no day or thinks. we. ask. time after time seeing the some of us around the world start to live life more normally again we're going underground from a continuing per capita or epicenter of the global corona virus pandemic coming up in the show as the world awaits a vaccine will cope with 1000 kill off new liberal intellectual property rights we are asking dean baker the economist who slammed alan greenspan's federal reserve and who predicted the 2008 property crash how to prevent the rich from using coronavirus to grab more from the poor and while boris johnson celebrates his new baby is government endangering lives in british hospitals cope with survivor and

front line n.h.s. doctor and dodgy tells us why clapping and charity for britain's national health service is just not good enough all the more coming up in today's going underground but 1st last time there was an economic crash major nations bailed out the rich this time around how can we stop the one percent from exploiting coronavirus to enrich themselves at the expense of the rest of us someone who predicted the $28.00 crash was economist dean baker he's the co-founder of the center for economic and policy research and he joins me now via skype from utah in the usa thanks so much dean for coming on millions with coronavirus hundreds of thousands killed do you see some policymakers actually using cove it to pour money into financial services there's been 645000000000 of q.e. just here for the city of london certainly that is the case and i just try to be a little fair to them in the sense that i think it does make sense for them to try to maintain stability in financial markets so that money's being where that's a big. even so they're doing want of things that i think are much more pernicious

for example the united states they passed a tax cut the $170000000000.00 over the next decade $17000000000.00 a year to the real estate industry that literally has nothing to do at least nothing that i or anyone else could think of has nothing to do with the pandemic so this all goes to the very wealthiest people in the country 17000000000 a year for things have nothing to with the pandemic is it a bit like top. back in 20 us ya know it is like tar i mean tarp in again i don't want to defend tarp at all but you know that was at least directly connected to the financial crisis these were banks i mean to my view many most them should be allowed to go under and they were bailed out but that was connect to the financial crisis the case of these real estate tax breaks it's just saying oh my god we have a bill has to go through congress we're going to put $170000000000.00 in tax breaks for rich people on it nothing to do with the pen demick for those of those watching

who don't know what top is and didn't benefit from the billions of dollars spent that's an asset relief program in the united states off to the $28.00 crash i'm going to ask you know now that donald trump is actually signing checks going to americans do you think we'll ever hear the mantra we contact for would it ever again we're already hearing it it's it's infuriating because this is something that was left out we had 2 very large pandemic relief bills that went through congress the 1st one was on the order of 2 trillion the 2nd one. rough number here about $500.00 billions of very very large bills both of them left out substantial aid for state and local governments are state local governments get most their money from sales tax income tax those revenue sources have plummeted at the same time they're facing massive demands on their services health care and other services to deal with that endemic so they have this massive shortfall and there's efforts by at least some of the democrats to get money for state local governments and mitch

mcconnell the leader of the republicans a senate saying oh i'm worried about the debt so we're already hearing that i want to come back to today with the u.n. repertoire in poverty complain that british policies of astaire and he killed tens of thousands of people the system asking him is orating of a population significant parts of the population here what was the point of austerity after the 2008 crash that ruined so many lives. to try and reduce the debt was a new point a tool only zia's since the $28.00 crash now that we have covert i would say it was absolutely no point i mean there were arguments made about how high debt levels would impede growth would lead to a risk of a crisis and those really didn't make sense i mean there were debates among academic economists that i'm not as i read every last one and i'm familiar with the general lives of the debate the side arguing that this had serious problems that debts create serious problems just really didn't have

a leg to stand on and one of their famous papers paper by 2 harvard professors carmen reinhart and ken rogoff it turned out their big result was based on a spreadsheet here so they didn't have a leg to stand on it's very hard to see what anyone in the u.k. hoping to get from austerity we had it as in the us as well not quite as bad but it's slowed growth kept people from getting jobs reduced wages it was really bad news for large segments of the population and it's very hard to see what the dividend was because one of the architects of austerity in the air in the u.k. he's now in the editor of a local london paper george osborne he's expressed support actually for jeremy kuhlmann successor as they believe to him he is saying already that we're going to need austerity in the post pandemic post coronavirus pandemic world is that is that going to be again the policy make is a. strategy of choice well i can't say how things will turn out there or here but we will see people argue you know it's

a safe bet and again i mean economists i could give you the evidence and what i'd like to hold up is japan has ratios of debt to g.d.p. that dwarfs anything we're likely to see in the united states and the u.k. are probably just about anywhere else you could point to and its economy and i say it's doing great but it didn't do particularly poorly compared to the us or other economies a you really advising the 4 x. train has been trained as. probably trading from home at the big financial institutions to ignore debt to g.d.p. ratios right that. i sure would i mean again i could go through the arguments where you can have a problem with the large deficit being an issue and a debt can impose a burden in the sense that if you pay high interest on a large debt that's a burden but countries have dealt with that burden the united states our debt service is about 3 and a half percent of g.d.p. in the 1990 s. very prosperous decade at least in the 2nd half currently our debt service burns

around one percent g.d.p. so you know we have a long way to go so this doesn't mean under no circumstances adverb as debt deficit ever pose any problem but we're not in those circumstances so it's really foolish to say ok we don't have money for the health care system we don't have the money to improve our infrastructure deal with climate change because the deficits and debt we're now in that situation you know your president donald trump expressed how disappointed he was repeatedly in the fed about interest rates before coronavirus what is it about these stock exchange listed banks that they will not pass on the interest rate cuts made by central banks well i'm not sure they're not passing them on they don't pass them on one to one they don't pass them on immediately but if you look at my whole business as a definitely saying they're not being biased well there are 2 different stories here one is do they generally lower their interest rate i think the answer that is yes i mean we have plenty of documentation that you can look at mortgage rates you can with a whole set of interest rates they do lower their rates now

a lot of small businesses may not be able to benefit from that because they're in very questionable financial shape so that's not a question of the fed not you know they're not passing on low interest rates from the fed do it in a situation where you have a restaurant that shut down has no cash reserves doesn't know if it could reopen would you make a loan to that restaurant well who's going to pay the loans in terms of the treasury bills. and the guilt over here is going to be the chinese communist party or is it going to be it's going to be pensions you know want them to raid the pensions you know again i can't speak for the u.k. most familiar with it but in the us i mean one of the big issues that is coming up is you have a number states that have pension burdens high pension debt and you have mitch mcconnell the leader of the republicans a senator who quite explicitly said he wants the states and cities to default on that so it doesn't mean workers would see 0 pension but they might see their pensions cut by 102030 percent which is

a really big deal for most workers that's most their retirement incomes are going about people who were just teachers as firefighters they are and 5060000 a year during their working careers or living on 30 $140000.00 retirement if they lose 20 percent of that because they have to cut the pension that's a really big hit now fundamental to the global economic aka texture is intellectual property something everyone is looking at as we desperately search for a vaccine against corona virus is this really the end of intellectual property as regards open source research on on pharmaceuticals right now because of corona virus because as you know the argument is always being it dean sent to vies is that the parties from looking into medicine this is this is a huge battle and knocking nearly as much attention was the united states as it should because we always have a lot of public funding for pseudocode pharmaceutical research so the united states

spent over $40000000000.00 a year funding research the national institutes of health and the few 1000000000 here and there through other it'll be about the tax pat not channel test that's right this is taxpayer funded research and then invariably you get a private company a mirka gilliard whoever might be they get patents and then they charge ridiculous prices for drugs that would otherwise be cheap no. in the case of the pen demick we're seeing a massive amount of open source which is fantastic so we're having research teams in london and korea other places around the world they're posting their results with the idea that other other researchers will benefit from them so they're not going to get patents they're not going to get rich from it they're going to post their results others will benefit from them they're getting paid these are mostly people getting paid through the government directly or indirectly so they're getting their paychecks but they are going to get rich by having a patent getting a really high price but you still have companies in the united states gilead sciences which has

a patent on run severe which is some evidence is effective in treating the qur'an a virus that they're hoping to make a huge fortune on that so this should be a huge battle because you're seeing you know always a say it's always the case a large amount of public funding in this case the bulk of the money is coming from the public we've open source research anything that comes out of this should be sold it's a generic and again the differences are incredible because almost invariably drugs are cheap to manufacture and distribute so we won't even have an argument about drug present even discuss them if everything was sold without pat monopolies but when you give a company a patent monopoly and it's something you need to for your health or your life charted tens of thousands sometimes hundreds of thousands this should be the end of that but i don't take that for granted well we invite any of those homes into companies on this program i'm sure they would absolutely deny any profiteering off the back of a taxpayer recent pharmaceuticals you expect joe biden to embrace something like

what you're just saying because a anyone who's been to k. street in washington d.c. knows how big the lobbying that the lobbying of big pharma is in washington this is going to be fair it's nice that i mean obviously biden has to 1st get in the white house but he's he feels pressure from the left in a way that he hadn't previously so if you compared joe biden to where barack obama was in 20082009. he's feeling much more pressure from the left the fact that you had the sanders campaign the warren campaign other efforts that have been really successful mobilizing a lot of voters obviously sanders born to get the nomination but a lot of people did vote for that and biden's aware that so there's going to be pressure from him to come down hard on the pharmaceutical industry but as you say they're powerful lobby they give money to both democrats and republicans so that's going to be a want date one of the things that's very much up for grabs both in his campaign what he says and then of course if he actually wins what he does when he's in the

white house well just finally as we've heard that jokes tropes memes about occupational health and safety being a. wearisome budden for big corporations do you see a revolution in occupational health and safety now that we realize our companies don't have mosques and basic protection for that what has joined this pandemic well i know i have not confident much of revolution but hopefully somewhat of an awakening of the united states where the occupational health and safety administration came in there and if you get 6970 years under dick nixon so as a republican white house. it originally i think did a fairly good job trying to improve or play say if the they've been weakened over the years with budget cuts and under the trump administration they've basically been prevented from doing their job and in the united states we've had a number of cases i mean there's all sorts of work places that are hazardous don't have proper protective equipment but it's been most pronounced in the meat packing

industry where you all these workers in cramped places with poor ventilation and we've had major outbreaks in a number of meat packing factors across the country and they've had to shut down trump's response incredibly was to order them to stay open so rather than ensuring that the workers could work there safely he just says open up i think revolution has too much to hope for at least some concern about worker safety would be great. thank you. thanks for i mean i thought for the reich counts a time bombs inadequate protection 60000 pound death payoffs and threaten for talking to journalists we go to the n.h.s. frontline and talk to a doctor who caught coronavirus while saving lives in a british offical only small coming up about to have going on the ground. which.

you cannot be both with the yeah you like. welcome back this week britain clapped again for key workers keeping its people alive after tens of thousands dead what has it be like on the front line of an n.h.s. arguably cut to ribbons to bail out the city of london after its 2008 crush joining me via skype from london is n.h.s. on college dr doherty thank you so much of the going on with the media the doctors labor's opposition leader the guest ahmed they all say boris johnson is doing his best tell me what happened for you for you to get coronavirus well i think the

bottom line is boris johnson's best is not good enough and it's been far too little far too late and it's still not enough so about 3 or 4 weeks ago i was sitting in a clinic with a number of colleagues about to see cancer patients some of the most vulnerable patients who are at risk of infection high risk of of death of serious infection and. towards the peak of infection rates and we were going to see them without any personal protective equipment at all and we were sitting there looking at each other and. with no guidance with no government policy at that point we felt very much like we were putting our patients' lives at risk and a number of us were very concerned or raise these concerns and i'm very pleased to say our hospital responded extremely well and started to provide that equipment and

our concerns were very well justified because within 3 days old that clinic i myself tested positive for the current virus and many many of my colleagues and we work in quite close quarters and and they basically we all went down like dominoes and the real real concern that a lot of us have and still have is not only that we were. ourselves. incredible risk but more innate in often cases was that we were cutting patients the very people we were supposed to be protecting and at risk and i was really wrapped with guilt for days after my contract since the illness and this will be the same story up and down the country or the government says it's doing its best and certainly the keep saying there's a global shortage of p.p.

which is why it's been difficult in the n.h.s. the challenge. is being repeated by mainstream media journalists as well so do you think more generally it is possible that people are being treated by medical staff that may not have been tested who have coronavirus whether it's asymptomatic or even symptomatic maybe. absolutely we know that's the case that happened with myself and i'm sorry i just do not buy the the government 6 cases really as i said this is too little too late being done we had a warning 3 years ago as we know the reports operation sickness and warned about the gross act of planning the government had drastically bitchy stockpiles for exactly this kind of situation they could have done something about it then they chose not to and we have seen now in that b.b.c. panorama report which has exposed how woefully and inadequately we were

prepared for this kind of crisis i do think that the political choices that have been made here will have cost people their life's essentially well one of our strengths as ministers previously his political rival in the 3rd body michael gove maintains that they were preparing for a flu pandemic not a coronavirus pandemic in the context of this exercise sickness which i have to say of course the results and conclusions are still confidential and and top secret we knew from the early reports of china certainly within the medical profession this is behaving nothing until like an average flu it was much more affectionate and the motel of the rate was much much higher and the government was appalled of this at the highest levels so it doesn't wash and you think it's quite believable that that medical staff have been using bin bags as p.p. on the front line where i work and i'm very lucky to work we are extremely well

resourced and we did get quite early access to testing and quite early access to people. but in other parts of the country they're not say lucky and so what you you'll see is stuff get desperate so of course staff had to resort to quite desperate measures dr. and they were even told to rebook. gowns you know this is unheard of and it just shows you again that there is has been a desperate desperate lack of planning and i think best a woeful incompetence well no procedures like that are being reported certainly in . china and humor and and also with the global south thankfully you did recover from coronavirus but obviously some of your comrades colleagues in the n.h.s. haven't been so lucky what did you make of the 60000 pound pay off of

a by boris johnson the government to staff in hospitals that die on the front line . there are no words really i would ask the people that came up with that number to take a look in the mirror and think about what their own life and the life of their loved ones would be worth it in monetary valley and i think it's absolutely shocking and again it just it really reflects what we ourselves within the n.h.s. have felt for a number of years now we are not valued we are not valued and this government has made active economic political choices to make us feel that time and time again we feel it in the n.h.s. and even when you pay the ultimate price your family is being told that you are worth an absolute pittance i don't have the words to express what i feel about that but the mainstream media and boris johnson and his government no doubt completely contradict you there they've been popping for n.h.s.

staff they value religious stuff is what they say i feel conflicted about. the cutting i think the millions of people across the country are coming out on their doorsteps to relay that gesture i find that extremely moving extremely heartwarming as i do similarly the incredible actions of captain tom moore i think as individuals people. are showing their support the n.h.s. is extremely valued institution by the british people by the government it is not and flourished johnson and resewn ak and every other. architects of the gradual decimation of n.h.s. working conditions for them to come out on their doorsteps and to clap us while simle taney a slate. the valuing the investing and actively breaking up the

n.h.s. and it's just the absolute hypocrisy that we've seen from this government for the last 10 years there's been widespread. support her white spread surprise widespread . alarm about the underreporting of figures of deaths for coronavirus in britain versus the way figures are reported all around the world what do you make of the reports that the chief coroner for england and wales has issued guidance apparently not to examine failures in p p when considering dead bodies the the dead from corona virus it is a very very closely related. risk that all people contracting this disease if they do not have protection. we are much more likely to contract the disease and potentially if you get serious

a serious illness you can die say to ignore or overlook that as a causative factor towards people dying and. it is extremely worrying extremely worrying and what one would wonder why that is being ignored and one that suspects and the government are looking to avoid the line as well as alarm about kadhum deaths belatedly in the media and by the government arguably there is also increasing alarm about cancer and you're in an oncology doctor what do you make of matt hancock boris johnson's health secretary saying that cancer treatment is unaffected by the current pandemic. it's not true i mean. all of us. oncologists i think unanimously surgeons radiotherapy doctors medical oncologists.

we've seen and alarming reduction in the amount of treatment we of course are trying ourselves to balance. whether or not patients would be more at risk from coming into hospital and trying to rationalize. high risk cases particularly the elderly people who have other co-morbidities. but to say that cancer treatments have not been affected is simply untrue and what we are increasingly concerned about is what we think are going to be the 2nd wave consequences of this and a number of doctors have written about this now. and there has been some quite extensive modeling on basically the numbers of lives that will be lost from us delaying treatments and it's likely to be in the many thousands to us treating

people we know if cancers are not being treated and not being diagnosed they will be growing and progressing. and people are going to presents in a much more extreme states and some may even be untreatable and that's something that we really have to try and address. before i think the full the cost is too high again i think if planning had been done differently i think if we didn't enter this country emic with a grossly under resourced. health service if we had sufficient starve if we hadn't seen cancer centers being closed. when the numbers of cancer cases are increasingly expanded and i don't think we would have had to have made the difficult choices to shut down as many cancer

services nothing you are saying correlates at all with what we hear at daily downing street press briefings that include the chief medical officer the chief scientific officer and numerous ministers have you been threatened against talking to the media do you know of other medical practitioners and staff that have been threatened and told not to speak to the media about. concerns like the ones you raised here so in the n.h.s. is a general encouragement to not frighten the public if things aren't going well and i think it would be fair to say that things are not going well at the moment and lots of star feel scared to speak up and there are lots of well known well publicized cases of and staff who have been targeted as whistleblowers and when they do speak up could technically about issues

around management issues around policy about investment. and that all applies in a situation so yes i would say i'm very aware of a culture of pressure almost to not speak out negatively about the decision was that it being made and but i think i myself not been threatened or asked not to speak. but in general i would say scar stuff a scared yes ghastly ragland doughty thank you that's it for the show on this the 75th anniversary of stalin's liberation of berlin which paved the way for the defeat of fascism and the apartheid hero dennis goldberg passed away this week he was sentenced with nelson mandela rivonia and never stopped fighting for global justice you don't want your interview with him on our you tube channel on monday and the globalization heroine of on the machine that explains the source of coronavirus stay safe followers and social media and see that.

yes i did but i. just. let me see yes. i was on the floor some days in my bathroom you know crying saying. yes it's time 1st west that work i was having chilling fever i didn't have any sense of snakes or smell has been the most you know the words of the world would

you. please tell me she you know sometimes or just used to feel. that was time to calm down no purpose and so. i have to think. who should myself to be for me in the face of go to. there's 2 kinds of leadership crisis leadership and non-crisis leadership that i'm talking about in non-crisis leadership when things are stable and there's peace and prosperity in the past produce the future and you just asked me to the trains run on time a mentally healthy person is a better leader but my sister is when you need creativity and risk taking and a different way of thinking those mentally healthy meters actually were not as good as he spent. time.