Leadership failure made the U.S. pandemic worse (with Ronald Klain)

Pathogens are inevitable—but the scale of disaster accompanying this pandemic was not. Ronald Klain, President Obama’s Ebola czar, joins Nick and Goldy to discuss why the extent of economic collapse and deaths we’ve seen from COVID-19 is borne of government unpreparedness and leadership failure, not fate.  Ronald Klain is a lawyer who served as the White House Ebola response coordinator for President Obama. He has held a wide variety of legal and policy positions in government, including his service as chief of staff to VPs Biden and Gore, chief of staff to the attorney general, associate counsel to the president, and chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee. He is currently an advisor to the Biden 2020 campaign. Twitter: @RonaldKlain Further reading:  Confronting the Pandemic Threat: https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/40/confronting-the-pandemic-threat/ We’re past ‘if’ on the coronavirus. We’re on to ‘how bad will it be?’: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-coronavirus-has-landed-in-the-us-heres-how-we-can-reduce-the-risk/2020/01/22/afebe9ee-3d53-11ea-baca-eb7ace0a3455_story.html Trump says US has coronavirus ‘completely under control’ as Washington state confirms first case outside of Asia: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/trump-coronavirus-china-wuhan-disease-outbreak-airport-screening-travel-a9296926.html Obama’s ebola czar on what strong federal response looks like: https://www.wired.com/story/ebola-czar-ron-klain-federal-coronavirus-response/ The huge cost of waiting to contain the pandemic: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/14/opinion/covid-social-distancing.html Website: http://pitchforkeconomics.com/ Twitter: @PitchforkEcon Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics Nick’s twitter: @NickHanauer

Om Podcasten

We are living through a paradigm shift from trickle-down neoliberalism to middle-out economics — a new understanding of who gets what and why. Join zillionaire class-traitor Nick Hanauer and some of the world’s leading economic and political thinkers as they explore the latest thinking on how the economy actually works.