Morning 99percenters!
Sunday morning news dump and music by Savoy Brown.

U.N. Report Calls on Governments to Protect Whistleblowers, Not Prosecute Them

The U.N. envoy charged with protecting free speech around the globe has declared that confidential sources and whistleblowers are a fundamental element of a healthy democracy and that governments must protect them rather than demonize them. The report by David Kaye, the United Nations special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, also sheds light on the punitive treatment of whistleblowers in the United States, most notably former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who is living in Russia as a fugitive from the U.S. government.

In this video from Human Rights Watch, Edward Snowden describes how “a whistleblower almost has to become comfortable with the idea of becoming a martyr, because the probability of retaliation is so certain.”

ACLU lawsuit against NSA mass surveillance dropped by federal court
Judge TS Ellis III dismissed the suit because it relied on ‘subjective fear’ that National Security Administration collects information that is innately harmful

A federal district court has dismissed a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union against the National Security Agency.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs argued that the surveillance program was innately harmful, despite the NSA’s silence on it in court. “The NSA’s mass surveillance violates our clients’ constitutional rights to privacy, freedom of speech, and freedom of association, and it poses a grave threat to a free internet and a free society,” said Ashley Gorski, a staff attorney with the ACLU national security project. “The private communications of innocent people don’t belong in government hands.”

The judge in the case, TS Ellis III, said the suit relied on “the subjective fear of surveillance”, because the NSA did not admit to having collected any of the information it was alleged to have collected by the ACLU.

Congressional Progressive Caucus Co-Chair Joins Chorus Questioning Legality of Drone Killing Program
Statement by Rep. Keith Ellison sparked by Intercept exposé on killing program

Sparked by an exposé on the Obama administration's drone war, co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) has echoed human rights groups and called into question the legality of the killing program.

Based on documents leaked to The Intercept by an anonymous intelligence source, The Drone Papers offers an unprecedented look at the global killing program.

As Common Dreams previously summarized,

The series of articles [...] follows months of investigation and uses rare primary source documents and slides to reveal to the public, for the first time, the flaws and consequences of the U.S. military's 14-year aerial campaign being conducted in Yemen, Somalia, and Afghanistan—one that has consistently used faulty information, killed an untold number of civilians, and stymied intelligence-gathering through its "kill/capture" program that too often relies on killing rather than capturing.

Let’s make the banks serve us: How the government subsidizes the super-rich, while we pay the overdraft fees
They get the bailouts. We pay for every overdraft. There's a really simple way to free the banks from the 1 percent
Michael Schulson

The United States has two personal banking systems. One of these systems is carefully regulated. It benefits from substantial government subsidies, and it offers extensive protections to consumers.

The other system serves the poor.

“One of the great ironies in American life is that the less money you have, the more you have to pay to use it,” writes Mehrsa Baradaran at the beginning of her new book, “How the Other Half Banks.” Baradaran, a law professor at the University of Georgia, is keying in on a deep social inequity: for millions of Americans, the main options for basic banking services are payday lenders and check cashers. These services charge exorbitant rates and fees. In many states, they’re barely regulated. They form an exploitative shadow market to the brick-and-mortar, federally-subsidized-and-guaranteed banks that serve more affluent Americans.

Baradaran is unconvinced that the private sector can offer good banking services to low-income Americans. Other than Wal-Mart, few companies are even trying. In “How the Other Half Banks,” Baradaran looks for another option — ideally, an institution with a national network of locations already in place and a commitment to public service.

Why Is Wealth/Income Inequality Soaring?

Why is wealth/income inequality soaring? The easy answer is of course the infinite greed of Wall Street fat-cats and the politicos they buy/own.

But greed can’t be the only factor, for greed is hardly unknown in the bottom 90%. The only difference between the guy who took out a liar loan to buy a house he couldn’t afford so he could flip it for a fat profit and the mortgage broker who instructed him on how to scam the system and the crooked banker dumping toxic mortgage-backed securities on the Widows and Orphans Fund of Norway is the scale of the scam.

The difference isn’t greed, it’s the ability to avoid the consequences or have the taxpayers eat the losses, i.e. moral hazard. The bottom 90%er with the liar loan mortgage and the flip-this-house strategy eventually suffered the consequences when Housing Bubble 1.0 blew up in spectacular fashion.

Moral hazard describes the difference between decisions made by those with skin in the game, i.e. those who will absorb the losses from their bets that go south, and those who’ve transferred the risks and losses to others.

US-Turkey "Buffer Zone" to Save ISIS, Not Stop Them
NATO's irregular forces face their supply lines being completely cut, that is, unless a "buffer zone" can be created to save them.

Russia's intervention in Syria has derailed US regime-change efforts aimed at Damascus. It also threatens America's secondary objective of dividing and destroying Syria as a functioning, unified nation-state. Long sought after "buffer zones" also sometimes referred to as "free zones" or "safe zones" still stand as the primary strategy of choice by the US and its regional allies for the deconstruction of Syria's sovereignty and the intentional creation of a weak, failed state not unlike what the US and NATO left within the borders of Libya since 2011.

And while the US seeks to sell its "buffer zone" strategy under a variety of pretexts - from protecting refugees to fighting the so-called "Islamic State" (ISIS/ISIL) - it is admittedly a tactic aimed instead at America's true objectives in Syria - the destruction of its government, the division of its people, and the eradication of its sovereignty.

ISIS is Clearly the Product of State-Sponsorship  

In 2012, it was clear that the region north of Aleppo and across the border into Turkey, had become one of two primary points (Jordan being the other) of staging and entry for NATO-backed terrorists operating in Syria. It was from across the border north of Aleppo and Idlib that NATO-armed, funded, and trained terrorists from Libya first flowed into Syrian territory and from where the initial 2012 invasion of Aleppo emanated.

#RiseUpOctober: 3-Day New York Event Focuses on Police Brutality

Thousands marched through the streets of Manhattan on Saturday to protest police brutality. A diverse, grass-roots coalition of activists and concerned citizens staged the three-day action, dubbed #RiseUpOctober.

Supported by such notable figures as scholar and academic Cornel West and actor Jesse Williams, the movement condemns a state-sanctioned system that they say endorses campaigns of “police terror” in poor communities and especially in communities of color.

Because of the hard work of the Black Lives Matter movement, victims such as Travyon Martin, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice and Sandra Bland have become household names. Coalition groups such as Stop Mass Incarceration are building on this growing political consciousness to expand the movement against “police terror” in communities of color.

Swimming With the Debt Sharks

Debt is one of the United States' most stringently enforced promises.

At least, that's true for those who cannot afford a high-powered legal team to fight it out in court. It's also true for the unfortunate many who don't work alongside revolving-door regulators who write and "enforce" the rules governing their once and future employers. And it's most true for non-corporate persons who cannot dispatch legions of lobbyists to secure billion-dollar bailouts and rewrite laws.

In the United States, all debtors are not created equal.

The depth of that inequality emerged after the crash of 2008 capsized the American dream. As billions of dollars worth of "promises" suddenly came due, it was quite obvious that the standards of enforcement for the captains of finance differed greatly from those applied to a multitude of drowning deckhands desperately clinging for life as their American dreams went underwater.

Water Remains Largely Marginalized in Climate Talks

United Nations - US Secretary of State John Kerry last week turned the spotlight on the "record number" of extreme weather-related events the world is witnessing these days.

With an eye on the upcoming climate change talks in Paris, he warned that in the South Pacific, entire islands are at risk, largely threatened by a sea-level rise.

In southeast Brazil, they're suffering through the worst drought in 80 years. In California, it's the worst drought in a century – plus wildfires.

In Malawi, there are record floods. And in the Arctic, whole villages are in danger, said Kerry, speaking at the Indiana University's School of Global and International Studies on Oct.15.

Here’s What It Will Take For Success at Climate Talks

Scientists agree: we need to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions drastically in the next decade if we are to avoid the worst ravages of climate change. World governments agree: the way to do that is to forge a global agreement at the climate talks scheduled for this November and December in Paris. Such an agreement would run from 2020 to 2030 and beyond, and encompass all the world’s economies, developing and developed, big and small.

With less than two months until that meeting convenes, major issues remain unresolved. Whether they can be settled in the short time available will determine whether Paris is a success — and whether the world can measure up to the major tasks ahead.

A measure of the urgency of the problem is the current refugee crisis in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Millions of refugees fleeing from Islamic State militias, the civil war in Syria and other unrest have overwhelmed European borders, causing unprecedented turmoil. Several prominent commentators have warned clearly that humanitarian disasters like this are only a foretaste of what is likely as climate change takes hold in the coming decades.