Andy Borowitz | Trump Stays Up All Night With Sharpie Crossing Out Lev Parnas in Photos With Him

19 January 20

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Disaster Fundraising: Is That All That Works?

It’s nearly impossible at this point to run a normal fundraiser. Unless things get seriously dire we get no support. That is one bad formula.

Again a “reasonable” stream of donations fixes all of this.

At this stage the January fundraising drive is - far - behind where it should be.

In earnest.

Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News

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18 January 20

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REVELATION: FUNDING THE ORGANIZATION IS NOT A CRIME: What all this hoopla over fundraising is all about is a basic budget for the organization. It a simple thing, a straight forward thing and something that, when ignored creates large immediate problems. It’s funding, getting it squared away is not a crime, it’s a necessity. In earnest. / Marc Ash, Founder Reader Supported News

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Andy Borowitz | Trump Stays Up All Night With Sharpie Crossing Out Lev Parnas in Photos With Him

Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
Borowitz writes: "Donald J. Trump pulled an all-nighter on Wednesday, using a Sharpie to cross out Lev Parnas from photos taken with him at hundreds of events."
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Devin Nunes. (photo: CNN)

New Evidence Shows a Nunes Aide in Close Conversation With Parnas
Catherine Kim, Vox
Kim writes: "The House Intelligence Committee released a new trove of evidence on Friday that appears to show extensive contact between the top aide for House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Devin Nunes (R-CA) and Lev Parnas, a former Rudy Giuliani ally and a key figure in the Ukraine scandal."
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Protesters in Tehran demonstrated against a U.S. air strike, in Iraq, that killed the Iranian general and foreign-military mastermind Qassem Soleimani. (photo: Ebrahim Noroozi/AP/Shutterstock)

Iran Has a 'Shockingly Strong' War-Crimes Case Against Trump Over Soleimani's Killing - and It Could Win
Mitch Prothero, Business Insider
Prothero writes: "Iran will pursue war-crimes charges against President Donald Trump at the International Criminal Court in the Hague over the January 3 assassination of its top commander, Gen. Qassem Soleimani."
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The original, unaltered photo of the 2017 Women's March in the District. An altered version appears in an exhibit at the National Archives. (photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images)

National Archives Exhibit Blurs Images Critical of President Trump
Joe Heim, The Washington Post
Heim writes: "The large color photograph that greets visitors to a National Archives exhibit celebrating the centennial of women's suffrage shows a massive crowd filling Pennsylvania Avenue NW for the Women's March on Jan. 21, 2017, the day after President Trump's inauguration."
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A police line during the eviction. (photo: Twitter/@solomonout)

Keeping Homeless Families Homeless, by Force

Indigo Oliver, Jacobin

Oliver writes: "When our housing system's primary function is to enrich capitalists rather than provide for humans' basic needs, it's no surprise that developers would deploy a small army to remove homeless families from an empty home."

n the morning of January 14, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office sent a small army to 2928 Magnolia Street in Oakland, California. With the house flanked by police dressed in military fatigues and an armored vehicle standing nearby, the sheriff’s men arrested two mothers after breaking the door down with a battering ram in a pre-dawn raid.

The two women are part of a collective of unhoused and marginally housed mothers called Moms 4 Housing. They, and two other mothers, had been occupying the vacant house with their children since November, though the property has remained empty for years. More than just a way to take shelter, the mothers’ residency in the empty home was a protest against the larger housing crisis that has gripped Oakland, which has some of the fastest rising rents of any city in the United States.

The home was bought in a foreclosure auction by Wedgewood Inc., a real estate investment firm that boasts of being the country’s largest “fix and flip” company. Hundreds of people had gathered the previous night after being alerted that the sheriff’s department was on their way to enforce the eviction notice.

Oakland has experienced some of California’s most rapid gentrification in recent years. The enormous influx of tech profits from neighboring Silicon Valley coupled with decades of segregation, disinvestment, and redlining have created a perfect storm to displace working-class families, particularly in majority-black communities. In Alameda County, where this showdown occurred, an $89,600 salary for a family of four is considered “low-income.”

Black communities have historically been shut out of homeownership, which contributes significantly to generational wealth or lack thereof. Decades of housing discrimination, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes, were followed by “a long period of predatory inclusion.” In the years leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, black homeowners were twice as likely to be given a subprime loan. “This historic collapse in black homeownership is an important part of why the wealth gap between black and white Americans is larger today than it has been in decades,” says Taylor.

In cities like Oakland, those foreclosed homes have created an opening for a multibillion-dollar market to emerge. Developers use houses as an investment vehicle, distributed on a large scale with the goal of making a profit — driving up rents in the process.

Wedgewood, which ended up with 2928 Magnolia in its portfolio, buys some 250 foreclosed homes a month. According to their website, the company “was built on the flip business and since 2009 has been actively engaged in the nonperforming loan market.” The company has also been accused of wrongfully evicting tenants on three separate occasions. After filing a “right to possession” in court on the basis that housing is a human right, Dominique Walker, one of the mothers arrested Tuesday, had her claim denied.

Among the demands coming from Moms 4 Housing was to resell the property to the Oakland Community Land Trust (OakCLT) at the price Wedgewood purchased it for, half a million dollars, to ensure that the house remains permanently affordable. Community land trusts as a form of common stewardship over land emerged during the Civil Rights Movement in the rural South. OakCLT provides “community ownership of land and resident control of housing” in order to remove property from the speculative market.

Oakland, once considered “undesirable” in the Bay Area, has become a relatively new frontier for developers and tech workers alike to settle. As a result, the city has seen its black residents pushed out: between 2001 to 2011 the black population dropped by 25 percent. But in a city where empty houses outnumber the homeless four-to-one, these property arrangements can only be maintained through force.

Two days after the raid, Misty Cross, one of the moms arrested, recounted the experience on Democracy Now!:

Once the sheriffs actually made their way through the door to get in a little bit, they sent in a robot that came in to roam around the home to see if there was any explosives or weapons of some form. I later found out that the tank that they had outside [had] a detection on it that can shoot people and detect weapons on site, just by like a metal detector. So it would shoot at anything that had some form of weapon on them. I just still am like traumatized from it.

Private companies like Wedgewood, who have a legally enforceable deed to empty properties, have no obligation to enter into negotiations with these mothers — they can simply call the county to send a small battalion of heavily armed officers.

A movement demanding a right to housing has emerged recently. Elected officials like Rep. Ilhan Omar have begun to take that demand up. We’ll need much more of such organizing. Otherwise, the kind of asymmetrical warfare that we saw at 2928 Magnolia against people whose only crime is needing housing will only grow.

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Over the past year, of the 250,000 Guatemalan migrants detained at the U.S.-Mexican border, more than half are Mayans, and many speak no or little Spanish. (photo: DN!)

Interpretation Crisis at the Border Leads to Deportation of Mayan-Language Speakers Seeking Refuge
Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "As the U.S. continues to use hostile policies to stop people from seeking refuge and asylum in the United States, we look at a key problem that is preventing migrants from getting due process, and in many cases getting them deported: inadequate interpretation for indigenous asylum seekers who speak Mayan languages."







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Dr. Christy Brigham locates a group of dead sequoias and observes a fallen monarch. (photo: Patrick Greenfield/Guardian UK)

'This Is Not How Sequoias Die. It's Supposed to Stand for Another 500 Years'
Patrick Greenfield, Guardian UK
Greenfield writes: "The fable of the giant sequoia tree is an enduring tale of America's fortitude. Standing quietly on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada, the Californian giants can survive almost anything - fire, disease, insect attack, cold years, hot years, drought - so the story goes."

Giant sequoias were thought to be immune to insects, drought and wildfires. Then the unthinkable happened: trees started to die – and scientists began the search for answers

he fable of the giant sequoia tree is an enduring tale of America’s fortitude. Standing quietly on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada, the Californian giants can survive almost anything – fire, disease, insect attack, cold years, hot years, drought – so the story goes.

The largest living organisms on the planet can grow over 90 metres (300ft) tall. When they do die after 3,000 years or so, the oldest trees, known as monarchs, usually succumb to their own size and collapse. Their giant trunks will rest on the forest floor for another millennia.

But the miraculous story of the near-indestructible giant trees that millions of Americans tell their children is no longer true.

For the first time in recorded history, tiny bark beetles emboldened by the climate crisis have started to kill giant sequoia trees, according to a joint National Park Service and US Geological Survey study set to be published later this year. Twenty-eight have gone since 2014. The combination of drought stress and fire damage appears to make the largest sequoias susceptible to deadly insect infestations that they would usually withstand.

One of the 28 is the optimistically named Lazarus, which stands in the Giant Forest in Sequoia national park, surrounded by other sequoias and a handful of cedars and pines that died in California’s great drought.

When Dr Christy Brigham, who is responsible for the welfare of the ecosystems in Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks, saw Lazarus for the first time, all she could do was weep.

“This is a tree that has lived through 2,000 years of fires, other droughts, wet years, dry years, hot years, cold years. It’s been here longer than Europeans have been in this country and it’s dead. And it shouldn’t be dead. This is not how giant sequoias die. It’s suppose to stand there for another 500 years with all its needles on it, this quirky, persistent, impressive, amazing thing, and then fall over. It’s not supposed to have all of its needles fall off from the top to the bottom and then stand there like that. That’s not how giant sequoias die,” she says, standing next to the skeletal Lazarus as the occasional tourist wanders past.

Even as tens of millions of trees died around them in California’s historic drought, reassuringly the vast majority of giant sequoias appeared to stand strong, as they had always done. But in 2017, Dr Nathan Stephenson, a forest ecologist with the US Geological Survey, noticed a live branch showing signs of beetle damage had fallen from a giant sequoia. Trees had died standing since 2014, but the fallen branches were the first indication of what might be going on. He incubated the branch for further research.

“Hundreds of beetles came out of these pieces of branch. We went back the next spring and that part of the tree that had been sampled was now dead,” he recalls, detailing how the giant sequoia faded to its death from the top down. Stephenson emphasises that there is still further research to do on how bark beetles are killing giant sequoias but he is clear on one thing.

“I think beyond reasonable doubt in the limited set of circumstances, which was the most severe drought on record and all the trees had had a recent fire at their base, you can weaken giant sequoias to the point that bark beetles can kill them.”

The post-mortem site of another monarch that died in this way stretches along the forest floor a short walk from Lazarus. The tree, unnamed, had been felled and cut into chunks to protect tourists passing on a nearby road. At what would have been the top, the bark exhibits the telltale cause of death: the elegant spirals and grooves of beetle galleries, formed where the insects are thought to have entered and slowly killed the weakened tree.

It is hard not to reflect on what the dead giant sequoia had endured and what awaits other trees in California’s groves. As CO2 levels continue to rise, wildfires grow in intensity and the climate crisis alters ecosystems in just a few years, what does the future hold for these giants of the forest?

“Predicting the future is a fool’s errand. But I would expect a ramping up of what we’ve already seen,” Stephenson says. Stephenson does not expect the widespread mortality events seen in other trees on the west coast but as everyone the Guardian speaks to emphasises, nobody has seen this before.

More than a century of fire suppression has hurt the health of these forests. Since the late 1880s, landscapes that are meant to burn regularly in California have not, causing a huge buildup of wood and dead trees on the forest floor. When the inevitable fires do come, they are increasingly not slow, smouldering blazes that clear the forest floor and invite new life to thrive. The fires are intense, more regular than they should be, incinerating monarch sequoias that should be able to survive.

Those trees that have succumbed from the top down in the drought – flagging first, then turning deathly autumnal orange – now stand grey on the mountainside in their millions, including many at famous views in Yosemite.

Yosemite national park, famous for its climbing, landscapes and wildlife, is struggling to deal with the wave of dead trees. They line roads, threatening to topple on cars, campsites, buildings. Dead trees are felled every day just to keep the forest safe, but there is only so much that can be done.

The bark beetle thought to have killed the sequoias, Phloeosinus punctatus, is different to the pine and spruce beetles that have claimed hundreds of millions of trees in Siberia, Europe and North America. But scientists are concerned about the classification of Phloeosinus and want further study.

Whatever new information emerges, Brigham is clear: “I can see why people could be confused because we are standing in a bog looking at giant sequoias that we say were killed by drought. It also doesn’t help that we’ve been telling people for 100 years that drought, fire and insects don’t kill giant sequoias. And now what I’m telling you is that the combination of drought, fire and insects is killing giant sequoias.”

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