On this episode of By Any Means Necessary, hosts Sean Blackmon and Jacquie Luqman are joined by Patrick Henningsen, writer, global affairs analyst, co-founder and executive editor of 21st Century Wire, to talk about the news that Chelsea Manning has been ordered free in the wake of her suicide attempt two days ago, whether the release represents real contrition by the prosecutors or merely an acknowledgment that their continued incarceration of Manning is causing more bad PR than it's worth, how all these developments tie into the ongoing attempts by the US government to extradite Wikileaks founder Julian Assange from the UK, and why the US government jailing Manning after her sentence was commuted indicates the Justice Department has limited confidence in their evidence against Julian Assange.
In the second segment, Jacquie and Sean are joined by Jim Kavanagh, a political analyst and contributor to Counterpunch and ThePolemicist.net, where you can read his piece “The Party’s Over: Bernie’s Last Dance With the Dems," to talk about the upcoming Democratic debate between Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, why Bernie Sanders has to go on the offensive and point out Biden's propensity to state mistruths if he wants to stay in the race, why the Coronavirus outbreak represents a golden opportunity for Sanders to point out the need for Medicare for All, why Sanders' reluctance to hit back at other Democrats may be one of his greatest weaknesses, why exhortations by establishment Democrats to maintain 'party unity' ring so hollow, and whether the momentum in the race could turn once more if Biden commits another of his signature gaffes in the debate, and why many media personalities are now using fear of the national Coronavirus crisis to call for the debate to scrapped altogether.
In the third segment, Sean and Jacquie are joined by Brian Becker, host of Loud and Clear with Brian Becker on Radio Sputnik and National Director for the ANSWER Coalition, to talk about the US airstrike in Iraq which Iraqi sources are saying killed multiple Iraqi soldiers and police, why mainstream media's framing of the strikes as "retaliatory" misportrays the situation, what Iraq was like before multiple US wars turned it into a sectarian wasteland, why the recent US offer of "humanitarian aid" to Iran is so cynical and disingenuous, how the ongoing sanctions on Iran mirror the State Department's treatment of Venezuela, why the US government's insistence on maintaining a military occupation of Iraq (despite the Iraqi Parliament's demand that they leave) reflects a growing fear of Iraqi cooperation with Russia and China, how references to a "shock and awe" strategy can ultimately be traced back to how slavemasters in the US responded to uprisings of enslaved Africans. and why international solidarity is so crucial to the struggle for global liberation.
Later in the show, Jacquie and Sean are joined by Natacia Knapper, an organizer with Stop Police Terror Project DC, to talk about Donald Trump's negligent response to the COVID-19 outbreak thus far, which local groups in DC are stepping in to fill in the glaring holes in the social welfare net exposed by the crisis, how school shutdowns are affecting the most impoverished, what steps she and other like-minded activists are taking to care for DC's most vulnerable populations as the government continues neglecting to do so, why it's so important to build highly-organized community networks to keep distributing supplies under increasingly stressful conditions, what to make of the huge contradiction between the popular American Exceptionalist imagining of the US and the harsh reality we now confront, whether this moment could ultimately represent a wake-up call for working people that we need a new socialist form of governance, what it means that dozens of Utah Jazz players were tested for Coronavirus while normal people struggle to get diagnosed, whether Trump's declaration that the Coronavirus Crisis is a national emergency signals that the federal government is finally taking the outbreak seriously, what to make of the new "Candyman" movie, and how a new generation of black directors and producers are upending pervasive racist tropes in cinema.
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