Good morning 99percenters!
Morning news dump and music by Martha and the Vandellas

Meanwhile, as the media and puppeteers decide who shall lord over us for the next four years, we inch closer to WWIII and the world burns.

U.S. kicks off its new bombing campaign in Libya killing 2 Serbian embassy workers
Serbian officials say they were close to freeing the two ISIS hostages, but U.S. airstrikes killed them

Just five years after leading a NATO war that destroyed Libya’s government, the U.S. is launching a new bombing campaign in the oil-rich North African nation.

The U.S. carried out airstrikes on an ISIS-controlled area in western Libya on Friday, killing approximately 40 people. Among those killed were two Serbian embassy workers who had been held hostage by the extremist group for months, AP reports.

Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic, AP noted, “said there was no doubt that Sladjana Stankovic, a communications officer, and Jovica Stepic, a driver, were killed in the American bombing.”

“Apparently, the Americans were not aware that foreign citizens were being kept there,” the prime minister remarked. “But that will always remain an unknown fact to us.”

Why the Deafening Silence on Cutting the Military Budget?

Bernie Sanders’ common sense proposals for dealing with universal health care, college tuition, restoring the infrastructure, confronting poverty and more have encountered predictable scorn from “fiscally responsible” corporatists.

They all scream about the “deficit spending” and tax hikes that might be required to pay for these vital programs. From predictable right-wing corporatists to Hillary Clinton (“free stuff! free stuff!” she mocks) to fictional “left-leaning economists” invented by the New York Times, numerous voices scorn Bernie’s agenda because his proposals “cost too much.”

But nowhere do we find anyone willing to take on the biggest imperial welfare program of them all, the most obvious source of revenue for the programs needed to heal our nation: the military budget. If Sanders were willing to cut the military budget he’d encounter no criticism for raising taxes, because he’d have no need to raise taxes. We hope that he’ll no longer pass up this opportunity to tell us how he would cut into a military budget that exceeds nearly all the rest of the world’s combined, and that largely has nothing to do with fighting terrorism (and so often makes it worse).

Saudi Arabia’s Dictator Demands Regime-Change in Syria — Otherwise WW III

As has been recently reported, many experts on international relations are saying that the danger of a nuclear war between NATO and Russia is greater now than it was during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 — in other words: greater than ever before in history. But it has just ratcheted a bit higher still:

The owner of Saudi Arabia, King Salman al-Saud, speaking through his spokesperson and chosen Foreign Minister, in an interview that was published on February 19th in Germany’s magazine Spiegel, says that he demands the resignation or else the overthrow of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, who is allied with both Iran and Russia. Polls of the Syrian public, by Western polling firms, consistently show Assad to be overwhelmingly approved by the Syrian people to be the leader of Syria, and show that Syrians blame the United States for causing ISIS, which is disapproved by 76% of Syrians. The other named jihadist groups, such as al-Nusra which is Al Qaeda in Syria, received similarly low approval-ratings from the Syrian public. In stark contrast, a poll of Saudi Arabians shows that 92% of them approve of ISIS. But the United States is allied with the fundamentalist-Islamic dictatorship Saudi Arabia, against the separation-of-church-and-state democracy of Russia. So too is America’s fellow-NATO-member Turkey allied with the fundamentalist Muslims, and they’re publicly threatening to invade Syria (another nation that has strict separation of church-and-state) with ground troops. They’re backed by planes that were supplied to the Sauds by the United States.

Robert Parry reported on February 18th, “A source close to Russian President Vladimir Putin told me that the Russians have warned Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that Moscow is prepared to use tactical nuclear weapons if necessary to save their troops in the face of a Turkish-Saudi onslaught. Since Turkey is a member of NATO, any such conflict could quickly escalate into a full-scale nuclear confrontation.”

Chomsky: 9/11 Was a Terrorist Atrocity - And So Was America's Reaction to It
Why do we continue to fight fire with fire?

Noam Chomsky wants you to forget everything that's been said about fighting terrorism and rise to "minimal levels of morality." What does that mean exactly? To Chomsky, it means holding all countries to equal standards. How should countries invaded by the US respond to terror? Should they bomb Washington? Of course not, because the entire Western response by Western standards is illegible.

"September 11 was a terrorist atrocity. So was the reaction to it," Chomsky explained in one of his iconic interviews on the US and the West's response to those historic events.

Terrorism is the calculated threat or use of violence to achieve political gain through fear. "Suppose you announce to people, 'We're going to continue to bomb you until you turn over to us, people who we suspect of crimes," Noam Chomsky hypothesized. "'We're not going to provide any evidence and we're going to refuse negotiations,' I'm quoting George Bush," he explains. "That's terrorism in the literal sense, extreme terrorism."

America’s Slide toward Failed State

We Americans, usually quick to judge other societies by American standards, can become more self-aware by reversing the direction of the comparison and thinking of what the attributes of other nations might highlight about our own deficiencies.

Such comparisons can work in either of two ways. One is to observe how far the United States has fallen behind others in endeavors at which others excel and set the standards. Investment in transportation infrastructure, for example. Ride a train in Switzerland after riding one in the United States and the point becomes clear.

The other sort of comparison is to examine the troubles of other countries that are deeply troubled, with an eye toward identifying underlying problems that might also be found in the United States even though the United States has not gone as far down the troubled path — at least not yet. There is no shortage of countries, from Syria to Somalia to South Sudan, that we commonly label as politically unstable and that present grief for their own citizens, challenges for U.S. policymakers, and fodder for foreign policy pundits.

Is America Really Getting More Tolerant? 100 New Hate Groups Appeared Last Year
People are finding new ways to bond around intolerance.

There are 892 Hate Groups currently operating in the US according to a new study by the Southern Poverty Law Center released earlier this week - over 100 more than in 2014. The hate groups were divided into 14 groups, all which believe that equality should be denied based on race, religion, sexual identity and/or naturalization.

WATCH: Interviews with members of lesser-known hate groups in America:

Albert Woodfox Is Free: Last of the ‘Angola 3’ Who Spent Decades in Solitary Is Released

Albert Woodfox, the last of the men known as the Angola 3, was released from a Louisiana prison on Friday.

He had spent over four decades in solitary confinement at the notorious Louisiana State Penitentiary known as “Angola.”

WBRZ Reporter Michael Vinsanau tweeted this photo of Woodfox as he walked out of prison:

Pure happiness from Alfred Woodfox as he left the prison @WBRZ pic.twitter.com/J6vBHfRPCj

— MichaelVinsanau WBRZ (@MVinsanau) February 19, 2016

His release, on his 69 birthday, comes after he pleaded no contest to charges of manslaughter and aggravated burglary in the 1972 death of a prison guard. Though his previous convictions of murder for the death were previously thrown out, the state had blocked his release. He had always maintained his innocence.

Arctic Sea Ice Is in Record Low Territory (Again)

Persistent warmth has baked the region, making snow a no show in parts of Alaska and, perhaps more importantly, slowing the growth of Arctic sea ice. Though it’s still likely a month before the Arctic sea ice reaches its maximum, the current trajectory is not a good one.

Slow and at times non-existent growth has already led to a record low January extent and preliminary data from February indicate sea ice continues to set daily record lows. It was just last year that Arctic sea ice set its record low winter extent, a record that could be short-lived.

As one of the key indicators of planetary health, the continued disappearance of sea ice raises major concerns about how the planet is faring as the climate warms.

The decline continues a long-term trend. Winter Arctic sea ice extent has been decreasing by 3.2 percent per decade since 1979 when accurate satellite measurements began. The region is warming at twice the rate as the rest of the globe, a trend that’s largely responsible for disappearing ice.

Two-Thirds of the Globe Face Water Shortages, Major Study Finds
Global water scarcity is far more severe than previously thought

Four billion people live under conditions of severe water shortages at least one month of the year, according to new research.

Nearly half of these people live in India and China, according to astudy by Science Advances. Other populations facing severe water scarcity live in Bangladesh, the United States (mostly in western states), Pakistan and Nigeria.

Of the total figure half a billion people experience water shortages all year round, with the highest number affected in India and Pakistan. In Saudi Arabia and Yemen year-round water scarcity affects all people in the country, putting these parts of the world in “an extremely vulnerable position”.

The findings reveal that the water scarcity is a far more severe problem than previously thought. Previous studies published in the past few years gave estimates between just 1.7 and 3.1 billion.

The digging never ends: It’s not just what ExxonMobil did, it’s what it’s doing
ExxonMobil's never-ending big dig is flooding the Earth with fossil fuels, Bill McKibben explains

Here’s the story so far. We have the chief legal representatives of the eighth and 16th largest economies on Earth (California and New York) probing the biggest fossil fuel company on Earth (ExxonMobil), while both Democratic presidential candidates are demanding that the federal Department of Justice join the investigation of what may prove to be one of the biggest corporate scandals in American history. And that’s just the beginning. As bad as Exxon has been in the past, what it’s doing now — entirely legally — is helping push the planet over the edge and into the biggest crisis in the entire span of the human story.

Back in the fall, you might have heard something about how Exxon had covered up what it knew early on about climate change. Maybe you even thought to yourself: that doesn’t surprise me. But it should have. Even as someone who has spent his life engaged in the bottomless pit of greed that is global warming, the news and its meaning came as a shock: we could have avoided, it turns out, the last quarter century of pointless climate debate.

As a start, investigations by the Pulitzer-Prize winning Inside Climate News, the Los Angeles Times, and Columbia Journalism School revealed in extraordinary detail that Exxon’s top officials had known everything there was to know about climate change back in the 1980s. Even earlier, actually. Here’s what senior company scientist James Black told Exxon’s management committee in 1977: “In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels.” To determine if this was so, the company outfitted an oil tanker with carbon dioxide sensors to measure concentrations of the gas over the ocean, and then funded elaborate computer models to help predict what temperatures would do in the future.

There’s another water pollutant Americans have to worry about: Mercury
Rainfall in the Rocky Mountains shows a surprisingly high amount of mercury, worrying scientists about what’s next

Several years after scientists thought they had put the problem to rest, they have once again discovered increasing concentrations of mercury, this time in rainwater. “It’s a surprising result,” says David Gay from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, who is a co-author on the new study. “Everybody expected [mercury levels] to continue going down. But our analysis shows that may not necessarily be the case.”

The results, recently published in Science of the Total Environment, is surprising because long-term trends had shown a decrease in mercury emissions whereas data collected between 2007 and 2013 indicate an unsettling upturn from the Rocky Mountains to the Midwest. The trend, however, is not due to regional activity. The authors speculate that because the U.S. has controlled its emissions since the 1970s, the toxic element was initially released via coal-burning power plants in Asia, drifted through the upper atmosphere for months, hit turbulence over the Rocky Mountains and was then pulled from the air in the form of rain.

Hannah Horowitz from Harvard University, who was not involved in the study, was surprised to see a similar—albeit less detailed—trend in her own work. After seeing the regional effects in this new study, she agrees that the toxic element likely comes from outside the U.S. “We see for other types of pollutants that [the Rocky Mountain region] tends to be more influenced by nonlocal sources because of its higher elevation—it has access to the free tropospheric air,” she says.

'Finally,' FDA Will Start Testing Food for Presence of Monsanto's Controversial Glyphosate
“It’s shocking that it’s taken so long, but we’re glad it’s finally going to happen.”

The Food and Drug Administration will begin testing food for glyphosate, the world’s most commonly used pesticide, according to Civil Eats. This marks the first time a U.S. agency will routinely test for glyphosate residue in food. It comes after the Government Accountability Office released a report condemning the FDA for failing to disclose its failure to test for glyphosate in its annual pesticide residue report.

The World Health Organization found that glyphosate, commonly known as Roundup, was a probable human carcinogen and has been named as a leading cause of massive declines in monarch butterflies.

“In the wake of intense scrutiny, the Food and Drug Administration has finally committed to taking this basic step of testing our food for the most commonly used pesticide. It’s shocking that it’s taken so long, but we’re glad it’s finally going to happen,” Nathan Donley, a scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity, said. “More and more scientists are raising concerns about the effects of glyphosate on human health and the environment. With about 1.7 billion pounds of this pesticide used each year worldwide, the FDA’s data is badly needed to facilitate long-overdue conversations about how much of this chemical we should tolerate in our food.”

ExxonMobil—More Than 50 Proud Years of Melting Glaciers

From the Department of “Time Makes Ancient Good Uncouth” comes this historical oddity, a double page advertisement from the February 2, 1962, issue of LIFE magazine (which featured a helmeted John Glenn on the cover as he prepared to become the first American astronaut to orbit the earth).

The ad, extolling the wonders of Humble Oil and Refining, the company now known as ExxonMobil, proudly boasts that “Each Day Humble Supplies Enough Energy to Melt 7 Million Tons of Glacier!” Like that’s a good thing.

Set against a beautiful color photograph of Alaska’s Taku Glacier, the copy reads, in part, “This giant glacier has remained unmelted for centuries. Yet, the petroleum energy Humble supplies – if converted into heat – could melt it at the rate of 80 tons each second! …Working wonders with oil through research, Humble provides energy in many forms – to help heat our homes, power our transportation, and to furnish industry with a great variety of versatile chemicals.” What a swell company.

Flint and Haiti: A Tale of Two Rivers, a Tale of Two Crimes

We made our way down the steep bank to the meandering river, Haiti's largest: the Artibonite. My friends warned me about the strong currents, and also about the dangerous spirits that lurk beneath the surface in deep parts, waiting to drag any wayward swimmer into their murky depths. We stayed close to the shore, sitting on rocks or treading water as we bathed, played and did the laundry. Amid our laughter, I was reminded that the river holds other deadly presences.

Along its many miles, people are washing dirty clothes and sheets, washing themselves, washing vehicles, bringing animals to drink and dumping sewage. The latter sparked what would quickly become the world's largest cholera epidemic in recent history. Since October 2010, when cholera was introduced into Haiti after sewage from a UN peacekeeping base was dumped into the river, close to 800,000 cases have been reported and more than 9,000 people have been killed. The UN continues to refuse to acknowledge or take responsibility for its proven involvement.

For two months in 2015, I lived and conducted ethnographic research in a rural region of Haiti near the mouth of the Artibonite River. I returned for a brief visit - and to celebrate the 212th anniversary of Haiti's independence - in January 2016. In 1804, the nation of Haiti liberated itself from French colonial rule, becoming the world's first independent Black republic. What followed has been a complex history made tumultuous by foreign intervention, natural disasters, political instability, epidemic disease, institutionalized elitism and legacies of colonialism, structural adjustment and trade "liberalization" that have wreaked havoc on Haiti's economy and capacity for self-sufficiency. For many, even myself, Haiti occupies a particular place in the collective imaginary, often relegated to such superlative categories as "poorest," "developing" and "third world."

Monsanto's Pesticide Is Top Suspect Behind Mysterious Kidney Disease

For several years now, a mysterious kidney disease epidemic has been underway in several parts of the global South. The victims are young, male outdoor workers - far from the usual demographic of older patients with sedentary lifestyles and a history of diabetes or high blood pressure. In Central America, thousands of young men who work in the sugar cane plantations have died of failing kidneys; in Sri Lanka and parts of rural India, it is rice farmers who are similarly afflicted. Although the "mystery disease" has garnered medical attention - at first as an anomaly, but increasingly as an inexplicable mass killer - for over 20 years now, the causes remain unknown. In fact, the disease goes by the moniker "chronic kidney disease of unknown etiology" (CKDu) to distinguish it from the ordinary form, CKD.

Numerous medical studies have considered heat stress (prolonged exposure to the sun, often in conjunction with insufficient access to drinking water) and exposure to chemicals in pesticides and fertilizers to be possible causes. However, the results are far from conclusive. What is conclusively evident, however, is that there are an inexcusable number of lives being cut short with no concrete effort at prevention. Most evidence points to one (or a combination) of the two above-mentioned factors. Accordingly, it would be relatively simple for interested parties to devise a preventive strategy on this basis. However, the response has been woefully inadequate.

Although definitive knowledge of causal factors is lacking, a name that is repeated in medical papers is that of the pesticide glyphosate. Marketed most notably by the Monsanto Corporation under the brand name Roundup, this chemical has been noted in academic literature, as well as in the media, as likely to be an aggravating factor.

The Beetles: Eighty-Nine Million Acres of Abrupt Climate Change

We were awash for 19 days in a tumultuous sea of mountains and forests, drifting a course through the heart of the US Rockies on a 6,000-mile journey of observation. Our film, What Have We Done, the North American Pine Beetle Pandemic, was released in 2009. It was the story of what is now 89 million acres of forest across the North American West that have been attacked by native insects. These insects had been driven to unprecedented numbers by warming that is twice or more the global average. Most of the trees in impacted forests were killed in the wake of the beetles.

It has been four years since the Climate Change Now Initiative's last post-film observation in 2010. Our epic crossing was different on that final journey. The mountainsides of impacted forests were not predominantly bright red. Some were red. Some were brown. And ghost forest of gray needleless conifers at times spread to the horizon.

My wife was along on this trip, on what is usually a solo operation. It was the first of these incredible journeys on which she has been able to accompany me. At an average of 285 miles per day, this was a little tamer than most, but still a grueling but exquisitely beautiful 21-day adventure across the Rockies.