Good morning 99percenters!
Morning news dump and music by William Clarke.

As Mission Creeps in Iraq and Syria, Lawmakers Ask: Will We Ever Vote on War?
A group of 35 bipartisan House Reps. issued an open letter calling for a Congressional vote on war authorization "as quickly as possible."

Amid intensifying U.S. military operations in Iraq and Syria, a group of 35 bipartisan House lawmakers issued an open letter on Friday calling for Congress to fulfill its responsibility by voting "as quickly as possible" on whether to authorize a war that is well over a year old.

The missive calls for new Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) to immediately force a vote on Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) "that clearly delineates the authority and limits, if any, on U.S. military engagement in Iraq, Syria, and the surrounding region."

The letter is signed by stalwart war critics, such as Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), as well as members of the conservative Freedom Caucus, in what one reporter called an "unusual coalition." Reps. Lee, Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), Tom Cole (R-Okla.), Walter Jones (R-N.C.), Peter Welch (D-Vt.), and John Lewis (D-Ga.) are leading the charge.

Squandering Peace Hopes in Syria

I have always been enthusiastic in my support for peace negotiations, which have been neglected all too often in internal and international conflicts. But it is clear that the international conference on Syria that held its first meeting in Vienna on Oct. 30 is a sham conference that is not capable of delivering any peace negotiations, and that the Obama administration knew that perfectly well from the start.

The administration was touting the fact that Iran was invited to participate in the conference, unlike the previous United Nations-sponsored gathering on Syria in January and February 2014. That unfortunate conference had excluded Iran at the insistence of the United States and its Sunni allies, even though several states without the slightest capacity to contribute anything to a peace settlement – as well as the Vatican – were among the 40 non-Syrian invited participants.

Iran’s participation in the Vienna conference represents a positive step. Nevertheless, the conference was marked by an even more fundamental absurdity: none of the Syrian parties to the war were invited. The 2014 talks at least had representatives of the Assad regime and some of the armed opposition.

‘Underwater drone with explosives’ spotted near Baltic Nord Stream pipeline

An unmanned military underwater vehicle rigged with explosives was spotted on the seabed in the vicinity of the Nord Stream gas pipeline in the Baltics on Friday, Swedish media report. The device is expected to be disarmed on November 9.

An abandoned expendable remotely-operated mine clearance underwater vehicle allegedly with explosives onboard has been detected in multinational waters of the Baltic Sea by the Swedish Navy, Svenska Daglabet reports.

The discovery was made during a routine check of the Nord Stream pipeline. Since it was discovered in the Swedish economic zone, north of the island of Gotland, the Nord Stream pipeline operator immediately notified the Swedish military.

U.S. navigation moves in South China Sea will continue: Carter

The United States will conduct freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea again, U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter said in a speech on Saturday, although he gave no timeline for any such actions.

Carter's comments, delivered at a defense forum at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California, came at the close of a trip to Asia, where he cruised on a U.S. aircraft carrier operating in the South China Sea and blamed Beijing's island-building for rising tensions in the region.

In October, a U.S. guided-missile destroyer, the USS Lassen, challenged territorial limits around one of China's man-made islands in the Spratly archipelago with a so-called freedom-of-navigation patrol.

Technology, Competition and the ‘Crapification’ of Jobs

Two recent articles shed light on the ‘crapification’ of jobs and the rise of income inequality:

Martin Wolf on the Low Labor Participation as the Result of the Crapification of Jobs (Naked Capitalism)

The Measured Worker: The technology that illuminates worker productivity and value also contributes to wage inequality. (Technology Review, via John S.P.)

While both articles offer valuable insights into the secular trend of stagnating employment and wages, I think both miss a couple of key dynamics. As a general starting point: if you want to understand the ‘crapification’ of jobs and wages, we have to look at the ‘crapification’ of the economy from the perspective of those who are doing the hiring: the employers.

US Builds a $43-Million Gas Station in Afghanistan and Nobody Seems to Know Why

These are the facts. At some point, someone somewhere in the US government had an amazing idea: why not build a compressed natural gas (CNG) filling station in Afghanistan? Forty-three million taxpayer dollars later, the city of Sheberghan, in the far north of the country, got its gas station. But, according to the watchdog agency probing Afghanistan reconstruction spending, nobody seems to know — or wants to admit — who signed off on the project or how its costs spiraled so completely out of control.

The whole thing is so strange and wrongheaded that the crazily high price tag — more than 100 times what a similar facility would cost in neighboring Pakistan — is not even the worst thing the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) found.

Natural Gas? For what Cars?

Even more troubling than the high price tag is that there was no point in building the gas station in the first place. While Afghanistan has vast natural gas reserves, it does not have a sufficient number of cars that run on natural gas, and converting a vehicle literally costs as much as the average Afghan earns in a year.

Killer Care: How Medical Error Became America's Third Largest Cause of Death, And What Can Be Done About It
A new book lays out the very real dangers each of us faces whenever we enter a hospital.

(The following is excerpted from Killer Care: How Medical Error Became America's Third Largest Cause of Death, And What Can Be Done About It by James B. Lieber. Reprinted here with permission by the publisher OR Books © 2015.)

By the end of the twentieth century, the health-care industry was avid about getting its arms around the problem of error. The news about accidents among the rich and poor, famous and obscure was alarming the public and undermining its confidence in the profession. Malpractice claims were on the rise; so were monetary payouts. Insurers, hospitals, and physicians pushed back with “tort reform” designed to award and divert litigation. Since lawsuits often arose from treatment, “quality of care” initiatives grew as a method of preventing cases. All of these issues focused researchers on two problems. First, how should medical errors be defined? Second, how many of them were there? Clearly, they were killing and maiming people, causing lawsuits, and mounting costs. So size mattered critically.

In 1978, a pathologist and lawyer, Don Harper Mills at the University of Southern California School of Medicine, published an early analysis of the frequency of accidents caused by health-care in the Western Medical Journal. These were termed “potentially compensable events” or PCE’s (meaning that a jury could award malpractice money damages). Supported by the California Medical Association and the California Hospital Association, Mills and his team analyzed 20,684 patient charts from twenty-three California hospitals involving discharges in 1974. They found that 4.65 percent of the patients experienced PCE’s of varying severity. This was a fairly shocking rate of about one in twenty admissions. Of the PCE’s, 80 percent were temporary disabilities (lasting less than thirty days), 3.8 percent were lasting functional disabilities, and 9.7 percent were fatal. The rate of PCE’s markedly increased in patients age 65 and older.

In the 1980s, the Harvard Medical Practice Study—formed by representatives from Harvard’s Medical School, School of Public Health, Law School, Kennedy School of Government, Department of Biostatistics, and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital—assembled to address these problems. One of its leaders was Dr. Lucian Leape, a respected pediatric surgeon and medical educator who had been Martin Makary’s public health professor.

Across America, Parents Push Back Against Creeping Authoritarianism and Criminalization of Students
Parents are bravely standing up to trends that restrict kids' freedom and love of learning.

America's public schools are the training ground for our next generation of engineers, doctors, artists, lawyers, and other professions that form our dynamic economy. Schools are also here to nurture our children, to allow them to grow, explore and have fun in an environment that is conducive to personal freedom.

But a troubling cultural undercurrent has been creeping into our education system, converting the educational experience into something that can range from the gratuitously stressful to downright racist and cruel, from high-stakes testing to the school-to-prison pipeline.

Parents are bravely standing up to these trends in a growing number of ways.

Breaking the School-to-Prison Pipeline

Recent events at Spring Valley High School in South Carolina have cast a spotlight on the increasing utilization of police officers in public schools for disciplinary tasks that used to be handled by teachers, administrators and parents. Protesters outside the state capitol called for the prosecution of the officer involved, and many said a wider institutional system that is over-policing schools is to blame. As budgetary pressures weigh down on schools, some districts are cutting back on these school resource officer (SRO) programs, as they are called.

The clock is ticking on a time bomb that could blow up a free internet: the TPP
The agreement poses a grave threat to our basic right to access information and express ourselves on the web

After years of secrecy, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement has finally been released to the public. The shadowy process and overreaching scope of the deal have sparked an international outcry; it’s been roundly condemned as an attack on worker’s rights, the environment, public health, small businesses and startups.

But perhaps the biggest concern is over the impact that it will have on the internet.

TPP is a legally binding pact negotiated between 12 countries, including the United States. Industry lobbyists and government bureaucrats huddled for months in closed-door meetings to draft and debate the deal while journalists, human rights advocates and tech experts were locked out. It can’t accurately be called a “trade deal”. Its 30 chapters and 6,194 pages cover a dizzying range of policy questions that have nothing to do with tariffs, imports or exports.

The final version of TPP confirms advocates’ worst fears. Thanks to, among other things, its dramatic expansion of copyright enforcement, the agreement poses a grave threat to our basic right to access information and express ourselves on the web, and could easily be abused to criminalize common online activities and enforce widespread internet censorship.

Renewable Energy Supply to Double in Major Economies

Renewable energy supply in eight major economies will collectively more than double by 2030 due to new national climate and energy plans, according to a study by the think tank World Resources Institute (WRI).

Total clean energy supply from eight of the world's 10 largest greenhouse gas emitters - Brazil, China, the European Union, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico and the United States - will jump to 20,000 terawatt hours (TWh) from around 9,000 TWh in 2009.

That is equivalent to India's current energy demand.

"These new renewable energy targets send strong signals to energy markets and investment circles," said Jennifer Morgan, Global Director, Climate Program, WRI.

"Combined with the Paris climate agreement, it's clear that renewable energy is poised to surge forward in the next 15 years bringing clean and affordable power to millions of people worldwide."

'Equity and Justice': Africa Demands More Input to Save the Climate

African civil society organizations championing for climate justice have criticized the Intended Nationally Determined Commitments (INDC’s) presented to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, calling them “weak, inadequate and not ambitious enough.”

“If you study carefully what has been submitted by the developed countries like, Russia, USA and EU compared to that from poor countries, you will clearly see that goalposts have been shifted to have Africa bare mitigation and adaptation costs, which goes against the principle of Common But Differentiated Responsibility and Respective Capacity (CBDR+C) of the Convention” said Sam Ogallah, the Program Manager at the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA) – the umbrella organization that brings together over 1000 African civil society organizations.

At the previous UNFCCC negotiations, countries agreed to publicly outline climate actions they intend to take, geared towards mitigation and adaptation to the changing climatic conditions, in a pact that came to be known as Intended Nationally Determined Commitments.

Despite Whining By Monsanto, Roundup DOES Cause Cancer … and Many Other Diseases

The World Health Organization is right when it announced recently that Roundup weedkiller – also known as “glyphosate” – probably causes cancer.

In response, Monsanto has been whining that the WHO is wrong.

But Reuters notes:

“There are a number of independent, published manuscripts that clearly indicate that glyphosate … can promote cancer and tumor growth,” said Dave Schubert, head of the cellular neurobiology laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California. “It should be banned.”

The Salk Institute is one of the world’s top neuroscience facilities:

In 2004, the Times Higher Education Supplement ranked Salk as the world’s top biomedicine research institute, and in 2009 it was ranked number one globally by ScienceWatch in the neuroscience and behavior areas.

Indeed, Roundup has been linked with numerous diseases, including autism, dementia, thyroid and bladder cancer,  kidney failure, bowel and intestinal disease, high blood pressure, obesity and diabetes.

Birds and Reptile Feel the Survival Heat

LONDON—The gloriously-coloured forest birds of Hawaii may lose at least half their living space because of climate change, according to new research.

And soaring global temperatures mean that many of the world’s lizards could be in trouble by 2100, and could seriously compromise the loggerhead turtle, whose sex is decided by the heat of the day at the time of incubation.

The plight of lizards is highlighted by Elvire Bestion, an ecologist at the University of Exeter Environment and Sustainability Institute, UK,  and the Experimental Ecology Research Station at Moulis in France and colleagues in a report in the Public Library of Science journal PLOS Biology.

Terrace Farming: An Indigenous Model for Food Security

Caspana, Chile - Terrace farming as practiced from time immemorial by native peoples in the Andes mountains contributes to food security as a strategy of adaptation in an environment where the geography and other conditions make the production of nutritional foods a complex undertaking.

This ancient prehispanic technique, still practiced in vast areas of the Andes highlands, including Chile, "is very important from the point of view of adaptation to the climate and the ecosystem," said Fabiola Aránguiz.

"By using terraces, water, which is increasingly scarce in the northern part of the country, is utilised in a more efficient manner," Aránguiz, a junior professional officer on family farming with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), told IPS from the agency's regional headquarters in Santiago, some 1,400 km south of the town of Caspana in Chile's Atacama desert.