Is Sanders The President We Need In a Covid-19 World?

In the face of the Coronavirus/Covid-19 pandemic, the US’s extreme wealth inequality, lack of nationalized health care system, lack of a federal paid sick leave law, and other related issues have shown the nation’s severe vulnerability.

In a New York Times article, Farhad Manjoo wrote, “Everyone’s a socialist in a pandemic. But the laugh catches in your throat because the only joke here is the sick one American society plays on workers every day.”

In this dangerous new world, we just happen to be in the middle of a critical primary election where one of the two front runners is a self-described democratic socialist who has been touting Medicare-for-All as the central plank of his domestic policy.

Sonali Kolhatkar asks Richard Wolff— professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst— Is Bernie Sanders the President we need in a pandemic like this?

Wolff is an author of a number of books including Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism, Occupy the Economy: Challenging Capitalism, Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA, and Capitalism’s Crisis Deepens: Essays on the Global Economic Meltdown.

His latest book is called Understanding Marxism.