RSN: FOCUS: George F. Will | The Supreme Court Has a Fresh Chance to Rein In Police Lawlessness

 

 

25 December 21

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FOCUS: George F. Will | The Supreme Court Has a Fresh Chance to Rein In Police Lawlessness
George F. Will, The Washington Post
Will writes: "When Hamdi Mohamud was a child, she was whisked away from Somalia's violence and corruption to Minnesota. There, however, she endured prolonged incarceration because of corrupt behavior by Heather Weyker, a St. Paul police officer who had been deputized by a federal task force."

When Hamdi Mohamud was a child, she was whisked away from Somalia’s violence and corruption to Minnesota. There, however, she endured prolonged incarceration because of corrupt behavior by Heather Weyker, a St. Paul police officer who had been deputized by a federal task force.

In 2011, Mohamud, then 16, was a bystander at a fight involving a knife-wielding girl who was a witness in Weyker’s “investigation” of a nonexistent Somali immigrant crime ring. Judicial proceedings have found that Weyker “exaggerated or fabricated” and “misstated facts,” to have been caught “lying to the grand jury” and lying “during a detention hearing.” Also, when providing compensation for a witness. And when “endorsing the validity” of a forged document.

Weyker got Mohamud arrested on suspicion of witness tampering, then filed a criminal complaint that included fabricated facts and excluded exculpatory evidence. Mohamud spent almost 25 months in federal custody. When Mohamud sued for violations of her constitutional rights, the district court denied Weyker’s claim of qualified immunity. But last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit ruled that because Weyker acted as a federal officer, she could not be sued at all.

In Texas, Kevin Byrd thinks he is likely alive only because the loaded pistol of an unhinged Department of Homeland Security agent, Ray Lamb, jammed when he pulled the trigger. In 2019, Byrd’s ex-girlfriend was injured as a passenger in a car driven by Lamb’s son when they left a bar’s parking lot and collided with a bus. Agent Lamb, who was at the bar the next morning when Byrd came to make inquiries, drew his gun, according to Byrd, and tried to smash the driver’s side window, yelling that he would “put a bullet through [Byrd’s] f---ing skull.” When police arrived, Lamb showed them his federal badge; they handcuffed Byrd and held him in a police car for several hours. But after viewing parking lot surveillance video, the police released Byrd and arrested Lamb for assault with a deadly weapon and criminal mischief — charges later dropped.

When Byrd sued Lamb for a civil rights violation, a district court denied Lamb’s claim of qualified immunity. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, bowing to its own precedents, last March held that because Lamb was a federal officer, he could not be sued.

Seven U.S. circuit courts recognize a damages remedy for the kind of injuries Mohamud and Byrd suffered. But 60 million Americans live in the states covered by the two circuit courts that have turned a federal officer’s badge into a license for lawlessness: In those states, it confers almost absolute immunity from being sued for violations of constitutional rights for which nonfederal law enforcement officers can be sued. But suing even state and local officers can be maddeningly difficult, even when the violations are egregious. And even when they did not result from split-second decisions in dangerous situations, the occasions for which qualified immunity can be appropriate.

The 5th and 8th circuit courts’ decisions occurred with this background: The Supreme Court has been reluctant to clarify the different but parallel qualified immunity doctrine in nonfederal cases. On Jan. 7, the Supreme Court will decide if it will hear the argument of Mohamud and Byrd — represented by the Institute for Justice’s libertarian litigators — for ending the anti-constitutional anomaly of almost impregnable immunity for federal officials who commit constitutional violations. The court should hear their case because, for 50 years, it has been shielding government officials from accountability through doctrines such as qualified immunity, which virtually nullifies accountability for all (not just federal) law enforcement and other government officials.

The Fourth Amendment guarantees, inter alia, the right of the people to be secure in their “persons” from unreasonable “seizures.” The Mohamud and Byrd cases, however, show that a circuit court can decide, without rhyme or reason, that if a person violating that guarantee possesses a federal badge, the person whose rights are violated has no right to a remedy.

Concurring, reluctantly, in the decision by his 5th Circuit colleagues, Judge Don Willett wrote that the implication of this circuit’s precedent is that “redress for a federal officer’s unconstitutional acts is either extremely limited or wholly nonexistent, allowing federal officials to operate in something resembling a Constitution-free zone.”

Willett said “middle-management circuit judges” such as him must follow precedent, but he hoped that “as the chorus” deploring “today’s rights-without-remedies regime” becomes “louder, change comes sooner.” Sooner could begin as soon as Jan. 7.

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RSN: FOCUS: Johnny Cash Is a Hero to Americans on the Left and Right. But His Music Took a Side.

 

 

09 December 21

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Should I be angry when I see 20,000 people come to Reader Supported News every day while maybe 15 contribute?

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09 December 21

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OBJECTIVITY? START BY SEPARATING THE NEWS FROM THE CASH FLOW. The problem with objectivity as defined by corporate sponsored news is the purity of message test. If it serves their interests then it meets the test. Then all you are you are left with propaganda. By supporting your news source you control it. Step up.
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FOCUS: Johnny Cash Is a Hero to Americans on the Left and Right. But His Music Took a Side.
Michael Stewart Foley, Slate
Foley writes: "In July and August of 1961, Johnny Cash recorded a batch of songs that became the basis for Blood, Sweat and Tears, a record many regard as merely a concept album about working people. But Blood, Sweat and Tears is a concept album about race in America, about the violent enforcement of racial hierarchies in America."

Listen to Blood, Sweat and Tears again.

In July and August of 1961, Johnny Cash recorded a batch of songs that became the basis for Blood, Sweat and Tears, a record many regard as merely a concept album about working people. But Blood, Sweat and Tears is a concept album about race in America, about the violent enforcement of racial hierarchies in America. It is the one great record made in support of Black lives by a country music star, even if almost everyone missed its message when it was released. To be fair, when we think of a civil rights album, we think of those freedom songs. If Cash had just recorded his own interpretation of Odetta’s “Freedom Trilogy” or, like Pete Seeger, brought news of the civil rights movement in song to a live audience—getting them to sing along on “If You Miss Me at the Back of the Bus,” “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize,” and “I Ain’t Scared of Your Jail”—it would have been much easier to label Cash as an activist artist, to see the work he was doing. But as musicologist and folklorist John Lomax once argued, folk music could “provide ten thousand bridges across which men of all nations may stride to say, ‘You are my brother.’ ” To put down on record—both vinyl and historical—evidence of the shameful, despicable practices of white bosses against Black men and their families made for a bridge of understanding that better suited Cash’s temperament than the freedom songs. On Blood, Sweat and Tears, he sings of racial bondage, of racial violence, of racist murder. He recorded these songs not to inspire activists so much as to confront his mostly white listeners with the shocking, documented brutality their silence made possible. His civil rights work, if we can call it that, is complementary; he stands as witness.

Side One of Blood, Sweat and Tears possesses such cumulative power, rooted in violence, that it is hard to listen to it twice in a row. One really needs to flip the record to the other side to find some relief, even if it is in limited supply on Side Two. Cash most likely learned original versions of all three of the songs on Side One—“The Legend of John Henry’s Hammer,” “Tell Him I’m Gone,” and “Another Man Done Gone”—from Lomax recordings (though, in the case of “John Henry,” there were dozens of versions out there already). But, in each case, Cash arranged, adapted, and added his own lyrics.

Cash begins the album with an eight-­minute version of “John Henry,” following in a grand tradition of interpreting and reinterpreting the song about the steel­ drivin’ man. In Merle Travis’ down­home introduction to the song on his album Folk Songs of the Hills, he says that people from different parts of the country—coal miners in Kentucky, ironworkers in Birmingham, railroad workers out West—have tried to claim John Henry. “I don’t know myself where in the world John Henry came from,” he says as he begins singing, and it is possible that, like a lot of white Southerners, he assumed that John Henry was white. By the time Cash considered recording “John Henry,” the subject’s identity as a Black working man, if not a Black convict, was well known. In their 1941 book, Our Singing Country, John Lomax and his son Alan described the “ballad of John Henry, the Negro steel­drivin’ man” as “probably America’s greatest single piece of folk lore.” Later, in the liner notes to Blue Ridge Mountain Music, one of the seven LPs in the Southern Folk Heritage Series that Cash committed to memory, Alan Lomax repeated that the Mountain Ramblers’ version of the song tells the story of “the Negro tunnel worker … who drove the steam drill down in a contest of the ‘flesh against the steam.’ ” Years later, when Cash made a 1974 television program called Ridin’ the Rails, he devoted two segments of his history of the railroad to honoring the work of Black men, showing gandy dancers and section men laying track, and John Henry himself (played by a Black actor) swinging a hammer. There is no question that Cash understood in 1962, as he sang about John Henry, he was singing about a Black man. We know today that John Henry was a real man, pushed into convict labor on a thin charge the way so many Black men were in the years after the Civil War, and who died on the job (though not before driving more steel than the steam drill). But even by 1962 there had been plenty of representations of John Henry wearing a ball and chain—enough that Cash, poring over Library of Congress recordings, could not have missed it.

Try listening to several versions of “John Henry” in a row—particularly Merle Travis’ upbeat picking rendition, Odetta’s more somber version, and Cash’s treatment at the end—to get a sense of how varied the interpretations of the song can be. At the time that Cash recorded the song, he was in the unyielding clutch of his drug addiction. Marshall Grant remembered him sitting on the floor banging pieces of rolled steel together to get the sound of the hammer hitting; he was so high he beat his hands bloody, apparently feeling no pain. In spite of his condition, his “John Henry” sounds like a continuation of the work he did on Ride This Train—not only because he again mimicked sounds from the field, as if to make it seem more authentic, but because in his delivery he is as much a narrator as a singer. But Cash doesn’t sound squeaky-clean, the way Merle Travis drifts into folk­crooner territory; instead, Cash builds momentum in the song, the way Odetta does, as the story reaches the part about the race between John Henry and the steam drill. Although Cash’s rendition of “John Henry” on Blood, Sweat and Tears is undermined somewhat by the shape he was in when he recorded it (the editing together of two separately recorded parts is obvious), the song became a standard part of his show so that by the time he recorded it again at Folsom prison in 1968, it had to be considered one of his best.

Cash follows “The Legend of John Henry’s Hammer” with “Tell Him I’m Gone,” a retitled, rewritten version of Leadbelly’s “Take This Hammer.” Just as a chef who changes more than three things in a recipe can claim the recipe as his own, Cash must have figured that he altered enough of the lyrics to justify a new title. The Lomaxes’ 1942 recording of Leadbelly singing “Take This Hammer” is pretty straightforward. It is the tale of a man fleeing from the chain gang, telling the new guy to whom he is giving his hammer to pass along a message to the boss, the captain: “Tell him I’m gone.” He doesn’t say much about why he is leaving except that he no longer wants “cornbread and molasses” because, he says, “it hurts my pride.” In fact, the lyrics published by the Lomaxes in Our Singing Country included additional lines such as “Cap’n called me a nappy­headed devil” and “I don’t want no cold iron shackles, around my legs, around my legs,” giving a clearer sense of the singer’s motives. When Odetta recorded the song live, at the Gate of Horn club in Chicago in 1957, she basically used Leadbelly’s version but reintroduced the “cold, iron shackles” line too, which surely helped the audience better see the scene. Perhaps emboldened by Odetta’s edits, Cash added several lines to the song that make the captain more violent, more menacing. There is nothing about the lousy cornbread hurting his pride. He even dropped the “cold, iron shackles” from Odetta’s rendition. Instead, Cash’s prisoner escapes from the chain gang because he cannot take the “kicks and whipping.” He says the captain called him “a hardheaded devil” (a revision of the “nappy­headed devil” line recorded by the Lomaxes), but since that is not his name, he is leaving. In all the previous interpretations of the song, it is pretty clear that the convict is confident he is going to find freedom, but Cash introduces a degree of uncertainty, saying that if the captain ever catches him, “he gonna shoot me down” with his big gun, “about a .99 caliber.” (This, too, is a modification of a line published by the Lomaxes—“Cap’n got a big gun, an’ he try to play bad”—which made it into no other recorded versions.) When Cash sings “about a .99 caliber” the first time, he lets out a “whooooa,” as if the character is both impressed with and deathly afraid of that gun. The howl sounds almost unhinged, desperate, and certainly not confident—like he knows he is risking his life. Taken together, the new lyrics describe an overseer who, as Cash said in “Going to Memphis,” whips convicts like mules, taunts them with names, and has the capacity, thanks to his big gun, to snuff out a convict’s life. As the saying went, “One dies, get another.”

“Another Man Done Gone,” the third and final song on the first side of Blood, Sweat and Tears, effectively tells us what happened to the convict who fled the chain gang in the previous song. The Lomaxes first recorded the song in 1948, as sung by a Livingston, Alabama, dishwasher named Vera Hall. Unlike “Tell Him I’m Gone,” which is narrated by the convict, “Another Man Done Gone” is told from the perspective of a witness to a crime involving the convict.

In Hall’s version, it is the convict who committed the crime, but in Cash’s version the convict is the victim. Hall sings that although she does not know the name of the man done gone, she could see that he came from the “county farm” and had a “long chain on.” The most important line, in comparing Hall’s original version to later renditions by other artists, including Cash, is that she says, “He killed another man.” The man done gone is a killer who, though imprisoned and on a chain gang, has now killed again and is on the run. “I don’t know where he’s gone,” she sings at the end. Odetta recorded “Another Man Done Gone” for her second, classic LP, Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues (1957), a collection of Lomaxian proportions with some songs drawn from their book Our Singing Country. But instead of singing, “He killed another man,” Odetta changed it to “They killed another man,” and she dropped the line about not knowing where he has gone; it’s apparent that in this rendition our narrator knows that the man being “done gone” means he is dead, killed by those who chased him from the county farm or the levee or wherever else they may have worked him so hard he fled. A year later, Leon Bibb, a less-well­known Black folk singer who was a mentor to Odetta, added another line to the song—“They hunted him with hounds”—which dispels any doubt about what happened to our convict. Cash doubtless knew all of these interpretations and may have even been inspired by Bibb’s introduction of a new line when he thought about recording his own.

Cash’s version of “Another Man Done Gone” is simply the most harrowing on record. Except for a single opening strum of a guitar, Cash sings the song a cappella (like Odetta and Vera Hall), but his baritone sounds as though it is coming from the bottom of a well, resonant with a bit of echo; it contrasts, in call and response, with the crystal-clear soprano of Anita Carter. Cash’s and Carter’s voices complement each other and lend a gothic feel to the original story. In Cash’s telling, there is no mention of hounds; instead, he skips directly from “he had a long chain on” to “they hung him in a tree.” Worse than that, “they let his children see.” These are Cash’s lines, and he alone sings them. Carter repeats most of the lyrics sung by Cash, but not these about the lynching. It’s as if the fragile purity of her voice cannot bear the weight of what our narrator has witnessed. But even here, Cash is not satisfied that his listeners will fully understand what he seems to have grasped—maybe from his Arkansas boyhood, maybe from family stories—about the repulsive evils of lynching. “When he was hanging dead,” he sings in his lowest register, “the captain turned his head, the captain turned his head.” The scene of a man’s lynching in front of his family is so distressing that even the captain, the man who led the lynch mob, cannot bear to look. Cash isn’t aiming for a hit single: he is aiming to turn our stomachs, and not gratuitously either, because he recorded it in the summer of 1962, when violence lurked everywhere. (Just months after the album came out, Klansman Byron De La Beckwith shot down NAACP organizer Medgar Evers in his driveway, in front of his wife and children.) The song punctuates Side One like an exclamation point, insisting that the lives of these exploited Black men, all in chains, mattered.

The second side of Blood, Sweat and Tears lacks the gathering sense of terror of the first, but its tone is still somber. Cash leads off with Harlan Howard’s song “Busted,” which Columbia released as the album’s only single. Howard set the song of a guy who is so poor that “a man can go wrong” in coal mining country, but Cash moves it to the cotton fields. As such, his slow lamentation is more consistent with the songs on the first side; it sounds more like an Odetta song than a Burl Ives (who had previously recorded it) or Ray Charles (who turned it into a hit at nearly the same time Cash released it) song. Cash followed with “Casey Jones,” the well­-known folk song about the daring railroad engineer who died in a wreck around the turn of the century. The origins of the song are murky; it is probably a composite of several old folk blues tunes sung by railroad workers, but at the time Cash recorded it, the Lomaxes and others agreed that a Black engine wiper named Wallace Saunders wrote the song. Saunders worked in the Canton, Mississippi, roundhouse and apparently knew Casey Jones. In Cash’s presentation, alongside these other songs of the Black experience, then, “Casey Jones” functions as an example of interracial harmony, a song by a Black engine wiper honoring the memory of a brave white engineer. “Nine Pound Hammer,” the Merle Travis song from Folk Songs of the Hills, is more sober than the original, even as it relies on banjo picking as its signature sound. Cash’s narrator sounds exhausted as he sings. If Blood, Sweat and Tears were merely an album about working people, Cash could have chosen “Dark as a Dungeon” by Travis, but in selecting a song about another hammer swinger, he seems, again, to be singing about a Black man’s 9-pound hammer. The next song, “Chain Gang,” another by Harlan Howard, confirms the theme by describing a guy getting picked up on vagrancy charges and winding up on a chain gang—likely a Black character, given that the overwhelming majority of men railroaded into being convict laborers were Black. “There ain’t no hope on a chain gang,” Cash sings. Unlike the first side of the LP, these songs are more ambiguous about the race of each one’s subject, so listeners could have assumed that the subjects were white. But given Cash’s experience, it’s hard to believe that’s what he thought.

Blood, Sweat and Tears is a landmark achievement in the contemplation of race by a country music artist, even if Columbia did not market it that way. It’s possible that Don Law didn’t fully appreciate what Cash had done with this album, and Cash himself remained strangely quiet. Perhaps he felt compelled to comment on Jim Crow segregation by drawing from the wellspring of Black American folk blues but also felt that, as a white Southerner, he couldn’t directly address it. “I was trying to write about history so that people could understand what was going on,” he said. Cash brought his own experience, his own witness, as an Arkansas white boy, as well as his research to the material. Years later, when he described his fascination with Blues in the Mississippi Night and the Lomaxes’ prison recordings, Cash acknowledged that although he felt comfortable recording some songs from that canon, he couldn’t play them all. One gets the sense that he felt like an interloper, not knowing if it was his place to give voice to some of these songs born of Black pain. And still, he showed no eagerness to speak out beyond his music. At least, not yet.

It would be easy to look from our own vantage point at Blood, Sweat and Tears today and accuse Cash of cultural appropriation, particularly for lifting those three songs on Side One from Black singers. No one used the term cultural appropriation at the time, but in more recent years it has been applied to stars like Elvis Presley for ripping off Big Mama Thornton and Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, as well as against the Beatles and the Rolling Stones for stealing songs and riffs from Chuck Berry and other Black stars. Unlike the Beatles and Elvis, Cash took old songs—songs whose authorship often could not be determined—that had been handed down by many others, and reinterpreted them. No less than Blind Willie McTell acknowledged that he “jumped” songs from other writers, “but I arrange ’em my own way.” Odetta said something similar: “There are those people who are at their best when they are inventing,” she once said. “And there are people who are idea people, interpretive … I am not inventive. My category, I would think, would be embellishing invention. The interpreter.” On Blood, Sweat and Tears, Cash similarly jumped, embellished, and interpreted. The album honors the Black American folk tradition without bastardizing or commodifying it. It is worth comparing Cash’s interpretations on this album with, say, Patti Page singing Leadbelly’s “Boll Weevil” on The Ed Sullivan Show the year before, 1962. It is simply cringe-inducing. Leadbelly sang from experience, knowing the damage a boll weevil could do to a sharecropper’s family, and that feeling of desperation comes across when he sings the song—but it is also clearly about Black migration, which Leadbelly had also experienced. Patti Page, who seems never to have gotten her fingernails dirty, turned it into a children’s song, a theme to a suburban sitcom for a mass audience. That is a kind of embellishing and interpreting, too, but it is not the kind that interested Cash. The folk music that Cash liked had a sharp edge. His interpretation of most of the songs on Blood, Sweat and Tears tells the story of America’s history with racial violence. It is not for children. It is not even for Ed Sullivan.

The significance of Blood, Sweat and Tears escaped the attention of segregationists and others who may have thought that Cash, after “Boss Jack,” was one of them. The album peaked at No. 80 on the pop charts, and although Cash performed “John Henry,” “Busted,” and “Casey Jones” frequently in his shows, he said nothing publicly as the clashes between civil rights activists and racists in the South intensified in 1963, 1964, and 1965. In these years of the March on Washington, Freedom Summer, and the Selma-to-Montgomery march, Cash did nothing more to provoke the segregationists. Under pressure from Columbia, he at least managed to produce “Ring of Fire,” his first hit in years, and after that, he began devoting himself almost exclusively to making Bitter Tears (1964), his next concept album. He did record “All God’s Children Ain’t Free” as the B-side to his single “Orange Blossom Special” at the end of 1964, the year that President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. The song, Cash said, is mostly about poor people not being equally free, but it also gestured toward prisoners and, with phrases about “opening doors” and “walking any street,” it hinted at support for civil rights. But when he fought back against the National States’ Rights Party for alleging that he was married to a Black woman, it seemed less like a principled stand than an isolated personal feud.

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10 years ago today, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” became history 🏳️‍🌈

 

Today, 10 years ago, President Obama relegated “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” to the dustbin of history. For seventeen years, the official military policy against LGBTQ+ service members was outright discrimination. It prevented thousands of brave Americans from serving in the armed forces, and its message of intolerance echoed throughout our society. The end of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was a victory for equality, justice, and our national security. But the fight against homophobic and transphobic discrimination continues today. Trans people in the U.S. still experience disproportionate rates of discrimination, violence and poverty. Many lack health care coverage, or have difficulty finding gender-affirming care. To make matters worse, Republican state legislatures across the country have passed or proposed a flood of bills targeting trans Americans, and federal law still doesn’t offer explicit civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ Americans. As a proud cosponsor of the Equality Act, Veronica is leading the fight to change that. If you can, please consider chipping in to support Veronica’s work for LGBTQ+ civil rights. Thank you, ANTONIO. — Team Veronica PAID FOR BY VERONICA ESCOBAR FOR CONGRESS Veronica Escobar for Congress P. O. Box 3961 El Paso, TX 79923 United States

RSN: Bill McKibben | Climate Activists Are Being Killed for Trying to Save Our Planet. There Is a Way to Help

 

16 September 21

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I CANNOT BELIEVE YOU GET SO LITTLE FUNDING! I don't understand how most readers expect you to do everything for nothing. If we don't stand behind you all we get is propaganda. Real journalism is so rare today. We all should be protecting it. I am in my 70s and no longer working, but what you do is crucial if we ever plan on becoming a democracy finally. That's why I give every month. All take and no give back is a recipe for disaster, and we don't want to dis the stars!
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Bill McKibben | Climate Activists Are Being Killed for Trying to Save Our Planet. There Is a Way to Help
Bill McKibben, Guardian UK
McKibben writes: "Each year, we learn more about the climate crisis. The data flows: ever-rising heat, unprecedented deforestation, record rainfall."

Last year, there were a record 227 killings globally. It is our duty to keep resisting the insatiable forces that led to their deaths

Each year, we learn more about the climate crisis. The data flows: ever-rising heat, unprecedented deforestation, record rainfall. And once a year, we also learn more about the human impact of the crisis too, as data is released on the killings of land and environmental activists, the very people highlighting and protesting at the breakdown of our climate. As Global Witness’ annual report reveals, in 2020, that number rose to a record 227 killings worldwide.

Every time, the data hits me like a blow to the face. I’ve spent much of my life as an environmental activist and journalist, and so if I haven’t actually met the people sadly on this list, I’ve met hundreds exactly like them. Strong local people, attached to place and community, seeing their role in defending terrain and ancestral territory. Every person like this around the world is at risk.

And they are at risk, in the end, not so much because of another local person who pulls the trigger or plunges the blade; they’re at risk because they find themselves living on or near something that some corporation is demanding. Like Fikile Ntshangase, the South African grandmother who led a spirited campaign against a coalmine in KwaZulu-Natal province and was shot dead in her home last year. Or Óscar Eyraud Adams, the indigenous activist who, during Mexico’s worst drought in 30 years, vocally advocated for his community’s right to water, as the authorities denied them and granted corporations ever more permits. Oscar was shot dead in Tecate last September.

The demand for the highest possible profit, the quickest possible timeline, the cheapest possible operation, seems to translate eventually into the understanding, somewhere, that the troublemaker must go. The blame rarely if ever makes its way back up to a corporation’s HQ. But it should. Especially since the people who inhabit these places never really share in the riches produced there: colonialism is still running strong, even if it’s dressed up with corporate logos or hidden with offshore bank accounts.

Meanwhile, the rest of us need to realise that the people killed each year defending their local places are also defending our shared planet – in particular our climate. The activities that flood our atmosphere with carbon – fossil fuel extraction and deforestation – are at the heart of so many of these killings. When people stand up to block a pipeline, or an illegal mine, or a new plantation slated for an old forest, they are also standing in the way of the activities that threaten us all. They make life harder for the oil companies and the timber barons, and in so doing strive to safeguard all of us from incessant temperature increases.

And as we try to head off that rise by moving to more benign technologies, such as solar panels and electric cars, we’ll need to do so in ways that don’t create the same kind of sad sagas – cobalt mining or lithium production can be exploitative, too. If we took seriously the stories told in the Global Witness report, we surely would be able to better design these emerging industries.

Great respect is due to those who are working to develop corporate codes of conduct, or industry-wide standards, or government regulations – those are the tools that can help rebalance power, so that people can stand up to exploiters with less fear of being killed. But since we live in a world where greenwashing is a constant threat, let’s be clear: the worth of those codes and standards and regulations is not the words themselves, or the promises their sponsors proudly make. Their worth is measured entirely in outcomes, like reducing threats against land and environmental defenders.

What does progress on the climate crisis look like? One wants so badly to pick up this annual report some year and see that the answer to that question is: fewer killings. That violence is trending dramatically down, that the deaths have begun to fall – it would be as satisfying as watching Covid cases drop in the spring. Since there’s no vaccine for the greed of the wealthy, it may be years before that happens. But we can still speed the day: you and I, armed with the stories of those lives lost, are capable of putting enough pressure on the culprits that they find it necessary to change.

None of that will bring back those defenders of the planet who have been killed. That we have to fight simply to get our leaders to pay attention to science is frustrating, but there’s a big difference between fighting and dying: the names of these activists should be on our lips and in our hearts. We owe them debts that can’t be repaid – only paid forward.

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Police confront people marching to protest the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis last year. (photo: Victor J. Blue/The New York Times)

Justice Dept. to Review Enforcement of Civil Rights Protections in Grants
Katie Benner, The New York Times
Benner writes: "The Justice Department will review how it enforces prohibitions on racial discrimination by law enforcement agencies that receive federal funding, according to a department memo, a move that could broaden the Biden administration's efforts to combat systemic racism in policing, prisons and courts."

The review, part of the Biden administration’s efforts to make preserving civil rights protections a priority, applies to federal funding for local law enforcement agencies.

The Justice Department will review how it enforces prohibitions on racial discrimination by law enforcement agencies that receive federal funding, according to a department memo, a move that could broaden the Biden administration’s efforts to combat systemic racism in policing, prisons and courts.

While the review concerns law enforcement funding, it could affect how the federal government oversees grant recipients in transportation, health care, education and other sectors that receive federal money.

The issue of racial discrimination in policing came to a head last year after the murder of George Floyd, a Black man, who died when a white Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck, setting off months of nationwide protests.

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Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) data shows that the Daikin plant in Decatur, Alabama, has released the equivalent of more than 1bn pounds of carbon dioxide. (photo: Pablo Martínez Monsiváis/AP)

Production of Forever Chemicals Emits Potent Greenhouse Gases, Analysis Finds
Tom Perkins, Guardian UK
Perkins writes: "A new analysis of Environmental Protection Agency data has revealed that PFAS chemicals - often known as 'forever chemicals' due to their longevity in the environment - are contributing to the climate crisis as their production involves the emission of potent greenhouse gases."

EPA data reveals that one of America’s biggest PFAS-making plants is second largest polluter of highly damaging HCFC-22 gas

A new analysis of Environmental Protection Agency data has revealed that PFAS chemicals – often known as “forever chemicals” due to their longevity in the environment – are contributing to the climate crisis as their production involves the emission of potent greenhouse gases.

In recent years, an ever-expanding body of scientific research has shown that per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are among the most toxic substances widely used in consumer products.

Now the new EPA report shows that one of America’s largest PFAS manufacturing plants is also the second largest polluter of the destructive greenhouse gas HCFC-22, which is about 5,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

“This is a sad-but-clear example of how toxic chemicals and climate change are connected: manufacturing PFAS chemicals not only pollutes people and the environment, but releases potent greenhouse gases, adding to the climate crisis,” said Erika Schreder, co-author of the report and science director for Toxic-Free Future.

HCFC-22 emissions are banned worldwide under the Montreal Protocol, a 1987 international environmental treaty, because the chemical is so destructive to the ozone layer. The plant of the PFAS manufacturer Daikin in Decatur, Alabama, released about 240,000 pounds of HCFC-22 in 2019 – the equivalent of more than 1bn pounds of carbon dioxide, or what would be released from driving 125,000 cars every day for a year.

“It seems like you wouldn’t want to let companies release hundreds of thousands of pounds of this gas every year,” Schreder said.

Diakin’s plant is one of many PFAS plants around the country, and many of the nation’s top 50 HCFC-22 polluters are “forever chemical” manufacturers. A loophole in the Montreal treaty allows companies to release HCFC-22 when it’s used as an intermediate in production of another chemical, such as PFAS.

Daikin’s plant appears to be the nation’s only one that produces PFAS used to make food packaging water and grease resistant, Schreder said.

PFAS are also applied to a wide range of consumer products, from cosmetics to clothing to nonstick cookware. Though they make effective barriers, they are also linked to serious health problems like cancer, kidney and liver disease, birth defects, reduced immunity and more. Several states have banned their use in food packaging, and legislation to do the same will soon be introduced in Congress.

The report notes that fast-food companies use a large amount of the Daikin plant’s PFAS in their wrappers. Toxic-Free Future used Food and Drug Administration data to estimate that Burger King treats its Whopper wrappers with about 21,900 pounds of PFAS annually, and McDonald’s treats its Big Mac wrappers with about 24,700 pounds of PFAS annually.

The nonprofit uses such findings to urge companies to phase out PFAS, and so far has secured commitments from McDonald’s, Whole Foods, Chipotle, Wendy’s and more.

“When Burger King decides to continue using PFAS, it needs to know that its decision has very serious impacts on communities in Alabama … and for the planet because of the climate impact,” Schreder said.

Toxic-Free Future discovered Daikin’s “dirty secret” as it investigated other environmental threats posed by the factory. At least three workers there have died on the job, and the company has poisoned a drinking water and recreation source for tens of thousands of downstream residents. Daikin recently had to pay $5m to help local municipalities clean up PFAS contamination.

Meanwhile, paper mills that produce food packaging treated with Daikin’s PFAS can release the chemicals to nearby water and sludge. FDA data shows that each PFAS-applying mill could be responsible every day for discharges of up to about 180 pounds of PFAS directly to surface water, along with up to 1,600 pounds in sludge, the report notes.

Daikin media representatives did not respond to a request for comment.

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Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer. (photo: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg)

Facebook Keeps Researching Its Own Harms - and Burying the Findings
Will Oremus, The Washington Post
Oremus writes: "Facebook knew all of those things because they were findings from its own internal research teams. But it didn't tell anyone. In some cases, its executives even made public statements at odds with the findings."

A series of leaked internal reports shows Facebook knows far more than it lets on. That’s by design.

Facebook knew that teen girls on Instagram reported in large numbers that the app was hurting their body image and mental health. It knew that its content moderation systems suffered from an indefensible double standard in which celebrities were treated far differently than the average user. It knew that a 2018 change to its news feed software, intended to promote “meaningful interactions,” ended up promoting outrageous and divisive political content.

Facebook knew all of those things because they were findings from its own internal research teams. But it didn’t tell anyone. In some cases, its executives even made public statements at odds with the findings.

This week, each of those revelations was the subject of a story in the Wall Street Journal, part of an ongoing investigative series that it’s calling the Facebook Files. The reporting is based on internal Facebook documents, some of which were turned over to the Journal by a person seeking federal whistleblower protection, and interviews with current and former employees, most of whom have remained anonymous.

While the stories are noteworthy in themselves, their provenance points to a deeper issue at Facebook. It is that the world’s largest social network employs teams of people to study its own ugly underbelly, only to ignore, downplay and suppress the results of their research when it proves awkward or troubling. Why it would do such a thing is a question whose answer lies at least partly in the company’s culture and organizational structure.

Like other major Internet platforms, Facebook weighs concerns about its impacts on users and society alongside traditional business imperatives such as growth, profit and marketing. Unlike some rivals, however, Facebook routes weighty decisions about content policy through some of the same executives tasked with government lobbying and public relations — an arrangement that critics say creates a conflict of interest. Often, they seem to prioritize public perception over transparency.

Facebook did not respond to a request for comment Thursday. In the past, it has responded to criticism over the role of its organizational structure by downplaying the role of any given executive and explaining that big decisions at the company receive input from multiple teams.

From its early days, Facebook has employed data scientists across various teams to study the effects of its products, and taken their findings seriously at the highest levels. In 2008, for instance, CEO Mark Zuckerberg signed off on the introduction of a “like” button only after its data scientists found in a test that it made users more likely to interact with one another’s posts, a story recounted by longtime Facebook executive Andrew Bosworth in a 2010 Quora post. In 2015, members of the company’s news feed ranking team explained to me how they rely on a dizzying array of surveys, focus groups and A/B tests to measure the impacts of any proposed change to the algorithm along multiple dimensions. Most of those findings were never publicized, but they factored heavily in the company’s decisions about which changes to implement.

More recently, Facebook has tasked its data scientists and multiple integrity and safety teams across the company with investigating questions about its products’ influence on things like global affairs, the flow of political information and users’ well-being. In at least a few cases, their findings have informed key product decisions. The 2018 Facebook news feed change around “meaningful interactions,” for one, was justified partly by appeal to research that found interacting with friends on social media was better for people’s mental health than passively watching videos.

Yet a pattern has emerged in which findings that implicate core Facebook features or systems, or which would require costly or politically dicey interventions, are reportedly brushed aside by top executives, and come out only when leaked to the media by frustrated employees or former employees.

For instance, the New York Times reported in 2018 that Facebook’s security team had uncovered evidence of Russian interference ahead of the 2016 U.S. election, but that Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg and Vice President of Global Public Policy Joel Kaplan had opted to keep it secret for fear of the political fallout. In February 2020, The Washington Post reported that an internal investigation following the 2016 election, called “Project P,” had identified a slew of accounts that had peddled viral fake news stories in the run-up to Donald Trump’s victory, but only a few were disabled after Kaplan warned of conservative backlash.

In September 2020, BuzzFeed obtained a memo written by former Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang, making the case that the company habitually ignored or delayed action on fake accounts interfering in elections around the world. In July 2021, MIT Technology Review detailed how the company pulled the plug on efforts by its artificial intelligence team to address misinformation, out of concern that they would hurt user engagement and growth. Just last month, the company admitted that it had shelved a planned transparency report showing that its most shared link over a three-month period was an article casting doubt on the safety of coronavirus vaccines.

Kaplan, a former Republican operative, is a recurring figure in many of these accounts. His current and former bosses, Nick Clegg and Elliot Schrage, respectively, also surface at times, albeit less often. They, in turn, report to Sandberg, who is Zuckerberg’s right hand.

Part of the issue, insiders say, may be the scope of these executives’ roles. As policy chief, Kaplan has input into decisions about how to apply Facebook’s rules, while also overseeing its relations with political leaders in D.C. — a mandate that all but ensures political considerations shape the platform’s policy choices. Clegg, meanwhile, oversees both policy and communications, weighing not only politics but PR concerns in evaluating which policies to pursue.

In contrast, Twitter’s then-vice president of global communications, Brandon Borrman, told me in 2020 that his company sends decisions about content enforcement, trust and safety, such as the call to fact-check one of Trump’s tweets for the first time, up a chain of command that is separate from its political and public relations divisions. Borrman said that he and the company’s top government relations executive were briefed on the decision only after CEO Jack Dorsey had accepted the trust and safety team’s recommendation.

Alex Stamos, Facebook’s former chief security officer who struggled to publicize his team’s findings on Russian election interference, has argued Facebook’s organizational structure helps to explain why all kinds of well-intentioned internal studies and projects at the company never see daylight. (Stamos now researches cybersecurity at the Stanford Internet Observatory.)

“I keep talking about how organizational design is a huge problem at Facebook,” Stamos tweeted Wednesday, after the third report in the Journal’s Facebook Files series. “In these cases, the unified product policy/government affairs structure and the isolation of people who care in dedicated Integrity teams are the problem. And Zuck.”

The last line of that tweet is a reference, of course, to Zuckerberg, who emerges in Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang’s recent book “An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination” as the driving force behind a company culture that has long prioritized growth and dominance over concerns of societal harms.

Sandberg, for her part, is portrayed in the same book as averse to confrontation and unable or unwilling to stand up to Zuckerberg and Kaplan on pivotal decisions. Her private conference room at Facebook’s headquarters long bore a sign that said “Only good news,” according to numerous reports — a credo that may go a long way toward explaining why uncomfortable internal research findings struggle to find an audience.

Robyn Caplan, a researcher at the nonprofit Data & Society, said she has repeatedly found over the years that online platforms’ struggles and inconsistencies with content moderation have their roots in corporate organizational dynamics that emerged from start-up culture. In many cases, Facebook will consult with internal and external researchers on how to address a problem, only for their advice to be overridden by more influential internal stakeholders, such as the leaders of their product, engineering or business divisions.

Caplan said the report that Facebook applied different tiers of content moderation practices to influential and ordinary users is symptomatic of a widespread practice in social media — one that prioritizes avoiding bad press over treating users fairly. “That’s an instance in creating a set of policies or processes designed to make the most (potentially) vocal critics happy, while undercutting needs of other users and groups,” she said. Caplan investigated a similar system at YouTube in a 2020 white paper that she co-authored with Tarleton Gillespie, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research.

For an approach that’s intended to avoid bad press, Facebook’s penchant for suppressing inconvenient internal research has itself generated a remarkable amount of, well, bad press.

As the latest batch of leaked internal critiques continues to trickle out, the company faces a choice. It could rethink its philosophy, realign its internal structure to separate policy from politics, and begin to pay greater heed to the trust and safety researchers and data scientists in its ranks. Alternatively, it could decide that such research creates more headaches than it’s worth, and limit the amount of self-critical projects it undertakes in the first place. Or it could carry on with the status quo, weathering this round of bad publicity and regulatory pressure as it has all the others before it — and likely continuing to rake in the enormous profits that have remained a constant through it all.

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Former Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin, right, addresses Hennepin County Judge Peter Cahill at the Hennepin County Courthouse in Minneapolis in April. (photo: AP)

Derek Chauvin Returns to Court for Allegedly Holding a Black Teen Down by the Throat
Associated Press
Excerpt: "A former Minneapolis police officer convicted of murder in the death of George Floyd is scheduled to be arraigned Thursday for allegedly violating the civil rights of a teenager in a separate case that involved a restraint similar to the one used on Floyd."
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Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte has repeatedly claimed the ICC has no jurisdiction over him. (photo: EPA)

ICC to Open Full Investigation Into Duterte's 'War on Drugs'
Ted Regencia, Al Jazeera
Regencia writes: "The International Criminal Court (ICC) has formally authorized an official probe into alleged crimes against humanity in Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte's 'war on drugs,' dealing a moral victory to human rights defenders and families of victims killed, including innocent children."

The Hague-based court says ‘specific legal element of the crime against humanity of murder’ has been met in the crackdown that killed thousands in Philippines.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has formally authorised an official probe into alleged crimes against humanity in Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s “war on drugs”, dealing a moral victory to human rights defenders and families of victims killed, including innocent children.

In a statement issued on Wednesday, the Hague-based tribunal said there was “reasonable basis” to proceed with the probe noting that “specific legal element of the crime against humanity of murder” has been met in the crackdown that left thousands dead.

The ICC’s pre-trial chamber also said that while it recognises the Philippines’ duty to fight drug smuggling and addiction, the “so-called ‘war on drugs’ campaign cannot be seen as a legitimate law enforcement operation, and the killings neither as legitimate nor as mere excesses in an otherwise legitimate operation”.

The order to investigate was signed by Judges Péter Kovács, Reine Adélaïde Sophie Alapini-Gansou and María del Socorro Flores Liera.

The court said that its judges considered the evidence presented on behalf of at least 204 victims, and what they found suggested that a “widespread and systematic attack against the civilian population took place pursuant to or in furtherance of a state policy”.

The ICC also noted that they have reviewed supporting materials that indicate that Philippine authorities “failed to take meaningful steps to investigate or prosecute the killings.” It also noted that that perpetrators of the killings were even offered “cash payments, promotions or awards for killings in the so-called ‘war on drugs’ campaign.”

Former ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda filed the request to investigate just before her retirement in June, alleging that “state actors, primarily members of the Philippine security forces, killed thousands of suspected drug users and other civilians during official law enforcement operations.”

Bensouda’s successor, Prosecutor Karim Khan, will now oversee the actual probe and possible trial of the case.

When Bensouda’s recommendation was announced in June, Duterte dismissed the news saying it was “bulls**t” while threatening to “slap” the ICC magistrates.

In an interview with DZBB, a Manila-based radio station on Thursday, Salvador Panelo, the president’s legal counsel repeated previous statements staying that the Duterte administation will not cooperate with the investigation.

Panelo also said that ICC investigators would not be permitted to enter the country to conduct the probe.

Hearing the news of the ICC decision, Llore Pasco, a resident of Metro Manila whose two sons were killed in May 2017, said she is relieved that the case is moving forward. She was one of the mothers who petitioned the ICC to investigate the deadly “war on drugs”.

“God is great. I feel some sense of relief and happiness. Now there’s hope that the victims can attain justice, and those who committed the crimes will be punished,” she told Al Jazeera on Thursday.

‘Reign of terror’

Duterte ran for president in 2016 on a single issue of fighting crime in the Philippines. During his campaign and later on as president, he repeatedly urged police to “kill” drug suspects.

After taking office on June 30, 2016, he immediately launched his deadly campaign described by the country’s Catholic leaders as a “reign of terror”.

The latest government data released in June shows that as of the end of April 2021, police and other security forces have killed at least 6,117 suspected drug dealers during its operations. But government figures cited by the UN in June 2020 already showed at least 8,600 deaths.

A Philippine police report in 2017 also referred to 16,355 “homicide cases under investigations” as accomplishments in the drugs war.

In December 2016, Al Jazeera reported more than 6,000 deaths in the drug war, raising questions about the inconsistency of the government’s record-keeping system and the possible “manipulation” of government data.

Human rights groups say the number of deaths could be between 27,000 and 30,000. They accuse the authorities of carrying out summary executions that killed innocent suspects, including children.

Among those killed were at least 73 children, with the youngest just five months old, according to a UN investigation. Countless people were also killed by “unknown” gunmen, who later turned out to be police officers, according to news reports. Only very few of the thousands of cases reported were prosecuted.

Withdrawal from ICC

In response to the initial move of the ICC to look into the drug war in the Philippines, Duterte withdrew the Philippines’s membership from the ICC in March 2018. The decision came into force exactly a year later in 2019.

When he announced he was going to withdraw from the court, Duterte defended his crackdown, saying it was “lawfully directed against drug lords and pushers who have for many years destroyed the present generation, especially the youth”.

The court, however, pointed out that it still has jurisdiction over the alleged crimes committed at the time that the Philippines was still a signatory to the Rome Statute until March 2019.

Manila ratified the Rome Statute on August 30, 2011, and the Statute entered into force beginning on November 2011.

The ICC was set up in 2002 by UN member states to adjudicate cases that countries are unable or unwilling to prosecute. In the past, it has indicted leaders such as Sudan’s former President Omar al-Bashir. In 2019, it convicted Bosco Ntaganda for war crimes and crimes against humanity for his involvement in armed conflict between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

‘Davao Death Squad’

Aside from the Duterte “drug war”, the ICC also said that it will look into alleged summary executions committed in the southern city of Davao between 2011 and 2016, when Duterte was mayor before he was elected president.

The ICC investigated at least 385 extrajudicial killings in Davao, covering the period that the Philippines was a state party to the Rome Statute.

The alleged executions were reportedly committed by local police officers and the so-called “Davao Death Squad” (DDS) vigilante group.

In 2017, a retired police officer had also linked Duterte and his men to nearly 200 killings when he was mayor there. But there have been as many as 1,424 summary executions listed by the Davao-based Coalition Against Summary Execution, according to the Mindanews website.

ICC prosecutors had alleged that those killed in Davao were also linked to the drug trade, adding that gang members and street children were also killed.

Duterte served as mayor of Davao for about 20 years. He had also served as congressman and vice mayor of the city.

ICC prosecutors said that authorities later employed the same tactics in the nationwide so-called war on drugs, when Duterte became president.

“According to available information, some of the persons involved appear to be the same. In fact, there is information that some police officers were transferred from Davao to Manila upon Rodrigo Duterte’ s assumption of the Presidency. Similarities in the modus operandi are also discernible.”

Citing the Philippines’ withdrawal from the Rome Statute, Duterte said that the ICC no longer has no jurisdiction over him and that the probe is “illegal”. Philippine legal analysts say that decision not to cooperate would only expedite the resolution of the case.

In an online forum, former University of the Philippines College of Law Dean Pacifico Agabin said Duterte’s legal strategy could even backfire, as it will only shorten the time for the ICC to review the case and proceed to the formal trial, during which the court could even issue an arrest warrant.

In the same forum, Tony La Vina, the dean of the Ateneo School of Government in Manila, added that Duterte and his team “will have a better chance appearing, rather than not appearing” at the Hague.

Taunting the ICC

When Bensouda first looked into the allegations of abuses in the Philippines, Duterte taunted her, referring to her as “that black woman”. He also called another UN human rights investigator, Agnes Callamard as “skinny and malnourished.” Callamard is now the secretary-general of Amnesty International.

In his State of the Nation address in July, he also addressed the ICC saying, “I have never denied [it], and the ICC can record it: Those who destroy my country – I will kill you,” he said.

His spokesman, Harry Roque, a former human rights lawyer, had earlier said that the ICC investigation was “legally erroneous and politically motivated.”

On Thursday, Roque said in Filipino that Duterte had already declared that “he would rather die than submit to a foreign tribunal”.

Roque also insisted that the judicial system in the Philippines in working, and as such the decision of the ICC violates the country’s “sovereignty and jurisdiction”.

Rights groups, however, welcomed the ICC’s decision on Wednesday saying, it reaffirms “the views of victims and their families”.

“Duterte and his cohorts should be made accountable for these crimes,” the human rights watchdog group Karapatan said in a statement.

In a statement, Human Rights Watch researcher Carlos Conde also praised the ICC’s decision saying, “Victims’ families and survivors have reason to hope that those responsible for crimes against humanity could finally face justice.”

Edre Olalia, the president of the National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers, said he hopes the decision “is the beginning of the end to impunity”

“No one should be invincible and infallible. There is always a time for everything.”

“It was a long and tortuous journey so far,” he told Al Jazeera.

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Satellite imagery shows that logging activity is spreading from peripheral areas of the Amazon toward the rainforest's core. (photo: Vicente Sampaio/Imaflora)

Illegal Logging Reaches Amazon's Untouched Core, 'Terrifying' Research Shows
Juliana Ennes, Mongabay
Ennes writes: "One of the main fears about the Brazilian Amazon is beginning to materialize: logging is starting to move from the periphery of the rainforest toward the core of the biome, groundbreaking new research shows."

One of the main fears about the Brazilian Amazon is beginning to materialize: logging is starting to move from the periphery of the rainforest toward the core of the biome, groundbreaking new research shows.

Tracking cut trees through satellite mapping data, the research found that logging activities cleared 464,000 hectares (1.15 million acres) of the Brazilian Amazon — an area three times the size of the city of São Paulo — between August 2019 and July 2020. More than half (50.8%) of the logging was reportedly concentrated in the state of Mato Grosso, followed by Amazonas (15.3%) and Rondônia (15%).

“Around 20 years ago, we feared that the forest would be devastated in the so-called ‘deforestation arch’ and the movement would migrate from the peripheral areas toward the central region of the Amazon,” said Marco Lentini, senior project coordinator of Imaflora, a sustainable development NGO involved in the mapping project. “Our map shows this is happening now: logging is going toward the Amazon core.”

He said the logging pattern was that of “frontier migration,” adding, “This is something that terrifies us. We have to stabilize this frontier.”

The research, released last week, was developed by the Simex network formed by four Brazilian environmental nonprofits: Imazon, Imaflora, Idesam, and Instituto Centro de Vida (ICV). The institutions say they set up the alliance to map, for the first time, logging in almost all of the Amazon. They managed to map seven of the nine states that make up the Brazilian Amazon — Acre, Amazonas, Amapá, Mato Grosso, Pará, Rondônia and Roraima — which together account for almost 100% of timber production from the rainforest.

Although the mapping was unable to specify the exact amount of trees illegally extracted from untouched forests, mostly of the illegalities were concentrated at the triple border between Mato Grosso, Amazonas and Rondônia, where intense logging activity was detected in an Indigenous reserve and a conservation unit, according to Vinicius Silgueiro, territorial intelligence coordinator at ICV, a nonprofit based in Mato Grosso. “Protected areas in this region show a large presence of logging and low level of fiscalization, with a lot of signs of illegality.”

The Sismex map covers areas where the Federal Police made the largest seizure of illegal timber in Brazil’s history earlier this year, recovering 226,000 cubic meters (8 million cubic feet) of wood on the border between Amazonas and Pará states. This operation triggered the ouster of the controversial minister of environment, Ricardo Salles, in June, after he reportedly asked for the release of the wood.

Ten municipalities accounted for almost 200,000 hectares (494,000 acres) of logging, five of them in Mato Grosso, two in Amazonas and the remaining in Roraima, Acre and Pará. Most logging activity, 78%, reportedly occurred on privately owned properties. Legal permits are often used to mask logging in restricted areas through a process known as tree laundering, according to the findings.

A more detailed study developed by Imazon focused on Pará shows that over half of the logging in the state has not received any governmental authorization. From August 2019 to July 2020, 50,139 hectares (123,896 acres) of forest were reportedly devastated, with 55% without authorization from environmental bodies. This represented a 20% growth over the 12 months before, when non-authorized logging totaled 38%, according to Imazon.

The map developed by the Simex network shows concentrations of logging activity in the state of Mato Grosso, followed by Amazonas and Pará. Image courtesy of Simex.Before the advent of the Simex project, only Pará and Mato Grosso had satellite-based maps identifying areas where logging has occurred. Imazon started monitoring Pará in 2008 and ICV joined the iniciative in 2013 by monitoring Mato Grosso. The institutions say that these states were their initial focus for data transparency due to high logging activities.

Logging for timber doesn’t clear forest area as extensively as deforestation does, and vegetation growth over logging sites can make visualization via satellite harder, according to Vinicius Silgueiro, territorial intelligence coordinator at ICV.

“With logging, different than deforestation, there is still some coverage by vegetation. We can identify scars in the forest made by the roads used to move the logs, as well as clear areas for storage. There is a whole infrastructure around logging that helps us find these areas,” Silgueiro told Mongabay in a phone interview.

In most states, however, he said it’s nearly impossible to verify when the logging activity is illegal, due to lack of transparency or technological barriers. Many times, he added, certificates for legal forestry activities are filed on paper, making it hard to cross-reference the database of certificates with the images. The only two states with digitized databases are Pará and Mato Grosso.

Another challenge is that the certificates allowing forest management give the location coordinates, but not the shape file — the digital map — of the area, which hampers efforts to identify through satellite imagery where illegal logging occurs, according to Lentini.

Despite these challenges, there are cases where it is very clear that the logging taking place is illegal, Lentini said: when it happens in protected areas like Indigenous reserves and conservation units. The study found that 6% of logging in the Amazon, or 28,112 hectares (69,466 acres), was in conservation units during the study period; 5% was in Indigenous reserves, at 24,866 hectares (61,445 acres). “These areas don’t have any kind of authorization for legal logging,” Silgueiro said.

A 2018 report by the Greenpeace, titled “Imaginary trees, real destruction,” highlighted the unreliability of Brazil’s forestry licensing and control systems, which it said makes it harder to tackle fraud.

“A critical flaw in the Amazon states’ forestry governance lies in the weakness of the licensing process for sustainable forest management plans,” the report said. For the most part, no field inspections are conducted before management plans are drawn up, or these inspections are of low quality, according to the report.

“This allows the forest engineers … to overestimate volumes or fraudulently add trees of high commercial value to the area’s forest inventory. State agencies subsequently issue credits for the harvesting and movement of this non-existent timber,” which will be logged from forests on Indigenous lands, protected areas or public lands, according to Greenpeace’s investigation.

Silgueiro, from ICV, said legal and illegal logging persist in proportions of around 60:40. “The more legal documentation there is for exploring the forest, the more illegal timber there is,” he said. He added that logging fraud will only stop once the whole process becomes traceable through technologies that help estimate the real volume of timber production and track each tree individually. “Traceability of production is essential,” Silgueiro said. “This technology already exists, but producing states are slow at adopting it.”

The environmental impact of illegal logging is immense. Recent studies show the Brazilian Amazon is now a net CO2 source, instead of being a carbon dioxide sink as would be expected, due to factors that include logging.

This article was originally published on Mongabay.

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