Critical Hour Discussion on Economic Path of Recovery and Whether to Vote for Biden (5/1/2020)

Trump Officials Plan Revenge Against China, Despite COVID-19's Natural Origin

"Senior officials across multiple government agencies are expected to meet Thursday to begin mapping out a strategy for seeking retaliatory measures against China," the Washington Post reported Thursday. "Officials in American intelligence agencies are also involved in the effort." Last week, we discussed the fact that some states have filed or are filing civil law suits in US courts for damages against China. Now the administration is trying to map out a plan.

"The city of New York delivered a freezer truck to a funeral home on Wednesday after it was found to be storing dead bodies in unrefrigerated U-Haul vehicles," Reuters reported Wednesday, citing an eyewitness. "ABC News reported about 100 bodies were stored in the vehicles after the owner of the Andrew T. Cleckley Funeral Services funeral home said the freezer that normally stores bodies stopped working. ... It was not clear how long the bodies had been stored in the U-Hauls or whether any were COVID-19 victims. The bodies were found after neighbors reported an odor coming from the trucks, New York media reported." This highlights some of the challenges that funeral homes are experiencing during the pandemic.

In economist Jack Rasmus' new piece on his website and in CounterPunch, titled "The Myth of the V-Shaped US Economic Recovery," he writes, "The spin is in! Trump administration economic ‘message bearers,’ Steve Mnuchin, US Treasury Secretary, and Kevin Hasset, senior economic adviser to Trump, this past Sunday on the Washington TV talking heads circuit launched a coordinated effort to calm the growing public concern that the current economic contraction may be as bad (or worse) than the Great Depression of the 1930s." How accurate is it?

Jim Kavanagh's latest piece in CounterPunch is entitled, "Joe or No?" In it, he writes, "Here we go again. Now that Bernie Sanders has completed his predictable circuit of loss and capitulation, leftists — those who stand for socialist and anti-imperialist, or even serious social-democratic and antiwar, politics — again confront the quadrennial quandary: Must one vote for the thoroughly neoliberal and imperialist Democratic presidential nominee?" What's going on here?

GUESTS:
Caleb Maupin — Journalist and political analyst who focuses his coverage on US foreign policy and the global system of monopoly capitalism and imperialism.
R. Bowman Horton — Owner of Horton Funeral Home Services.
Jim Kavanagh — Political analyst and commentator and editor of The Polemicist.
Dr. Jack Rasmus — Professor of economics and politics at St. Mary’s College in California and the author of the new book "The Scourge of Neoliberalism: US Economic Policy from Reagan to Trump."

[My segment begins at 32:20]
Listen to "Trump Officials Plan Revenge Against China, Despite COVID-19's Natural Origin" on Spreaker.

The Critical Hour is a daily 60-minute news analysis and talk radio program on Radio Sputnik hosted by Dr. Wilmer Leon. Introduction above is theirs, with related articles of mine referenced in brackets.