Here And There With Dave Marash

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. 

With oil, you get gas.  That's just how nature works. With access, you get influence. That's just how politics works. Cody Nelson has reported for Source NM on how access and influence, spiced with healthy splashes of campaign contributions, works for New Mexico's oil and gas industry. State revenues from taxes on oil and gas extraction mean even more. Environmentalists say state officials are less open to them than they are to lobbyists from the energy industry, and they have evidence. The story, in depth on HERE & THERE -- coming up next.  

Lessons derived from 20 years of war in Afghanistan, and how they might be applied in the future...for war planning and in looking at the new American military and diplomatic initiatives challenging Chinese ambitions in the Pacific. Rajan Menon of the City University of New York weighs in on, among other things, the clear roadmap for failure in Afghanistan that US planners seem to have ignored as a warning and followed to a second, failed conclusion. 

Waiting for our boosters to be approved and distributed as the pandemic grinds on.  Meanwhile, Yale School of Public Health epidemiologist and columnist for The Nation Gregg Gonsalves has some survival suggestions and policy prescriptions for us to think about. Here are 2 ideas to start with ... the crisis isn't over and the coming winter could be a testing time. 

 More than anything else, the future of New Mexico depends on water, how much of it climate change will leave us and how we will use what we have.  Laura Paskus of Our Land on NM Public Television ... on a once in a generation examination of NM's water resources. One thing the experts found was that the State needs better collection and analysis of ongoing climate and water data. Otherwise, policy-makers are drilling in the dark.

As the coronavirus pandemic threatened to crash the global economy, the American central bank, the Federal Reserve stepped in, opened the taps, and saturated the other banks and nations of the world in US Dollars.  Our guest Adam Tooze's brilliant new book, Shutdown explains how it was done and looks at what might happen next. Tooze shows how lessons were learned from the austere response to the financial meltdown of 2008 and a different course was taken.

The American approach to welfare could hardly be more negative. Not only is what welfare recipients receive considered "good enough for them," the humiliations they have to go through to get their pittance are even worse. Eli Hager of Pro Publica on the hoops some single mothers had to jump through to feed their families. Dollars that could go to relieve financial distress get diverted to pay for the investigations and interrogations that precede the first grant.

As the coronavirus pandemic threatened to crash the global economy, the American central bank, the Federal Reserve stepped in, opened the taps, and saturated the other banks and nations of the world in US Dollars.  Our guest Adam Tooze's brilliant new book, Shutdown explains how it was done and looks at what might happen next. Tooze shows how lessons were learned from the austere response to the financial meltdown of 2008 and a different course was taken. 

Mauricio Savarese, Peter Prengaman's co-author of Dilma's Downfall, and colleague at the Associated Press in Brazil picks up the story of what happened after Dilma fell, taking us up to today and President Jair Bolsonaro, the vaccination-refuser whose delegation during a recent visit to the UN, turned out to have 4 Covid-infected members.

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff had a remarkable career.  Once an imprisoned, tortured accused "terrorist," then a local political organizer who worked her way up to become President Lula's chief-of-staff, then the twice-elected President herself.  Guest Peter Prengaman co-wrote Dilma's Downfall, a new book about the first female President of Brazil to be impeached.