RSN: Andy Borowitz | Fauci Urges Trump to Remain on Golf Course Until Pandemic Is Over

26 May 20 Now Leaping Out the Window for Your Donation! In fairness it’s a first floor window above a soft landing of wood chips and leaves so it’s a purely symbolic expression. Nonetheless if it will help I’ll give it a try. Here goes … Marc Ash Founder, Reader Supported News Sure, I'll make a donation! Update My Monthly Donation If you would prefer to send a check: Reader Supported News PO Box 2043 Citrus Hts CA 95611

25 May 20

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WE HAVE YOUR SUPPORT BUT WE HAVE NO BUDGET - We have more supportive messages now than we have ever received before. It is a genuine outpouring. Now we need a budget. So far for May we have 488 donations in 17 days of trying. Yes, we have received 488 donations in “one” day before. We can do this. We need your help. / Marc Ash, Founder Reader Supported News

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Andy Borowitz | Fauci Urges Trump to Remain on Golf Course Until Pandemic Is Over

Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
Borowitz writes: "Sharply disagreeing with critics of Donald J. Trump's weekend visit to the Trump National Golf Club, Dr. Anthony Fauci has urged Trump to remain on the golf course until the pandemic is over."
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Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. (illustration: Lauren Crow/High Country News)

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz: American Violence in the Time of Coronavirus
Graham Lee Brewer, High Country News
Excerpt: "Author Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz puts armed 'reopen' protests in their historical context."

EXCERPT:

n both An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States and Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz digs into the roots of violence buried deep within the country’s history. From the election of Donald Trump to the crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic, American violence has been on unprecedented display. The pandemic has likewise exposed some of the nation’s starkest disparities, not only in justice and health-related issues, but also along racial and class divides. Now, as states consider relaxing stay-at-home orders in response to the economic crisis health restrictions have led to, the country is witnessing the armed occupation of state capitals, emotionally charged protests and the outright denunciation of science and research. 

Dunbar-Ortiz helps put these contemporary events in a historical context. “The United States was founded as a capitalist state and an empire on conquered land, with capital in the form of slaves,” she writes in Loaded, as she traces violence from the nation’s founding to today. “The capitalist firearms industry was among the first successful corporations. Gun proliferation and gun violence today are among its legacies.” This legacy helps explain American gun culture and the conspicuous display of firearms at the COVID-19 “reopen” protests. 

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Election workers prepare ballots to mail out for Nebraska's primaries. (photo: Nati Harnik/AP)

Mail-In Voting Triggers an Unhinged Trump Rant
Peter Wade, Rolling Stone
Wade writes: "Seemingly terrified of losing his reelection bid at least in part due to mail-in voting, President Trump continued to be dishonest about the process's legitimacy in a tweet so packed with lies it's surprising he was able to fit them all within the character count."
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Lay Guzman stands behind a partial protective plastic screen and wears a mask and gloves as she works as a cashier at the Presidente Supermarket on April 13, 2020 in Miami, Florida. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Yes, Unemployment Insurance and Welfare Encourage People to Quit Lousy Jobs. That's the Point.
Leo Gertner and Shaun Richman, In These Times
Excerpt: "Do we have a right not to work? The answer is we don't if Democratic leaders stubbornly try to keep the 'era of big government' confined to the 20th century."

Think of a barista right now in Georgia. She’s home collecting unemployment and watching her two kids while the schools and the cafe where she worked are closed. Her boss says they’re reopening next week even as the coronavirus continues its deadly spread, but schools won’t. Governor Kemp, along with other GOP governors, is using the horrifying tactic of threatening to kick workers off unemployment insurance if they don’t return to their jobs. What should she do?

This is the stark choice many workers are left with in post-”big government” America. Return to work and face a deadly virus when intensive-care beds are already nearly full in Georgia and her kids are alone, or stay home and risk losing all income. That so much of the current tension around a healthcare crisis focuses on a patchwork of complex, underfunded state unemployment programs speaks to the dearth of programs and policy tools available to sustain people when work is scarce or conditions are miserable.

Most people’s experiences with the stinginess and arcane rules of our nation’s patchwork of unemployment systems have conditioned us to assume that we’re not eligible and that we should be discouraged from applying, even under desperate circumstances. Blame it on steady erosion of our more than 80-year-old New Deal-era safety net and the decades of attacks on the idea of welfare, capped by Bill Clinton’s era-ending declaration that accompanied the catastrophic 1996 reform bill he signed into law with support of many Congressional Democrats, including our presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

Our current crisis has exposed two flawed premises around how we think about money: that not all workers deserve enough of it to live on and that the government is incapable of providing it. Like our flagship retirement programs for those over 65 years old, Social Security and Medicare, income replacement can and should be for everyone. Universal, or near-universal, programs like unemployment insurance and Social Security are popular for a reason. They provide much-needed sustenance and promote the idea that everyone deserves to have their basic needs met. Newer social programs have been replaced by stingier, more complicated models that means-test who “deserves” life-saving support. This breeds both unnecessary administrative burdens and resentment between voters who should be united in trying to improve conditions. According to One Fair Wage, 44% of all applicants for pandemic unemployment still haven’t received their benefits.

Worst of all, means-testing makes government programs easy targets and far less effective. Remember Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) that welfare reform killed? Sixty-eight out of 100 families received it in 1996, when it was replaced by far less generous Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). In 2018, only 22 out of 100 received aid. The same has already happened to unemployment. Only 27% of unemployed workers received benefits in 2016. The average unemployment benefit (excluding the added $600 per week stimulus), which varies wildly by state, replaces just 38% of the average paycheck. And now the system is under unprecedented strain. Already underfunded, the flood of claims has jammed up government phone lines and websites. In New York alone, hundreds of thousands of workers are still waiting for their checks.

As a way to shore up bank accounts and put food on the table, unemployment was possibly our best option under the rushed circumstances of the CARES Act. But it’s a deeply-flawed compromise that, like the Affordable Care Act before it, utilizes a means-tested patchwork that deals Republican governors in on the implementation of a policy that many of them oppose. And like private health insurance, unemployment ties a critical safety net to the whims of a brutal job market that had hardly even recovered from the 2008 crash.

Many of the unemployed workers that we, a college administrator and labor lawyer, have spoken to have been reluctant to file. One, a building trades apprentice who was still taking her 40-hour OSHA safety class and hadn’t gotten her first work assignment, assumed she would be rejected for unemployment since she wasn't laid off from a paying job. A stagehand who is not working while live entertainment is out of the question fears that filing would give the employer where he had recently helped form a union an excuse to fire him for “job abandonment.” A lawyer who lost his well-paid job hesitated to fill out a claim form because he felt the system was for "struggling workers," not someone like him. He worried his claim would dry up resources for people who need it the most. Why should relief for them depend on their employers or governors?

One of the few bright spots of the CARES Act is that it will boost unemployment checks by $600 until July, pushing that wage replacement rate up to 100%. And it covers independent contractors. However, many workers will still be left out or shortchanged, including those whose incomes are too low to qualify, undocumented workers, and tipped workers whose unemployment benefits will depend on whether their employers reported their tips as income.

It is clear that the federal government will need to pass multiple rounds of economic rescue packages. Democratic leaders have to drop their pathological insistence upon means-testing benefits. On one side are Trump’s big promises of across-the-board benefits (bearing his signature), on the other is Republican lawmakers’ actual hardline bargaining to shovel money to corporations while keeping benefits as stingy as possible to force people to drag their carcasses to lousy, dangerous jobs. Caught in between, this is no time to limit expectations and pose as the “more responsible” party. Key to Democratic electoral fortunes is making voters believe that the government can be a force for good in their lives, and that means making demands and fighting like Hell to win them.

Congress’ bi-partisan zeal to swish-swish over one and a half trillion dollars for the initial recovery package puts the lie to every bit of “h0w D0 y0u P@y F0r iT” scare-mongering about universal programs like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal that were trotted out during the presidential debates. The next year will likely prove that both the recovery package and Sanders’ moderate platform are wholly inadequate for solving our looming economic disaster.

Republican Senators like Lindsey Graham and Ben Sasse who publicly fretted that the enhanced unemployment benefit might be—as Bernie Sanders caustically characterized it—“a few bucks more” than their paltry wage said the quiet part out loud. If a government-sponsored income replacement program gives workers the bargaining power to refuse to work without better compensation and workplace protections, would bosses have to take their lives more seriously?

No one should have to choose between unsafe, underpaid work or poverty and starvation.  The point of unemployment insurance (and welfare) is to give workers enough bargaining power to reject unacceptable working conditions and to force bosses to make a job worth doing. We must focus on [expanding programs until there’s universal coverage. That means boosting benefits levels for essential programs like Social Security Disability and raising the federal poverty level ($26,200 for a family of four) to broaden eligibility to programs like Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs and Medicaid. We should also restore welfare as we knew it before Bill Clinton dismantled the program. We must also explore capping the workweek and fully subsidizing education and training for those who want it. That’s something worth leaving the house for.

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A voter casts his ballot in Florida. Felons are currently barred from voting until they have paid all their legal fees. (photo: Joe Burbank/AP)

US Judge Rules Florida Felons Can Vote Without Paying Legal Fees
Associated Press
Excerpt: "A law in Florida requiring felons to pay legal fees as part of their sentences before regaining the vote is unconstitutional for those unable to pay, or unable to find out how much they owe, a federal judge has ruled."
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Filiz Degidiben works as part of a contact-tracing team in Berlin. (photo: Maja Hitij/Getty Images)

While US Struggles to Roll Out COVID-19 Contact Tracing, Germany's Been Doing It From the Start
Loveday Morris and Luisa Beck, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "There's no sophisticated technology in the northern Berlin office where Filiz Degidiben spends her days tracking down contacts of people infected with the coronavirus."
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Planting a tree. (photo: Михаил Руденко/iStock/Getty Images Plus)

Planting Trees Won't Stop Climate Change
Ted Williams, Slate
Williams writes: "Mass plantings are apt to do more harm than good. And it's nearly impossible to distinguish decent projects from bad ones."

Not only are planted trees not the carbon sinks you want, but tree planting frequently ends up doing more harm than good.

umans have long believed that planting trees, any kind of tree, anywhere, is good, something Mother Nature cries out for, something that might even solve our climate crisis. Tree-planting initiatives proliferate: the Bonn Challenge, Trees for the Future, Trees Forever, the 10 Billion Tree Tsunami, Plant a Billion Trees, 8 Billion Trees, the Trillion Tree Campaign, the One Trillion Trees Initiative, to mention just a few. 

The passion for planting trees comes partly from the fact that, in some places, they sequester carbon. This has been broadly interpreted to mean that festooning the Earth with trees will solve the problem of climate change, which is why tree-planting programs are so popular with carbon polluters seeking to avoid cleanup costs. President Donald Trump, for example, instantly embraced the One Trillion Tree Initiative launched in January by the World Economic Forum, pledged U.S. participation, and then gushed about it in his State of the Union address: “To protect the environment, days ago, I announced that the United States will join the One Trillion Tree Initiative, an ambitious effort to bring together government and the private sector to plant new trees in America and around the world.” 

Planting trees can be beneficial, especially in countries where predatory logging and other land abuse has destroyed soil stability and deprived people of shade, clean water, fish, and fruit. But such initiatives are the exception. Mass plantings are apt to do more harm than good. And it’s nearly impossible to distinguish decent projects from bad ones. 

First there is the problem of duplicity, not unusual among tree-planting outfits. Consider Plant for the Planet, the organization behind the Trillion Tree Campaign. In March 2019, the German newspaper Die Zeit revealed that the group’s website was rife with untruths. For example, one person—a “Valf F.” from France—was reported to have single-handedly planted 682 million trees. 

The other, larger problem is the ecological havoc tree planters can wreak if they are not careful. Few divulge what species they plant. Fewer still commit to planting only native species. Those who do commit are apt to plant monocultures, which are nearly worthless to wildlife and vulnerable to disease, insects, and wind. Forests are complex machines with millions of meshing parts. You can’t plant a forest; you can only plant a plantation. 

Trees planted in wrong places, particularly places that are naturally treeless, do more harm than good and trash native ecosystems. Prairies, for example, provide important habitat for all manner of wildlife. But ever since European settlement, Americans have been destroying them with trees. When J. Sterling Morton moved to Nebraska from Michigan in 1854, he decided that Mother Nature had gotten it all wrong. In due course he called forth “a grand army of husbandmen … to battle against the timberless prairies,” and on April 10, 1872, established the first Arbor Day. Twenty-four hours later, Nebraskan prairies had been degraded by roughly 1 million planted trees. 

Tree planting, especially on Arbor Day, became a national obsession. In celebration of the 100^th anniversary of Arbor Day, the Nebraska-based Arbor Day Foundation was formed. It hasn’t deviated far from Morton’s mindset. Join and you can receive 10 free Colorado blue spruce seedlings with instructions on how to plant them. This would be fine if you live in the central or southern Rockies. But everywhere else, these trees are aliens. 

Illustrating the extent of our current tree-planting craze is the recent marketing of biodegradable coffee cups impregnated with tree seeds. Not only do they encourage littering, but they guarantee that wrong trees will be planted in wrong places. 

But such slapdash planting is an American tradition. In 1876, possibly inspired by Arbor Day, a man named Ellwood Cooper sought to improve his 2,000-acre, mostly treeless ranch near Santa Barbara, California, with 50,000 eucalyptus seedlings. They shot up 40 feet in just three years, an unheard-of growth rate for which they became known as “miracle trees.” Eucalyptus trees are not native to California. 

Shortly thereafter, the University of California and the state Department of Forestry distributed free eucs for everyone to plant. Prairies, chaparral, and cutover forestland were jammed full of these aliens. One hundred years after the first Arbor Day, 271,800 acres of eucalyptus had been planted in the U.S., 197,700 of them in California. 

When I inserted my arm into euc leaf and bark litter in Bolinas, California, I couldn’t touch the bottom. That’s because the microbes and insects that eat it are in Australia, not California. Native plant communities can’t survive in these plantations because eucs kill competition with their own herbicide, creating what botanists call “eucalyptus desolation.” Eucs evolved with fire and prosper from it. Their tops don’t just burn; they explode. Living near them is like living beside a gasoline refinery staffed by chain smokers. 

But eucs remain popular in California. They’re still being planted. And agencies seeking to protect the public and recover native ecosystems by razing eucs inevitably face the fury of eucalyptus lovers who have, for example, accused them of being “plant Nazis.” 

According to a mantra heard for more than three decades, trees are good, even if they disrupt native ecosystems, because they can serve as carbon sinks. In 1988, the then–113-year-old American Forestry Association (now American Forests) initiated its Global ReLeaf campaign under the shibboleth “Plant a tree, cool the globe.” Too bad it’s not that simple. A study led by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory concludes that any carbon sequestration benefit from trees planted much north of Florida is more than offset because solar heat absorbed and retained by the trees makes the climate warmer. 

The notion that any significant percent of the carbon humanity spews can be sucked up by planted trees is a pipe dream. But it got rocket boosters in July, when Zurich’s Crowther Lab published a paper, in Science, proclaiming that planting a trillion trees could store “25 percent of the current atmospheric carbon pool.” That assertion is ridiculous, because planting a trillion trees, one-third of all trees currently on earth, is impossible. Even a start would require the destruction of grasslands (prairies, rangelands, and savannas) that reflect rather than absorb solar heat and that, with current climate conditions, are better carbon sinks than natural forests, let alone plantations. Also, unlike trees, grasslands store most of their carbon underground, so it’s not released when they burn. 

The Crowther paper horrified climate scientists and ecologists, 46 of whom wrote a rebuttal, explaining that planting trees in the wrong places would exacerbate global warming, create fire hazards, and devastate wildlife. They rebuked the authors for “suggesting grasslands and savannas as potential sites for restoration using trees” and for overestimating by a factor of 5 “potential for new trees to capture carbon.” 

Tree plantations are already destroying natural areas that are far more efficient at storing carbon—wetlands, for example. When organic detritus is trapped underwater it can’t release carbon because there’s no oxygen for decomposition. Carbon sequestration efficiency of coastal wetlands (marshes, mangroves and seagrasses) actually increases with global warming because, as sea levels rise, more and more storage space for detritus becomes available. 

Ill-conceived tree plantings can dewater wetlands. Consider the yet-to-be-launched initiative to plant 2.4 billion trees in India’s Cauvery River basin, which is the brainchild of the Isha Foundation, based in Coimbatore, India. Leonardo DiCaprio, whose foundation is a major backer, received a letter in September from 95 of India’s environmental and public interest groups that cited litigation against the plan. It read in part: “Biodiversity, forests, grasslands and the massive deltaic region that this river nurtures would be devastated. … It appears to be a programme that presents, rather simplistically, that the river can be saved by planting trees on banks of her streams, rivulets, tributaries and the floodplains … a method that promotes a monoculturist paradigm of landscape restoration which people of India have rejected long ago.” The Isha Foundation dismissed the letter as an attempt “to gain publicity.” 

Similarly, in September Ireland committed to planting 440 million trees as part of its Climate Action Plan. Many of them will be commercially valuable Sitka spruce from North America’s Pacific Northwest. When they’re harvested, sequestered carbon will spew back into the atmosphere. Meanwhile, these aliens will be drying up wetlands, increasing global warming by absorbing and retaining solar heat, and, as the Irish Wildlife Trust warns, speeding extirpation of fish and wildlife (ongoing because of previous alien-tree plantings). 

The notion that tree planting is an elixir for what ails the earth is as popular with polluters as it is with nations, a fact that spawned the “carbon offset industry.” Polluters hire third parties—often unseen, uninterviewed, and in other countries—to plant any kind of trees, anywhere. For instance, in November, EasyJet announced that it will spend $33 million for tree planting and other carbon-reduction schemes, supposedly rendering itself the first airline to offset all its CO₂ pollution. In February Delta Air Lines pledged to zero out its carbon emissions by spending $1 billion over the next decade. While it was vague on how this will be accomplished, tree planting is reportedly part of the strategy. 

Carbon offsetting has been likened to “indulgences,” the forgiveness notes hawked by the pre-Reformation Catholic Church—go and sin no more unless, of course, you pay us off again for future sins. Also, hired tree planters frequently charge for trees that would be planted anyway or pocket the money and plant nothing. 

According to Kevin Anderson, professor of energy and climate change at the U.K.’s University of Manchester, the entire carbon offset industry is a “scam.” In 2019, after two decades of carbon offsetting, CO₂ levels peaked at the highest levels in recorded history. 

Carbon offsetting might work if polluters paid parties to protect existing forests and maybe also restore wetlands and grasslands by cutting planted and invading trees. On 400,000 acres in Montana, the American Prairie Reserve recovers native prairie by razing alien Russian olive and Chinese locust trees and reseeding bare, abandoned cropland with a native prairie mix. 

The same restoration is done by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at national wildlife refuges such as Bowdoin and Medicine Lake, both in Montana. “I have old photos showing settlers out on the prairie, and there’s not a single tree in the background,” says Neil Shook, who manages these two refuges. “Now the same places are littered with trees. By cutting trees we’re seeing increases in prairie vegetation and grassland songbirds. But people are still planting Russian olives. Right outside our boundaries you can see what will happen if we don’t cut. That private land is just full of trees.” 

Thanks to aggressive tree removal by the USFWS at Union Slough National Wildlife Refuge in Iowa, prairie-dependent plants, birds, and mammals are surging back. For years, tree lovers have railed at Union Slough managers, accusing them of such malfeasance as “arboricide.” But as the refuge presses on the noise fades. 

Reform seems to take two steps back and three forward. “We’re pushing hard for San Francisco to plant native trees that will bring wildlife into the city and link it with our parks,” remarks Jacob Sigg of the California Native Plant Society. “But the old-boy network plants non-natives and is deaf to our arguments. Planting any trees anywhere sends chills down my spine. I do see progress, but then I hear some prominent person talking about planting a ‘trillion trees.’ ” 

Sigg brightened when I asked about Angel Island. It had been blighted by eucalyptus desolation when I’d seen it. Now, he reported, virtually all the eucs have been cut and chipped, and native grasslands and scrub oaks have recovered. The California Department of Parks and Recreation had not been deaf to the society’s arguments. In the face of savage bullying from groups like POET (Preserve Our Eucalyptus Trees), it stood tall. 

I think the great landscape photographer Ansel Adams put it best when he helped run tree-planting Boy Scouts off the prairie in what’s now the Golden Gate National Recreation Area: “I cannot think of a more tasteless undertaking than to plant trees in a naturally treeless area, and to impose an interpretation of natural beauty on a great landscape that is charged with beauty and wonder, and the excellence of eternity.” Treeless landscapes are not only natural, in many cases—they’re better for the Earth, too. 

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