do this transition I am I am not aware myself of how um pandemics have been handled without rather uh you know authoritarian measures and and you know there's a spectrum of that and let me also add that yes China um enforced you know family separations and isolation and and case tracing and so on and and that seems to be and I'm not an infectious disease expert but from my knowledge of it that seems to be something you have to do but there are different degrees of it and in South Korea for example where they you know did some rather intrusive um tracing you know using cell phones and tracking people's movements on it had widespread support there may have been some objections to it but they have a government which you know which is broadly supported and which is very connected to people's movements and to a very strong labor movement and things are very different you know in the Scandinavian countries for example there are huge databases on health and there's an enormous amount that can be learned from uh compiling a whole lot of health data and people do that willingly where they have a trusting relationship with their government you know um we don't for a very good reason and you know so those kinds of measures are much more uh threatening and dangerous I think in our country where privacy is already invaded and abused and uh you know we have an extremely authoritarian government witness what's happening to Julian Assange right now um you know which I think should be a warning to all of us that we really have to stand up and defend our civil liberties as this is going on but that said there has to be some degree of testing and contact tracing uh South Korea just had another election and their leftist government was just elected overwhelmingly I think more than any other government they now have a very strong parliamentary majority in the wake of these measures so um you know while they did uh you know go farther than some other countries did you know that seems to have been very broadly supported so I don't think it's inherently a dangerous thing but in the hands of the government that we have right now these things are dangerous and that drives home to me the point that we can't just fix this with a little widget you know that um we need a big fix here and I think you know the economic and political systems and you know and our health and economic and racial disparities and all that they really go hand in hand and I just want to put in a word that at the end of the day you know we're seeing both parties complicit in this you know where is the opposition party when we are bailing out to the tune of five or six trillion dollars the power structure and and corporations and extremely rich and wealthy people are getting huge bailouts here right now and working people everyday people are getting a single check you know which hasn't arrived and may never arrive for 1200 dollars which is laughable and a joke where is the opposition party you know there's hardly a word of it and and I want to just stress that it's really important you know people are frozen in their tracks right now because trump is as horrific as he is but on the other hand trump was elected because people were tired of being thrown under the bus by eight years of a democratic administration that was bailing out wall street and throwing everyday people to the dogs so you know we keep trading between democrats and republicans one corporate party after the other and we just keep moving to the right and we keep becoming more unjust more unsustainable more of a travesty of a civilization I want to just stress that there is a solution at hand it's called rank choice voting it's actually taking place in a very important senate race right now and there's no better way to highlight it than to throw support to that senate race there is an independent green endorsed candidate in that race who represents everything that richard and I are talking about so you actually do have an opportunity to support it and promote it or make phone calls for it or whatever it's sort of a you know it's a better alternative really to the sanders campaign because it was constrained in a lot of ways including around foreign policy and the war machine this race is not it's a lisa savage who is a green endorsed but independent candidate running in a ranked choice election in Maine that means there's no possibility of spoiling the election or splitting the vote this is a voting reform which both parties but in particular the democrats do everything they can to suppress you're not supposed to know about it they want you to feel trapped in this two-party systems so that you'll be silenced so that you will buy into this lesser evil thing that just keeps pushing us further to the right down this path of bipartisan evil so I just want to throw that out there is a way we can really highlight and support and and showcase the solution right now in a campaign which is actually winnable that could bring this without the restraints of a corporate party into the senate where you know where us everyday people badly need a voice we need people to be speaking out right now for what we need you know we need we need the bailout for working people we need health protections at the workplace before people are sent back to the workplace and it's not only the meatpackers and it's outrageous what is being inflicted on them right now but it's also in Georgia for example who is it you know that's being put on the firing line right now it's hair salons and nail parlors you know these are largely small businesses particularly run by people of color they are being made the test cases the sacrificial lambs right now because the government of Georgia doesn't want to pay them unemployment so if they just declare them no longer shut down they're not obliged to pay their unemployment so this is a way to get rid of them and to pretend like things are being normalized but things are not normalized and I'll just make one other point which is that we've had a long-standing health disparity and that is you know largely white people of privilege versus people of color and working people and indigenous african-americans particularly but also latinos and others and it's been a devastating chronic health disparity when you look at you know rates of heart disease and just death and uh and disability in general it is vastly tied to poverty and vastly tied to racial disparities and you know it's the majority of deaths it's the majority of chronic diseases are really born by low income and people of color for a variety of reasons many of them are driven by social and economic disparities and then there are other issues including environmental racism exposure to air pollution and food deserts the inability to access or afford healthy food and so on but what's happened now with the pandemic is that this chronic inequity has exploded into an acute health emergency which is equally uh inequitable and uh fundamentally racist and um you know harmful to to working people both in the lack of protection but in who it is along the pathway of the virus who is living in crowded inadequate um living conditions uh traveling on crowded forms of transportation uh living out on the street without housing whatsoever entirely lacking in health care and in addition to some you know it's like half of the adult population practically it's about 45 percent that is under insured or uninsured there are now you know seven to ten million additional people who've lost their jobs and they're for their health insurance so this is not a new problem you know this is a um this is an incredible expansion of a chronic problem and of economic and political inequity a rapacious predatory system that needs to be fought and we need to fight it on the street when we can get out in the street we need to fight it through social movements and as Richard mentioned there are mayday events and every opportunity that there is to support striking workers we should be a part of that right now there were 50 strikes last month which is like an unbelievable record there really is an uprising going on we need to support that but we also need a political voice we need a political focus because without that we can be written off over and over and over again we have to do both and I really encourage people to support independent politics don't be intimidated support rank choice voting because that is a legitimate and really powerful way out of this two-party tailspin which is absolutely essential on that note I'd really like to ask you both to assess Trump's performance in trying to handle this crisis and to what extent he can be personally blamed for the disaster Richard if you'd like to answer first yeah I I hope I don't upset anyone but frankly I think Mr Trump has exhausted most of us we seen that he doesn't care pretty much what he says per minute to minute is whatever he thinks will advantage him at that point if he has to deny what he said last week he will he has a complicated relationship with factuality and truth I don't understand frankly and I'm not much moved by endless demonstrations in the New York Times or the Washington Post how he has now done it again the demonization of him strikes me as very dangerous Jill put it real well this is an old problem it predates Donald Trump it will continue unless change is made long after Donald Trump is off the scene so I'm not interested in Mr Trump I'm interested in what the Democrats the people who run the Democratic Party the people who run the Republican Party the elite whatever you want to call them the people who make the decisions what they're doing and and let me focus on that I think that's more adequate than than beating up on Mr Trump Lord knows he deserves it but after a while it really misses the point so here we go all of the people who will make policy right now are talking about getting the economy back to normal by which they mean something like what it was before the virus hit that's crazy because that's like saying gee it was terrible how those people in that train that was headed right for the stone wall how they were oblivious and then they were crushed to death and what we have to do is get them back to where they were before the train hit the wall no no no because that train was headed on those tracks to that wall look we have had just to give you the the the core of it we have had now the third crash of capitalism in this young century we had what we call the dot-com crisis of 2000 we had the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008 and now we have the corona crisis in each case notice the name of the crisis is about the external event that triggered it as if there's nothing to be said about the system that couldn't handle this problem that was vulnerable that was about to fall apart that's a very clever way by using language to put the burden on the trigger and not on that which it triggered the dot-com crisis was because the price of dot-com stocks was crazier if you remember back then there were all these companies that were worth thousands of dollars per share that had never earned a profit and were telling everybody they wouldn't for five or ten years yet they cost a fortune and they had made fortunes and so but that's not the first time that there have been groups of stock that are crazily priced you haven't explained why there was a crash when you point to something that happened before it because then you've left open gee capitalism didn't collapse 20 other times that that happened ditto 2008 was not the first time that lots of people with mortgages couldn't pay the state of florida is a history for the last hundred years of repeatedly being in that situation sometimes that leads to a crash of the system other times it doesn't you know why because it's a question of how the system is structured now we have a virus as i said earlier i won't repeat myself this is not the first time we've had a virus we've had viruses in the past and they haven't produced a global collapse of capitalism normal is not what you want to get back to because normal is a system that crashed three times in the first 20 years of this century joe i just wanted to change tack a little bit about the actual virus itself we don't really know all that much about it but we in consortium news have been under attack because we have accepted that we need this lockdown and that this is a very serious disease this is not just the flu so could you tell us whether you agree with that this isn't just a flu is it you've you seen corpses being loaded into refrigerated trucks in new york city because they've run out of space at the morgue before i don't think so so can you tell what do we know about this virus we don't know about it and why for example the antibody test we just don't know whether that gives immunity or not and there's certainly no no treatment yet and we may never find a vaccine there's no vaccine for hiv there's no vaccine for kamikov it seems to be assuming that we're going to have a vaccine at some point yes um there's a lot that we don't know um you know what we do know this is a corona virus it is similar to sars the severe acute respiratory syndrome virus around early 2000s it's very similar to sars it's similar to mers which was the middle east version of the virus which was even more deadly than this one but it was so deadly that it killed its host the virus killed you pretty quickly so it couldn't really be passed on and people were not asymptomatic carriers so it made it easy to separate people who had the disease from everybody else but this is kind of it's your perfect storm for a pandemic because it's not as serious as mers uh it's actually not as deadly as sars either um you know and and that's a double edged sword because that enables it to kind of travel travel covertly and people can be completely asymptomatic they're not coughing they're not sniffling they feel fine and they're quite contagious and it replicates when it passes from one person to the next person it becomes transmissible pretty quickly so it's extremely dangerous for that reason it's also dangerous because it has such a wide spectrum of effects and some people will never know that they had it you know some people will feel like they had a mild cold some people will feel like it's a mild cold and then over the course of an hour they will go into severe respiratory failure there's a name for it um called basically ARDS acute respiratory failure and they'll go into this really fast so fast that many people can't get to the hospital even um often there is time to get to the hospital but we don't even know what the body count is yet outside the hospital and it's it's going to be much bigger than the current body count and once you get sick if you get really sick people are on respirators for a month um not necessarily for a month but that's about kind of you know I don't want to say there's an average or a norm but it's not unusual at all to see people on respirators for a month and to come off with you know with uh what are called bed sores because they've been really tied to a respirator and intubated for so long so this is a dreadful disease and if you go into acute respiratory failure um you know it may be something like 50% maybe it's getting a little bit better but we don't have a treatment for it and this is it's kind of the final common pathway of severe infection and if you get severe infection from any number of causes you can go into acute respiratory failure or it's called sepsis and so on so jill you're not uh describing the regular flu could you just say something about these insane uh social media people who are saying it's a hoax it's all a big design uh by bill gates and by the state institute a total tyrant system and as richard said earlier you know the people the capitalist class wants workers to go back uh they didn't arrange this could you say something about try to put to bed these crazy ideas that this is all just a hoax yeah um you know uh I wish you could take a tour of of the hospitals in new york and see you know they had to shut down their operating rooms I mean the hospitals are going you know they are certainly at risk for bankruptcy I'm hearing this all over the place because they don't have an income stream right now they've had to shut everything down except for taking care of COVID patients and um you know if you don't know anybody who's died you know um look around because the people especially who are being hit here are um african-americans especially an older generation in new orleans it's the old jazz musicians who are just being wiped out um that's happening in in new york too uh it's just it's heartbreaking it's absolutely tragic who is being um you know wiped out and killed but i'll say that you know social media is just full of craziness uh on all counts and polls actually show that about 75 percent of the american people are strongly in favor of uh you know of of the lockdown and of maintaining social distancing so you know i think there are always going to be a kind of nutcases out there and we live in a society that is you know there is no trust we have become so corporatized we've become so corrupted that our relationships you know uh have really been destroyed the public commons has been uh hijacked you know the public commons has gone corporate you know and especially our media with the exception of uh of consortium news and a few others you know media too has been completely hijacked so people are really confused and you know i think that the pandemic is it's sort of a symbol of of this really pervasive social sickness right now and it's really important for us to affirm what's real our relationships a vision forward that just you know says no to this predatory exploitation of our economic and political system it's understandable that there's such distrust it's like the boy that cried wolf not richard wolf but the who believed who believes the government anymore except this time even though they screwed up they have to they weren't prepared as which are brilliantly laid out they had to now take these measures and we have to obey them unfortunately right if you want to cut this down for myself let me just say you know i as a medical doctor and i i have two sons that are both very involved in caring for covid patients right now you know so i'm hearing the blow by blow up close and personal and reading the medical literature and you know uh my husband who is also a physician um and you know i mean we are as we're not under any kind of lockdown we're under completely voluntary social isolation right now and i think you have to be really misinformed not to want to do that it's extremely dangerous um and there are you know there are young people out there as well who are on respirators and who are dying so it's not as though it's just an issue of age um there are you know i think you know i think there are um it we'll put it this way it is known that chronic diseases like high blood pressure like being overweight unfortunately like um having elevated cholesterol having uh diabetes or prediabetes all this increases your risks and i think it it really emphasizes that there are things we can do and we need to get the word out about how we can minimize our risks because i think we can air pollution is also very much tied to this it turns out um you know so there are things we can do and we need to do them but i think complying with uh social isolation and with staying safe at home i think it's absolutely critical and it's very much in our own interest i'd like to quickly ask richard about the economy specifically the international labor organization said this week that up to 1.5 billion workers with a b around the world may lose their jobs because of the virus the u.s economy contracted in the first quarter and part of it was pre-covid the next quarter may see a 30 percent decline in us gdp and so richard just how bad is this going to be and ken the fed keeps spending its way out of this or are we looking at another depression i think we're already two-thirds of the way towards another depression i think you're right the terrible numbers that came out today the cut about five percent in recession the cut in gdp only really takes into account the two weeks of march worth of collapse the huge collapse happened in april that won't show up until we get the numbers for the second quarter of this year so it will be worse the truth of it is nobody has the faintest idea i'm not going to give you a prediction and you should respond to anybody else's prediction by a decision to talk to somebody else because it's worth absolutely nothing the ramifications of this are going to be profound in all directions and last for a long time jill said earlier we don't even know the body count we have tested if i understand correctly roughly one or under one percent of the people of the united states which means we don't even know who has a disease who is asymptomatically conveying it to whom uh how do you do possibly develop a coherent plan if you don't know where the disease is and if you are not even now testing the the number i heard recently maybe as high as 170 to 200 000 people a day it will take months to cover the american population at that rate and that's the highest rate they've achieved so far so the economic consequences of this are spectacular here's an example that's not being discussed obama bush trump they all want more jobs to come to america they don't want companies to leave this country and they want foreign companies to come here they're not gonna come here because we don't keep our people safe and healthy your only economic strategy is undone by this unspeakable behavior every company in the world that thought of locating here is now rethinking that plan and every company that thought of getting out of here looking at how the situation of a virus was handled in china or south korea or new zealand or any one of a dozen other countries is going to now take that into account in a way that directly contradicts the whole thrust of what was supposed to be our grand strategy and when you look at the federal reserve please understand what they are doing is the behavior of people who have completely panicked they are throwing every bit of money they can think of at the problem which isn't surprising because it's more or less what they did on a smaller scale after the dot com crisis in 2000 on a bigger scale after the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008 and now on the biggest scale and they're doing it and it's really important to understand because the french have a lovely saying in french it says so keep her uh and in english roughly translate every man for himself every person save your own skin they know that capitalism is itself now in question there's no point in hesitating how much money you create and even to the economy to understand this is to understand why emperors at the end of historical empires did what we call debase the currency they didn't have enough money to solve their problems so they made coins that looked like they had an ounce of gold but actually it was half an ounce of gold and half an ounce of bronze or some funny money it used to be called because it was the desperate final step you know at the beginning of the program someone mentioned i don't remember who something about the black death in the 14th century a spectacular disease wiped out a third of europe it was carried by fleas i believe it was a virus fleas on rats the fleas on the rats then jumped on to the people bit the people and they died well it was the end of feudalism with that wiping out the serfs who had sustained the lords were dead or sick and the system could not ever then came the renaissance the reformation the french revolution and it was over i'm wondering historically when we look back on this one whether the display of a system that can't cope with fleas on a rat like a system that can't cope with a virus of the sort we have known for at least a good century and a half it's a sign of a system that is disintegrating and i think the perception in a hundred forms artistic music and others is percolating as the american people watch you know the idea that a family in chicago is going to see their mother or father forced back into the meat slaughtering play risking his or her life i mean these are unspeakable moments it's like what jill said walking through a hospital ward seeing it well americans in huge numbers are now seeing it and it's going to change this country in ways that kind of everybody knows are coming although we don't know the contours of the shape still take jill following on from that thought do you sense that faced with the economic catastrophe that richard was just discussing that governments are in denial about how dangerous it is in order to reopen their economies and perhaps too soon i think they are in complete denial and i think they're terrified because um this is um you know this is blood on their hands both from the deaths and you know and from the economic ruin that so many working people are facing right now you know what do we have 30 million small businesses something like that who are just going to go belly up um there is you know they're they're being thrown crumbs if even that and and you know richard mentioned that the oligarchy is doing everything it can think of but it's only doing you know what it can think of is itself you know it's just throwing unlimited resources at itself and it's making the problem worse it's not even handling the um the pandemic and if you don't fix the pandemic you know we could see an escalating catastrophe here because if workers are getting sick and it's not only meat packers and you know hair and nail salons and things like that but it's also people who are picking the food you know who are at very high risk right now because they are being kept in horrific housing um and you know who knows the border could be closed to them you know most of them are migrant workers we very much depend on migrant workers are our very predatory food system depends on these workers who are terribly abused and they are a setup for infection as well so we could see crops I mean crops are spoiling in the fields right now because it's too expensive for farmers to harvest them and then not be able to send them to schools or businesses places they used to send them so there's a huge amount of food which is going to waste right now and you know this is horrible in and of itself but it could get a whole lot worse we could see this economic catastrophe also spiral into um you know massive food shortages and a very unfair and insecure unsustainable food system could also go into meltdown and we could have widespread hunger starvation I mean already the crisis of the pandemic is supposed to have thrown an additional 250 million people I believe into not only into poverty but put them at real risk for starvation and this is like overseas that doesn't even address the potential in this country as well you know I think it's a good time for everybody to be starting a victory garden actually right now as just an insurance policy and connecting to our communities these are kinds of things we can do even while being socially distanced you can get out there and garden or have a you know a container garden on your balcony etc or work on community spaces that can be done in a way which which is safe there's a lot that we can do it's a time to really double down on you know on building community and building a healthy and sustainable future what we need to do right now to survive is not rocket science you know what we really need is is a political revolution a transformation you know a real transfer of power so that we can do these very simple and basic things one of the silver linings here is that we've seen the powers that be really demonstrate that money grows on trees you know the thing that I was ridiculed for by you know one of the comedians I forget who it was but you know he thought it was so ridiculous that I was proposing a bailout for for students you know we bailed out wall street why can't we bail out students and they really tried to tear that to shreds until of course they all adopted you know this year along with a green new deal and a few other you know traditional green ideas but yeah I mean now they've shown us money really does go grow on trees or if it doesn't grow on trees you can just tax the rich and yeah they may not have income but they have assets so how about we tax wealth you know if the income's not there we can tax wealth there's this is not an obstruction you know the only obstruction is is there um having convinced too many people that we don't have the power that we actually have we do have the power and we have the capacity to blow this off you know and to actually implement a government of buying for the people that can do the things that are survival and our future depend on we need to make that happen now Richard uh speaking of money growing on trees uh how long can the fed keep printing yet will that be a solution here it's the only solution they can see and in a sense they're right the system has come to such a pass that they really don't within the framework of their system because they're not going to look at the issues that jill quite rightly set up you know in economics classes even in this country we teach that when the system has a crash which capitalism has every four to seven years on average for 300 years in every country where capitalism has settled it has a downturn we call it a recession a depression a crisis a breakdown we have lots of words because we have lots of experience with this phenomena everything has been tried to get that to stop in the 1930s the great depression we even had a whole new kind of economics developed by a british economist named canes we call it canesian economics trying to stop the crisis stop the every four to seven years well we've had 20 years of this century we've had three crashes guess what so it works out to every seven years it never stops this system is now at such a point having accumulated all of the failed efforts to cope with this instability and by the way you know when i teach my classes you might enjoy it i lean across the podium and i say to my students if you lived with a roommate as unstable as capitalism you would have moved out long ago jill let me go to you um you know as if this situation weren't dramatic enough it's coming in the middle of a presidential election here and a quite a different kind of election it'll probably will be um clearly trump is vulnerable now after this dismal performance and trying to be a leader he's been a disaster at the podium etc he he he was going to run on the economy and the rugs been pulled from under him now he doesn't know what is hidden do you think that joe biden would really be the nominee for the democrats well he but his obvious decline in his mental abilities and now these new very credible allegations of sexual assault well the democrats have to go to someone else and generally how do you see this election chipping up also the issue of mail-in votes going to the polls it was your assessment of where the now forgotten and in the back burner presidential election i agree um trump is certainly in trouble he's kind of um you know a one-hit wonder the economy was his thing he doesn't have much else and um you know it's hard to envision any way that we're going to be headed for an economic recovery by the election and um he's just been you know shown to be so incompetent and um you know dangerous as a national leader that um you know hopefully this will be the last we see of him and that wouldn't be too soon unfortunately joe biden doesn't seem to have much to offer to say the least and the democrat strategy seems to be to keep him hidden and quiet you know for him to just be sort of the silent um placeholder uh but he's going to get called out and you know he's going to get exposed uh i would not be surprised to see the democrats pull another you know dirty trick i think this was partly why new york just shut down it's primary it's not going to hold one they don't want to see a revival take place for bernie sanders um you know be wonderful if this created an opening for bernie sanders but i think the democrats are more afraid of bernie sanders than they are of uh of donald trump and that was evident in their rally around around joe biden so i don't have much faith in the democrats to do something good and i've sort of stopped wasting my time trying to imagine what they're going to do or how we're going to deal with it in my view it's really time to double down for a ranked choice voting which enables us to vote for what we want and not against what we fear we need you know to bring our values back to our votes and let you know bring a moral compass to our electoral system i think voting machines are dangerous and maybe that's another silver lining of this crisis that voting machines are also you know they're great um places for contagious diseases to you know to have a field day so i think that uh right in ballots with a very strict chain of custody and with you know perhaps public hand counted voting you know would be a great thing and maybe this is finally a time that people will pay attention to that to actually you know which is done in many countries in europe um there's no reason why we have to have an instant result we need a reliable result and a vote that we can believe so either a hand counted or a system that can be verified optical scanners um you know can be verified and they can also be programmed for ranked choice voting which can also be verified so again it's not rocket science and i think we should not shrink from demanding what we actually need now i find it very hard to imagine a scenario that that the democrats are going to come up with something with integrity that we can believe in and that we should all rally around you know it hasn't happened for about a hundred years i don't think they're about to start now i think they are they have once again proven their incompetence and their subservience to a predatory oligarchy and i think we need to step away and vote for something that that we can build and again i would really urge people to look at a senate race that will really highlight voting reform ranked choice voting and a candidate who can bring this vision into the senate and for us to again build from the ground up richard before i asked the last question do you want to weigh in on the presidential election which everyone's forgetting about now there is one yes yeah again i don't want to repeat things that jill said that i i'm i find myself in agreement with i would only add that i like the old remark that we have two parties that both endorse support and and help capitalism they believe in capitalism you'll remember that remarkable moment two or three years ago when nancy polosi was asked a question about socialism by a student in a college where she was speaking and she was really kind of dumbstruck with the question he asked her what her views were about socialism versus capitalism or something like that and after hesitating because she really didn't know what to say she looked in a kind of blank way at the young man and said but i quote i believe but we're all capitalists now okay i think that's right nancy you know i think she speaks what she feels and and certainly is consistent with her position and as long as we have two parties both of whom are competing to be supportive of capitalism they really only disagree on how best to do that um we're stuck we're stuck in a society that is governed by that tweedle dumb tweedle d exchange from time to time yes we'll have the naughty boy trump types from time to time but basically i don't think this is a this is this is going nowhere we have to have a party that is critical of capitalism and is willing and able to say we're in favor of doing better than capitalism we could have done it every other system slavery feudalism has been born has evolved over time and then it died we know capitalism was born we know capitalism evolved over time the next chapter is it dies and it's get replaced by something else people were convinced they could do better than slavery and they eventually did they had the same feeling about feudalism and we have the same feeling about capitalism nothing illustrates it better than the failure of this system in the face of this pandemic and therefore we advocate and then i really do believe it has to be a fundamental change that people can understand and as some of you know i advocate for transforming the workplace the democratization of the workplace the end of a situation where every factory office and store is run by a handful of people at the top the owner the board of directors the major shareholders and all the mass of people have to live with the decisions they are excluded from that is an anti-democratic way of organizing production and if you do that it befouls and it undermines any effort to make democracy happen anywhere else i think the american working class if it could be presented with an exciting image of a revolution that transformed their daily life at the workplace they're no longer the drone they're no longer the one who's told what to do everybody has two job descriptions the particular task and your participation in running designing strategizing for the enterprise as a whole makes the whole idea of a transformation to a better different system less threatening less caught up in old cold war imagery and something that can move the population i'm really convinced by the last 10 years of my running around this country that the audience for this is there that the interest in this is there jill is right it's the organization figuring out how to bring all of those people together now that occupy taught them that there's lots of them bernie has taught them that there's lots of them jill and others have taught us there's lots of us out there now the trick is bring it together in a way that can gel into a movement for change which that brings us to the last question which is i see three possible scenarios going forward after this crisis one is that us becomes a more equitable society there's actually a national health plan like a medicare for all there could be nationalization of key industries which you're referring to second possibility is a totalitarian police state having built off of the measures that are being imposed now and the third is the status quo ante just like the 2008 financial crisis in the end it went right back to the way it was maybe got worse but there wasn't fundamental change even by that serious crisis jill let me start with you what do you think uh what are the most likely scenarios going forward what we know is that this is not a static situation um that we have been in a state of economic ecological social and health decline the virus didn't you know this pandemic is bad and it didn't come out of nowhere uh we don't have the capacity to deal with it and we're not going to unless we can make fundamental changes that our current political structure is not capable of it's going to be there for a while we're not going to have what so-called herd immunity until it's thought about 60 or 70 percent of us have had it unless they're able to come up with a vaccine um and that may take quite a while so this is going to be a problem we're not going to be able to restore the economy uh until we get a handle on this health crisis um the system is just in such meltdown and it's a convergent meltdown and then add to that climate change you know and add to that um you know the extinction crisis which this is actually part of that we are um we're kind of bumping up against these reservoirs of viruses that we've never been exposed to because we've denied all kinds of species their habitat we're invading everywhere we're developing everywhere and so we're having you know and then factory farming is a part of this too we we have a completely unsustainable and unjust system which is self-destructing right now so i think there is no alternative actually to a transformational change i think when you know when people face full on the reality that this is the end game and it may be the pandemic or maybe climate catastrophe that you know unravels i mean there's a lot of there's a whole lot of stuff going on on the climate front too including the meltdown of the Antarctic in particular in greenland and you know we could see equally catastrophic things more catastrophic things happening on the climate front in potentially you know in the next decade or two so it's not like oh we're going to get over this we're not going to get over this we are going to face a series of catastrophic challenges right now that we cannot handle as a predatory society we you know capitalism can't handle this the predatory oligarchs cannot handle this we need a system that's operating in the public interest with the full breadth of our resources and our creativity and our sense of justice that's what we got to bring to the table that's the only way out of here we got to do this together and in a way with honesty and integrity and that's it there ain't no other choices so you know i think it's all a matter of when we mobilize around that vision Richard i think you put your finger i think we're going to see a three-way struggle the republicans democrats they they've told us what they want they want to go back to the way it was before the virus hit which is to go back on the train heading right into the stone wall waiting either for the next virus or for the climatic crisis or for the financial crisis that's but that's who they are that that's what trump wants that's what the leadership of the republican party wants that's what joe biden and andrew quomo and you know the clintons that that's what they want that's who they are on the other hand you have those who understand that that's not gonna work anymore and those are whatever polite name we call them the fascists the people who want now to bring the government and the private sector together one enforcing the dominance of the other in exchange for being given what for example mr trump has given to the defense establishment from the day he took office which is why he has no threat from that corner and then there's us and for us we ought to be out front as a new left socialist whatever words people find comfortable i don't really care but a radical transformation that brings democracy to the workplace and that takes seriously the social commitment we have as members of a community and all that that has meant and i want us to be really radical because that's the only way the only way that we might persuade both of the others that what they need to do is what roosevelt did in the 30s i'm not a fan of that i was a critic you know when i was young about those things i'm a critic of them now but compare what roosevelt did to what is being done now that only happened not because roosevelt figured those things out he didn't you look at his campaign when he became president the first time it's a clinton obama quomo biden program he advocated in case you don't know it in 1932 a balanced budget only a crazy person would have done that then it was the movement from below the alliance of the labor movement the cio which was conducting the greatest labor organization movement in the history of the united states you never had anything before that like that we've never had anything since then like that and they were allied with two socialist parties and a communist party and they worked very well together and they went to mr roosevelt and they said you better take care of us in this crisis because if you don't we'll vote you out and there's among us these socialists and communists and they're going to give you a revolution and roosevelt went back to the rich and he basically told them you better give me the money to take care of people because if you don't you won't have any money at all he didn't convince them all but he split them and the half that went with him then introduced what we now call the new deal the fact that later capitalists tried to take credit for the middle class created by the new deal was a clever ploy but they fought it tooth and nail and it was only because of an extremely radical labor socialist alliance that we got the new deal so that's why we ought to advocate it now not because we'll necessarily win it great as that might be but we will shift the conversation as successfully to the left as the extreme right has been able to shift it to the right in the last 25 years that's the struggle I see emerging now that was brilliant thank you very much and thank you Jill Stein for joining us and I thank Elizabeth Loss my co-host and our audience for watching the latest episode of CN Live thank you very much