Here And There with Dave Marash

Sofia Martinez of KUNM and The Nation, where she wrote about the plight of the Trinty Test downwinders of the Tularosa Basin and the attempts to renew and reform the Radiation Exposures Compensation Act to include them.

Mark Ludwig, violist emeritus of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and author of the new book Our Will to Live, about the remarkable musical life in the Nazi concentration camp of Terezin (Theresienstadt.)

Megan Kate Nelson, historian and author of Saving Yellowstone, about the exploration of the Yellowstone Basin, its conversion into a National Park, and how this fits into the historical context of the Reconstruction era. 

Catherine Rhodes, Assistant Professor of Ethnology at UNM and co-author of the new book Migration Narratives -- talking about how 2 generations of Mexican immigrants have transformed a small city in the Mid-Atlantic states.

The coronavirus crisis produced the opportunity to create miracle vaccines. So much for the good news. The bad news is, the vaccine-makers are breaking the bank over-charging the world. Just one offense cited in John Nichols's new book Coronavirus Criminals and Pandemic Profiteers. Politicians and corporate chiefs make villainy and greed a public-private partnership.

Vladimir Putin is threatening to use nuclear weapons because of "aggressive language" by opponents of his invasion of Ukraine. Sticks and stones may break his bones, but harsh words have Putin brandishing nuclear threats. He's done this before, but never during actual war-time. Nuclear weapons expert Joseph Cirincione of the Quincy Institute on what Putin's threat really means. Does the concept of nuclear arms control have a future now?

A big reason the Russian invasion of Ukraine is going so slowly is that almost all Ukrainians know exactly how bad life can be under Russian domination. They know this because of family and neighborly ties, and because of Ukraine's lively news ecosystem.  Gulnoza Said of The Committee to Protect Journalists on how reporters in Ukraine are working under siege and how reporters in Russia are under attack by their own government.

Something new under the sun...the American use of declassified intelligence to predict or pre-empt Russian aggression against Ukraine. The wide public release of when, where and how the Russians planned to attack didn't stop them, but it did help unify the Western response, rejecting President Putin's war. Shane Harris of the Washington Post says so far there's been no pushback from inside the US intel community, but the accuracy of the predictions has undoubtedly rebuilt some confidence in the global credibility of the United States. 

You might think the flat earth obsession was old hat, knocked into anachronism by a world in which so many people flown around the world in planes, but has more adherents today than ever before.  Kelly Weill's new book Off the Edge looks at the history of the Flat Earth movement and the other conspiracy theories it might have helped to flourish. In a world that rejects facts, every lost argument becomes confirmation for the believers, many of whom pray at the church of YouTube. 

 The recently-completed 30-day session of the New Mexico Legislature produced relatively few bills and more than a few surprises, but Andy Lyman of the NM Political Report and KSFR FM news says, the biggest impact may be what got in and what got left out of a record breaking $8.48 billion budget. Good news for teachers and police officers.

Kleptocracy, crime organized by a state to benefit its leaders and his or her friends and family, is a global phenomenon, but few kleptocracies can match the series of ripoffs of the citizens of the DRC, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. John Dell'Osso, senior investigator for The Sentinal, led a team probing how billions of dollars were misspent. Up to $15 billion had been stolen by President Mobuto Sese Seko before he was run out of the country. But what came next was more of the same.

When the lockdowns caused by the coronavirus pandemic hit the supply chain for food, customers who wanted organic, home-grown vegetables in Los Angeles had a problem. Dean Kuipers of The Nation wrote about how he and his wife tried to create a solution.  It wasn't easy, but he says, it worked. And not just for the green-hungry customers, but for the farmers at the front end of the supply chain.  And when the lockdowns started to unlock..solutions had to be reconsidered.

The billions of dollars in Federal money from the bi-partisan infrastructure bill passed last November are about to be released.  The 3 guiding principles seem to be -- get it out fast, use it most effectively and distribute it most equitably. Worthy goals, but John C. Austin of the University of Michigan and the Brookings Institution says there are conflicts to solve first. Efficient use of the money may direct it to communities that need it least. 

When the Obama Administration offered incentives for states to expand their coverage of Medicaid. Both Louisiana and Mississippi were among the Republican-governed states that said no. Then Louisiana elected a Democratic governor and changed its mind. April Simpson of the Center for Public Integrity on the differences that made. To illustrate, Simpson went to a pair of rural, Black-majority counties on opposite banks of the Mississippi River. 

 Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin give each other figurative gold medals at the Winter Olympics and a big lump of coal to the United States and President Biden.  Are their beefs legit, or just cover for dreams of ever-expanding Chinese and Russian power and influence. Rajan Menon of the City University of New York has been thinking and writing about what Washington should do. Interesting answers about important questions.

Oil spills across the world, increasing global warming is it spreads, but Chris McGreal of The Guardian and The Nation reports, ExxonMobil says legal actions against the company should stop at the Texas State Line. If you can't gaslight the legal system, their strategy suggests, at least you can forestall the Day of Judgment. Petro-kings call on the tides to stop. Didn't work for Ireland's Cuchulain, but hey. 

A great untold story of nuclear espionage. Dave Lindorff of The Nation on how one brother -- America's top designer of ballistic missiles -- protected his younger sibling -- who gave the Russians huge secrets about the atomic bomb being built at Los Alamos. Imagine the frustration of FBI Director J Edgar Hoover as he watched both brothers keep their freedom. The spy left the country long after his damage had been done, the other brother's value to Americn kept paying off for decades. 

The MDC, the Metropolitan Detention Center in Albuquerque is like most jails full of innocent people awaiting trial. Much too full, reports Austin Fisher of Source NM, for a shrinking staff of correction officers to handle. It's become something of a death trap, in part because of unfilled gaps in medical and mental health care.  Making the crises worse ... dealing with the coronavirus pandemic and a cyberattack that put everyone into lockdown. Inmates can't shower, get mail, meet with their lawyers or leave their cells for more than half an hour a day. 

A woman is jailed for littering a sidewalk. She's one of very many, She dies in detox at Albuquerque's Metropolitan Detention Center. She's one of several. Cecilia Nowell of The Nation on the policies that overfill a city/county lock-up with more prisoners than it can handle and the tragic consequences.

If it ain't broke," the old saying goes, "don't fix it."Unless your intent isn't fixing but shattering something that works, like America's system of free and fair elections. Matt Vasilogambros of the Stateline news service says in dozens of states, Republicans are changing the rules and terrorizing election officials in support of Donald Trump's Big lie, the so-called "Steal." They've even upgraded the old abuse of Gerrymandering. 

Marking the beginning of Black History Month -- Today when a substantial majority of players in pro football and basketball and in the college games are African-American, it's hard to remember when things were Jim Crow different.  Maya Washington's new book Through the Banks of the Red Cedar looks back to the 1960s when her father, football and track star Gene Washington was one of the few Blacks in Big 10 and NFL football. Playing a key role at Michigan State University and in pro football was a teammate, then competitor, all-time all-star defensive lineman Bubba Smith. 

One thing most Americans seriously lack when it comes to our foreign wars is a rear-view mirror. What happens to the people and places where America has sent troops or, more particularly, dropped bombs and other ordinance?  Few Americans seem to know or care, a failing which documentarians Jerry Redfern and Karen Coates address in Eternal Harvest, about Laos, where the US dropped more explosives in the 1960s and 70s than we did on Germany in World War 2, and where one lone American is trying to acknowledge what was done in our names. 

 London's not the only home for crooked cash.  Real estate and other overpriced luxuries for launder corrupted money are also for sale in New York.  Some say this is good for Gotham's economy, but Frank Vogl, who helped found Transparency International, writes in his new book The Enablers ... an addiction to dirty money is a good for a city as being hooked on fentanyl. And in a kleptocratic world, where did money meant as global pandemic relief wind up? 

When there was still a Soviet Union the KGB knew London was the best location to store the fruits of corruption.  Why was that? Alexander Cooley of Columbia University and Chatham House recently took part in a major study that starts from the proposition as the USSR became Putin and Company, even more corrupted cash from oligarchs and other friends and enemies of the Russian tyrant made its way to London for the same good reason: because it could.

  It's been a year and then some since marauders, egged on by that rotten deviled egg Donald Trump, attacked the US Capital.  There have charges and arrests and investigations on the law side, but Brian Levin of Cal State San Bernardino says hate and sedition on the lawless side have only grown. 

 The Corporate trail runs from Anaconda Copper through Atlantic Richfield to today's ARCO.  Droppings along the path, tons of toxic wastes, and hundreds of sick people. The company says it's paid its bill for the Jackpile Mine, but Elizabeth Miller of NM in Depth says ARCO got off cheap and the costly consequences have fallen on the Laguna Pueblo and taxpayers across America. Picking up the poop from decades of uranium mining and refining. This bag's for you. 

Ever put down a dish for your littlest puppies and watch bigger dogs grab most of the food?  That's how it can be for tax breaks meant for people or business start-ups of modest scale.  Somehow the lion's share of the benefits wind up down the gullets of America's least neediest. Investigative reporter Jesse Drucker of the NY Times lays out one the latest examples. Help meant for corporate start-ups being stashed in trusts for the descendants of million and billionaire families.

Two words sum up the American news media's treatment of African-Americans: "malign neglect."  Both in hiring and in coverage, the representation of American communities of color on radio, TV and in print journalism has been underdone.  So how to make up for it? Journalist and media literacy specialist Damaso Reyes says reparations are in order. But what does that mean?  Reyes' answer is more nuanced than you might have assumed. 

Logic says national unity must precede national elections, but Libyan journalist Mustafa Fetouri says the vast majority of his countrymen want a chance to vote for a new President, even if the winning candidate may have little chance to govern efficiently, much less unify a bitterly fragmented nation-state. 2021's civil war suggested the country was split in two. Reality is much messier. One leading candidate is the overthrown leader Muammar Gaddafi's son. 

The term geo-engineering may sound generic, but actually it refers specifically to the concept of deflecting from Earth some solar rays to cool global warming. Environmental scientist Gernot Wagner's book Geo-Engineering: The Gamble looks at the perceived positive and negative effects of putting theory into practice. Good may not be good enough in itself and might distract from better ideas. One casualty might be New Mexico's 300-plus days of sparkling sunshine. 

As the Omicron Variant moves from East to West across the country, the New Mexico healthcare system is bracing for a new wave of infections. The emergency care physician Clayton Dalton, who writes eloquently for The New Yorker, says his rural hospital is already over-stressed with a dwindling core of staff and fewer options to send patients to better-equipped hospitals. Dr. Dalton admits, the fact that almost all his most serious cases are people who chose to be unvaccinated makes everything harder. 

Watchers have had as much luck finding photographic proof  of the Loch Ness Monster as Congress has had in holding the Pentagon accountable for its budget and how it's been spent. Winslow Wheeler spent decades as a top staffer in Congress and as a monitor for the POGO think tank. Wheeler will explain why we -- not to mention Congress -- keep signing ever-bigger blank checks for  military spending. They say, where there's a will, there's a way. But Congress consistently lacks the will and the Trump Administration all but eliminated the ways to keep track. 

Sam Quinones' book The Least of Us described how fentanyl pills, mass manufactured in Mexico and marketed on social media have created huge new populations of addicts in America. Today, reporter Matthew Reisen of the Albuquerque Journal narrows the focus to the streets of New Mexico's biggest city where fentanyl is addicting new generations of people. Reisen talked with officers from the DEA and APD, with sellers and buyers of America's new king of addictive drugs.

In 2015, Sam Quinones wrote Dreamland the book that broke the news of America's opioid addiction epidemic and how the market had moved from prescription drugs like OxyContin to cheaper Mexican heroin. Late last year, Quinones updated the story in The Least of Us, a book about the industrialization of addiction through fentanyl.

It's as if he were Donald Trump's shadow. David Cay Johnston was born two years after Trump and they stayed away from one another for 30 years. Then their paths crossed when Johnston was writing a book about casinos, Wall Street and the Mob. Johnston's new book The Big Cheat is his third on The Donald. 

Is America headed for a second Civil War? No, says Brian Michael Jenkins of the RAND Corporation. But mostly, he says, that's because that kind of formal war is out of date. What Jenkins worries about is an America beset by uncivil rhetoric leading to violent confrontation, even planned attacks like January 6, and old and new media sources busy normalizing them. But if and when such bad things happen, it's the job of government to respond to them. 

When it comes to sentencing, how much consideration should be given to the age of the convict when the crime was committed? Special consideration for people under 18? Austin Fisher of Source NM has reported the case of a woman, just 17 when she was holding the bag that held a murder weapon. She got 30 years to life. Her defense was inept and her sentencing hearing took 19 minutes, which included an ill-judged rant from the judge.

The migration of blue-collar jobs to non-union or lower-wage destinations on both sides of the Texas-Mexico border have left Indiana hollowed up. Indianapolis is a graveyard of abandoned factory buildings and hundreds of left behind workers. Farah Stockman's new book American Made is focused on a question: "What happens to people when work disappears?" She follows 3 skilled, but unemployed former factory workers --one woman, 2 men, one White, one African American.  But they're all human and all wondering what happens next.

 When climate change hits the top of a mountain, a lot of things happen -- less snow, faster melt and more degradation of the rocks themselves. Elizabeth Miller has written in Scientific American about how this climate-driven process is putting more heavy metals and rare earths into less water headed for people's drinking supplies.We know some of the heavy metals, like lead and cadmium can endanger human health, but what's scary is what we don't know about rare earth elements. 

The COP 26 climate change conclave is over.  Most of the world's most powerful leaders dropped by Glasgow , leaving people wondering why Chinese leader Xi Jinping didn't, and wondering what that signaled. Meanwhile Xi and President Biden had private talks, some also focused on climate change. But what did COP 26 accomplish? And what's supposed to happen next?  Talk is cheap, but real fixes are very expensive.  Is there a plan to pay for saving the planet? Andrew Freedman covers climate issues for Axios. 

The customers paying Facebook to help them target buyers say it's a process of inclusion...finding everyone likely to want their product,  But Zinyan Zang of the Kennedy School at Harvard and the Brookings Institution says his research shows Facebook's parsing of the population produces exclusion based on racial and ethnic discrimination. And Zang says so-called reforms forced on facebook by a suit by the ACLU have only made matters worse.

The story of asbestos is like that of leaded gasoline.  Its manufacturers knew for decades it was a deadly threat to human health, but they sold it just the same. Alisa Ghura of the Brookings Institution on the presence of asbestos in Philadelphia's public schools.  Ordinary school buildings filled with impoverished, mostly-minority students get patched, elite schools get fixed. The problem and the faux-solution exists in other cities from Baltimore to Chicago to Berkeley, CA. 

 China tests 2 hypersonic weapons and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs calls it a shock approaching the launch of Sputnik. But Mark Thompson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist now at the Project on Government Oversight reminds us, military threats like hypersonic weapons can begin with hype.

 The US Constitution guarantees all people accused of crimes the option of a trial by jury.  But is part of that guarantee that it takes a unanimous vote to convict?  The Supreme Court says the answer is yes -- from this day forward.  But what about Louisiana's 1500 prison inmates convicted by less-than-unanimous juries? And does it matter that 80% of those people are African-American. Jeremy Young of Al Jazeera English's Fault lines has the story, of Jim crow justice.

The region around Albuquerque has had several job-creation achievements to celebrate. But will Facebook and Amazon pay people enough to afford safe and sound places to live?  Reporter Patrick Lohmann of Source NM on the housing crisis in NM's biggest city and an ongoing hospital crisis in the smaller town of Gallup.  For weeks, Gallup's Rehoboth McKinley hospital was no place to birth a baby. The labor and delivery unit was shut down. 

4 words describe corporate spending on keeping America's power lines humming -- too little, too late. Ivan Penn of the NY Times on utility CEOs' promises and reality in hurricane-hit Louisiana and in fire-ravaged California, while the isolated Texas power grid's struggle with winter cold and summer heat prove, you can't cure stupidity. Penn says scientific progress is outrunning technical capacity as the country tries to fit the power grid for use in a post-fossil fuel world.

Leon Panetta, one of the politicians most tied to the war in Afghanistan said, as the US withdrew its troops...you can leave a battlefield but not the war on terrorism.  David Bromwich columnist for The Nation and Professor of Literature at Yale University says Panetta is significantly wrong on both points. Reducing a country to a battlefield is a losing strategy, he says, and adopting strategies of warfare to combat terrorism has largely failed as well.

Since 2014, a Federal USGS study has tied fracking to earthquakes. In Oklahoma and Northeastern New Mexico, increased fracking for oil and gas extraction has been followed by increased seismic activity.  Now that pattern is showing up in SE New Mexico where not just petroleum products are below ground. Jerry Redfern of Capital & Main and Source NM reports on a potential threat to nuclear waste sites.

How did Donald Trump manage to turn America into a political dystopia?  Karen Greenberg, the Director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University Law School answers that question in her new book Subtle Tools.  Trumpism starts by corrupting language continues by undermining government structures and processes and hiding the impact through secrecy. 

When the German elections were over, the flavor of the results was tutti frutti.  Any governing coalition had to include at least three parties, and the votes for the top two parties were so close, that the next two parties could essentially go either way.  But which way might the progressive Greens and the pro-business Free Democrats want to go? Madeleine Schwartz of The Ballot and the NY Review of Books helps us understand the story, in depth.

First it devastated the shark and tuna populations off its shores.  Then, it went looking for other seafood in other waters. AP's Joshua Goodman broke the story of how the Chinese fishing fleet -- the world's biggest -- is taking tons of squid from both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans off South America. Not only is the Chinese fishing fleet big, it is growing, and when it comes to playing by the rules of the seas, they showed Goodman a lot of signs they were bad.