Paul Jay talks about TRNN’s approach to covering the furor surrounding Trump and the need to focus on parasitical finance and existential threats

Story Transcript

PAUL JAY: Hi everybody. It’s Paul Jay from the Real News Network. We’re in the midst of our spring fundraising campaign. For every buck you give, we’ll be given another buck by the Quitiplas Foundation that will take us to $200,000 which will certainly help us as we head into the summer. If you want to see more of the kind of news that Real News does, then we need to you to help. We are building up our climate change bureau, even already increasing our climate crisis coverage. I had a great note from a viewer who told me to stop saying climate change, and start staying climate crisis, and I think he’s right, so that’s what we’re going to start calling it now, the climate crisis, not just climate change. There are structural changes taking place, systemic changes, and in my mind it all has to do with the great increase in power of Wall Street, or parasitical finance and the power that financial sector wields over politics, it’s no surprise that of the top 10 donors, funders, political contributors to the Clinton and the Trump campaigns, the vast majority of those 10 were hedge fund people or gamblers one way or the other, if you throw in Sheldon Adelson. This is what Real News is about. Real News is about digging into where real power is, how the billionaire class and the financial elites in particular wield that power. The surface coverage of who did what to whom, it’s all very interesting and of course I follow it myself, you know, the Comey affair and the Comey lie about this or lie about that and all of that. It’s all fascinating, but it’s not what the real problem is. The real problem is we’re in a very decayed state of the American empire, of this stage of capitalism, and this decay is very dangerous and people need to be aware of how dangerous and of course paramount in that is the climate change crisis which is an existential threat. This is where we’re preoccupied. This is the kind of news we want to do, but we can’t do it without you because this ain’t market driven news. This is not the kind of news that attracts advertisers, and of course, we wouldn’t take them anyway, but honestly it doesn’t attract a lot of big funders either. Funders, especially at this time, liberal funders and such that usually fund independent media, they want to fund something in some way associated with the Democratic party, because they see that as the only real opposition to dethroning Trump, and of course there’s some truth to that. But when we report on the Democratic party, we’re interested in the struggle within the Democratic party, the movement that was behind Sanders and whether it’s with Sanders or someone else, but that insurgency in the Democratic party was against the oligarchy to use Sanders’ language. The fight against the oligarchy takes place on many fronts, and that’s the story we want to cover but can’t do without you because nobody from the oligarchy’s all that interested in what we’re doing. If you can, please hit the donate button and we hope you will watch. We hope you will share the stories. We hope you donate and we hope you send any comments and questions or suggestions to contact@therealnews.com, and pretty soon we’re going to do some live hits, some live interaction. People can talk what they like about the Real News, what they don’t like, and I’ll try to answer questions, and we may bring some of our favorite guests on for live hits back and forth as well, so maybe you let us know if that’s something you would appreciate. Thanks for joining on the Real News Network.