Friday, April 17, 2020

‘We’re in deep trouble’: Noam Chomsky explains how Trump and his ‘freak show’ are ‘moving literally to destroy the country’
 April 13, 2020 By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!

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, as Senator Bernie Sanders announces he is suspending his campaign for the presidency. Chomsky also describes how frontline medical workers and progressive organizing are giving him hope.



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


AMY GOODMAN: We’re broadcasting from New York City, the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic. The U.S. itself is now the worldwide epicenter, with one person dying of COVID-19 every 47 seconds. Nearly 16,700 coronavirus deaths have been recorded in the United States, with the number of confirmed cases approaching half a million — more than Italy, Spain and France combined. Of course, the true rate of infections is far, far higher due to a critical lack of testing. This comes as the Labor Department said Thursday over 6.6 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits over the past week, as the pace and 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 turn today to Noam Chomsky for the hour, 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 50 years. 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 Wednesday from his home in Tucson, Arizona, where he is sheltering in place with his wife Valeria. This was just before Senator Bernie Sanders announced he’s suspending his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, 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, and 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 leader 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: Back with professor Noam Chomsky in 30 seconds.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “Ave Maria,” performed today, Good Friday, inside the burned-out shell of the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. It was live-streamed. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue my interview with Noam Chomsky. I asked him how the United States, the wealthiest country in the world, has become the epicenter of the pandemic.

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?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, remember that it continued even after the pandemic was already in force. Now, the budget proposal is astonishing. This is February 10th, well into the pandemic. Trump cuts further the health-related components of the government, continuing the hit. They were under the ax, just as they were throughout his term.

Actually, the clips that you played before are part of a very clever strategy. Whether this is consciously planned or just intuitive, I don’t know. But the pattern of simply making one statement today, contradicting it tomorrow, coming out with something else the next day is really brilliant. It means he’s going to be vindicated. Whatever happens, he’ll have said it. You shoot arrows at random, some of them are going to hit the target. And his technique with the Fox echo chamber and the worshipful base simply tuned to Fox, Limbaugh, etc., they’re just going to pick whatever happened to be right, and say, “Look, our wonderful president, the greatest president we’ve ever had, our savior, knew it all along, and here was his statement.” Can’t miss.

It’s very much like the technique of producing constant lies. You know, I don’t even have to go through it. The assiduous fact-checkers tot them up. I think it’s maybe 20,000 by now or something. And he’s laughing all the way. This is perfect. You tell constant lies, what happens is the concept of truth just disappears.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Noam Chomsky, world-renowned linguist, political dissident. Back with him in 30 seconds.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “Here Comes the Sun” by The Beatles. At a hospital in Long Island, it became so overwhelming every time a patient coded, the staff decided to counter it by playing “Here Comes the Sun” on the PA system every time a patient was released. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, as we return to my interview with professor, linguist, world-renowned political dissident Noam Chomsky.

AMY GOODMAN: So, this is a clip, Noam, of The Daily Show with Trevor Noah called “Saluting the Heroes of the Coronavirus Pandumbic.” It’s extended, the three-minute video, highlighting members of the right-wing media, like Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Tomi Lahren and others, as well as Republican members of Congress and the Trump administration, downplaying or mocking the coronavirus pandemic. It starts on February 24th and ends with Donald Trump claiming March 17th and Hannity saying March 18th that they had always taken the pandemic seriously. This is “Saluting the Heroes of the Coronavirus Pandumbic.”

SEAN HANNITY: Tonight I can report the sky is absolutely falling. We are all doomed. The end is near. The apocalypse is imminent, and you’re going to all die. Or at least that’s what the media mob would like you to think.

RUSH LIMBAUGH: Yeah, I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks. The hype of this thing as a pandemic, as the Andromeda Strain, as “oh my god, if you get it, you’re dead.”

PETE HEGSETH: This is one of those cases where the more I learn about coronavirus, the less concerned I am. There’s a lot of hyperbole.

LOU DOBBS: The national left-wing media playing up fears of the coronavirus.

TOMI LAHREN: The sky is falling because we have a few dozen cases of coronavirus on a cruise ship? I am far more concerned with stepping on a used heroin needle than I am getting the coronavirus. But maybe that’s just me.

JEANINE PIRRO: It’s a virus like the flu. All the talk about coronavirus being so much more deadly doesn’t reflect reality.

DR. MARC SIEGEL: This virus should be compared to the flu, because at worst — at worst, worst-case scenario — it could be the flu.

GERALDO RIVERA: The far more deadly, more lethal threat right now is not the coronavirus, it’s this — it’s the ordinary, old flu. People are dying right now.

STEVE DOOCY: The flu is here, everywhere.

GERALDO RIVERA: Nobody has died yet in the United States, as far as we know, from this disease.

STEVE DOOCY: That’s right.

LAURA INGRAHAM: And the facts are actually pretty reassuring. But you’d never know it, watching all this stuff.

JESSE WATTERS: You want to know how I really feel about the coronavirus, Juan? If I get it, I’ll beat it. I’m not afraid of the coronavirus, and no one else should be that afraid, either.

MATT SCHLAPP: It is very, very difficult to contract this virus.

DR. DREW PINSKY: It’s milder than we thought. The fatality rate is going to drop.

ED HENRY: When you hear the context, it’s not quite as scary.

AINSLEY EARHARDT: It’s actually the safest time to fly. Everyone I know that’s flying right now, terminals are pretty much dead. And then the planes — remember back in the day when you had a seat next to you possibly empty? You could stretch out a little more? It’s like that on every flight now.

REP. DEVIN NUNES: One of the things you can do, if you’re healthy, you and your family, it’s a great time to just go out, go to a local restaurant.

MARIA BARTIROMO: Yeah.

REP. DEVIN NUNES: Likely, you can get in, get in easily.

NEWS ANCHOR: Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz mocked concerns about the spread of the virus by wearing a gas mask on Capitol Hill.

JOHN KING: [reading] “When a reporter in the Capitol asked Senator Inhofe of Oklahoma, 85, what precautions he was taking … [he] extended his arm with confidence: ‘Wanna shake hands?’”

VICE PRESIDENT MIKE PENCE: In our line of work, you shake hands. I expect the president will continue to do that. I’ll continue to do it.

LARRY KUDLOW: We have contained this. We have contained this — I won’t say airtight, but pretty close to airtight.

KELLYANNE CONWAY: It is being contained. And do you not think it’s being contained?

SEAN HANNITY: Zero people in the United States of America have died from the coronavirus. Zero.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: This is a flu. This is like a flu. It’s going to disappear one day. It’s like a miracle. It will disappear. … I have felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic. I took it very seriously.

SEAN HANNITY: By the way, this program has always taken the coronavirus seriously.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Sean Hannity and Donald Trump, right before that, on March 17th and 18th, saying, “We have always taken the coronavirus pandemic seriously.” “Saluting the Heroes of the Coronavirus Pandumbic” from The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, who is now doing his show each night from home to protect against community spread. So, Noam Chomsky, world-renowned political dissident, well-known linguist, author, activist, as you listen to the Fox News — this is not just a channel; these are the people that President Trump channels. These are perhaps his senior advisers, as they continually played this down. Do you hold President Trump responsible? Would you say he has blood on his hands?

NOAM CHOMSKY: There’s no question. Trump makes some crazy statement. It’s then amplified by the Fox News echo chamber. The next day, he says the opposite. That’s echoed; the echo chamber amplifies that. Notice that the tone — the tone of the reporting is interesting. It’s all with perfect confidence, not what any sane, rational person would say — “We really don’t know. There’s a lot of uncertainty. This is the way things look today.” There’s nothing like that. Absolute confidence. No matter what the dear leader says, we amplify it. And it’s an interesting dialogue. They amplify what he says. Sean Hannity can say, “This is the greatest move that was ever made in the history of the world.” And the next morning, Trump tunes in to Fox & Friends, listens to whatever is said. That becomes his thought for the day. It’s an interaction, Murdoch and Trump moving literally to try to destroy the country and destroy the world, because in the background, we should never forget, is a far greater threat that is coming closer and closer while Trump is leading the way to destruction.

He has some assistance. So, down on the southern part of the hemisphere, there’s another madman, i.e. Jair Bolsonaro, who’s trying to vie with Trump to see who can be the worst criminal on the planet. He’s telling the Brazilians, “It’s nothing. It’s just a cold. Brazilians don’t get viruses. We’re immune to them.” His health minister and other officials are trying to butt in and say, “Look, this is really serious.” The governors, many of them, fortunately, are ignoring what he says. But Brazil is facing a terrible crisis. It’s actually gotten to the point where in the favelas, you know, these miserable slums, in Rio, where the government does nothing for the people, others have intervened to try to impose sensible restrictions, insofar as it’s possible under those miserable conditions. Who? The crime gangs. The crime gangs, that torture the population, have moved in to try to impose health standards. The indigenous population is facing a virtual genocide, which won’t bother Bolsonaro. He doesn’t think they should be there anyway. Meanwhile, while all this is going on, scientific papers are coming out warning that in 15 years the Amazon is going to shift from being a net carbon sink to a net CO2 emitter. That’s devastating for Brazil — in fact, for the whole world.

So, we have the Colossus of the North, as it’s called, in the hands of sociopaths, who are doing whatever they can to harm the country and the world. And the Colossus of the South, as it’s been called, is, in its own way, doing the same thing. I’m able to follow this pretty closely because my wife Valeria is Brazilian and keeps me up to date with the news that’s coming out in Brazil. And it’s simply shocking to see.

But meanwhile, other countries are reacting sensibly. So, as soon as the news started coming out from China — and there was plenty of news right away, contrary to what is being claimed — the countries on the Chinese periphery began to react — Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore — quite effectively. Some of them have it basically under control. New Zealand has apparently quashed the coronavirus, maybe almost completely, with a lockdown right away, an immediate lockdown for a couple of weeks, and seems to have come close to ending it. You look into Europe, and most of Europe just dithered, but some countries, the better-organized countries, did act right away. It’s very striking. It would be very useful for Americans to compare Trump’s ravings, of the kind you illustrated, with Angela Merkel’s, German chancellor, her sober, factual account and talk to the German people, describing exactly what’s happening and what has to be done.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam, we only have a minute, but I wanted to ask you, as we speak to you at your home in Tucson, Arizona, where you are sheltering at home, where you are staying at home because we are in the midst of this pandemic, to prevent community spread and to protect yourself and your family: What gives you hope?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, I should say that I’m following a strict regimen, because my wife Valeria is taking charge, and I follow her orders. So Valeria and I are in isolation.

But what gives me hope is the actions that popular groups are taking all over the world, many of them. Some of them are — there are some things happening that are truly inspiring. Take the doctors and the nurses who are working overtime under extremely dangerous conditions, lacking — especially in the United States, lacking even minimal support, being compelled to make these agonizing decisions about who to kill tomorrow. But they’re doing it. It’s just a — it’s an inspiring tribute to the resources of the human spirit, a model of what can be done, along with the popular actions, the moves to create a Progressive International. These are all very positive signs.

But you look back in recent history, there have been times where things looked really hopeless and desperate. I can go back to my early childhood, the late ’30s, early ’40s. It looked as though the rise of the Nazi plague was inexorable, victory after victory. It looked like you couldn’t stop it. It was the most horrible development in human history. Well, turns out — I didn’t know that at the time — that U.S. planners were expecting that the post-war world would be divided between a U.S.-controlled world and a German-controlled world, including all of Eurasia — a horrifying idea. Well, it was overcome. There have been other serious — the civil rights movement, Young Freedom Riders going out into Alabama to try to encourage black farmers to go to vote, despite the threat, serious threat, of being murdered, and being murdered themselves. These were some — this is examples of what humans can do and have done. And we see many signs of it today, and that’s the basis for hope.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky, world-renowned political dissident, linguist, author, speaking to us from Tucson, where he is now sheltering at home, laureate professor at University of Arizona, taught for more than half a century.
Report: COVID-19 Cases in U.S. Amazon Warehouses Will Likely Skyrocket

APR 17, 2020


A report by two grassroots workers’ rights organizations suggests coronavirus cases in U.S. Amazon warehouses will likely “exponentially increase” in the coming days as the corporation refuses to shut down some of its facilities — even when workers test positive for COVID-19. More than half of Amazon’s 110 warehouse facilities in the country have reported cases of coronavirus. Meanwhile, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has told shareholders he now wants to test all employees for COVID-19. Despite the economic crisis triggered by the pandemic, Amazon’s stock continues to climb, lifting Bezos’s personal fortune to nearly $140 billion. In related news, Amazon has shut down all of its warehouses in France after a court ruled Tuesday the company needs to reassess the safety of its workers during the pandemic.
UnitedHealth Group Profits Surge as Coronavirus Spreads

APR 17, 2020



The for-profit health insurance giant UnitedHealth Group reported profits grew by over $160 million during the first quarter of 2020, as demand for nonessential medical treatment plummeted while coronavirus hospitalizations surged. UnitedHealth reported a 3.4% year-over-year increase in quarterly earnings to $5 billion. Former health insurance executive Wendell Potter tweeted in response, “The earnings were so good, the company said it still expects to make as much in total profits this year as they predicted in December … when no one could predict the massive loss of life & jobs caused by the coronavirus. In other words, they’re thriving during a pandemic.”

COVID-19 & Indian Country: Pandemic Exposes Navajo Nation’s Water Access Crisis & Health Disparities

APRIL 15, 2020

GUESTS
Dean Seneca
epidemiologist who spent nearly 20 years as a senior health scientist for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He is now executive director of Seneca Scientific Solutions Plus. He is a citizen of the Seneca Nation.
Emma Robbins
director of the Navajo Water Project, and a Navajo artist and activist.

LINKS
Emma Robbins on Twitter
Navajo Water Project
Seneca Scientific Solutions


As the COVID-19 death toll continues to rise in the U.S., fear is mounting that the spread of the virus could devastate tribal communities. We look at how the coronavirus is impacting Indian Country with Dean Seneca, a citizen of the Seneca Nation and epidemiologist who spent nearly 20 years as a senior health scientist for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Navajo activist and artist Emma Robbins, director of the Navajo Water Project, a community-managed utility alternative that brings hot and cold running water to homes without access to water or sewer lines. “One of the hardest things right now is being able to wash your hands in the Navajo Nation,” says Robbins. The Navajo Nation is the largest tribal nation in the United States and the hardest hit by the outbreak, with nearly 30 deaths and more than 830 confirmed cases.

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


AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman. Democracy Now! The Quarantine Report, as we broadcast from the epicenter of the pandemic, New York City.

We turn now to look at how the coronavirus is impacting Indian Country. As the COVID-19 death toll continues to rise in the U.S., fear is mounting the spread of the virus could devastate tribal communities. Already at least 44 people in the Indian health system have died. There are more than 1,100 confirmed cases, according to Indian Country Today.

Navajo Nation, which stretches some 27,000 square miles across portions of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, has been the hardest hit by the virus so far, with more than 830 reported cases and 28 deaths as of Tuesday. In Arizona, 16% of COVID-19 deaths have been Native Americans, who make up only 6% of the state’s population. Meanwhile, two pueblos in New Mexico, Zia Pueblo and San Felipe, have some of the highest rates of infection in the United States. In Oklahoma, the first COVID-19-related death in the state was a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.

And experts warn these numbers will only grow due to a disproportionate number of preexisting health conditions in tribal communities and resource-starved tribal healthcare systems ill-prepared for the pandemic. The coronavirus federal stimulus package provides $8 billion in relief for the 574 federally recognized tribes, but many say far more is needed to adequately protect indigenous people from the virus’s spread.

For more, we’re joined by a public health leader for American Indian and Alaska Native populations, epidemiologist Dean Seneca. He spent nearly 20 years as a senior health scientist for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He’s now executive director of Seneca Scientific Solutions Plus. He’s a citizen of the Seneca Nation.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Dean Seneca. Can you give us a lay of the land right now? How hard has the pandemic hit Indian Country here in the U.S.?

DEAN SENECA: Well, thank you. Thank you for having me.

The pandemic, it’s hit pretty hard in certain areas throughout Indian Country. Like you said, the Navajo Nation is definitely hit the hardest. And some areas where we have high populations or cities where people can come together, we have a sparsity of cases, you know, for example, in Portland, Oklahoma and some other areas. But overall, given the situation that Native people are in regarding health disparities and preexisting conditions, except for Navajo Nation, I think we’re not doing that bad, as far as the pandemic hitting Indian Country. You know, with just 12,000 tests only and over 1,100 confirmed, like you pointed out, many at Navajo Nation, the rest of the country is faring pretty well, in my opinion, given what the outbreak has done throughout the rest of the country.

Now, having said that, my fear is that the virus hasn’t really hit rural America yet. And as you know, many of our tribal nations throughout the country are in rural America. So, that will be the big test. I feel that it will be a matter of time before we really see if the spread has hit into the deep pockets of Indian Country.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to Navajo Nation for a minute, the largest tribal nation in the United States and the hardest hit by the coronavirus outbreak, with nearly 30 deaths and more than 830 confirmed cases as of Tuesday. Government and health officials, as well as community members, are scrambling to protect the roughly 175,000 people living on and around the reservation, as many residents still lack access to clean water and face the scarcity of other resources that are crucial to curb the spread of the daily virus. I wanted to go to Navajo Council Delegate Amber Crotty.


DELEGATE AMBER CROTTY: When you come back home to your remote area, you’re surrounded by family and friends. And so, that’s where the contact also happens, when you’re in a household with multigenerational families, grandmas in the household, with grandpa. Then it’s you, and then it’s your children, and possibly if you have older children. And so it’s multiple generations that are being hit, and that’s what we’re seeing. And the remoteness now, we can — as long as we’re moving, the virus is moving with us. It’s just shedding light on the disparities that have already existed and also the lack of federal funding to meet the demand of the health needs.

AMY GOODMAN: Navajo Nation is currently on lockdown. Meanwhile, Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez and Vice President Myron Lizer have quarantined themselves after learning they came in contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19. Neither of them is currently presenting symptoms.

I’d like to bring Navajo activist and artist Emma Robbins into the conversation with Dean Seneca. She’s the director of the Navajo Water Project, a community-managed utility alternative that brings hot and cold running water to homes without access to water or sewer lines.

Emma, welcome to Democracy Now! I wanted to ask you — I mean, if people were to say what’s the number one rule all over the country right now, it’s wash your hands, and wash them well and often. Talk about Navajo Nation, how hard hit is right now, and your access to water.

EMMA ROBBINS: Yeah. Good morning. Thank you, Amy, for having me.

As you mentioned, one of the hardest things right now is being able to wash your hands on the Navajo Nation. If you don’t have hot and cold running water and access to soap, that’s extremely difficult. And as we’ve all heard throughout the past weeks, that’s one of the ways to flatten the curve the most.

In addition to that, not having drinking water on the reservation is very difficult, because when you need access to running water, you need to actually get bottled water and travel to these different grocery stores. And a lot of times when residents arrive, there just isn’t any left.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, talk about how hard hit Navajo Nation is right now.

EMMA ROBBINS: Yeah, as mentioned, you know, we’re one of the hardest-hit areas. Not only does our reservation have an extremely high infection rate, but those surrounding ours, as well, of the Pueblo Nations, do, too. So it’s very concentrated in one area. As you mentioned, there are over 800 cases of COVID on the Navajo Nation currently. And unfortunately, we’ve lost 28 community members.

AMY GOODMAN: Dean Seneca, if you can talk about the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic in Indian Country, and overall? I mean, you, for years, worked for the — you’re an epidemiologist, you’re a citizen of the Seneca Nation, and you worked for the Centers for Disease Control, an agency that now everyone in this country has come to be familiar with.

DEAN SENECA: Well, as you can tell, you know, right from the very beginning, I mean, he didn’t make this pandemic a priority. He did a lot of mixed messaging in the very, very beginning when he started to talk about this. And you see that he’s trying to now — in his recent reports, trying to justify that, “No, we were on top of this right from the beginning.” And that’s far from the case. You know, his mixed messaging is what was really critical. At times, he would say, “Well, hey, this virus is just going to go away. And we’ll wake up one day, and it won’t be here.” You know, people listen to this information, and that is the wrong thing to send. He made a major mistake in eliminating his council on international health and global pandemics. That was huge right from the beginning. He should never have done that.

AMY GOODMAN: And explain. That was in that National Security Council. So, when he’s talking in — what? — December about more money for bombs and building a wall, if that pandemic group were represented, they would have said, “Sir, what about China?” although it’s clear, very early on, the intelligence agencies, his closest Cabinet members, I mean, heads of agencies —

DEAN SENECA: Correct. Correct.

AMY GOODMAN: — were actually warning him about this.

DEAN SENECA: Yes. And he kind of put it aside, thinking that the pandemic would never leave China and reach the United States. And actually, one of the things that I predicted early, when I saw 20,000 cases in China, I said the virus is already here. And I said that, you know, way before many of the experts.

But here’s the big thing. When I did the Ebola outbreak, you know, I can say with certainty that the White House, CDC, FDA and USDA were literally connected at the hip. OK? I think that that’s one of the big things that made us successful, is that our communications were very, very tight, and we were working together and communicating several times a day.

During this response, we know that the White House is really, really struggling on who is in charge and who’s overseeing this. At one time it was CDC that was in charge. Then they recently moved it to the FDA. So they were scrambling for leadership there. And, you know, that speaks to poor leadership right from the top. I hate to say that, being a veteran myself, a military person in the Army, Army Reserves. I don’t ever want to see the United States fail. But I really do feel that the administration really did not get on board in a timely manner when they needed to. That’s evident. The leading expert from NIH has also pinpointed to that a little bit, and then he had to go back on TV recently to justify his hypothetical comments.

So, you know, strong leadership right at the beginning of a pandemic like this is critical, is essential, because we’re fighting a war. This is a war where you can’t see the enemy. You don’t know where the enemy is. The enemy can be around you at any time. And you have to do your best to protect yourself. This is a different kind of war. And in any kind of war, in any kind of situation like this, you need strong leadership. And that’s evident it did not happen.

AMY GOODMAN: Your perspective is an unusual one, Dean Seneca. You’re there in Seneca Nation, upstate New York. You’re a Native epidemiologist, worked for the CDC for years. You took on Zika and H1N1. Explain the differences.

DEAN SENECA: Well, you know, the big difference is, you know, those viruses really — I mean, they did hit the United States, but they never hit the United States hard. And we were able to do very effective contact tracing. And that’s one thing I’ve been preaching throughout this whole pandemic, is that contact tracing is the tool in which we can really stop and mitigate an outbreak.

But, you know, H1N1, we had a few cases here, something that we never saw before as a country. We ramped up our emergency operations components. You know, we did see a couple deaths, and we did see a minor spread. And then, after a while, it was another strain of the flu, very, very different. It did give us an opportunity to kind of exercise our emergency preparedness capabilities.

Zika, a little bit different. It did impact a little bit the southern part of the country, but not a major life-threatening situation with Zika — not in all cases, but, you know, pretty much the southern border, a different kind of a situation where it was a vector-borne virus that was transmitted, and it caused several different chronic conditions. This, the corona —

AMY GOODMAN: And Ebola.

DEAN SENECA: Oh, yeah, and Ebola. And I must say that Ebola was probably the hardest thing that I ever did in my life, when you go overseas and you have to prepare for something like Ebola, which is, you know, a very violent kind of hemorrhagic fever where the body, when infected, literally bleeds internally. You know, that was the hardest thing I ever did, very dangerous situation. I went over there, and I was part of a team of scientists, I’m proud to say, that actually were a part of putting the curve into the ground. And what we did there is we went from passive epi-surveillance to active epi-surveillance, to prospective, you know, being active and getting out into the community and seeking cases ahead of time, instead of people being sick and getting this information reported to us.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Dean Seneca, when you hear that President Trump is ending funding for the World Health Organization, what is your response?

DEAN SENECA: This is a very ill-responsible move on behalf of a leader that is leading the world in good public health and leading the world in almost every facet — economics, military, education, health. You know, it’s just — really speechless at how ill-responsible that move is. If anything, we should be trying to work with the WHO, which is such a very nonpolitical, very, very passive, has a lot of empathy organization. You know, it’s a caring organization. They try to do their best with the limited resources they have. And they’re all around the world.

AMY GOODMAN: And very quickly, Dean Seneca, for understanding how Indian Country works, when a governor like Governor Cuomo declares, you know, shelter at home, does that apply to the reservations in New York, or do you issue a separate order?

DEAN SENECA: Well, what I’ve been promoting is that — you know, we coordinate with our state and local and county health departments, but tribal nations have the ultimate public health authority. And, you know, they need to exercise that public health authority when necessary. Given this situation, yes, we want our tribal nations to work with other state entities and those kinds of things in order to isolate and practice social distancing. And I know, for example, that Seneca Nation, recently, President Armstrong issued a stay-at-home order, which is a very, very good thing, to kind of reduce the spread of this virus.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go back to Emma for a moment. One of the things we’ve been focusing on on Democracy Now! are the mutual aid efforts that are going on all over. This is Kim Smith, a Navajo woman who’s running a relief operation from a farm in Hogback, New Mexico.


KIM SMITH: We’re stepping up for the community members at a time that is so crucial. And that’s what we’re here for, ultimately, as young people, to be able to sacrifice ourselves, sacrifice our well-being, so that more of our people don’t get sick. And the reality is, is that our ancestors sacrificed so much more for us to continue to be here.

AMY GOODMAN: So, I wanted to go back now to Emma Robbins to talk about what is happening in Navajo Country — you run the Navajo Water Project, as we said before — the mutual aid that’s going on, and also why the Navajo community is so hard hit, a hot spot in — not only in places like New Mexico and Arizona, but in Indian Country overall.

EMMA ROBBINS: Yeah. You know, that’s such a great question, because the Navajo Nation experiences some of the highest rates of water poverty in the United States. Navajos are 67 times more likely to not have indoor plumbing and potable water and sanitation in their homes. And again, getting back to the idea of not being able to wash your hands, you’re not able to flatten the curve then. And we’ve seen a rise of COVID cases when that happens. As I mentioned, when people go out to haul water, whether that’s from stores or watering points, they’re also exposing themselves to others. I think it’s also been really tough because we don’t have a ton of health facilities across the reservation. And those that do have access to it often live very far away and aren’t able to get there in time.

AMY GOODMAN: And can you talk about the role of Navajo women in leading mutual aid?

EMMA ROBBINS: Yeah. I’m glad that you asked that question. I think I’ve seen many Navajo women step up and fight for our communities, which is our traditional role. That’s not to say that we’re in the '60s and it's the idea of stay in the kitchen. It’s that we are the caretakers of our communities. And this is nothing new for us. It’s time to step up and work together and just make it happen, where people are able to get the help that they need and to really just come back and serve our communities. I think of this as by Navajos, for Navajos, of projects that are happening on the reservation successfully.

AMY GOODMAN: And now the chairman of the Navajo Nation, Jonathan Nez, and the vice president — he’s the president — currently in quarantine?

EMMA ROBBINS: Yes, that’s correct. They do believe that they could have come in contact with COVID themselves.

AMY GOODMAN: And the hospitals and clinics on the reservation, are they adequate? And what do you think needs to happen at the national level in the United States? We’re talking stimulus package. The kind of aid that Indian Country is getting from that $2 [trillion] — it’s obviously much more — $4 [trillion], $6 trillion stimulus package?

EMMA ROBBINS: Yeah. So, it’s important to understand that on the Navajo Nation we have two types of hospitals. One is IHS, or Indian Health Service, which is across Indian Country. And then we have what are called 638 hospitals, which are hospitals that were originally part of the federal government but have been taken over by the tribal government. And on the reservation, there are 16 health centers. Nine of those are clinics. Seven are hospitals. There are about 400 hospital beds across the nation and 46 ICU beds. You know, talking about these numbers, that is not proportionate at all, and it’s scary to think about these numbers rising. And so, yes, we are a sovereign nation. Yes, we are able to help ourselves. But it’s also important that we do have our treaties honored and have that funding from the federal government, because this is when we need help. Right now we can’t wait.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Emma Robbins, I want to thank you so much for being with us, head of the Navajo Water Project. And I want to thank Dean Seneca, epidemiologist and citizen of the Seneca Nation, where he was speaking to us from, in upstate New York. For years, he worked at the CDC, took on H1N1, took on Zika, took on Ebola, now dealing with this century’s most significant, hardest-hitting pandemic of all, the coronavirus.

This is Democracy Now! When we come back, why was an African-American doctor, wearing a mask, getting together his equipment to test homeless people in Miami, Florida, handcuffed? Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Tears for Fears frontman Curt Smith and his daughter Diva giving a quarantine performance of the band’s song “Mad World.”


SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=NAVAJO

Trump Cuts Funds for World Health Org as Oxfam Warns Pandemic Could Push Half a Billion into Poverty

New analysis shows the economic crisis caused by coronavirus could push over
half a billion people into poverty unless urgent and dramatic action is taken. This
virus affects us all, even princes and film stars. But the equality ends there. By
exploiting the extreme inequalities between rich and poor people, rich and poor
nations and between women and men, unchecked this crisis will cause immense
suffering.  Report: "Dignity Not Destitution"

APRIL 15, 2020
GUESTS
Paul O'Brien
vice president of Oxfam America who is coordinating the organization’s coronavirus advocacy response.


LINKS
Paul O'Brien on Twitter


Report: "Dignity Not Destitution"
As the confirmed cases of coronavirus surpass 2 million around the world, President Donald Trump says he will cut U.S. support for the World Health Organization. Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet medical journal, called it a “crime against humanity.” Oxfam America said the cuts slash “any hopes for the responsible international cooperation and solidarity that is critical to save lives and restore the global economy.” This comes as a new Oxfam report estimates the pandemic’s economic fallout could push more than half a billion more people into poverty. We get response from Paul O’Brien, vice president of Oxfam America.

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


AMY GOODMAN: As the death rate from the coronavirus pandemic continues to accelerate, with more than 2 million confirmed infections worldwide and at least 127,000 deaths, President Trump said Tuesday he would cut off U.S. support for the World Health Organization. Speaking from the Rose Garden, Trump sought to shift blame for his administration’s disastrous handling of the pandemic onto the U.N. public health agency, accusing the WHO of helping China to cover up the spread of the coronavirus when it emerged late last year.


PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: The world depends on the WHO to work with countries to ensure that accurate information about international health threats is shared in a timely manner and, if it’s not, to independently tell the world the truth about what is happening. The WHO failed in this basic duty and must be held accountable.

AMY GOODMAN: Trump’s decision sparked international outrage and condemnation. Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet medical journal, tweeted, “President Trump’s decision to defund WHO is simply this — a crime against humanity. Every scientist, every health worker, every citizen must resist and rebel against this appalling betrayal of global solidarity.”

The American Medical Association’s president, Patrice Harris, called on Trump to reconsider the cut, saying, quote, “Fighting a global pandemic requires international cooperation and reliance on science and data,” she said. The global anti-poverty organization Oxfam America said the cuts slash, quote, “any hopes for the responsible international cooperation and solidarity that is critical to save lives and restore the global economy.”

This comes as a new Oxfam report estimates the pandemic’s economic fallout could push more than half a billion more people into poverty. For nearly 3 billion people already living in poverty and facing malnutrition, the virus could be deadly. In all, it estimates half of the world’s 7.8 billion people could be living in poverty in the virus’s aftermath. The report is called “Dignity Not Destitution: An 'Economic Rescue Plan For All' to tackle the Coronavirus crisis and rebuild a more equal world.”

For more, we’re joined by Oxfam America’s vice president, Paul O’Brien.

Welcome to Democracy Now! Let’s begin with President Trump. In the midst of this pandemic, where the U.S. is the epicenter of the world’s pandemic — more deaths than any other country in the world — President Trump announces he’s ending support for the World Health Organization. Paul O’Brien, your response?

PAUL O’BRIEN: Thanks for having me on.

It was pretty shocking to hear that last night. We had predicted last week that the number of deaths from coronavirus could be as high as 40 million over the coming period. So, we’re already in crisis, but it could get significantly worse.

President Trump has his treasury secretary talking to other G20 finance ministers today, and what that leader needs to be able to show is America’s role in leading multilateral cooperation. And at the same time, he’s announcing that he’s going to cut the legs off the World Health Organization, thereby undermining his own attempt to show global leadership. It was profoundly self-destructive for U.S. leadership. It’s profoundly harmful for our world.

And it seems to be nothing other than short-term blame shifting and scapegoating in order to distract people from the failures of this administration to properly lead on the issue. But its consequences could be devastating for people.

AMY GOODMAN: Paul O’Brien, there are many critics of the World Health Organization. But across the board now, with President Trump announcing that he is cutting the funding for this organization — the U.S., the largest funder of the World Health Organization — explain what this organization does and why it is so critical. And with President Trump so deeply concerned about what’s happening in the United States, one would think, why what happens in the rest of the world makes an enormous difference to what will happen in this country?

PAUL O’BRIEN: Well, as you say, New York is the epicenter of the crisis. The U.S. is now facing more deaths per day than has been seen. We are facing our own health crisis here. We’re also facing our own economic crisis here just at the same time. You’ve got 17 million new unemployed in the United States. And even before the crisis started, you had 40% of Americans didn’t have $400 to their name for an emergency. And then the crisis hits. So you’ve got a health crisis and an economic crisis here. You’ve got that, in many ways, even worse in many of the communities that Oxfam works in. We work in 90 countries around the world, including the United States. But you’ve got this health and economic crisis coming at the same time.

You’ve got a World Health Organization, whose job it is to convene leaders to make sure that the response is coordinated and evidence-based, is based on science, and that there is a truly global response to a global pandemic. So, apart from the financing of the organization, the leadership and the moral authority of the organization to be able to drive global consensus to respond to this health and economic crisis is absolutely critical. And for President Trump, the world’s most powerful politician, to stand on a stage yesterday, for whatever reason he had, and to attack them, in order to blame shift, undermines their ability to get that global consensus at a critical time. So, this act, in itself, could have profound repercussions for many of the people that we see as particularly vulnerable in the United States and around the world.

AMY GOODMAN: He made the announcement in the Rose Garden yesterday, the single one-day — the highest one-day death toll for any nation in the world: 2,228 people died of COVID-19. That’s the United States. Talk about the rest of the world, where perhaps the — where COVID-19 hasn’t hit as hard yet, mainly, for example, in Africa, and what the World Health Organization means particularly for these areas of the world, the most vulnerable.

PAUL O’BRIEN: Right. Well, the whole world is vulnerable. We think, particularly when you look at the combination of bad health systems or weak health systems and economic vulnerability, three areas are at greatest risk: sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa and the Middle East. You’ve got, in our — our report found that we think 500 million more people could go into poverty as a consequence of this, essentially wiping out all the progress that’s been made over the last 30 years, in some contexts, and, on an average, the last 10 years of progress.

Women are going to be, as is so often the case, facing the brunt of much of the consequences of this. In Bangladesh, for example, a million garment workers were laid off from their jobs. Eighty percent of them are women. In Kenya, flower factories just shut down, 30,000 people sent home. Most of them are women.

We don’t have enough protections in the United States, because we haven’t addressed the problems of chronic extreme inequality. But when you look at what’s going on outside of the United States, where 80% of the people on the — of the workers on the planet Earth have no health insurance, 2 billion people are in the informal economy.

So, if you’re in a context — let me just raise five contexts for you. These are the five largest slums in the world. There are slums in Karachi and Mumbai in Asia, in Cape Town and in Nairobi, in Kenya, and in Mexico City. Those five — they’re the largest single slums in larger cities — have 5.7 million people. When coronavirus hits those environments, first, there’s no healthcare system in those contexts that stock ventilators waiting for them. In some countries where we work, there are literally two or three ventilators in the whole country. But economically, people are living in close quarters. There’s no physical distancing possible. They get no sick pay. Their economies are being shut down. They’re being told, “Stay in place.” They’re not able to trade. They’re not able to access goods. In many contexts, their borders are now not allowing food, if they’re net importing countries.

So we have an economic crisis that is potentially coming, along with a health crisis, that is going to be profoundly harmful for many people, and potentially destabilizing in ways that we will all face the consequences of.

AMY GOODMAN: Your report is called “Dignity Not Destitution: An 'Economic Rescue Plan For All.'” You say Oxfam is calling for wealthy countries to agree to a global economic rescue package that includes canceling $1 trillion in debt payments for poorer countries. They say debt cancellation could free up to $400 billion, to free up money to fight the coronavirus pandemic.

PAUL O’BRIEN: Yeah. There are ways forward. And this is an incredibly important week, and today is an important day. You’ve got ministers of finance — the G20 is meeting, and ministers of finance from the 189 countries are meeting, to ask and answer the question: What can they do collectively to address the economic fallout of this crisis? You reported what’s going to happen to the global economy. We think there are three ways forward, and we’re calling on these governments to work together to show the kind of multilateral leadership that President Trump failed to show last night.

The first, as you mentioned, is debt. We’ve seen some early movement this week. Yesterday we got some — the beginnings of good news, in that the G7 supported some debt suspension, and the IMF agreed to a debt moratorium for and put in place some debt relief packages for 25 countries. That’s a start. It’s nowhere near enough. What we don’t want to see happen this year is that debt payments are essentially suspended in a moratorium and where the interest will accrue and countries are going to be forced to pay that over the following years, even if they suspend it for 2020. Think of it this way: In 45 countries, their health systems are a quarter the size of the debt payments that they have to make. So they have to make 400% the size of their health budgets just in paying their debt allocations. So —

AMY GOODMAN: Paul, very quickly, I wanted to ask you about Yemen and Gaza.

PAUL O’BRIEN: From which perspectives? Because both of them are now facing both health and economic crisis. You’ve got, in those contexts — and we work in both of those contexts, with refugee populations and those who have been forcibly displaced, to try and reduce the level of conflict. But as you know, I was in Gaza not long ago. People are living in incredibly constrained quarters. It’s very dense. They have almost no economic activity at the best of times, because of restrictions that are put on the environment. And when you put COVID into that context, from an economic perspective, it creates potentially catastrophic levels of slowing down any form of economic activity. So, we are deeply worried about both Yemen and Gaza. As I said earlier, we think that the Middle East is probably one of the fulcrums of concern for harm from this crisis.

AMY GOODMAN: Paul O’Brien, thank you so much for being with us. We’re going to link to your report. Paul O’Brien is vice president of Oxfam America. The new report, “Dignity Not Destitution: An 'Economic Rescue Plan For All' to tackle the Coronavirus crisis and rebuild a more equal world.

When we come back, we look at coronavirus in Indian Country. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “Medicine” by Christopher Mike-Bidtah, a Diné musician also known as Def-I.
Pandemic Is a Portal: Arundhati Roy on COVID-19 in India, Imagining Another World & Fighting for It

APRIL 16, 2020
GUEST
Arundhati Roy
award-winning writer and activist.

LINKS
Column: “The Pandemic Is a Portal”
"The Pandemic Is a Portal: A Conversation with Arundhati Roy"
"Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction."
"My Seditious Heart"


Officials in India say six major cities are coronavirus hot spots, including the capital city, New Delhi. We go there to speak with writer and activist Arundhati Roy, who has a new essay on how “The Pandemic Is a Portal.” She says, “You have the sense that you’re sitting on some kind of explosive substance,” and describes how the government of Narendra Modi is using the pandemic to crack down on opponents and dissidents.

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


AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh. We turn now to India, where officials say six major cities are coronavirus infection hot spots, calling them red zones, including the capital, New Delhi, and the financial center, Mumbai. The country has more than 420 deaths, 12,000 infections, though the number is likely far higher due to lack of testing.

This comes as press freedom and civil liberties groups are sounding the alarm that the government of Narendra Modi is using the coronavirus outbreak to crack down on opponents and dissidents. This month, police arrested a prominent journalist, Siddharth Varadarajan, accusing him of spreading “discord” and “rumors,” after he reportedly criticized a Hindu nationalist politician for participating in a religious ceremony with dozens of people during the national lockdown. Elsewhere, activist Anand Teltumbde, who is 69 years old, and journalist Gautam Navlakha, who is 67, were arrested Tuesday over charges they both say were fabricated. Teltumbde wrote an open letter to the people of India on the eve of his arrest, saying, quote, “I do not know when I shall be able to talk to you again. However, I earnestly hope that you will speak out before your turn comes,” he said.

Prime Minister Modi has announced India’s nationwide coronavirus lockdown, affecting 1.3 billion people — the largest at any time in the world — announced it will be extended until May. In Mumbai, hundreds of migrant workers left homeless and unemployed by the lockdown held a protest Tuesday demanding the government deliver food and assistance.


SHAHBAZ: [translated] We are not getting anything here. The government promised to provide money and other amenities, and nothing has been delivered yet.


SHABANA: [translated] We have nothing to do now. We have small kids, and they are not getting anything to eat. What should we do?

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we go to New Delhi, India, where we’re joined by the award-winning writer, author, activist Arundhati Roy. She has a new essay in the Financial Times headlined “The pandemic is a portal.” It’s drawn from her forthcoming book, Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction. Her most recent book is My Seditious Heart: Collected Nonfiction. She won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her first novel, The God of Small Things.

Arundhati, welcome back to Democracy Now! As you speak to us from New Delhi, if you can talk about what’s happening there and why you see the pandemic as a portal?

ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, in India, you know, we have a COVID crisis whose contours we don’t know yet. I mean, you mentioned the figures and also the fact that we don’t know if they’re reliable, because there’s not that much testing happening. But on the other hand, just looking around, you know that there isn’t a run on hospitals like there has been in New York, you know? The disease doesn’t seem to have really got its claws into us yet. But we have the COVID crisis. We have a hunger crisis. We have a hatred crisis. And we have a health crisis apart from COVID.

So, as you said, you know, on the 24th of March, with four hours’ notice, which ran between 8:00 at night and 12 midnight, Modi locked down this nation of 1.38 billion people without warning. And the crisis that that has created, the lack of planning, the lack of thinking forward, although like some states like Kerala, which you talked about, have done wonderful work, but from the center, the crisis has been exacerbated into something that might — might really become even more serious than the epidemic that it’s planning for. You have a situation where you have millions of workers and migrant workers under a lockdown, which is supposed to enforce social distancing, but it only enforces physical compression. People are crammed together. People are separated from their families. In many places, they have no food. They have no access to money even. They’ve sold their phones. You have the sense that you’re sitting on some kind of explosive substance.

And yet, at the same time, like you said, arrests have been made, not just the people who you mentioned. Siddharth Varadarajan has not been arrested, the editor of Wire, but he has a case filed against him. Senior lawyers who speak out against Modi have had FIRs filed against them. Gautam Navlakha and Anand Teltumbde have been arrested. Young students and people, a lot of Muslims, who are now being accused of being part of the massacre that took place against Muslims in northeast Delhi, are being arrested. You know, the circles are closing in.

And the reason I said that the pandemic is a portal is that all over the world you have a situation now where, on the one hand, the powers that be are going to try and increase surveillance, increase inequality, increase privatization, increase control, and, on the other hand, you have populations of people who will want to increase solidarity and who will want to see and understand the fact that what has happened in the U.S., as well as what has happened in India, is that the pandemic has exposed structural problems of such egregious injustice and inequality. Even the calling of the shutdown with four hours’ notice was a sign of panic from this prime minister, because he knows that this infrastructure of this country, it can’t even deal with normality, forget about a pandemic.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Arundhati, I want to ask you more about that, about Modi’s declaration of a lockdown with just four hours’ notice. He declared it at 8 p.m., and it went into effect at midnight on March 24th. But the first case, reported case, of COVID-19 was on January 30th, so he had — it’s unclear why he took seven weeks to shut down the country. But you went, when the first — when the country went into lockdown, you used a press pass, and you went and spoke to some of the migrants, the hundreds of thousands of people who were forced to flee Delhi once all transportation had already been shut down. You spoke to some of these migrants in Delhi. Can you tell us what they said about their situation?

ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, as soon as the lockdown was announced, mass transport was stopped. It was the last week of March. People had not been paid their salaries, people who live virtually from day to day. The landlords in these little cramped, medieval tenements, into which five and 10 people are squashed into a room, said that they wanted their rent on time. So people just had to leave. And it was a surreal sight, you know, while there was no traffic on the streets, but suddenly the structural inequality and the horror, the shame of how our societies live, made themselves manifest.

And I just realized that these people have started walking, walking for hundreds of kilometers to their villages. And I went out because I felt like the tectonic plates were shifting. You know, it was crazy. So I went to the border between Delhi and Uttar Pradesh, where I walked with many of them. And I spoke to many of them, including Muslims who had just survived this horrific kind of wannabe pogrom against them, which didn’t turn out that way because people were so prepared that they fought back. But having survived that, now they were walking these hundreds of miles home — you know, carpenters, tailors, construction workers.

And all of them were aware of the virus. All of them were wearing masks. They were doing their best to maintain social distance. It was impossible. There was a rumor that buses might be organized, and suddenly like 100,000 people were there together, pressed together, waiting for buses. And I asked some of them, “So, what do you think of this virus?” They said, “Whatever we think of the virus, right now we have no food, we have no water, we have nowhere to sleep. We have to reach home.” And that was so much more present for them than this.

A lot of them felt that this was a rich people’s illness brought in by planes. “Why didn’t they stop people at the airport instead of kicking us out of our jobs and our homes, you know?” And a lot of people just — one of the people who I wrote about in the Financial Times piece said — he just said to me, ”Shaayad Modiji ko hamaare baare mein pata nahi [phon.],” meaning “Maybe Modi doesn’t know about us,” you know, which was just perhaps true in a way, that the government and everybody else who controls anything in this society has more or less airbrushed the poor out of their imagination — out of films, out of literature, out of everything. You know? Except NGO brochures where the poor feature in order to raise money, you know?

AMY GOODMAN: Arundhati, I wanted to ask you about President Trump’s critical trip to India right at the time the pandemic was exploding, the famous pictures of them shaking hands, the stadium of 100,000 people. When President —

ARUNDHATI ROY: No, a million people. In India, it was a million people. In the U.S., it was 50,000, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: So, as President Trump took off and was flying back to the United States, it was then that he read the comments of a U.S. scientist talking about the effects of the pandemic and what it will mean in the United States. He was so enraged by what she had to say that he canceled a meeting of scientists when he was returning, in retaliation. And then you have this whole relationship with India around hydroxychloroquine, what “Dr. Trump” — and I’m saying that very facetiously — President Trump has been pushing, hydroxychloroquine, because Narendra Modi said he was going to crack down on sales, exports of this drug, until President Trump pressured him. And now one study after another is coming out saying people are dying in the studies around hydroxychloroquine.

ARUNDHATI ROY: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Just overall, talk about what Trump has meant for Modi and what Modi means for Trump, this U.S.-India alliance, and what it’s doing in your country.

ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, it is giving such a great amount of legitimacy to a situation which I can’t hardly explain, Amy, on TV, because I’ve been writing about this for so long, you know? And what I said earlier, the crisis of hunger, and then the crisis of hatred. So, the time Modi came to the U.S. and did the “Howdy Modi” show, and then, when Trump came here and it was the “Namaste Trump” and so on, this sort of bizarre dance between these two, I’m sorry to say, but not very intelligent human beings, but very, very powerful people, who are legitimizing the horror of what is happening in the U.S. with immigrants, with racism, with undocumented workers, and the horror of what the BJP regime, the RSS, which is the mothership of the BJP cultural guild to which Modi belongs, which believes that India should be a Hindu nation and that everyone else should be second-class citizens, toward which they have made new citizenship laws and are building detention centers. And all of this is being legitimized by this idea that the most powerful country in the world and the most powerful man in the world loves Modi, you know?

And between them, the — I mean, it’s a tragedy for the world that this particular pandemic has arrived at a time where country after country is controlled by people like this, which is why I said it’s a portal, because, you know, are we going to — are we going to sleepwalk into this fascist surveillance state that everyone has in store for us? I mean, the app, called the Aarogya Setu app, which Modi has asked people to download and became the fastest-downloaded app in the world — we have 50 million downloads now — I mean, every technical expert says it’s just a surveillance app, you know? And all various — so many democratic societies are moving toward this, in this panic and fear that has been created.

And there are so many things about the coronavirus, you know, so many heartwarming things. I was reading in The New York Times today how it’s creating solidarity between people in the U.S. I just saw a wonderful video of people thanking a Pakistani doctor for having invented a mechanism that allows a single ventilator to be shared by many.

But here, you have Muslims being blamed for corona. There’s the whole concept of “corona jihad.” And I’ve been reading of how, in the 1930s, the Nazi state basically blamed Jews for typhus and used it as a way of stigmatizing and ghettoizing Jews. The same thing is happening here with Muslims. You know, you have to hear the language that the mainstream media uses, and people on the street.

So, it’s an extremely dangerous situation, which is being completely legitimized by Trump and by all these powerful people who meet and shake hands and refuse to see how this virus is going to move in and exacerbate inequalities, exacerbate injustice and create a situation where they, too, are frightened, because they know these millions of people, hungry, starving. How are you going to deal with that anger? In India, I’ll tell you how they’re going to deal with it. They are going to try and divert it into an anti-Muslim rage, which is the only thing they do always.

But at some point — you know, already things are exploding. People are burning shelters and so on. And the hunger is so urgent, it has to be addressed now. The granaries are full of food which is not being distributed. You know, people need cash transfers, but they don’t have bank accounts, or they don’t have access to their bank accounts. It’s a crisis which you feel you’re sitting on some kind of explosive substance right now. And, you know, as it deepens, once you distribute that grain, where will the next batch of food come from? Because right now is the harvest season, and, you know, people are — even those who have been able to harvest are not being able to sell. And, you know, the whole cropping pattern of this country has changed into cash crops.

AMY GOODMAN: Arundhati, we have 10 seconds.

ARUNDHATI ROY: Yeah. Tell me.

AMY GOODMAN: We just have — I want to thank you very much for being with us, as we run out of time.

ARUNDHATI ROY: Oh, OK. You’re so welcome.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to link to your piece, “The pandemic is a portal,” that’s in Foreign Policy. Arundhati Roy is — next Thursday, April 23rd, will be joining an online teach-in with Princeton professor Imani Perry and Haymarket Books on “The Pandemic Is a Portal.” And we’ll link to your essays, as well, at democracynow.org.

Democracy Now! is working with as few people on site as possible. The majority of our amazing team is working from home. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh. Be safe.
The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. 
Happy International Bat Appreciation Day! Why on Earth Would We Celebrate Bats?

April 17 is International Bat Appreciation Day, a day reminding us to show love to our flying friends who play a key role in ecosystems all over the world.


Happy International Bat Appreciation Day!

(TMU) — Today, April 17th, is celebrated as International Bat Appreciation Day—a day meant to remind us to show love to our flying pollinator friends who play a critical role in environments and ecosystems all over the world.

Bats are the common name for roughly 1,400 species that have been discovered, and these fabulous creatures make up about 20 percent of mammal species after rodents. An estimated 48 bat species live in the United States, and three states—Texas, Oklahoma, and Virginia—have their own official state bats. What makes bats unique among mammals is their ability to fly naturally and in a sustained manner.

In general, bats are a very misunderstood creature. No doubt, we can understand if a bat flying in the middle of the night gives some people the creeps—their depiction in pop culture associates them with spooky things like Dracula, the blood-sucking vampire.


April 17th is National #BatAppreciationDay. Bats play an important role in many ecosystems around the world. They are crucial pollinators for cactus species and many other tropical plants, they help control insect populations & also disperse seeds!
Why are bats important to you? pic.twitter.com/YLB69M22Ms
— EveryBat (@EveryBat) April 17, 2020

But as various scientific studies show, most bats eat a wide variety of insects, balancing the population of such creepy-crawlers and nuisance bugs like locusts, flies, scorpions, moths, centipedes, and mosquitos.

Other bat species are frugivores and enjoy such fruits as figs, mangoes, bananas, and dates, as well as seeds and the pollen of flowers. And yes, three types of vampire bats do exist in Central and South America, but humans have no reason to fear them.

Most bats are nocturnal creatures that come out at night, with many using their extreme sense of hearing and ability to see in the dark to get around. A large variety of bats use a trick called echolocation that relies on sonar to navigate, avoid obstacles, and find food—not unlike dolphins. However, some bats in Southeast Asia fly and hunt their meals during the daytime.



Today is International Bat appreciation day 🦇 pic.twitter.com/EdC4iaQemS
— Wildlife World Zoo, Aquarium & Safari Park (@ZooWildlife) April 17, 2020

And while bees and butterflies often get the lion’s share of credit for their role as pollinators, bats are no less important to providing us with a crucial link in our food supply. As the Bat Conservation Trust explains, some 500 plant species rely on bats to pollinate their flowers. This includes various species of banana, mango, guava, durian, and agave—the succulent, pollen-rich plant that provides us with tequila. Many of these plants actually co-evolved with bats over the course of millennia.

Before reading the above information, some of you may have asked: why would we be celebrating these god-forsaken creatures when they were the source of the coronavirus that causes CoViD-19? Aren’t they the reason that we’re being quarantined indoors, jobless and bored, and now we’re supposed to celebrate them?

Well, as Deutsche Welle aptly put it: a bat didn’t “cause” the coronavirus pandemic. We did. More specifically, it was likely the fault of the rampant, illegal trafficking of wild animals.

Today is International Bat Appreciation Day! Despite all the bad press, bats are actually pretty cool and very important in nature. We have a lot to learn about bats, viruses and disease – read our blog to learn more:https://t.co/wCfEfAnNY9#virology #bats #batappreciationday pic.twitter.com/Gt7A67I5B
— The Science Social (@TheSciSocial) April 17, 2020

While some bats have been shown to carry a number of infections deadly to humans—including Ebola, rabies, and SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), among others—the vast majority of bats aren’t infected. There also isn’t any solid scientific proof that CoViD-19 took flight from bats yet, although there is plenty of conjecture and speculation. Some believe that pangolins may have acted as an intermediary for the novel coronavirus. Either way, bats that do carry coronaviruses pose zero threat to humans provided they are left undisturbed in the wild.

Sadly, a combination of misinformation, long-standing ignorance, and mass hysteria over the coronavirus led to villagers in Peru attacking our winged friends last month and killing hundreds of the creatures.

The problem led to Peru’s National Service of Wild Forests and Fauna (SERFOR) reminding locals that “bats are not our enemies,” and explaining that “70 percent of the [bat] species in the world feed off insects, many of which are harmful to agriculture and our health, like mosquitoes that spread dengue and other diseases.”

So with that in mind, let’s remember that bats are nothing to be scared of. Indeed, we hope that we’ve provided our readers with plenty of good reasons to not only appreciate bats, but to cherish and protect these good friends to our species. When it comes to bats, the facts make clear that to know them is to love them.

By Elias Marat | Creative Commons | TheMindUnleashed.com
CDC Investigating SD Pork Processing Plant, Single Biggest COVID-19 Hot Spot in U.S.

HEADLINE APR 17, 2020


In South Dakota, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is investigating one of the largest pork processing plants in the world, where cases of COVID-19 related to the factory have surged to at least 730. The Smithfield plant in Sioux Falls is now the biggest single coronavirus hot spot in the United States. The mayor of Sioux Falls has ordered residents to shelter in place, after Republican Governor Kristi Noem refused to issue a statewide remain-at-home order.

THIS IS THE RESULT OF REPUBLICAN POLICIES FROM REAGANS DAYS WHEN THEY ALLOWED MEAT PACKING TO BREAK UNION CONTRACTS AND BRING IN FOREIGN WORKERS ON SO CALLED PERMIT WORK, WHICH MEANT THEY PAID THEM MINIMUM WAGE OR BELOW!!!!!!  BUT THE WORKERS OF COURSE STAYED AND DID NOT GO BACK, TO MEXICO, ECUADOR, GUATAMALA, ETC. 

REAGAN REDUCED RED TAPE BY REMOVING SAFETY REGULATIONS, REDUCING INSPECTIONS AND INSPECTORS AND ALLOWING THE INDUSTRY TO VOLUNTARILY SELF REGULATE WITHIN A YEAR THERE WAS A VIRULENT E-COLI BREAKOUT IN THE USA THAT THEY ATTEMPTED TO CLAIM CAME FROM CANADIAN BEEF. IT HAPPENED AGAIN A YEAR LATER WITH JACK IN THE BOX RESTAURANTS THE CANADIAN BEEF TROPE DID NOT WORK THAT TIME.

THIS WAS THE RESTRUCTURING OF THE MEAT PACKING INDUSTRY IN NORTH AMERICA, CANADA WAS IMPACTED AS WELL, AS CONSOLIDATION IN THE INDUSTRY MEANT FEWER AND FEWER PLAYERS UNTIL TODAY THE BIGGEST MONOPOLY MEAT PACKER IN NORTH AMERICA IS JBS FROM BRAZIL.

Deaths of Inequality: AOC on Black and Latinx Communities at Epicenter of Epicenter of the Pandemic


STORY APRIL 07, 2020

GUEST
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
U.S. congressmember for New York’s 14th Congressional District.

LINKS
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter

As COVID-19 deaths spike in African-American and immigrant communities, almost a third of New York City’s infections are in Queens, one of the most diverse places in the world, and many in the hardest-hit neighborhoods are undocumented and working-class. We speak with Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who represents the neighborhoods at the epicenter of the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, about how the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic is causing “deaths of incompetence,” “deaths of science denial” and “deaths of inequality.”

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


AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. I’m broadcasting from New York; he’s in New Jersey. Here in New York, the coronavirus death toll has nearly reached 5,000. We’re spending the rest of the hour with U.S. Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who represents the neighborhoods that have been called the “epicenter of the epicenter” of the coronavirus pandemic here in New York City: Queens and the Bronx. Almost a third of the city’s COVID-19 cases are in Queens, which has been called the most diverse place in the world. Many of the hardest-hit neighborhoods in those neighborhoods are undocumented, working-class, working-poor. In Elmhurst, Queens, more than two-thirds of residents were born outside of the United States. The majority are black and Latinx. Queens has more COVID-19 cases than any other borough, yet it has fewer hospitals than its neighbors, with only three major medical centers. The New York Times reports, “Queens has 1.5 hospital beds per 1,000 people, compared to 5.3 in Manhattan.”

Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s district also includes Rikers Island jail, where at least one prisoner has died of complications of COVID-19. Hundreds have tested positive. Rikers currently holds just over 5,000 people, many there for parole violations or serving less than a year for a low-level offense. Many are there in pretrial detention; they simply don’t have money for bail.

On Friday, Congressmember Ocasio-Cortez tweeted, quote, ”COVID deaths are disproportionately spiking in Black + Brown communities. Why? Because the chronic toll of redlining, environmental racism, wealth gap, etc. ARE underlying health conditions. Inequality is a comorbidity. COVID relief should be drafted with a lens of reparations,” she wrote.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joins us now. Thank you so much for being with us, Congressmember Ocasio-Cortez. Can you start out by talking about your district? We have heard a lot about Elmhurst Hospital, as we should. The doctors and the nurses, like so many around the country, and the sanitation workers in these hospitals are not properly protected. We have not heard as much — and there may be a deep connection here — about the community that it serves. In just the last week, I’ve heard about three men — two Mexican brothers who died in their home, not even in the hospital, their bodies just recently taken out; a third died in the hospital — but fears of even going to hospitals, knowing what could happen to them, who have been hard-working members of our communities for so many years. Talk about your community.

REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: Yes. No, thank you, and thank you for the opportunity to discuss the actual community surrounding Elmhurst Hospital and Elmhurst, Queens. This is one of the most working-class and, as you mentioned, blackest and brownest communities in New York City. It is extraordinarily dense. Even for New York City, it is a very dense and densely populated community.

It’s no surprise that, you know, in the wake of this pandemic, right after the Trump administration announced its public charge rule, which basically said, if you are undocumented and seek public services, public healthcare, SNAP, WIC, etc., then you will be essentially put on a fast track to either denial of citizenship or outright deportation — and so, now that we have this pandemic and it is hardest-hitting in communities that are heavily immigrant and also with strong historically black communities, as well, that people are either afraid to go to Elmhurst Hospital out of the cost or out of sheer fear that they will be put in the public charge list.

Now, after we pushed the Trump administration, we were able to secure — we were able to secure confirmation from the administration that they would not refer COVID-related cases and treat them under the public charge rule, but there’s so much confusion already that many members are scared to go. These are the same people who are preparing our food. They’re the same people who stock our grocery shelves. They’re the same people who deliver our goods. And the idea that we can deny them care, as though the pandemic will not affect just in greater ways because of that, is naive, and it’s unscientific.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Congresswoman, I wanted to ask you about this enormous racial and ethnic disparity in the cases and especially in the deaths that are occurring. As you mentioned and as Amy mentioned earlier, the areas of Elmhurst, Jackson Heights and Corona are the epicenter of the epicenter. But the Bronx, a portion of which you also represent — your congressional district stretches out there — has also been hard hit. According to the — as of 10:59 last night, according to the tracker that the city website produces for New York City every day, there were 679 people, Bronx residents, who had died of coronavirus. That’s more than twice as many as have died in Manhattan — only 302 in Manhattan — even though the Bronx is significantly smaller in population than Manhattan. And you’ve got a situation where the Bronx is 16% of the population of the city, but it represents 24% of all the deaths. So we have a situation here where, even in Brooklyn, the areas of Brooklyn where most residents are dying are in North Brooklyn in black and brown communities. How do you assess the city and the state’s response to what is clearly a disparate impact of this epidemic?

REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: Yes. Well, as I had mentioned earlier, inequality, environmental racism, these are preexisting conditions. And when you have a pandemic, similar to what we saw with Hurricane Maria, when you have a natural disaster or an event like a pandemic hit communities that have already been ravaged by weakened healthcare systems, weakened infrastructure — the South Bronx has one of the highest childhood asthma rates in the country. When we talk about environmental racism, we’re talking about illegal dumping. We’re talking about concentrating waste sites and concentrating highways and trucking zones through the poorest communities in the country, and the blackest communities and the brownest communities. And so, we already have an issue of extreme and acute concentration of respiratory illnesses in the Bronx. That is largely due to the trucking that comes through here, through the environmental inequalities that come through here.

And so, when you have the Cross Bronx Expressway, which was a notorious project of racism by Robert Moses, the way that he tried to concentrate and push these communities and design these communities through, when you have the toll of health inequities, and, on top of that, these are our frontline workers, where you see our frontline workers living are where you see — are the same places where you are seeing COVID cases spiking. Black and brown workers are overwhelmingly part of this frontline. They are the grocery store workers. They are the delivery workers. They are hospital workers, including janitorial staff. And so, when you have this pandemic layer on top of it, when you pair that to the unequal access to care, when you pair that with ratios of hospital beds far lower than more affluent communities, this is what you get.

And so, when it comes to the city’s response, you know, I believe that the city is doing absolutely everything that it can, but we also have to acknowledge that there are two entirely different starting lines that these communities are starting with. And so, we’ve been working very hard, but also, when we don’t push for things like rent and — full rent and mortgage moratoriums, you push these workers to go outside, because they feel a pressure to make their rent. And they may go out and take work. They may take work under the table in order to make ends meet. And so, without this economic relief, it also adds to the public health issues that we currently face.

AMY GOODMAN: After break, we’re going to talk with you about the stimulus package, about what you’ve called the “corporate slush fund,” that $500 billion, and how it will be monitored. But I want to ask you about another area of your district, which also goes to you as a congressmember dealing with prisons and jails all over the country, but Rikers Island, the whole jail system there in New York — what, Rikers Island, 4,600, 5,000, in the New York City jail system. Are people still being sent there for pretrial detention simply because they don’t have enough money to post to stay out of jail? And what’s happening? We see hundreds of both prisoners and staff have tested positive. There’s already been a death. What about the calls for decarceration, for releasing prisoners, not only at Rikers, but then around the country now? Tell us where they stand.

REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: Yes. We’ve been approaching and we’ve been calling very strongly on the governor and the mayor to take a strong decarceral approach to Rikers. That first death — you know, not that any death on Rikers is merited, no matter what anyone has done, but that first death wasn’t even for a criminal offense. It was for a simple parole violation that was noncriminal in nature. And so, what we’re seeing here is that the city is packing Rikers with individuals, and they know it’s a tinderbox. It’s a tinderbox for the workers. It’s a tinderbox for incarcerated people.

And we have to demand — not just in Rikers, but across the country, we need to increase our demands for elderly clemency, to end pretrial detention as much as possible, to make sure that we not arresting people for low-level arrests. We’ve been placing inquiries to see if there are people being moved to Rikers. We believe that the mayor is trying to take off low-level arrests, but there are still so many individuals that do not belong there.

And that also goes for our immigration detention facilities. ICE was — knowing that this pandemic was coming, knowing everything that was happening, ICE was still conducting raids in sanctuary cities. And, you know, this is part of a larger political project by the president to punish those cities that act as sanctuary cities for immigrants. And so, ICE, as well, is knowingly packing these detention facilities with people who, again, have not committed crimes but are merely there for civil proceeding reasons and who are merely awaiting a court date.

And so, there’s no reason that these jails should be filled. There’s no reason that they should be packed. We must pursue a decarceral agenda in order to really fulfill our responsibility as public servants.

AMY GOODMAN: Can I ask you, just before we go to break, Congressmember — you confronted an ICE agent at LaGuardia Airport — if you could talk about this, what exactly was happening — who was transporting immigrant children? Can you explain what happened?

REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: Yes. So, this happened several weeks ago. I got a call in the evening from our local — one of our local immigration community organizations, New Sanctuary Coalition. And they had gotten a tip from a worker that ICE was transporting six minors, six children, into New York City from a different — you know, from Texas. And we were extraordinarily concerned, and so we decided to hop into a car, drove straight to LaGuardia Airport, and I just waited at the gate. And after some time, an ICE agent came out with six young boys.

And they were being transported into New York City. This was after the pandemic had erupted. This was after the Pentagon already started banning much domestic travel for members. And here we have ICE transporting children into a pandemic zone, into the most concentrated area of the most concentrated city. They were flying into LaGuardia. They weren’t even flying into JFK or Newark. They were flying into the shadow of East Elmhurst — or, Elmhurst Hospital.

And so, you know, I confronted the agent. They were transporting these children into ORR facilities here in New York City where staffers have been confirmed to have COVID-19 cases. And after inquiring, we started to make a lot of noise about this. ICE, since then, has started to place some restrictions, but not nearly enough, to protect these children and to protect all immigrants in our system.

AMY GOODMAN: Last month, a reporter asked Trump if undocumented immigrants are welcome at testing sites, and can they be tested without fear of being reported to immigration authorities. This is what President Trump said.


PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: The answer is, yes, we will do those tests, because I think, in that case, it’s important. I think that if — you could call — you could say “illegal alien.” You could say “illegal immigrant.” You could say whatever you want to use your definition of what you’re talking about. We’re all talking about the same thing. Yes, we will test that person, because I think it’s important that we test that person. And we don’t want to send that person back into wherever we’re going to be sending the person, whether it’s another country or someplace else, because, you know, we’re now bringing them right out of our country. But, yeah, we will test those people.

AMY GOODMAN: Wow! I mean, so there you have President Trump talking about, “Yeah, test them before you send them out.” Overall, your response to President Trump, his antagonism against any kind of criticism, the well-known, documented lack of tests, lack of PPE, protective gear for people who work in hospitals, and now this, saying, “Sure, test them before we deport them”?

REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: Well, overall, you know, not just President Trump, but this entire administration, knew what was coming. Trump knew this pandemic was coming. The military knew this pandemic was coming. The CDC knew this pandemic was coming. HHS, Health and Human Services, knew this pandemic was coming. And there was a structural, but also universal, refusal to acknowledge and, more importantly, to act.

And this pandemic is — you know, and the casualties that we are seeing are, again, not just due to coronavirus. There are people dying unnecessarily. As you mentioned earlier, there are people not just dying in hospitals. In New York City alone, we are seeing 200 to 300 people dying in their homes a day — per day in New York City, inside their homes, in addition to the hospitalizations. These numbers that you’re seeing, all in all, many of them are confirmed coronavirus cases. As you mentioned, many people do not have access to tests, so a lot of these deaths that you are seeing, there are many more that are uncounted, that are being counted as pneumonia or being counted as other causes of death, because those people were not able to get a COVID-19 test.

And so, these additional deaths, many of them are unnecessary. They are deaths of incompetence. They are deaths of science denial. They are deaths of inequality. And so, it’s important for us to acknowledge how unnecessary the level of crisis that we are at right now, that is due to the incompetence of this administration, that is due to the lack of responsiveness of this administration.

And when it comes to the particular cruelty to undocumented immigrants, it is also a form of denial of the fact that many of these undocumented people pay taxes, they fund our public schools, and they fund the very public health system that they are being denied access to right now, through the billions of dollars of taxes that they pay. Billions more, by the way — these undocumented workers pay billions more in taxes than Facebook does, than Amazon does and than many other corporations do. And so, when it comes to contributions to our public systems, they do far more than these corporations do. And it’s extraordinarily important that they have safe access to our public health system.

And by the way, it shouldn’t just be for COVID-19 cases. Our public health system should be free at the point of service for every single person in this country. There are folks that are saying, “Oh, you’ll get paid sick leave if it’s COVID-19-related,” as we’re seeing with Amazon. They’ll take your fever. If you don’t have a test, then you will not be paid — you will not receive paid sick leave. We should have universal systems where every person can see the doctor free of charge when they need to see it, so that they can get the care that they need. That is what it means to live in an advanced and modern and humane society. And so long as we don’t do that, we have not earned the right to call ourselves one.

AMY GOODMAN: We are speaking to Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. We’ll be back with her in 30 seconds.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: That is Dr. Elvis Francois singing John Lennon’s “Imagine.” He’s from the Mayo Clinic.

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