US wants to stop a coalition between Germany and Russia because the combination of German capital and technology with Russian natural resources and manpower can counter American dominance. Its move to destabilize and throw countries “off balance” in Eurasia threatens China’s “One Belt, One Road” project that would help Eurasian economic integration and reduce ungoverned space for terrorist organizations to thrive. The world now waits to see if the US November election can usher in a new era of a multi-partner world to confront global challenges

It seems the American people and US allies from Europe to Asia are increasingly disenchanted with Washington war hawks’ policies that are threatening global stability.

At the Democratic National Convention, angry delegates shouted “no more war” when former CIA director and defense secretary Leon Panetta began to criticize Trump.

Although Panetta appeared to be surprised and taken aback, the delegates’ frustrations should be understandable. After the Beltway war hawks wasted trillions of taxpayer dollars in endless counter-productive wars in Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq and Syria that have destroyed their countries and empowered Islamic State (IS) and al-Qaeda, and mortgaging the prosperity of America’s future generations with a $21 trillion debt burden, Americans have had it.

And so have US allies from Europe to Asia.

In Asia, the Philippine president accused US of importing terrorism into the Middle East with its regime change policies, the Japanese are protesting to kick out US troops on Okinawa, and the Singapore prime minister chastised Uncle Sam for excluding its largest trading partner China in the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). [2]

In a Wall Street Journal interview, Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Long questioned US intentions for its “Asia Pivot” and stated Asian countries “do not want to have opponents or hostilities when it is not necessary” and asked, “To develop a trans-Pacific relationship, you have to deepen the trans-Pacific trade and investment ties, which have done so much to benefit the people of both sides…If in fact, you are re-balancing towards Asia with aircraft carriers and airplanes, what is it in aid of?”

Peter Lee of Asia Times observed Singapore and other Asian partners are worried about US actions that may increase tensions and destabilize the region, and want more than “US military leadership of the anti-China side of a polarized East Asian security regime.”

Likewise in Europe, the Brits told US to mind its own business regarding their sovereign decision for Brexit,[3] the German foreign minister accused US-led NATO of warmongering,[4] the Bulgarian prime minister rejected joining a NATO fleet against Russia in the Black Sea,[5] and a German MP blasted the US as the biggest threat to European peace and stability.[6]

Addressing the German parliament in July, deputy chair of Die Linke party Sahra Wagenkhneht protested, “The Americans are placing nukes in Germany, supposedly to counter Putin’s aggression in the Baltics.  Do the Americans seriously expect us to believe in such stupidity?”

Read more: http://atimes.com/2016/07/us-war-hawks-eurasia-goal-prevent-russo-german-coalition-chinas-obor-project/

Christina Lin is a former visiting fellow at The Washington Institute, where she focused on China's increasing footprint in the Middle East and on ways that China, the United States, and U.S. allies can cooperate to resolve regional security issues.

Dr. Lin has extensive U.S. government experience, having served at the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Council, the Department of State, the Export-Import Bank of the United States, and the federally funded Institute for Defense Analyses. Her foreign policy portfolio included defense planning; Chinese military strategy and the militarization of its energy security policy; regional security architecture such as the NATO Global Partnership and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization; and dual-use strategic industries related to the EU arms embargo on China. Prior to entering government service, she worked in the private sector at Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs in London.

Dr. Lin has published papers in Israel, Germany, and the United States on the militarization of Chinese energy security policy, Eurasian regional security architecture, and nuclear proliferation. She has been a key author of the annual China file for Jane's Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Intelligence Centre at IHS Jane's. Her papers on the nexus between East Asian and Middle Eastern WMD proliferation have been cited widely, including reports in the Korea Herald, Wall Street Journal, World Tribune, and Jerusalem Post.

Education: Ph.D., M.Sc., London School of Economics; M.A., Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies; B.A., University of California, Irvine

Languages: Taiwanese, Mandarin Chinese, French (basic)

Expertise: Energy security, China-Greater Middle East relations, Shanghai Cooperation Organization, East Asia-Middle East WMD proliferation, Chinese military doctrine

http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/experts/view/lin-christina

FRACTURED LANDS: HOW THE ARAB WORLD CAME APART

This is a story unlike any we have previously published. It is much longer than the typical New York Times Magazine feature story; in print, it occupies an entire issue. The product of some 18 months of reporting, it tells the story of the catastrophe that has fractured the Arab world since the invasion of Iraq 13 years ago, leading to the rise of ISIS and the global refugee crisis. The geography of this catastrophe is broad and its causes are many, but its consequences — war and uncertainty throughout the world — are familiar to us all. Scott Anderson’s story gives the reader a visceral sense of how it all unfolded, through the eyes of six characters in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan. Accompanying Anderson’s text are 10 portfolios by the photographer Paolo Pellegrin, drawn from his extensive travels across the region over the last 14 years, as well as a landmark virtual-reality experience that embeds the viewer with the Iraqi fighting forces during the battle to retake Falluja.

It is unprecedented for us to focus so much energy and attention on a single story, and to ask our readers to do the same. We would not do so were we not convinced that what follows is one of the most clear-eyed, powerful and human explanations of what has gone wrong in this region that you will ever read.

– JAKE SILVERSTEIN, EDITOR IN CHIEF

The New York Times (link not available from this computer find it yourself)

----------------------

We know that the war on Iraq was waged under false pretences. The "intel" had been fabricated to suit the war. Knowing that the USA can create false flag events on such a scale, we know that there is an intent beyond just mere fucups.

So what is going on?... The destruction of the "Arab" world has been designed to eliminate the Shia component with an appearance of promoting the Sunnis. ALL the wars being waged presently in Yemen, Syria and Libya are designed to this end. But there also deceptions in the process in order to make it less obvious to the naked eye. We are taken on field trips of porkies and distractions while the main game is fought below the plimsol line. The greater intent here is to manipulate the price of oil while weakening the Muslim/Arab civilisation by HELPING THEM FIGHT EACH OTHER. This was the intent of the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980s that lasted 8 bloody years. And the West made a killing out of that, by selling weapons and giving intel on both sides.

Far fetched. I give you this one. No. This is the reality. The dynamics are still the same... On this level, Donald is giving the game away: OBAMA AND HILLARY CLINTON helped Al Qaeda by supporting "moderates" to oust Assad. Assad runs a secular government. The Sunnis ("moderates", AlNusra, Al Qaeda, ISIS) want to turn Syria into a caliphate. And the US is helping under false pretences of humanitarian cover.

The Russians know this and will do anything to let the rest of the world know. But we (our rotten biased media)  only want to see the Russians interests in this WHICH THE RUSSIANS DO NOT DENY.

A 2012 defense intelligence report, originally stamped SECRET exposes that the US-backed anti-Assad coalition at the time was spearheaded by al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) that soon after cobbled together to form the Daesh terror network..

read more: http://sputniknews.com/middleeast/20160813/1044242978/trump-obama-hillary-isis-syria.html

The destruction of Libya was done under false "good" intentions. Hell is paved with good intentions. There was no good intentions of the part of the US. Libya was prosperous, independent and about to create African independence from the US mighty dollar by creating a Pan-African bank. You work out the rest. Boom. 

Now if you read about the personnel and about the purpose of many Western think-tanks (I will link them at one stage — their structure is quite leading) which basically lead to this caper of the destruction of the Arab world, you soon follow the trail to Israel. But even there, there are two leading opposing factions in that camp, though the one that support the weakening of the Arabic world is winning...

Hence the wars we see at present. The next ones are on the drawing board and well advanced. Making Russia and China heel at the foot of the mighty dollar. This war is waged economically, humiliation through the Olympic bans (especially that of the disabled athlete — a scandal) and other mediatic and military events, such as the recent NATO exercises... The corruption of the Ukrainian government is part of this slow attack on Russia. 

The US empire does not like competition. 

Bin Laden was not killed because he had done 9/11, nor because he was going to launch another attack on the US. He was killed because he knew too much about the US intent towards the "Arab world". Now his sons and family members might carry on the spill... Below our "friend" the Saudis are carrying on the stint under the umbrella of the US:

A spokesperson for the aid group Medicines Sans Frontiers (MSF) says their staff in northern Yemen received the bodies of at least 10 dead children after Saudi-led coalition warplanes bombed a school.

MSF said 21 children, all under 15 years of age, were admitted with injuries in the town of Haydan, near Saada.

"A bit before 10:00am we received the first 15 children," Hassan Boucenine, the MSF head of mission in Yemen, told the ABC.

"Relatives, neighbours brought them to the hospital."

Mr Boucenine said the children who were killed died of multiple trauma and head injuries. He called on all parties to respect civilians.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-14/yemen-air-strike-ten-children-reported-dead-parliament-convenes/7732242

And for those who love princes and princesses:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farah_Pahlavi

I still remember the wedding...

In an interview on Fox, Democrat McCaskill claimed that Putin and Trump were responsible for ISIS... I hope that the media can see through the thick lie in this flippant remark... McCaskill is a rich democrat who should know better. A) trump was not in politics long enough to create ISIS and B) Putin could not have done such feat — even by supporting Assad... Even McCaskill admitted that ISIS was a derivative from the war on Iraq, after the new government of Iraq refused to prevent the prosecution of the US invading forces under a SOFA agreement, thus US troops could not stay in Iraq. Of course Claire McCaskill is a rabid Aristocratic corporate Democrat who urged Sanders, the man of the people, to submit to the Moneycracy in the Democratic party... If this is the calibre of people in Clinton's pants, then may Clinton rot in hell. McCaskill is one of these women who fought adversity by marrying a rich bloke after having divorced her first pot-smoking husband who got killed under suspicious circumstances 10 years later.

And by the way, Claire "forgot" to pay taxes on her $2.5 million luxury plane until it was pointed out by some really bad people. She then paid the back taxes in cash...

Every struggling democrat I know fly their own Pilatus which even secondhand can cost up to $4.5 million.

Wallace pivoted to the foreign policy debacles that Herr Drumpf attributes to President Obama and Secretary Clinton. When Wallace tried to pin a record of neglect in fighting ISIS, Senator McCaskill gave some impressive statistics in the recent battle against the Islamic State. Wallace then asked about Hillary Clinton's 'role' in creating ISIS.

WALLACE: Doesn't she bear some responsibility if not the founder, some responsibility for the rise of ISIS?

MCCASKILL: There's a lot of reasons that ISIS rose up. One of them was the status of forces agreement known as SOFA that Bush negotiated. We couldn't leave our troops in Iraq even if the president wanted to because the parliament in Iraq was refusing to give them immunity.

Now, Trump probably thinks the SOFA, the status of forces agreement, is a gilded couch at Mar-A-Lago. He probably doesn't know what SOFA is. But that was a very relevant part of this.

It was also important to realize that Assad, by what he did in his country, allowed ISIS to move into what was then Iraq -- al Qaeda in Iraq into Syria and get strongholds and recruit. That was the work and support of Putin who is Trump's best buddy. So, you can say Trump and his friend Putin are the founder of ISIS, which probably would be more accurate than calling out the commander-in-chief in that way.

Wallace replied,

Well, I’m glad for that last comment. That will certainly get Donald Trump's attention.

Sadly, that will get his attention and McCaskill will be the subject of his next misogynist attacks, or perhaps he'll blame the entire Ferguson P.D. debacle on her. Who knows? One thing's for certain, his response will not be the careful, measured words of an actual candidate for POTUS.

http://crooksandliars.com/2016/08/claire-mccaskill-trump-and-his-friend

Crooksandliars tends to tell that Trump is a big liar but on this one Claire McCaskill is the Queen of Pinocchio porkies. Trump is correct: The policies of Obama and Clinton, especially in regard to Syria and Libya helped foster the rise of ISIS. 

A former top intelligence adviser to President Barack Obama predicts Australia could play a "very consequential" role if a war breaks out between the United States and China.

David C Gompert was principal deputy director of National Intelligence from 2009 to 2010 and has just led a US Army-commissioned report examining the prospect of the two military powers going to war.

The report War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable says war between the US and China would be long, destructive and could erupt if regional disputes already underway overheat.

The 115-page document by the Washington-based RAND Corporation also suggests Australia, as a close American ally, could play a pivotal role if tensions with Beijing escalate.

"Depending on the cause and focus of the conflict, other East Asian states would mostly side with the United States in varying degrees: from support ranging from permission to use bases to the possible commitment of forces (eg Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines)," it says.

"The participation of Australian forces, because of their quality, could have military significance despite their small size.

"Apart from military contributions, the longer and more severe the conflict, the more and perhaps more permanently China could become isolated from the very region it aspires to lead."

Mr Gompert said as a long-standing American ally, Australia could play a pivotal role in any eventual war with China.

"Australians would know better than I what Australia might do, but I would say that [what] Australia would do could be very consequential," he told ABC Radio's The World Today.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-15/australia-would-be-vital-in-a-us-china-war,-army-report-says/7735836

The Australian government should tell the Yanks to sodoff... Only more tears and glorious useless sacrifice to come for this idiotic caper... Go away...

US elections: This is not a time for jokes
If you believe in America, if you love this country, then the founding ideals are what you should be fighting for.

byJohn Metta

John Metta is a writer on racial issues in the US.

White supremacy in the United States is dying. Many, including me, have said this before.

White supremacy - the implicit acceptance of the superiority of white people and culture - is slowly being pushed aside as people (themselves slowly) accept the reality that "white culture" is nothing more than one stop on the global tour of humanity.

The fact that, in the US, white is the default definition of "normal" is a historical accident, and that pillar of history is falling. That makes this a very dangerous time.

The death of white supremacy is dangerous because of the depths of fear into which some white people have fallen.

This is unfortunate because white supremacy's demise in no way implies a dying white race. It does not even imply the actual death of white supremacy itself.

That venomous serpent, as we've seen in the 1800s and the 1960s, suffers only a metaphorical death, shedding its skin and returning in a different guise.

-------------------

This diatribe by John Metta on Al Jazeera is designed to support Ms Clinton against the white supremacist Donald Trump. What Metta may realise but does not want to mention is that Ms Clinton is a white supremacist as well, with some pastel tones. Of course the element of "feminism" in her candidature is strongly tooted, by the Democrats. 

This is why the Corporate aristocrat democrats shafted Bernie Sanders. Not only is LaFemale a "whitish supremacist", she is also a dedicated warrior. Trump may be a girating idiot but he is not a supremacist of any kind, except himself. He will say stupid things to collect the gun-totters, but will contradict himself while talking to the evangelical supremacists. The other Republican candidates who bit the dust were mostly white supremacists, all warriors, a sacking business woman and a black creationist. 

The only one with a chance might have been Romney who burnt his bridges at the 2012 elections. 

All of them, from Cruz (Republican Right) to Clinton ("Democratic" Right) are influenced by "dark money". Trump is not. He has made his cash by twisting the bankruptcy legal system. All are crooks.

By Chris Floyd...

The title of one of Christopher Logue’s multi-volume reworkings of Homer’s Iliad stands as the perfect encapsulation of our age: All-Day Permanent Red. We live in a time when the collective amygdala has been stoked into overdrive, sending messages of blank, blind fear that overwhelm the centers of reason, empathy and openness in our brains, propelling us into a state of inchoate anxiety that seeks release in tropes of extremist certainty and spasms of violence – active, verbal or vicarious.

This natural human propensity – which has waxed and waned in various forms over the centuries – has been magnified to the nth degree by the moral and psychological disfigurements of the Terror War. Today we also have the curse of 24/7 corporate news channels and the sleepless howling of the internet to batter the mind with an unending series of “urgent” dangers to our lives, our beliefs, our identities. This produces both a threat to tribal identities (political, religious, ethnic, racial, etc.), and a constant reinforcement of them – identities which we can see hardening across the spectrum in virtually every nation and culture.

A great deal of this is done deliberately. There are enormous profits and much power to be gained from war and rumors of war, from the militarization of society (including the police forces), and from the incessant stoking of fear at home and abroad. It is scarcely a secret that the United States has turned itself into a nation whose economic and political structures are now dependent on a globe-straddling system of military and economic domination. Over the past century, America’s ruling elite have come to believe that the United States can only survive through domination, through the constant expansion of American hegemony across the earth, like a Great White shark unable to stop moving and devouring. And as we have seen over the decades, our elites are willing to kill an inordinate amount of human beings to prove their own noble commitment to the betterment of humanity. They are even willing to flirt with world-destroying nuclear war – as Obama is doing now with his genuinely insane policy of military brinkmanship with Russia – to keep the hegemonic shark in motion.

Deliberate, yes; but it is not – always – done cynically. Would to god that it were; a Machiavellian cynic might possibly pull back in time if they saw that their clever fearmongering gambit was drifting too close to catastrophe. But one of the main problems we face in the world today, especially in America, is this: elites who believe their own bullshit.

This is the only thing that accounts for much of American foreign policy at the moment (and for many years previously). They actually believe in “exceptionalism,” they believe the United States must dominate the world, that it is our solemn duty to bear this heavy burden and bring American values to all peoples. Not because we are perfect – lord knows, we have many problems and failings of our own! – but because the American way just happens to be better than all the others, the only path to true freedom and fulfillment. Who would not want that? Who would not be a Roman, if the Empire opened its arms to you? Only the savage, the ignorant and the evil.

Read more: http://www.chris-floyd.com/home/articles/all-day-permanent-red-the-living-death-of-perpetual-emergency-07082016.html

Read from top...

The attempted coup in Turkey offers a dramatic reminder that even democracies are vulnerable. Yet that nation’s elected leader, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has been jailing his critics.

Many people around the world suffer under brutal oppression, and Americans should stand for the freedom of all. While there is no single best political system, any legitimate government must be accountable to those it claims to represent.

Dictatorships should not be viewed as just another cultural affectation warranting respect. Preventing people from choosing their leaders, barring citizens from debating issues, arresting demonstrators protesting state abuses, and punishing the faithful for worshiping the “wrong” god all are violations of people’s most basic rights.

Liberty is not a gift from government, but inherent to the human person. Individuals are morally responsible to choose good. They must be free to make decisions for themselves. Every life has greater value than the grandest political empire.

However, American foreign policy cannot be centered on democracy promotion. The U.S. government is responsible to the American people. It should not risk their lives and take their money except when necessary to protect them—their society, homes, prosperity, and liberties. Military personnel are not gambit pawns to be sacrificed in ivory-tower crusades.

read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/america-cannot-promote-democracy-at-gunpoint/

In their struggle to understand the Trump phenomenon, establishment pundits, political scientists and millions of flabbergasted American voters have settled on a long list of sober-sounding socioeconomic explanations: Deindustrialization. Anomie. Racial animosity. The rising up of a dislocated America.

Perhaps. Surely, Donald J. Trump is where he is because of a new force in American politics, one very different from the old politics as usual. But the difference is not just socioeconomic. It’s much deeper than that. Mr. Trump has survived disasters that would have sunk an establishment politician because he and his supporters have a fundamentally different worldview. Mr. Trump isn’t just the first reality-TV candidate; he is the first candidate to embrace a slice of the country that sees everything, even the fate of the nation, through the logic of cutthroat American capitalism.

The world that Mr. Trump inhabits is today’s Other America, the seamy, blustering, hustling and huckstering underside of our fabled brightness and optimism. For those who can afford to idealize politics, it may seem alien. But for many people, it is everyday life.

The political and business worlds have always overlapped. But we used to — and the establishment still does — expect politicians to adhere to a minimal level of honesty and consistency. We judge business tycoons differently; within the confines of the law, more or less, we expect them to lie and cheat their way to the top, and we assess them solely on how quickly and efficiently they get there. The reputation of Ulysses S. Grant was tarnished by the mere association with the unseemly practices that earned his Gilded Age counterparts in the business world everlasting glory.

Perhaps it was only a matter of time before someone with the plutocrat’s professional ethics made that leap into presidential politics. But the rest of the country had to catch up. We lauded robber barons like John D. Rockefeller and Jay Gould for their business success, but no one suggested for a second that they were statesman material. Now, in an era when the market reaches deep into our private lives and even high school students are expected to be experts in self-marketing, the door is finally open. Enter Donald Trump.

read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/10/opinion/campaign-stops/the-selling-of-donald-j-trump.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region&region=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region&_r=0

... Hillary was even more of a war-hawk than Bush was, or than Obama was: she supported not just Bush’s invasion of Iraq, but Obama’s invasions of Libya and Syria, a coup in Honduras, and helped plan Obama’s coup in Ukraine, which led to Ukraine’s breaking apart into civil war. Plus she was even more of a champion of Wall Street than Obama was, and maybe even more so than Bush was. Yet many Democrats think that the anti-Establishment Donald Trump is, somehow, even worse. They claim that Trump is a “racist” — as though either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton hadn’t been leading a country where the top 0.1% got the vast majority of the economic benefits and the bottom 90% — including especially Blacks and Hispanics — got no gains at all, neither in income nor in wealth. So: what good did Obama do for Blacks-as-a-whole, or for Hispanics-as-a-whole? Other than invasions, there was nothing real, just words of “racial reconciliation” and other hypocrisies, for which he did little or nothing.

Obama has no legacy except words (words that often contradicted his actual decisions in office). Mere words are just a nullity; all that counts is actions. Empty words are, perhaps, lies, insincere expressions; but they certainly aren’t actions; they’re no legacy at all (especially when the speaker’s actions belie his words).

Democrats want to blame Republicans for Obama’s failures about everything; and Republicans did all they could to help him fail, but those same Republicans also condemned Donald Trumpuntil he won the White House, and your enemy’s enemy is your friend; so, why is Donald Trump not Democrats’ friend? Maybe he’s an enemy to both the Republican and the Democratic Establishment. Only time will tell; they’ll tell when his words become replaced with actions, which will show what he really is. But the anti-Trump protesters are not — at least as of yet — protesting his actions. Democrats simply want President Trump to fail, like Republicans had wanted Obama to fail. But it’s only Obama (and Clinton) who is a proven failure, with a lousy-to-no legacy of achievement; so, why aren’t there Democratic demonstrations against him (and her), instead?

The Clinton-Obama Democrats who remain loyal to the Democratic Party in the wake of Trump’s victory, are world-champion hypocrites, even if they’re too oblivious of reality to know it. The Clinton-Obama political tradition, of pro-megacorporate government, actually repudiates, instead of embodies, the Democratic Party that real progressives are proud of: the Democratic Party’s earlier, quintessential period: the 1932-1980 FDR-dominated (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) era — the most progressive period in all of U.S. history.

Though I voted both times for Barack Obama, he turned out to be one of the worst U.S. Presidents, if not the worst of them all — even if he was (as I thought each time) the better of the bad (in each election). 

His only real legacy as President turns out to have been disasters, including things far worse than his failed Obamacare, which increased the healthcare inflation-rate in our country, where healthcare already costs twice as much — and twice as high a percentage of GDP — as the international OECD average, but delivers inferior healthcare results. America is becoming internationally even less competitive in our healthcare system than before — which was already at the international bottom. It’s sucking the lifesblood out of the U.S. economy.

But most of the real hell that Obama produced is in foreign countries: his bloody coup in Ukraine followed by civil war there, and, before that, the bloody catastrophe in Libya, and the bloody years-long attempt (ever since Obama first came into office) to overthrow the non-sectarian leader of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, and replace him with Al Nusra and other jihadists that the Obama-regime weaponized and the Saud regime (America’s ‘allies’) financed and recruited hoping for them to replace Assad and produce a Sharia-law Syrian government. Al Qaeda in Syria — “Al Nusra” — were leading Obama’s ‘moderate rebels’ in Syria. Obama lied and said he was supporting only ‘moderate rebels’. 

The Administration kept the reality hidden from the American public until late in October when Hillary’s victory seemed assured and so Obama started to acknowledge publicly that he was actually backing all of the anti-Assad people there except ISIS. Thus, for example, on October 20th, Russia’s Sputnik News quoted an interview two days earlier in which the American Russia-expert Stephen Cohen had remarked upon this sudden change:

If you pick up a paper today the narrative is completely different,” the US academic stressed, “In Aleppo there are only rebels, there are no longer terrorists. You don’t see the word ‘terrorist’ or ‘jihadist’ in the narrative any more. And alongside them, with rebels protecting them, there are children who are being killed by Russian and Syrian war planes.” As the whole narrative has been re-written, Moscow and Damascus are now being portrayed as “war criminals” which are targeting civilians in Aleppo, he noted.

Whereas previously, Obama behind-the-scenes had been protecting and arming the non-ISIS jihadists even while acknowledging that they existed, he was now starting publicly to acknowledge that the U.S. was actually supporting them.

According to the US academic, the inconvenient truth is that the US and its allies in one way or another have abetted terrorists in Syria for many years. “The motive of the United States, the only mission that the US has in Syria, is removing [Syrian President] Assad from power,” Cohen emphasized, adding that the most powerful force fighting against Damascus are jihadi terrorists.

But after the election, because Trump will be Obama’s successor, Obama has finally decided that Al Qaeda and the other jihadist groups that it leads in Syria are no longer ‘moderates’, but instead are people to target and kill in Syria. Finally — after his having long refused to join Russia’s air-campaign to kill them there.

Not only did Obama protect the jihadists in Syria, but by doing so he created hell there, and even Western-sponsored polling shows that the vast majority of the Syrian population blame the U.S. above all as being the global power that enables the jihadists to destroy their country.

I write this as a three-time voter for Barack Obama (both the primaries and the general election in 2008, and then again the general in 2012). I first became disappointed with Obama soon after his election in 2008 as President, when, on 25 November 2008, he chose as the White House’s chief economic advisor the snobbish Republican-turned-Democrat Lawrence Summers, whose advice to President Bill Clinton in 1999 had encouraged him to terminate FDR’s Glass-Steagall separation of consumer-banking (checking and savings accounts) from investment-banking (Wall Street’s casinos). 

That Clinton action had left the FDIC protections of savers on the hook to bail out the billionaire gamblers who found themselves without a musical-chairs seat when the music finally stopped and George W. Bush’s MBS Ponzi real-estate economy came crashing down in 2007-2008. The purpose of ending Glass-Steagall was to put taxpayers ultimately on the hook for billionaires’ stock-and-bond gambling-losses. Wall Street’s propaganda said that doing this deregulation would ‘unleash capitalism’, but all it really unleashed was the banksters. Clinton’s repeal of Glass-Steagall necessitated the Bush-Obama bailout of Wall Street — Main Street’s bailout of Wall Street. That’s part of Bill Clinton’s delayed legacy. But it’s also Bush-Obama’s legacy during their Administrations. 

I recognized Obama to be a total fake ‘progressive’ because, the day before appointing Summers, he had appointed, on 24 November 2008, yet another pro-repeal ‘Democrat’, Summers’s friend Timothy Geithner, who was the G.W. Bush era’s N.Y. Federal Reserve Bank President and thus king of Wall Street, to become U.S. Treasury Secretary, supposedly to help America recover from the crash that Geithner and Summers and Bill Clinton had in crucial ways created. (The other major way they created the crash was their supporting total deregulation of derivative securities — turning derivatives into the financial system’s crack cocaine. Brilliant! Brilliantly evil.)

And even before that, on November 18th, Obama had appointed Eric Holder to be Attorney General, signaling that the U.S. ‘Justice’ Department under Obama was to become headed by Wall Street’s Mr. Unaccountability, an infamous champion of keeping billionaires not only unconvicted and even uncharged but uninvestigated on any criminal law the billionaire might actually have committed — and thus out of prison.

Even then — before he had so much as entered the White House — Obama showed that he wasn’t really interested in serving the public but in protecting the banksters, just like Bill Clinton and G.W. Bush had done before him. I kept voting for Obama because the alternative — originally Hillary Clinton, and then John McCain, in 2008, but now Romney in 2012 — was even worse. The system itself was rotten; it gave us only a choice only between bads (goods for the aristocracy, but bads for the public) — this was by now clear. 

And here’s how bad President Obama actually was:

On 27 March 2009, Obama secretly told the chieftains of Wall Street assembled at a private meeting inside the White House (from which these morsels leaked out), “My Administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks,” thus comparing these billionaires and agents of billionaires, with the martyred Blacks whom KKKers in previous decades had chased with pitchforks before lynching. But that’s not all of what Obama said to the banksters. This arrogant self-identifier with the aristocracy was very direct with them about his siding with them and their agents who had ripped off the entire world and enriched themselves thereby: 

You guys have an acute public relations problem, and I want to help. … I’m not out there to go after you. I’m protecting you.” 

And that’s exactly what he then, in fact, did (he told the truth only to his masters, never to their victims, the public): 

On 15 November 2011, TRAC Reports headlined that “Criminal Prosecutions for Financial Institution Fraud Continue to Fall”, to record lows under Obama, even below the pathetic level of George W. Bush. 2009 was a record low. 2010 was a new record low. So was 2011. TRAC Reports never issued a follow-up article on that, but on 21 October 2016, they headlined with their usual understatement, “White Collar Crime Prosecutions for August 2016”, and showed there that since 2003 each month’s white-collar-crime prosecutions had peaked in 2011, and now were at record lows in 2015 and 2016. This at least suggests that the category of white-collar crimes that consists of “financial institution fraud” had at least not risen from its all-time low posted in 2011.

During Obama’s 24 January 2012 State of the Union address, he promised

to expand our investigations into the abusive lending and packaging of risky mortgages that led to the housing crisis. (Applause.) This new unit will hold accountable those who broke the law.”

He lied. Two years later, the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Justice issued on 13 March 2014 its “Audit of the Department of Justice’s Efforts to Address Mortgage Fraud”, and reported “We found mortgage fraud to be a low priority, or not [even] listed as a priority, for the FBI Field Offices we visited.” No wonder that white-collar-crime prosecutions were subsequently at record lows. It’s not merely Hillary Clinton and her emails; it’s the entire aristocracy who stand above the nation’s laws, under Barack Obama’s Presidential Administration.

Impunity hidden behind lies is what defines Obama’s Presidential legacy.

But it’s zero in other ways, too.

Obama’s most ambitious project was his three proposed mega-‘trade’ treaties — TPP, TTIP, and TISA — each of which was designed with a feature in it called “Investor State Dispute Resolution” or ISDS, which empowers international corporations to sue any signatory nation that will increase any regulation regarding the environment or product-safety or the rights of workers (employees) — no matter what the latest scientific findings on such a given subject might happen to indicate. The international corporation can sue for ‘loss of profits’ when any such regulation is made more stringent. Profits to stockholders are thus made sovereign and protected above the citizenry, the electorate; the controlling stockholder in an international corporation is granted rights that are above the rights of any mere citizen — even if that controlling stockholder lives abroad, and even if the international corporation is a foreign corporation. ISDS grants only one-way rights to sue: corporations suing governments, no governments suing corporations.

Taxpayers pay those fines. The suits — this new profit-center for international corporations at the public’s expense — are heard in no court of law in any nation but instead in international-corporate panels, each having three ‘arbitrators’ no judges and no juries and no democratic accountability to any electorate at all except to stockholders who elect the board of directors in their international corporation, which is suing. Hillary Clinton favored it and would probably have passed some or all of these fascist-world-government treaties, into law; but, instead, Donald Trump will be President. He is far less likely to move forward with Obama’s grand scheme to spread ISDS — a world government controlled by international corporations — like wildfire around the world.

“Poverty Rose In 96% Of U.S. House Districts, During Obama’s Presidency”. What does Obama have to show for his 8 years in the White House? He served his masters well, even if not as well as he had been hoping (to pass into law his ISDS-infested international-trade mega-treaties: TPP, TTIP, and TISA). The income and wealth of the billionaires soared like at no time since 1923-1928. The “Share of income and wealth of bottom 90% wealth holders” both declined. He served his masters well. But they weren’t the American public, and they certainly weren’t the publics in other nations, especially not in Syria, Libya, Ukraine, Honduras, and Haiti, in each of which nations Obama made things far worse, and turned those lands into hells.

Was Barack Obama even worse than George W. Bush? Bush achieved almost all of the evil he pushed for; by contrast, Obama failed to achieve his biggest legacy-item of all: passage into law of his three international-corporate-government ‘trade’ treaties, which would have done more harm to the world’s future than all the rest of his Presidency combined — even made impossible any implementation of an effective regulation of greenhouse gases (about which Obama’s rhetoric feigned concern). Obama was trying to be even worse than he was ultimately able to be. Because of Bernie Sanders’s and Donald Trump’s shared leadership, those treaties finally became politically too toxic to pass. Maybe Obama there was prevented from being the worst U.S. President ever. That failure did more to improve Obama’s legacy than any of his successes did. 

“Democratic Leadership ADMITS that Clinton Lost the Election Because of Voters’ Economic Worries” — click onto that and you’ll see that “the Democratic leadership itself admits that the economy is the issue that sunk Clinton.” Hillary Clinton was running on Obama’s record except she was even more for “regime change” than he.

To call Obama’s legacy “zero” or “nonexistent” would actually be unrealistic praise of him; his legacy is actually deeply negative. No doubt he’ll be rewarded handsomely for it, by his masters — which never were the American public.

Barack Obama was the greatest con-artist ever to occupy the U.S. White House. If he has any legacy (besides the hell he created in Libya, Syria, and elsewhere), that’s it. (After all, he won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, didn’t he?)

So: no, it wasn’t actually “nonexistent”; it was atrocious

https://off-guardian.org/2016/11/21/obamas-nonexistent-legacy/

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In an exclusive interview with Athens daily Kathimerini, Assad said there was no reason to meet face-to-face with Trump, since the US president “says something today, and does the opposite tomorrow,”and is likely not even being in control of policy decisions.

“[W]e don’t think the president of that regime is in control,”Assad told the paper, referring to Trump. “We all believe that the deep state, the real state, is in control, or is in control of every president, and that is nothing new. It has always been so in the United States, at least during the last 40 years, at least since Nixon, maybe before, but it’s becoming starker and starker, and the starkest case is Trump.”

Assad also dismissed the possibility of a third world war breaking out in Syria, telling the Greek newspaper that Moscow’s levelheadedness has so far prevented a catastrophic escalation – even as the US aims to expand the conflict. Asked directly if he was concerned about the possibility of a third world war, Assad replied: “No, for one reason: Because fortunately, you have a wise leadership in Russia, and they know that the agenda of the deep state in the United States is to create a conflict. Since Trump’s campaign, the main agenda was against Russia, create a conflict with Russia, humiliate Russia, undermine Russia, and so on,” the Syrian president said.

Assad ended the interview by vowing to reunify Syria and restore its sovereignty, adding that the US, France, UK, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey are ultimately responsible for the seven-year war and must be held accountable for supporting “terrorists” fighting in Syria.

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/426342-trump-assad-deep-state-syria/

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