Day: May 18, 2020

China Gives $2 Billion to the WHO While the US Cuts Funds and Blames Them for the Pandemic

We begin with the 73rd WHO, World Health Organization’s assembly which China’s President Xi Jinping addressed by video-link pledging $2 billion to deal with the coronavirus pandemic while the US, which has cut off funds to the WHO, was represented by HHS Secretary Azar who shifted blame from the Trump administration’s serial bungling onto the WHO, accusing them of failing to respond to the pandemic costing many lives. Dr. Amesh Adalja, a Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security who works on emerging infectious disease and pandemic preparedness, joins us. We discuss the US effort, along with the EU and Australia, to get 100 nations to call for an independent investigation into the coronavirus pandemic and its origin which prompted Xi Jinping to tell the assembly he supports an international review led by the WHO – but only once the health emergency ends. Although the WHO points out that they alerted the world on January 5 then the virus was identified on January 7 and the genome sequence shared with the world on January 12, it appears the U.S. is likely to continue scapegoating China as an election campaign issue. Sadly China does need to held to account but the U.S. has lost its moral authority due to Trump’s incompetence now that we have one third of the world’s cases and over a quarter of the deaths.

While Main Street is Hurting, a Wall Street Hedge Fund is up 80%

Then we speak with Pulitzer Prize-winning senior reporter at ProPublica Jesse Eisinger who covers Wall Street and finance and was a regular columnist The New York Times’s Dealbook section and is the author of The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives. He joins us to discuss his article at ProPublica “The Bailout is Working – For the Rich” and how, while Main Street is hurting, shares are up 80% for the Apollo Group private equity firm and have risen 50% for the private equity behemoth Blackstone.

The Likelihood a Defeated Trump Will Refuse to Leave Office

Then finally we examine the likelihood that Donald Trump will refuse to leave office if he is defeated in November and the possibility that a narrow victory by Biden could be overturned in the Electoral College at the hands of “faithless electors”.  Lawrence Douglas, the James Grosfeld Chair of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought at Amherst College joins us to discuss his new book, out tomorrow, Will He Go? Trump and The Looming Electoral Meltdown and his article at The Guardian “Could ‘rogue electors’ tilt the balance of a US election?”