Good morning 99percenters!
Morning news dump and music by Merle Travis.

With War Now Displacing 60 Million, Time for World to 'Reaffirm Its Humanity'
In rare joint call, head of both UN and International Red Cross say human conflict is reaching unprecedented proportions

Citing nearly unprecedent levels of conflict and instability across the world, the heads of both the United Nations and the International Red Cross on Saturday issued a rare joint call warning that nations and global leaders must dramatically step up efforts to scale back wars and miltary actions that are causing massive human suffering while ripping apart families, communities, entire nations, and regions.

"Rarely before have we witnessed so many people on the move, so much instability, so much suffering," said Peter Maurer, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). "In armed conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, South Sudan, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere, combatants are defying humanity’s most fundamental norms. Every day, we hear of civilians being killed and wounded in violation of the basic rules of international humanitarian law, and with total impunity. Instability is spreading. Suffering is growing. No country can remain untouched."

Citing figures that are the highest they've been since the Second World War, the two agencies said that sixty million people around the world have now been displaced from their homes because of conflict and violence. What's more, they say, today's conflicts have become more protracted, meaning that many displaced people face years away from their homes, communities and livelihoods.

'No Survivors' After Russian Airliner with 224 Aboard Goes Down Over Egypt
Authorities are not yet publicly speculating on what may have caused the disaster

A Russian passenger airliner with 224 hundred on board has crashed in Egypt on Saturday with early reports indicating no survivors.

Adel Mahgoub, chairman of the state company that runs Egypt's civilian airports, has said that all 217 passengers and the seven crew members were all Russian citizens. Later reports indicate that nationals from Ukraine and Belarus may also have been on board.

Though an armed militant group in the Sinai has reportedly claimed responsibility for downing the airliner, there has been no confirmation the crash resulted from an onboard explosion or by a surface-to-air missile. Both the Russian and Egyptian governments were quick to dismiss those claims.

Ban Ki-Moon Condemns the American Stand on Syria, Endorses Putin’s

In an interview with Spanish newspapers that was published October 31st, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon condemned U.S. President Barack Obama’s demand that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad be removed from office, and Moon said: “The future of Assad must be determined by the Syrian people.”

Here is the entire quotation: “The future of President Assad must be decided by the Syrian people. Now, I do not want to interfere in the process of Vienna, but I think it is totally unfair and unreasonable that the fate of a person [diplomatese here for: U.S. President Barack Obama’s demand that Assad be removed from the Presidency of Syria] to paralyze all this political negotiation. This is not acceptable. It’s not fair. The Syrian government insists that Assad should be part of the transition. Many Western countries oppose the Syrian government’s position. Meanwhile, we lost years. 250,000 people have been killed. There are 13 million refugees or internally displaced. Over 50% of hospitals, schools and infrastructure has been destroyed in Syria. You must not lose more time. This crisis goes beyond Syria, beyond the region. It affects Europe. It is a global crisis.”

The U.N. Secretary General is here implicitly blaming all of this — lots of blood and misery — on U.S. President Obama, and on the “many Western countries” who ally with him and have joined with him in demanding regime-change in Syria.

Untangling America from the American Empire

The Status Quo would have us believe that America and its Empire are one entity. This is handy for those with Imperial designs but it is false: America could be untangled from its Empire, and many of us believe it is essential that America untangles itself from its Imperial structures and ideologies.

What I call The Imperial Project was cobbled together in the aftermath of World War II, when the Soviet Union and America posed an existential threat to each other’s ideologies and systems. It may be hard to believe, but the U.S. did not have a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or other espionage/intelligence gathering agency prior to World War II.

America had no spy agency and no Black Operations/Special Forces capabilities. The National Security State as we know it today did not exist.

Though the Deep State has long been an essential feature of the American power structure, the post-war Deep State extended its reach globally in ways that the pre-war Deep State could not.

Obama Keeps Pentagon Spigot Open

The Pentagon just won another small skirmish in its long war with Social Security and Medicare. That is the unstated message of the budget deal just announced gleefully by congressional leaders and President Barack Obama. To understand why, let’s take a quick trip down memory lane.

Last January, President Obama submitted Fiscal Year (FY) 2016 budget to Congress, and he proposed to break the spending limits on both defense and domestic programs.  These limits are set by the long-term sequester provisions of the Budget Control Act of 2011  (BCA), which, for better or worse, is the law of the land, and Obama was asking Congress to change the law.

Mr. Obama wanted to finance his ramped up spending proposals by increasing taxes. Of course, he knew that the Republican-controlled Congress lusted for defense increases but hated domestic spending, particularly entitlements, such as Social Security and Medicare.

More US Boots Coming to Europe?
The US Army (separately from NATO) is reviewing its own readiness to counter phantom 'Russian aggression' in Europe - especially in the Baltics

The U.S. Army is reviewing its force structure in Europe, measuring everything from crisis-response capabilities to its mix of armor and infantrymen, as the service adapts to counter a revanchist Russia, the Army chief of staff said.

Gen. Mark Milley, who was at U.S. Army Europe headquarters in Wiesbaden this week to confer with more than 30 European army generals, signaled that an era of steadily drawing down in Europe should be halted.

“We don’t need Cold War-levels of forward-deployed forces or anything like that,” Milley said in an interview on Tuesday. “But at the same time, you want to make sure you have sufficient capabilities to deter further aggression by Russia.”

'Unlawful and Fatally Flawed': U.S. Navy to Conduct Dangerous War Games Over National Forest
"The Navy has an astonishing sense of entitlement to public lands and waters," said retired U.S. Fish & Wildlife biologist Karen Sullivan.

The U.S. Navy aims to begin conducting electromagnetic warfare training across much of Washington State's Olympic Peninsula soon.

Meanwhile, it is being accused of breaking federal laws in order to secure the permits necessary to move forward with its training operations.

Karen Sullivan worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for 15 and a half years, and is an expert in the bureaucratic procedures the Navy is supposed to be following.

She is now part of the West Coast Action Alliance, one of two large multistate and international citizen groups who have tasked themselves with watchdogging the Navy, due to what they believe are ongoing violations of the law, blatant acts of disrespect toward human and environmental health, and ongoing bellicose behavior by the military branch in their areas.

How Will We Reach an Ecological Civilization and Who Will Build It?

We are now officially living amid the sixth great extinction, according to scientists, but the global economy has still not shifted to prevent climate change's existential threat to human civilization and much of the biosphere.

Will transnational corporations and the political leaders that cater to them realize that it is in their own interest of self-preservation to address the problem of global climate change by halting the unrelenting use of fossil fuels? What would it take for the capitalist economy to prioritize ecological concerns? Perhaps, when 10 of the largest oil and gas companies sign a letter calling on world leaders to sign an effective deal at the international climate negotiations in Paris in December, progress is being made. In a statement that will likely surprise many, the CEOs of these 10 giant fossil fuel corporations state that, "we will continue in our efforts to help lower the current global emissions trajectory," as they apparently commit themselves to ensuring a "20C future."

Yet Exxon, the biggest oil company, has been busily undermining its own climate research for the last two decades, and sowing doubt in the reality of climate change at every opportunity. Similarly, fossil fuel corporations consistently underplay the growth of renewables and talk up demand. One of the signers of the statement, Shell, predicted in their most recent annual report to shareholders that by 2040 demand for oil and gas would be greater than today by 14 to 55 percent, thus justifying expansion of drilling in the Arctic. Can the very corporations that are rushing to every corner of the world to find and extract more fossil fuels be the answer to reducing fossil fuel production? In the words of Josu Jon Imaz, CEO of Repsol, "We could be part of the problem, but we are convinced we are part of the solution."

Climate Denialism: A Brief History

In the late 1970s, scientists first came to a consensus that global warming was likely to result from increasing greenhouse gases released by the burning of fossil fuels. This idea had been around since the turn of the century, but the development of computer models made it possible to make quantitative predictions. Almost immediately, a small group of politically connected and conservative scientists began to question this consensus. As empirical scientific data mounted up, their attacks became more unprincipled. These conservative scientists used data selectively and often misrepresented the conclusions of many studies undertaken by the scientific community.

In 1992, world leaders gathered in Rio de Janeiro to sign the United Nations Framework on Climate Change. President George W Bush promised to translate the written document into "concrete action". Three years later, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) declared that the human impact on the earth's climate was no longer a prediction but an observable fact.

In the early 1990s, a group of skeptics claimed that Roger Revelle, one of the first climate scientists, had changed his mind about global warming and no longer believed it was a serious problem. The claim was repeated through several news outlets, including the Washington Post. When a graduate student named Justin Lancaster - who had worked closely with Revelle before his death in 1991 - tried to insist that Revelle had not changed his view, he was sued for libel. Lancaster was obliged to settle out of court. The claim was repeated again and again, and even today, exists on the Internet.

Exposing the climate denial lies: Bill McKibben, the truth and the fight against the fossil-fuel industry
The fossil-fuel lobby would cook us all off the earth if given the chance. One man has stood up to it for decades

In October, a month before a show at the Orpheum, I drove up to Burlington, Vermont, on Bill McKibben’s and 350’s home turf, to attend the “dress rehearsal” for the national “Do the Math” tour, set to launch in Seattle the day after the election. On assignment for Grist magazine, I’d been invited to spend some time “backstage” with the 350.org team, watch their run-throughs for the evening’s production, and chat with McKibben and the others. And though I was on assignment, everyone knew (including of course my editor at Grist, Scott Rosenberg) that I was hardly there to cover it as a conventional reporter. Earlier that year I’d helped launch 350 Massachusetts, the independent grassroots network started by 350.org’s allies at Better Future Project, a young nonprofit in Cambridge (on whose board I served until late 2014). And I was getting involved with other alumni in the nascent, student-led Divest Harvard campaign. You could say my assignment in Burlington was an inside job.

Perhaps this is where I should pause and explain that Bill McKibben and I have been acquainted for many years, having worked together occasionally when I was an editor at the Atlantic and the Boston Globe. As I dove deeper into the climate movement, we developed a kind of collaboration as fellow writers and activists. Not that Bill and I have ever really become close friends—we don’t hang out with each other, we’ve never shared much about our personal lives—but we have a warm, collegial relationship.

I say all of this not only for the sake of transparency, but because Bill McKibben has had a significant impact on my own thinking about climate. That doesn’t mean I’m incapable of stepping back and giving my honest view of his work. Much of what I write here he’ll probably appreciate; some of it he may feel compelled to argue with. I don’t know. But I’m sure I’ll find out.