Here And There With Dave Marash

Well, here's some bad news, fentanyl is in town, in Santa Fe...and here's worse news, it's being abused by local teenagers.  Victoria Traxler of The New Mexican reports the number of NM children under 20 being killed by drug overdoses is now growing faster than for adults. 

The scholar and foreign policy analyst Moises Naim is from Venezuela, where his new novel 2 Spies in Caracas is set.  The book paints a frightening portrait of the late Bolivarian revolutionary Hugo Chavez and the corrupt, inept state he created.  We'll talk about Chavez' legacy and American attempts to combat it. Current President Nicolas Maduro came from behind Chavez' shadow and seems a dim replication in every way, except when it comes to clinging to power, at which he has so far excelled. 

How many American healthcare workers have been killed by Covid-19? The terrible answer is, we really don't know, but Christina Jewett of Kaiser Health News and The Guardian's Lost on the Frontline Project says we do know, the government's official counts by the CDC and OSHA are terribly short.  She notes, the Nurses' union says the death toll has passed 4000. Suffice it to say, CDC's count is far less than half that, and lacks the person-by-person documentation the union and the Lost on the Frontline Project present. Is it that Uncle Sam doesn't want to know, or that government doesn't want you to know? 

If the now year and a half long siege of Covid-19 has been stressful for adults, has it been even harder to handle for children?  Katie Stone host and producer of the excellent radio program The Children's Hour says one answer does not fit all kids.  So how can adults help their children? Finding out what they know is a good start. And when it comes to things neither the child nor the adult knows, the best answer is ... look it up together and then the whole family can know. 

Communist China has had 5 significant changes of leadership since the Peoples Republic was proclaimed in 1949.  Scholar David Shambaugh's new book China's Leaders: From Mao to Now profiles Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping ... from Mao's permanent revolution to Xi's self-assignment as Emperor for Life.

Kim Jong Un, the tyrannical leader of North Korea has slimmed down, but was the weight loss caused by bad health?  Korea expert Bruce Bennett of the RAND Corporation sees a symptom in changes to the rules of governance that could reduce Kim's control of the country, something that, in the past, he's killed to keep. Covid has put North Korea into a mega-lockdown, meaning outsiders see even less of what's going on in that dark and endangered nation. 

One of the practices that sums up the corruption of America's system of justice is judge shopping, finding a judge you think will see things your way and not the way of your accusers. The Sackler family, the people behind Purdue Pharma, the company behind oxycontin and the epidemic of addiction the opioid drug set off just finished an exemplary bit of judge-shopping and, many would say, injustice. Chris McGreal of The Guardian has covered the opioid epidemic from start to, well, this.

President Biden says withdrawal from Afghanistan ends the era of America's "forever wars." But what does that mean? Mark Thompson covers military issues for POGO, The Project on Government Oversight and asks, what will happen to the Pentagon money budgeted for an Afghan Army that no longer exists?  And what can "over the horizon" forces like drones and missiles do to contain the threat of terrorism? Answers, he says, have more to do with political will than military muscle.

Even being tossed unprepared onto a battlefield in Iraq didn't prepare Matthew Hoh for Afghanistan where his mission for the State Department was undermined by the Afghan security forces and government. The brutality of government troops was overmatched by the corruption and ineptitude of the civilians sent to work with Hoh's Provincial Reconstruction project in Zabul province. A look at what worse was to come. 

There goes the neighborhood.  Investigative reporter Tony Davis of the Arizona Star and High Country News on how the arrival of a massive CAFO  (concentrated animal feeding operations) has dimmed the stars in the sky and devoured water from the ground and brought traffic, dust and manure aromas to rural areas in Arizona and Minnesota. Riverview LLP has brought with it jobs and money, but many neighbors says it's reduced the value of their homes and savings.

If America's private security contractors sometimes run out of control, security industry scholar David Isenberg says the reason is, the people who hire them at the Defense Department are happy with the arrangement.  He cites recent reports from the Government Accounting Office (the GAO) on all things the Pentagon doesn't know about its PSCs, including how many they have, where they are and what they're doing.

America living in the shadow of fear. Spencer Ackerman's new book Reign of Terror says anxieties created by the terrorist attacks of 9/11/2001 and stoked by the National Security Industry have changed our country is just the ways President Dwight Eisenhower warned us about.  Endless wars beget endless security budgets.  And mass tolerance of authoritarian grifters like Donald Trump. 

When all the 2020 votes were in, substantially more Americans had voted for Democrats running for Congress, but still the Republican Party made important gains in seats in the House. 2 reasons why -- gerrymandering and voter suppression.  Journalist-author Dave Daley on how this contradiction could repeat itself only moreso in 2022.  When politicians game elections and then start to change the game. Not just Democrats, but democracy itself loses. 

Two things that can follow a successful revolution: the once popular leaders can become brutal autocrats and they start to eliminate their former fellow-revolutionaries.  Both those things are happening in Nicaragua. Linda Mannheim has written in The Nation about how President turned dictator Daniel Ortega has been locking up former comrades who are now his political opponents.  She says the recent arrest of the Sandinista Revolution's most beloved women shows a dangerous red line is being crossed.

Polls consistently show that about 80% of the American people support the Endangered Species Act, so why is the Fish and Wildlife Service weakening enforcement of its protections for animals like the red wolf and the Florida panther? Jimmy Tobias has written about these issues for The Intercept and recently in The Nation.  The threats to both animals aren't just hunters, but developers a nd right-win Republican politicians. 

What will it take to solve the water shortage on the Navajo reservation?  The coronavirus pandemic was a cruel reminder of the consequences when you live unable to follow the simplest survival suggestion -- wash your hands.  That takes water to do that.  Without access to clean, reliable sources of water, hundreds of Native Americans have died.  And still progress is slow. Elizabeth Miller has been covering the story for NM in depth.

A too-often neglected part of climate change is that change often involves eradication. Marina Psaros's new book The Atlas of Disappearing Places, looks at 20 places around the planet which could be lost beyond recovery because of rising temperatures and oceanic sea levels.  The endangered locales are parts of great cities like New York and Shanghai, the important grain-basket and fisheries of the Mekong Delta and low-lying islands in the Indian Ocean and the Chesapeake Bay. 

Today on HERE & THERE: For the Catholic Church to lose $415 million on a planned real estate development in London is a catastrophe, no doubt, but is it a crime?  Vatican prosecutors think so and they've charged, among others, one of Pope Francis' once-most-trusted Cardinals and the Vatican Bank's two top experts on financial intelligence Jason Berry of the National Catholic Reporter has been covering the issues in the Vatican's just-begun trial of the century. 

Why do so many Americans seem to have no concept of either of the two words, "civic duty?" Amber Northern, director of research for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute says this may be a result of too many states with no, or poorly thought-out standards for teaching US History and Civics in their public schools. The Fordham Institute has been evaluating standards for teaching U S History for a couple of generations.  What's being taught in today's classrooms, their study says, is "a national crisis." 

More than a billion dollars a year in economic activity is generated by the Great Salt Lake.  But drought and development have reduced the Lake to its lowest water levels ever recorded.  Lindsay Whitehurst, based in Salt Lake City for the Associated Press explains the causes and the consequences of unplanned shrinkage. Among species facing serious disruption are white pelicans and brine shrimp, not to mention the humans who love seeing the birds or who earn a living from harvesting the shrimp and their eggs.