Rejuvenated Movement Provides Hope in The Face of Pandemic’s Spiritual Toll

In this episode of By Any Means Necessary, hosts Sean Blackmon and Jacquie Luqman are joined by Marc Steiner, Peabody Award-winning journalist and host of The Marc Steiner Show on The Real News Network to discuss the relatively small sums of money that the ultra-wealthy would have to pay to fund impactful services for working and poor people. The inability and outright refusal of the capitalist system to adequately tax the ultra-wealthy and provide for the needs of working and poor people, and the need for a movement of working and poor people to spur political action in the millionaires’ club that is Congress.

In the second segment, Sean and Jacquie are joined by Aisha Jumaan, Founder and President of Yemen Relief and Reconstruction Foundation to discuss the deadly escalation in the ongoing war on Yemen and the mainstream media’s overemphasis on Houthi and Yemeni resistance to Saudi bombing campigns and inattention to the US role in the war, the geopolitical and economic aspects of the war wrapped in the broader US campaign for dominance, the United Arab Emirates’ efforts to institute colonial-like measures on Yemen, Joe Biden’s failure to deliver on his campaign promise to end US involvement in the war, and the role the anti-war movement can play in forcing an end to US involvement in the war.

In the third segment, Sean and Jacquie are joined by technologist Chris Garaffa, the editor of TechforthePeople.org to discuss Crisis Text Line’s disturbing sharing of potentially extremely sensitive user data with its for-profit spin-off and its dubious claims of anonymization, the gross exploitation of data collected in emotionally intense moments for profit, the FBI’s recently uncovered purchased of the NSO Group’s Pegasus product and the wide-reaching international influence of the NSO Group, and the Elsevier scientific journal cracking down on the sharing of materials under the guise of protection from ransomware.

Later in the show, Sean and Jacquie are joined by Delonte Gholston, Pastor of Peace Fellowship Church in Washington, DC to discuss the psychological and spiritual toll of the COVID-19 pandemic on Black and brown communities who are often more exposed to the virus through work, how the pandemic exposed the broader spiritual and psychological toll that this system takes on working and poor people, the hope that the organizing and mutual aid networks that have grown during the pandemic provide in contrast to the bleakness of life in the pandemic, and the refusal of the Black misleadership class to speak truth to power and demand aid for working and poor Black people.