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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FAIR: Corporate Media Team With Trump to Disparage Public Health Experts

View article on FAIR's website Corporate Media Team With Trump to Disparage Public Health Experts JULIE HOLLAR To the New York Times' Michael Powell (7/6/20), what's interesting about public health experts' recommendations about protests and Covid is not whether they were accurate, but what he saw as the experts' "conflicted feelings." Public health experts, unaccustomed to the spotlight, have really taken a beating lately. As they tirelessly work to unravel the mysteries of the Covid pandemic (and are increasingly burning out), the president of our country has constantly attacked and undermined them—and, lately, so have corporate media. In a July 6 report, the New York Times seemed bizarrely eager to cast doubt on those experts' intentions. "Are Protests Dangerous? What Experts Say May Depend on Who’s Protesting What," read the headline over Michael Powell's report. The subhead continued the framing of the experts as hypocrites: Public health experts decried the anti-lockdown protests as dangerous gatherings in a pandemic. Health experts seem less comfortable doing so now that the marches are against racism. Many readers wouldn't be terribly surprised at the story, since it's a curiously late addition to the small flurry of coverage around a letter circulated more than a month ago, signed by more than 1,200 public health experts, that supported the wave of anti-racist protests that erupted around the country after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The letter—which the Times notably did not link to, though it did link to two negative media responses to it—began by recognizing that many public health experts had condemned the white armed protesters who took over the Michigan State Capitol building, who were "protesting stay-home orders and calls for widespread public masking to prevent the spread of Covid-19." After explaining that "white supremacy is a public health issue that predates and contributes to Covid-19," they wrote that while they support staying at home, social distancing and public masking, they do not condemn [anti-racism] gatherings as risky for Covid-19 transmission. We support them as vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people in the United States. The letter carefully distinguished this from the protests against stay-at-home orders, which "not only oppose public health interventions, but are also rooted in white nationalism and run contrary to respect for Black lives." It continued by offering guidance for protesters and allies to minimize transmission risk at protests, like wearing masks, maintaining distance where possible, staying home when sick and providing hand sanitizer to protesters. It seems pretty clear: Black people and other people of color are disproportionately hospitalized and dying of the disease, not as a result of some biological difference but because of the ways that systemic racism has put them at greater risk. Therefore, racism is a vital public health issue—both in general, as people of color suffer worse overall health outcomes than white people, and specifically concerning Covid-19. So it's clearly not a question of "who" is protesting, as the Times' headline suggests. It does matter very much "what" is being protested. In the case of the anti-lockdown protesters, the entire goal was to make government officials flout public health experts' recommendations for infection control. Obviously, those actions couldn't be supported from a public health perspective—not to mention that, given their agenda, most protesters were not wearing masks or keeping distance. It's worth noting, too, that experts' understanding of the novel coronavirus' transmission has played a role in shifting recommendations. Early on, less was understood about transmission, which is why full lockdowns were encouraged: If people aren't near each other, they can't pass the virus to each other, whatever its preferred mode of transmission. As more research has emerged showing that outdoor activities are far less dangerous, and that masks seem to make a big difference in preventing transmission, experts can make finer-grained recommendations about which activities are higher and lower risk. Since anti-racism protesters were largely compliant with mask wearing, moving around rather than staying in one place, and in many cases attempting to keep distance from others, many experts judged that their outdoor activities were relatively low risk, particularly when weighed against the potential benefits from any outcomes that worked to dismantle systemic racism. (Note that public health experts are not a monolith—they are individuals with individual perspectives and judgments—and not infallible. The public health experts at the WHO, in the most obvious example of both of these points, clung to their recommendation against universal mask wearing until well after the pandemic was underway—CNN, 3/30/20—and likewise refused to acknowledge mounting evidence pointing to airborne transmission until just this week, under pressure from hundreds of other health experts around the world—Reuters, 7/7/20.) But like many who came before him (FAIR.org, 6/10/20), the Times' Powell was eager to skim over all these nuances, erasing the public health distinctions between the two kinds of protests. He played up the political distinctions to paint epidemiologists and other health experts as hypocritical, feeding the media narrative that they were "politicizing science." At the time of the letter, other outlets similarly cried foul. "Suddenly, Public Health Officials Say Social Justice Matters More Than Social Distance," huffed Politico (6/4/20). "The Protesters Deserve the Truth About the Coronavirus; Public Health Experts Should Strive to Provide a Neutral Accounting of Risk," scolded the Atlantic (6/4/20). The right wing, which has been attacking public health experts since the beginning of the pandemic, went predictably nuts; Jonah Goldberg (Dispatch, 6/5/20) went so far as to accuse epidemiologists of "treason." Some on the left, too, offered up false arguments to condemn the public health experts who supported the anti-racist protests, arguing that if they counseled everyone to stay at home in the face of the pandemic, at extreme economic and psychological cost, they certainly couldn't say it's okay for some to now go out and protest. In a widely-cited essay in the Guardian (6/8/20), Thomas Chatterton Williams (who later spearheaded a letter at Harper's decrying so-called cancel culture and the "vogue for public shaming" on the left) leaned on ideas of political correctness gone amok to argue that "two weeks ago we shamed people for being in the street; today we shame them for not being in the street." Public health experts, he wrote, are "politicizing science" and "have hemorrhaged credibility and authority." According to the Intercept's Glenn Greenwald (6/11/20), "People who left their homes for any reason other than officially approved 'essential' functions were—no matter how careful they were—publicly shamed if not fined and arrested." Glenn Greenwald in the Intercept (6/11/20) was similarly outraged, calling the letter's distinction between the two kinds of protests plainly political judgments, not scientific ones, and the shoddy, glaring conflation of them is nothing less than a manipulation, an abuse, of public health credentials. For scientists to purport to dictate which citizens can and cannot safely choose to leave their house — based not on health judgments but on their political ideology — is repressive, and certain to erode the credibility of their profession. Yet this is exactly what they are doing: explicitly and shamelessly. Again, it's not about "which citizens" can leave their house, it's about the purpose of the leaving: Why would public health experts not condemn efforts to pressure governments to rescind public health measures? And it expressly is about health judgments—both about the relatively low risks of sporadic, masked outdoor protests versus the high risks of people going about their normal business, and about the health judgment that protests against racism could improve health outcomes for people of color, during and beyond Covid-19. Moreover, Greenwald, like Williams, the Atlantic's Conor Friesendorf and others, seems convinced that public health ought to be somehow objective, scientific and neutral, not political. But public health can't avoid being political. Managing the health of an entire population is done through policy decisions, many of which people will disagree about. Gun control, smoking, obesity—so many of our major public health issues are highly politicized. If we want public health experts to tell us how to maximize our health, we can't at the same time insist that they only tell us about certain narrow kinds of health outcomes, or health outcomes for certain kinds of people. Williams and Greenwald appeared less concerned about hypocrisy concerning different kinds of protests and mostly upset about—as Greenwald put it—the apparently sudden deviation from the previous "dictate" from public health experts "that we could not go outside for any reason." Greenwald wrote: One of two things is true; either 1) these protests will lead to a significant spike in coronavirus infections and deaths, in which case public health experts should reconcile that outcome with how they could have encouraged and endorsed them; or 2) it will not lead to such a spike, in which case it will appear that the months of extreme, draconian lockdowns—which caused great suffering and deprivation around the world—were excessive, misguided and unwarranted. First of all, stay-at-home orders were not intended to keep people locked up inside; since the beginning of the pandemic, health experts have been recommending that people continue to get outdoor exercise while maintaining social distance (NPR, 4/1/20). Perhaps more importantly, the economic hardship caused by lockdowns does not happen in an apolitical bubble; as public health experts Julia Marcus and Gregg Gonsalves pointed out in the Atlantic (6/11/20), they and many other such experts have long been pushing for massive economic assistance to help forestall such fallout, as has been done quite successfully in many other countries. In other words, lockdowns do not have to lead to the kind of suffering and deprivation being experienced right now in this country, and no public health expert is advocating that. There’s now been more than enough time to judge the impact of the protests on infections—and, despite nefarious police tactics that raised risks of transmission (like kettling, using tear gas, and not letting arrested protesters wear masks while they were held for long periods in police custody), there is no evidence that the protests spurred outbreaks; no increases in infection rates in places that saw some of the biggest protests, like Minneapolis, New York City and Washington, DC, and in fact an increase in social distancing in places where protests took place, which presumably helped drive down transmission (NEBR, 6/20). On the other hand, in several US states that have relaxed their "draconian" lockdowns in a manner at odds with public health experts' recommendations, infections are beginning to escalate exponentially. So, in fact, neither of Greenwald's two things are true: Public health experts did not recklessly abet a spike in protest-related infections, nor have their recommendations for lockdowns in the face of increasing transmission been proven unfounded. Which brings us back to the Times article, which came a full month after the letter was first published, and well after the outcome was clear. Perhaps to justify the existence of his article, Powell left open a wide berth for alternate interpretations of the data: "There is as of yet no firm evidence that protests against police violence led to noticeable spikes in infection rates." But of course, it's not just no "firm" evidence—Powell offered no evidence, period. So why run this story, framed in this way, now? With nothing new to contribute, the article serves only to further erode trust in the very people we have to rely on to get us out of the disaster we're currently in.

© 2020 Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting. All rights reserved. Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting Our mailing address is: FAIRNESS & ACCURACY IN REPORTING 124 W. 30th Street, Suite 201 New York, NY 10001 FAIR's Website FAIR counts on your support to do this work — please donate today.

RSN: Juan Cole | Sanders, AOC, Tlaib Threaten to Cut Israeli Funding if Netanyahu Annexes 1/3 of Palestinian West Bank

06 July 20

It's Live on the HomePage Now:
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Juan Cole | Sanders, AOC, Tlaib Threaten to Cut Israeli Funding if Netanyahu Annexes 1/3 of Palestinian West Bank

Juan Cole, Informed Comment
Cole writes: "Progressive members of Congress will circulate a letter on Tuesday threatening US funding for Israel if the Netanyahu government proceeds with its plans to steal one third of the Palestinian West Bank in July."
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World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus attends a news conference Friday in Geneva. (photo: Reuters)

Scientists Urge WHO to Address Airborne Spread of Coronavirus
James McAuley and Emily Rauhala, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "More than 200 scientists from over 30 countries are urging the World Health Organization to take more seriously the possibility of the airborne spread of the novel coronavirus as case numbers rise around the world and surge in the United States."
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Magazine editor William F. Buckley, Jr., editor of the National Review, holds a copy of the magazine as he makes a statement on the steps of the U.S. Courthouse on May 13, 1958. (photo: Intercept/Bettmann Archive)

National Review Is Trying to Rewrite Its Own Racist History
Ryan Grim, The Intercept
Grim writes: "Stuart Stevens, who has gone from running Mitt Romney's campaign for president in 2012 to a perch as a leading Never Trumper, is out with a new book: his mea culpa of sorts, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump."
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This photo provided by WROC-TV shows the remnants of a Frederick Douglass statue ripped from its base at a park in Rochester, N.Y., Sunday, July 5, 2020. (photo: Ben Densieski/WROC-TV/AP)

Frederick Douglass Statue Vandalized in Rochester Park
Associated Press
Excerpt: "A statue of abolitionist Frederick Douglass was ripped from its base in Rochester on the anniversary of one of his most famous speeches, delivered in that city in 1852."
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Ransomware. (photo: Getty Images)

New Mac Ransomware Is Even More Sinister Than It Appears
Lily Hay Newman, Ars Technica
Excerpt: "ThiefQuest or EvilQuest can grab passwords and credit card numbers."
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Ethiopian military ride on their pick-up truck as they pa

Uneasy Calm in Ethiopia After Protests, Official Death Toll Doubles
Dawit Endeshaw, Reuters
Endeshaw writes: "More than 166 people were killed during anti-government protests in Ethiopia last week, the government said on Sunday, as the capital and other hotspots remained closely guarded by security forces and a blanket Internet shutdown entered its sixth day."
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Australia's native guava was the hardest hit by the fungus. (photo: Wikimedia/Scientific American)

Australian Plant Species Face 'Imminent Extinction' From Invasive Pathogen
John R. Platt, Scientific American
Excerpt: "The once-common native guava has nearly vanished - killed off by an invasive fungus that arrived just 10 years ago. Other plant species may soon follow."

or Australia’s native guava, death came in the form of a fungus.

Just 10 years ago, a virulent strain of the fungus Austropuccinia psidii arrived in New South Wales. First observed in Hawaii in 2005, the fungus causes a devastating plant disease called myrtle rust, which has quickly and mysteriously spread around the world—most likely through industrial shipping and other elements of our global economy. Each species that encounters the fungus displays different levels of resistance, but many plants experience deformed leaves, defoliation, stunted growth and even death. The fungus reproduces prodigiously, spewing out trillions of microscopic spores that can easily be carried to new areas by the wind.

Once the fungus hit Australia it quickly spread from coast to coast, infecting hundreds of species from the Myrtaceae family, which includes native guava, eucalyptus, tea trees and bottle brushes.

Native guava (Rhodomyrtus psidioides) was hit the hardest. Just a decade after myrtle rust first turned up in Australia, the once-common plant is now almost completely incapable of producing seeds, fruits or new growths throughout its range. According to a new study, 23 percent of native guava populations have disappeared. Another 61 percent have been reduced to “root suckers,” little growths that the fungus attacks and kills as soon as they emerge from the ground. Out of 66 regularly monitored guava sites in Queensland and New South Wales, 65 sites have lost every plant.

“The guava itself is just screwed,” says Rod Fensham, an ecologist with the University of Queensland and the Queensland Herbarium who’s the study’s lead author. “It’s so susceptible to the disease, it just kills every living tip. They’re unable to set viable seed, so they’re functionally extinct.”

And it’s not alone. The study predicts that myrtle rust will cause the “imminent extinction” of many other Myrtaceae species. “I reckon there’s at least 15 species that are soon going to be functionally extinct,” Fensham says. “They’re not seeding.”

He sees the effects of the fungus every day while he’s self-isolating at home during the COVID-19 pandemic. “I could take you down to my back garden where I’ve planted some of these Myrtaceae in the last month or two,” he tells me while video chatting from his back porch in Brisbane. “They’re showing signs of the rust already. I’m probably just going to watch them die.”

All this from a relatively invisible threat.

“It’s just these little dust particles floating in the air,” Fensham says. “It’s not a giant bulldozer or fires roaring through the landscape. It’s these particles that innocently arrived as a result of some unknown artifact of globalization.”

The loss of the guava and other Myrtaceae species, Fensham warns, could drive other ecological threats.

An Ecological Loss

As a widespread, fruiting tree, native guava traditionally supports a wide range of other species, including more than 100 pollinating insects. So myrtle rust’s invasion could result in “the local extinction of both the floral resource and disruption of associated plant–insect relationships” throughout the plant’s range, according to the paper.

And it’s not just insects. “Unlike eucalyptus that have got a hard, woody nut, these Myrtaceae have got a fleshy fruit which must be an important resource for frugivores,” Fensham says. “I know people who have had native guavas around their houses, and they say bats just loved them. They were gorging themselves on these guavas. That was only ten years ago and now the thing’s gone.”

Meanwhile the loss of native guava and other Myrtaceae could cause another problem: fire.

Lighting the Wick

Some Myrtaceae species affected by myrtle rust typically grow at the edge of Australia’s rainforests. There they can serve as a kind of barrier, slowing or preventing any fires along the edge from entering the heart of the rainforest. “Their trick is to retard the fire at the edge of the forest, and they do it in a spectacular fashion,” Fensham says. This isn’t the case for species such as eucalyptus, which encourage fire in the bush, but certain rainforest species have a dense, tightly packed canopy that appears to minimize ground layer growth of more flammable plants and block the wind that drives fires.

But as Myrtaceae plants disappear, what replaces them serves the opposite function. The same rainforest edges are also home to another invasive species, a beautiful flowing plant from the American tropics called lantana (Lantana camara). One of the world’s most invasive species, lantana is considered by the Australian government to be a “weed of national significance,” as its quick growth rate—it seeds six times a year—allows it to take over native brushland habitats, converting them to dense, impassable thickets.

It’s also toxic to livestock, and its woody structure serves as ready fuel for forest fires.

Fensham says as Myrtaceae disappears, lantana has the potential to become “sort of a wick into the rainforest.” If the fungus kills off the native plants and the invasive plants replace them, the lantana could carry fire into the normally protected rainforests and the wide range of unique species that live within them.

“It’s a really important source of biodiversity that’s going to be wiped out,” he says. Australia’s recent slate of brushfires has mostly left the county’s rainforests unscathed, but that could change as the loss of Myrtaceae allows lantana to continue its spread.

Resistance and Reservoirs

At the moment, the greatest hope for native guava is the potential that some individuals may show resistance to myrtle rust.

That hasn’t happened yet. “It just doesn’t seem…we can’t find them, for the guava,” Fensham says. There are plants holding on, but barely. The most notable example is at Byron Bay, a popular tourist destination, where just 10 trees remain. “We’re monitoring them, but we expect they’ll just succumb,” he says. “And even if they don’t succumb, they can’t fruit and seed, so they’ll just die of old age and there won’t be another generation.”

Other Myrtaceae species might have more resistance than the guava, although that’s still an area of active research. “It’s a bit early to say. But in some populations of some species, some individuals seem less affected than others.” If researchers do find resistant individuals or populations, there’s a possibility for keeping the various species going.

“The biggest hope for survival,” Fensham says, “is just that we can find some signs of resistance in the wild populations, and then reintroduce those resistant strains back into places where they used to be, but…” His voice trails off.

Meanwhile, the best chance for native guava’s continued existence lies in captivity. Two special “rescue gardens” outside the plant’s native range have been set up to keep the species from totally disappearing. “They’re just beyond the reach of the myrtle rust,” Fensham says. They’re drier than the guava’s normal habitats, so “we might have to water them in droughts, for example, and they become more like a garden than a translocated, self-sustaining population. So that’s wait and see.”

But so far they’ve helped to save the species from extinction, and the 80 plants growing there are doing well.

“What I can tell you is that in these gardens, the guavas look fantastic. So just beyond the reach of the disease in these dryer environments, in a town just an hour and a half to the west of here, the guavas are doing fine, they’re leaping out of the ground. I guess that’s a good news story, and we’ll be adding to these gardens other species that we’re worried about.” 

What Fensham finds most unprecedented about myrtle rust is the speed of its spread and impact.

“You know, I can’t find any documentation of anything else this fast,” he says. “You’ve got the American chestnut blight and the Dutch elm disease, but this seems extraordinarily rapid and severe.”

It’s unprecedented even in Australia, which has one of the highest concentrations of endangered species in the world but relatively few plant extinctions to date.

“Europeans have done some pretty nasty things to this continent,” he says. “It’s remarkable with what we’ve thrown at this continent how few things have gone extinct. And here’s myrtle rust—10, 20 years, we could lose 15 species. Who knows, we could lose more.”

Which brings us back to COVID-19.

“We’ve tried to change the climate of the planet,” Fensham says. “We’ve poisoned our oceans with all these things. And maybe the most critical threat to humanity is just this tiny little organism.”

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