https://vimeo.com/427252731

In the streets and at the ballot box, we must fight for: No return to work until it's safe and with full economic support; community control of the police; and publicly-owned banking and enterprises that create jobs and put the public interest first. - Paul Jay on the Law and Disorder Radio Show 

Rush Transcript

Michael Smith

This is Law and Disorder. Police murder of George Floyd triggered a nationwide popular explosion, the likes of which the ruling elites of America have never endured since the founding of the USA as a settler-colonial state.

244 years ago, the rebellion against police violence comes in the context of 40 million people being unemployed and a pandemic which has sickened a million and a half people, killing over 100000 of them. The plague has brought about a depression in the economy, which will go on for many years, leaving people unemployed, uninsured, hungry and homeless. As always, the most advanced sector of the population in the USA is the African-American population. But there has been an unprecedented amount of solidarity expressed between Americans of all races and ages.

Although we do not yet have a leadership with sufficient clarity, organization and strength, we must view the development of the rebellion as a process. Will demand for community control of the police unfold more generally and to demand for a more just society with the democratic control of the economy. That, of course, is the big question. We are joined today by Paul Jay. The founder and editor of theAnalysis.news. He's a journalist, filmmaker and the founder of Real News.

He is currently working with Daniel Ellsberg on a documentary series based on Ellsberg, his book, The Doomsday Machine Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. We will discuss the kind of movement that is needed to reverse the nuclear arms race, as well as bring about the democratic organization of our society and economy.

Welcome to Law and Disorder.

Paul Jay

Thank you, Michael. 

Thanks for inviting me. 

Michael Smith

Paul, we're going to talk today about Trump's pulling out of the international treaties designed to limit the possibility of nuclear war and the one trillion dollars he and Obama before him plan to spend over the next 30 years revamping America's nuclear arsenal. But before we get into this, let's talk about the rebellion that started last week. You covered the situation in Baltimore after the murder of Freddie Gray.

What do you make of what's going on nationwide now after the murder of George Floyd? 

Paul Jay

Well, I'm not in Baltimore now or in one of the cities that things are exploding.

I got I got away from New York because of the Corona virus, but I have a sense of what's going on because of having been in Baltimore through the whole Freddie Gray experience.

The thing that's being missed, I guess, in the way corporate media covers all of this is they they pay a bit of lip service to the issue of poverty and racism, but they don't ever ask why. Why is there chronic poverty in these cities? Why is there systemic racism? They'll even use those words these days. I saw Hillary Clinton, I think, actually use the word systemic racism, but it's a complete abstraction the way they talk about systemic racism, because systemic racism isn't some virus.

It's not a covert 19. Systemic racism is an outgrowth of a capitalism that developed out of a slave soci...