democracynow--2020-08-04--Public Health vs. Politics: White House Scrapped Nationwide COVID-19 Testing Plan to Hurt Blue State

Public Health vs. Politics: White House Scrapped Nationwide COVID-19 Testing Plan to Hurt Blue States

This is a rush transcript .
Copy may not be in its final form .
AMY GOODMAN : As the national coronavirus death toll surpasses 156,000 — the highest by far in the world , the U.S. making up more than a quarter of global deaths — on Monday , President Trump attacked top White House coronavirus adviser Dr. Deborah Birx for saying that the U.S. is in a new phase as the virus spreads out of control .
AMY GOODMAN : President Trump responded Monday , tweeting , “ So Crazy Nancy Pelosi said horrible things about Dr. Deborah @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was too positive on the very good job we are doing on combatting the China Virus , including Vaccines & Therapeutics .
In order to counter Nancy , Deborah took the bait & hit us .
Pathetic !
” he said .
Dr. Anthony Fauci defended Dr. Birx , saying community spread is “ insidious.
” Despite this , Trump told Axios ’ s Jonathan Swan the coronavirus is under control .
AMY GOODMAN : In fact , the coronavirus has spread all over the United States .
More than five months into @ @ @ @ @ @ @ critical testing shortages and delays .
How did we get here ?
We turn now to a stunning new exposé in Vanity Fair that reveals how the Trump administration ended up with no national testing plan despite a months-long effort spearheaded by Trump ’ s son-in-law Jared Kushner .
In an explosive piece headlined “ How Jared Kushner ’ s Secret Testing Plan 'Went Poof Into Thin Air , ' ” reporter Katherine Eban writes Jared Kushner was pursuing a national testing plan with the help of handful of wealthy business owners , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not necessary because COVID-19 had , quote , “ hit blue states hardest.
” Eban writes , quote , “ This summer has illustrated in devastating detail the human and economic cost of not launching a system of national testing , which most every other industrialized nation has done , ” Eban writes .
She joins us now from Truro , Massachusetts .
She ’ s author of Bottle of Lies : The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom and Dangerous Doses : A True Story of Cops , Counterfeiters , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Supply .
Katherine , welcome back to Democracy Now !
KATHERINE EBAN : Thanks .
It ’ s great to join you .
AMY GOODMAN : Can you lay out what you learned about why we are at this point in this country , where people around the country are waiting hours and hours and hours for their tests , and then they wait days , if not weeks , for the results , rendering them virtually ineffective ?
Go back to what this White House was doing in the early months .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ March , it was very clear to every public health expert that we needed a nationally organized diagnostic testing plan , one that could surge supplies , allocate test kits , allocate precious laboratory capacity .
And Jared Kushner , inside the White House , gathered a group of his associates , including his college roommate , some Morgan Stanley bankers , a sort of brain trust .
They began reaching out to billionaires who did not have public health experience per se .
But then they brought in a group of diagnostic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ night and day , in secret , on the encrypted WhatsApp platform , they hammered out a national testing plan that essentially resembled what every other advanced nation has established.And the participants in the plan — and we obtained the plan , I should say .
The participants expected that at any moment in early April , the plan would be announced .
It vanished into thin air , as one participant described it .
AMY GOODMAN : Why ?
And what was the reason ?
KATHERINE EBAN : So , the plan @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the White House .
The view at that point in early April , in part led by predictions by Dr. Deborah Birx , is that the virus was on its way out , it was subsiding .
There was a view that a national testing plan would be an enormous effort with a lot of political liability .
But there was an additional calculation , which was expressed from one member of Kushner ’ s team to someone that we interviewed , which is that this was mostly affecting blue states .
And @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they could simply blame those Democratic governors for the spread .
And so the national testing plan was abandoned .
And on April 27th , Trump stepped to the podium in the Rose Garden and announced the administration plan , which bore no resemblance to the one hammered out by the group .
And this was a plan that essentially kicked the problem to the states .
The states would individually be responsible for getting test kits , getting lab capacity .
And that really has led to what we have seen over @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cars in Texas and Arizona heat waiting on line to get tests , people waiting seven-plus days to get results , which essentially renders the tests useless .
And that ’ s where we are .
You know , we can not monitor where this virus is at point , because we don ’ t have enough testing .
You can not fight what you don ’ t see .
And that is the predicament we are currently in .
JUAN GONZÁLEZ : And , Katherine Eban , what about the reaction of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to this , first of all , to the Kushner team itself , and then to the fact that the president didn ’ t even implement the plan of that team ?
KATHERINE EBAN : Well , you know , public health experts have known all along that a national testing plan was absolutely required .
But my understanding is that this Jared Kushner team did not really work with the public health agencies .
As far as I can tell from my reporting , his plan , which we obtained , never @ @ @ @ @ @ @ decision-makers within HHS and other entities .
Now , of course , the White House has come out and denied this and denied our report .
But , you know , as one participant said to us , “ We were working in a bubble .
You know , we were in a bubble , they were in a bubble , and the bubbles never overlapped.
” JUAN GONZÁLEZ : And what about this whole issue of kicking the testing situation down to the states ?
You quote a Dr. Pellini saying that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ quote , “ loosely constructed web ” and that COVID-19 is , in essence , “ a stage five hurricane.
” How is this loosely connected web going to be able to deal with the current crisis that we have ?
KATHERINE EBAN : It ’ s a great question .
The answer is , it ’ s not .
You know , as someone described it to me , it ’ s like the early 20th century and the power grids , right ?
And every city and location had its own @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t surge power from one grid to another , right ?
So , Quest Diagnostics ’ lab capacity only belongs to Quest .
And LabCorp ’ s capacity only belongs to LabCorp .
And Quest Diagnostics came out in July and announced that the median time to get results was seven days , because they were so overrun .
Now , the testing plan that was worked out by Kushner ’ s team would have solved that problem , because one of the things it called for was allowing any lab with capacity @ @ @ @ @ @ @ And you would have had an organized system of sending samples to labs that had capacity .
You know , it ’ s just like when you go to a supermarket , or in the old days , before coronavirus , when we all shopped at crowded supermarkets , and there were people who guided shoppers to checkout lines that had space .
That is essentially what was required here .
I mean , as one person we interviewed said , this is not rocket science .
This is just like creating UPS @ @ @ @ @ @ @ you have to connect these dots .
And that was never done .
AMY GOODMAN : Confusing here , Katherine Eban , is that President Trump wants to open the economy , and he is demanding that kids be able to go to school all over the country .
Of course , his son , his school is not open .
He doesn ’ t talk about that very much .
But in order to do those things , in order to have a rational plan where everyone doesn ’ t come down @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
So it goes against his own interests .
KATHERINE EBAN : Well , that ’ s right .
I mean , it ’ s stunningly shortsighted .
So , the Rockefeller Foundation , I described their effort in the piece .
They saw this absolute absence of a plan , and they stepped forward with a very detailed plan , which they ’ re now trying to implement , which would surge up testing to 30 million tests a week , which is what they say we need in order to reopen @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who are going to school , workers who are returning back , how do you do any of that if you can ’ t quickly identify who is infected ?
So , without a national plan , the only thing that is left for you to do is to shut down the economy again , which is a really blunt instrument .
So , you know , President Trump says he wants to reopen the economy , he wants to reopen schools .
But , literally , the only way to do that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ other experts , is to have this widespread system of testing , which we currently lack .
JUAN GONZÁLEZ : And , Katherine , your piece in Vanity Fair starts out with a delivery of a 1 million Chinese-made diagnostic tests in March , and with a strange invoice for 3.5 million tests for $ 52 million , and there ’ s just a note that says “ WH.
” Could you talk about that ?
KATHERINE EBAN : Yeah .
So , this is actually where my reporting for this piece began @ @ @ @ @ @ @ strange invoice .
It ’ s from a company , Cogna Technology Solutions , which misspells its name on the invoice .
They ’ re a subsidiary of Group 42 , which is an artificial intelligence company that has close ties to the ruling family of the United Arab Emirates .
The invoice is for 52 million diagnostic — excuse me , $ 52 million worth of diagnostic tests .
But what was so strange about this invoice is it lists a client name , which was just two initials , “ WH.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
And as I further reported it , the tests got delivered to the embassy of the United Arab Emirates .
So , this was first 1 million tests delivered , then 2.5 million more delivered .
And when they were tested in a government lab , it turned out that they were contaminated and useless .
So , as the FDA said to me , they were shipped from the Middle East .
The reagents have to be kept cold .
And so , you know , this was , as I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , overseen by Jared Kushner ’ s task force , to ramp up diagnostic testing .
I mean , I think you ’ ll remember — I think it was March 6th — Donald Trump goes to the CDC , and he said , rather infamously now , you know , “ The tests are beautiful .
Anyone who wants a test gets a test.
” That was completely untrue .
And so , behind the scenes , his son-in-law and this team are trying to ramp up diagnostic tests and access to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ seem to have procured didn ’ t work .
AMY GOODMAN : Can you talk about , for example , Phoenix and what happened , what the mayor of Phoenix , Mayor Gallego , said ?
And then also talk about another country , like South Korea , an example of what can work .
KATHERINE EBAN : Yeah .
I mean , this is really two different universes .
So , in Arizona , the mayor of Phoenix , Kate Gallego , goes to FEMA in April and says , “ We @ @ @ @ @ @ @ diagnostic testing .
We need money .
We need organization.
” And they say to her — because at this point now the decision has been made to shift the responsibility to the states , they say , “ Well , you ’ re not really qualified to get our assistance because your case count is low.
” And behind the scenes , people who work for her pointed out , in emails I obtained , “ The reason our case counts are low is because we don ’ t have access to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we need would show that our case counts aren ’ t low.
” That was ignored .
Fast-forward to June .
You know , Arizona was the first state — the last state to close its economy and the first state to reopen , with really no provisions for a phased reopening .
Their case counts start skyrocketing in June .
The mayor described to me , she lives near one of these drive-thru testing sites , and , literally , she ’ s seeing her neighbors waiting in miles-long lines of cars @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who can ’ t breathe , are struggling to breathe , are waiting for tests .
And when they finally are able to get tests , Gallego ’ s own staff had to wait two weeks to get back test results .
So , what that means is those tests are essentially useless , right ?
I mean , it ’ s not just getting a test .
It ’ s how quickly you get back the results and what you do with those results .
So — AMY GOODMAN : I want @ @ @ @ @ @ @ speaking on Fox & Friends two days after President Trump ’ s news conference in late April .
He was asked about testing .
AMY GOODMAN : So , that ’ s Jared Kushner speaking in April .
Of course , Florida went into free fall after that , when it came to the numbers of deaths and infections .
So , then , contrast this — I mean , you have Harvard University saying there should be 20 million tests a day being done in this country to even begin to deal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ — with South Korea .
KATHERINE EBAN : Yeah .
So , I mean , the whole idea of preparedness is you prepare before you have a problem .
Then , if you don ’ t need what you prepared for , that ’ s wonderful , but if things get bad , you are prepared .
So that ’ s what South Korea did .
Before they had rising case counts , they set up a whole system of not just drive-thru testing sites , but walk-thru testing sites .
They ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with plexiglass barriers .
And that has two effects .
It preserves PPE , protective equipment , because if staff are protected , they don ’ t have to wear as much of it .
It preserves their energy , because it ’ s very hard to be wearing that while you ’ re testing .
So , people can get tested .
Then , they get the results back within 24 hours .
So , that is timely information that you can act on .
Further , when they get a positive @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and they ’ re put in supportive isolation , which means food is brought to them .
They ’ re able to quarantine with support .
So , if you contrast that with the miles-long lines of cars , you know , waiting for tests , it ’ s really stunning .
And just to say one more thing about that clip you played from Jared Kushner , you know , I ’ m struck by what he said about Texas , how there ’ s way more supply than there is demand @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gambling here , you know ?
They were really banking on this idea that you would not have spread from blue states to red states , which is an incredibly dumb gamble when you consider that this was a virus that crossed oceans , you know .
JUAN GONZÁLEZ : And , Katherine , I wanted to ask you about the racial and class breakdown in even this testing crisis .
I mean , we have not only people in the White House being tested almost on a daily basis ; we now @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , I consider it outrageous — that Major League Baseball is testing its players constantly to make sure that the teams can stay on the field , and yet so many Americans don ’ t have access , not only to a test right away , but , most especially , as you ’ re mentioning , to the results .
KATHERINE EBAN : You know , you ’ re absolutely right .
I mean , they ’ re demanding — President Trump is demanding reopenings of schools and businesses , and yet @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , you know , in my reporting of the Rockefeller Foundation ’ s plan , I sort of sat in on some of their deliberations .
This was a huge question about school reopenings .
You know , you have private schools that can afford to stand up a system of testing .
They have nurses .
Then you have impoverished public school systems where they can ’ t even afford a school nurse .
So , how are they going to manage this ?
You know , they ’ re not getting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t have access to anything .
So there is this remarkable discrepancy which is at the heart of it , yes .
AMY GOODMAN : And finally , Katherine Eban , you ’ re the author of Bottle of Lies : The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom .
Talk about your concerns about drug shortages , regulations , quality control , and just overall in the midst of this pandemic .
KATHERINE EBAN : Yeah .
So , the book exposes widespread fraud in overseas manufacturing plants that make the bulk @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , many , many people viewed , with concern , that this was a national security crisis in the making , because we are dependent on Chinese active ingredients , finished doses from India .
Once the pandemic hit , we were literally flying blind , right ?
The FDA can no longer go overseas to inspect those plants .
The FDA was also basically eroding its own safeguards by accepting pharmaceutical products from plants they had never inspected .
Suddenly , India is saying , you know , “ We ’ re @ @ @ @ @ @ @ essential drugs , ” right ?
So we ’ re in shortage .
We need all kinds of specialized pharmaceuticals in order to ventilate patients .
So we ’ ve seen , you know , increased shortages .
So , what I wrote about in that book is , really , coronavirus has accelerated all these issues .
AMY GOODMAN : I want to thank so you much for being with us , Katherine Eban , investigative journalist and author .
Her new report for Vanity Fair is headlined “ How Jared Kushner @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Into Thin Air . '
” We ’ ll link to it at democracynow.org .
She ’ s also author of Bottle of Lies : The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom and Dangerous Doses : A True Story of Cops , Counterfeiters , and the Contamination of America ’ s Drug Supply .
When we come back , we talk to one of the immigration attorneys arrested outside the California governor ’ s mansion calling on him to stop transferring people into immigrant jails , where they can spread or catch @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to a hunger striker inside an ICE jail .
And then , what about that raid of a humanitarian camp on the Arizona-Mexico border ?
We ’ ll go there .
Stay with us .

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: As the national coronavirus death toll surpasses 156,000 — the highest by far in the world, the U.S. making up more than a quarter of global deaths — on Monday, President Trump attacked top White House coronavirus adviser Dr. Deborah Birx for saying that the U.S. is in a new phase as the virus spreads out of control.
DR. DEBORAH BIRX: What we’re seeing today is different from March and April. It is extraordinarily widespread. It’s into the rural as equal urban areas. And to everybody who lives in a rural area, you are not immune or protected from this virus.
AMY GOODMAN: President Trump responded Monday, tweeting, “So Crazy Nancy Pelosi said horrible things about Dr. Deborah Birx, going after her because she was too positive on the very good job we are doing on combatting the China Virus, including Vaccines & Therapeutics. In order to counter Nancy, Deborah took the bait & hit us. Pathetic!” he said. Dr. Anthony Fauci defended Dr. Birx, saying community spread is “insidious.” Despite this, Trump told Axios’s Jonathan Swan the coronavirus is under control.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Under the circumstances —
JONATHAN SWAN: It’s giving them a false sense of security.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: — right now I think it’s under control. I’ll tell you what.
JONATHAN SWAN: How? A thousand Americans are dying a day.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: They are dying, that’s true. And you have — it is what it is. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t doing everything we can. It’s under control as much as you can control it. This is a horrible plague that beset us.
AMY GOODMAN: In fact, the coronavirus has spread all over the United States. More than five months into the crisis, there continue to be critical testing shortages and delays. How did we get here?
We turn now to a stunning new exposé in Vanity Fair that reveals how the Trump administration ended up with no national testing plan despite a months-long effort spearheaded by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
In an explosive piece headlined “How Jared Kushner’s Secret Testing Plan 'Went Poof Into Thin Air,'” reporter Katherine Eban writes Jared Kushner was pursuing a national testing plan with the help of handful of wealthy business owners, when the White House decided it was not necessary because COVID-19 had, quote, “hit blue states hardest.” Eban writes, quote, “This summer has illustrated in devastating detail the human and economic cost of not launching a system of national testing, which most every other industrialized nation has done,” Eban writes.
She joins us now from Truro, Massachusetts. She’s author of Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom and Dangerous Doses: A True Story of Cops, Counterfeiters, and the Contamination of America’s Drug Supply.
Katherine, welcome back to Democracy Now!
KATHERINE EBAN: Thanks. It’s great to join you.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you lay out what you learned about why we are at this point in this country, where people around the country are waiting hours and hours and hours for their tests, and then they wait days, if not weeks, for the results, rendering them virtually ineffective? Go back to what this White House was doing in the early months.
KATHERINE EBAN: So, starting in March, it was very clear to every public health expert that we needed a nationally organized diagnostic testing plan, one that could surge supplies, allocate test kits, allocate precious laboratory capacity. And Jared Kushner, inside the White House, gathered a group of his associates, including his college roommate, some Morgan Stanley bankers, a sort of brain trust. They began reaching out to billionaires who did not have public health experience per se. But then they brought in a group of diagnostic testing experts from the industry.
Working night and day, in secret, on the encrypted WhatsApp platform, they hammered out a national testing plan that essentially resembled what every other advanced nation has established.And the participants in the plan — and we obtained the plan, I should say. The participants expected that at any moment in early April, the plan would be announced. It vanished into thin air, as one participant described it.
AMY GOODMAN: Why? And what was the reason?
KATHERINE EBAN: So, the plan at that moment hit shifting sentiment at the White House. The view at that point in early April, in part led by predictions by Dr. Deborah Birx, is that the virus was on its way out, it was subsiding. There was a view that a national testing plan would be an enormous effort with a lot of political liability.
But there was an additional calculation, which was expressed from one member of Kushner’s team to someone that we interviewed, which is that this was mostly affecting blue states. And if a political argument was needed, they could simply blame those Democratic governors for the spread.
And so the national testing plan was abandoned. And on April 27th, Trump stepped to the podium in the Rose Garden and announced the administration plan, which bore no resemblance to the one hammered out by the group. And this was a plan that essentially kicked the problem to the states. The states would individually be responsible for getting test kits, getting lab capacity.
And that really has led to what we have seen over this terrible summer: miles-long lines of cars in Texas and Arizona heat waiting on line to get tests, people waiting seven-plus days to get results, which essentially renders the tests useless. And that’s where we are. You know, we cannot monitor where this virus is at point, because we don’t have enough testing. You cannot fight what you don’t see. And that is the predicament we are currently in.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Katherine Eban, what about the reaction of the medical experts in the federal government to this, first of all, to the Kushner team itself, and then to the fact that the president didn’t even implement the plan of that team?
KATHERINE EBAN: Well, you know, public health experts have known all along that a national testing plan was absolutely required. But my understanding is that this Jared Kushner team did not really work with the public health agencies. As far as I can tell from my reporting, his plan, which we obtained, never trickled down to the agencies and the decision-makers within HHS and other entities. Now, of course, the White House has come out and denied this and denied our report. But, you know, as one participant said to us, “We were working in a bubble. You know, we were in a bubble, they were in a bubble, and the bubbles never overlapped.”
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what about this whole issue of kicking the testing situation down to the states? You quote a Dr. Pellini saying that the diagnostic testing industry is a, quote, “loosely constructed web” and that COVID-19 is, in essence, “a stage five hurricane.” How is this loosely connected web going to be able to deal with the current crisis that we have?
KATHERINE EBAN: It’s a great question. The answer is, it’s not. You know, as someone described it to me, it’s like the early 20th century and the power grids, right? And every city and location had its own power grid, and you couldn’t surge power from one grid to another, right? So, Quest Diagnostics’ lab capacity only belongs to Quest. And LabCorp’s capacity only belongs to LabCorp. And Quest Diagnostics came out in July and announced that the median time to get results was seven days, because they were so overrun.
Now, the testing plan that was worked out by Kushner’s team would have solved that problem, because one of the things it called for was allowing any lab with capacity to test any sample, right? And you would have had an organized system of sending samples to labs that had capacity.
You know, it’s just like when you go to a supermarket, or in the old days, before coronavirus, when we all shopped at crowded supermarkets, and there were people who guided shoppers to checkout lines that had space. That is essentially what was required here. I mean, as one person we interviewed said, this is not rocket science. This is just like creating UPS for an industry. You know, you have to connect these dots. And that was never done.
AMY GOODMAN: Confusing here, Katherine Eban, is that President Trump wants to open the economy, and he is demanding that kids be able to go to school all over the country. Of course, his son, his school is not open. He doesn’t talk about that very much. But in order to do those things, in order to have a rational plan where everyone doesn’t come down with COVID, you need the tests. So it goes against his own interests.
KATHERINE EBAN: Well, that’s right. I mean, it’s stunningly shortsighted. So, the Rockefeller Foundation, I described their effort in the piece. They saw this absolute absence of a plan, and they stepped forward with a very detailed plan, which they’re now trying to implement, which would surge up testing to 30 million tests a week, which is what they say we need in order to reopen safely, right? So, kids who are going to school, workers who are returning back, how do you do any of that if you can’t quickly identify who is infected? So, without a national plan, the only thing that is left for you to do is to shut down the economy again, which is a really blunt instrument.
So, you know, President Trump says he wants to reopen the economy, he wants to reopen schools. But, literally, the only way to do that, according to the Rockefeller Foundation and other experts, is to have this widespread system of testing, which we currently lack.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Katherine, your piece in Vanity Fair starts out with a delivery of a 1 million Chinese-made diagnostic tests in March, and with a strange invoice for 3.5 million tests for $52 million, and there’s just a note that says “WH.” Could you talk about that?
KATHERINE EBAN: Yeah. So, this is actually where my reporting for this piece began, which is I obtained this very strange invoice. It’s from a company, Cogna Technology Solutions, which misspells its name on the invoice. They’re a subsidiary of Group 42, which is an artificial intelligence company that has close ties to the ruling family of the United Arab Emirates. The invoice is for 52 million diagnostic — excuse me, $52 million worth of diagnostic tests. But what was so strange about this invoice is it lists a client name, which was just two initials, “WH.” And that was the White House.
And as I further reported it, the tests got delivered to the embassy of the United Arab Emirates. So, this was first 1 million tests delivered, then 2.5 million more delivered. And when they were tested in a government lab, it turned out that they were contaminated and useless. So, as the FDA said to me, they were shipped from the Middle East. The reagents have to be kept cold.
And so, you know, this was, as I understand it now, an early effort, overseen by Jared Kushner’s task force, to ramp up diagnostic testing. I mean, I think you’ll remember — I think it was March 6th — Donald Trump goes to the CDC, and he said, rather infamously now, you know, “The tests are beautiful. Anyone who wants a test gets a test.” That was completely untrue. And so, behind the scenes, his son-in-law and this team are trying to ramp up diagnostic tests and access to tests, but the tests that they seem to have procured didn’t work.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about, for example, Phoenix and what happened, what the mayor of Phoenix, Mayor Gallego, said? And then also talk about another country, like South Korea, an example of what can work.
KATHERINE EBAN: Yeah. I mean, this is really two different universes. So, in Arizona, the mayor of Phoenix, Kate Gallego, goes to FEMA in April and says, “We need assistance and help to ramp up diagnostic testing. We need money. We need organization.” And they say to her — because at this point now the decision has been made to shift the responsibility to the states, they say, “Well, you’re not really qualified to get our assistance because your case count is low.” And behind the scenes, people who work for her pointed out, in emails I obtained, “The reason our case counts are low is because we don’t have access to tests. Right? The tests that we need would show that our case counts aren’t low.” That was ignored.
Fast-forward to June. You know, Arizona was the first state — the last state to close its economy and the first state to reopen, with really no provisions for a phased reopening. Their case counts start skyrocketing in June. The mayor described to me, she lives near one of these drive-thru testing sites, and, literally, she’s seeing her neighbors waiting in miles-long lines of cars in heat over 100 degrees. People who can’t breathe, are struggling to breathe, are waiting for tests. And when they finally are able to get tests, Gallego’s own staff had to wait two weeks to get back test results. So, what that means is those tests are essentially useless, right? I mean, it’s not just getting a test. It’s how quickly you get back the results and what you do with those results. So —
AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to Jared Kushner himself, speaking on Fox & Friends two days after President Trump’s news conference in late April. He was asked about testing.
JARED KUSHNER: Everyone’s talking about testing. And I have to say that the work that’s been done over the last 60 days on testing has been absolutely extraordinary. We’re at about 5.8 million tests now performed, by far the most in the world, and you’re going to see that number continue to accelerate. We’re starting another round of calls with all the governors today to ask them what additional supplies they need, what’s their two-month plan, what’s their six-month plan. And right now we’ve fulfilled all the orders that the governors have. They have excess capacity in their states. Yesterday Governor DeSantis was saying that he has more testing capacity than he has demand for the tests.
And so, we’re really doing quite well with that. And I always find that we see the leading indicators, and often the media sees the lagging indicators. But the leading indicators are testing — are extraordinarily positive, and I’m very confident that we have all the testing we need to start opening the country.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Jared Kushner speaking in April. Of course, Florida went into free fall after that, when it came to the numbers of deaths and infections. So, then, contrast this — I mean, you have Harvard University saying there should be 20 million tests a day being done in this country to even begin to deal with this community spread throughout the country — with South Korea.
KATHERINE EBAN: Yeah. So, I mean, the whole idea of preparedness is you prepare before you have a problem. Then, if you don’t need what you prepared for, that’s wonderful, but if things get bad, you are prepared.
So that’s what South Korea did. Before they had rising case counts, they set up a whole system of not just drive-thru testing sites, but walk-thru testing sites. They’re sort of phone booth testing sites with plexiglass barriers. And that has two effects. It preserves PPE, protective equipment, because if staff are protected, they don’t have to wear as much of it. It preserves their energy, because it’s very hard to be wearing that while you’re testing. So, people can get tested. Then, they get the results back within 24 hours. So, that is timely information that you can act on. Further, when they get a positive test, their contacts are traced, and they’re put in supportive isolation, which means food is brought to them. They’re able to quarantine with support. So, if you contrast that with the miles-long lines of cars, you know, waiting for tests, it’s really stunning.
And just to say one more thing about that clip you played from Jared Kushner, you know, I’m struck by what he said about Texas, how there’s way more supply than there is demand. I mean, they were really gambling here, you know? They were really banking on this idea that you would not have spread from blue states to red states, which is an incredibly dumb gamble when you consider that this was a virus that crossed oceans, you know.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Katherine, I wanted to ask you about the racial and class breakdown in even this testing crisis. I mean, we have not only people in the White House being tested almost on a daily basis; we now have the spectacle — and to me, I consider it outrageous — that Major League Baseball is testing its players constantly to make sure that the teams can stay on the field, and yet so many Americans don’t have access, not only to a test right away, but, most especially, as you’re mentioning, to the results.
KATHERINE EBAN: You know, you’re absolutely right. I mean, they’re demanding — President Trump is demanding reopenings of schools and businesses, and yet there is this incredible discrepancy. So, you know, in my reporting of the Rockefeller Foundation’s plan, I sort of sat in on some of their deliberations. This was a huge question about school reopenings. You know, you have private schools that can afford to stand up a system of testing. They have nurses. Then you have impoverished public school systems where they can’t even afford a school nurse. So, how are they going to manage this? You know, they’re not getting help with testing. They don’t have access to anything. So there is this remarkable discrepancy which is at the heart of it, yes.
AMY GOODMAN: And finally, Katherine Eban, you’re the author of Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom. Talk about your concerns about drug shortages, regulations, quality control, and just overall in the midst of this pandemic.
KATHERINE EBAN: Yeah. So, the book exposes widespread fraud in overseas manufacturing plants that make the bulk of our low-cost generics. You know, many, many people viewed, with concern, that this was a national security crisis in the making, because we are dependent on Chinese active ingredients, finished doses from India. Once the pandemic hit, we were literally flying blind, right? The FDA can no longer go overseas to inspect those plants. The FDA was also basically eroding its own safeguards by accepting pharmaceutical products from plants they had never inspected. Suddenly, India is saying, you know, “We’re going to ban the export of 26 essential drugs,” right? So we’re in shortage. We need all kinds of specialized pharmaceuticals in order to ventilate patients. So we’ve seen, you know, increased shortages. So, what I wrote about in that book is, really, coronavirus has accelerated all these issues.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank so you much for being with us, Katherine Eban, investigative journalist and author. Her new report for Vanity Fair is headlined “How Jared Kushner’s Secret Testing Plan 'Went Poof Into Thin Air.'” We’ll link to it at democracynow.org. She’s also author of Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom and Dangerous Doses: A True Story of Cops, Counterfeiters, and the Contamination of America’s Drug Supply.
When we come back, we talk to one of the immigration attorneys arrested outside the California governor’s mansion calling on him to stop transferring people into immigrant jails, where they can spread or catch COVID. And we’ll speak to a hunger striker inside an ICE jail. And then, what about that raid of a humanitarian camp on the Arizona-Mexico border? We’ll go there. Stay with us.


democracynow--2020-08-04--Headlines for August  4, 2020

Headlines for August  4, 2020

The U.S. death toll from COVID-19 has topped 156,000 — by far the highest in the world .
On Monday @ @ @ @ @ at his top White House coronavirus adviser , Dr. Deborah Birx , after she warned @ @ @ @ @ widespread.
” Trump took to Twitter calling Birx “ pathetic.
” Meanwhile , concern is @ @ @ @ @ may rush to approve a vaccine to boost the president ’ s chances of winning @ @ @ @ @ York Times reveals the Department of Health and Human Services produced a slideshow for the @ @ @ @ @ developing a vaccine .
The first slide read , ” DEADLINE : Enable broad access @ @ @ @ @ 2020.
” The date was in bold letters .
One regular participant in White House @ @ @ @ @ been Trump ’ s son-in-law Jared Kushner , who is also helping to run his @ @ @

The U.S. death toll from COVID-19 has topped 156,000 — by far the highest in the world. On Monday, President Trump lashed out at his top White House coronavirus adviser, Dr. Deborah Birx, after she warned the virus is “extraordinarily widespread.” Trump took to Twitter calling Birx “pathetic.”
Meanwhile, concern is growing that the Trump administration may rush to approve a vaccine to boost the president’s chances of winning in November. The New York Times reveals the Department of Health and Human Services produced a slideshow for the White House in April about developing a vaccine. The first slide read, ”DEADLINE: Enable broad access to the public by October 2020.” The date was in bold letters. One regular participant in White House meetings on vaccine development has been Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who is also helping to run his reelection campaign.


democracynow--2020-08-05--The End of Big Tech? Calls Grow to Break Up Facebook, Amazon for "Mob-Like" Behavior, Monopoly Power

This is a rush transcript .
Copy may not be in its final form .
AMY GOODMAN : This is Democracy Now !
, The Quarantine Report .
I ’ m Amy Goodman .
It was an unprecedented congressional hearing .
The big four tech CEOs of Amazon , Apple , Google and Facebook faced lawmakers on Capitol Hill last Wednesday for five hours , as Democratic and Republican lawmakers alike hammered the executives with questions about the tactics they use to dominate the market .
In a spectacle compared to the infamous 1994 congressional hearing of tobacco executives who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hands , and claimed cigarettes were not addictive , CEOs Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook , Sundar Pichai of Google , Tim Cook of Apple and Jeff Bezos of Amazon faced accusations of stifling competition and monopoly .
Republican lawmakers accused them of anti-conservative bias .
Committee chair , Congressman David Cicilline , a Democrat from Rhode Island , said , “ Our founders would not bow before a king , nor should we bow before the empowers of the online economy.
” This is Pramila Jayapal , the congressmember , questioning Facebook CEO @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s Congressmember Pramila Jayapal , questioning CEO Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook , who was testifying remotely , as the other CEOs were , in the midst of the pandemic .
House Judiciary Chair Jerrold Nadler also questioned Zuckerberg , condemning Facebook ’ s acquisition of Instagram .
AMY GOODMAN : Near the end of the hearing , subcommittee chair , David Cicilline , called for breaking up the big tech companies .
AMY GOODMAN : The hearing came just days after Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos reportedly made $ 13 billion in a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has left millions of Americans jobless , struggling to make ends meet .
It was Bezos ’ s first-ever congressional testimony .
For more , we ’ re joined by Scott Galloway , professor of marketing at New York University Stern .
He ’ s the author of The New York Times bestseller The Four : The Hidden DNA of Amazon , Apple , Facebook , and Google and The Algebra of Happiness .
His recent opinion piece in Business Insider is headlined “ This may be the beginning of the end of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as a punishment , but a restoration of balance ” : https : //www.businessinsider.com/scott-galloway-beginning-of-the-end-of-big-tech-2020-7 .
Welcome to Democracy Now !
It ’ s great to have you with us , Scott .
Can you start off by , well , answering your question ?
Will this be the end of Big Tech ?
This was an unprecedented hearing .
But will the answer be unprecedented ?
SCOTT GALLOWAY : That ’ s the correct question , Amy , and good to be with you .
And while I ’ ve been wrong before @ @ @ @ @ @ @ more spectacle than historic .
And that is , it ’ s a lot of positioning for the cameras , and it doesn ’ t appear that two or three months post the hearing , that a lot has happened .
This felt like the culmination , and it was the culmination , of a 13-month investigation where they collected over a million pages of evidence .
And the panelists weren ’ t really looking to the witnesses to provide them additional information ; it seemed as if they were there to use @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and articulate to the general public and other lawmakers their conclusions .
And their conclusions seemed pretty swift and unified across both sides of the aisle , that these companies have just aggregated too much power .
Now , each of the parties seems to be upset for different reasons , but this , at the end of the day , feels like a bipartisan action and belief that these companies have grown too powerful .
So it does in fact feel , as I wrote in that article , that may be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Tech as we know it .
AMY GOODMAN : Let me turn again to Congressmember Pramila Jayapal , who represents Seattle , questioning Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos , also of course Seattle , during last Wednesday ’ s hearing .
AMY GOODMAN : So that ’ s Pramila Jayapal , questioning Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos .
Scott Galloway , can you explain what exactly she ’ s getting at ?
SCOTT GALLOWAY : Well , one , if you own the rails , and you know what ’ s in the cars , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a store , but you also have stores , your ability to understand what is selling well and what components of those products are inspiring additional sales—you have just an unfair advantage .
So if you own the rails , you are not supposed to be competing with the end destination .
And in this instance , when Amazon understands user behavior , why people are purchasing certain products , where those products are being fulfilled from , the margins on those products , when they have to go on sale , how @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for example , that batteries is a great high-margin business and they can produce those batteries in the same factories and brand them Amazon and then start selling them , themselves , and even advertise or put a banner ad in front of the consumer when they are perhaps buying competitive batteries—it seems as if it ’ s just an unfair advantage .
So Representative Jayapal is basically getting to the notion that one , you can ’ t own the rails and also compete with them .
And two , with respect @ @ @ @ @ @ @ some point—at some point , if you are so intimidating to somebody , you basically show up and say , “ Either sell to us or we ’ re going to put you out of business , ” it begins to feel very mob-like .
In addition , Representative Nadler accused the firm of stating when they were purchasing Instagram that their justification , one of their justifications for the purchase of Instagram was to cauterize a competitor , which is in direct violation of antitrust .
So it feels like it ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ angles of why antitrust law was created , to stop this type of behavior .
AMY GOODMAN : So will these companies emerge actually stronger and more powerful , after the pandemic , than they were before ?
As people are suffering all over this country , I mean , just pointing out that in one day in the last weeks , Jeff Bezos made $ 13 billion .
SCOTT GALLOWAY : Well , it ’ s worse than that .
The day after the hearings , the firms reported record earnings , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ earnings after the close of market , their stocks increased by a combined quarter of a trillion dollars .
So they added the value of AT & T , Pinterest and Twitter in 15 minutes .
And it ’ s no accident that they negotiated to testify the day before their earnings , because according to these individuals , they have competitors coming from everywhere , but the next day , they managed to announce record earnings and profits in the midst of a global pandemic .
What was also telling about the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ companies are so big and the indices are weighted , so typically when these four firms all go up , the indices go up .
In this instance , the indices went down .
Because if you ’ re adding a quarter of a trillion dollars in market capitalization across just four companies in a low-growth economy or an economy that is in decline , it means every other publicly traded company is likely losing revenues to these companies .
So in sum , what is now good for Big Tech seems to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ economy , because they have aggregated just so much power and so much of the spoils .
AMY GOODMAN : Explain what you think has to happen , Professor Galloway .
SCOTT GALLOWAY : I think the DOJ or the FTC need to file antitrust action against three of the four firms—Amazon , Facebook and Google .
I think Facebook should divest Instagram and WhatsApp .
If they acquired them , that they can divest them .
I think Google should be forced to spend [ sp ] YouTube in their cloud business @ @ @ @ @ @ @ into three companies—Amazon the core retail platform , AWS and Amazon fulfillment as a standalone company .
And I don ’ t think there ’ s an elegant way to split up Apple .
I think Apple is more about regulation than antitrust .
Because elegant antitrust not only restores the marketplace and oxygenates it with increased competition , but the core shareholders do better off .
I think if Amazon spun AWS , AWS itself would be the most valuable company in the world .
So I think elegant antitrust , you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , too .
Competition , and you increase the share value of the existing shareholders .
With Apple , it ’ s difficult to understand how you would split it up because the question that arises is who has domain over the core asset , the brand .
However , I do think you would need to regulate the app store which now controls two thirds of what we call the app economy , and has been accused of usurious pricing and anticompetitive behavior .
So split those three companies into eight or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ GOODMAN : Scott Galloway , you were always on CBNBC , NBC ’ s sort of business channel .
I haven ’ t seen you there recently .
SCOTT GALLOWAY : [ laugh ] Yeah .
I was on CNBC every morning for , gosh , the better part of five years .
And I don ’ t know what happened ; they just stopped calling .
I heard from one of the folks there that some of my comments were not well received by their advertisers .
I don ’ t know @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I am happy to be here with you now .
I still really like the folks at CNBC , and I still watch it .
But yeah , I ’ m no longer on CNBC .
AMY GOODMAN : That ’ s why independent media is so important .
Let me ask you about Donald Trump announcing and then reversing his decision to ban the Chinese-owned video sharing platform TikTok , after Microsoft said it ’ s in talks to acquire U.S. operations for the extremely popular app .
He is also saying @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Can you explain all of this ?
SCOTT GALLOWAY : I don ’ t think anyone can explain it .
So first off , let me acknowledge , there are legitimate concerns around a company that is , if not controlled , is influenced by the Chinese government in terms of access to data around behavioral and location data around American consumers .
I think those are legitimate concerns .
The issue is what is the right remedy .
And what ’ s unprecedented is what the president is proposing , is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to ban the company unless it sells to not only an American company , but he has already decided which company it should be sold to , and that he should get a commission .
We ’ ve just never seen anything like this .
And you can imagine , this goes very strange places , where say , for example , the Indonesian government might decide to threaten to ban Facebook , its second-largest market by users , unless they sell to an Indonesian social media firm .
This just isn ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of production are controlled by the state , and the yield is divided up by the state .
And this feels very socialist , when a president starts playing CEO with bigger chess pieces , and calling Microsoft and saying , “ You should buy this company ” and then blessing it , and then asking for a commission .
People would argue that whether you believe that our tax policy is accurate or not , people would argue that that ’ s just not how CEOs behave .
We have never seen @ @ @ @ @ @ @ unlikely that it ’ s legal to do this .
But I think it has a lot of people flummoxed as to what is the role of a president .
And we ’ ve never seen a president weigh in and start basically acting like a real estate broker across foreign and local organizations .
It ’ s just unprecedented .
It ’ s hard to even envision where this goes from here .
AMY GOODMAN : A lot has been made about President Trump going after China ; this is a way @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it ’ s just going after Sarah Cooper .
He doesn ’ t like to see a woman of color impersonating him , right ?
The star of TikTok right now .
SCOTT GALLOWAY : Yeah , it appears that he does have some personal animus .
He has a track record of making decisions based on his own personal biases .
Not only that , a lot of people thought that TikTok was the platform that people used to reserve tickets for his rally that didn ’ t get the attendance they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ powerful company .
It ’ s growing fast .
And to be fair , China has let many of our big tech companies in , just long enough to steal the IP and then kick them out .
But this is unprecedented .
You could see much different remedies .
Even if they were worried about the data , you could imagine them forcing the company maybe to go public on a U.S. exchange , have all the servers located domestically , ensure that security agencies and the SEC felt that the company @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mainland China .
But this feels , again , very mob boss like .
But there ’ s no doubt about it ; it does feel as if something around this is personal .
We saw the same thing when the president encouraged the DOJ to block AT & T ’ s acquisition of Time Warner , which included CNN .
So this feels like it is governance by id as opposed to any strategy or consistency or the law as a guide .
AMY GOODMAN : We only have 20 seconds , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ about Amazon starting to get into health insurance .
SCOTT GALLOWAY : Yeah , or healthcare more broadly .
I believe that Amazon will be the largest or the fastest-growing healthcare company in the world within two or three years .
Jeff Bezos has famously said , “ Your margin is my opportunity.
” The largest margin , largest dollar business , it has grown twice [ sp ] as fast as any sector in the world , is U.S. healthcare .
Amazon has a direct pipeline into every home .
They have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ body mass index .
They know how healthy or unhealthy you are .
And they have the capital to go into this field .
I think Amazon in the next few years is the fastest-growing healthcare company in the world .
AMY GOODMAN : Scott Galloway , we want to thank you for being with us .
We hope to have you back .
Professor of marketing at NYU Stern , author of The New York Times bestseller , The Four and The Algebra of Happiness .
Host of The Prof G Show @ @ @ @ @ @ @ That does it for our show .
I ’ m Amy Goodman .
Stay save , save lives , wear a mask .

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! The Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
It was an unprecedented congressional hearing. The Big Four tech CEOs, of Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook, faced lawmakers on Capitol Hill last Wednesday for five hours, as Democratic and Republican lawmakers alike hammered the executives with questions about the tactics they use to dominate the market.
In a spectacle compared to the infamous 1994 congressional hearing of tobacco executives, who put up their hands, their right hands, and claimed cigarettes were not addictive, CEOs Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Sundar Pichai of Google, Tim Cook of Apple and Jeff Bezos of Amazon faced accusations of stifling competition and monopoly. Republican lawmakers accused them of anti-conservative bias. Committee chair, Congressmember David Cicilline, a Democrat from Rhode Island, said, “Our founders would not bow before a king. Nor should we bow before the emperors of the online economy.”
This is Pramila Jayapal, the congressmember, questioning Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
REP. PRAMILA JAYAPAL: Has Facebook ever taken steps to prevent competitors from getting footholds by copying competitors?
MARK ZUCKERBERG: Congresswoman, I view it as our job to understand what people are finding valuable in all of the services that they use. And certainly, if someone else in the market —
REP. PRAMILA JAYAPAL: Do you copy — do you copy your competitors?
MARK ZUCKERBERG: Congresswoman, we’ve certainly adapted features that others have led in, as have others copied and adapted features that we invented.
REP. PRAMILA JAYAPAL: I’m not concerned about others. I’m just asking you, Mr. Zuckerberg, since March of 2012, after that email conversation, how many competitors did Facebook end up copying?
MARK ZUCKERBERG: Congresswoman, I can’t give you a number.
REP. PRAMILA JAYAPAL: Did you warn Evan Spiegel, the founder of Snapchat, that Facebook was in the process of cloning the features of his company, while also attempting to buy Snapchat?
MARK ZUCKERBERG: Congresswoman, I don’t remember those specific conversations, but that was also an area where it was very clear that we were going to be building something.
REP. PRAMILA JAYAPAL: Facebook is a case study, in my opinion, in monopoly power, because your company harvests and monetizes our data, and then your company uses that data to spy on competitors and to copy, acquire and kill rivals.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Congressmember Pramila Jayapal questioning CEO Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, who was testifying remotely, as the other CEOs were, in the midst of the pandemic. House Judiciary Chair Jerrold Nadler also questioned Zuckerberg, condemning Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram.
REP. JERROLD NADLER: Facebook saw Instagram as a threat that could potentially siphon business away from Facebook. And so, rather than compete with it, Facebook bought it. This is exactly the type of anti-competitive acquisition that the antitrust laws were designed to prevent.
AMY GOODMAN: Near the end of the hearing, Subcommittee Chair David Cicilline called for breaking up the Big Tech companies.
REP. DAVID CICILLINE: This hearing has made one fact clear to me: These companies, as exist today, have monopoly power. Some need to be broken up. All need to be properly regulated and held accountable. We need to ensure the antitrust laws, first written more than a century ago, work in the Digital Age.
AMY GOODMAN: The hearing came just days after Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos reportedly made $13 billion in a single day, as the coronavirus pandemic has left millions of Americans jobless, struggling to make ends meet. It was Bezos’s first-ever congressional testimony.
For more, we’re joined by Scott Galloway, professor of marketing at New York University Stern. He’s the author of The New York Times best-seller, The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google and The Algebra of Happiness. His recent opinion piece in Business Insider is headlined “This may be the beginning of the end of Big Tech — we shouldn’t see it as a punishment, but a restoration of balance.”
Welcome to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us, Scott. Can you start off by, well, answering your question? Will this be the end of Big Tech? This was an unprecedented hearing. But will the answer be unprecedented?
SCOTT GALLOWAY: That’s the correct question, Amy. And good to be with you. And while I’ve been wrong before, this felt — most congressional panel hearings are more spectacle than historic. And that is, it’s a lot of positioning for the cameras, and it doesn’t appear that two or three months post the hearing that a lot has happened.
This felt like the culmination, and it was the culmination, of a 13-month investigation, where they collected over a million pages of evidence. And the panelists weren’t really looking to the witnesses to provide them additional information; it seemed as if they were there to use the witnesses as props just to confirm and articulate to the general public and other lawmakers their conclusions.
And their conclusions seemed pretty swift and unified across both sides of the aisle, that these companies have just aggregated too much power. Now, each of the parties seems to be upset for different reasons, but this, at the end of the day, feels like a bipartisan action and belief that these companies have grown too powerful. So it does in fact feel, as I wrote in that article, that this may be the beginning of the end of Big Tech as we know it.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, let me turn again to Congressmember Pramila Jayapal, who represents Seattle, questioning Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, also, of course, Seattle, during last Wednesday’s hearing.
REP. PRAMILA JAYAPAL: So, let me ask you, Mr. Bezos: Does Amazon ever access and use third-party seller data when making business decisions? And just a yes or no will suffice, sir.
JEFF BEZOS: I thank you for the question. I know it’s is an important topic. And I also want to thank you for representing us. But I can’t answer that question yes or no. What I can tell you is, we have a policy against using seller-specific data to aid our private label business, but I can’t guarantee you that that policy has never been violated.
REP. PRAMILA JAYAPAL: Mr. Bezos, you’re probably aware that an April 2020 report in The Wall Street Journal revealed that your company does access data on third-party sellers, both by reviewing data on popular individual sellers and products and by creating tiny product categories that allowed your company to categorically access detailed seller information in a supposedly aggregate category. Do you deny that report?
JEFF BEZOS: I’m familiar with The Wall Street Journal article that you’re talking about. And we continue to look into that very carefully. I’m not yet satisfied that we’ve gotten to the bottom of it, and we’re going to keep looking at it.
REP. PRAMILA JAYAPAL: OK. So —
JEFF BEZOS: It’s not as easy to do as you would think, because some of the sources in the article are anonymous. But we continue to look into it.
REP. PRAMILA JAYAPAL: I’ll take that as a you’re not denying that; you’re looking into it. I will tell you a former Amazon employee in third-party sales and recruitment told this committee, quote, “There’s a rule, but there’s nobody enforcing or spot-checking. They just say, ’Don’t help yourself to the data.’ It’s a candy shop. Everyone can have access to anything they want.”
AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Pramila Jayapal questioning Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Scott Galloway, can you explain what exactly she’s getting at?
SCOTT GALLOWAY: Well, one, if you own the rails, and you know what’s in the cars, and those cars are shipping products to a store, but you also have stores, your ability to understand what is selling well and what components of those products are inspiring additional sales, you have just an unfair advantage. So, if you own the rails, you’re not supposed to be competing with the end destination.
And in this instance, when Amazon understands user behavior, why people are purchasing certain products, where those products are being fulfilled from, the margins on those products, when they have to go on sale, how much they sell — and they might decide, for example, that batteries is a great high-margin business, and they can produce those batteries in the same factories and brand them Amazon and then start selling them themselves, and even advertise or put a banner ad in front of the consumer when they are perhaps buying competitive batteries — it seems as if it’s just an unfair advantage.
So, Representative Jayapal is basically getting to the notion that, one, you can’t own the rails and also compete with them. And two, with respect to Instagram, whether or not at some point — at some point, if you are so intimidating to somebody, you basically show up and say, “Either sell to us, or we’re going to put you out of business,” I mean, it begins to feel very mob-like.
In addition, Representative Nadler accused the firm of stating, when they were purchasing Instagram, that their justification, or one of their justifications, for the purchase of Instagram was to cauterize a competitor, which is in direct violation of antitrust. So it feels like there’s just — it’s a textbook case of all different angles of why antitrust law was created, to stop this type of behavior.
AMY GOODMAN: So, will these companies emerge actually stronger and more powerful after the pandemic than they were before, as people are suffering all over this country? I mean, just pointing out that in one day in the last weeks, Jeff Bezos made $13 billion.
SCOTT GALLOWAY: Well, it’s worse than that. The day after the hearings, the firms reported record earnings, and within 15 minutes after reporting their earnings, after the close of market, their stocks increased by a combined quarter of a trillion dollars. So they added the value of AT&T, Pinterest and Twitter in 15 minutes.
And it’s no accident that they negotiated to testify the day before their earnings, because, according to these individuals, they have competitors coming from everywhere, but the next day they managed to announce record earnings and profits in the midst of a global pandemic.
What was also telling about the market the next day is that these companies are so big, and the indices are weighted, so typically when these four firms all go up, the indices go up. In this instance, the indices went down, because if you’re adding a quarter of a trillion dollars in market capitalization across just four companies in a low-growth economy or an economy that’s in decline, it means every other publicly traded company is likely losing revenues to these companies. So, in sum, what is now good for Big Tech seems to be bad for the rest of the economy, because they have aggregated just so much power and so much of the spoils.
AMY GOODMAN: So, explain what you think has to happen, Professor Galloway.
SCOTT GALLOWAY: Well, I think the DOJ or the FTC need to file antitrust action against three of the four firms: Amazon, Facebook and Google. I think Facebook should divest Instagram and WhatsApp. If they acquired them, they can divest them. I think Google should be forced to spin YouTube and their cloud business. I think Amazon should be split into three companies: Amazon, the core retail platform; AWS; and Amazon fulfillment as a standalone company.
And I don’t think there’s an elegant way to split up Apple. I think Apple is more about regulation than antitrust, because elegant antitrust not only restores the marketplace and oxygenates it with increased competition, but the core shareholders do better off. I think if Amazon spun AWS, AWS itself would be the most valuable company in the world. So, I think elegant antitrust, you have your cake, and you eat it, too — competition, and you increase the share value of the existing shareholders. With Apple, it’s difficult to understand how you would split it up, because the question that arises is who has domain over the core asset, the brand. However, I do think you would need to regulate the app store, which now controls two-thirds of what we call the app economy, and has been accused of usurous pricing and anticompetitive behavior. So, split those three companies into eight or nine, and regulate Apple.
AMY GOODMAN: Scott Galloway, you were always on CBNBC — right? — NBC’s sort of business channel. I haven’t seen you there recently.
SCOTT GALLOWAY: Yeah. I was on CNBC every morning for, gosh, the better part of five years. And, you know, I don’t know what happened. They just stopped calling. And I heard from one of the folks there that some of my comments were not well received by their advertisers. I don’t know if it was Big Tech. But I’m happy to be here with you now. I still really like the folks at CNBC, and I still watch it. But yeah, I’m no longer on CNBC.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s why independent media is so important. Let me ask you about Donald Trump announcing and then reversing his decision to ban the Chinese-owned video-sharing platform TikTok, after Microsoft said it’s in talks to acquire U.S. operations for the extremely popular app. He’s also saying the U.S. Treasury would have to benefit. Can you explain all of this?
SCOTT GALLOWAY: I don’t think anyone can explain it. So, first off, let me acknowledge there are legitimate concerns around a company that is, if not controlled, is influenced by the Chinese government in terms of access to data around behavioral and location data around American consumers. I think those are legitimate concerns. The issue is what is the right remedy.
And what’s unprecedented is what the president is proposing, is that he directly gets involved and threatens to ban the company unless it sells to not only an American company, but he’s already decided which company it should be sold to, and that he should get a commission. We’ve just never seen anything like this.
And you can imagine, this goes very strange places, where, say, for example, the Indonesian government might decide to threaten to ban Facebook, its second-largest market by users, unless they sell to an Indonesian social media firm. This just isn’t — the definition of socialism is the means of production are controlled by the state, and the yield is divided up by the state. And this feels very socialist, when a president starts playing CEO with bigger chess pieces and calling Microsoft and saying, “You should buy this company,” and then blessing it, and then asking for a commission.
People would argue that — whether you believe that our tax policy is accurate or not, people would argue that that’s just not — that’s not how CEOs behave. We’ve never seen anything like it. It’s unlikely that it’s legal to do this. But I think it has a lot of people flummoxed as to what is the role of a president. And we’ve never seen a president weigh in and start basically acting like a real estate broker across foreign and local organizations. It’s just unprecedented. It’s hard to even envision where this goes from here.
AMY GOODMAN: A lot has been made about President Trump going after China; this is his way of getting at them. But maybe it’s just going after Sarah Cooper. He doesn’t like to see a woman of color impersonating him, right? The star of TikTok right now.
SCOTT GALLOWAY: Yeah, it appears that he does have some personal animus. And he has a track record of making decisions based on his own personal biases. But this is — not only that, a lot of people thought that TikTok was the platform that people used to reserve tickets for his rally that didn’t get the attendance they were hoping for.
You know, this is a powerful company. It’s growing fast. And to be fair, China has let many of our Big Tech companies in, just long enough to steal the IP and then kick them out. But this is unprecedented. You could see much different remedies. Even if they were worried about the data, you could imagine them forcing the company maybe to go public on a U.S. exchange, have all the servers located domestically, ensure that security agencies and the SEC felt that the company wasn’t funneling data back to mainland China.
But this feels like — this feels, again, very mob boss-like. But there’s no doubt about it: It does feel as if there’s something around this is personal. We saw the same thing when the president encouraged the DOJ to block AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner, which included CNN. So this feels like it’s governance by id, as opposed to any strategy or consistency or the law as a guide.
AMY GOODMAN: We only have 20 seconds, Professor Galloway, but you’ve talked about Amazon starting to get into health insurance.
SCOTT GALLOWAY: Yeah, or healthcare more broadly. I believe that Amazon will be the largest or the fastest-growing healthcare company in the world within two or three years. Jeff Bezos has famously said, “Your margin is my opportunity.” The largest-margin, largest-dollar business — it’s grown prices faster than any sector in the world — is U.S. healthcare. Amazon has a direct pipeline into every home. They have great actuarial data. They know your body mass index. They know how healthy or unhealthy you are. And they have the capital to go into this field. I think Amazon, in the next few years, is the fastest-growing healthcare company in the world.
AMY GOODMAN: Scott Galloway, we want to thank you for being with us. We hope to have you back, professor of marketing at NYU Stern, author of The New York Times best-seller The Four and The Algebra of Happiness, host of The Prof G Show and co-host of the Pivot podcast.
That does it for our show. I’m Amy Goodman. Stay safe. Save lives. Wear a mask.


democracynow--2020-08-05--Journalist Rami Khouri: Beirut Explosion Follows Years of Lebanese Gov't Incompetence & Corruption

This is a rush transcript .
Copy may not be in its final form .
AMY GOODMAN : This is Democracy Now !
, The Quarantine Report .
I ’ m Amy Goodman , as we continue to look at the aftermath of this massive explosion at the port of Beirut in Lebanon that sent a devastating shockwave through the Lebanese capital Tuesday evening , leveling buildings , overturning cars , shattering windows miles from the blast site .
More than 100 people have been confirmed dead .
Hundreds are still missing .
Over 4,000 are injured .
At the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ facing an economic , political and public health crisis amidst the pandemic , exacerbated by U.S. sanctions imposed by the Trump administration .
At the White House , President Trump told reporters U.S. military generals believed the explosion was caused by a bomb .
AMY GOODMAN : “ They think it was ” —he ’ s referring to military generals .
Trump offering no evidence for his claim , which was not supported by intelligence agencies .
The Pentagon declined to comment and deferred all press questions to the White House .
After @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Pompeo called former Prime Minister Saad Hariri to offer assistance to the Lebanese people , not the current prime minister , Hassan Diab .
For more , we are joined by Rami Khouri , senior public policy fellow and journalist in residence at the American University of Beirut .
He ’ s a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative , columnist at The New Arab , joining us from Cambridge , Massachusetts .
Was just heading back to Lebanon .
Welcome to Democracy Now !
Again , Rami Khouri @ @ @ @ @ @ @ scale , like an earthquake .
Cyprus felt it , miles and miles away .
Can you talk about what you think happened ?
How is it possible that , what is it , 2,700 tons of ammonium nitrate—I mean , two tons took down the Oklahoma City building that killed close to 170 people .
This was 2,700 tons , being kept at the port ?
What do you know , Rami Khouri ?
RAMI KHOURI : Well , the information that has come out from the people who investigated it so @ @ @ @ @ @ @ also storing some fireworks and other materials nearby , and it was those materials that caught fire or ignited or something happened because of the heat and humidity , and created a little fire .
The fire department was there to put it out , and then that fire ignited the ammonium nitrate .
But the real story is not just the 3.5 magnitude Richter scale measurement .
It ’ s the 9.0 magnitude political scale measurement that this is going to unleash .
Because looking backwards and looking forwards , this explosion @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , corruption , lassitude , amateurism and uncaring attitude by successive Lebanese governments , going back ten , 15 years that has brought the Lebanese people to a point of pauperization and desperation .
They don ’ t have enough water .
They don ’ t have electricity .
They don ’ t have jobs .
They don ’ t have reasonably priced food .
Education is declining .
Every dimension of life in Lebanon has declined , steadily , uninterruptedly , for the last 15 or 20 years .
It is the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this , and looking back and looking forward , because this amount of ammonium nitrate was allowed to be stored there , when people knew about it .
Other governments knew about it and did nothing about it .
And people were talking to judges to pass a ruling to get the stuff out of there , because it was dangerous .
And nobody did anything .
So therefore the political shocks , the aftershocks are really going to be , I think , the significant dimension of this , beyond the humanitarian @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with .
AMY GOODMAN : Talk about the politics in Lebanon , also the U.S. relationship .
As you have President Trump immediately calling this—he was holding a coronavirus press briefing and asked about Lebanon—said a bomb , an attack , he knew .
Military generals were not backing him up on this , though he said they were the ones who said it .
And then you have Pompeo , the secretary of state , calling not the current prime minister , but the previous prime minister .
RAMI KHOURI : Well @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ignorance of the American government being exhibited at the level of the highest political class in the White House and the State Department .
These people don ’ t care about Lebanon or the Arab world .
They don ’ t know anything about it .
They are basically following a rule book that is dictated by internal American politics linked heavily to fundamentalist Christian extremist skinheads who are very , very linked closely to Israeli settler colonialists .
And this is something that has been consistent for the last three and a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to be there .
They are campaigning against Iran and Hezbollah , and anything that happens in Lebanon that is bad , they ’ re going to link it to Hezbollah and Iran .
And so this is predictable .
It ’ s amateurish .
It falls into the realm of criminality and cruelty at the same time .
And amateurism .
So I would completely discard anything that Trump or Pompeo says about this .
And the fact that they called Hariri , not the prime minister or the president , is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ about humanitarian suffering .
300,000 people have lost their homes .
They don ’ t care about that .
All they want to do is talk to somebody in there who can link them , say , to the Saudis or the Emiratis or somebody who can help them push against Hezbollah and Iran .
And the terrible irony is that this policy has only strengthened Hezbollah and Iran over the years , and the Lebanese people are not focused on that .
They are focused on recreating a legitimate , credible , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ its own citizens as human beings and not as animals .
And this is not just Lebanon , by the way .
Iraq , Palestine , Algeria , Sudan , other Arab countries , Egypt—the ordinary people feel that their government treats them like animals , without rights , without feelings , without voice .
And the Lebanese and others are out in the streets , demonstrating now for several years .
Actually since 2010 , there has been nonstop public demonstrations all across the Arab world .
There ’ s more happening @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
So this is part of a regional reality , which is the pauperization and dehumanization of the Arab citizenry by an increasingly militarized state .
And if you just look at—any time you see pictures of officials , they ’ re surrounded by soldiers and troops .
So the Lebanese people are trying to peacefully demonstrate to re-legitimize their own government system to address the issues they have .
And Trump and Pompeo are adding to the misery and the complexities and the complications of these systems .
So I would not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
AMY GOODMAN : What was also raised yesterday is at the end of the week on Friday , the Special Tribunal in Lebanon is due to deliver its verdict on the 2005 assassination of the former prime minister , Rafic Hariri , the father of the former prime minister , more recent prime minister , Saad Hariri , and 21 others .
The four defendants , it is alleged having ties to Hezbollah .
Do you see any links here which is perhaps what Trump was somehow referring to in this comment @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from U.S. intelligence ?
RAMI KHOURI : I don ’ t see any link whatsoever , except in the mind of people like Trump , who are desperate to find any reason to push their right-wing Christian fundamentalist pro-Zionist settler colonial agenda and pin anything bad on Hezbollah or Iran or their supporters in the region .
There ’ s absolutely no evidence .
And even his own generals came out and said , “ Look , we don ’ t see any evidence.
” So like I said , don ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or Pompeo say about the Middle East .
It is amateurish , it is based on ignorance , it is ideologically driven .
It is emotional nonsense .
AMY GOODMAN : Can you talk about U.S. sanctions , newly imposed , targeting the Syrian government also undermining Hezbollah in Lebanon ?
RAMI KHOURI : Well , this is part of a legacy that goes back several decades , that the U.S. keeps either attacking or threatening to attack or sanctioning Arab governments or Arab organizations like Hezbollah or Hamas or others that they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ irony is that this has been a failed policy .
If you go back the last 20 years , if you track the American policy of taking measures to pressure Iran , whether in Lebanon or Yemen or any other country where they are trying to pressure Iran directly or indirectly , and you track against that the extensive and expanding links of the Iranian government with governments and individuals around the Middle East , you will find that the American pressure has only led to more complications in the region that have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Iranians to step in , or increasingly the Chinese and the Russians to step in or the Turks to step in .
So this idea that more sanctions are going to bring about any results is sophomoric , childish .
AMY GOODMAN : Can you talk about what kind of investigation you think will be done ?
The Lebanese government said they will conduct an investigation .
People are calling for an independent , international investigation , not trusting the government .
And what you think—how this could be conducted .
RAMI KHOURI @ @ @ @ @ @ @ now .
The Lebanese people , broadly speaking , don ’ t trust their government anymore , because they ’ ve seen the consequences of their government ’ s actions over the last 10 , 15 , 20 years .
And respectable people , academics , civil society activists , whatever , have spoken out in the last 24 hours , saying , “ We need an international investigation .
We can not leave this in the hands of the Lebanese government.
” Some members of Parliament have already said they are going @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not only an international investigation , but immediately to detain the port officials and other officials who knew about this , detain them preemptively and then give them a fair trial when the investigation is done .
But this is really the critical point now .
The transition from the humanitarian catastrophe of the explosion , which we have to deal with for the next two , three , four weeks , until things stabilize—the transition from that to a political reconfiguration of the Lebanese political system .
That ’ s the real @ @ @ @ @ @ @ see it in people saying , for instance , Lebanese saying , “ Don ’ t give aid money to the government .
They will steal it .
They have stolen everything else .
They ’ re going to steal the aid money .
Give aid money to the Lebanese Red Cross , to NGOs , to hospitals .
But don ’ t give it to the Lebanese government.
” This is an important point because the ability of the Lebanese government , like all the Arab governments in the last 20 years @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of autocratic authoritarian militarized policymaking that has led to the pauperization of a majority of Arabs .
Around 70 % of Arabs are poor or vulnerable now .
And that is quickly increasing with COVID-19 and other things like this bombing .
The ability of Arab governments to maintain these cruel policies is very much linked to the support they get from international parties including the Americans , the French , the British , the Russians .
Everybody .
There ’ s nobody that comes out of this modern legacy of Arab state @ @ @ @ @ @ @ French president is supposed to go to Lebanon today .
People are very much anxious to hear what he says .
And if he just comes and meets with the Lebanese government and makes happy statements about “ we will always support you , ” people are going to jeer at him and tell him to go home .
AMY GOODMAN : Very quickly , Rami Khouri , just last week , Save the Children reported half a million children are hungry in Beirut .
And you have Beirut importing 80 % of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has now been completely leveled .
So in this last 30 seconds , what you see needs to happen immediately for this humanitarian catastrophe ?
RAMI KHOURI : There needs to be massive coordinated international , Arab and internal Lebanese support to non-governmental organizations .
And the Lebanese government should be told to just watch how you do this properly , and let the people of Lebanon and their many , many civil society groups and humanitarian groups get the job done .
The humanitarian need is urgent .
There ’ s 300,000 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Their homes were bombed out .
So water , food , energy .
People get electricity two or three hours a day .
This is going to be terrible for the next month until new materials come to replace what was destroyed at the port—wheat , foodstuffs , medicines , oil , things like that .
So that ’ s really what needs to be done .
Let the Lebanese people carry out the job of addressing their needs , and this is an opportunity to show how it can be done @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
And this is what many Lebanese are calling for .
AMY GOODMAN : Rami Khouri , we want to thank you for being with us .
Senior public policy fellow , journalist in residence , at American University of Beirut .
Also senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School ’ s Middle East Initiative and a columnist at The New Arab .
When we come back , this moment of the big tech CEOs , the big four , testifying before Congress .
Stay with us .

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! The Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue to look at the aftermath of this massive explosion at the Port of Beirut in Lebanon that sent a devastating shock wave through the Lebanese capital Tuesday evening, leveling buildings, overturning cars, shattering windows miles from the blast site. More than 100 people have been confirmed dead. Hundreds are still missing. Over 4,000 are injured.
At the time of the blast, Lebanon already facing an economic, political and public health crisis amidst the pandemic, exacerbated by U.S. sanctions imposed by the Trump administration. At the White House, President Trump told reporters U.S. military generals believed the explosion was caused by a bomb.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It would seem like it, based on the explosion. I met with some of our great generals, and they just seem to feel that it was. This was not a — some kind of a manufacturing explosion type of event. This was a — seems to be, according to them — they would know better than I would, but they seem to think it was an attack. It was a bomb of some kind.
AMY GOODMAN: “They think it was” — he’s referring to military generals. Trump offering no evidence for his claim, which was not supported by intelligence agencies. The Pentagon declined to comment, and referred all press questions to the White House. After the explosion, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called former Prime Minister Saad Hariri to offer assistance to the Lebanese people, not the current prime minister, Hassan Diab.
For more, we’re joined by Rami Khouri, senior public policy fellow and journalist-in-residence at the American University of Beirut. He’s a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative, columnist at The New Arab, joining us from Cambridge, Massachusetts, was just heading back to Lebanon.
Welcome to Democracy Now! again, Rami Khouri. So, it’s this — I mean, this registered 3.5 on the Richter scale, like an earthquake. Cyprus felt it, miles and miles away. Can you talk about what you think happened? How is it possible that — what is it? — 2,700 tons of ammonium nitrate — I mean, two tons took down the Oklahoma City building that killed close to 170 people. This was 2,700 tons, being kept at the port? What do you know, Rami Khouri?
RAMI KHOURI: Well, the information that’s come out from the people who investigated it so far is that the storage shed was also storing some fireworks and other materials nearby, and it was those materials that caught fire or ignited, or something happened because of the heat and humidity, and created a little fire. The fire department was there to put it out. And then that fire ignited the ammonium nitrate.
But the real story is not just the 3.5 magnitude Richter scale measurement. It’s the 9.0 magnitude political scale measurement that this is going to unleash, because looking backwards and looking forwards, this explosion is a consequence of the cumulative incompetence, corruption, lassitude, amateurism and uncaring attitude by successive Lebanese governments, going back 10, 15 years, that has brought the Lebanese people to a point of pauperization and desperation. They don’t have enough water. They don’t have electricity. They don’t have jobs. They don’t have reasonably priced food. Education is declining. Every dimension of life in Lebanon has declined, steadily, uninterruptedly, for the last 15, 20 years.
And it’s the ruling political elite that is responsible for this. And that’s — looking back and looking forward, because this amount of ammonium nitrate was allowed to be stored there, when people knew about it — other governments knew about it and did nothing about it. And people were talking to judges to pass a ruling to get the stuff out of there, because it’s dangerous, and nobody did anything. So, therefore, the political shocks, the aftershocks, are really going to be, I think, the significant dimension of this, beyond the humanitarian suffering that we’re now seeing dealt with.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, talk about the politics in Lebanon, also the U.S. relationship, as you have President Trump immediately calling this — he was holding a coronavirus press briefing and, asked about Lebanon, said a bomb, an attack, he knew. Military generals were not backing him up on this, though he said they were the ones who said it. And then you have Pompeo, the secretary of state, calling not the current prime minister, but the previous prime minister.
RAMI KHOURI: Well, this is the ideological amateurism and ignorance of the American government being exhibited at the level of the highest political class in the White House and in the State Department. These people don’t care about Lebanon or the Arab world. They don’t know anything about it. They’re basically following a rule book that is dictated by internal American politics linked heavily to fundamentalist Christian extremist skinheads who are very, very linked close to Israeli settler colonialists. And this is something that’s been consistent for the last three-and-a-half years, and it will continue to be there.
They’re campaigning against Iran and Hezbollah. And anything that happens in Lebanon that’s bad, they’re going to link it to Hezbollah and Iran. And so, this is predictable. It’s amateurish. It falls into the realm of criminality and cruelty at the same time, and amateurism. So I would completely discard anything that Trump or Pompeo says about this.
And the fact that they called Hariri, not the prime minister or the president, is fascinating, because they don’t care about humanitarian suffering. Three hundred thousand people have lost their homes. They don’t care about that. All they want to do is talk to somebody in there who can link them, say, to the Saudis or the Emiratis, or somebody who can help them push against Hezbollah and Iran.
And the terrible irony is that this policy has only strengthened Hezbollah and Iran over the years. And the Lebanese people are not focused on that. They’re focused on recreating a legitimate, credible, effective and humanistic government system that treats its own citizens as human beings and not as animals. The Lebanese people feel — and this is not just Lebanon, by the way. Iraq, Palestine, Algeria, Sudan, other Arab countries, Egypt — the ordinary people feel that their government treats them like animals, without rights, without feelings, without voice. And the Lebanese and others are out in the streets, demonstrating now for several years. Actually, since 2010, there’s been nonstop public demonstrations all across the Arab world. There’s more happening in Jordan now, for different reasons.
So, this is part of a regional reality, which is the pauperization and dehumanization of the Arab citizenry by an increasingly militarized state. And if you see this, if you just look at — any time you see pictures of officials, they’re surrounded by soldiers and troops. So, the Lebanese people are trying to peacefully demonstrate to relegitimize their own government system to address the issues they have. And Pompeo and Trump are adding to the misery and the complexities and the complications of these systems, and so I would not pay any attention to Trump or Pompeo.
AMY GOODMAN: What was also raised yesterday is, at the end of the week, on Friday, the Special Tribunal for Lebanon is due to deliver its verdict on the 2005 assassination of the former prime minister, Rafic Hariri, the father of the former prime minister, more recent prime minister, Saad Hariri, and 21 others — the four defendants, it is alleged, having ties to Hezbollah. Do you see any links here which would — which is perhaps what Trump was somehow referring to in this comment that didn’t have much backing from U.S. intelligence?
RAMI KHOURI: I don’t see any link whatsoever, except in the mind of people like Trump, who are desperate to find any reason to push their right-wing, Christian fundamentalist, pro-Zionist, settler-colonial agenda and pin anything bad on Hezbollah or Iran or their supporters in the region. There’s absolutely no evidence. And even his own generals came out and said, “Look, we don’t see any evidence.” So, like I said, don’t pay any attention to anything Donald Trump or Pompeo say about the Middle East. It is amateurish. It is based on ignorance. It is ideologically driven. It is emotional nonsense.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about U.S. sanctions, newly imposed, targeting the Syrian government, also undermining Hezbollah in Lebanon?
RAMI KHOURI: Well, this is part of a legacy that goes back several decades, that the U.S. keeps either attacking or threatening to attack or sanctioning Arab governments or Arab organizations, like Hezbollah or Hamas or others, that they don’t like. And the terrible irony is that this has been a failed policy. If you go back over the last 20 years, if you track the American policy of taking measures to pressure Iran, whether in Lebanon or in Yemen or any other country, where they’re trying to pressure Iran, directly or indirectly, and you track against that the extensive and expanding links of the Iranian government with governments and individuals around the Middle East, you’ll find that the American pressure has only led to more complications in the region that have opened opportunities, vacuums, for the Iranians to step in, or, increasingly, the Chinese and the Russians to step in or the Turks to step in. So, this idea that more sanctions are going to bring about any results is sophomoric. It’s childish. But this is —
AMY GOODMAN: So, can you talk about what kind of investigation you think will be done? The Lebanese government said they’ll conduct an investigation. People are calling for an independent, international investigation, not trusting the government. And what you think, how this could be conducted?
RAMI KHOURI: Absolutely. This is really central now. The Lebanese people, broadly speaking, don’t trust their government anymore, because they’ve seen the consequences of their government’s actions over the last 10, 15, 20 years. And respectable people — academics, civil society activists, whatever — have spoken out in the last 24 hours, saying, “We need an international investigation. We cannot leave this in the hands of the Lebanese government.” Some members of Parliament have already said they’re going to resign. And people are asking for not only an international investigation, but immediately to detain the port officials and other officials who knew about this — detain them preemptively and then give them a fair trial when the investigation is done.
But this is really the critical point now. The transition from the humanitarian catastrophe of the explosion, which we have to deal with for the next two, three, four weeks, until things stabilize — the transition from that to a political reconfiguration of the Lebanese political system, that’s the real aftermath of this explosion. And you see it in people saying — for instance, Lebanese saying, “Don’t give aid money to the government. They’ll steal it. They’ve stolen everything else. They’re going to steal the aid money. Give aid money to the Lebanese Red Cross, to NGOs, to hospitals. But don’t give it to the Lebanese government.”
So, this is an important point, because the ability of the Lebanese government, like all the Arab governments in the last 20 years or so, to continue a policy of autocratic, authoritarian, militarized policymaking, that has led to the pauperization of a majority of Arabs — around 70% of Arabs are poor or vulnerable now. And that is quickly increasing with the COVID-19 and other things, like this bombing. The ability of Arab governments to maintain these cruel policies is very much linked to the support they get from international parties, including the Americans, the French, the British, the Russians — everybody. There’s nobody that comes out of this modern legacy of Arab state failures — nobody comes out looking good.
The French president is supposed to go to Lebanon today. People are very much anxious to hear what he says. And if he just comes and meets with the Lebanese government and makes happy statements about “we will always support you,” people are going to jeer at him and tell him to go home. So, this is a —
AMY GOODMAN: Very quickly, Rami Khouri, just last week, Save the Children reported half a million children are hungry in Beirut. And you have Beirut importing 80% of its food. And now the port has now been completely leveled. So, in this last 30 seconds, what you see needs to happen immediately for this humanitarian catastrophe?
RAMI KHOURI: There needs to be massive, coordinated, international, Arab and internal Lebanese support to nongovernmental organizations. And the Lebanese government should be told to just watch how you do this properly, and let the people of Lebanon and their many, many civil society groups and humanitarian groups get the job done.
The humanitarian need is urgent. There’s 300,000 people who have apparently lost their homes. Their homes were bombed out. So, water, food, energy — people get electricity two or three hours a day. This is going to be terrible for the next month, until new materials come in to replace what was destroyed at the port — wheat, foodstuffs, medicines, oil, things like that. So, that’s really what needs to be done. Let the Lebanese people carry out the job of addressing their needs. And this is an opportunity to show how it can be done by sidelining the Lebanese government, as well. And this is what many Lebanese are calling for.
AMY GOODMAN: Rami Khouri, we want to thank you for being with us, senior public policy fellow, journalist-in-residence at American University of Beirut, also senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative and a columnist at The New Arab.
When we come back, this moment of the Big Tech CEOs, the Big Four, testifying before Congress. Stay with us.