Democrats Face Electoral Disaster Without Significant Change of Course

Congress Pushes Risk of US War With China, BAMN Reviews “Nope,” What’s Missing In Student Loan Discussions

In this episode of By Any Means Necessary, hosts Sean Blackmon and Jacquie Luqman are joined by K.J. Noh, a scholar, educator and journalist focusing on the political economy and geopolitics of the Asia-Pacific, member of Veterans for Peace, and senior correspondent with Flashpoints on KPFA to discuss the approval of the Taiwan Policy Act by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the dangerous provocations that are included within the bill, how this bill would effectively reverse the One China policy and bring the US and China closer to war, and the recent agreement between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin on closer collaboration at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit and how that will affect the global trend toward a multipolar world order.

In the second segment, Sean and Jacquie are joined by Josh Gomez, producer for By Any Means Necessary to discuss Jordan Peele’s recent film “Nope” and its themes of spectacle and how profit is made from horrible things, the tension between the exploitation of spectacle and care for the subjects of exploitation as demonstrated by the characters of the film, and the film’s human exploration of trauma and surviving in a capitalist system.

In the third segment, Sean and Jacquie are joined by Erica Caines, founder of Liberation Through Reading and Editor of Hood Communist Blog to discuss the recent cancellation of some student loan debt by the Biden administration and why student loans exist in the way they do today, how higher education quickly became a site of class struggle and the efforts of the Nixon administration to prevent the formation of an “educated proletariat,” and how the discourse around student loan forgiveness disguises the broader conversation around the skyrocketing cost of tuition and how colleges and universities are a collective site of struggle.

Later in the show, Sean and Jacquie are joined by Walter Smolarek, a journalist, organizer and editor of Liberation newspaper, and managing editor of LiberationNews.org to discuss the strategy employed by some Democratic operatives to boost the profiles of right-wing congressional candidates and how that reveals weakness in the Democrats agenda, why recent improvements in the approval rating of Joe Biden and the Democrats are likely to be mitigated by issues like the ongoing military operation in Ukraine and its economic impact, Donald Trump’s recent threats of violence should he be indicted for allegedly taking classified documents from the White House and the chances that he runs for a second presidential term in 2024, and the stunt pulled by Ron Desantis and other Republican governors to send migrants to Martha’s Vineyard reportedly with no assistance.

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