https://vimeo.com/437348112 The climate emergency and the pandemic require us to build a broad popular front that fights for democratization and public ownership in critical areas like health care, fossil fuels, finance, and arms production. Paul Jay is a guest on 'Economics and Beyond' hosted by Rob Johnson of INET. Rob JohnsonWelcome to Economics and Beyond. I'm Rob Johnson, President of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. I'm here today with Paul Jay who is the founder of theAnalysis.news. He's a filmmaker currently working on a project with Daniel Ellsberg in his book The Doomsday Machine, and he was the founder of The Real News Network. Paul has been an acquaintance of mine for many, many years. Has a very, very best sensibility, awareness, lateral pattern recognition skills that are outstanding, and I thought it would be important to share with our audience how Paul sees the current situation. Paul, thanks for joining me today. Paul JayThank you, Rob. And I thank you for that. I don't even think I can pronounce the skillset that you just mentioned, so I'm not so sure I have it. Rob JohnsonI've always known you to be someone who can integrate. You speak to economists and political scientists and historians and security analysts, and you seem to weave them all into a continuum. So that's what I'm celebrating here at the outset. We'll just have to prove the point on the flight. Anyway, here we are near the end of June 2020. The pandemic is unmasking a whole lot of things. We're in a presidential election year, the death of Geroge Floyd and "I can't breathe" and all kinds of tensions have led to a lot of activity in the streets. And it seems as if, if you will, what you might call intimidation or grounding of some kind of conventional wisdom has just broken loose. So I'm curious, what do you see? What do you see that you find haunting or daunting? What would you like to see? And where do you see light at the end of the tunnel? Paul JayWell, I'll save light at the end of the tunnel until the end. And I hope I don't get too pessimistic as we get there. On a webinar you did recently with Jesse Eisinger of Pro Publica, you asked a question I found quite interesting, and I wanted to answer. You asked, how do people regain any, I don't know if the word was respect or belief, in the role of government and capitalism? And my answer, I guess, is they don't. I think we've reached a moment in history. Actually, let me back up from saying they don't. I'm saying they shouldn't. Because the role of government now, not the government as we would like to see it, and the role of capitalism now, I think has reached the end of the road. Now the end of the road could take decades. The problem is we don't have decades. The climate crisis has created a kind of urgency that's unlike any other time in history. There's never been a time where you could say, there's simply no possibility for incremental, slow evolutionary change. In fact, you know, history has been on the whole, that kind of evolutionary change, giving rise to revolutionary changes, some of which have kind of worked and some have not. But on the whole, in human history, there's a chance to play things out. We're at a moment where there's no time to play things out. The leading climate scientists in Australia just a few weeks ago, I think was quoted as saying, that the path we're on is leading us to the end of human society as we know it. That's the dissolution of human society. And we're talking a timeframe of a matter of a decade, by 2030. The window is kind of closing. Most of the climate scientists are saying we already are going to pass 1.5 degrees,
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