Testing

Wednesday, 2 October 2019

ACLU: Rapid DNA Machines in Police Departments Need Regulation

Rapid DNA Machines in Police Departments Need Regulation
Fast, cheap, and easy-to-use can be a recipe for misuse

Police departments around the country are beginning to deploy “Rapid DNA” machines, which can take a cheek swab or other genetic sample and automatically generate an identifying DNA profile. These machines cost as little as $30,000 and claim to take just 90 minutes. They handle some of our most sensitive information (our DNA) — and yet their design and use is largely unregulated. That should be cause for concern for several reasons.

First, Rapid DNA machines are likely to increase the risk of misidentification and wrongful conviction. Even traditional DNA analysis — which is typically done by trained professionals according to rigorous protocols in accredited laboratories — has led to terrible scandals and errors. For Rapid DNA machines — which police officers operate in precinct houses, without clear protocols, and after at most just a few hours of training — the risks of such injustices are even higher. Limited pilot studies have already raised concerns about the machines’ accuracy, including their failure to produce usable profiles, contamination of samples due to leaks in the machine, and the generation of at least one faulty profile.

These machines are also being used by police in ways they aren’t intended for. They were designed to test samples taken from individuals for identification purposes, but local police departments are already deploying them on crime scene evidence, which is often far more complex. Such samples often include DNA that may be damaged or degraded, is present only in low amounts, or mixes many people’s genetic material. The FBI’s expert “Scientific Working Group on DNA Analysis” sternly warns that only a trained forensic DNA analyst can interpret crime-scene samples, and that Rapid DNA machines should not be used on them. The scientists also point out that “crime scene samples are often irreplaceable, and Rapid DNA instruments consume the entire sample.” The National District Attorney’s Association takes a similar position. But local police are not listening.

Second, “cheap and easy to use” is a perfect recipe for overuse, particularly when it comes to sensitive technologies in the hands of the government. We have seen this dynamic with cell phone location tracking, face recognition, and communications eavesdropping: intrusive information collection that was once subject to “natural limits” because it was expensive gets deployed far too broadly when new technology makes it cheap. Rapid DNA machines are likely to have this effect. Our DNA is far more than a replacement for the fingerprint; it is the “nuclear weapon” of identifying technologies. It can reveal much more — and more intimate — information than simply our identity, including our propensity for certain diseases, our family members, and our ancestry. And, as technology develops, DNA may reveal even more.

Third, Rapid DNA machines are likely to encourage the growth of government DNA databases, putting some of our most sensitive information in government hands. It also raises the likelihood of false hits. Even before Rapid DNA machines, we were seeing local police departments asking too many people — even kids — to provide DNA samples. This cheaper, faster technology — combined with the fact that many states have expanded their laws to authorize DNA collection from those who have merely been arrested — is only likely to exacerbate the problem. According to reports by the New York Times and other outlets, the FBI is working to enlist these machines into a national pipeline that will pour into its centralized DNA database, CODIS. And these machines are also likely to incentivize the growth of rogue DNA databases, which are maintained at the local level with far fewer quality, privacy, and security controls than federal databases.

Fourth, the easy availability of DNA testing through these machines is likely to exacerbate existing problems with the criminal justice system, including racial disparities in DNA collection that exist because our criminal justice system disproportionately suspects, arrests, and convicts people of color — and collects DNA from them accordingly. Rapid DNA machines may also encourage police attempts to obtain DNA without a warrant, including through pretextual arrests and the collection of so-called “abandoned” DNA that we all scatter around as we live our lives (for example on the things we touch and eat).

Recommendations

Given these risks, policymakers at all levels should think hard about whether it is appropriate to allow police departments to deploy Rapid DNA machines. Where police departments have already acquired them or been permitted to do so, measures (some which we have discussed previously) must be taken to guard against the pitfalls discussed above, including:

Strict quality controls. The FBI is currently crafting use standards for Rapid DNA machines that will feed into CODIS. But local police departments are already using the machines outside of any standards. State lawmakers should look at this issue promptly and impose quality controls, including training and validation standards, to prevent sloppy use from creating injustices.
Formal acquisition, use, and retention restrictions. This technology demands formal, legally binding restrictions on the collection, use, and retention of DNA. This should include regulations that: limit use to individuals who police have probable cause to believe committed a crime; ensure that the samples and results will be used only for their intended purpose; guarantee individuals whose DNA is collected and tested a right to access their results; and ensure expungement as soon as a person’s DNA data is no longer needed for the purpose that justified its collection.
Limitation on “voluntary” collection. Collection of DNA should not be based on the fiction that submission is “voluntary” — that people are free to refuse police officers asking them for a biometric reading. Police officers have significant power and discretion in their encounters with us, and few such encounters are free from coercion. The New York Times story clearly showed such abuse in action; in the Pennsylvania town they profiled, where police must obtain consent from those under arrest, 90 percent of individuals asked agreed to hand over a sample. Officers explained that away with “criminals do stupid things,” but more likely most of those people did not feel they had a choice. Even people with more privilege may fear saying “no” to a police “request” that sounds an awful lot like a demand. No one should have to identify themselves to the police if they’re not suspected of a crime — and certainly should not be asked to turn over their DNA.
Democratic control. Many local departments purchase surveillance technologies using DHS or DOJ grants that circumvent the local democratic budgetmaking process. And at least one town profiled by ProPublica paid for its DNA database with funds acquired through police banditry (aka “civil asset forfeiture”). No police department should spend money on this technology — no matter its source — without permission from its city council, county board, or other democratically elected oversight body. That is true even in jurisdictions that have not yet passed the “Community Control Over Police Surveillance” (CCOPS) legislation that the ACLU recommends.
Transparency. Democratic control over police technology is impossible if communities don’t know what their officers are using and how. Legislators should ban nondisclosure agreements with technology vendors in which the government promises not to be transparent to its community about the nature of the technology it’s buying. Among other things, such agreements interfere with independent expert study of the technology. Individuals accused of a crime should also be guaranteed access to any available information about their tests and how they were conducted.

Published October 3, 2019 at 01:15AM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/2nLctxH

ACLU: Rapid DNA Machines in Police Departments Need Regulation

Rapid DNA Machines in Police Departments Need Regulation
Fast, cheap, and easy-to-use can be a recipe for misuse

Recommendations

Strict quality controls. The FBI is currently crafting use standards for Rapid DNA machines that will feed into CODIS. But local police departments are already using the machines outside of any standards. State lawmakers should look at this issue promptly and impose quality controls, including training and validation standards, to prevent sloppy use from creating injustices.
Formal acquisition, use, and retention restrictions. This technology demands formal, legally binding restrictions on the collection, use, and retention of DNA. This should include regulations that: limit use to individuals who police have probable cause to believe committed a crime; ensure that the samples and results will be used only for their intended purpose; guarantee individuals whose DNA is collected and tested a right to access their results; and ensure expungement as soon as a person’s DNA data is no longer needed for the purpose that justified its collection.
Limitation on “voluntary” collection. Collection of DNA should not be based on the fiction that submission is “voluntary” — that people are free to refuse police officers asking them for a biometric reading. Police officers have significant power and discretion in their encounters with us, and few such encounters are free from coercion. The New York Times story clearly showed such abuse in action; in the Pennsylvania town they profiled, where police must obtain consent from those under arrest, 90 percent of individuals asked agreed to hand over a sample. Officers explained that away with “criminals do stupid things,” but more likely most of those people did not feel they had a choice. Even people with more privilege may fear saying “no” to a police “request” that sounds an awful lot like a demand. No one should have to identify themselves to the police if they’re not suspected of a crime — and certainly should not be asked to turn over their DNA.
Democratic control. Many local departments purchase surveillance technologies using DHS or DOJ grants that circumvent the local democratic budgetmaking process. And at least one town profiled by ProPublica paid for its DNA database with funds acquired through police banditry (aka “civil asset forfeiture”). No police department should spend money on this technology — no matter its source — without permission from its city council, county board, or other democratically elected oversight body. That is true even in jurisdictions that have not yet passed the “Community Control Over Police Surveillance” (CCOPS) legislation that the ACLU recommends.
Transparency. Democratic control over police technology is impossible if communities don’t know what their officers are using and how. Legislators should ban nondisclosure agreements with technology vendors in which the government promises not to be transparent to its community about the nature of the technology it’s buying. Among other things, such agreements interfere with independent expert study of the technology. Individuals accused of a crime should also be guaranteed access to any available information about their tests and how they were conducted.

Published October 2, 2019 at 08:45PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/2nLctxH

ACLU: How Laws Targeting Clinics Could End Abortion Access

How Laws Targeting Clinics Could End Abortion Access
Abortion could become inaccessible in entire states even without an explicit abortion ban

Abortion rights captured the nation’s attention earlier this year when seven states passed early abortion bans. With the changes in the Supreme Court, and President Trump’s promise to appoint justices that would overturn Roe v. Wade, the concern about whether these new abortion bans would be upheld by the Supreme Court understandably reached a fever pitch.

But banning abortion outright isn’t the only way to eliminate abortion access in a state. For decades, anti-abortion politicians have been quietly trying to push abortion out of reach by passing abortion restriction on top of restriction. The new Supreme Court term started this week, and several challenges to such restrictions are pending in the Supreme Court. The Court could thus issue a ruling that would affect the future of abortion access this year without ever taking up a case involving an outright abortion ban.

Many of the abortion restrictions passed in recent years are called Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers (TRAP) laws. They serve no medical purpose, and are passed with the sole intention of making it difficult — if not impossible — for people to access abortion. A TRAP case from Louisiana, brought by our colleagues at the Center for Reproductive Rights, is one of the cases that SCOTUS could take up this term.

The TRAP law in question in the Louisiana case requires doctors who work at abortion clinics to have admitting privileges at a local hospital. If it stands, it would shutter all the clinics in the state except for one.

A district court struck down the law after finding that it would serve no medical purpose and would decimate abortion access in the case. The state appealed, and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the law. While it agreed that the law had limited-to-no medical utility, the court inaccurately found that the law wouldn’t cause clinics to close.

If you are experiencing déjà vu, you are not alone. In 2016, the Supreme Court heard Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, and found that a nearly identical law in Texas, which also required abortion providers to have admitting privileges at a local hospital, served no medical purpose and would unnecessarily force clinics to close. The Court ruled that the law was therefore unconstitutional. The Whole Woman’s Health decision should have controlled the outcome in the Louisiana case too, but the Fifth Circuit failed to follow it.

Louisiana is not alone in trying to use TRAP laws to effectively ban abortion. In Kentucky, we represent the last abortion clinic in the state, EMW Women’s Surgical Center, in several lawsuits, including a challenge to a TRAP law that requires abortion facilities to have a written transfer agreement with a local hospital. EMW had a transfer agreement with a local hospital for years, but Governor Bevin’s administration rejected it because it was signed by the head of the OB/GYN department rather than the hospital’s CEO. To prevent the state from shutting EMW down and eliminating abortion access in Kentucky, we went to court. The law was struck down after trial, but the state’s appeal is now pending in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.

In Ohio, a TRAP law is also being used to quietly and gradually close abortion clinics. The law creates a complicated obstacle course for clinics: it says surgical facilities must have a written transfer agreement with a hospital, but the state department of health can waive that requirement if the clinic has one or more backup doctors with hospital admitting privileges. The health department previously said that two backup doctors are insufficient for a waiver, and have arbitrarily demanded three instead. Now – for no medical reason – they are requiring four back-up doctors. In states where doctors are subject to harassment for simply being associated with abortion access, finding that many back-up doctors can be next to impossible.

In Missouri, the state’s last clinic is facing a similar fight. Earlier this year, the health department threatened to shut down that clinic, which is a Planned Parenthood affiliate, over disputes about its license. Planned Parenthood’s lawyers ran to court, and were able to get a court order prohibiting the state from closing the clinic—for now.

These states have followed up their restrictive TRAP laws with legislation that effectively bans abortion (although none are currently in effect). The agenda of these anti-abortion politicians is clear: TRAP laws have nothing to do with public safety, and everything to do with hostility to abortion. They are part of a strategy to do anything that eliminates abortion access.

As the Supreme Court starts its new session this week, all eyes should be on the Louisiana case. If the Court allows the Louisiana law to take effect, it will not only be devastating for people in Louisiana, it could also pave the way for courts to uphold other TRAP laws and abortion restrictions that will push abortion out of reach even more so than it already is. TRAP laws hide their true intention under complex regulatory requirements that obscure what they are meant to accomplish, which is an end to abortion access. We must remain vigilant against all attempts to ban abortion, including both explicit as well as more subtle attempts.

Published October 2, 2019 at 08:15PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/2pirx64

ACLU: How Laws Targeting Clinics Could End Abortion Access

How Laws Targeting Clinics Could End Abortion Access
Abortion could become inaccessible in entire states even without an explicit abortion ban

Published October 2, 2019 at 03:45PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/2pirx64

Fire Sale: Finance and Fascism in the Amazon Rainforest

In a recent piece for Jacobin, climate writers Alyssa Battistoni and Thea Riofrancos drew a connection between fires burning in Greenland and those still ablaze in the Amazon rainforest: “They’re being sparked by the rich and powerful, whether by agricultural conglomerates, complicit right-wing governments, or fossil fuel executives who’ve lied to the public so they can keep spewing heat-trapping carbon up into the atmosphere for a quick buck.” The simplicity of the claim was dumbfounding, and, to that end, haunting. Was it merely the rich and powerful who lit the match?

Another writer for the magazine, Kate Aronoff, called for fossil fuel executives to be tried for crimes against humanity. “Technically speaking, what fossil-fuel companies do isn’t genocide,” she wrote, clarifying that energy CEOs don’t target their victims based on racial or ethnic animus. Yet genocidal land grabs are being carried out to expand “the Red Zone” — the agricultural frontier — eking its way deeper into the Amazon rainforest by way of roads and infrastructure backed by global capital. The Amazon, or the lungs of the earth, as it’s often referred to, is being seized from indigenous communities by mining and agribusiness interests, gutting the resiliency of one of the earth’s last great carbon sinks and producers of oxygen. But who is responsible for burning it? Bolsonaro? Corruption in Brazil? The World Bank? U.S. Financial Firms? Silicon Valley? Could the culprits be named, I wondered? Tried?

In July, just weeks before the news of the fires went global, I wrote an essay for this site about the connection between cattle ranching and indigenous land dispossession. In it, I tried to draw a parallel between how ranching shaped both the progression of westward expansion in the United States during the 19th century and the cattle boom that’s clearing the Amazon today. The connections are uncanny: from their mutually shoddy justifications for land-grabbing to their eerily similar cowboy-nostalgia–themed boom towns, 1880s Kansas resembles the Red Zone of today. One of the connections I neglected to note was the role of international finance in funding the frontiers’ forward momentum. British firms invested in American ranching in the late nineteenth century, and today, as The Intercept recently reported, American firms are torching the rainforest for an easy return on investment.

“It’s a shame that the Brazilian cavalry hasn’t been as efficient as the Americans, who exterminated the Indians,” Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro said in 1994. Since taking power in 2018, Bolsonaro has rapidly pulled off the gloves protecting the Amazon and holds no pretext of preserving it, exacerbating the plunder that has been in progress for generations. “The Brazilian state now acts merely as the facilitator of private extraction,“ as the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research put it in their recent report on the Amazon, which traces mining in the rainforest to the WWII era. “Mining in the Amazon dates back to the discovery of manganese (essential to iron and steel production) in the state of Amapá in 1945 by the mining firm Icomi. Icomi represented the interests of the US transnational corporation Bethlehem Steel,” the report notes.

Since the end of the military dictatorship in 1985, the era during which Bolsonaro was an army captain and nostalgia for which he ran his presidential campaign on, Brazil moved left, culminating in the Workers’ Party’s (PT) rise to power. The party ruled from 2003-2016, making large strides for the working class — this resulted in cash transfers for the poor, raising the minimum wage, and expanding access to education. Converging factors — a car wash corruption scandal sinking PT’s political prospects; neoliberal austerity, brought on partially by the United States withdrawing investment in Brazilian bonds in 2013, making PT unable to continue to deliver on popular social programs; and rightward drift egged on, in part, by the adjustment of YouTube’s algorithm flooding the country with paranoid right wing conspiracy theories; among others — created a vacuum that made way for Bolsonaro’s rise.

The following reading list attempts to make sense of the ongoing pillaging of the Amazon rainforest. From global capital to YouTube, carbon credits to indigenous land defenders in their own words, I tried to figure out who lit the match and how the fire might be stopped. –WM

1. Bolsonaro’s Brazil (Perry Anderson, London Review of Books)

In this epic 17,000 word tour-de-force, historian and sociologist Perry Anderson takes readers through the ups and downs of Brazil’s recent unravelling and rightward ascent. At once both gripping and dense, Anderson leaves few stones unturned in understanding PT leader Lula’s fall and his successor Dilma Rousseff’s pivoting failure, creating the space for Bolsonaro to rise through the cracks of fringe obscurity onto the national stage.

[Bolsonaro] is no enemy of foreign capital. His nationalism, in expression hyperbolic enough, essentially takes the form of virulent tropes of anti-socialism, anti-feminism and homophobia, excrescences alien to the Brazilian soul. But it has no quarrel with free markets. In local parlance, it offers the paradox of a populismo entreguista, a ‘supine’ populism – one in principle at least, perfectly willing to hand over national assets to global banks and corporations.

2. What Indigenous Rights Have to Do With Fighting Climate Change (Andre Pagliarini, The New Republic)

Latin American history professor Andre Pagliarini lays out the stakes of the Amazon fires within the contours of Indigenous resistance. This brief piece is rich with historical detail from the military dictatorship forward, weaving together the Brazilian political situation with global climate imperatives in an easily digestible essay.

Clearly, it is in the interest of both indigenous groups and the international community to try to preserve Brazil’s rainforest. But it’s not clear what approach would be productive: Bolsonaro has long questioned the need for the state to protect indigenous lands, and sees the Amazon as a source of Brazilian wealth threatened by international preservation initiatives: “where there is native land, there is wealth underneath it,” he said in 2017. The recent uptick in interest from the United States, wondering how to save the Amazon—one writer even posited the increased likelihood “of serious confrontations and possibly serious conflict” with other countries if Brazil cannot or will not stem the tide of devastation—are unlikely to be productive. After all, retaining control over the roughly two-thirds of Amazon rainforest within Brazilian territory is one of the most pressing concerns of the country’s armed forces. Influential segments of the Brazilian armed forces believe developed countries are currently waging “an indirect war” against Brazil for control of the Amazon using the Catholic church, NGOs, and international organizations like the UN. These generals care less about protecting the Amazonian rainforest per se than they do about sovereignty, that is, protecting Brazil’s territorial integrity against foreign encroachment. This is why the military today is apt to support Bolsonaro’s forceful claim to the Amazon without any real concern for what is happening in and to the Amazon and its inhabitants. As long as those borders are respected, the Amazon can burn for all they care.

Indigenous peoples are speaking the language of resistance. In January, as Bolsonaro took office, an indigenous man in southeast Pará told conservation news site Mongabay that “for the moment we are waiting to see what action the authorities will take, but, if they do nothing, we shall have to see what we can do.” Two months later, a teenage member of the Wapishana tribe told The Guardian that “we are here to fight to the last indigenous person, be it verbally or physically.”

3. Rainforest on Fire (Alexander Zaitchik, The Intercept)

Reporter Alexander Zaitchik went to the Amazon and saw the ballooning Red Zone up close. In a beautiful piece of narrative journalism, Zaitchik takes readers back to the deforestation under the dictatorship and traces its ebbs and flows to the present. The piece follows the indigenous land defenders, militant stooges of agribusiness, and the government’s shoddy defense of the forest as they wrestle for control of the natural resources in the Amazon.

They imagined an Amazon transformed: Out of an impenetrable wilderness, settlers would build a dense grid of ranches and small farms, each one connected to coastal ports and global commodity markets by a mighty network of roads and highways. The inhabitants of the forest, both Indians and non-Indigenous people living traditionally, would have to make way, adapt, and integrate. “Amazonian occupation will proceed as though we are waging a strategically conducted war,” said Castelo Branco, one of the generals who led the 1964 coup.

4. How YouTube Radicalized Brazil (Max Fisher and Amanda Taub, The New York Times)

“If social media didn’t exist, I wouldn’t be here; Jair Bolsonaro wouldn’t be president,” Carlos Jordy, a right-wing-YouTube-vlogger-cum-federal-legislator, told The Times. In probably the most far-out piece on this list, journalists Fisher and Taub report on new research that links Brazil’s right turn to YouTube. “In the months after YouTube changed its algorithm, positive mentions of Mr. Bolsonaro ballooned,” they write, suggesting a direct correlation between Bolsonaro’s rise and an algorithmic tweak.

Then Brazil’s political system collapsed just as YouTube’s popularity there soared. Mr. Bolsonaro’s views had not changed. But YouTube’s far-right, where he was a major figure, saw its audience explode, helping to prime large numbers of Brazilians for his message at a time when the country was ripe for a political shift.

5. Hour of the Furnaces: Imperial Finance and the Colonization of Daily Life (Morgan Adamson, Viewpoint Magazine)

Reading about Brazil, now dubbed the “world’s slaughterhouse”, I couldn’t help but think of the Hour of the Furnaces, a 1968 film made under military dictatorship by far-left filmmakers in Argentina. The film put forth an expansive political analysis that feels prescient to understanding Brazil today, linking neocolonialism, finance, and imperialism; demonstrating how international bankers rob entire countries with fountain pens, to borrow from Woody Guthrie. One of the most iconic scenes is of cows being hung and killed in a slaughterhouse while advertising clips for multinational corporations flash on the assembly line. The scene contextualizes Argentina’s agribusiness industry, situating it within the global commodity market; showing how the country must produce exports in order to pay down their debt to international creditors, thus creating a cycle of “dependency.” In this rewarding review of the four-hour film, scholar Morgan Adamson uses the film’s critique of imperialism and finance to build a bridge between an early-industrial Marxian/Leninist analysis to that of the neoliebral period, culminating in Argentina’s 2001 default.

To understand the critique of finance put forward by Hora de los hornos, we first have to acknowledge that financial systems have their origins in colonial and imperial violence. Take the 1781 Zong slave ship massacre, for example, in which the crew cast 133 captives into the Atlantic, allowing their “owners” in Liverpool to file insurance claims for the drowned “cargo.” For Ian Baucom, this massacre and its aftermath inaugurate what he calls the “speculative discourse” of modernity, connecting the violence of the middle passage to the birth of insurance and other forms of financial speculation. K-Sue Park similarly argues that the practice of foreclosure has its origins in the expropriation of indigenous lands in the early colonial period of North America. Contemporary scholars are not the first to notice that key financial technologies were developed in the course of colonial expropriation during the brutal passage from mercantile to industrial capitalism. In the chapters on primitive accumulation in Capital, volume 1, Marx himself tells the interpenetrating story of the rise of the modern banking system, national debt, and the “idyllic proceedings” of colonial plunder across the globe, concluding that capital comes into the world “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”

Kickstart your weekend reading by getting the week’s best Longreads delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon.

6. How Larry Fink, Joe Biden’s Wall Street Ally, Profits From Amazon Cattle Ranching (Robert Mackey, The Intercept)

This short piece hit me on an emotional level because it exposes the Wall Street allies of prominent American Democrats for who they really are: Bolsonaro sympathizers, content to pillage the planet for short term gain. If we are looking to name the individuals responsible for the destruction of the rainforest, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink seems high on the list of complicity, if you ask me.

That desire to be seen as an ethical investor has not, however, stopped BlackRock from contributing to the climate crisis by providing significant financing to the world’s biggest meatpacker, JBS, which has been caught year after year buying cattle raised on illegally deforested Amazon land.

[…] About a third of that beef is exported by JBS, the spectacularly corrupt Brazilian meat-packing conglomerate BlackRock is heavily invested in. But even as Fink publicly urged business leaders to consider their environmental impact, BlackRock increased its stake in JBS by $41 million between 2016 and 2018, according to research conducted for Friends of the Earth.

7. A Top Financier of Trump and McConnell Is a Driving Force Behind Amazon Deforestation (Ryan Grim, The Intercept)

The Red Zone could not be expanded without the financial support of U.S. investment dollars. Although the WorldBank has historically been involved with expanding roads and infrastructure into the rainforest to aid mining and agribusiness, the complicity of Blackstone and its CEO Stephen Schwarzman feels noteworthy, because, like Fink, Schwarzman is an individual who is playing an outsize role in the Amazon’s destruction. (The two men and their companies, perhaps not at all surprisingly, have a shared history.)

The Amazon terminal is run by Hidrovias do Brasil, a company that is owned in large part by Blackstone, a major U.S. investment firm. Another Blackstone company, Pátria Investimentos, owns more than 50 percent of Hidrovias, while Blackstone itself directly owns an additional roughly 10 percent stake. Blackstone co-founder and CEO Stephen Schwarzman is a close ally of Trump and has donated millions of dollars to McConnell in recent years.

In recent months, the Sackler family, whose members founded and own the pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma, have become pariahs for their role in facilitating the opioid crisis and the deaths of tens of thousands of people. Schwarzman’s contributions to the destruction of the Amazon, which stands between humanity and an uninhabitable planet, may ultimately render him as socially untouchable as the Sacklers, given the scale of the fallout from the destruction of the rainforest.

8. Why Carbon Credits For Forest Preservation May Be Worse Than Nothing (Lisa Song, ProPublica)

ProPublica reporter Lisa Song went on a world tour of carbon offsets. She learned quickly that they didn’t work and were helping corporations emit guilt-free. “What if Chevron or Shell or Phillips 66 could offset some of their damage by paying Brazil not to cut down trees?” she asks. Song starts her investigation in the Amazon Rainforest, where they are experimenting with exactly that. Still, the cash from oil executives has not halted deforestation, and, in many cases, trees continue to be cleared for cattle to graze, despite all their good intentions.

I looked at projects going back two decades and spanning the globe and pulled together findings from academic researchers in far-flung forest villages, studies published in obscure journals, foreign government reports and dense technical documents. I enlisted a satellite imagery analysis firm to see how much of the forest remained in a preservation project that started selling credits in 2013. Four years later, only half the project areas were forested.

In case after case, I found that carbon credits hadn’t offset the amount of pollution they were supposed to, or they had brought gains that were quickly reversed or that couldn’t be accurately measured to begin with. Ultimately, the polluters got a guilt-free pass to keep emitting CO₂, but the forest preservation that was supposed to balance the ledger either never came or didn’t last.

9. Operation Amazon Redux (Tatiana Dias, The Intercept)

Tatiana Dias, a reporter for The Intercept Brasil, connects the genocidal land grabs occurring today to those that took place under a military dictatorship in the 1930s. Conspiratorial paranoia has been used to justify rapid expansion into indigenous territories, then and now. Talk of international NGOs using the pretext of environmental concern, as well as even the Catholic Church’s appeals to protect ecology, has fanned the flames of Brazil’s calls for “sovereignty.” In many ways, this article exposes the flip side of eco-fascism: Instead of entrenching militarized borders to fence out climate refugees, this strain suggests that indigenous people, globalists, and environmental activists are an affront to the country’s self-rule; that land must be torched and bulldozed for benefit of, as Bolsonaro put it, the country’s “common good.”

From the populist president-turned-dictator who made one of the early industrial pushes into the forest in the 1930s to the military dictatorship that ruled the country for two decades from 1964 until 1985, the justifications have largely been the same — economic gain and geopolitical paranoia — as were the often poor results.

Take the dictatorship’s push. Known as Operation Amazon, the colonization plan hatched during the military government envisioned integrating the territory into Brazil through building roads and developing agricultural and corporate enterprises — all accomplished by settling people from the south, southeast, and northeast of the country and the coasts in the forest.

10. Money Is the Oxygen on Which the Fire of Global Warming Burns (Bill McKibben, The New Yorker)

Global warming campaigner and author Bill McKibben, in a recent essay for the New Yorker, explicitly examines the role of banking, finance, and insurance in fueling the climate crisis. Not only do giant firms like Chase and BlackRock have the power to pull the plug on lines of credit for new fossil fuel projects, like Arctic drilling, but doing so effects only a small amount of their investment load. McKibben’s group 350 has pushed a global divestment campaign, which, as the essay notes, has halted new fossil fuel projects in their tracks.

But what if there were an additional lever to pull, one that could work both quickly and globally? One possibility relies on the idea that political leaders are not the only powerful actors on the planet—that those who hold most of the money also have enormous power, and that their power could be exercised in a matter of months or even hours, not years or decades. I suspect that the key to disrupting the flow of carbon into the atmosphere may lie in disrupting the flow of money to coal and oil and gas.

11. We, the peoples of the Amazon, are full of fear. Soon you will be too (Raoni Metuktire, The Guardian)

This op-ed in The Guardian speaks for itself.

When your money comes into our communities it often causes big problems, driving our people apart. And we can see that it does the same thing in your cities, where what you call rich people live isolated from everyone else, afraid that other people will come to take their piu caprim away from them. Meanwhile other people starve or live in misery because they don’t have enough money to get food for themselves and their children.

But those rich people will die, as we all will die. And when their spirits are separated from their bodies their spirits will be sad and they will suffer, because while they are alive they have made so many other people suffer instead of helping them, instead of making sure that everyone else has enough to eat before they feed themselves, which is our way, the way of the Kayapó, the way of indigenous people.

* * *

Will Meyer is a writer and musician. He is editor of The Shoestring, a local online publication in Western Massachusetts.

Editor: Dana Snitzky

Tuesday, 1 October 2019

Georgia : Technical Assistance Report-External Sector Statistics Mission

Georgia : Technical Assistance Report-External Sector Statistics Mission
Published October 01, 2019 at 07:00AM
Read more at imf.org

A Single Sentence

The following essay, like all those collected in I Will Never See the World Again, was smuggled out of jail among Ahmet Altan’s notes to his lawyers.

I woke up. The doorbell was ringing. I looked at the digital clock by my side, the numbers were blinking 05:42.

“It’s the police,” I said.

Like all dissidents in this country, I went to bed expecting the ring of the doorbell at dawn.

I knew one day they would come for me. Now they had.

I had even prepared a set of clothes in an overnight bag so that I would be ready for the police raid and what would follow.

A pair of loose black linen trousers tied with a band inside the waist so there would be no need for a belt, black ankle socks, comfortable soft trainers, a light cotton T-shirt and a dark-colored shirt to be worn over it.

I put on my “raid uniform” and went to the door.

Local Bookstores
Amazon

Through the peephole I could see six policemen on the landing, sporting the vests worn by counterterrorism teams during house raids, the acronym “TEM” stamped in large letters on their chests.

I opened the door.

“These are search and arrest orders,” they said as they entered, leaving the door open.

They told me there was a second arrest order for my brother Mehmet Altan, who lived in the same building. A team had waited at his door, but no one had answered.

When I asked which number apartment they had gone to, it turned out they had rung the wrong bell.

I phoned Mehmet.

“We have guests,” I said. “Open the door.”

As I hung up, one of the policemen reached for my phone. “I’ll have that,” he said, and took it.

The six spread out into the apartment and began their search.

Dawn arrived. The sun rose behind the hills with its rays spreading purple, scarlet and lavender waves across the sky, resembling a white rose petal opening.

A peaceful September morning was stirring, unaware of what was happening inside my home.

While the policemen searched the apartment, I put the kettle on.

“Would you like some tea?” I asked.

They said they would not.

“It is not a bribe,” I said, imitating my late father, “you can drink some.”

Exactly forty-five years ago, on a morning just like this one, they had raided our house and arrested my father.

My father asked the police if they would like some coffee. When they declined, he laughed and said, “It is not a bribe, you can drink some.”

What I was experiencing was not déjà vu. Reality was repeating itself. This country moves through history too slowly for time to go forward, so it folds back on itself instead.

Forty-five years had passed and time had returned to the same morning.

During the space of that morning which lasted forty-five years, my father had died and I had grown old, but the dawn and the raid were unchanged.

Mehmet appeared at the open door with the smile on his face I always find reassuring. He was surrounded by policemen.

We said farewell. The police took Mehmet away.

My two high walls were built with a single sentence.

I poured myself tea. I put muesli in a bowl and poured milk over it. I sat in an armchair to drink my tea, eat my muesli and wait for the police to complete their search.

The apartment was quiet.

No sound could be heard other than the police as they moved things around.

They filled thick plastic bags with the two decades-old laptops I had written some of my novels on and therefore could not bring myself to throw away, old-fashioned diskettes that had accumulated over the years and my current laptop.

“Let’s go,” they said.

I took the bag, to which I had added a change of underwear and a couple of books.

We left the building. We got into the police car that was waiting at the gate.

I sat with my bag on my lap. The door closed on me.

It is said that the dead do not know that they are dead. According to Anatolian mythology, once the corpse is placed in the grave and covered with dirt and the funeral crowd has begun to disperse, the dead person also tries to get up and go home, only to realize when he hits his head on the coffin lid that he has died.

When the door closed, my head hit the coffin lid.

I could not open the door of that car and get out.

I could not return home.

Never again would I be able to kiss the woman I love, embrace my kids, meet with my friends, walk the streets. I would not have my room to write in, my machine to write with, my library to reach for. I would not be able to listen to a violin concerto or go on a trip or browse in bookstores or buy bread from a bakery or gaze on the sea or an orange tree or smell the scent of flowers, the grass, the rain, the earth. I would not be able to go to a cinema. I would not be able to eat eggs with sausage or drink a glass of wine or go to a restaurant and order fish. I would not be able to watch the sunrise. I would not be able to call anyone on the phone. No one would be able to call me on the phone. I would not be able to open a door by myself. I would not wake up again in a room with curtains.

Even my name was about to change.

Ahmet Altan would be erased and replaced with the name on the official certificate, Ahmet Hüsrev Altan.

When they asked for my name, I would say “Ahmet Hüsrev Altan.” When they asked where I lived, I would give them the number of a cell.

From now on, others would decide what I did, where I stood, where I slept, what time I got up, what my name was.

I would always be receiving orders: “stop,” “walk,” “enter,” “raise your arms,” “take off your shoes,” “don’t talk.”

Kickstart your weekend reading by getting the week’s best Longreads delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon.

The police car was speeding along.

It was the first day of a twelve-day religious holiday. Most people in the city, including the prosecutor who had ordered my arrest, had left on vacation.

The streets were deserted.

The policeman next to me lit a cigarette, then held the packet out to me.

I shook my head no, smiling.

“I only smoke,” I said, “when I am nervous.”

Who knows where this sentence came from. Nowhere in my mind had I chosen to make such a declaration. It was a sentence that put an unbridgeable distance between itself and reality. It ignored reality, ridiculed it, even as I was being transformed into a pitiful bug who could not even open the door of the car he was in, who had lost his right to decide his own future, whose very name was being changed; a bug entangled in the web of a poisonous spider.

It was as if someone inside me, a person whom I could not exactly call “I” but who nevertheless spoke with my voice, through my mouth, and who was therefore a part of me, said as he was being transported in a police car to an iron cage that he only smoked when he was “nervous.”

That single sentence suddenly changed everything.

It divided reality in two, like a Samurai sword that in a single movement cuts through a silk scarf thrown up in the air.

On one side of this reality was a body made of flesh, bone, blood, muscle and nerve that was trapped. On the other side was a mind that did not care about that body and made fun of what would happen to it, a mind that looked from above at what was happening and at what was yet to happen, that believed itself untouchable and that was, therefore, untouchable.

I was like Julius Caesar, who, as soon as he was informed that a large Gallic army was on its way to relieve the besieged occupants of Alesia, had two high walls built — one around the castle to prevent those inside from leaving, and one around his troops to prevent those outside from entering.

My two high walls were built with a single sentence which prevented the mortal threats from entering and the worries accumulating in the deep corners of my mind from exiting, so that the two could not unite to crush me with fear and terror.

Reality itself is taken aback.

I realized once more that when you are faced with a reality that can turn your life upside down, that same sorry reality will sweep you away like a wild flood only if you submit to it and act as it expects you to.

As someone who has been thrown into the dirty, swelling waves of reality, I can say with certainty that its victims are those so-called smart people who believe that you have to act in accordance with it.

There are certain actions and words that are demanded by the events, the dangers and the realities that surround you. Once you refuse to play this assigned role, instead doing and saying the unexpected, reality itself is taken aback; it hits against the rebellious jetties of your mind and breaks into pieces. You then gain the power to collect the fragments together and create from them a new reality in the mind’s safe harbor.

The trick is to do the unexpected, to say the unexpected. Once you can make light of the lance of destiny pointing at your body, you can cheerfully eat the cherries you had filled your hat with, like the unforgettable lieutenant in Pushkin’s story “The Shot” who does exactly that with a gun pointing at his heart.

Like Borges, you can answer the mugger who demands, “Your money or your life,” with, “My life.”

The power you will gain is limitless.

I still don’t know how I came to utter the sentence that transformed everything that was happening to me and my perception of it, nor what its mystical source might be. What I do know is that someone in the police car, the person who was able to say he smoked only when he was nervous, is hidden inside me.

He is made of many voices, laughs, paragraphs, sentences and pain.

Had I not seen my father smile as he was taken away in a police car forty-five years ago; had I not heard from him that the envoy of Carthage, when threatened with torture, put his hand in the embers; had I not known that Seneca consoled his friends as he sat in a bath full of hot water and slit his wrists on Nero’s orders; had I not read that, on the eve of the day he was to be guillotined, Saint-Just had written in a letter that the conditions were difficult only for those who resisted entering the grave and that Epictetus had said when our bodies are enslaved our minds can remain free; had I not learned that Boethius wrote his famous book in a cell awaiting death, I would have been afraid of the reality that surrounded me in that police car. I would not have found the strength to ridicule it and shred it to pieces. Nor would I have been able to utter the sentence with secret laughter that rose from my lungs to my lips. No, I would have cowered with anxiety.

But someone whom I reckon to be made from the illuminated shadows of those magnificent dead reflected in me spoke, and thus managed to change all that was happening.

Reality could not conquer me.

Instead, I conquered reality.

In that police car speeding down the sunlit streets, I set the bag that was on my lap onto the floor with a sense of ease, and leaned back.

When we arrived at the Security Department, the car drove through a very large gate at the entrance and started down a winding road. As we descended the slope there was less and less light and the darkness deepened.

At a turn in the road, the car stopped and we got out. We walked through a door into a large underground hall.

This was an underworld completely unknown to the people milling about above. It reeked of stone, sweat and damp. It tore from the world all those who passed through its dirty yellow walls, which resembled a forest of sulphur.

In the drab raw light of the naked lamps every face bore the wax dullness of death.

Plainclothes policemen waited to greet us creatures ripped from the world. Past them, a hallway led deeper inside. Piled at the base of the walls were plastic bags that looked like the shapeless belongings of the shipwrecked swept ashore.

The policemen removed the tie from around the waist of my trousers, together with my watch and my ID.

Here in depths without light, the police, with each of their gestures and words, carved us out of life like a rotten, maggot-laced chunk from a pear, severing us from the world of “the living.”

I followed a policeman into the hallway, dragging my feet in laceless shoes. He opened an iron door and we entered a narrow corridor where an oppressive heat grasped me like the claws of a wild beast.

A row of cells behind iron bars ran along the corridor. They were congested with people lying on the floor. With their beards growing long, their eyes tired, their feet bare and their bodies coated in sweat, the boundaries of their existence had melted and they had become a moving mass of flesh.

They stared at me with curiosity and unease.

The policeman put me in a cell and locked the door behind me.

I took off my shoes and lay down like the others. In that small cell filled with people, there was no room to stand.

In a matter of hours, I had traveled across five centuries to arrive at the dungeons of the Inquisition.

I smiled at the policeman who was standing outside my cell, watching me.

Viewed from outside, I was one old, white-bearded Ahmet Hüsrev Altan lying down in an airless, lightless iron cage.

But this was only the reality of those who locked me up. For myself, I had changed it.

I was the lieutenant happily eating cherries with a gun pointing at his heart. I was Borges telling the mugger to take his life. I was Caesar building walls around Alesia.

I only smoke when I’m nervous.

* * *

From I Will Never See the World Again, by Ahmet Altan, recently published by Other Press.

Ahmet Altan, born in 1950, is one of Turkey’s most important writers. In the purge following the failed coup in July 2016, Altan was sent to prison pending trial for giving “subliminal messages” in support of the coup. In February 2018 he was sentenced to life in prison without parole for attempting to overthrow the government. Fifty-one Nobel laureates have signed an open letter to President Erdogan calling for Altan’s release. Altan is the author of seven essay collections and ten novels.

Longreads Editor: Dana Snitzky