In this episode of By Any Means Necessary, hosts Sean Blackmon and Jacquie Luqman are joined by Dr. Margaret Flowers, Co-Founder of Popular Resistance and Director of the Health Over Profit for Everyone Campaign, to talk about the news that Trump wants the US economy to return normalcy within a couple of weeks despite COVID-19 cases continuing to increase exponentially, why such an action is sure to expose the most vulnerable in our society to the virus, why a socialized medical system and centralized distribution of resources are so crucial to effectively managing an outbreak, and how Trump's steady stream of misinformation regarding the virus seems to have claimed a victim already.
In the second segment, Sean and Jacquie are joined by Morris Mock, an organizer, and worker at a Nissan auto plant in Canton, Mississippi, to talk about how worker succeeded in getting management to shut down operations over COVID-19 concerns, why this moment presents certain opportunities in the ongoing struggles to organize workers in Mississippi under hostile political conditions, and what the future of labor organizing looks like in the new Coronavirus era and beyond.
In the third segment, Sean and Jacquie are joined by Gilbert Mercier, Editor in Chief of News Junkie Post and the author of "The Orwellian Empire," to talk about how France's neoliberal "reforms" have slowly carved out the French healthcare system, why the government's failure to respond to initial warnings of the COVID-19 threat by the Chinese government left them so vulnerable to the Coronavirus, and how French President Macron is now using the prior failure to respond to justify a draconian curtailing of civil liberties and a national crackdown on the Yellow Vests.
Later in the show, Sean and Jacquie are joined by Maurice Cook, Adjunct Faculty Professor at the University of the District of Columbia and founder of Serve Your City, to talk about the work being done in DC by mutual aid groups, how the crisis is highlighting the DC city government's consistent disregard for those most vulnerable to the impacts of the outbreak, why the overwhelming lack of preparedness is so alarming that doctors in the city are feeling compelled to reach out to mutual aid groups to denounce it, why many of our elected leaders seem poised to use their lackluster response to the virus to later justify a police crackdown on civil liberties here and how mutual aid groups might navigate such an outcome, how the business interests deeply embedded in both political parties prevent us from enacting the kind of centralized socialist policies which China has successfully used to address the pandemic, and why this historic moment gives us a unique opportunity to assess the merits of different political states and decide how to move forward as a collective.
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