Noam Chomsky on Trump’s Disastrous Coronavirus Response, WHO, China, Gaza and Global Capitalism

How did the United States — the richest country in the world — become the worldwide epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, with one person dying of COVID-19 every 47 seconds? We spend the hour with Noam Chomsky, the world-renowned political dissident, linguist and author, discussing this unprecedented moment in history, and its political implications. Chomsky reflects on the significance of the Bernie Sanders campaign, calling it “an extraordinary success” that “completely shifted the arena of debate and discussion” in the United States. He also responds to President Trump’s cuts to U.S. support for the World Health Organization and the surge in deaths in the United States to another record high, and discusses conditions in Gaza, the rise of authoritarianism around the world, and the progressive response

MAY 25, 2020

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re broadcasting from New York, the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic. The United States itself is the worldwide epicenter with about a third of the world’s reported infections and a quarter of the global death toll, even though the U.S. makes up less than 5% of the world’s population. This comes as the U.S. Labor Department says roughly 40 million Americans have filed for unemployment benefits since mid-March, and the scale of U.S. job losses is set to rival the Great Depression.
Well, for more on the political implications of this unprecedented moment, we’re spending the hour with Noam Chomsky, the world-renowned political dissident, linguist and author, laureate professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona, Tucson, professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he taught for more than half a century. His recent books include Global Discontents: Conversations on the Rising Threats to Democracy, Who Rules the World? and Requiem for the American Dream: The 10 Principles of Concentration of Wealth & Power.
Noam Chomsky joined us for a conversation in April from his home in Tucson, Arizona, where he’s sheltering in place with his wife Valeria. We spoke on the day that Senator Bernie Sanders announced he was suspending his presidential campaign, making former Vice President Joe Biden the presumptive nominee to face Donald Trump in the November election. I began by asking Professor Chomsky about what’s happening right now in the context of the 2020 elections, what he sees happening in November.

NOAM CHOMSKY: If Trump is reelected, it’s a indescribable disaster. It means that the policies of the past four years, which have been extremely destructive to the American population, to the world, will be continued and probably accelerated. What this is going to mean for health is bad enough. I just mentioned the Lancet figures. It will get worse. What this means for the environment or the threat of nuclear war, which no one is talking about but is extremely serious, is indescribable.

Suppose Biden is elected. I would anticipate it would be essentially a continuation of Obama — nothing very great, but at least not totally destructive, and opportunities for an organized public to change what is being done, to impose pressures.

It’s common to say now that the Sanders campaign failed. I think that’s a mistake. I think it was an extraordinary success, completely shifted the arena of debate and discussion. Issues that were unthinkable a couple years ago are now right in the middle of attention.

The worst crime he committed, in the eyes of the establishment, is not the policy he’s proposing; it’s the fact that he was able to inspire popular movements, which had already been developing — Occupy, Black Lives Matter, many others — and turn them into an activist movement, which doesn’t just show up every couple years to push a lever and then go home, but applies constant pressure, constant activism and so on. That could affect a Biden administration. It could also — even if it’s just a holding action, it means there’s time to deal with the major crises.

Take Medicare for All or, the other major plank in Sanders’s program, free college education. Across the whole mainstream spectrum, all the way to what’s called the left in the mainstream, this is condemned as too radical for Americans. Just think what that means. That’s an attack on American culture and society, which you would expect from some hostile enemy. What it’s saying is it’s too radical to say that we should rise to the level of comparable countries. They all have some form of national healthcare. Most of them have free higher education — the best-performing countries nationally, like Finland, free; Germany, free; right to our south, Mexico, a poor country, high-quality higher education, free. So, to say we should rise to the level of the rest of the world is considered too radical for Americans. It’s an astonishing comment. As I say, it’s a critique of America that you’d expect from some super hostile enemy.

That’s the left of the spectrum. Tells you that we have really deep problems. It’s not just Trump. He’s made it much worse, but the problems go much deeper, just like, say, the ventilator catastrophe, which I described, just based on good capitalist logic with the extra hammer blow of making the government ineffectual to deal with things. This is much deeper than Trump. And we have to face those facts. Some do. I’m sure you reported — I don’t remember — you probably reported the setting of the Doomsday Clock in January. OK?

AMY GOODMAN: Yes.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Notice what happened. All through Trump’s term, the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock, the best general assessment we have of the state of the world, moved closer to midnight — termination — reached the highest point ever. This January, it exceeded it. The analysts gave up minutes, moved to seconds: a hundred seconds to midnight, thanks to Donald Trump.

And the Republican Party, which is just monstrous, no longer qualifies as a political party. It simply sheepishly echoes everything the master says. Zero integrity. It’s just amazing to watch. He’s surrounded himself by a collection of sycophants who just repeat worshipfully everything he says. Real major attack on democracy, alongside the attack on “the survival of humanity,” to quote JPMorgan Chase again — the nuclear war, raising the threat of nuclear war, dismantling the arms control system, which has, to some extent, protected us from total disaster. It’s astonishing to watch.

The same memo that I quoted about how the policies we’re following are risking the survival of humanity ended by arguing that the banks should cut back its fossil fuel support, in part because of the reputational consequences. Their reputation is being harmed. What does that mean? That means that activists are putting pressure on them, and they have to maintain some kind of reputation. Now, that’s a good lesson.

And it works. We’ve seen some very striking examples. Take, say, the Green New Deal. A couple of years ago, that was an object of ridicule, if it was mentioned at all. Some form of Green New Deal is essential for the survival of humanity. Now it’s part of the general agenda. Why? Activist engagement. Especially Sunrise Movement, a group of young people, acted significantly, up to the point of sitting in in congressional offices. They received support from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other young legislators who came into office as part of the Sanders-inspired popular wave — another great success. Ed Markey, senator from Massachusetts joined in. Now it’s a part of the legislative agenda. The next step is to force it through in some viable form. And there are very good ideas as to how to do that. Well, that’s the way things can change.

With a Biden presidency, there would be, if not a strongly sympathetic administration, at least one that can be reached, can be pressured. And that’s very important. If you look over the very good labor historian — I’m sure you know Erik Loomis, who has studied the efforts by working people to institute changes in the society, sometimes for themselves, sometimes for the society generally. And he’s pointed out — made an interesting point. These efforts succeeded when there was a tolerant or sympathetic administration, not when there wasn’t. That’s a big — one of many enormous differences between Trump, the sociopath, and Biden, who’s kind of a pretty empty — you can push him one way or another. This is the most crucial election in human history, literally. Another four years of Trump, and we’re in deep trouble.

AMY GOODMAN: If you can talk about the enormity of this moment and the fact that the United States has become the epicenter of the pandemic in the world? Can you hold forth on this? What does this mean, the wealthiest country in the world?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, the United States is — I mean, countries have reacted to this in many ways, some very successfully, some more or less successfully. One is at the bottom of the barrel. That’s us. The United States is the only major country that cannot even provide data to the World Health Organization, because it’s so dysfunctional.

There’s a background. Part of the background is the scandalous healthcare system, which simply is not ready for anything that’s out of the normal. It simply doesn’t work. This is exacerbated by the strange collection of gangsters in Washington, who have — it’s almost as if they systematically took every possible step to make it as bad as possible. Through Trump’s term, the last four years, he has been systematically cutting back on all of the health-related aspects of the government. Pentagon goes up. Building his wall goes up. But anything — actually, anything that might benefit the general population goes down, particularly health.

Some of it is almost surreal. So, in October, for example, just very exquisite timing, he canceled completely a USAID project — Predict, it was called — that was working in Third World countries, also in China, to try to detect new viruses that might turn into the anticipated pandemic. And in fact it was anticipated since — at least since the SARS epidemic in 2003. So we have a kind of combination of factors, some of them specific to the United States.

If we want to ensure or at least hope to avoid new pandemics, which are very likely to come, more serious than this one, in part because of the enormous rising threat of global warming, we have to look at the sources of this one. And it’s very important to think them through. So, just roughly to go back, pandemics have been predicted by scientists for years. The SARS epidemic was quite serious. It was contained, but vaccines were — there was the beginning of development of vaccines. They never proceeded to the testing phase. It was clear at that time that something more was going to happen, and several epidemics did.

But it’s not enough to know that. Somebody has to pick up the ball and run with it. Who can do it? Well, the drug companies are the obvious place, but they have no interest in it. They follow good capitalist logic: You look at market signals, and there’s no profit to be made in preparing for a predicted and anticipated catastrophe. So they weren’t interested.

At that point, another possibility is the government could step in. I’m old enough to remember the terror of polio was ended by a government-initiated and -funded project that finally led to the Salk vaccine, which was free, no intellectual property rights. Jonas Salk said it should be as free as the sun. OK, that ended the polio terror, measles terror, others. But the government couldn’t step in, because there’s another particular aspect of the modern era: the neoliberal plague. Now, you remember Ronald Reagan’s sunny smile and his little maxim about how government is the problem, not the solution. So the government can’t enter.

There were some efforts, nevertheless, to try to prepare for this. Right now in New York and other places, doctors and nurses are forced to make agonizing decisions about who to kill — not a nice decision to make — because they simply don’t have equipment. And the main lack is ventilators, huge shortage of ventilators. Well, the Obama administration did make an effort to try to prepare for this. And this kind of dramatically reveals the kind of factors that are leading to catastrophe. They contracted with a small company that was producing high-quality, low-cost ventilators. The company was bought up by a larger one, Covidien, which makes fancy, expensive ventilators. And they shelved the project. Presumably, they didn’t want competition with their own costly ones. Shortly after that, they turned to the government and said they wanted the contract ended. The reason was it was not profitable enough, so therefore no ventilators.

We have the same thing in hospitals. Hospitals, under the neoliberal programs, are supposed to be efficient, meaning no spare capacity, just enough beds to get by. And in fact, plenty of people, me included, can testify that even the best hospitals caused great pain and suffering to patients even before this broke out, because of this just-on-time efficiency concept that was guiding our privatized, for-profit healthcare system. When anything hits out of the normal, it’s just tough luck. And this runs across the system.

So we have a combination of capitalist logic, which is lethal but could be controlled, but it can’t be controlled under the neoliberal programs, which also say the government can’t step in to pick up the ball when the private sector doesn’t.

On top of that — now, this becomes specific to the United States — we have a freak show in Washington, a totally dysfunctional government, which is causing enormous problems. And it’s not that nothing was known. A pandemic was anticipated all through Trump’s term, even before. His reaction was to cut back preparation for it. Astonishingly, this continued even after the pandemic hit.

So, on February 10th, when it was already serious, Trump released his budget for the coming year. Take a look at it. The budget continues the defunding of the Center for Disease Control and other government institutions responsible for health, continues to defund them. It increases funding for some things, like fossil fuel production, gives new subsidies to the fossil fuel industries. I mean, it’s as if the country is simply — maybe not “as if” — the country is simply run by sociopaths.

And the result, so, we cut back on the efforts to deal with the pandemic that’s taking shape, and we increase the efforts to destroy the environment, in which — the efforts in which the United States, under Trump, is in the lead in racing to the abyss. Now, bear in mind that that’s — I don’t have to tell you — is a far more serious threat than the coronavirus. Now, this is bad and serious, particularly in the United States, but we’ll recover somehow, at severe cost. We’re not going to recover from the melting of the polar ice sheets, which is leading to a feedback effect, well known, that increases — as they melt, there’s less reflective surface, more absorption in the dark seas. The warming that’s melting increases. That’s just one of the factors that’s leading to destruction, unless we do something about it.

And it’s not a secret. Just recently, for example, couple of weeks ago, there was a very interesting leak, a memo from JPMorgan Chase, America’s biggest bank, which warned that, in their words, “the survival of humanity” is at risk if we continue on our present course, which included the funding of fossil fuel industries by the bank itself, said we’re endangering the survival of humanity. Everyone who’s got eyes open in the Trump administration is very well aware of this. It’s difficult to find words for this.

I should say, other countries have — first of all, it was not a secret. I mean, it’s become convenient now. Trump is desperately seeking some scapegoat that he can blame for his astonishing failures and incompetence. The most recent one is the World Health Organization, the China bashing. Somebody else is responsible.

But it’s simply — the facts are very clear. China very quickly informed the World Health Organization last December that they were finding patients with pneumonia-like symptoms with unknown etiology. Didn’t know what it was. About a week later, January 7th, they made public the fact to the World Health Organization, the general scientific community in the world, that Chinese scientists had found out what the source was: a coronavirus resembling the SARS virus. They had identified the sequence, the genome. They were providing the information to the world.

U.S. intelligence was well aware of it. They spent January and February trying to get somebody in the White House to pay attention to the fact that there’s a major pandemic. Just nobody could listen. Trump was off playing golf or maybe listening — checking his TV ratings. Yesterday, we learned that one very high-level official, very close to the administration, Peter Navarro, in late January had sent a very strong message to the White House saying this is a real danger. But even he couldn’t break through.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam, you mention Peter Navarro, the trade representative, sending a memo — it just came out in The New York Times — in late January warning of the coronavirus, saying that, I think, something like up to a million people could die. And Trump took from that setting a travel ban on China, but not doing a corollary, which was ensuring that the United States had the proper tests and also had the PPE, the protective personal equipment, that doctors, that nurses, that the custodial staff in hospitals needed to stay alive, to treat patients, to help them stay alive. And the intelligence agencies, it came out, at this time, even before Navarro, they were all warning Trump. If you could go back to even two years ago, when he disbanded his pandemic unit within the National Security Council, said that when he’s at the table in China talking about spending money on bombs or a wall, they’re not saying, “Sir, you also have to look at what’s happening here”? And that unit, pandemic unit, not only is about how we deal in the United States, but also ensuring, as the CDC does and other agencies of the U.S. government, that scientists are sent out to other countries, like China, to investigate and to help other countries, because when it comes to a pandemic, we’re all in this together. So, if you could talk about these early warnings and why testing and this personal — protective personal equipment is so important?

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