Ukraine Refugee Sponsorship Program Exposes Opportunism and Racism of US Imperialism

US starts Ukraine refugee sponsorship program, what the nonaligned movement can tell us about the war in Ukraine, Elon Musk buys Twitter

In this edition of By Any Means Necessary hosts Sean Blackmon and Jacquie Luqman are joined by Albert Saint Jean, community organizer and immigration advocate to discuss the Biden Administration’s emergency humanitarian sponsorship program for Ukrainian refugees, how this program differs from existing humanitarian refugee programs, the ways that asylum-seekers from countries like Haiti have been systematically denied ayslym and even deported as Biden continues to argue to maintain the racist Trump-era Title 42 program, and the potential for the inequalities that already exist in these humanitarian sponsorship programs can be a point of organizing as the new Ukrainian program exposes even further the racial inequality in the immigration/asyslum system.

In the second segment, Sean and Jacquie are joined by Roger McKenzie, a reporter for the Morning Star, the world’s only daily socialist newspaper in the English language and the general secretary of Liberation, one of the oldest human rights organizations in the United Kingdom to discuss how the endless spending by the US and its allies on weapons for Ukraine reminds us of the calls of the Bandung Conference in 1955 to refocus the priorities of the non-aligned countries away from spending on military weaponry and toward social spending, the forgotten focus from the conference on resisting the proliferation of nuclear weapons compared to the lack of focus on the danger of a nuclear conflict the Ukraine has brought the world closer to, the need for the anti-war movement around the world to relign their priorities with those that came out of the Bandung Conference, and the continued struggle to identify and challenge the primary contradiction - imperialism - in the conflict in Ukraine and for future organizing toward peace and non-alignment.

In the third segment, Jacquie and Sean are joined by Chris Garaffa, the editor of TechforthePeople.org and co-host of the ReBoot podcast, to discuss multi-billionaire Elon Musk buying, a smarthome company closing and reappearing seemingly out out nowhere and how workers at an Apple Store in New York are fighting for a union.

Later in the show, Sean and Jacquie are joined by Jon Jeter, award-winning journalist and foreign correspondent, radio and television producer, Bluesologist and Decolonizer, and author of the book “Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People,” to discuss corporate media gatekeeping “objectivity” despite the deeply political nature of journalism, the US government defining just what constitutes world opinion on the war in Ukraine and how to begin to undo years of incessant propaganda from mainstream media.

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