In this episode of By Any Means Necessary, hosts Sean Blackmon and Jacquie Luqman are joined by Dr. Richard Wolff, Economist and Professor at the New School University and author of the new book “Understanding Marxism,” to talk about why this morning's announcement that the Fed will backstop all US credit markets by guaranteeing to purchase as many US Treasury and mortgage-backed securities as necessary demonstrates the ruling class' main priority yet again is bailing out themselves, the unsurprising news that lobbyists are shaping the trillion-dollar Coronavirus stimulus bill to their industries' advantage, whether the universal basic incomes promised is essentially window dressing to ensure the passage of another corporate bailout, and what the inability of our business elites to make any gesture towards solidarity (like Jack Ma is doing) reflects about the mindset of the US ruling class.
In the second segment, Sean and Jacquie are joined by Douglass Kauffman, a hospital worker at Keck Medical Center in Los Angeles and shop steward for National Union of Healthcare Workers, to talk about how we ended up so under-prepared for the imminent expansion of the COVID-19 outbreak, why the for-profit nature of the healthcare industry means the system is by design unsuited to mobilizing against a large-scale viral outbreak like the one we're facing, and how the lack of testing capability is creating a vicious cycle in which the bottleneck of healthcare workers unable to return to work after being exposed further erodes our healthcare capabilities.
In the third segment, Sean and Jacquie are joined by Frank Lara, Executive Board member of the United Educators of San Francisco, an active member of US Labor Against the War to talk about how the near-complete shutdown of schools nation-wide is affecting students, educators, and their families, the many underlying social issues now making school closures so difficult to handle for teachers, and why the pandemic is making the need for workers to stand together more clear than at any point in recent history.
Later in the show, Sean and Jacquie are joined by Mondale Robinson, founder of the Black Male Voter Project, to talk about Joe Biden's lackluster address on the Coronavirus crisis after an apparent hiatus from the campaign trail, why the federal government's refusal to collaborate with the Cuban healthcare system could jeopardize lives in the US, whether President Trump is likely to use the chaos surrounding the crisis to further expand executive powers—and whether the political establishment will use it to help the ruling class further consolidate wealth, why it's so crucial to use the events unfolding around us to continue the broader project of political education, and where to find reliable information in a thoroughly politicized media landscape where so many treat inconvenient facts as 'fake news.'
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