Biden Administration’s COVID-19 Response Exposes Deference to Capital

New Hope For Amazon Workers, Backdoor Medicare Privatization Scheme, 2021 In Tech

In this episode of By Any Means Necessary, hosts Sean Blackmon and Jacquie Luqman are joined by Chris Smalls, President of the Amazon Labor Union, founder of The Congress Of Essential Workers, and host of the podcast “It’s a Smalls World,” to discuss a recent settlement reached between the National Labor Relations Board and Amazon over its worker organization repression tactics, what this means for organizing drives in Bessemer and Staten Island, and recent deaths at Amazon warehouses all over the country and Amazon’s complicity in those deaths.

In the second segment, Sean and Jacquie are joined by Dr. Margaret Flowers, Co-Founder of Popular Resistance Director of the Health Over Profit for Everyone Campaign to discuss a backdoor scheme to privatize medicare through direct contract entities which increase the hold of private equity and private insurance firms on the program, how this program exposes the fundamental cruelty of the for-profit health care system, and how we can fight back against this privatization scheme.

In the third segment, Sean and Jacquie are joined by technologist Chris Garaffa, the editor of TechforthePeople.org to discuss some of the biggest tech stories of the year, including the leaked Facebook documents outlining how toxic the platform is for all users and especially for teens and pre-teens, the increase in surveillance of workers by their employers as working from home continued during the ongoing pandemic and the violations of privacy that it entailed, the collaboration between the Ring home security system and local police departments, and the organizing of Apple retail employees and other tech employees this year.

Later in the show, Sean and Jacquie are joined by Kamau Franklin, Founder and Board President of Community Movement Builders in Atlanta and Co-host of the Renegade Culture podcast to discuss the Los Angeles Police Department killing a 14-year-old girl with a stray bullet, what this situation demonstrates about police terror and abolition, the inexplicable order from the CDC cutting the time for isolation after infection with COVID-19 in half and the Biden administration’s deference to capital in its response to the pandemic, and the elevation of people like Charlamagne Tha God and other celebrities, comedians, and musicians as the Black community’s connection to politics.

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