COVID 19 MATRIX

WHAT EVERYONE NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT COVID-19 | Noam Chomsky


Motivation Madness. 2020. WHAT EVERYONE NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT COVID-19 | Noam Chomsky. 2020 July 30. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASPTDg_3ADE.

The coronavirus is serious enough but it's worth recalling that there's a much greater horror approaching.

We are racing to the edge of disaster far worse than anything that's happened in human history.
There are two threats that we're facing: One is the growing threat of nuclear war which has exacerbated it by tearing to what's left of the arms control regime and the other of course is the growing threat of global warming--both threats can be dealth. There isn't a lot of time and the coronavirus is a horrible plague. The others they won't be recovered. It's finished. If we don't deal with them. We're done

And so the childhood memories are coming back to haunt me but
different dimension threat of nuclear war. We can get a sense of where the world really is by looking uh too early to this january
as after you know every year the doomsday clock is uh set with the minute hand a certain distance from midnight which means termination but ever since trump was elected the minute hand has been moving closer
and closer to midnight uh last year was two minutes to midnight matching the highest it ever reached this year.

The analysts had dispensed with minutes started moved to second 100 seconds to midnight that's the closest it's ever been citing
three things uh the threat of nuclear war, threat of global warming and the deterioration of democracy.

If we're leaving our fit to sociopathic with buffoons were finished
and that's coming close trump is the worst that's because of u.s power which is overwhelming.

The U.S. imposes devastating sanctions it's the only country that can do that everyone has to follow europe may not like in fact pageants under iran but they have to follow they have to follow the master girls
they're kicked out of the international financial system.

That's not a law of nature it's a decision in europe
to be subordinate to the master in washington.
other countries don't even have the choice back to the corona virus one of the most shocking harsh aspects of it is the use of sanctions to maximize the pain perfectly consciously iran is in has its own enormous internal problems but by the stranglehold of tightening sanctions
which are consciously designed openly to make the suffer
and suffered bitterly now and you know cuba has been suffering from it
from the moment that it gained dependent 

but it's astonishing that they survive but
they stay resilient and one of the most
ironic elements of today's
virus crisis is that cuba is helping
europe i mean this is so shocking that
you don't
know how to describe it 

germany can't help greece but cuba can help european countries

The civilizational crisis of the west at this point
is devastating to think about 

Tthe meaning is that if we want to deal
with the crisis we have to move to something like
wartime mobilization 

So if you think of
like a rich country like the united
states it has the resources to overcome
the immediate economic justice 

Mobilization for the second world war
led the country into far greater debt
than is contemplated today and was very successful

Opposition practically quadrupled the
u.s manufacturing
ended the depression left the country
within us
dead but a capacity to grow now that's
the lesson we need probably not on that
scale it's not like this in our war but
we need the
mentality to try to overcome the
short-run crisis which is severe
in a civilized world 

The rich countries
would be giving assistance
to those who were in need
instead of strangling them which is what
we're doing

Bear in mind that the with current
tendencies if they persist 

South asia
is going to be unlivable in a few
decades--that the temperature reached 50 degrees
c in rajasthan this summer and it's
increasing

The waters running out uh it could get
even worse there's
two nuclear powers there who are going
to be fighting over
restricted and produced water supplies i
mean

The coronavirus is very serious we can't
underestimate it
but we have to remember that it's a
fraction small fraction of major crises
that are coming along they may not
disrupt life to the extent that the
coronavirus does today but they will disrupt life to the point
of making the species unsurvivable and not in the very distant future so we have many problems to deal with
immediate ones 

Coronaviruses serious has
to be dealt with
uh and much larger ones vastly larger
ones.

And there is a civilizational crisis

We have to to time
possibly good side of the coronavirus
as it may might bring
people to think about what kind of a
world do we want.


So we want the kind of a world that
leads to this and we should think about the origins of
this crisis.

Why is there a coronal vibrancy crisis

It's a colossal market failure 

It goes
right back to the essence of markets
exacerbated by the neoliberal the savage
neoliberal
intensification of deep social economic
problems

It was known for a long time
that pandemics are very likely and it
was understood
very well understood that they are
likely to be coronavirus endemic
slight modifications of the sars
epidemic 15 years ago

It was overcome.

The viruses were
identified sequenced to the vaccines
were available
the labs around the world could be
working
right then on developing protection
for potential coronavirus
endemics 

Why did they do it?
The market
signals were wrong
the drug companies we have handed over
our fate to private tyrannies
called corporations which are
unaccountable to the public

In this case big pharma and for them uh picking new body creams is more profitable than finding a vaccine that will protect
people from total destruction 
it would have been possible for the
government to step in
going back to wartime mobilization
that's what happened

Polio at the time i can remember very
well was a terrifying threat 

It was ended by the discovery of the
salk vaccine by a government institution
set up by the roosevelt administration

No patents available to everyone

That could have been done this time 

But the neoliberal plague has blocked that we are living
under an ideology for which economists have
a good bit of responsibility so it
comes from the court protector 

An ideology which is typified by uh ronald reagan
reading the script handed to by his
corporate masters with his
sunny smile saying government is the
problem

Let's get rid of government which means let's hand over decisions to private tyrannies that are unaccountable with
the bubbles

The point is that this coronavirus pandemic could have been prevented
The information was there to prove and in fact it was
well known in october 2019 just before the outbreak 

Tthere was a large-scale stimulation high-level simulation in the united states in the world of a possible pandemic of this kind nothing
was done 

Tthe crisis was then
made worse by the treachery
of the political systems which didn't
pay attention to the information that
they were aware of

On december 31st China informed the world health organization
of pneumonia like symptoms with unknown ideology. A week later
they identified some chinese scientists identified it as a
coronavirus. Other countries just ignored it.
 
The worst were the united kingdom and
the worst of all was the united states
you know one day there's no crisis it's
just like flu
the next day it's a terrible crisis and
"i knew it all along"

The next day we have to go back to business because i have to win the
election.

The idea that the world is in these hands is tracking but the point is that it started with a again a colossal market failure uh pointing to fundamental problems in the socioeconomic order made much worse
by the neoliberal plague and it
continues because of the collapse of
the kinds of institutional structures
that could deal with it if they were
functioning

As i said what kind of world do we want to live in

There will be options. 

The options range from installation of highly authoritarian brutal states all the way over to radical reconstruction of society on more humane terms concerned with human needs, not private profits.

And we should bear in mind that highly authoritarian vicious states are quite compatible with neoliberalism.

In fact the gurus of neoliberalism were perfectly happy with massive state violence as long as it supported what they called sound economics 

There is the possibility that people will organize become engaged as many are doing and bring about a much better world which will also confront the enormous problems that we're facing right down the road 

The problems of nuclear war which is closer than it's ever been and the
problems of environmental catastrophe from which there is no recovery 

Once we've gotten to that stage it's over and that is not far in the distance unless we act decisively.