Quote of the day: It’s all about the oligarchs

Fro, Bernie Sanders, interviewed by the Guardian:

“Yeah, of course the oligarchs run Russia. But guess what? Oligarchs run the United States as well. And it’s not just the United States, it’s not just Russia; Europe, the UK, all over the world, we’re seeing a small number of incredibly wealthy people running things in their favour. A global oligarchy. This is an issue that needs to be talked about.”

Mr. Fish: THE PROFIT

From the World’s Greatest Living Editorial Cartoonist™:

Eugene V. Debs reviews ‘Birth of a Nation’

Labor leader, radical, Socialist, presidential candidate: Eugene Victor Debs was a homegrown American original. He formed the American Railway Union, led the Pullman strike of the 1890s in which he was jailed and emerged a dedicated Socialist. An idealistic, impassioned fighter for economic and social justice, he was brilliant, eloquent and eminently human. As a “radical” he fought for women’s suffrage, workmen’s compensation, pensions and Social Security — all commonplace today. Five times the Socialist candidate for president, his last campaign was run from federal prison where he garnered almost a million votes.

— From his entry in the U.S. Department of Labor’s Hall of Honor

No figure in American history better exemplifies the role socialism once played in American politics than Eugene V. Debs, whose role in the labor movement began with his time as a railroad fireman.

Shoveling tons of coal into the fireboxes of the massive steam engines that moved endless cars caring the raw materials and finished produced of American industry products and raw materials of industry and agriculture and kept people on the move in a vast and growing land.

As a union organizer he learned political skills he would then use to run for office, both as a successful legislative candidate and as presidential candidate, including one run from a prison cell after his incarceration for opposing America’s participation in the First Word War.

But today we focus on a unique work, a critique of America’s first grand film spectacle, D.W. Griffith’s infamous Birth of a Nation.

Griffith’s film, a Southerner’s paen to the “heroic” role of the Ku Klux Klan in defeating the North’s efforts at Reconstruction of the defeated South following the Civil War, is filled with execrable racist tropes and praises the lethal violence deployed against freed slaves attempting to claim their promised equality.

Debs took on the film in a letter to the editor of his hometown paper, the Terre Haute, Indiana, Post, which the editor ran as a standalone article in the paper’s January 1916 edition under the headline “Debs Says Local Elections Bad as Ones in Big Movie”:

The merits of the spectacular drama The Birth of a Nation excite bitter comment whenever it is presented. There is no question that it is a wonderful production, that many of its scenes are tense and thrilling, and that there is much in the play to approve and commend, but if the author’s studied purpose was to insult the black race and to revive and intensify the bitter prejudices which grew out of the war, he could not have better succeeded. It would be passing strange if the colored people did not protest against certain shocking features of the drama as doing them and their race grossest injustice.

If it be absolutely essential to the play to present those harrowing rape scenes, then why not round them out in their historic completeness and show the dissolute sons of the plantation owner ravishing the black daughter before her parents’ eyes?

For every white woman raped in the South by a black fiend, a thousand black women have been seduced and outraged by white gentlemen; but no hint of this is given in the series of pictures composing The Birth of a Nation. It is only the black brute that is guilty according to this and all other stories written about the Negro by Thomas Dixon, the author, who also calls himself a minister of Christ.

Four Million Mulattos

There are four million mulattos in this country, most of whom were born out of wedlock and all of whom have a white father or grandfather, and these white gentlemen are ready to fight at the drop of the hat for “white supremacy” and against “nigger equality.”

The pretended reverence for Lincoln in the play does not at all square with the facts of history. Lincoln was hated with a savage hate by the slaveowners of the South and it was this ferocious hate that culminated in his assassination. The reverence now shown him on the stage is a convenient mask behind which the same blind hate may vent itself upon the unoffending Negro.

Let it not be overlooked that all our histories have been written by white men and that Negroes had no hand in them. They simply had to take what was given them, but even at that there is no denying the fact that from the time the Negroes were first stolen from their native land by white slave-traders, whom it would be flattery to call brutes, until the last law disfranchising them in the South was put into effect and the last “Jim Crow” car put into commission to attest their standing as livestock, the whole history of the treatment of the Negro race is one of shameless exploitation and degradation, for which the white race can never atone in time nor eternity.

If the black people today could tell their story about The Birth of a Nation, it would be replete with scenes infinitely more cruel and damning than those based upon Dixon’s novel and flashed upon the screen to conceal the white man’s crimes behind the Negro’s misfortune.

Klan Glorified

The Ku Klux Klan are glorified in these pictures as spotless knights, the personification of chivalry and honor, and the audience applauds madly as they dash to the rescue of some imaginary white victim of a black fiend, but care is taken not to portray any of the outrages perpetrated upon defenseless, unoffending Negroes by these same lawless nightriders.

The pictures showing the scenes about the polling places of election day, under Negro domination, are especially calculated to subject the Negro to ridicule and contempt, and the white audience never fails to attest its appreciation by its sneers and cheers.

It’s true such election scenes with their black sluggers and their sodden corruption are disgraceful and revolting, but how much more disgraceful and revolting are they than the election scenes which have occurred in and about Terre Haute during the last few years — scenes in which the sluggers were white, instead of black, and insulted white ladies instead of black wenches; scenes unspeakably low and vile as everyone will admit who bore witness to them? How would it do to make pictures of some of these and travel through the South with them, flashing them upon a screen to show the Negroes in that section what an eminently respectable thing an election is when dominated by white men and by what pure and incorruptible methods the will of the people is expressed in a civilized white community?

Whites Also to Blame

If the white race has demonstrated its “superiority” in any one thing, it is in its politics and elections, and if Negroes should be disfranchised, the evident purpose of Dixon’s pictures, because of their disgraceful conduct at the tolls, then by the same token white men should also be stripped of the ballot and driven from the polling places.

The cheap commercial statistics exhibited at the close of the play to show the progress made by the Negro race is but a weak attempt to excuse the wanton insults heaped upon that race. Intelligent Negroes will not be deceived. The progress they have made is mainly due to themselves. They owe little to the white race as a whole, save their exploitation and degradation.

Let the colored people learn how to depend upon themselves, how to do for themselves, and to win their own way in the world. When they cut loose from the grafting politicians that use them as pawns in the political game and reward one of their number with a spittoon cleaning job in recognition of their race, and stand together; when they begin in earnest to educate themselves and to develop their minds and do their own thinking, they will then command the respect of the white race and of the world, but not before.

Debs’ essay attracted the attention of another remarkable figure, one of the first and perhaps the greatest of America’s early black journalists, Ida B Wells, whose heroic efforts to document lynchings of black Americans remain an iconic chapter in the history of the American press:

Born into slavery, Wells knew first-hand the viciousness of racism, and the terrorism employed to prevent black Americans from their aspirations for equality under the law.

For more on Debs, here’s a little documentary created in 1979 by another socialist who would later make runs at the White House, Sen. Bernie Sanders:

Tweet of the day: Bernie burns ’em

From our favorite solon:

Mr. Fish: BEAR NAKED

From America’s Greatest Living Editorial Cartoonist:

Quote of the day: Hoping for Cold War II

From a Der Spiegel interview with noted British historian of World War II Anthony Beevor:

Having assumed complacently after the collapse of the Soviet Union that the threat of totalitarianism had become unthinkable, especially with the spread of economic and cultural globalism, the liberal West is now facing a decline, and even possibly a collapse, in confidence in parliamentary democracy. The heroic resistance of Ukraine is perhaps the only hope that we will recognize in time the dangers of the general slide towards authoritarianism in an increasingly Manichaean world – that is to say, a new dualism of two power blocs confronting each other: one with a free and liberal stance, and one without.

Under Putin, Russia enters full-blown fascism

Swiss psychiatrist and disillusioned Freudian Carl Gustav Jung, pondering how people often turn their backs on ideals once espoused to become the opposite of their previous aspirations, coined a term for the phenomenon: Enantidromia, which he defined as “the emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time.”

Throughout the first half of the 20th Century, no two ideologies were more violently opposed than internationalist communism and ultranationalist fascism, accounting for at least 30 million Soviet and Nazi German deaths in World War II alone.

Given those massive losses, it would be hard to predict that as of today, the country that spilled so much blood destroying the fascist Nazi empire would become today’s embodiment of the very evil they once shed oceans of blood to destroy.

But today, in a Russia headed by a man who once served in the anti-fascist organs of state security, fascism has emerged yet again, embodied in its President, ex-KGB officer Vladimir Putin.

Just call it a textbook case of entantidromia,

Alexander Motyl, Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University and a New York native born to Ukrainian immigrants, makes the diagnosis in this essay from The Conversation. an plain language academic journal published under a Creative Commons license:

Yes, Putin and Russia are fascist – a political scientist shows how they meet the textbook definition

When Vladimir Putin unleashed an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, the Ukrainian media, public and policymakers almost unanimously began calling the Russian president and the state he leads “rashyst.” The term is a hybrid of a derogatory moniker for Russia – “rasha” – and “fascist.”

Ukrainians did so for two reasons. First, they were countering Putin’s absurd insistence that the Ukrainian authorities – including Ukraine’s Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy – were Nazis and that Ukraine needed to be “de-Nazified.” Since Ukraine’s tiny number of right-wing extremists are about as influential as the Proud Boys in the United States, what Putin really had in mind was Ukrainians with a distinct Ukrainian identity. De-Nazification thus meant de-Ukrainianization.

Second, Ukrainians were drawing attention to those features of Putin’s Russia that indicated that it was fascist and thus in need of “de-Nazification.” Putin’s Russia was aggressive, anti-democratic and enamored of Putin himself. Unsurprisingly, his Russia’s resemblance to the regimes built by Mussolini and Hitler had not gone unnoticed by Russian and Western analysts in the last decade or so.

Few policymakers, scholars and journalists listened, however, as the term fascism struck many as too vague, too political or too loaded to serve as an accurate description of any repressive regime. Having written about Putin’s Russia as quasi- or proto-fascist already in the mid-2000s, I know from personal experience that few took my claims seriously, often arguing tautologically that Putin had constructed a “Putinist” system.

But as a political scientist who studies Ukraine, Russia and the USSR empirically, theoretically and conceptually, I believe Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine suggests that a reconsideration of the term’s applicability to Russia is definitely in order.

Defining fascist states

But, first, a brief foray into the classification schemes that social scientists like to use, which most people find incomprehensible.

Classifications are essential for good social science, because they enable scholars to group political systems according to their shared features and to explore what makes them tick. Aristotle was one of the first to divide systems into those ruled by one, those ruled by a few and those ruled by many.

Contemporary scholars usually classify states as being democratic, authoritarian or totalitarian, with each category having a variety of subtypes. Democracies have parliaments, judiciaries, parties, political contestation, civil societies, freedom of speech and assembly, and elections.

Authoritarian states rest on the state bureaucracy, military and secret police; they usually circumscribe most of the features of democracies; and they typically are led by juntas, generals or politicians who avoid the limelight.

Totalitarian states abolish all the features of democracy, empower their bureaucracies, militaries and secret police to control all of public and private space, promote all-encompassing ideologies and always have a supreme leader.

Fascist states share all the features of authoritarianism, and they may also share the features of totalitarianism, but with two key differences. Fascist leaders have genuine charisma – that ephemeral quality that produces popular adulation – and they promote that charisma and the image that goes with it in personality cults. The people genuinely love fascist leaders, and the leaders in turn present themselves as embodiments of the state, the nation, the people.

The bare-bones definition of a fascist state is thus this: It is an authoritarian state ruled by a charismatic leader enjoying a personality cult.

Seen in this light, Franco’s Spain, Pinochet’s Chile and the Greece of the colonels were really just your average authoritarian states. In contrast, Mussolini’s Italy and Xi Jinping’s China are clearly fascist, as were Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s USSR. Fascist states can thus be on the right and on the left.

‘Dismantled’ democratic institutions

Putin’s Russia also fits the bill. The political system is unquestionably authoritarian – some might say totalitarian.

Putin has completely dismantled all of Russia’s nascent democratic institutions. Elections are neither free nor fair. Putin’s party, United Russia, always wins, and oppositionists are routinely harassed or killed.

The media have been curbed; freedom of speech and assembly no longer exists; and draconian punishments are meted out for the slightest of criticisms of the regime.

A hypernationalist, imperialist and supremacist ideology that glorifies all things Russian and legitimates expansion as Russia’s right and duty has been both imposed on and willingly accepted by the population.

War is worshipped and justified by the state’s mendacious propaganda machine. As the brutal invasion of Ukraine shows, war is also practiced, especially if it is directed against a people whose very existence Putin regards as a threat to himself and to Russia.

Finally, secret police and military elites, together with a corrupt bureaucracy, form the core of the political system headed by the infallible Putin, who is the undisputed charismatic leader glorified as the embodiment of Russia. One of Putin’s minions once noted that “if there is no Putin, there is no Russia!” There’s a striking similarity with French King Louis XIV’s assertion, “L’état, c’est moi” – “The state is me” – and Hitler’s “One people, one empire, one Führer.”

Fascist states are unstable. Personality cults disintegrate with time, as leaders grow old. Today’s Putin, with his bloated face, is no match for the vigorous Putin of 20 years ago.

Fascist regimes are overcentralized, and the information that reaches the supreme leader is often sugarcoated. Putin’s disastrous decision to invade Ukraine may have been partly due to his lacking accurate information about the condition of the Ukrainian and Russian armies.

Finally, fascist states are prone to wars, because members of the secret police and generals, whose raison d’etre is violence, are overrepresented in the ruling elite. In addition, the ideology glorifies war and violence, and a militarist fervor helps to legitimate the supreme leader and reinforce his charisma.

Fascist states usually prosper at first; then, intoxicated by victory, they make mistakes and start losing. Putin won decisively in his wars in Chechnya and in Georgia, and he appears to be headed for defeat in Ukraine.

I believe Putin’s fascist Russia faces a serious risk of breakdown in the not-too-distant future. All that’s missing is a spark that will rile the people and elites and move them to take action. That could be an increase in fuel prices, the development that led to a citizen revolt in Kazakhstan earlier this year; a blatantly falsified election, such as the one that led to riots in autocratic Belarus in 2020; or thousands of body bags returning to Russia from the war in Ukraine.

Mr. Fish: I Read the News Today, Oh Boy

From the World’s Greatest Living Editorial Cartoonist, via Clowncrack:

Here at esnl, we’re very partial to cartoons which play on famous works of art, and Fish’s creation is a timely and topical take of The Raft of the Medusa, a massive 1819 creation by French artist Théodore Géricault.

From Wikipedia:

Completed when the artist was 27, the work has become an icon of French Romanticism. At 491 by 716 cm (16 ft 1 in by 23 ft 6 in), it is an over-life-size painting that depicts a moment from the aftermath of the wreck of the French naval frigate Méduse, which ran aground off the coast of today’s Mauritania on 2 July 1816. On 5 July 1816, at least 147 people were set adrift on a hurriedly constructed raft; all but 15 died in the 13 days before their rescue, and those who survived endured starvation and dehydration and practiced cannibalism (the custom of the sea). The event became an international scandal, in part because its cause was widely attributed to the incompetence of the French captain.

Fish’s take is simply brilliant, capturing the sheer horror of today’s headlines and placing it in historical context [note Hitler, who also invaded Ukraine, Burger King Trump, Putin’s foremost American facilitator, and the grinning visage of Mao Tse Tung, the founder of modern China, the nation emerging as the one clear winner of the Ukrainian invasion.

It is. perhaps, the best single summation of what historians see as the long 20th Century, which began with the horrors of World War I and culminated in Trump’s election.

Headline of the day: Is napalm ‘green’?

From Deutsche Welle, military/industrial opportunism at work:

Pointing to Ukraine war, arms lobby pushes for ‘sustainable’ label

• Weapons have played a key role in helping Ukraine defend itself against Russia’s invading forces. Now the arms lobby is pushing for investors and EU regulators to classify the industry as “sustainable.”

Chart of the day: Americans are less trusting

With the third year of the COVID pandemic well underway and as the second year of the Biden administration commences, Americans are becoming less trusting of traditional authority figures, a new survey from the Pew Research Center.

Trust of scientists and the military remains relatively high, although core support for the military drop the most sharply of all groups, while confidence in journalists, business executives, and politicians nears rock bottom.

From the report:

Americans’ confidence in groups and institutions has turned downward compared with just a year ago. Trust in scientists and medical scientists, once seemingly buoyed by their central role in addressing the coronavirus outbreak, is now below pre-pandemic levels.

Overall, 29% of U.S. adults say they have a great deal of confidence in medical scientists to act in the best interests of the public, down from 40% who said this in November 2020. Similarly, the share with a great deal of confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interests is down by 10 percentage points (from 39% to 29%), according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

The new findings represent a shift in the recent trajectory of attitudes toward medical scientists and scientists. Public confidence in both groups had increased shortly after the start of the coronavirus outbreak, according to an April 2020 survey. Current ratings of medical scientists and scientists have now fallen below where they were in January 2019, before the emergence of the coronavirus.

Scientists and medical scientists are not the only groups and institutions to see their confidence ratings decline in the last year. The share of Americans who say they have a great deal of confidence in the military to act in the public’s best interests has fallen 14 points, from 39% in November 2020 to 25% in the current survey. And the shares of Americans with a great deal of confidence in K-12 public school principals and police officers have also decreased (by 7 and 6 points, respectively).

Large majorities of Americans continue to have at least a fair amount of confidence in medical scientists (78%) and scientists (77%) to act in the public’s best interests. These ratings place them at the top of the list of nine groups and institutions included in the survey. A large majority of Americans (74%) also express at least a fair amount of confidence in the military to act in the public’s best interests. Roughly two-thirds say this about police officers (69%) and K-12 public school principals (64%), while 55% have at least a fair amount of confidence in religious leaders.

The public continues to express lower levels of confidence in journalists, business leaders and elected officials, though even for these groups, public confidence is tilting more negative. Four-in-ten say they have a great deal or a fair amount of confidence in journalists and business leaders to act in the public’s best interests; six-in-ten now say they have not too much or no confidence at all in these groups. Ratings for elected officials are especially negative: 24% say they have a great deal or fair amount of confidence in elected officials, compared with 76% who say they have not too much or no confidence in them.

With trust in leading institutional leaders plunging, it’s no wonder that populism flourishes. . .

Herbicide 2,4-D found in 1/3 of Americans

Back in the early 1960s I spent three teenage summers in an intimate relationship with 2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid. more commonly known as 2,4-D.

Employed by the corporation own a system of irrigation canals in two Northern Colorado counties, my job consisted of sitting on the bumpers of tanker trucks traveling easement roads along canals, hose and spray nozzle in hand, dousing Canadian Thistles with chemical to prevent the plants from flowering and spreading their pesky airborne seeds into the waters of the canals and thence on to farmers’ fields, where they crowd out crops of wheat, maize, and sugar beets.

I and another teenager who held the other hose were assured the chemical was harmless to humans, often sprayed each other to cool off during the frequent hot days of July and August.

2,4D gradually faded from the picture after American agroindustrial giant Monsanto delivered a new weed-killer, Roundup, along with seeds genetically engineered to resist the herbicidal properties of glyphosate, the patented active ingredient in the concoction.

The one-two combination of a potent new weed killer and corporate-owned seeds designed to protect crops from the chemical’s otherwise lethal onslaught made Monsanto king on Big Ag globally [the company was sold to German chemical giant Bayer in 2018].

But resistance to Monsanto’s purported panacea, a combination of concerns over the company’s insistence on barring farmers from using seeds from their harvest to plant next years crops and a forced sale of crops only to dealers authorized by the company along with a growing numbers of research papers challenging the chemical’s safety [which we have covered extensively] has led to a resurgence of that old standby 2.4-D, along with new GMO crops designed to resist it.

But a new study just published raises serious questions about the safety of 2,4-D and the revelation that the bodies of a third of Americans now harbor significant amounts of the chemical, with the most troublesome levels found in the bodies of children and women and child-bearing age.

From George Washington University:

One out of three people in a large survey showed signs of exposure to a pesticide called 2,4-D, according to a study published today by researchers at the George Washington University. This novel research found that human exposure to this chemical has been rising as agricultural use of the chemical has increased, a finding that raises worries about possible health implications.

“Our study suggests human exposures to 2,4-D have gone up significantly and they are predicted to rise even more in the future,” Marlaina Freisthler, a PhD student and researcher at the George Washington University, said. “These findings raise concerns with regard to whether this heavily used weed-killer might cause health problems, especially for young children who are very sensitive to chemical exposures.”

Lead author Freisthler and her colleagues looked for biomarkers of the pesticide found in urine samples from participants in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. They estimated agricultural use of 2,-D by studying public and private pesticide use data from 2001 until 2014.

Out of 14,395 participants in the survey nearly 33 percent had detectable levels of 2,4-D in their urine. The researchers found that participants with urine levels of this pesticide went from a low of 17 percent at the start of the study in 2001-2002 to a high of nearly 40 percent ten years later.

Other key findings of the new study:

▪ As the use of the herbicide increased during the study period so did human exposures.

▪ Children ages 6-11 had more than double the risk of increasing exposure to 2,4-D.

▪ In addition, women of childbearing age had nearly twice the risk of increased exposure compared to men in the same age group.

▪ Human exposures are likely to rise even more in the near future as this herbicide’s use continues to go up.

2,4-D was developed in the 1940s and soon became a popular weed-killer for farmers who wanted to increase crop yields. In addition, homeowners looking for a pristine, green lawn also turned to 2,4-D often in combination with other lawn chemicals.

Exposure to high levels of this chemical has been linked to cancer, reproductive problems, and other health issues. While scientists don’t know what the impact of exposure to lower levels of the herbicide might be, they do know that 2,4-D is an endocrine disruptor and this study shows children and women of childbearing age are at higher risk of exposure.

Children can be exposed if they play barefoot on a lawn treated with the weed-killer or if they put their hands in their mouths after playing outside, where the soil or grass might be contaminated with the chemical. People also can be exposed by eating soybean-based foods and through inhalation. The now widespread use of 2,4-D on GMO soybeans and cotton leads to more 2,4-D moving in the air, which can expose more people to this chemical, according to the researchers.

“Further study must determine how rising exposure to 2,4-D affects human health–especially when exposure occurs early in life,” Melissa Perry, a professor of environmental and occupational health and senior author of the paper, said. “In addition to exposure to this pesticide, children and other vulnerable groups are also increasingly exposed to other pesticides and these chemicals may act synergistically to produce health problems.”

Consumers who want to avoid exposures to pesticide can purchase organically grown food, which is less likely to be grown with weed killers. They can also avoid using 2,4-D or other pesticides on their lawn or garden, the researchers said.

The study, “Association between Increasing Agricultural Use of 2,4-D and Population Biomarkers of Exposure: Findings from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2001-2014,” was published online in Environmental Health.

Meanwhile, Roundup faces an uncertain fate in Europe, where its use is authorized only until 15 December, pending a further review of the compound’s safety.

And there are signs of troubles ahead, as the Guardian reported 26 November:

Only two out of a group of 11 industry studies given to European regulators in support of the re-approval of the main ingredient in Roundup herbicide are scientifically “reliable”, according to a new analysis of corporate-backed studies on the chemical glyphosate.

<snip>

In a report released on Friday, researchers from the Institute of Cancer Research at the Medical University of Vienna in Austria said their review of a set of safety studies submitted to EU regulators by Bayer AG and a coalition of other chemical companies showed that the vast majority do not meet current international standards for scientific validity.

While two of the corporate studies were considered reliable, six were considered partly reliable and three were not reliable, according to the report.

And as for 2,4-D, it was the one of two primary ingredients in Agent Orange, the notorious compound sprayed over much of South Vietnam to kill crops and the trees used by Viet Cong troops to hide from American air strikes during what folks there now call the American War.

From the Chicago Tribune.

One ailment conclusively linked to Agent Orange exposure is bladder cancer, a malady for which we underwent a surgical removal seven years ago, We can’t but wonder if that affliction stemmed from those cooling spays on hot summer days under the Colorado sun decades before.

Quote of the day: On the chaos in Canada

From Canadian journalist Andrew Nikiforuk, writing on the trucking chaos north of the border for The Tyee, in which he also reveals that much of the funding for the protest hails from the U.S. side of the border:

Welcome to the mining republic of Canada where dysfunction and disinformation accumulate daily like waste in a leaky, toxic tailing pond.

Over the last two weeks Canadians have not only been served a master class on the dismal quality of our political leadership but a pointed lecture on how to destabilize a democracy.

It is clear now that a highly organized group of militants — some with military and counterinsurgency experience — have mobilized incoherent popular frustrations created by the pandemic to shield their goal of undermining a democracy and overthrowing a government they don’t like. Many of these militants hail from Alberta and the west.

The protesters talk about individual rights and freedoms but no one talks about responsibilities and that’s how democracies fail.  

They are aided by the internet, foreign funds and perhaps foreign players (the whole “freedom convoy” movement has the stink of covert Russian involvement). As they occupied Ottawa, they presented a hard face composed of a phalanx of diesel trucks and a soft face made up of rock music, fireworks, kids and hot tubs.

And people defecating on doorsteps.

Chart of the day: Anti-migrant sentiment soars

After four years of Trump and the radicalization of the Republican Party, this comes as no surprise.

From Gallup:

From their report:

Nearly six in 10 Americans, 58%, are dissatisfied with the level of immigration into the U.S. today, while 34% are satisfied. This marks an eight-percentage-point increase in dissatisfaction since last year and a return to the 2019-2020 range.

The 58% dissatisfied includes 35% of all Americans who would prefer that immigration be decreased, 9% increased, and 14% who want levels kept the same. Last year, those dissatisfied were about equally as likely to favor an increase as a decrease, but now the predominant view among the dissatisfied is for less immigration. The proportion who want less immigration has nearly doubled from 19% in 2021 and is well above where it was in 2019 (23%) and 2020 (25%). At the same time, calls for more immigration into the country have dropped.

The dark side of African ‘green’ development

During our decades of work in community journalism, much of our work focused on the role of developers in the political realm.

One thing a reporter quickly learns is that people who develop real estate for profit exploit the dreams of politicians and buyers to cloak their own dreams of wealth to win approval of their projects. [That real estate developers are also the leading contributors to election campaigns also plays a significant role.]

The same is true when it comes to selling their complete developments.

And at a time when anxieties about climate change and environment degradation reign, what better way to sell developments to the rich that by enshrouding them with a mantle of green?

Consider the following from the Dutch Public Broadcasting service VPRO:

Program notes:

Climate change warnings are leading to large investments in conservation and wildlife management in Africa. But the ambition to guard nature and animals increases social inequality and creates green apartheid.

Bram Vermeulen is in Hoedspruit. This small town on the edge of South Africa’s Kruger Park has been transformed in a short time into a five-star resort, full of restaurants, souvenir shops and real estate agents selling a big promise. For relatively little money you can buy land and luxury villas here, amidst nature and wildlife. A paradise for those who can afford it. But what lies behind this green dream?

A Dutch entrepreneur is among the property developers marketing the ‘Out Of Africa dream’, particularly to Dutch buyers.

An African farmer breeds the animals needed to fill the game parks for hunting and pleasure; from rhinos to sable antelopes. And a militarized anti-poaching unit guards the green paradise we all want so badly.

But on the edges of the town, things are brewing. The staff who work at the resorts are tucked away in a slum. And there appear to be land claims on the land where the private game parks and resorts are springing up.

Thousands of black South Africans are demanding back the land they were driven from during apartheid. The land on which the Dutch entrepreneur is building is also being claimed.

Meanwhile, the private anti-poaching unit that guards the parks and resorts is embroiled in a war with crime syndicates that want to sell the horns of killed rhinos to the Far East for a lot of money.

Glacial retreat: Climate change in action

At 400 square miles in area, the Columbia Glacier of southeastern Alaska is one of great wonders of nature, a mass of blue ice emptying into the waters of Prince William Sound.

But the glacier is vanishing, and the cause is clear, as a study from Oregon State University has determined:

Anthropogenic forcing was sufficient to trigger the recent retreat of Columbia Glacier from its extended position of the past [9,000 years], consistent with our data-driven assessment of the relationship between regional climate change and glacier extent. We conclude that the recent retreat of Columbia Glacier is a response to climate change rather than part of a natural internal tidewater-glacier oscillation.

And now, via NASA’s Earth Observatory, comes dramatic visual evidence of global warming in action:

This video is based on images from World of Change: Columbia Glacier, Alaska.

The transcript:

Located in southeastern Alaska, the Columbia Glacier descends from the flanks of the Chugach Mountains and flows into a narrow inlet connected to Prince William Sound.

Prior to 1980, the glacier was generally stable. This photo from 1957 shows it reaching all the way to Heather Island.

It held a similar position in this aerial photo shot in 1969.

But in 1980, the glacier began to retreat, likely triggered by climate change. It became one of the fastest shrinking glaciers in the world.

Satellite images from the long-running Landsat program have documented the retreat.

This natural-color image shows the glacier as your eyes would see it.

But false-color images can help differentiate between snow and ice, open water, vegetation and exposed bedrock, and rocky debris on the glacier’s surface.

This series of false-color images, acquired over the span of 35 years, shows the glacier’s dramatic retreat as well as some key moments along the way.

1986: Six years into Columbia’s retreat, the glacier had withdrawn more than a mile from Heather Island.

1989: At this point, the glacier still had three branches: the West Branch, Main Branch, and a sliver of ice that flowed east of Great Nunatak Peak.

1995: In some years, patches of lighter colored ice float south of the glacier. This mixture, or “mélange,” consists of sea ice mixed with icebergs that have broken from the glacier.

1997: Notice the medial moraine—a line of debris deposited along the ice surface that shows where separate channels of ice merged.

2000: As Columbia Glacier thinned, rings of freshly exposed rock, known as trimlines, became prominent around the inlet.

2001-2006: The retreat stalled until 2006, when the glacier became constricted by peaks on either side of the channel.

2008: Then, as the glacier’s front retreated into deeper water, it began to float.

2009: As a result, larger chunks of ice started to break off.

2011: By 2011, Columbia’s West and Main branches had split. Icebergs now calved from two distinct fronts.

2013: The West Branch took a large step backward in 2013, surprising scientists who thought it had stabilized.

2014: The Main Branch became increasingly unstable when thinning caused the glacier to lose traction with the floor of the inlet.

2019: Amid a hot summer, the West Branch appeared close to the limit of its retreat.

2021: Continuing to crumble away, the Main Branch in 2021 had retreated about 15 miles from its initial position.

While climate change likely started the retreat, mechanical processes kept the disintegration going.

Tidewater glaciers tend to cycle between periods of slow advance and rapid retreat. What Columbia Glacier will do next remains to be seen.

These dramatic images, coupled with today’s earlier post of the massive drought now afflicting the American Southwest, should, in a rational world, provide yet more conclusive evidence that the need for action to stem our fossil fuel addiction is long past due.

Mr. Fish: BEAUTY AND THE BEAST

From Clowncrack, the website of America’s Greatest Living Editorial Cartoonist™:

Study: Southwest drought worst in 1,200 years

Centuries ago, a great civilization flourished in the American Southwest, building cities, and complex irrigation systems to feed a growing population, as well as miles of finely engineered roads.

Cliff Place, an Anasazi dwelling complex in Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado, via Wikipedia.

But then, within the span of a few years, violence exploded, the Anasazi cities were abandoned, the roads and canals fell into disrepair, and cannibalism appeared among the haggard survivors..

A major factor in the collapse of the Anasazi civilization, scientists have learned, was a massive drought.

And now a similar crisis has struck the American Southwest, a drought as severe as that destroyed the world of the Anasazi, a drought in which the massive carbon releases of modern industrial civilization is playing a leading role, according to a new study.

From the University of California, Los Angeles [UCLA]:

Megadrought in southwestern North America is region’s driest in at least 1,200 years

The drought that has enveloped southwestern North America for the past 22 years is the region’s driest “megadrought” — defined as a drought lasting two decades or longer — since at least the year 800, according to a new UCLA-led study [$29 to read for non-subscribers] in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Thanks to the region’s high temperatures and low precipitation levels from summer 2020 through summer 2021, the current drought has exceeded the severity of a late-1500s megadrought that previously had been identified as the driest such drought in the 1,200 years that the scientists studied.

UCLA geographer Park Williams, the study’s lead author, said with dry conditions likely to persist, it would take multiple wet years to remediate their effects.

“It’s extremely unlikely that this drought can be ended in one wet year,” he said.

The researchers calculated the intensity of droughts by analyzing tree ring patterns, which provide insights about soil moisture levels each year over long timespans. (They also confirmed their measurements by checking findings against historical climate data.) Periods of severe drought were marked by high degrees of “soil moisture deficit,” a metric that describes how little moisture the soil contains compared to its normal saturation.

Since 2000, the average soil moisture deficit was twice as severe as any drought of the 1900s — and greater than it was during even the driest parts of the most severe megadroughts of the past 12 centuries.

Studying the area from southern Montana to northern Mexico, and from the Pacific Ocean to the Rocky Mountains, researchers discovered that megadroughts occurred repeatedly in the region from 800 to 1600. Williams said the finding suggests that dramatic shifts in dryness and water availability happened in the Southwest prior to the effects of human-caused climate change becoming apparent in the 20th century.

Existing climate models have shown that the current drought would have been dry even without climate change, but not to the same extent. Human-caused climate change is responsible for about 42% of the soil moisture deficit since 2000, the paper found.

One of the primary reasons climate change is causing more severe droughts is that warmer temperatures are increasing evaporation, which dries out soil and vegetation. From 2000 to 2021, temperatures in the region were 0.91 degrees Celsius (about 1.64 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than the average from 1950 to 1999.

“Without climate change, the past 22 years would have probably still been the driest period in 300 years,” Williams said. “But it wouldn’t be holding a candle to the megadroughts of the 1500s, 1200s or 1100s.”

As of Feb. 10, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, 95% of the Western U.S. was experiencing drought conditions. And in summer 2021, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, two of the largest reservoirs in North America — Lake Mead and Lake Powell, both on the Colorado River — reached their lowest recorded levels since tracking began in 1906.

Regulators have continued to implement water conservation measures in response to water shortages caused by the drought. In August, for example, federal officials cut water allocations to several southwestern states in response to low water levels in the Colorado River. And in October, California Gov. Gavin Newson declared a drought emergency and asked Californians to voluntarily decrease their water usage by 15%.

Williams said initiatives like those will help in the short term, but water conservation efforts that extend beyond times of drought will be needed to help ensure people have the water they need as climate change continues to intensify drought conditions.

The study was a collaboration among researchers from UCLA, NASA and the Columbia Climate School.

Here, from the report, is a look at Southestern droughts as revealed by the scientific record:

(a) Number of years in a running 22-year window when the 22-year mean summer soil moisture anomaly across southwestern North America (SWNA) was drier than the 800–2021 average. (b) The percentage of SWNA area where the 22-mean summer soil moisture was locally ranked in the top 5 driest 22-year periods in 800–2021.

In a rational world, this newest evidence of the profound impacts on climate change and its capacity to generate social collapse, mass violence, and the forced migration of whole peoples should serve as further impetus to change our self-destructive behavior and engage with the the consequences of our actions.

And in a truly rational world we would act, willingly and cooperatively.

Map of the day: The World of Weed

From Deutsche Welle:

The Amazon rainforest crisis accelerates

As we’ve noted many times before, we are killing the Amazon rainforest, one of the most unique and diverse environments on the planet, and home to dozens of indigenous tribal groups.

While the Amazon rainforest had long been called “the lungs of the planet” for its ability to capture carbon through plant respiration, that role is now in danger.

A study by 18 international scholars [$32 to read for non-subscribers] published in the 14 July 2021 edition of Nature, the world’s per-eminent scientific journal, reaches a stunning conclusion: Part of the Amazon note emits more carbon that in captures, and fire is the culprit.

Here’s the summation, emphasis added:

Amazonia hosts the Earth’s largest tropical forests and has been shown to be an important carbon sink over recent decades. This carbon sink seems to be in decline, however, as a result of factors such as deforestation and climate change. Here we investigate Amazonia’s carbon budget and the main drivers responsible for its change into a carbon source. We performed 590 aircraft vertical profiling measurements of lower-tropospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide at four sites in Amazonia from 2010 to 2018. We find that total carbon emissions are greater in eastern Amazonia than in the western part, mostly as a result of spatial differences in carbon-monoxide-derived fire emissions. Southeastern Amazonia, in particular, acts as a net carbon source (total carbon flux minus fire emissions) to the atmosphere. Over the past 40 years, eastern Amazonia has been subjected to more deforestation, warming and moisture stress than the western part, especially during the dry season, with the southeast experiencing the strongest trends. We explore the effect of climate change and deforestation trends on carbon emissions at our study sites, and find that the intensification of the dry season and an increase in deforestation seem to promote ecosystem stress, increase in fire occurrence, and higher carbon emissions in the eastern Amazon. This is in line with recent studies that indicate an increase in tree mortality and a reduction in photosynthesis as a result of climatic changes across Amazonia.

And an ever new study reveals that microscopic atmospheric particles can trigger declining rainfall totals in the Amazon.

A haven for ecological and cultural diversity

So why is Amazonia so important, besides its role as a carbon sink?

Consider this, from the World Wildlife Fund [WWF]:

The Amazon is a vast biome that spans eight rapidly developing countries—Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, and Suriname—and French Guiana, an overseas territory of France.

The landscape contains:

▪ one in 10 known species on Earth
▪ 1.4 billion acres of dense forests, half of the planet’s remaining tropical forests
▪ the 3,977-mile-long Amazon River, the second-longest river on Earth after the Nile
▪ 2.6 million square miles in the Amazon basin, about 40% of South America

The Amazon contains millions of species, most of them still undescribed, and some of the world’s most unusual wildlife. It is one of Earth’s last refuges for jaguars, harpy eagles, and pink river dolphins, and home to thousands of birds and butterflies. Tree-dwelling species include southern two-toed sloths, pygmy marmosets, saddleback and emperor tamarins, and Goeldi’s monkeys. The diversity of the region is staggering:

▪ 40,000 plant species
▪ 2,400 freshwater fish species
▪ more than 370 types of reptiles

There is a clear link between the health of the Amazon and the health of the planet. The rain forests, which contain 90-140 billion tons of carbon, help stabilize the local and global climate. Deforestation releases significant amounts of this carbon, which is having negative consequences around the world.

Uncontacted tribes at risk, too

In addition to the vast array of plants and animals endangered by deforestation, the Amazon basin is also home to a wide array of indigenous tribal groups, manyu of which have had little contact with modern civilization.

From Native Languages of the Americas [links to individual tribes at the website], a list of known tribes:

In addition to known tribes, ethnologists believe that the Amazon still holds tribes which have yet to make contact.

And they are in danger, as Reuters reported in December:

Deep in the Amazon rainforest, the world’s largest area containing isolated and uncontacted tribes is under increasing threat from illegal logging and gold mining, advancing coca plantations and drug trafficking violence, a new report warns.

An undetermined number of indigenous people that could number several thousand inhabit a vast swathe of forest twice the size of Ireland that overlaps the Brazil-Peru border.

Their longhouses in jungle clearings have been spotted from planes but encounters with outsiders or clashes with invaders are anecdotal.

In the most comprehensive study to date of the so-called Javari-Tapiche corridor, a Peruvian indigenous organization says the world’s largest number of uncontacted people are in danger. Anthropologists have recorded groups crossing to Brazil looking for food, metal utensils and clothing to the south of the corridor, reportedly moving away from violence in Peru.

Beefing up deforestation

While mining and logging pose considerable dangers to the rainforest and its inhabitants, as the WWF reports, feeding the global demand for beef is the leading driver of deforestation in the Amazon basin:

Extensive cattle ranching is the number one culprit of deforestation in virtually every Amazon country, and it accounts for 80% of current deforestation. Alone, the deforestation caused by cattle ranching is responsible for the release of 340 million tons of carbon to the atmosphere every year, equivalent to 3.4% of current global emissions. Beyond forest conversion, cattle pastures increase the risk of fire and are a significant degrader of riparian and aquatic ecosystems, causing soil erosion, river siltation and contamination with organic matter. Trends indicate that livestock production is expanding in the Amazon.

Brazil has 88% of the Amazon herd, followed by Peru and Bolivia. While grazing densities vary among livestock production systems and countries, extensive, low productivity, systems with less than one animal unit per hectare of pasture are the dominant form of cattle ranching in the Amazon.

And in Brazil, one company dominates, a Brazilian agroindustrial giants which just happens to dominate the U.S. meat market as well.

From Wikipedia:

JBS S.A. is a Brazilian company that is the largest meat processing company [by sales] in the world, producing factory processed beef, chicken and pork, and also selling by-products from the processing of these meats. It is headquartered in São Paulo. It was founded in 1953 in Anápolis, Goiás. As of 2017, the company had 150 industrial plants around the world

In addition to its Brazilian operations, JBS also ranks as the leading meant supplier in the U.S., having acquired Swift & Company, Pilgrim’s Pride, Smithfield Foods’ beef operations, the prok business of Cargil, as well as Mexican and Brazilian operations of Tyson Foods, Inc.

More from Bloomberg on the company’s impact on the Amazonian rainforest:

Understanding how Brazil’s beef industry and rainforest destruction are inextricably intertwined reveals a truth that JBS doesn’t acknowledge: As the region’s biggest beef producer, its supply chain is also among the biggest drivers of Amazon deforestation the world has ever known. While marketing itself as a friend of the environment, JBS has snapped up more cattle coming out of the Amazon than any other meatpacker in an industry that’s overwhelmingly to blame for the rainforest’s demise. It has helped push the world’s largest rainforest to a tipping point at which it’s no longer able to clean the Earth’s air, because large swaths now emit more carbon than they absorb. Late last year, at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, governments and financial institutions—including JBS investors—made ambitious green commitments to drastically alter their business models to save the environment. With Amazon deforestation at a 15-year high, JBS is a case study illustrating how difficult it is to keep such promises.

For more than a decade, JBS has committed to ridding its supply chain of animals born or raised on deforested land. Bloomberg analyzed about 1 million delivery logs that JBS accidentally posted online to show just how far its footprint has reached into the Amazon in that period. A 10-day trip into the heart of Brazil’s cattle country put on full display how easily and openly cows from illegally cleared land flood supply chains. JBS says it sets the highest standards for its suppliers, but it’s using a greenwashed version of an animal’s origin and working within a legal system so full of loopholes that prosecutors, environmentalists and even ranchers themselves consider it a farce.

Asked to respond to this article, JBS said “it has no tolerance for illegal deforestation.” The São Paulo-based company added that it “has maintained, for over 10 years, a geospatial monitoring system that uses satellite imagery to monitor its suppliers in every biome” in Brazil.

On a positive note, Reuters reported in December that six major European supermarket chains have announced they will stop all beef imports from Brazil.

For more on the role of Big Beef in the plunder of the Amazonian read Beef, Banks and the Brazilian Amazon. a December 2020 investigation by Global Witness.

Fires accelerate ecological catastrophe

Published in the open source academic journal Remote Sensing last month, “Fires Drive Long-Term Environmental Degradation in the Amazon Basin,” a study by team of Brazilian and French scholars, offers an alarming look at the acceleration of ecological destruction wrought by the most commonly employed means of forest “clearance”:

In recent years, the frequency and intensity of fires have increased worldwide, especially during dry years. Globally, fires and deforestation are the main causes of biodiversity loss in the tropics], and the expectation is that without, a reduction in the present disturbance rates, undisturbed forests will have entirely disappeared in large tropical humid regions by 2050. In the Amazon, the use of fire is the fastest, most efficient, and least expensive way to clear a forested Amazonian agricultural frontier area and is often employed in protected areas, such as conservation units (CUs) and indigenous lands (ILs). Ranchers, farmers, miners, and land grabbers all employ this practice. A recent study that determined different types of fires that occur in the Amazon showed that deforestation fires are fires in areas that have been previously cleared and can invade standing forests; their drivers and positive feedbacks can lead to more fires in the region. Such fires lead to the release of a significant amount of GHGs [greenhouse gases] into the atmosphere.

In the Amazon region, fires are ubiquitous at the end of the dry season (September-October), but have often worsened in years of extreme drought (i.e., 2005, 2010, and 2015). Anomalously dry years are associated with tropical seas surface temperature anomalies; high temperatures and low humidity provide favorable conditions for the rapid spread of fires. These extreme-drought events have the potential to destabilize large areas by reducing rainfall and thereby increasing the risk of forest death, which could, in turn, lead to the further intensification of regional droughts as a result of vegetation loss. A warmer and drier climate can lead to the mortality of plant species adapted to wetter climates, as well as a decrease in water recycling in the central part of the Amazon Researchers forecast a possibility of doubling of the burned area south of the Brazilian Amazon in the coming decades]. This projection is in accordance with the scenarios proposed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which are based on global numerical models] that indicate increased environmental degradation in the near future. Indeed, the Amazon ecosystem has been identified as a region with the highest vulnerability index in ecosystem function, particularly in areas of large-scale forest degradation and fragmentation.

The great Brazilian land grab continues

Just as White settlers and corporations swallowed up land belong to indigenous tribes in the U.S. starting with the arrival of the first settlers [who were brought over from Europe to populate corporate-owned colonies, encouraged and assisted by an expropriating monarchy] so too the Amazon is being grabbed up with the aid of a government headed by a very bigoted Right-wing populist.

So show does it work?

Consider the following from three University of Florida scholars – Gabriel Cardoso Carrero, graduate student Fellow and doctoral candidate in Geography; Cynthia S. Simmons, Professor of Geography; and Robert T. Walker, Professor of Latin American Studies and Geography – and published in The Conversation, an open source online academic journal written in everyday language:

The great Amazon land grab – how Brazil’s government is turning public land private, clearing the way for deforestation

Imagine that several state legislators decide that Yellowstone National Park is too big. Also imagine that, working with federal politicians, they change the law to downsize the park by a million acres, which they sell in a private auction.

Outrageous? Yes. Unheard of? No. It happens routinely and with increasing frequency in the Brazilian Amazon.

The most widely publicized threat to the Amazonian rainforest is deforestation. Less well understood is that public lands are being converted to private holdings in a land grab we’ve been studying for the past decade.

Much of this land is cleared for cattle ranches and soybean farms, threatening biodiversity and the Earth’s climate. Prior research has quantified how much public land has been grabbed, but only for one type of public land called “undesignated public forests.”

Our research provides a complete account across all classes of public land. We looked at Amazonia’s most active deforestation frontier, southern Amazonas State, starting in 2012 as rates of deforestation began to increase because of loosened regulatory oversight. Our research shows how land grabs are tied to accelerating deforestation spearheaded by wealthy interests, and how Brazil’s National Congress, by changing laws, is legitimizing these land grabs.

How the Amazon land grab began

Brazil’s modern land grab started in the 1970s, when the military government began offering free land to encourage mining industries and farmers to move in, arguing that national security depended on developing the region. It took lands that had been under state jurisdictions since colonial times and allocated them to rural settlement, granting 150- to 250-acre holdings to poor farmers.

Federal and state governments ultimately designated over 65% of Amazonia to several public interests, including rural settlement. For biodiversity, they created conservation units, some allowing traditional resource use and subsistence agriculture. Leftover government lands are generally referred to as “vacant or undesignated public lands.”

Tracking the land grab

Studies have estimated that by 2020, 32% of “undesignated public forests” had been grabbed for private use. But this is only part of the story, because land grabbing is now affecting many types of public land.

Importantly, land grabs now impact conservation areas and indigenous territories, where private holdings are forbidden.

We compared the boundaries of self-declared private holdings in the government’s Rural Environmental Registry database, known as CAR, with the boundaries of all public lands in southern Amazonas State. The region has 50,309 square miles in conservation units. Of these, we found that 10,425 square miles, 21%, have been “grabbed,” or declared in the CAR register as private between 2014 and 2020.

In the United States, this would be like having 21% of the national parks disappear into private property.

Our measurement is probably an underestimate, given that not all grabbed lands are registered. Some land grabbers now use CAR to establish claims that could become legal with changes in the law.

Land grabs put the rainforest at risk by increasing deforestation. In southern Amazonas, our research reveals that twice as much deforestation occurred on illegal as opposed to legal CAR holdings between 2008 and 2021, a relative magnitude that is growing.

Large deforestation patches point to wealth

So who are these land grabbers?

In Pará State, Amazonas State’s neighbor, deforestation in the 1990s was dominated by poor family farms in rural settlements. On average, these households accumulated 120 acres of farmland after several decades by opening 4-6 acres of forest every few years in clearings visible on satellite images as deforestation patches.

Since then, patch sizes have grown dramatically in the region, with most deforestation occurring on illicit holdings whose patches are much larger than on legal holdings.

Large deforestation patches indicate the presence of wealthy grabbers, given the cost of clearing land.

Land grabbers benefit by selling the on-site timber and by subdividing what they’ve grabbed for sale in small parcels. Arrest records and research by groups such as Transparency International Brasil show that many of them are involved in criminal enterprises that use the land for money laundering, tax evasion and illegal mining and logging.

In the 10-year period before President Jair Bolsonaro took office, satellite data showed two deforestation patches exceeding 3,707 acres in Southern Amazonas. Since his election in 2019, we can identify nine massive clearings with an average size of 5,105 acres. The clearance and preparation cost for each Bolsonaro-era deforestation patch, legal or illicit, would be about US$353,000.

Legitimizing land grabbing

Brazil’s National Congress has been making it easier to grab public land.

A 2017 change in the law expanded the legally allowed size of private holdings in undesignated public lands and in rural settlements. This has reclassified over 1,000 square miles of land that had been considered illegal in 2014 as legal in southern Amazonas. Of all illegal CAR claims in undesignated public lands and rural settlements in 2014, we found that 94% became legal in 2017.

Congress is now considering two additional pieces of legislation. One would legitimize land grabs up to 6,180 acres, about 9.5 square miles, in all undesignated public forests – an amount already allowed by law in other types of undesignated public lands. The second would legitimize large holdings on about 80,000 square miles of land once meant for the poor.

Our research also shows that the federal government increased the amount of public land up for grabs in southern Amazonas by shrinking rural settlements by 16%, just over 2,000 square miles, between 2015 and 2020. Large ranches are now absorbing that land. Similar downsizing of public land has affected Amazonia’s national parks.

What can turn this around?

Because of policy interventions and the greening of agricultural supply chains, deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon fell after 2005, reaching a low point in 2012, when it began trending up again because of weakening environmental governance and reduced surveillance.

Other countries have helped Brazil with billions of dollars to protect the Amazon for the good of the climate, but in the end, the land belongs to Brazil. Outsiders have limited power to influence its use.

At the U.N. climate summit in 2021, 141 countries – including Brazil – signed a pledge to end deforestation by 2030. This pledge holds potential because, unlike past ones, the private sector has committed $7.2 billion to reduce agriculture’s impact on the forest. In our view, the global community can help by insisting that supply chains for Amazonian beef and soybean products originate on lands deforested long ago and whose legality is longstanding.

Time is running short.

Mr. Fish: THE OFFERING OF THE APPLE

From Clowncrack, the website of America’s Greatest Living Editorial Cartoonist™: