In this episode of By Any Means Necessary, hosts Sean Blackmon and Jacquie Luqman are joined by Greg Elich with the Solidarity Committee for Democracy and Peace in Korea to discuss half a million workers in South Korea participating in a general strike, the labor conditions, lack of protections, and lack of work in the country that precipitated the strike, and the dominance of neoliberal austerity in South Korea and the role the US has played and continues to play in the shaping of South Korean society.
In the second segment, Sean and Jacquie are joined by Libre X Sankara, poet, cultural worker,educator and organizer with the Troika Kollective to discuss rolling blackouts and power outages and protests in Puerto Rico against Luma Energy, the private company tasked with distributing electricity, Luma’s attempts to maximize its profit from the electric grid and outsource labor to maintain it despite its failures, the colonial history and conditions that have proceeded and contribute to the current situation, and how the unelected fiscal control board instituted in 2016 plays into the privatization of infrastructure in Puerto Rico and continues the colonial relationship the island has with the US.
In the third segment, Sean and Jacquie are joined by Nate Wallace, co-host of Red Spin Sports to discuss the 1994 documentary “Hoop Dreams,” which highlights the realities of youth basketball and its impacts on children attempting to play professionally, the auction-block dynamic on Black athletes that pervade professional sports and starts early in athletes’ careers, the commodification of education and its use a carrot to reward reliable athlete compliance, and Jon Gruden’s whitening of the Oakland Raiders and issues of race in the NFL.
Later in the show, Sean and Jacquie are joined by Eugene Puryear, host of the Punch Out podcast on Breakthrough News and author of the book Shackled and Chained: Mass Incarceration in Capitalist America to discuss the distortion of the conflict in Ethiopia by the corporate media and the Tigray Patriotic Liberation Front’s brutal collaborationist history, how the conflict plays into the US imperialist project in Africa, the liberal, identitarian, and individualist character of “lived experience” and its use to advance imperialist projects, and how HBCUs simultaneously uses student organizing to promote itself while cracking down on student activists.
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