In this episode of By Any Means Necessary, hosts Sean Blackmon and Jacquie Luqman are joined by Will Merrifield, a former attorney at the Washington Legal Clinic for the homeless who is now a candidate for an open at-large city council seat in Washington, DC, to talk about the news that housing activists in Los Angeles have managed to appropriate 12 vacant publicly-owned houses to secure housing for a number of homeless families, why institutional barriers pose a near-insurmountable hurdle for homeless families trying to access welfare system benefits, why the already-overwhelmed homeless shelters are so poorly prepared to handle the outbreak, why a serious response by local government must go far beyond merely temporarily decriminalizing homelessness and actually secure permanent housing for those currently residing in shelters, and why the many unaffordable units built by wealthy developers which are currently sitting empty are the perfect location to begin such an initiative.
In the second segment, Sean and Jacquie are joined by K.J. Noh, a writer, teacher, Veterans for Peace member and long-time activist working on global justice issues, to talk about the tit-for-tat response by the Chinese government to the State Department's designation of five Chinese media outlets as "foreign missions," whether the mainstream media's demonization of the Chinese response to COVID-19 effectively makes them complicit in the bungled US response to the outbreak and the wave of anti-Asian racism currently sweeping the country, and why reporting by Russian-funded media on the lack of preparedness from the US and the European Union is now being twisted by the mainstream media into a supposed Russian disinformation campaign to exacerbate the viral outbreak.
In the third segment, Sean and Jacquie are joined by Jason Dzubow, an immigration attorney, partner at Dzubow & Pilcher, PLLC and blogger at www.asylumist.com, to talk about what the closure of the Southern border means for immigrant families, whether we should expect the new immigration restrictions to ever be rolled back after the crisis subsides, how the outbreak is creating a bottleneck in the immigration court system, and how the fear of arrest by ICE agents is aggravating the danger posed by the virus.
Later in the show, Sean and Jacquie are joined by award-winning journalist and editor of The Grayzone Max Blumenthal to talk about the news that top members of the Senate Intelligence Committee like Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein appear to have committed insider trading and enriched themselves on the back of the Coronavirus crisis, what it means that Cuba and China are leading the fight against the pandemic while the US only seems to contribute bombs and sanctions, what explains the complete lack of appetite among the ruling class for a shared global climate of cooperation in the face of the crisis, why there's so much more spite for the drunken beachgoers in Florida than for the Governor who kept the beaches open, why countries like Nicaragua which have achieved food sovereignty are considerably less vulnerable to the ravages of the Coronavirus outbreak, and why unprecedented collective international mobilization is likely the only way to exit this global catastrophe.
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