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This evening's music features blues guitarist, singer and songwriter Little Son Joe mostly known for his work with his wife, Memphis Minnie. Enjoy!

"Before we had investment rules and ISDS international agreements, unlawful behavior by countries that targeted foreign investors tended either to go unaddressed or escalate into conflict between countries. In fact, early in our history, the U.S. had to deploy “gunboat diplomacy,” or military intervention, to protect private American commercial interests. ISDS is a more peaceful, better way to resolve trade conflicts between countries. In addition, ISDS strengthens and promotes the rule of law by creating incentives for governments to follow basic due process and rights that are recognized around the world."

-- White House website explanation of the need for TPP

News and Opinion

This is a totally excellent article which should be read in full. Here's a taste to get you started:

Columbus Day Is the Most Important Day of Every Year

Columbus’ landfall in the western hemisphere was the opening of Europe’s conquest of essentially all of this planet. By 1914, 422 years later, European powers and the U.S. controlled 85 percent of the world’s land mass.

White people didn’t accomplish this by asking politely. As conservative Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington put it in 1996, “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion … but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”

In fact, European colonialism involved a level of brutality comparable in every way to that of 20th century fascism and communism, and it started with Columbus himself. Estimates of the number of people living on the island of Hispaniola when Columbus established settlements range from 250,000 to several million. Within 30 years of his arrival, 80 to 90 percent of them were dead due to disease, war and enslavement, in what another Harvard professor cheerily called “complete genocide.” Contemporary accounts of the Spainards’ berserk cruelty really have to be read to be believed.

Formally, of course, European colonialism largely ended in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. Yet informally, it has — behind the mask of what Pope Francis recently called “new forms of colonialism” — continued with surprising success.

Thus European colonialism is the central fact of politics on earth. And precisely because of that, it is almost never part of any American discussion of politics. Anthropologists call this phenomenon “social silence” — meaning that in most human societies, the subjects that are core to how the societies function are exactly the ones that are never mentioned.

Christopher Columbus was a lost sadist. There shouldn't be a holiday in his name

The second Monday in October has been designated an American federal holiday in Christopher Columbus’s honor since 1937. ... The holiday’s popularity has been waning for some time. In cities like Seattle and Minneapolis, it has been already been renamed Indigenous Peoples’ Day, a reminder that Columbus’s voyages set off a chain of events that wreaked havoc on native populations in the New World. It’s time to make that piecemeal commemoration official: stop celebrating Columbus and start celebrating the native cultures he began the process of displacing.

For generations, school children learned to recite, “In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue”. They then learned the story of the brave explorer who navigated into uncharted territory with sailors who were frightened of falling off the edge of a flat earth. That tale, much of it created by Washington Irving (the man who gave us The Legend of Sleepy Hollow), is bunk. Mariners knew full well the earth was round, including Columbus and his crew. Columbus just thought the circumference of the earth was thousands of miles smaller, and thus that the islands of the Caribbean were the East Indies. Our holiday celebrates a man who was lost.

Lost or not, he immediately captured some of the natives he met, writing of the “seven [natives] which I have ordered to be taken and carried to Spain,” and further musing that “I could conquer the whole of them with 50 men, and govern them as I pleased”. In December, his ships reached Hispaniola – the island that now hosts Haiti and the Dominican Republic – where he forced the natives to provide him gold; those who didn’t had their hands lopped off. It was the beginning of a rapid decline of the island’s population; historian Laurence Bergreen estimates that there were 300,000 natives on Hispaniola when Columbus arrived; by 1550, there were just 500. Many had been killed by disease or Spanish soldiers; others had been enslaved and sent back to Spain. A huge number simply took their own lives rather than live under Spanish rule. Is this really worthy of a celebration and a three-day sale at the local department store?

From Million Man March to Columbus Day: Challenging White Supremacy & "Doctrine of Discovery"

Russian airstrikes support Syrian troops to push back rebels in strategic town

Syrian army and allied forces supported by Russian warplanes have made further advances in their offensive against insurgents with the fiercest clashes for nearly a week, a monitoring group said.

Russian jets carried out at least 30 airstrikes on the town of Kafr Nabuda, Hama province, in western Syria, and hundreds of shells hit the area as the Syrian army and Hezbollah fighters seized part of it, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Monday.

Forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad have recaptured territory close to the government’s coastal heartland in the west in the past few days thanks to Russia’s intervention, reversing rebel advances made earlier this year. ...

Lebanon-based television station al-Mayadeen also reported that troops had taken over the southern part of Kafr Nabuda.

The town’s capture would bring government forces closer to insurgent-held positions along the main highway that links Syria’s major cities.

War with Isis: Why Syria’s Christians can never go home

Syrian Christians are too terrified of past kidnappings and present suicide bombings by Isis to return to their homes in towns and villages from which the Islamist militants have been driven. Much the same is true of other communities in Syria, meaning that few of the 4 million Syrian refugees now outside the country and the 7 million within it are ever likely to go home.

Isis has adopted a strategy of ensuring that even where it is defeated and forced to retreat, it can ensure that there is a state of terror and permanent insecurity in the territory from which it has withdrawn. One can see the results of this process clearly in the town of Tal Tamir and nearby villages on the Khabur river in north-east Syria, where there were once large Assyrian Christian populations and which were seized by Isis at the start of the year. These places were recaptured by the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) in the early summer but they remain desolate and uninhabited. ...

Syrians often begin conversations by saying their neighbourhood is safe and only gradually confess that this security has its limitations. Mr Abraham was no exception and, after 10 minutes, he revealed that a woman suicide bomber from Isis had been detected the previous week in Tal Tamir trying to enter a market, though she had been detained before she could blow herself up. ...

Isis is pursuing the same tactics across Kurdish-controlled north Syria where the Islamist militants have suffered their most serious military defeats this year at the hands of YPG ground forces backed by intense United States bombing. The YPG broke Isis’s long siege of Kobani in January, though 70 per cent of the city was pulverised by US bombs and missiles, and the Kurdish fighters have since advanced to the Euphrates. Isis lost an important border crossing with Turkey at Tal Abyad in June and failed in an attempt to seize Hasaka city. Yet the front line between Isis and the YPG is long and porous, so it is impossible to defend against infiltrators. Pervasive fear that Isis has “sleeper cells” in every Sunni Arab community stokes paranoid suspicions and deepens hostility between Arab and Kurd. ...

The Kurds say the corner of Syria they control is secular and all sectarian and ethnic groups can live there, but even so the insecurity is so great that normal life has become impossible. Even where there has been little destruction, the fear and sense of threat is so high that few refugees or displaced people can go home.

Did U.S. weapons supplied to Syrian rebels draw Russia into the conflict?

American antitank missiles supplied to Syrian rebels are playing an unexpectedly prominent role in shaping the Syrian battlefield, giving the conflict the semblance of a proxy war between the United States and Russia, despite President Obama’s express desire to avoid one.

The U.S.-made BGM-71 TOW missiles were delivered under a two-year-old covert program coordinated between the United States and its allies to help vetted Free Syrian Army groups in their fight against President Bashar al-Assad. ... So successful have they been in driving rebel gains in northwestern Syria that rebels call the missile the “Assad Tamer,” a play on the word Assad, which means lion. ... More missiles are on the way, he said. New supplies arrived after the Russian deployments began, he said, and the rebels’ allies have promised further deliveries soon, bringing echoes of the role played by U.S.-supplied Stinger antiaircraft missiles in forcing the Soviet Union to withdraw from Afghanistan in the 1980s. ...

Supplied mostly from stocks owned by Saudi Arabia, delivered across the Turkish border and stamped with CIA approval, the missiles were intended to fulfill another of the Obama administration’s goals in Syria — Assad’s negotiated exit from power. The plan, as described by administration officials, was to exert sufficient military pressure on Assad’s forces to persuade him to compromise — but not so much that his government would precipitously collapse and leave a dangerous power vacuum in Damascus.

Instead, the Russian military intervened to shore up the struggling Syrian army — an outcome that was not intended.

“A primary driving factor in Russia’s calculus was the realization that the Assad regime was militarily weakening and in danger of losing territory in northwestern Syria. The TOWs played an outsize role in that,” said Oubai Shahbandar, a Dubai-based consultant who used to work with the Syrian opposition.

A Decisive Shift in the Balance of Power

The world is beginning to realize that a seachange in world affairs occured on September 28 when President Putin of Russia stated in his UN speech that Russia can no longer tolerate Washington’s vicious, stupid, and failed policies that have unleashed chaos, which is engulfing the Middle East and now Europe. Two days later, Russia took over the military situation in Syria and began the destruction of the Islamic State forces. ...

If Obama has any sense, he will dismiss from his government the neoconservative morons who have squandered Washington’s power, and he will focus instead on holding on to Europe by working with Russia to destroy, rather than to sponsor, the terrorism in the Middle East that is overwhelming Europe with refugees.

If Obama cannot admit a mistake, the United States will continue to lose credibility and prestige around the world.

Taliban Has Most Territory in Afghanistan Since 2001

UN Report Based on Early September, Before Kunduz Fell

A new report from the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan has provided an alarming metric for the ongoing US-led occupation of Afghanistan, revealing that the Taliban’s reach in the country is its largest since the 2001 US invasion, meaning 14 years of war has left the Taliban with growing influence.

The report has not been publicly released, but has made the rounds across to several nations, warning that more than half of the country’s districts are now under either “high” or “extreme” threat from the Taliban, reflecting their ability to span the country.

It gets worse though. The UN report is based on data from early September, before the Taliban seized the major northern city of Kunduz. That means this war-time worst situation actually got significantly worse after the report was already penned.

This should be another hugely damaging blow to US confidence in the honesty of military leadership, as Gen. John Campbell, the top commander of the war, insisted in testimony only last week that the situation was well in hand, and that Afghanistan’s military held “nearly all” of the districts in Afghanistan.

US to Make 'Condolence Payments' to Families of Victims in Afghan Hospital Bombing

The Pentagon says it will offer "condolence payments" to the families of civilians who were killed or injured when the US bombed a Doctors Without Borders hospital in the northern Afghanistan last week.

"The Department of Defense believes it is important to address the consequences of the tragic incident at the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan," Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said in a statement. "One step the Department can take is to make condolence payments to civilian non-combatants injured and the families of civilian non-combatants killed as a result of US military operations." ...

The US has paid the family members of civilian casualties numerous times in the past, and does not consider the payments to be an admission of wrongdoing. According to the New York Times, "there has been no public, systematic account of how frequently it has made them or how much money it has spent on them."

Doctors Without Borders Rejects Pentagon Offer to Help Rebuild Bombed Hospital

Doctors Without Borders rejected the Pentagon’s offer to rebuild their hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, which United States military forces bombed on October 3. The aid group also indicated “condolence payments,” which the Pentagon is prepared to authorize, should not preempt or prevent an independent investigation into how U.S. military ever approved of a strike on the medical compound.

Twelve MSF staff and ten patients, including three children, were killed in a strike, which General John Campbell, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, claims went through a “rigorous” procedure before being approved by the chain of command.

Dr. Joanne Liu, president of Doctors Without Borders International, claimed staff heard a U.S. army plane circle multiple times before it released bombs on the “same building within the hospital compound at each pass.”

“The building targeted was the one housing the intensive care unit, emergency rooms, and physiotherapy ward. Surrounding buildings in the compound were left largely untouched,” according to Liu.

In a statement on October 11, the group—also known as Medecins Sans Frontieres—shared, “MSF’s longstanding policy is to not accept funding from any governments for its work in Afghanistan and other conflicts around the world. This policy allows us to work independently without taking sides and provide medical care to anyone who needs it. This will not change.”

“MSF has not officially received any details of the compensation announced by the Pentagon for those killed and wounded in the U.S. airstrike on MSF’s hospital in Kunduz,” the group added. “It is important to note that under international humanitarian law, the offer of comepnsation at this stage cannot preempt the result of present and future investigations, nor preclude any further claims or rights of those affected by the U.S. airstrike.”

Shock & Panic in Turkey: Deadliest Terrorist Attack in Country’s History Leaves as Many as 128 Dead

Ankara bombing: An attack designed to sow division appears to have succeeded

Police Attack Mourners Near Site of Saturday Blasts

Is Turkey joining the array of eight countries engulfed by violence in the Middle East and North Africa? The suicide bombing of a peace rally in Ankara that killed more than 100 people on Saturday is an ominous sign that the same factors that have effectively destroyed Iraq and Syria as unitary countries are affecting Turkey. ...

The initial signs do not encourage optimism. People going to place flowers at the scene of the bomb attack were tear-gassed by police. Nobody has yet claimed responsibility for the two suicide bombings, but the attack has all the hallmarks of Isis. ...

The general assumption is that Mr Erdogan’s actions are directed at discrediting, or even seeking to eliminate, the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP). By winning 13 per cent in the poll in the last general election in Turkey in June, the HDP robbed the AK party of its majority and prevented Mr Erdogan from creating an all-powerful presidency.

It did so primarily because of Mr Erdogan’s apparent preference for Isis over the Syrian Kurds during the siege of Kobani that ended in January with a Kurdish victory. The HDP’s success came almost entirely because conservative and religious Kurds switched from the AK party. Nothing that Mr Erdogan or the AK have done since the last election is likely to woo these voters back in the coming election on 1 November.

The Turkish government has shown continuing tolerance towards attacks on the HDP offices and those of newspapers it deems hostile. The PKK has now declared what amounts to a ceasefire, but the guerrilla war in south-east Turkey has built up its own momentum with ambushes and killings creating waves of anger among Turks and Kurds. Could all this be switched off after the election when Mr Erdogan will have played the nationalist card with or without success? If he does not wish to de-escalate the Kurdish/Turkish confrontation, or finds he cannot do so, the outlook for Turkey will be permanent unrest and insecurity. ...

Mr Erdogan has miscalculated at every stage of the Syrian crisis since 2011 and there is no sign of these missteps ending.

Turkish PM Blames Islamic State for Ankara Bombings as Funerals Continue

Turkey's Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said today that the Islamic State (IS) is the focus of the probe into a twin suicide bombing that killed at least 97 people in the country's capital Ankara on Saturday and that investigators are close to identifying one of the suspects. ...

Two explosions happened seconds apart on Saturday as hundreds gathered for a march organized by pro-Kurdish activists and civic groups to protest over a conflict between Turkish security forces and Kurdish militants in the southeast.

Anger is continuing over the incident in Turkey, and hundreds of people chanted anti-government slogans as they marched towards a mosque in an Istanbul suburb today for the funeral of several victims of the bombings.

The funerals were due to be attended by Selahattin Demirtas, leader of the pro-Kurdish opposition Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) which says it was the target of the bombings and has blamed President Tayyip Erdogan and the government. The HDP, which said it was the target of the attack, has put the death toll at 128 and said it had identified all but eight of those bodies.

Riot police with water cannon and armored vehicles stood by as the crowd, some chanting "Thief, Murderer Erdogan" and waving HDP flags, moved towards the mosque in the working class Umraniye neighborhood of Istanbul.

A top Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) commander said the group's militants would stick to a ceasefire pledge announced at the weekend in memory of the people killed in the Ankara bombing, a news website close to the PKK said on Monday. ...

Deputy Prime Minister Yalcin Akdogan had already dismissed the anticipated PKK ceasefire declaration as a "tactic" ahead of the election.

Iran Parliament Approves P5+1 Nuclear Deal

In a 139-100 vote, Iran’s parliament voted in favor of the P5+1 nuclear deal. The vote saw a heated debate, with Iran’s conservative bloc broadly opposed to the deal condemning the reformist government for making concessions and claiming the “American wolves” had gotten the better of the deal.

The vote is just the first of a pair of procedural votes the deal needs to pass though having passed the first it seems all but certain it will survive the second, scheduled for Tuesday. The bill also needs approval from a key clerical body before it is fully approved.

Trim the Pentagon's Shadow Workforce

Cutting back on contractors would save money and increase transparency.

As Congressional gridlock continues to keep a lid on the Pentagon's base budget, it's long past time to reduce spending on unessential goods and services. One area that hasn't received the attention it deserves is the Pentagon's massive shadow work force. According to the Pentagon's most recent report to Congress, its service contractor work force stands at over 641,000 people, employed by 41 different components within the department. Private contractors perform a wide range of tasks for the Pentagon, from maintaining equipment to providing security at bases to gathering and analyzing intelligence.

There are strong reasons to believe that the Pentagon's latest tally of contract employees is an underestimate. Robert Gates has noted that when he was secretary of defense, he wasn't able to determine how many private contractors the Pentagon employed. And in an analysis published in March of this year, the Congressional Budget Office determined that figures on government employment of contractors are only "approximate" due to the fact that the existing database on the subject is "not complete." Finally, in the latest Pentagon report the number of contract employees in four sub-units was classified, including the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office and the Africa Command.

Getting an accurate accounting of the numbers of service contractors employed by the Pentagon should be just a first step. The next critical question is what tasks these hundreds of thousands of service contractors are carrying out. If they are performing functions that can and should be done by government employees, their positions should be phased out. The savings would be substantial. An analysis by the Project on Government Oversight estimates that the Pentagon could save more than $20 billion per year if it reduced its contractor work force by 15 percent.

Prosecutor Slammed for Releasing Reports That Call Tamir Rice Shooting 'Reasonable'

An Ohio prosecutor handling the fatal police shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice while he played with a replica pistol was criticized by activists on Sunday for releasing two reports that called the shooting "reasonable" before any grand jury decision on charges had been announced.

"It looks as though the prosecutor is trying to taint the grand jury process as well as manipulate the judicial process overall," said Edward Little, one of the so-called Cleveland 8, a group of clergy, academics and activists who have called for the two police officers involved in the November 2014 playground shooting of Rice to be indicted. ...

Little said the release of the reports to media late Saturday on a holiday weekend was "reminiscent" of prosecutors' handling of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, where details of the case were leaked to the media before a grand jury decision not to bring charges against the police officer involved.

"This community has lost all hope in this prosecutor to be fair and impartial," Little said. ...

The Rice family's attorney, Subodh Chandra, accused prosecutors of failing to properly advocate for the victim and of "sandbagging" the grand jury proceedings by improperly releasing case documents.

"Our prosecutor is freelancing. The officers here are being given special treatment," he said in a phone interview.

Hundreds of Thousands March in Berlin Against TTIP Trade Deal

Hundreds of thousands of people rallied on Saturday afternoon in the German capital against the massive Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) accord being negotiated by the European Union and the United States. Critics say the trade deal will benefit large corporations at the expense of average Europeans.

Trade unions, environmental groups, NGOs and anti-globalization groups were among the organizers of the huge rally, which went from the main railway station in central Berlin to the national parliament.  Over 250,000 people turned out for the event - many more than the 50,000 to 100,000 expected, but Berlin police claimed the number was closer to their initial expectation of 100,000.

Marchers banged drums, blew whistles and held up posters reading "Stop TTIP" and "TTIP signals climactic shipwreck" and "Yes, we can – Stop TTIP." A group of protesters dragged a giant wooden trojan horse – a reference to the Trojan horse of Greek legend – to demonstrate how the trade deal is being sneaked into law by corporate lobbyists and EU officials through subterfuge.

"Never before have we seen so many people take to the streets for this issue," the German trade union confederation DGB, which helped organize the protest, said on Saturday.

"We are here because we do not want to leave the future to markets, but on the contrary to save democracy," said Michael Mueller, president of the ecological organization German Friends of Nature.

Over three million people who have signed an online petition calling on the European commission to abandon the deal.

US government deporting Central American migrants to their deaths

Guardian investigation into consequences of Obama’s migration crackdown reveals US deportees have been murdered shortly after return to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, with study saying as many as 83 killed since 2014

The US government is deporting undocumented immigrants back to Central America to face the imminent threat of violence, with several individuals being murdered just days or months after their return, a Guardian investigation has found.

The Guardian has confirmed three separate cases of Honduran men who have been gunned down shortly after being deported by the US government. Each was murdered in their hometowns, soon after their return – one just a few days after he was expelled from the US.

Immigration experts believe that the Guardian’s findings represent just the tip of the iceberg. A forthcoming academic study based on local newspaper reports has identified as many as 83 US deportees who have been murdered on their return to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras since January 2014.

Human rights groups warn that deterrent measures taken by the Obama administration after last year’s “surge” in arrivals at the border of unaccompanied children from Central America have triggered a series of powerful unintended consequences across the region.

Bernie Sanders' Democratic debate challenge: turning down the volume

Candidate will not ‘become a hitman’ targeting Hillary Clinton, aides say as they hope he can shift from impassioned speeches to conversation

Out on the campaign trail, Bernie Sanders’ full-throated attacks on the billionaire class have been so loud and passionate that aides have taken to offering him honey, to help soothe noticeably wrecked vocal cords.

But when he takes on Hillary Clinton for the first time, in a television studio in Las Vegas on Tuesday night, staff members are hoping he will bring his indoor voice instead of the gravelly bark that has electrified record crowds at rallies. ...

“[His] experience of doing Sunday shows, being asked substantive questions in a live television environment – which is not a shouting environment, which is a talking environment – he’s done a lot of that … and I think the debate is a lot like that,” his senior adviser, Tad Devine, told the Guardian. ...

Sanders aides have been working hard on how to counter Clinton’s recent shift to the left on a number of issues that would once have been easy targets. The most dramatic of these came less than a week before the debate, when Clinton announced an about-turn on free trade and adopted much of the same opposition to President Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TTP) deal that has made Sanders popular among progressive Democrats and trade unions. ...

“Bernie is not going to become a hitman,” said Devine, who helped run the presidential campaigns of Al Gore and John Kerry and has been leading the Sanders debate prep alongside campaign manager Jeff Weaver.

“He is not going to go out there and start attacking. It’s against everything he believes in and stands for when it comes to campaign politics,” added Devine.

Why Build the Green Party? - Jill Stein

Hmmmm... listing one vote, despite the fact that it was a consequential vote, as the entirety of your foreign policy experience doesn't seem like a good campaign strategy. Bernie still needs a lot of help with this area of his campaign.

In Debate Preview, Bernie Sanders Criticizes Hillary Clinton for Iraq Vote

If there was any question about how Senator Bernie Sanders would go after Hillary Rodham Clinton in the first Democratic presidential primary debate on Tuesday evening, it was answered on Saturday in the form of a press release attacking his rival’s vote authorizing the Iraq War.

With a headline “Sanders’ Foreign Policy Experience,” the press release focuses entirely on Mr. Sanders’ opposition to the Iraq war when he was a congressman from Vermont.

Mrs. Clinton’s vote in 2002 authorizing the use of force of Iraq, which then-President George W. Bush sought, became a defining issue in her 2008 presidential primary against then-Senator Barack Obama. Mr. Obama used that vote to raise questions about Mrs. Clinton’s judgment and her character.

Gyasi Ross: Why I Support Bernie Sanders & the #BlackLivesMatter Protesters Who Interrupted Him

Clinton's Big Wall Street Reform Plan: Not Reinstating Glass-Steagall

Hillary Clinton on Thursday put forth her plan for Wall Street reform, absent from which is an element progressives see as key: the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall.

The Depression-era law, which put a wall of separation between investment and commercial banking, was repealed under President Bill Clinton in 1999. The most important effect of its repeal, wrote Public Citizen president Robert Weissman, "was to change the culture of commercial banking to emulate Wall Street's high-risk speculative betting approach."

Clinton's newly unveiled plan puts her approach to Wall Street reform squarely at odds with her rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and former Gov. Martin O’Malley (D-Md.). Sanders, for his part, has given his support to the 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act, which aims to "reduce risk in the financial system and dial back the likelihood of future financial crises."

Explaining her plan in a Bloomberg op-ed, Clinton writes that she would "increas[e] resources for the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate and prosecute executives for financial crimes;" "strengthen and enforce the Volcker Rule so banks can’t make risky and speculative trading bets with taxpayer-backed money;" "give regulators the authority they need to reorganize, downsize or even break apart any financial institution that is too large and risky to be managed effectively;" and put a tax on some high-frequency tax trades.

CNN Money reports, "The reaction [to Clinton's plan] from the banking community was a shrug, if not relief."

El Niño could leave 4 million people in Pacific without food or drinking water

Two dozen people have already died from hunger and drinking contaminated water in drought-stricken Papua New Guinea, but the looming El Niño crisis could leave more than four million people across the Pacific without enough food or clean water.

The El Niño weather pattern – when waters in the eastern tropical Pacific ocean become warmer, driving extreme weather conditions – may be as severe as in 1997-98, when an estimated 23,000 people died, forecasters believe.

In Papua New Guinea’s Chimbu province in the highlands region, a prolonged drought has been exacerbated by sudden and severe frosts which have killed off almost all crops. The provincial disaster centre has confirmed 24 people have died from starvation and drinking contaminated water.

Provincial disaster co-ordinator Michael Ire Appa told RadioNZ he feared the death toll could even be higher.

“The drought has been here for almost three months now and in areas that were affected by the drought there’s a serious food shortage, including water, and some of the districts have not reported, so there may be more [deaths] than that,” he said. ...

Oxfam Australia’s climate change policy advisor Dr Simon Bradshaw said many parts of PNG would run out of food in two or three months, but in some areas there was as little as a month’s food left, and few ways to get more in.

Alaska Governor's Puzzling Math: To Cope with Climate, We Must Drill More Oil

Displaying a rather circular logic that defies common scientific understanding, Alaskan Gov. Bill Walker has said that the state must expand fossil fuel drilling in order to pay for the damage caused by climate change.

Walker, an independent, told BBC News that Alaska is facing "a significant fiscal challenge," due to falling oil prices and Shell's decision to pull out of drilling in the Chukchi Sea. Meanwhile, he noted, "We have villages that are washing away because of changes in the climate."

To pay for adaptation and mitigation efforts, Walker said he wants to "urgently" drill in the protected lands of the Arctic National Wilderness Refuge (ANWR): "This isn't something we can put off for 10-20 years... We have to begin this process now—it's an absolute urgency for Alaska."

These remarks echo ones he made in late September, after Shell announced it was scrapping its Arctic drilling plans.

Climate Treaty Forecast: Cloudy With a Chance of Disaster

If the climate pledges countries have submitted are any indication of whether the world can save itself with a global climate treaty, the planet doesn’t stand a chance.

More than 140 countries have submitted plans to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change on how they will reduce carbon dioxide emissions to fight climate change. These countries account for about 90 percent of global emissions. They form the basis for final treaty negotiations that will take place in Paris in December.

Climate scientists agree that in order to prevent the worst consequences, global warming must be held to within 2 degrees Celsius. The pledges submitted so far will reduce emissions by about 60 gigatons compared to business as usual, but will limit temperature rise to only 3.5 degrees Celsius, according to Climate Interactive, the nonprofit tracking the progress of the global climate change movement.

Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.

Respectability politics won't save the lives of black Americans

Stephen Harper is the last remnant of George W Bush in North America

US Caught Faking It in Syria

The West Rightly Condemns Isis Vandalism of Ancient Sites – But Not When the Saudis Do It

Chris Hedges: ‘A Pipeline Straight to Jail’

Cops Called on Reporter Who Asked About Climate at Oil & Gas Convention

A Little Night Music

Little Son Joe w/Memphis Minnie - A.B.C. blues

Little Son Joe - Black Rat Swing

Little Son Joe - Ethel Bea

Little Son Joe - A Little Too Late

Memphis Minnie + Little Son Joe - When You Love Me

Memphis Minnie + Little Son Joe - Pig Meat On The Line

Memphis Minnie + Little Son Joe - Please Set A Date

Memphis Minnie + Little Son Joe - Me and My Chauffeur Blues

Memphis Minnie - Kissing In The Dark

Memphis Minnie - In My Girlish Days

Memphis Minnie - Looking The World Over

Memphis Minnie - True Love

Memphis Minnie - Nothing In Ramblin'

Memphis Minnie - Fish Man Blues

James Cotton - Diggin' My Potatoes (written by Little Son Joe)

Doctor Clayton - On The Killin' Floor (written by Little Son Joe)

Jimi Hendrix - Killing Floor (written by Little Son Joe)