Hurricane Katrina and Racial Capitalism, Iraq’s Political Crisis and the US Occupation, One Year Since US Withdrawal From Afghanistan.

In this episode of By Any Means Necessary, hosts Sean Blackmon and Jacquie Luqman are joined by Anthony Rogers Wright, Director of Environmental Justice with New York Lawyers for the Public Interest to discuss the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s impact on the city of New Orleans and the ensuing racism in the response and gentrification rebuilding of the city, the racist terror brought upon Black residents of New Orleans by vigilantes and other forces and the racist media coverage of Black poor and working people in the Katrina’s aftermath, how New Orleans became a laboratory of gentrification and privatization after the hurricane, and how the aftermath of Katrina exposes the connections between climate change, racism,and capitalism.

In the second segment, Sean and Jacquie are joined by Mazda Majidi, long-time antiwar and social justice activist who is from Iran and has written extensively on the nuclear deal and other issues pertaining to Iran and the Middle East to discuss recent violent protests in Iraq following Muqtada al-Sadr’s announcement of his resignation from politics, how the US invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 set the stage for the rise in Sadr’s profile and the current political tensions built into the constitution, how Iraqis are paying the price for the US occupation failure in its goal to establish another stable client state in the Middle East, and the afterthought that is the human cost of US interventions abroad.

In the third segment, Sean and Jacquie are joined by Sohrob Aslamy, a doctoral candidate at Syracuse University to discuss the anniversary of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and the ongoing sanctions regime imposed by the US after the Taliban’s takeover of the government, the context of twenty years of the occupation of Afghanistan by the US as part of its so-called “war on terror,” the continued operations in Afghanistan by the US government and how the US uses those operations as justification for the theft of Afghanistan’s assets and denial of aid, and the challenge to the Afghan people to find peace and stability in the aftermath of the US occupation and withdrawal.

Later in the show, Sean and Jacquie are joined by Dr. Radhika Desai, a Professor at the University of Manitoba and Director of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group to discuss the recently released UN report on China’s treatment of the Uyghur minority in Xinjiang and the innuendo and shaky premises that the report largely relies on, how the US propaganda effort against China exposes the gulf between the goals of the ruling class and the needs of working and poor people, Canada’s place in US machinations for a new cold war with China and Russia, how this cold war drive signifies the dying gasps of neoliberal capitalism, and the fractures that are beginning to form on the ruling class unity on Ukraine as Europe’s economy is strained by the sanctions it has imposed on Russia.