Here And There With Dave Marash

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.