Good morning 99percenters!
Morning news dump and music by blues artist Karen Carroll

The United States is scarier than the Islamic State
Even our closest allies fear that we are a menace militarily and environmentally. The threat is lethal and real

Two years ago, Gen. Martin Dempsey said before a Senate committee, “I will personally attest to the fact that [the world is] more dangerous than it has ever been.” While there’s good reason to doubt that this claim is accurate, as Steven Pinker masterfully details in his “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” the fact is that there are many dark forces lingering in the world today, and modern technologies — from Twitter and YouTube to nuclear bombs and bioweapons —are empowering malicious actors like never before.

When I ponder the greatest threats to the United States, the first thing that comes to mind is Islamic terrorism. No doubt this is the case for most Americans. Since the early 1990s, religious terrorism, most notably driven by Muslim fanatics overseas, has emerged as a major source of violence. According to the Global Terrorism Index, religious terrorism is now the “main driver” of terrorism in the world. This is disconcerting because religiously motivated acts of violence tend to be both more lethal and indiscriminate than past forms of terrorism perpetrated by nationalists, anarchists and Marxists. In this sense, Dempsey is absolutely correct that our situation is more dangerous, even if statistics suggest an overall decline in violence.

This being said, when I consider the greatest threats to human civilization, it’s the United States that stands out above other potential risks. And I’m not the only one: According to a 2014 global survey, the world as a whole voted the United States to be the No. 1 threat to world peace “by a large margin.” Even some of our closest allies identified America as the most significant menace. This is an astonishing result that suggests that a reinterpretation of American exceptionalism may be in order: Perhaps we are exceptional after all, but not in the ways we’d like to think. The world is scared of us.

Sanders butts heads with Clinton in debate, condemning her hawkishness, proposing “a new foreign policy”
Sanders said "Clinton is too much into regime change," criticizing her role in the disastrous wars in Iraq & Libya

“I want a new foreign policy, one that takes on ISIS, one that destroys ISIS, but one that does not get us involved in perpetual warfare in the quagmire of the Middle East,” Bernie Sanders began the Democratic presidential debate Saturday night.

The critical debate was held in New Hampshire, where Sanders has been leading Clinton in the polls. Foreign policy and national security were some of the most contentious issues of the night.

Sanders butted heads with Hillary Clinton, whom he accused of being overly hawkish.

“Secretary Clinton is too much into regime change and a little bit too aggressive without knowing what the unintended consequences might be,” Sanders said. “Our differences are fairly deep on this issue. We disagreed on the war in Iraq. We both listened to the information from Bush and Cheney. I voted against the war.”

“Hillary just terrified everyone”: Edward Snowden slams Clinton’s hawkish foreign policy in third debate
Whistleblower Edward Snowden took to Twitter to condemn Clinton's hawkishness in the last 2015 Democratic debate

Aaaaaaaaand Hillary just terrified everyone with an internet connection. #DemDebate

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) December 20, 2015

Snowden, who worked for a private contractor with the National Security Agency (NSA), leaked documents in 2013 showing how the U.S. government was spying not just on all of its citizens’ private phone calls and messages, but also even on the private phone calls of allied heads of state in Germany, France, and more. Journalist Glenn Greenwald, the Washington Post, and leading British newspaper the Guardian were awarded the prestigious Pulitzer Prize, journalism’s highest honor, for their work with Snowden.

Snowden was referring to Clinton’s hawkish foreign policy positions, which she defended in the New Hampshire debate.

When Clinton proudly stood by her role building a coalition and leading the 2011 NATO war in Libya, which destroyed the government and plunged the country into chaos, Snowden sarcastically tweeted “That Libya coalition worked out great.”

That Libya coalition worked out great.

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) December 20, 2015

Clinton and Sanders Clash On Surprising Number of Issues in 2015's Final Debate
Sanders seemed to dominate on domestic issues.

The Democratic Party’s top two candidates for president clashed on numerous domestic and foreign policy issues in 2015’s last debate Saturday night, underscoring that Bernie Sanders would go further than Hillary Clinton to redirect private wealth at home for public goals while implementing a more restrained military presence overseas.

In a spirited two-hour debate from Manchester, New Hampshire, the candidates laid out different approaches to confronting ISIS, removing the Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, whose civil war has created millions of refugees, and whether the U.S. should pursue regime change. On domestic issues, they clashed on how much Wall Street’s financial speculators and banking giants should be regulated and taxed, how rising health insurance and prescription drug costs could be countered, and how to make higher education costs and student loans more affordable.

The debate, which also included former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, who is in the single digits in the polls, began with Sanders apologizing to Clinton for his staff’s handling of a data breach related to the Democratic National Committee’s nationwide voter files—where a DNC vendor has repeatedly sent confidential information to competing campaigns. She accepted his apology, and both were eager to move onto debating more substantive issues.

Pete Seeger Labelled 'Subversive' After Speaking Out Against Plan to Deport Japanese
Newly released 1,700-page FBI file shows the US government 'went to lengths' to track beloved folk icon

Beloved singer and activist Pete Seeger inspired countless worldwide with his songs about peace and equality, and—according to his newly released FBI file—he also inspired the ire of the U.S. government, which spied on the folk icon for decades and labelled him a "subversive" for his Communist sympathies.

The 1,700-page tome, handed over by the National Archives under the Freedom of Information Act, was revealed in an Associated Press report on Saturday.

Among the revelations was that the U.S. military launched an investigation into the young singer in 1942 after Seeger sent a letter to the California American Legion condemning the group's resolution "advocating deportation of all Japanese, citizens or not, and barring all Japanese descendants from citizenship."

"We're fighting precisely to free the world of such Hitlerism, such narrow jingoism," Seeger wrote in the letter, which was penned as the U.S. government was actively forcing Japanese-American citizens to live in government internment camps.

CBS Edits Out Criticisms of U.S. Policy From Frank Luntz Focus Group With Muslim Americans

When a CBS News segment featuring a focus group of American Muslims aired Friday, it highlighted their relationship to terrorism, with a particular fixation on how much responsibility they felt to condemn terrorist attacks.

But in interviews with The Intercept, two Muslim Americans who took part in the group complained that CBS edited out parts of the discussion where they raised their own concerns — including critiques of U.S. militarism, surveillance and entrapment.

They also said that Frank Luntz, the right-wing pollster who led the focus group, silenced members of the group when they criticized discriminatory U.S. government policies.

When Luntz asked the group how they respond to attacks such as the recent one in San Bernardino, New York City activist Amelia Noor-Oshiro told The Intercept she asked Luntz “Why don’t you ask that to people who actually commit acts of terror? Why don’t you ask that to White America who are responsible for a majority of domestic terror attacks?”

US Marine who Invaded Iraq: Only Iraqis can Understand Pure Evil, Genocide US has Waged on their Nation

By participating in what he now calls the US’s ‘genocidal military campaign’ against Iraq, former marine Vincent Emanuele says he ‘helped create ISIS‘:

I think about the hundreds of prisoners we took captive and tortured in makeshift detention facilities staffed by teenagers from Tennessee, New York and Oregon.

[Prisoners who got released were dropped off in] the middle of the desert … several miles from their homes…

Who knows how long they survived… no one cared.

Challenging US Overseas Military Bases

I am honored to speak at this symposium in Okinawa about the need to abolish United States military bases around the world, and particularly here in Okinawa where you have been subjected to these bases for over 70 years following World War II.

From the beginning, let me state that I apologize for the continuing presence of some many U.S. bases on Okinawa and the trauma they have caused to the people of Okinawa.

I worked for nearly 40 years in the United States government. I served 29 years in the U.S. Army/Army Reserves and retired as a Colonel. I was also a U.S. diplomat for 16 years and served in U.S. Embassies in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia, Afghanistan and Mongolia.

However, in March 2003, I was one of three U.S. government employees who resigned in opposition to President Bush’s war on Iraq. Since then, I, as well as everyone on our Veterans for Peace delegation, have been publicly challenging policies of the Bush and Obama administrations on a variety of international and domestic issues including extraordinary rendition, unlawful imprisonment, torture, assassin drones, police brutality, mass incarceration, and U.S. military bases around the world, including of course, the U.S. military bases here on Okinawa

San Bernardino: What Did Gov Know About Shooters?
Mass-Murdering Couple May Have Been Known to Law Enforcement Despite Denials

It’s starting to look like there are some eerie parallels between the San Bernardino shooting and the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.

After the Boston bombing, authorities were quick to deny any previous knowledge of the men they identified as the bombers. Then, over time, the public learned that — oops — maybe law enforcement did know significantly more than they initially let on.

After the San Bernardino suspects died in a hail of bullets, federal and local law enforcement officials alike claimed to have had no previous interaction with or interest in Syed Farook or his wife, Tashfeen Malik, at any time before last week’s attack, which killed 14 and wounded 21 others.

Now that story may be changing.

On Thin Ice: Big Northern Lakes Are Being Rapidly Transformed
As temperatures rise, northern lakes are undergoing major changes that include swiftly warming waters, diminished ice cover, and outbreaks of harmful algae.

For more than 25 million years, Lake Baikal has cut an immense arc from southern Siberia to the Mongolian border. The length of Florida and nearly the depth of the Grand Canyon, Baikal is the deepest, largest in volume, and most ancient freshwater lake in the world, holding one-fifth of the planet’s above-ground drinking supply. It’s a Noah’s Ark of biodiversity, home to myriad species found nowhere else on earth. It’s also changing

Baikal’s surface waters are warming at an accelerating pace, rising at least 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) over the past quarter century — twice as fast as global air temperatures, new research shows. The ice season, which typically covered the lake from January through May, has been shortened by nearly three weeks since the mid-1800s, and the ice has thinned nearly 5 inches since 1949. By the end of the century, scientists say that Baikal could be ice-free a month or more longer than today.

This rapidly changing climate threatens the lake’s unique, cold-adapted creatures, including the iconic nerpa — the world’s only true freshwater seal — whose fertility drops in warmer winters. Fishermen complain that the omul — a once-bountiful species of whitefish — has already grown scarce. Rising temperatures may also factor into some mysterious new problems plaguing the lake in the past few years. The brilliant green underwater forests of endemic Baikal sponges are dying, victims of an unknown pathogen. And dense algal mats choke wide swaths of bottom near shore.

After Paris, the Movement for Climate Justice Has Only Just Begun

At Saturday’s mass gathering in Paris marking the end of the United Nations climate negotiations, there were tens of thousands of people on the streets. One of them, a Swedish activist named Svetlana Gross, held a sign that said simply “climate justice.” The phrase was the one most commonly used at the COP21 summit, which culminated in a historic agreement to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

Gross explained to me that her sign meant that “we need to acknowledge that everyone on this planet has the right to a decent living standard within the limits of the environment, which means that particularly in Western Europe we are overconsuming. Our lifestyles assume that other people don’t have the right to [decent living standards]. And I don’t think that’s right.”

But the “right to a decent living standard within the limits of the environment” was not at center stage in the negotiations. Although poor and developing nations won the right to be held to different standards in their abilities to cut emissions, the closest the agreement comes to climate justice is, in the words of the document, “emphasizing ... sustainable development and the eradication of poverty.” The Paris accord goes as far as “recognizing” the importance of “safeguarding food security and ending hunger,” and “acknowledging ... human rights, the right to health, the rights of indigenous peoples, local communities, migrants, children, persons with disabilities ... gender equality, empowerment of women,” etc. Words like “recognize,” “emphasize” and “acknowledge” are legally meaningless.

How a Maine Food Co-op Could Push Local Food to the Next Level

The mass-produced carrots and peppers on most of our plates are tasteless and bland compared to their locally grown counterparts, and most of us don't even realize it. We have grown used to eating old produce shipped long distances by Sodexo, Aramark and Compass, the three major food service management corporations that control 90 percent of the national food service market.

National efforts are afoot, however, to develop mass appetites for better-tasting and nutritious food grown locally, and these efforts are starting to alter the face of food production in the United States.

One of the most dramatic possibilities for large-scale change in food production is being contemplated in Maine, where the Maine Farm and Sea Cooperative is bidding against Sodexo (based in Paris) and Aramark (based in Philadelphia) in an effort to win a $12.5 million, five-year contract to operate food procurement and service operations at seven of the eight University of Maine campuses. The Maine Farm and Sea Cooperative - potentially the country's first farm-to-institution food service cooperative - wants to offer locally sourced food for the university community. The cooperative and the two mega-corporations submitted their bids for the contract in early December.

Coal's Hidden "Double Whammy"

When forests are cleared for coal mines, the threat to the planet multiplies through increased carbon emissions, and the lives of those living in the forests are often devastated.

Now, for the first time, we have a global picture of where this threat lies and an estimation of its scale.

By overlaying coal mining concession and forest cover data we've produced a global map showing that nearly 12 million hectares of forest – an area larger than Portugal – is at risk from coal mining.

In Indonesia, where a coal rush in Kalimantan has led to land grabs, pollution and wholesale forest clearances with predictably dire consequences for the indigenous people, we've calculated that 8.6 million hectares – almost nine per cent of the nation's total forest cover – is threatened by coal mining.

Animal Rights Activists Employ New Tactics to Thwart Hunters

Stephanie looked in her rear-view mirror and watched as the black Suburban descended upon her Jeep. She punched the accelerator in an effort to put some distance between the two vehicles, but the Suburban kept gaining. Matthew, riding shotgun, turned in his seat to watch it.

"She's trying to come up beside us," Stephanie said.

The Suburban swerved hard left, then right, nearly hitting another vehicle. A forty-something woman was driving. Her face was an angry blur, her mouth open and shouting. She lifted an iPad, evidently in an attempt to capture some photos or video of Matthew and Stephanie.

"She forgot to turn it around," Matthew said as the hulking Suburban sped up to them. "She's taking pictures of herself."