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Backward and Forward
October 1, 2021
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Jesus Christ famously told his disciples, as they sat down to a Passover meal, “In my Father’s house are many mansions.” One interpretation is that this was a plea for tolerance and diversity — there are a lot of ways and places to dwell with God.
But that tolerance should not be extended to mass murderers, like the Merchants of Death who have for generations sold us products they knew were killing millions of people and the planet we share.
Example: Alfred P. Sloan, a major perpetrator of leaded gasoline which has not only fouled Earth's air, the soil and water, it has, according to some researchers, measurably lowered the global IQ, through the brain damage lead residues are known to cause. All Sloan's philanthropies, worthy and welcome as they were, cannot "wash away the sins" the General Motors "genius" and his colleagues knowingly inflicted on all of us.
Then, there is the coal crew, the people who still push the worst of the fossil fuels notwithstanding the clear evidence of the harm it does. Joe Manchin isn't the only Senator or Representative who publicly protects a death-dealing industry whose profits he privately shares in, but it is largely coal money that's made him a millionaire many times over..
In addition to his close ties to deadly coal, Senator Joe's family circle has made an unholy amount of money as Merchants of Life (for a Price.) When he was Governor of West Virginia, Joe appointed his wife Gayle to the State Board of Education, and in 2012, when Governor Manshin had become Senator, Gayle became Chair of the Ed Board and began a campaign to equip all West Virginia school districts with more medical supplies, including the Epi-Pen. Simultaneously in Washington, Senator Manchin campaigned to get federal funding to put Epi-pens in every American school. Soon 10 more states had followed West Virginia in adopting Epi-Pens for schools.
2012 was the same year that Heather Bresch, Joe and Gayle Manchin's daughter, became CEO of the Dutch Pharmaceutical Company Mylan — the makers of Epi-Pen. When Mylan acquired the rights to Epi-Pen it started raising its price, but the rises really took off after Heather Bresch got there. The same two-jab package of Epi-Pens cost $109 in 2007 and twice that when Besch took over and has almost tripled since to $700 today.
I guess in the Lord's outhouse there are also many Manchins.
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THIS WEEK: CHILDREN ARE PEOPLE; KIDS ARE NOT "SHEEPLE." COVID KILLED THOUSANDS OF HEALTHCARE WORKERS, BUT HOW MANY, EXACTLY? VENEZUELA'S "ALO PRESIDENTE" HAS BEEN CANCELED, BUT MADURO'S POLICE STATE RUNS ON; AND REMEMBERING TEXAS ON ICE.
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This week began with a visit Monday with Katie Stone, the host and producer of the excellent nationally-distributed radio show The Children's Hour. Her cast, the "Kids Crew" aged four-and-a-half to eighteen, handled the transition from meeting in person in the studio to doing radio via Zoom in ways some adults could learn from. Children live in the same world we do, and see it from their own perspective.
You can find the show here.
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On Tuesday, we updated an old, very sad story — the U.S. government's utter failure to keep track of the deaths inflicted on healthcare workers by COVID-19. Compared to counts made by a nurses' union and research by Kaiser Health News and The Guardian for their joint Lost on the Frontline project, records compiled by both the CDC and OSHA miss more lost lives than they count. Christina Jewett has been on the project and the story for months, and for family reasons, got a better understanding of why the undercount has been worse for workers and residents of nursing homes than those in hospitals. Find the show here.
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 Wednesday's guest, Moises Naim is one of the world's most respected political analysts and investigative reporters. His books The End of Power and Illicit are classic examples of each discipline. His new book, his first work of fiction, Two Spies in Caracas, is a thriller in which Naim told me he wrote about things he "knows" but cannot "prove." His big story: what he calls "the occupation" of his homeland Venezuela by Cuban influence and Cuban intelligence operatives. In the book, there some characters who have "real" models, some who are "composites," and some he just made up. This can, Naim admitted, get "slippery" but also informative for a wider audience.
You can find the show here.
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Thursday's encore featured Texas Tribune and Pro Publica investigative reporter Jeremy Schwartz and looked barely back (it first aired on March 15) at the "Big Freeze," the February blizzard of snow, ice and deadly cold that knocked almost all the power grids in Texas offline.
Even then what had gone wrongest was obvious. The Lone Star State had intentionally been disconnected from most power sources elsewhere in America. Then, came the next shock: that most of the costs of the breakdown would be paid by Texas' power customers — or at least those who didn't die waiting for heat, water and electricity.
You can find the show here.
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THIS WEEK (QUICKLY): FENTANYL COMES TO SANTA FE, DEATH FOLLOWS. THE IMPEACHMENT OF BRAZILIAN PRESIDENT DILMA ROUSSEFF AND WHAT'S HAPPENED SINCE; AND MORE PEOPLE ARE USING MARIJUANA IN US GOVERNMENT-ENFORCED IGNORANCE.
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Next week is Fall Fund Drive week at our host station KSFR, and to make room for some fund-raising, next week's HERE & THERE's will run about 40 minutes, 10 less than our usual. Gotta admit, it threw me off my rhythm, but I hope you'll never notice.
Monday's program features reporter Victoria Traxler of the fine Santa Fe daily The New Mexican. She's been covering some recent cases of overdoses of the opioid fentanyl by local teenagers, one of whom, a 15 year old girl, died. But the statewide context is even more troubling. Data uncovered by Traxler shows, people under 20 are dying from fentanyl overdoses at a rate that is increasing even faster than the upward curve of fentanyl deaths among adults.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, we get to welcome back the coauthors of the new book Dilma's Downfall, about the 2016 impeachment of Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff. Tuesday, former Associated Press Bureau Chief for Brazil Peter Prengaman (he's now AP's News Director for the Western U.S.) recounts the impeachment, in which the charges were minuscule and made by people facing much worse charges of corruption than anything alleged against her. The bottom of the impeachment barrel? Then little-known Senator Jair Bolsonaro's enthusiastic shout-out to the military officer who had tortured Rousseff when she was his prisoner in 1970.
On Wednesday, Dilma's Downfall's coauthor Mauricio Savarese, who still works as AP's top investigative reporter in Brazil, picks up the story with what happened next, after Rousseff was impeached. There have been important new charges of corruption, arrests, even convictions — some of them reversed but none of them touching Rousseff herself . Her tormentor Bolsonaro is now president and, unless everyone is very lucky, the first COVID-19 super-spreader to bring the Coronavirus inside the United Nations General Assembly. Wotta guy!
Thursday, we revisit an old fund drive HERE & THERE from 2018 with my friend Dr. Ben Daitz, University of New Mexico Medical School physician and documentary film-maker. His The Medicine in Marijuana for New Mexico Public Television explained some of the few things we know about cannabis, but underscored how much more we don't know and why — the U.S. government's decades of prohibitions barring scientific research. Know-nothingism didn't start with Donald Trump.
—dmarash
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