Hindsight being 20-20, some distinguished people are analyzing how the U.S. coulda, shoulda, woulda been better prepared for a pandemic if it hadn’t been for … (insert finger, point it).

For renowned dissident Noam Chomsky, neoliberal capitalism itself is behind the U.S.’s failed response to the pandemic. According to neoliberal doctrine, the task of corporate managers is to maximize profits. 

“There’s no profit in preventing a future catastrophe,” Chomsky said during an interview with Truthout, a nonprofit news organization reporting on social justice issues. Chomsky is professor emeritus of linguistics at MIT, laureate professor at the University of Arizona, and has written more than 120 books and thousands of articles and essays.

The lack of ventilators causing major bottlenecks represents one of the most dramatic and murderous failures in confronting the pandemic, Chomsky said. Here’s how it happened in his words:

“The Department of Health and Human Services foresaw the problem and contracted with a small firm to produce inexpensive, easy-to-use ventilators. But then capitalist logic intervened,” Chomsky said. “The firm was bought by a major corporation, Covidien, which sidelined the project, and, ‘In 2014, with no ventilators having been delivered to the government, Covidien executives told officials at the (federal) biomedical research agency that they wanted to get out of the contract, according to three former federal officials. The executives complained that it was not sufficiently profitable for the company.'”

Instead of the government acting to overcome the gross market failure which is now causing havoc, neoliberal logic intervened, Chomsky said.

The world will recover from COVID-19, Chomsky predicted, but he suggests that the same neoliberal logic that failed the U.S. pandemic response may threaten the entire planet — and we may not recover from that.

“There will be recovery from the COVID-19 crisis, at severe and possibly horrendous cost, particularly for the poor and more vulnerable. But there will be no recovery from the melting of the polar ice sheets and the other devastating consequences of global warming. Here, too, the catastrophe results from a market failure — in this case, of truly earth-shaking proportions. “

The Trump administration had ample warning that a pandemic was likely, Chomsky said. A high-level simulation was run as recently as October 2019. U.S. intelligence tried to get Trump’s ear but failed in January and February. Officials told the media that “they just couldn’t get him to do anything about it. The system was blinking red.”

Trump responded to warnings about health and the environment by “defunding and dismantling every relevant part of government and assiduously implementing the instructions of his corporate masters to eliminate the regulations that impede profits while saving lives — and leading the race to the abyss of environmental catastrophe, by far his greatest crime — in fact, the greatest crime in history when we consider the consequences.”

On February 10, when coronvirus was incubating all over the U.S., the White House released its annual budget proposal. It made further sharp cuts in “all the main health-related parts of the government (in fact just about anything that might help people) while increasing funding for what’s really important: the military and the wall,” Chomsky said.

The U.S. has become the global epicenter of the crisis thanks to limited and belated testing, Chomsky said. Our testing is “well below others, making it impossible to implement the successful test-and-trace strategies that have prevented the epidemic from breaking out of control in functioning societies. Even the best hospitals lack basic equipment.”

Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 70: Jamarlin Martin Jamarlin goes solo to discuss the COVID-19 crisis. He talks about the failed leadership of Trump, Andrew Cuomo, CDC Director Robert Redfield, Surgeon General Jerome Adams, and New York Mayor de Blasio.

It’s tempting to blame Trump for neoliberalism and the disasterous response to the pandemic, according to Chomsky. However, he says “the neoliberal version of capitalism has been in force since Reagan … Reagan’s generosity to the super-rich is of direct relevance today as another bailout is in progress. Reagan quickly lifted the ban on tax havens and other devices to shift the tax burden to the public, and also authorized stock buybacks — a device to inflate stock values and enrich corporate management and the very wealthy (who own most of the stock) while undermining the productive capacity of the enterprise. Such policy changes have huge consequences, in the tens of trillions of dollars. Quite generally, policy has been designed to benefit a tiny minority while the rest flounder. That’s how we come to have a society in which 0.1 percent of the population hold 20 percent of the wealth and the bottom half have negative net worth and live from paycheck to paycheck. While profits boomed and CEO salaries skyrocketed, real wages have stagnated.”

Chomsky describes the U.S.’s privatized for-profit health care system as “an international scandal, with twice the per capita expenses of other developed societies and some of the worst outcomes.” Again, Chomsky blames neoliberal doctrine. “Any disruption and the system collapses,” he said, much like “the fragile global economic order forged on neoliberal principles.”

Trump inherited this world, Chomsky said. “For those concerned with reconstructing a viable society out of the wreckage that will be left from the ongoing crisis, it is well to heed the call of Vijay Prashad: ‘We won’t go back to normal, because normal was the problem.'”