Good morning 99percenters!
Morning news dump and music by Catherine Russell

Beauty Secrets of the Spies
CIA’s Venture Capital Arm Is Funding Skin Care Products That Collect DNA

SKINCENTIAL SCIENCES, a company with an innovative line of cosmetic products marketed as a way to erase blemishes and soften skin, has caught the attention of beauty bloggers on YouTube, Oprah’s lifestyle magazine, and celebrity skin care professionals. Documents obtained by The Intercept reveal that the firm has also attracted interest and funding from In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The previously undisclosed relationship with the CIA might come as some surprise to a visitor to the website of Clearista, the main product line of Skincential Sciences, which boasts of a “formula so you can feel confident and beautiful in your skin’s most natural state.”

Though the public-facing side of the company touts a range of skin care products, Skincential Sciences developed a patented technology that removes a thin outer layer of the skin, revealing unique biomarkers that can be used for a variety of diagnostic tests, including DNA collection.

Skincential Science’s noninvasive procedure, described on the Clearista website as “painless,” is said to require only water, a special detergent, and a few brushes against the skin, making it a convenient option for restoring the glow of a youthful complexion — and a novel technique for gathering information about a person’s biochemistry.

NATO as a War-Racket
NATO Causes Refugees, Then Uses Them As Excuse for More Invasions

NATO is the anti-Russia military club of nations, even after the communist Soviet Union and its military club against the U.S., the Warsaw Pact, ended in 1991 — NATO didn’t reciprocate that by ending itself, as it should have done (and would have done if the U.S. President at the time, George Herbert Walker Bush, had had any basic decency; instead, he said in private, “To hell with that; we won, they didn’t!” but he continued telling Gorbachev that NATO wouldn’t move “one inch to the east” — which promise he was planning to violate, and which his successors have been violating).

With the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact gone, NATO’s claimed raison d’etre was also gone, but NATO shamelessly continued on, and it even has expanded right up to Russia’s borders (just try to imagine what John Fitzgerald Kennedy would have thought if it hadn’t been Soviet nuclear missiles merely in Cuba in 1962, but all surrounding the U.S. — and that’s the situation today but reversed: today’s Russia is in the situation of 1962’s U.S., but even more so, though NATO has the audacity to accuse Russia of ‘aggression’ for, essentially, defending itself from NATO — from the enemies that are increasingly surrounding it!). (Yes, what America has been doing, really, is that bad.)

Is Hillary Clinton ‘Qualified’?

By Robert Parry

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has dismissed Sen. Bernie Sanders questioning her qualifications to be President as “silly” – and looking at her résumé alone, she’d be right – but there is also the need to judge her performance in her various jobs.

What is troubling about Clinton’s record is that she has left behind a trail strewn with failures and even catastrophes. Indeed, her highest profile undertakings almost universally ended in disaster – and a person’s record should matter when voters are deciding whether to entrust him or her with the most powerful office on earth.

In other words, it’s not just a question of her holding one prestigious job or another; it’s also how well she did in those jobs. Otherwise, you have a case of the Peter Principle Squared, not just letting someone rise to the level of his or her incompetence, but in Clinton’s case, continuing to get promoted beyond her level of incompetence.

So, looking behind Clinton’s résumé is important. After all, she presents herself as the can-do candidate who will undertake small-scale reforms that may not move the needle much but are better than nothing and may be all that’s possible given the bitterly divided Congress.

Covering Up Hillary’s Libyan Fiasco

Years after the end of the Vietnam War, as memories of its horrors and folly dimmed, conservative “revisionists” emerged to peddle the myth that U.S. commitment there was both justified and “winnable.” By obfuscating the historical record, they sought to undo the painful lessons learned by a generation of Americans about the perils of intervention and the costs of government lying.

The same kind of revisionism is being peddled today by interventionists to explain away a staggeringly costly string of more recent American failures in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Iraq and other theaters of conflict. A new article by Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Shadi Hamid, who touts the nobility of NATO’s disastrous campaign in Libya, illustrates the shameless mythmaking of such revisionists.

Last year, Glenn Greenwald reminded us that Brookings — the venue for Hillary Clinton’s first major foreign policy campaign address — “served as Ground Zero for centrist think tank advocacy of the Iraq War . . . Brookings’ two leading ‘scholar’-stars — Kenneth Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon — spent all of 2002 and 2003 insisting that invading Iraq was wise and just, and spent the years after that assuring Americans that the “victorious” war and subsequent occupation were going really well . . .

“Since then, O’Hanlon in particular has advocated for increased military force in more countries than one can count. That’s not surprising: Brookings is funded in part by one of the Democratic Party’s favorite billionaires, Haim Saban, who is a dual citizen of the U.S. and Israel and once said of himself: ‘I’m a one-issue guy, and my issue is Israel.’”

We Stopped Pfizer’s Giant Tax Dodge, Now Let’s End the Stock Market Manipulation
Want affordable healthcare? This shady practice of stock market manipulation must go.

Now that new Treasury Department rules have effectively thwarted Pfizer's attempt to evade its U.S. tax obligations by using its proposed merger with Allergan to do a tax inversion, it's time policymakers turned their attention to a far more common, and even more damaging corporate practice: stock buybacks. This mode of distributing corporate cash to shareholders helps pump up the pay of Pfizer's senior executives, while, as President Obama said of the tax inversion, "it sticks the rest of us with the tab."

Last October, in justifying the proposed merger that would effect the tax inversion, Pfizer CEO Ian C. Read complained that the company's U.S. tax burden meant that his management team had to take on global competition "with one hand tied behind our back." But, as research by the AIRnet has shown, Pfizer makes debilitating decisions that deplete its finances far more than taxes do. During Read's reign as CEO from 2011 through 2015, Pfizer paid out $44.7 billion in buybacks and $32.9 billion in dividends. Buybacks alone dwarfed the $16.0 billion Pfizer provisioned for U.S. income taxes over the same period. 

Buybacks have clearly helped inflate the pay of Ian Read; in his five years as CEO he has raked in $76.8 million in direct compensation, of which 63% came from stock-based pay. Other senior Pfizer executives as well as stock-market traders who have been adept at timing their Pfizer stock sales have also gained from buybacks. 

Climate Change to Cut Global Financial Assets by Trillions

Climate change could cut the value of the world’s financial assets by $2.5 trillion, according to the first estimate from economic modeling.

In the worst case scenarios, often used by regulators to check the financial health of companies and economies, the losses could soar to $24 trillion, or 17 percent of the world’s assets, and wreck the global economy.

The research also showed the financial sense in taking action to keep climate change under the 2°C (3.6°F) danger limit agreed by the world’s nations. In this scenario, the value of financial assets would fall by $315 billion less, even when the costs of cutting emissions are included.

“Our work suggests to long-term investors that we would be better off in a low-carbon world,” said Professor Simon Dietz of the London School of Economics, the lead author of the study. “Pension funds should be getting on top of this issue, and many of them are.” He said, however, that awareness in the financial sector was low.

Humans an Invasive Species Heading for a 'Crash,' Study Says
"The question is: Have we overshot Earth's carrying capacity today?"

Human population growth has followed the trajectory of a typical invasive species, says a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, and that suggests there may be a looming global population "crash."

"The question is: Have we overshot Earth’s carrying capacity today?" said Elizabeth Hadly, a professor in environmental biology at Stanford University and senior author of the paper, in a press statement.

"Because humans respond as any other invasive species," Hadly continued, "the implication is that we are headed for a crash before we stabilize our global population size."

The study examined 1,147 archaeological sites via radiocarbon dating to understand the patterns of human population growth in South America. As a successfully invasive species, upon arrival "humans spread rapidly throughout the continent," the study authors note.

'Unprecedented' Youth Climate Case Against Government Moves Forward
Decision marks 'tipping point on the scales of justice,' teen plaintiff says

A federal judge in Oregon on Friday ruled that the lawsuit brought against the U.S. government by a group of youths last August can go to trial—a huge victory for the case climate activists are calling "the most important lawsuit on the planet right now."

The lawsuit, filed by 21 plaintiffs ages 8-19, and climate scientist Dr. James Hansen, states that the federal government is violating their right to life, liberty, and property, as well as their right to public trust resources, by enabling continued fossil fuel extraction and use.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas Coffin in Eugene, who called the case "unprecedented," rejected motions by federal lawyers and representatives of fossil fuel groups to dismiss the lawsuit. He stated in his decision (pdf) that the plaintiffs "give this debate justiciability by asserting harms that befall or will befall them personally and to a greater extent than older segments of society."

There is a need for a court to assess the "constitutional parameters of the actions or inactions taken by the government," Coffin said.

Toxic Teflon Chemical, C8, Found In Tap Water in Several States
Meanwhile, chemical industry’s own research indicates that “safer substitutes” are also potentially hazardous.

New information emerged last month about toxic contamination from chemicals used to manufacture Teflon pots and pans and many other consumer, military, and industrial products. Water tests in several states have revealed a growing number of sites where the groundwater is polluted by the most well studied of these chemicals — C8 or PFOA — prompting calls from a group of state governors for federal action.

Meanwhile there are new indications that another perfluorinated chemical (PFC), heavily promoted by chemical manufacturers as a safer substitute for C8, is also toxic and just as persistent in the environment as C8, raising questions about the adequacy of a voluntary C8 phase-out agreement promoted for the past decade by the Environmental Protection Agency.

First created in a lab in 1947, C8 has managed to spread extraordinarily far and wide. Built from one of the strongest bonds in organic chemistry, the tie between carbon and fluorine atoms, the chemical that acts as a surfactant was, until recently, used not just in Teflon cookware, but in hundreds of other consumer products including fast food wrappers, waterproof clothing, electrical cables, and pizza boxes.

Monsanto's Willing Executioners

Is Monsanto "evil"?

Just pop that question into Google and you'll find out quickly why Monsanto ranks near the top of every "most hated company" list. And ask any news editor ... the name "Monsanto" is guaranteed clickbait that reels in readers by the bushel.

It's probably why you are reading this right now.

Perhaps you, like many anti-GMO farmers, environmental watchdogs and consumer advocates, see Monsanto as the embodiment of everything that's wrong with corporate America. Its name is synonymous with unbridled greed, indifference to the environment, bipartisan cronyism and a demonstrated willingness to steamroll the little guy.

To wit, Monsanto wields a three-decade-old Supreme Court patent ruling like a scythe as it cuts down farmers who dare to save seeds for the next planting season. It has also beaten back challenges from organic farmers who fell victim to "genetic drift" when Monsanto's patented crops cross-pollinated with their non-GMO neighbors and therefore rendered them unsellable.

Climate Change is Altering How the Poles Drift

The spin of the earth is a constant in our lives. It’s quite literally why night follows day.

And while that cycle isn’t going away, climate change is messing with the axis upon which our fair planet spins. Ice melting has caused a drift in polar motion, a somewhat esoteric term that tells scientists a lot about past and future climate and is crucial in GPS calculations and satellite communication.

Polar motion refers to the periodic wobble and drift of the poles. It’s been observed for more than 130 years, but the process has been going on for eons driven by mass shifts inside the earth as well as ones on the surface. For decades, the north pole had been slowly drifting toward Canada, but there was a shift in the drift about 15 years ago. Now it’s headed almost directly down the Greenwich Meridian (sorry Canada no pole for you, eh).

Like many other natural processes large and small, from sea levels to wildfires, climate change is also playing a role in this shift.