Good morning 99percenters!
Morning news dump and music by Ronnie Hawkins.

Hundreds of Thousands March in Berlin Against TTIP Trade Deal
TTIP, activists fear, would erode labor and environmental standards.

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.

Many trains and more than 600 buses had been chartered to bring protesters to Berlin, who marched carrying signs that read "Stop TTIP" and "TTIP signals climactic shipwreck".

Henry Kissinger, dangerous fraud: Why he’s as responsible for Iraq and the Middle East as Vietnam
He was a mad man, not a realist. He paved the way for disaster after disaster. We still think about him all wrong

Two weeks ago, a mini-scandal rocked the New York literary world. Gawker revealed that Andrew Roberts, the New York Times Book Review’s choice to review the authorized biography of Henry Kissinger, had in fact been Kissinger’s original choice to write the authorized biography.

Roberts also was a long-time friend of Niall Ferguson, the man who Kissinger wound up choosing to write his authorized biography. Roberts and Ferguson had even written a lengthy chapter together in a volume of essays edited by Ferguson. Worse yet: Roberts had revealed almost none of these involvements — with Ferguson, with Kissinger — to the New York Times when it asked him to write the review.

So unseemly were these entanglements, and the lack of transparency about them, that Margaret Sullivan, the New York Times public editor, felt called upon to rap the paper’s knuckles. Which prompted a further back and forth between Sullivan and Pamela Paul, the editor of the Times Book Review. While the back-scratching world of book reviews in the New York Times is an old topic — unlike other publications, the Times purports to be objective and untainted by personal connections, and its reviews help promote or kill books — this scandal brought it into especially sharp relief.

Video and Audio of Pilots Who Bombed Hospital

There is video and audio. It exists. The Pentagon says it’s critically important. Congress has asked for it and been refused. WikiLeaks is offering $50,000 to the next brave soul willing to be punished for a good deed in the manner of Chelsea Manning, Thomas Drake, Edward Snowden, and so many others. You can petition the White House to hand it over here.

The entire world thinks the U.S. military intentionally attacked a hospital because it considered some of the patients enemies, didn’t give a damn about the others, and has zero respect for the rule of law in the course of waging an illegal war. Even Congress members think this. All the Pentagon would have to do to exonerate itself would be to hand over the audio and video of the pilots talking with each other and with their co-conspirators on the ground during the commission of the crime — that is, if there is something exculpatory on the tapes, such as, “Hey, John, you’re sure they evacuated all the patients last week, right?”

All Congress would have to do to settle the matter would be to take the following steps one-at-a-time until one of them succeeds: publicly demand the recordings; send a subpoena for the recordings and the appearance of the Secretary of “Defense” from any committee or subcommittee in either house; exercise the long dormant power of inherent contempt by locking up said Secretary until he complies; open impeachment hearings against both the same Secretary and his Commander in Chief; impeach them; try them; convict them. A serious threat of this series of steps would make most or all of the steps unnecessary.

Obama’s Two-Faced Foreign Policy

By Robert Parry

The mystery of the Obama administration’s foreign policy has always been whether President Barack Obama has two separate strategies: one “above the table” waving his arms and talking tough like Official Washington’s arm-chair warriors do – and another “below the table” where he behaves as a pragmatic realist, playing footsy with foreign adversaries.

From the start, Obama surrounded himself with many hawkish advisers – such as Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Gen. David Petraeus, National Security Council aide Samantha Power, etc. – and mostly read the scripts that they wrote for him. But then he tended to drag his feet or fold his arms when it came to acting on their warmongering ideas.

Friday’s decision to tank the hapless $500 million training program for “moderate” Syrian rebels is a case in point. Obama joined in the hyperbolic rhetoric against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, lining up with the neocons and liberal interventionists demanding “Assad must go,” but Obama has remained unenthusiastic about their various wacky schemes for overthrowing Assad.

The FBI Wants YOUR Face and Fingerprints
Should This Make Us Nervous?

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is envisioning a future in which its agents would be able to use small handheld devices to collect fingerprints and photographs in the field and add them to a massive biometrics database.

If the Bureau gets its way, that future is not too far off — it has already taken major steps this year to make it a reality.

Most recently, the FBI is soliciting bids for the development of software that would enable agents to collect fingerprints and pictures of people they encounter. The prints and images could then be compared to the Bureau’s massive biometrics database.

As the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) points out, the plans seem to expand the FBI’s “RISC” program. RISC stands for Repository for Individuals of Special Concern. It allows field agents to compare the biometric information of suspects with the information on their database.

The Backstory on Bernie Sanders and Israel-Palestine - Why Is He So Quiet About the Mideast Tragedy?
Tensions between progressives and Sanders on the issue of Palestine aren't going away any time soon.

One of the most appealing qualities about Bernie Sanders' campaign for the presidency is how consistent he is. While Hillary Clinton continually faces questions about her changing positions, Sanders is seen as the good kind of broken record – someone who says what progressives want to hear over and over again, for decades.

But there is one area where Sanders used to be much more outspoken, and has in recent years been very quiet about: Palestine. Considering the elevated role of the Israel-Palestine issue in progressive circles, and Sanders' continued success leading up to the primaries, it's worth revisiting Sanders' history on the topic and his early approach to foreign policy.

Dumb Bernie Sanders delusions: Progressives who champion Sanders need to consider this — and no, it’s not the Supreme Court
The one issue that no one -- including Democrats -- wants to discuss is precisely the topic America must confront

Images of dead children awash on the shore haunt social media feeds and appear throughout mainstream media coverage of the global refugee crisis. The corpses of children are the gruesome results of a confluence of factors, but we must acknowledge and examine our own influence and impact – incalculable and destructive – on the creation of catastrophe.

The war in Iraq, the invasion of Libya and a continued commitment to bomb, maim, disrupt and demolish Middle Eastern nations and peoples – all but killing any hope for stability in the region – produces horrific tragedy and atrocity. As the body count rises, the barely audible American discourse on the consequences of its foreign adventurism and militarism does little to recognize its tendency to poison what it claims to protect, and pollute the economic, moral and political environment at home.

The United States of America has a president who reportedly bragged to aides — drolly sarcastic or not — that he is “really good at killing people,” and demonstrates his skill with weekly drone strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. According to a rapporteur for the United Nations, and a joint study from New York University and Stanford, most of the victims of drone strikes are innocent civilians. Reprieve, a human rights organization, studied the available data on drone strikes, and reported that the Obama administration has targeted 41 men for extrajudicial assassination, but its missiles have killed 1,147 people. Without presentation of evidence, even when the targets are American citizens, the United States government now claims the right to kill people, while casually dismissing the women, children and innocent men with the poor luck to stand near a “suspected terrorist” as “collateral damage.”

Do the Democrats Offer a Progressive Choice for President?

Although the 2016 presidential election is a year away, the media is abuzz with the candidates - the Republican and Democratic candidates, that is. When CBS's Stephen Colbert posed comedically with a collage of the 18 or so declared hopefuls, the Green Party's candidate, Dr. Jill Stein, was noticeably absent from his photo. Only outlets like Democracy Now!, PBS and RT News feature the good doctor.

What choices do progressives have?

Hillary Clinton leaves a lot to be desired. She does favor a woman's right to choose and has recently come out in support of marriage equality. Clinton supports comprehensive immigration reform but also backs stepped-up border enforcement. A former member of the board of Walmart, she is cozy with Wall Street and voted for the Patriot Act. Clinton has been called a "focus group Democrat," often accused of believing what polls and focus groups tell her she should believe.

On foreign policy issues, Clinton is a first-class hawk. As Robert Scheer wrote on Truthdig: "Clinton, in rhetoric and action, will never allow a Republican opponent to appear more hawkish than herself. In the general election, she will burnish her record of support for every bit of military folly from George W. [Bush]'s invasion of Iraq to her own engineering of the campaign to overthrow all secular dictators in the Middle East who have proved to be an inconvenience to the Saudi theocracy."

Go Ahead, Back Hillary Clinton and Forget All About Her Record

Go ahead and support Hillary Clinton, those of you for whom having the first female president is the top priority. She is by far preferable to Carly Fiorina, though of course no match for likely Green Party candidate Jill Stein (I know: You want to win). Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a principled and electable person, is not available, and political integrity be damned.

Just admit that you will be voting for someone to be president of the world’s most powerful nation who has not only been profoundly wrong on the two most pressing issues of our time—economic injustice and the ravages of unbridled militarism—but, what is more significant, seems hopelessly incapable of learning from her dangerous errors in judgment.

Like her husband, she is certainly smart enough to avoid advocating what President Obama has aptly termed “stupid stuff.” However, the good intentions of the Clintons are trumped by opportunism every time.

Coral Reefs Die as El Niño Heats Up

LONDON—Record sea temperatures combined with a strong El Niño are causing widespread coral bleaching, which is threatening to kill over 12,000 square kilometres of reefs.

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has declared a global bleaching event, making this only the third such crisis in recorded history.

NOAA’s declaration has implications for the livelihoods of 500 million people worldwide and income worth $30 billion, because reefs support 25% of all marine species and are a nursery ground for many species of fish.

After the Frack: Hydraulic Fracturing's Intense Thirst

Ever since Josh Fox's documentary film Gasland startled viewers with its scenes of flammable tap water, concerns about groundwater contamination have fueled the community-level opposition to hydraulic fracturing. While water contamination continues to be a serious concern when it comes to fracking, a slew of scientific and government reports published in recent years points to perhaps a more immediate environmental threat: unsustainable groundwater and surface water withdrawals.

Scientists have long understood that fracking comes with a range of environmental risks. A 2014 study appearing in Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry concluded that the closer an ecosystem is to a fracking site, "the higher the risk of that ecosystem being impacted by the operation." The scientists further confirmed that oil and gas field infrastructure also uses significant amounts of water. "These operations may result in increased erosion and sedimentation," the study stated, as well as "increased risk to aquatic ecosystems from chemical spills or runoff, habitat fragmentation, loss of stream riparian zones, altered biogeochemical cycling, and reduction of available surface and hyporheic water volumes because of withdrawal-induced lowering of local groundwater levels."

In addition to habitat fragmentation and the risk of pollution, diminished flows in rivers and streams are one of the concerns that researchers outline in a study published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. One of the study's authors, Kimberly Terrell told Earth Island Journal that freshwater withdrawal and stream siltation from fracking activities has lasting effects on aquatic ecosystems. "In the shale areas in the eastern US there is tremendous aquatic diversity," Terrell says. "However, only 21 percent of streams are healthy. The vast majority are not in good biological condition. On top of that, we have drained over 50 percent of our wetlands in the US."