By John Ballard
Lots to think about this week.
Thousands of starving people from another African famine, record casualties in the Afghan war coupled with an army report of 32 suicides for July alone, a bloody mess in Syria, a thousand arguments in Israel, a political circus in Iowa.
Not to mention the London riots, a planned Day of Rage for the South part of Manhattan (How many people realize that's a short walk to where the World Trade Center once stood?) and a record price for gold.
I don't want to seem flip, but sometimes all you can do is watch the parade and shake your head, knowing that the people on the floats are just passing by and you are only one person in a very large crowd of onlookers.
Here are a few items that caught my eye the last few days.
Ninety years ago this month, 10,000 West Virginia miners waged a violent battle in support of labor rights. The fight now: Will the historic Blair Mountain battleground be preserved, or mined?
The Labor South link is a brief commentary by Joe Atkins pointing out, one more time, how economic forces bigger than any one person can control, divide and conquer a community, in this case for the advancement of the dirtiest of fossil fuels.
James Dial earns $65,000 a year (nearly twice what local school teachers earn) doing "reclamations" on destroyed mountains -- that is, taking his bulldozer and crew and trying to rebuild a mountain with the refuse of rock and sand mountaintop removal leaves. He's a trained carpenter, but that line of work doesn't pay $65,000 a year in rural West Virginia. He and his wife lead the effort to let the companies have their way.
On the other side of the equation are folks like: Jimmy Weekley, whose house is close to Blair Mountain; Billy Smutko, who worries about "what do you get" 30 years from now after all the mountains are destroyed, and along with them streams and other water sources; and Chuck Keeney, whose great-grandfather was one of the 10,000 coal miners who went on strike on Blair Mountain in 1921 to fight coal company tyranny and be able to join the United Mine Workers. That bloody battle was one of the key events in labor history in this country, and Keeney and others would like to preserve Blair Mountain for that reason as well.
O'Brien does an admirable job bringing together scientists, government officials, and activists who tell how destructive mountaintop removal is in Appalachia. It creates an environmental disaster, they say. This is where she frames the story: environment versus jobs, tree huggers versus blue-collar workers.
?Did The Employer Mandate Work In Massachusetts?
Short answer: yes. �Employer coverage increased in Massachusetts even though health insurance premiums rose in the range of 10 percent every year. So worries that employers would drop coverage and pay the much cheaper penalty ($295 a year) instead, were largely unfounded�:
Do not confuse "individual mandate" with "employer mandate." They are not the same.
ACA has incentives for employers to continue to provide group insurance, including exceptions for those offering shitty plans, but nobody is saying that out loud. It might be mentioned that during the campaign the subject of health care reform was rarely mentioned by either party. Everybody who is anybody knew and still knows that health care inflation in America is a national disgrace, exceeded only by an appetite for drugs, both legal and illegal.
Hillary Clinton's plan and Barack Obama's plan were virtually identical, which is why that subject was not a bone of contention during their otherwise spirited arguments. The main difference was that the Clinton plan specified a mandate but Obama's plan did not. So if the Supreme Court invalidates the individual mandate (contrary to what Congress crafted) the ACA will more nearly resemble what candidate Obama might have envisioned. That would leave several millions of people uninsured which might strengthen the case for a public option.
It would most certainly motivate states to craft more attractive exchage options unless they want to continue the non-systems now in place.
?In '1493,' Columbus Shaped A World To Be
Over the last couple of years I have weaned myself of the need to acquire and hoard books. But two or three times a year I get the need to order one anyway.
Books are like chocolate. Sometimes there is just no good substitute and you gotta go for the real thing. Terry Gross' interview of Charles Mann made me know if I don't get his book at Christmas I will have to order it anyway. It's just too rich to skip over.
GROSS: Now is it Jamestown that also brings malaria into America?
Mr. MANN: Yeah. No, there was no malaria in the Americas. And this is a tremendous thing for Native people - of course, they didn't know it - because malaria is this tremendously wily parasite. It's a single-celled creature that has proven just extraordinarily difficult to eradicate and has had huge impacts in places like Africa, where, you know, there's all kinds of calculations by economists that if malaria hadn't existed in Africa for the last 200 years, it would just be fantastically wealthier than it is now because so much of the continent's human capital goes into being sick all the time.
And so what happens is that there are - malaria is this parasite that needs these particular mosquitoes to survive. They exist in the Americas, different species, but they're compatible with malaria. And Europe has malaria at this time, particularly southeast England, and they - it comes over in the bodies of colonists, gets picked up by the mosquitoes and makes this broad band of the coastal Americas - from Chesapeake Bay down to, you know, the southern border of Brazil - just full of malaria, and it becomes quite inhospitable for European colonists.
And in places like Virginia, they have to go through this process, it's called seasoning, which is you bring over an indentured servant and then you sit around and wait for a year to find out if he's going to survive or not. And death rates are up to, you know, 40 percent. So you bring over these servants, and 40 percent of them kick the bucket the first year, and many of them are sick for long periods thereafter. It's hugely expensive. And at that point, people start looking around and they start seeing Africans.
Now the interesting thing about Africans is that they're - in a sort of a strict Darwinian-type sense - they're genetically superior to Europeans because their bodies contain - particularly people from West Africa - certain mutations that make them the most immune to malaria of any people on Earth. I'm skipping a lot of technical details. There's actually two types of malaria, and so on. But the basic thing is that Africans are much less likely to get sick. And so people who import them have an economic advantage over people who import Europeans. And the result is that in malaria areas is kind of, the Columbian exchange, bringing over this parasite, the malaria parasite is actually kind of nudging these societies toward slavery.
Now it doesn't mean that malaria causes slavery. Obviously, people are moral agents and make their own decisions. But we all know what the lure of the market is, and you just have a better chance of making a success out of your operation if you bring in people who won't get sick immediately.
GROSS: And also, I would imagine if a lot of the people they were bringing in as indentured servants were dying, that slavery seemed to the plantation owners to be an economically favorable system. Not only weren't the Africans dying, but, you know, you didn't have to replace them as quickly, because they had this immunity - not that the Europeans understood the concept of immunity yet.
Mr. MANN: No, exactly. It's - you didn't have to understand it to have the economic advantage. It's sort of weird, you know, in a way, to be talking about slavery - which is this awful thing - in this kind of cold-blooded way. But, you know, at bottom, it was an economic institution. And the Columbian Exchange - in the form of bringing over these diseases - favored its creation in this broad belt of the Americas. It's striking to me that the area in which the worst kind of malaria - which is called falciparum malaria - can survive, you know, regularly, in a routine way in the Americas, stops right about Chesapeake Bay, right about Washington, D.C., actually. And that's where the Mason-Dixon line is.
Societies north of that - you know, where I live in Massachusetts - had slaves much more than people in New England like to acknowledge. But the societies south of the malaria line are really slave societies in ways that New England and places like that are not.
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GROSS: ...So your new book "1493" is about how the world was environmentally changed, how ecosystems were changed after Columbus and subsequent European explorers came to the Americas. So what's one or two of the things you wish students were being taught in school now about Columbus?
Mr. MANN: That - I would wish that students were taught what a tremendous landmark in human history 1492 was. That, you know, it was the beginning of the modern world, and that two huge things happened as a result of it, to the human race itself. The first was that the things we've been describing, there was this tremendous die-off of Native people. And it's been estimated that, you know, one out of every five people on the planet died in the next hundred years as a result of this unintentional bringing over of diseases.
And the second thing is that what happened after the Europeans came was not so much that Europeans came, but the Africans came. The number of Africans who came to the Americas up till about 1840, 1850 far outweighed the number of Europeans. There were three Africans for every European who came to the Americas in those first couple hundred years.
?And finally, this interview of Nouriel Roubini from the Wall Street Journal.
(Thanks, Uncle Rupert. Trying to win a few brownie points, perhaps?)
Thumbnails at the link let you watch short snips if you haven't time for the whole twenty minutes or so.
Roubini's accent and deadpan monotone delivery make for hard listening, but this is the guy who advised getting out of the stock market a year ahead of the collapse of 2008. They call him "Doctor Doom" but he's a rock star in the investment community.
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