RSN: The Coronavirus Is Airborne. Keep Saying It.

03 August 20

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The Coronavirus Is Airborne. Keep Saying It.

Michael A. Fisher, Slate
Fisher writes: "There is no time to waste. COVID-19 has already killed over 674,000 people, including more than 152,000 Americans."
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A brush fire burns amid the Apple Fire in Banning, Calif. on Saturday. (photo: Ringo H.W. Chiu/AP)

California's Apple Fire Destroys More Than 20,000 Acres
Christianna Silva, NPR
Silva writes: "Multiple wildfires are spreading across California, forcing thousands of people to evacuate their homes in the midst of a global pandemic."
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A view outside the makeshift morgue outside of Bellevue Hospital during the Coronavirus pandemic on April 4, 2020 in New York City. Officials in Hinds County, Mississippi have run out of space to store their dead. (photo: Noam Galai/Getty Images)

Morgues Are Overflowing in Mississippi and Coroners Are Terrified
Larrison Campbell, The Daily Beast
Campbell writes: "COVID-19 deaths are exploding in the state - and it may be a massive undercount. One coroner put it simply: 'It's bad.'"
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QAnon supporters wait for a military flyover at the World War II Memorial during Fourth of July celebrations in Washington. (photo: Evelyn Hockstein/WP)

How the Trump Campaign Came to Court QAnon, the Online Conspiracy Movement Identified by the FBI as a Violent Threat
Isaac Stanley-Becker, The Washington Post
Stanley-Becker writes: "The viral online movement, which took root on Internet message boards in the fall of 2017 with posts from a self-proclaimed government insider identified as 'Q,' has triggered violent acts and occasional criminal cases."
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Oportun boasted $600m in revenues last year - more than 90% of that from the interest rates customers pay on their loans. (image: Eric Pratt/The Guardian/Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)

The Litigious Debt Collectors Targeting Latinos During a Pandemic
Raheem Hosseini, Guardian UK
Hosseini writes: "A California lending company that targets Latinos with high-interest loans is dismissing thousands of lawsuits days after the Guardian questioned the volume of actions against customers."

Oportun, a California loan company that filed 14,000 lawsuits in six months, has dismissed thousands of claims after a Guardian investigation

An investigation by the Guardian has revealed that Oportun Inc is one of the most litigious debt collectors in California, accounting for at least 15% of all small claims filings from July 2017 through June 2018. The company advertises a path to the American dream, but an extraordinary number of its clients end up facing punitive legal action.

According to an analysis of available court records in 20 of California’s 58 counties, the San Carlos-based company filed more than 30,000 collections lawsuits in 2019 and at least 14,000 through the first half of 2020, a period in which the coronavirus outbreak shattered unemployment records and pushed millions of Americans to the brink.

“The number is astounding,” said Noah Zinner, a consumer attorney at Bay Area Legal Aid. “Why are you suing people in small claims? Why are you suing people during a pandemic?”

The company, which sells unsecured personal loans in 12 states and auto loans in California only, declined to provide the total number of lawsuits it filed this year and last in California and Texas, where it has a robust process for filing small claims actions against customers who fall 60 days behind in their payments.

But four days after the Guardian contacted Oportun about its litigious practices, the company announced it would dismiss all pending small claims lawsuits and suspend legal collection efforts during the pandemic.

The company also said it would reduce future collections lawsuits by 60% and cap interest rates at 36%.

Raul Vazquez, Oportun’s CEO, told the Guardian last week that his company was spurred by recent media inquiries to examine how Oportun’s debt collection practices compared with larger financial institutions.

“The fact that we were even near the top … and in some counties, we were the top, was not consistent with the way that we seek to position our business as a mission-driven company,” he said.

But suing customers in small claims courts has been a consistent practice for Oportun. At a time when debt collection lawsuits represent the single most common type of civil litigation in America, Oportun stood as a leader in California, deluging Los Angeles county with more than 15,000 lawsuits last year, or one for every 667 residents in a county of over 10 million.

“They’re by far the largest segment of the small claims hearings here in San Diego,” said Alysson Snow, a legal aid attorney. Snow, who serves as the senior consumer protection attorney at the Legal Aid Society of San Diego, said Oportun had inundated her county courthouse with small claims lawsuits because that was the easiest way to secure indefinite monetary judgments against vulnerable people.

“Most of the time they win by default,” Snow said of Oportun. “They know the community they’re targeting, so there’s a lot of people who have questions of legality regarding citizenship status.”

In California, small claims courts do not have to provide interpreters and do not permit legal counsel, which is why even most legal aid organizations have not come across Oportun. If defendants do not show up to court, judges award default judgments against them in favor of the plaintiff. While damages are capped at $2,500 for anyone who files more than two small claims lawsuits a year, Snow and Zimmer said any judgments allowed Oportun to garnish its customers’ wages and pad on interest for at least 10 years.

Two sides of Oportun

It’s difficult to determine how much small claims judgments affect Oportun’s bottom line. The company boasted $600m in revenues last year – more than 90% of that from the interest rates customers pay on their loans.

According to company lore, Oportun was founded in 2005 by three college-age guys who wanted to help their Latino community members build their credit history. The company was called Progreso Financiero back then and, legend has it, distributed its first loan from a folding card table in a Latino grocery store.

In its 15 years, the company has weathered an economic recession, a name change and a bitter lawsuit from one of its founders on its way to becoming a quiet titan of high-interest loan debt.

In 2018, Oportun issued 374,488 unsecured consumer loans worth $1.1bn in principal, according to a report submitted to the California department of business oversight. Nearly 43% of those loans, all for amounts under $2,500, were charged an annualized interest rate between 40% and 69.9%. (California actually permits payday lenders to charge far more in some cases.)

The vast majority of Oportun’s customers fall behind on payments. At the end of 2018, Oportun collected nearly $8.2m in late fees from over 545,000 loans, roughly 75% of its customer portfolio, which numbered more than 743,000 active customers at the end of April.

According to the company’s filings to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Oportun has customer contact centers in Mexico, Colombia and Jamaica, as well as a robust process for filing small claims lawsuits in California and Texas against customers who get too far behind.

Snow said Oportun’s interest rates did not do much to differentiate it from the predatory lenders it claims to be an alternative to.

“This is a desperate person’s type of loan,” she said. “You take out a loan to help pay your electric bill and then all of a sudden you have a [small claims] judgment that puts you in a worse position than you would’ve been without the loan in the first place.”

The loyal customer

That’s what happened to David Barrera, an Oportun customer of two years who was served papers in June.

The 49-year-old El Salvadoran lives with his wife, son, daughter and two granddaughters in a two-level apartment that sits a five-minute walk from Oportun’s office in San Francisco’s Mission District. Barrera works as a desk clerk at a residential hotel in the city, where he makes $16 an hour and tries to stretch his salary to keep a roof over his family’s head. His daughter was laid off during the pandemic and his wife, who has worsening diabetes and painful arthritis, can no longer work.

Like a half-dozen other Oportun customers interviewed by the Guardian, Barrera said he desperately needed a little help to pay his bills. Barrera says a friend told him about a place that lends money to people like them – working-class immigrants with dismal or no credit scores, who don’t have access to traditional loans. It was called Oportun, which means “opportunity” in Spanish.

Spanish-language loan documents show Oportun issued Barrera a $6,500 loan in 2018, which he would have to pay back in biweekly installments of $135 with fees and a 33.9% interest rate. Even if everything went as planned, Barrera would remain in debt to the company for 156 weeks and pay it $4,040.32 more than he borrowed.

But then the pandemic hit and Barrera fell behind. Then came the phone calls, no longer friendly. Then came the lawsuits, one for him and his daughter, who had taken out her own loan before she lost her job.

“If before I was barely making it, now I’m struggling very bad,” Barrera told the Guardian. “I don’t know how I’m going to do it.”

A day after Oportun announced it was suspending all small claims actions along with capping annual percentage rates at 36%, Barrera hadn’t yet gotten his reprieve. In fact, he was sinking deeper into debt to the company. He owes $4,900 on his loan, more than when he first signed his name two years ago.

“I already paid $2,000 and that barely scratched my loan,” he said.

In mid-July, Barrera worked out a weekly payment plan to pay $135 every Saturday. Or thought he did. Two weeks later, he received a letter informing him he was being sued and setting his court date for November. His daughter is due in court the month before.

Vazquez, who joined Oportun in 2012, said his company’s pledge to lower interest rates and wipe out customer lawsuits show the company is serious about helping people like his parents, who are from small mining towns in Mexico. He said all customers have to do is text “defer” to a company representative to get a 30-day grace period.

“As we took a look at what’s happening in our country and around the world, we know that low- and moderate-income communities and communities of color – again, my friends, parents of friends, aunts, uncles, cousins – they’re being hit among the hardest of anyone,” Vazquez said. “So we decided that this was the right time to take a big step forward.”

Snow is not impressed by the recent announcements. She said she first encountered the company when it was still calling itself Progreso Financiero and taped a fake legal summons to her client’s front door “to scare them into paying their debts”.

A company spokesman declined to address that specific allegation, saying in a statement: “We have continually transformed our collections practices since our founding, and we haven’t utilized in-person collectors for over four years. We’ve already taken action on the commitments we announced earlier this week to further evolve our approach.” 

Snow said she only learned the company had rebranded but maintained its rapacious collections appetite when she tagged along with an active-duty service member to his small claims hearing and heard one name dominate the docket: Oportun. “And [I was] like, ‘What the hell is going on? This is crazy,’” she recalled.

According to figures provided by the San Diego superior court, Oportun Inc has sued more than 6,500 people in the county between 2017 and 30 July of this year.

During the 2018 financial year in Sacramento and Orange counties, Oportun filed between 14% and 16% of all collections lawsuits and was the single largest source of small claims filings, outpacing housing agencies, bail bonds agencies and other payday lenders.

The company was responsible for nearly half of all small claims lawsuits in Madera and Tulare counties, and more than a quarter of small claims lawsuits in Fresno county.

In Tulare county, which is 65.6% Hispanic and where Oportun accounted for 46.6% of the 1,507 small claims lawsuits filed in 2017-18, the lending company won uncontested judgments in 38% of the 755 small claims lawsuits it filed in the 2018 calendar year.

In an email following Oportun’s announcement, Snow said the company was “still doing more extensive litigation than any other debt collector at the moment”.

The company has taken a financial hit during the pandemic. Oportun Financial Corp reported a net income loss of $13.3m at the end of March and its publicly traded stock was selling for a high of $15.23 a share on 27 July, down $8.54 since January.

As for Barrera, he was planning to call Oportun on Friday to let them know he wouldn’t be able to make his next $135 payment. He sighs when he thinks of his mounting bills.

“I can tell you, I’m behind on everything. I’m behind with my rent, I’m behind with my bills, my phone bills, I’m behind with everything,” he said. “We are not making it. I mean, we are barely surviving.”

The family has started frequenting food banks to stretch what they already don’t have. Barrera noted that it may actually be cheaper for him to lose in small claims court, where Oportun can obtain a maximum judgment against him of $2,500.

“It’s like way lower than I actually owe,” he said. “I thought about it.”

But Barrera quickly dismissed the idea. He said he’s not one to break his word.

“I never been a person who hides from my duties, my bills, and yeah, I will try to pay them off,” he said.

Oportun’s top executive will probably appreciate it. Vazquez only cleared $3.5m in salary, stock options and incentives last year, down from $4.5m the previous year.

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Voja Antonić and his colleague Jova Regasek (left) putting together the Galaksija prototype in 1983. (photo: Jacobin)

The Lost History of Socialism's DIY Computer
Michael Eby, Jacobin
Excerpt: "The Galaksija computer was a craze in 1980s socialist Yugoslavia, inspiring thousands of people to build versions in their own homes. The idea behind them was simple - to make technology available to everyone."
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Laurie Marker, founder of the Cheetah Conservation Fund, feeds a cheetah rescued by the organization. (photo: Sigi de Vos/NBC News)

Demand for Cheetahs as Pets Is Leading to Their Extinction
Keir Simmons, Sigi de Vos and Henry Austin, NBC News
Excerpt: "A baby cheetah named Vickey, plucked from her mother when she was just a few weeks old, was among hundreds of big cats taken by traffickers to be sold as pets in illegal online markets."

“When they hear the cheetah is expensive, they say, ‘Wow, we must catch them and sell them,’” veterinarian Muse Saed told NBC News earlier this year.

 baby cheetah named Vickey, plucked from her mother when she was just a few weeks old, was among hundreds of big cats taken by traffickers to be sold as pets in illegal online markets.

One of the lucky ones, Vickey was rescued from traders in the East African self-declared state of Somaliland. She would otherwise likely have been shipped to the Middle East, where many cheetahs are kept as pets — status symbols for the rich, who flaunt them on social media, according to the Cheetah Conservation Fund, or CCF, a charity dedicated largely to rescuing and rehabilitating the animals.

She would have been worth thousands of dollars on the open market. And even though the traders from whom she was rescued would only have seen a small percentage of that, it would still have been a small fortune in Somaliland (which, despite a declaration of independence, is internationally recognized as part of Somalia).

The traders in Somaliland make only a fraction of what the online brokers make, but it’s still a lot of money to them.

“When they hear the cheetah is expensive, they say, ‘Wow, we must catch them and sell them,’” Muse Saed, a veterinarian based in Somaliland’s capital, Hargeisa, told NBC News earlier this year.

So the mothers are killed and the cubs taken from their dens, some of them only a few days old.

Saed, who works for the CCF said he cried when he saw Vickey for the first time. She was imprisoned in a small enclosure of rocks, and was “physically very poor and dehydrated.”

For the first five months of her life, she was fed meat just once a week on a starvation diet that stunted her growth. Her diet consisted primarily of camel milk. She barely survived.

The conservation fund believes she was destined for a buyer on the Arabian Peninsula. The cheetahs, stored in cardboard boxes or crates, are shipped across the Gulf of Aden, often to war-torn Yemen, before being transported to their final destinations.

Many end up in Middle Eastern countries such as the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, where their owners often brag about them on social media, despite laws forbidding their ownership.

Fewer than 20 percent survive, the conservation group estimates.

Laurie Marker, an American who founded the CCF in Namibia in 1990 after years of researching cheetahs with the Wildlife Safari in the United States, said Vickey’s survival was “a miracle.”

“Her’s is the worst story ever,” Marker said. “She’s a sweetheart, which is amazing after what she’s been through.”

In May 2018, the Cheetah Conservation Fund began operating in Somaliland, on the Horn of Africa, where it estimates between 300 and 500 of the creatures remain.

Somaliland effectively broke away in 2000 after an internationally backed government struggled to wrest control from clan-based fiefdoms that emerged following the overthrow of the military regime of President Siad Barre in 1991.

Although it has been inching toward stability since another internationally backed government was installed in 2012, the new authorities still face a challenge from Al Qaeda-aligned al-Shabab insurgents.

Confusion surrounding Somaliland’s status means it does “not really have foreign investment,” according to Minister of Environment and Tourism Shukri Haji Ismail Bandare.

That, she said, was hindering progress in the region.

However, Somaliland’s government, which made trafficking the creatures illegal in 2015, was putting “much effort and time to save the cheetahs,” she said.

“It’s a huge challenge because, as the demand is there, the supply will be there,” she said. Confiscating the cheetahs from traders, she said, takes “time, effort, money, everything.”

She said it was “beyond imagination” to think of how the baby cheetahs suffered due to the trade. “You can hold them in the palm of your hand,” she said. “They are our heritage. ... They could become our future if we can save them.”

The scars of Somalia’s violent past are easy to see along Hargeisa’s dirt roads, which are lined with high walls, often pockmarked with bullet holes.

Behind one of them, the conservation fund has set up cheetah “safe houses.”

“Safe House One,” a yellow single-story building lined with razor wire, has been partially turned into a clinic. Shelves are packed with syringes, eye drops and other veterinary essentials.

“Clinic supplies to buy: feeding tube,” read one of the many notes written on a white board.

In the wild, cheetahs, the fastest land animal in the world, reach speeds of up to 70 miles per hour. Keeping them behind walls strikes cheetah experts as torture.

“This is an animal person’s worst nightmare,” Marker said.

In Somaliland, the cheetahs often come to them younger, which makes it harder — and, in many cases, impossible — to “rewild” them, she said.

Vickey is among the cheetahs that cannot be rewilded. If she survives into adulthood, Marker said, she will be used as an ambassador for cheetah conservation.

Still, some of the areas in which cheetah trafficking is taking place are too dangerous for Marker to visit. Her volunteers move around in nongovernmental organization vehicles, identifiable by their red license plates. They are banned from driving at night.

“The one thing this region needs is peace,” Marker said. “And I can’t control that.”

The organization, which has an annual income of $3.5 million to $4 million, hopes eventually to create a reserve for the cheetahs.

It also aims to educate people about the dangers of the illegal cheetah trade.

“We have to educate people; we have to show them the value of wildlife,” Saed said. “You have to explain the law that bans the wildlife trade.”

In the meantime, the organization will continue to care for 41 cheetahs, eight of which it helped to rescue alongside Somaliland authorities in three separate missions over the last two weeks.

“Many people ask us if wildlife trafficking is still happening through COVID-19, and we know the answer is yes,” Marker said in a July 30 news release.

“We’ve become more aware of how coronaviruses can spread, which includes wild animals moving across international borders, so we must stop people from taking animals from the landscape,” she said. “For their health, and ours, too.”

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