Good morning 99percenters!
Morning news dump and music by Dan Tyminski.

Not-So-Subtle Establishment Threat? Bloomberg Hints at Presidential Run
Former New York City mayor indicates willingness to spend "at least $1 billion"... especially if Sanders bumps Clinton

Is the real establishment getting worried?

As news broke Saturday afternoon that billionaire former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg is "seriously" considering the idea of a third-party run for president in 2016, some political observers immediately smelled a rat.

The New Yorks Times was the first to report that Bloomberg has asked his political team to draw up plans for what a campaign might look like. The Times cited sources close to the former mayor who said he is prepared to invest "at least $1 billion" of his own money in order to finance a run against the Republican and Democratic nominees that ultimately emerge.

As Jamelle Bouie, political writer at Slate, put it snidely: "Billionaire contemplates buying White House for himself."

Hillary Clinton Laughs When Asked if She Will Release Transcripts of Her Goldman Sachs Speeches
According to accounts of those in attendance at one such speech, Clinton reassured the crowd that banker-bashing was unproductive and foolish

After Hillary Clinton spoke at a town hall in Manchester, New Hampshire, on Friday, I asked her if she would release the transcripts of her paid speeches to Goldman Sachs. She laughed and turned away.

Clinton has recently been on the defensive about the speaking fees she and her husband have collected. Those fees total over $125 million since 2001.

Her rival Democratic presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders, has raised concerns in particular over the $675,000 she made from Goldman Sachs, an investment bank that has regularly used its influence with government officials to win favorable policies.

Watch the video:

Hillary has nothing to brag about: Her foreign policy record is a disaster
She may have a wealth of experience on the international stage, but her judgment has proven wanting time and again

Tuesday the Clinton campaign released a signed letter by ten prominent diplomats and career national security wonks backing Clinton for President and calling Sanders foreign policy expertise into question. The letter was both unsurprising and underwhelming. Unsurprising because it was signed by former Bill and Hillary Clinton appointees (half of whom have connections to weapons contractors and all of whom will be looking for work in January 2017) and underwhelming because she could only muster ten signatories. This isn’t to say there aren’t legitimate critiques of Sanders’s foreign policy – there certainly are – but as the democratic primary race heats up with only days until the first primary, Clinton and her partisans are doubling down on the conventional wisdom she can pass the “Commander-in-Chief test” due to her foreign policy experience – a consensus widely shared by registered Democrats, 72% of whom trust Clinton over Sanders on matters of “foreign policy”.

There’s only one problem: this consensus is entirely without objective merit.

The entire notion of “foreign policy” experience is based more on vague impression than reality. What matters above all, as Obama rightly insisted in 2008, is judgment not “experience”. In the case of Clinton there hasn’t been a major foreign policy decision in the Middle East she pushed for that didn’t end up being a disaster both at home and the countries she advocated meddling in. The most commonly cited “mistake” was her support for the Iraq war which is one of the main reasons she lost the nomination the first time around. But even if one excludes this. Even if one puts it into a memory hole and buries it along with her support for DOMA, welfare reform, and harsh prison sentences, the choices she’s made after 2008 show she not only didn’t learn any lessons from that war but has only grown more bellicose and hawkish. From her advocating regime change in Libya, to arming dubious opposition forces in Syria, to undermining peace with Iran — Clinton has consistently been wrong on foreign policy even after her supposedly humbling loss of 2008.

Politics deals in impressions, approximants and nowhere is this more clear than on matters of “foreign policy” – a topic where those wrong are more likely to rise to the top. William Kristol, Thomas Friedman, Dan Savage, all of whom were colossally wrong about the Iraq War, are currently working in cushy pundit jobs while those in the media who sounded the alarm like Peter Arnett and Phil Donahue were relegated to obscurity.

Hillary Clinton Seeks Neocon Shelter

By Robert Parry 

In seeking to put Sen. Bernie Sanders on the defensive over his foreign policy positions, ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is embracing a neoconservative stance on the Middle East and gambling that her more hawkish approach will win over Democratic voters.

Losing ground in Iowa and New Hampshire in recent polls, the Clinton campaign has counterattacked against Sanders, targeting his sometimes muddled comments on the Mideast crisis, but Clinton’s attack line suggests that Sanders isn’t adequately committed to the positions of Israel’s right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his American neocon acolytes.

Clinton’s strategy is to hit Sanders for seeking a gradual normalization of relations with Iran, while Clinton has opted for the neocon position of demonizing Iran and siding with Israel and its quiet alliance with Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states that share Israel’s animosity toward Shiite-ruled Iran.

Bernie v. Media

By: David Swanson

Major corporate media outlets in the United States are reporting on a new viability for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, based on his rise in the polls nationally and in Iowa and New Hampshire — and possibly, though this goes largely unmentioned, based on his big new advertising purchases from major corporate media outlets. In independent progressive media as well, there’s a small flood of maybe-he-can-really-win articles.

Whether this goes any further or not, something remarkable has happened. The Donald Trump campaign (in many ways outlandish and uniquely dangerous) more or less fits the usual mold in terms of media success; the data are very clear that the media gave Trump vastly disproportionate media coverage, following which he rose in the polls — the same polls later used anachronistically to justify the coverage. This was the story of how the media created Howard Dean’s success before tearing him down in 2004, and it has been the story of most candidates, successful and otherwise: the polling closely follows the coverage, not the other way around.

Bernie is something new. The major media has given him ridiculously little coverage, and belittled him in most of that coverage. Yet he has surged in the polls, in volunteers, in small-donor fundraising, and in real world events. While television news has shunted aside actual events, crises, social movements, the state of the natural environment, any number of wars, countless injustices, and most legislative activities in order to focus more than ever on the next election, and has done so ever since it was nearly two years away, the media has also given wildly disparate attention to certain candidates, in a way that bears no correlation to polling or internet searching or donors or any such factor. As of last fall, Bernie Sanders had received a total of 8 minutes of coverage from broadcast evening news, less than Mitt Romney or Joe Biden got for deciding not to enter the race.

US criminal oligarchy: top 20 Americans own more than bottom 50%, 0.1% own more than 90%; ~$30 TRILLION stored in ‘tax havens’

US “leaders” in government, banking/finance, and media are obvious criminals that should be legally stopped by arrests for the following Emperor’s New Clothes obvious crimes:

• Unlawful and lie-began wars.
• Crimes Against Humanity for ongoing intentional policy of poverty that’s killed over 400 million human beings just since 1995 (~75% children; more deaths than from all wars in Earth’s recorded history).
• So-called “money” that is actually debt that creates accelerating and unpayable total debt. The .01% hide ~$30 trillion in tax havens while demanding public austerity.
• Destruction of nearly all rights lawfully guaranteed in the US Bill of Rights within the US Constitution, and in Orwellian inversion of limited government.
• “Covering the crimes” with lies by corporate media.

These crimes annually cost millions killed, billions harmed, and trillions looted, with recent history continuing literal centuries of US lie-began Wars of Aggression that involved nearly all families in two horrific global wars for colonial empire.

Survivor of US Drone Attack: Obama Belongs on List of World's Tyrants
'I am the living example of what drones are,' says Pakistani who was just a boy when U.S. missile struck his family's home

"It’s not about me. It’s about every civilian who has been killed in Waziristan."

Those are the words of Faheem Qureshi who was just a young boy in 2009 when a U.S. drone, on the orders of a newly-elected President Barack Obama, fired a missile that slammed into his uncle's home in the Waziristan region of Pakistan where family and friends were gathered. Though others in the house were not, Qureshi was lucky to survive.

As the Guardian's Spencer Ackerman reports Saturday:

It took nearly 40 days for Qureshi to emerge from a series of hospitals, all of which he spent in darkness. Shrapnel had punctured his stomach. Lacerations covered much of his upper body. Doctors operated on the entire left side of his body, which had sustained burns, and used laser surgery to repair his right eye. They could not save his left.

Until Today, I Assumed Putin’s Russia Had Litvinenko Killed … Then I Looked for Myself

I’ve always assumed that Putin’s KGB (now called the FSB) killed Alexander Litvinenko.

But today’s announcement by the British that Putin “probably” approved Litvinenko’s murder made me curious enough to take a look for myself.

Initially, Litvinenko was poisoned with radioactive polonium as he sipped tea in an upscale London hotel. The report makes it sound like only Russia had access to polonium, but it’s actually available online to anyone.

Learning to Love — and Use — the Bomb

At a time when America’s public sector is apparently too strapped financially even to provide safe drinking water for some of its residents, the Obama administration plans to commit the nation to spending at least $1 trillion over the next three decades to improve our ability to fight a nuclear war. That’s right — an almost unthinkable war that would end up destroying much of the habitable portion of the globe.

That wasn’t the message President Obama conveyed in April, 2009 when he declared in Prague, “The existence of thousands of nuclear weapons is the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War. … Generations lived with the knowledge that their world could be erased in a single flash of light. … Just as we stood for freedom in the Twentieth Century, we must stand together for the right of people everywhere to live free from fear in the Twenty-first Century.

“And as . . . the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act. … So today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”

Legal Limbo: One Oregon Tribe's Fight for Federal Recognition

Millions of indigenous people living within US territory exist in a legal limbo - unrecognized by the US government. They enjoy none of the powers and benefits federally recognized tribes enjoy as sovereign nations.

In the continental United States, tribes whose treaties were never acknowledged or ratified are not "Indians" in the eyes of the federal government. The indigenous peoples living in US colonies and in states outside the continental United States (Hawai'i and Alaska) are left out of the US government's definition of "Indian." Some have populations in the hundreds of thousands while others have tiny populations due to the ravages of colonial violence. None are sovereign.

Over time, many have won recognition and now enjoy nation-to-nation relations with the US government. Some remain in the midst of decades-long legal disputes to win recognition, like the Chinook Indian Nation in Washington State. Others, including over 500,000 Native Hawaiians, are actually fighting not to be recognized by procedures they see as a continuation of federal land grab policies. At the end of the day, it is sovereignty - political control of their land - that they all pursue. There is no one-size-fits-all preference or procedure.

Our real Sarah Palin nightmare: We debate sideshows and phony problems — while this very real threat looms undiscussed
While we waste time debating whether science is real, a terrifying biodiversity loss continues under our noses

It’s an amazing fact that the contemporary world is marked by a growing number of problems that are genuinely global in scope. Some of these problems even have existential implications for the survival of human civilization — yet instead we spend too much time discussing smaller threats, including North Korea, ISIS, Oregon militias and even Sarah Palin. One such problem is anthropogenic climate change — a catastrophe whose effects are anticipated to be “severe,” “pervasive” and “irreversible.” Based on the best current science, climatologists anticipate more extreme weather events, melting glaciers, sea level rise, megadroughts, desertification, deforestation, food supply disruptions, famines, infectious disease, mass migrations, social upheaval, economic distress, and political instability. While there’s a small (but real) chance that a runaway greenhouse effect could turn Earth into an unlivable cauldron like our planetary neighbor Venus, climate change is perhaps best described as a “conflict multiplier” that will exacerbate existing geopolitical problems and introduce brand-new struggles between state and nonstate actors vying for control of habitable land and dwindling resources.

But climate change isn’t the only problem of this sort. In fact, for many who spend their lives studying environmental issues, it can be frustrating to see climate change — a highly contentious issue among non-experts, despite a scientific consensus about its reality and causes — dominate the public discussion. The fact is that biodiversity loss constitutes an equally worrisome (albeit related) threat to the future of humanity. Few people today realize just how dire this situation has become as a result of human activity, or how severe the consequences could be if we continue to prune the evolutionary Tree of Life with reckless abandon.

Consider some cold hard facts. According to the 3rd Global Biodiversity Report (GBO-3), the total population of vertebrates — a broad category that includes mammals, birds, reptiles, sharks, rays and amphibians — living within the tropics declined by a shocking 59% from 1970 to 2006. Take a moment to let this sink in. In only 36 years, more than half of the vertebrate population between the Tropic of Capricorn and the Tropic of Cancer disappeared. The report also found that the abundance of vertebrates living in freshwater environments fell by 41 percent since 1970, farmland birds in Europe declined 50% since only 1980, birds in North America declined by 40% between 1968 and 2003, and nearly 25 percent of all plant species — the foundation of the food chains upon which we depend — are currently “threatened with extinction.”

Josh Fox: What We Have to Do to Prevent Climate Apocalypse
The 'Gasland' director talks to AlterNet about the dangers of fracking, his new film and how you can be a part of the solution.

The so-called fracking revolution has transformed America’s energy landscape. With more than 100,000 oil and gas wells drilled and fracked since 2005, the nation has secured cheap and plentiful energy, forcing a drop in natural gas prices. The oil giant BP believes that with this surging production of shale oil and gas, the U.S. could become energy self-sufficient by 2030, escaping the grip of OPEC, the Saudi-led oil cartel that currently accounts for 35 percent of American oil imports.

But as advocates hail fracking as a savior that can unlock the nation’s energy independence, opponents have raised the alarms about this method of extracting natural gas for its harmful effects on public health and the environment. Fracktivists have also warned that the focus on fracking has derailed the ultimate goal of moving to a low-carbon economy powered primarily by renewable energy. The anti-fracking movement has steadily grown, bringing together environmentalists, public health advocates, supporters of renewable energy and local communities across the country that have felt the negative impacts of fracking projects.

One of the early mobilizers of the nationwide anti-fracking movement was the 2010 Emmy Award-winning documentary Gasland, written and directed by Josh Fox, whose journey into fracking started in May 2008, when he received a letter from a natural gas company offering to lease his family's land in Pennsylvania for $100,000 to drill for gas. In his new film, How to Let Go of The World (And Love All the Things Climate Can't Change), which premieres this month at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, Fox travels to 12 countries on six continents to examine climate change through a fresh lens and uncover personal stories of hope.

The Arctic and the Mediterranean Face Hot-Spot Worries

LONDON—Forget the notion of a 2 degree C global average temperature rise. In parts of the Arctic, regional average warming passed that limit 15 years ago.

New research suggests that if the world really does warm to an average of 2 degree C, then mean temperatures in the Mediterranean region could be 3.4 degree C warmer than in pre-industrial times. And in some parts of the Arctic, 2 degree C average warming could translate as a 6 degree C rise.

Sonia Seneviratne, head of the land-climate dynamics group at Switzerland’s Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science (ETH Zurich), and colleagues report in Nature journal that they have been thinking about the meaning of a 2 degree C global average warming.

Because it is an average, some regions will inevitably be hotter than this average. So she and her fellow researchers have been trying to calculate what further emissions of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere—the exhausts from fossil fuel combustion that drive global warming—will mean for the people who live in specific parts of the planet.

Humanity Has Entered a New and Scary Geological Era

According to NASA and NOAA scientists, 2015 was the warmest year ever for global land and ocean surfaces, dating all the way to 1880.

And it's not just US scientists who are reporting that last year was the warmest on record, British scientists reported that it was the warmest year since 1850, and Japanese scientists reported that it was the warmest year since 1891.

Keep in mind, 2014 had set the previous record for global surface temperatures, and 2015 just beat that record by a longshot.

Part of what's going has to do with an unusually warm Pacific Ocean due to an El Niño that's going on right now, but that doesn't explain it all.

As Dr. Michael Mann explained to the New York Times, if the global climate weren't warming, the odds of setting two back-to-back record years would be about one chance in every 1,500 pairs of years.

Atlantic, Caribbean Storms Strengthen With Warming

Hurricanes in the Atlantic and Caribbean oceans will grow more than twice as powerful and damaging as ocean temperatures rise from global warming, a new study says.

Warming seas could produce more rainfall and far more destructive storm surges of water along the ocean shorelines in the next 50 to 100 years, said the study by U.S. scientists published this week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

"It could affect the entire Atlantic coast," said William Lau, a co-author and research associate at the University of Maryland's Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center.

Simulation showed future storms with as much as 180 percent more rain than what occurred during Superstorm Sandy, which heavily damaged the Northeastern United States in 2012, he said.

Warmer Indian Ocean Could Be ‘Ecological Desert’

Anslem Silva has fished for four decades from this popular harbor on Sri Lanka's west coast, but for five years now filling his boat has become increasingly difficult.

"We seem to be spending more and more time out at sea looking for catch. Where there were fish for decades, now there is very little. It is strange, but all of us have been noticing that," said the 54-year-old fisherman, who operates his own trawler on multi-day trips reaching 100 to 150 kilometres (60 to 90 miles) off the coast.

Overfishing is responsible for some of the lowered catch, but another problem may also be contributing: lack of food for the fish themselves, driven by global warming.

"Rapid warming in the Indian Ocean is playing an important role in reducing phytoplankton up to 20 percent," said Roxy Mathew Koll, a scientist at the Centre for Climate Change Research at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune.