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12 April 20
James Risen | Under Cover of Covid-19, Donald Trump Ramps Up His War on Truth-Tellers
James Risen, The Intercept
Risen writes: "Now, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic that has killed thousands of Americans, it's more clear than ever that the officials who stayed in public service to try to curb Trump's worst abuses are becoming his most numerous victims."
James Risen, The Intercept
Risen writes: "Now, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic that has killed thousands of Americans, it's more clear than ever that the officials who stayed in public service to try to curb Trump's worst abuses are becoming his most numerous victims."
EXCERPT:
Trump views anyone who tells the truth as an enemy who must be crushed. Since the onset of the pandemic, he has often assaulted the truth in the middle of White House press briefings. That the docile White House press corps has repeatedly let it happen with barely a murmur encourages Trump to keep it up.
In the middle of a press briefing on Sunday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the government’s top infectious disease expert, tried to answer a question about whether an anti-malaria drug, hydroxychloroquine, could be an effective treatment for Covid-19. Trump has continuously touted the drug in public despite the fact that there is no conclusive proof of its usefulness and plenty of evidence of its harmful side effects. His heedless quackery threatens to kill thousands.
The last thing Trump wanted was for Fauci to tell the truth while standing next to him in front of the press, so Trump blocked him from answering the question and attacked reporters for asking about it. “You don’t have to ask the question again,” Trump told a reporter, while complaining that Fauci had already talked about the anti-malarial drug “15 times.”
Fauci has tried hard over the last few weeks to avoid directly contradicting Trump, particularly in official press briefings. He has instead used alternative media interviews — including a popular online chat with NBA star Stephen Curry — to try to get the truth out.
Yet the fact that Fauci must stand by and let Trump spout dangerous misinformation shows how Trump’s purges have intimidated the remaining professionals inside the government.
Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been almost completely sidelined from press briefings. Stat, a health and medicine news organization, noted that the CDC hasn’t given its own press briefing since March 9, after Trump and the White House took control of public messaging about the pandemic. “CDC experts, who held regular briefings to update the public about previous health threats such as the H1N1 flu pandemic and the Zika outbreak, have been silenced,” Stat reported.
Instead, CDC Director Robert Redfield, a conservative Christian appointed to his position in 2018, has mainly been giving interviews to local radio stations, in which he stresses the value of social distancing while avoiding directly contradicting Trump.
Trump has lied and spouted propaganda and conspiracy theories ever since he took office. In the last few days, he has intensified his war against the truth and anyone who speaks it. With Covid-19, we are witnessing the results.
Employees at a San Diego retirement community hold a daily pep rally to boost the spirits of quarantined residents. (photo: Gregory Bull/AP)
A Plan to Defeat Coronavirus Finally Emerges, but It's Not From the White House
Lena H. Sun, William Wan and Yasmeen Abutaleb, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "A national plan to fight the coronavirus pandemic in the United States and return Americans to jobs and classrooms is emerging - but not from the White House."
READ MORE
Lena H. Sun, William Wan and Yasmeen Abutaleb, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "A national plan to fight the coronavirus pandemic in the United States and return Americans to jobs and classrooms is emerging - but not from the White House."
READ MORE
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, listens as Trump speaks at a briefing on March 27. (photo: Yuri Gripas/Bloomberg/Getty Images)
Fauci: US Could Have 'Saved Lives' if Social-Distancing Restrictions Were Enforced Earlier
Justin Wise, The Hill
Wise writes: "Anthony Fauci, the U.S. government's top infectious disease expert, said Sunday that the U.S. would have saved lives had the country enforced firm social-distancing requirements as early as February, but noted that those recommendations were met with pushback at the time."
READ MORE
Justin Wise, The Hill
Wise writes: "Anthony Fauci, the U.S. government's top infectious disease expert, said Sunday that the U.S. would have saved lives had the country enforced firm social-distancing requirements as early as February, but noted that those recommendations were met with pushback at the time."
READ MORE
A supporter of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange posts a sign on the Woolwich Crown Court fence, ahead of a hearing to decide whether Assange should be extradited to the United States, in London, Britain February 25, 2020. (photo: Henry Nicholls/Reuters)
Assange Fathered Two Children While Holed Up in Embassy, Lawyer Says
Peter Graff, Reuters
Graff writes: "WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange fathered two children with a lawyer who was representing him while he was holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London fighting extradition, the lawyer told a British newspaper on Sunday."
READ MORE
Peter Graff, Reuters
Graff writes: "WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange fathered two children with a lawyer who was representing him while he was holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London fighting extradition, the lawyer told a British newspaper on Sunday."
READ MORE
A USPS mail carrier wearing a mask delivers mail in Flushing, New York, on April 11. (photo: John Nacion/NurPhoto/Getty Images)
The Debate Over a Post Office Bailout, Explained
Matthew Yglesias, Vox
Yglesias writes: "The US Postal Service, like many American businesses, is suffering from sharply declining demand due to the coronavirus crisis: Last week, members of Congress were informed that it will 'run out of cash' in September without federal assistance."
Matthew Yglesias, Vox
Yglesias writes: "The US Postal Service, like many American businesses, is suffering from sharply declining demand due to the coronavirus crisis: Last week, members of Congress were informed that it will 'run out of cash' in September without federal assistance."
Republicans in Congress, meanwhile, remain narrowly focused on putting more money into the Paycheck Protection Program for small businesses — and are opposed to broadening the scope of what will be considered in the next bill.
But the Trump administration also appears to be specifically hostile to the idea of a Postal Service bailout. Its distaste for a postal bailout merges ideological conservatives’ generic preference for postal privatization with the president’s specific hangup about the idea that USPS is giving Amazon a sweetheart deal on shipping.
In general, there are a lot of complexities to the long-term postal policy picture in the United States, but the immediate crisis is actually pretty simple: Mail volumes are plunging, taking USPS revenue down with them. And unless something is done relatively quickly to make up for those lost revenues, it’s hard to see how significant layoffs and service reductions can be avoided.
The Postal Service’s long-term problem
The Postal Service has been organized in several different ways across American history, but its modern paradigm, dating from the 1970s, dictates that the USPS is supposed to be a self-funded, independently operating public sector entity.
And at the core of that entity is a two-sided bargain. On the one hand, the Postal Service gets a monopoly on the provision of daily mail services. On the other hand, the Postal Service undertakes a series of public service obligations that a private company would not provide — most notably daily mail delivery and flat postage rates regardless of where you live.
But the volume of first class mail — the source of the lion’s share of USPS revenue and the cornerstone of both its monopoly and its universal service obligations — peaked in 2001 at 104 billion pieces of mail. Decline has been fairly steady since then, falling to just 55 billion pieces in 2019. The cost of meeting USPS’ basic service obligations, by contrast, has essentially remained steady, creating an obvious financial problem.
There’s no reason to think the decline of paper mail will reverse at any point in the future, so one possible response would be to cut costs by closing post offices, canceling Saturday delivery, and laying off workers. Congress has generally opposed that, pushing the postal service to instead find new sources of revenue such as its parcel delivery business in which it competes with UPS, Federal Express, and other private companies.
A few other solutions have been floated, but none have taken hold. For instance, many people on the left would like to see laws changed to allow USPS to begin offering banking services to both increase revenue and create a public option that would compete with private banks. On the right, the general preference is to privatize postal services (which is what’s largely happened in Europe) and end the mix of special monopolies and special service obligations that currently governs postage.
Back in 2006, a lame duck Republican Congress turned up the pressure on privatization by forcing the Postal Service to prefund decades of pension and retiree health costs through investments in low-yield government bonds. That onerous obligation made USPS technically insolvent before coronavirus hit. But rather than achieving its apparent intended result of spurring privatization, in practice it mostly served to give privatization opponents something to complain about rather than addressing the underlying decline in USPS’ business model. Along the way, however, USPS did find a promising new line of business as a contractor delivering Amazon packages.
Donald Trump really hates Amazon
In the fall of 2016, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos accused Donald Trump of “eroding our democracy.”
And while some major tech CEOs, like Apple’s Tim Cook, have gone out of their way to kiss up to Trump since he became president, Bezos largely hasn’t. Instead, Amazon’s top spokesperson is Jay Carney — who served as White House press secretary under President Barack Obama — and who has occasionally offered harsh criticisms of the Trump administration on a wide range of grounds.
Bezos also owns the Washington Post, and Trump has made no secret of his desire to use the power of the government to punish Amazon financially unless the Post changes its coverage of him. Facebook seems to have paid attention to this message and deliberately altered its editorial practices in order to try to ensure more favorable regulatory treatment from the Trump administration. The Post, which is run by professional journalists with ethics, has refused to do the same. Adding to the tension between the parties is the fact there’s currently litigation underway exploring allegations that Trump’s highly irregular cancellation of a major military contract with Amazon was motivated by partisan payback.
In the context of that feud, Trump has pushed the Postal Service to start raising the prices it charges Amazon.
New York Magazine’s Josh Barro has dug into the substance of the parcel pricing controversy and finds that Trump’s contention that the Postal Service could improve its financial situation by doubling what it charges Amazon is false. The key issue is that because of USPS’ universal service obligations, it can’t drastically reduce its real estate footprint or the number of trucks it sends driving around the country. The reason it gives Amazon good rates is that the facilities it’s using would otherwise be half-empty. Raising prices without making any other operational changes could lead to Amazon looking elsewhere for delivery services, which would leave the post office in even more desperate financial circumstances.
What’s true, however, is that if USPS were privatized and its special obligations went away, then it would be possible — and profit-maximizing — for the hypothetical future USPS to charge Amazon higher rates. In other words, the longstanding conservative goal of postal privatization aligns well with Trump’s personal agenda of punishing the Washington Post. But it’s not true that soaking Amazon would, per se, provide the Postal Service with a way out of its financial problems.
Democrats want to save the Postal Service
USPS consistently rates as the most popular government agency. It employs a lot of unionized workers, and its costliest business practices help out rural communities who are given disproportionate weight in the political process.
Therefore Democrats’ inclination for a while now has been to say that the federal government should either just directly subsidize the Postal Service or else help them out by changing the rules to let USPS get into more lines of business like banking.
The sharp crisis induced by coronavirus is compelling USPS to ask openly for government support, with House Democrats describing a proposal for $25 billion in operating subsidies, $25 billion in capital grants for modernization, and $25 billion in guaranteed loans from the Treasury.
Trump, by contrast, has emphasized his incorrect ideas about Amazon as a solution that would somehow simultaneously address both the short-term and long-term issues.
“They have to raise the prices to these companies that walk in and drop thousands of packages on the floor of the post office and say, ‘Deliver it,’” he said at a press conference last week. “And if they’d raise the prices by actually a lot, then you’d find out that the post office could make money or break even. But they don’t do that. And I’m trying to figure out why.”
None of that is true, and whether or not Amazon gets charged higher prices, the agency is going to go bust because people aren’t sending enough mail.
Of all the things the federal government could conceivably spend money on, subsidizing six-days-a-week delivery of paper mail has never struck me personally as a particularly compelling value proposition. But given USPS’ popularity with the public, it’s also not really clear why spending money on this would be a big problem other than a principled opposition to having the government do anything at all.
In the immediate circumstances of a collapsing national economy that coincides with a census, a huge surge in people’s dependence on delivery services, and the potential need to convert the entire fall election to vote-by-mail, laying off tons of postal workers seems obviously unhelpful. But unless Congress can reach some sort of deal, that’s the situation they’ll be facing by late summer.
New Zealand, led by Jacinda Ardern, is a world leader in combating the virus. (photo: Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)
The Secret Weapon in the Fight Against Coronavirus: Women
Arwa Mahdawi, Guardian UK
Mahdawi writes: "What do Germany, Taiwan and New Zealand have in common? Well, they've all got female leaders and they're all doing an exceptional job in their response to the coronavirus crisis."
Arwa Mahdawi, Guardian UK
Mahdawi writes: "What do Germany, Taiwan and New Zealand have in common? Well, they've all got female leaders and they're all doing an exceptional job in their response to the coronavirus crisis."
EXCERPT:
What is true, however, is that women generally have to be better in order to become leaders; we are held to far higher standards than men. Women are rarely able to fail up in the way men can; you have to be twice as good as a man in order to be taken half as seriously. You have to work twice as hard. With a few notable exceptions (*cough* Ivanka Trump *cough*), you’ve got to be overqualified for a top job.
A surplus of qualifications isn’t exactly a problem Donald Trump has. America’s response to the coronavirus crisis is arguably the worst in the world – although Britain also gets an honourable mention here. Instead of expertise, the Trump administration has led with ego. While thousands of Americans die, Trump tweets about his TV ratings. Instead of cooperating, Trump is lashing out at the press and state leaders. It’s hard to imagine Hillary Clinton responding to a crisis in this way without being immediately impeached. Which raises the question: are some men simply too emotional to be leaders?
A worker sprays disinfectant near the tiger cages at Alipore Zoological Garden in Kolkata. (photo: Getty Images)
To Prevent the Next Pandemic, Leave Animals Alone
Dharna Noor, Gizmodo
Noor writes: "We don't know exactly how the tiger contracted the coronavirus, but we do know that it's zoonotic disease, meaning it's caused by a bacteria, parasite, or in this case, a virus that spreads from animals to humans."
Dharna Noor, Gizmodo
Noor writes: "We don't know exactly how the tiger contracted the coronavirus, but we do know that it's zoonotic disease, meaning it's caused by a bacteria, parasite, or in this case, a virus that spreads from animals to humans."
ver the weekend, a tiger at the Bronx zoo tested positive for covid-19. The weird occurrence raised questions about the zoonotic transmission of covid-19. Did Joe Exotic have anything to do with this? (Probably not). Did the tiger contract the virus from human contact? Can the tiger infect humans? How can we limit the spread of viruses between people to animals?
New research has found that to limit “virus spillover” of these illnesses, we should stop messing with animals’ natural habitats.
In a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B on Tuesday, researchers found that the risk for viruses to spread to humans from animals increases when we exploit wildlife through land use practices, agriculture, and hunting.
“Spillover of viruses from animals is a direct result of our actions involving wildlife and their habitat,” lead author Christine Kreuder Johnson, project director of USAID PREDICT and director of the EpiCenter for Disease Dynamics at the University of California’s One Health Institute, said in a statement. “The consequence is they’re sharing their viruses with us.”
Removing animals from their natural habitats can stress them out, which increases the risk that those creatures will spread diseases. And when humans spend time around those stressed animals—whether that’s on a farm or out hunting—we risk exposure to high viral loads.
The authors identified 142 cases of zoonotic viruses spreading to people. Then, using the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species, they teased out patterns in the way those species have been affected by human action. The study traced half of the new diseases that animals transmitted to humans after 1940 to hunting, trade, habitat degradation.
The researchers found that domesticated mammals—including livestock like cows and pigs as well as pets like cats and dogs—host the highest number of viruses that can be shared with people. In fact, these domestic species carry eight times more of these viruses than wild mammal species. Wild animals that have adapted well to human civilization and most often live in urban centers, such as rodents, bats, and primates, also often carried zoonotic diseases.
The study also found that among threatened and endangered species, zoonotic viruses were far more common among those whose habitats human had directly destroyed or degraded. Wildlife whose populations declined due to hunting, trade, and human occupation were more than twice as likely to carry zoonotic viruses compared to those threatened for other reasons, such as the changing climate.
That in turn increased the likelihood of spillover into humans. That’s troubling, because species with declining populations are also more likely to be directly monitored by humans trying to bring about their population recovery, which also puts them into greater contact with people.
“The study by Christine Kreuder Johnson and colleagues highlights the importance of rethinking our relationship with wild animals and wild places and most importantly the contact areas between them,” Christian Walzer, executive director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Wildlife Health Programs, told Earther. “The study provides new evidence on how the conservation of wild species and their respective environments can create global health wins and support the mitigation of future epidemics and pandemics.”
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