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TPP already dead.
We likely avoided Nuclear War with Russia, at least for 7 weeks. = SIX

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Pentagon Activates Its Fight Against Al-Nusra Front in Syria after Trump’s Victory?

The Pentagon has received an order of US President Barack Obama to deploy more unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in Syria in order to detect locations of terrorists of the Jabhat Fatah al-Sham (previously known as the Al-Nusra Front) group, The Washington Post newspaper reported on Thursday, citing unnamed US military officials.

The newspaper noted that the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) will have more resources and more authority to track leadership of the Jabhat Fatah al-Sham.

According to sources of The Washington Post, JSOC-controlled UAVs were already conducting more operations in September and have already allowed to kill at least four ‘high-value’ targets.

This move seems a bit strange in the light of a recent statement of spokesman for the US Department of State John Kirby, who said that the Jabhat Fateh al-Sham is not the main aim of the US-led coalition in Syria, where it fights only against the Islamic State (IS) terrorist group.

So, it looks like the Pentagon has ‘sensed something’ – Donald Trump has just won presidential elections in the US, and the country’s department of defense has immediately activated its actions against Al-Nusra terrorists in Syria.

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Obama directs Pentagon to target al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, one of the most formidable forces fighting Assad

President Obama has ordered the Pentagon to find and kill the leaders of an al-Qaeda-linked group in Syria that the administration had largely ignored until now and that has been at the vanguard of the fight against the Syrian government, U.S. officials said.

The decision to deploy more drones and intelligence assets against the militant group formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra reflects Obama’s concern that it is turning parts of Syria into a new base of operations for al-Qaeda on Europe’s southern doorstep, the officials said.

The move underlines the extent to which Obama has come to prioritize the counter­terrorism mission in Syria over efforts to pressure President Bashar al-Assad to step aside, as al-Nusra is among the most effective forces­­ battling the Syrian government.

[Amid a world of problems, Trump’s policy prescriptions remain opaque]

That shift is likely to accelerate once President-elect Donald Trump takes office. Trump has said he will be even more aggressive in going after militants than Obama, a stance that could lead to the expansion of the campaign against al-Nusra, possibly in direct cooperation with Moscow. The group now calls itself Jabhat Fatah al-Sham — or Front for the Conquest of Syria — and says it has broken with al-Qaeda, an assertion discounted by U.S. officials.
President Obama arrives at the 71st annual U.N. General Assembly in New York, on Sept. 20, 2016. (Peter Foley/Via Bloomberg)

The United States has conducted sporadic strikes in the past against veteran al-Qaeda members who migrated to northwestern Syria from Afghanistan and Pakistan to join al-Nusra and whom U.S. officials suspected of plotting against the United States and its allies.

Obama’s new order gives the U.S. military’s Joint Special ­Operations Command, or JSOC, wider authority and additional intelligence-collection re­sources to go after al-Nusra’s broader leadership, not just al-Qaeda veterans or those directly involved in external plotting.

The White House and State Department led the charge within the Obama administration for prioritizing action against the group. Pentagon leaders were reluctant at first to pull resources away from the fight against the Islamic State.

But aides say Obama grew frustrated that more wasn’t being done by the Pentagon and the intelligence community to kill al-Nusra leaders given the warnings he had received from top counter­terrorism officials about the gathering threat they posed.

In the president’s Daily Brief, the most highly classified intelligence report produced by U.S. spy agencies, Obama was repeatedly told over the summer that the group was allowing al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan and Afghanistan to create in northwest Syria the largest haven for the network since it was scattered after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Officials also warned Obama that al-Nusra could try to fill the void as its rival, the Islamic State, lost ground.

Lisa Monaco, Obama’s White House homeland security and counter­terrorism adviser, said Obama’s decision “prioritized our fight against al-Qaeda in Syria, including through targeting their leaders and operatives, some of whom are legacy al-Qaeda members.”

“We have made clear to all parties in Syria that we will not allow al-Qaeda to grow its capacity to attack the U.S., our allies, and our interests,” she said in a statement. “We will continue to take action to deny these terrorists any safe haven in Syria.”
In this 2013 photo, which has been authenticated based on its contents and other AP reporting, rebels from al-Qaida affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra sit on a truck full of ammunition at Taftanaz air base, that was captured by the rebels, in Idlib province, northern Syria. (Edlib News Network/AP)

To support the expanded push against al-Nusra, the White House pressed the Pentagon to deploy additional armed drones and intelligence-collection assets in the airspace over northwestern Syria, an area that had been sparsely covered by the United States until now because of its proximity to advanced Russian air-defense systems and aircraft.

[Who will Trump be as commander in chief?]

A bitterly divided Obama administration had tried over the summer to cut a deal with Moscow on a joint U.S.-Russian air campaign against al-Nusra, in exchange for a Russian commitment to ground Syrian government warplanes and to allow more humanitarian supplies into besieged areas. But the negotiations broke down in acrimony, with Moscow accusing the United States of failing to separate al-Nusra from more moderate rebel groups and Washington accusing the Russians of war crimes in Aleppo.

Armed drones controlled by JSOC stepped up operations in September, according to military officials.

Drone strikes by the U.S. military under the program began in October and have so far killed at least four high-value targets, including al-Nusra’s senior external planner. The Pentagon has disclosed two of the strikes so far. One of the most significant strikes — targeting a gathering of al-Nusra leaders on Nov. 2 — has yet to be disclosed, officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss operations.

So far, Russian air-defense systems and aircraft haven’t interfered with stepped-up U.S. operations against al-Nusra. Officials attributed Moscow’s acquiescence to the limited number of U.S. aircraft involved in the missions and to Russia’s interest in letting Washington combat one of the Assad regime’s most potent enemies within the insurgency. U.S. officials said they provided notifications to the Russians before the al-Nusra strikes to avoid misunderstandings.

Officials said the expanded al-Nusra campaign was similar to those that Obama has directed against al-Qaeda affiliates in Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan.

While al-Qaeda’s central leadership in Pakistan has been decimated, the United States now faces more threats involving more extremists from more places than at any time since 9/11, Nicholas J. Rasmussen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, told a Senate committee in September.

The push into the province of Idlib and other parts of northwestern Syria coincides with ­Pentagon-backed offensives in and around Islamic State strongholds in eastern Syria and in Iraq, which have attracted the majority of U.S. military resources and public attention.

White House officials had considered launching a more systematic campaign to destroy al-Nusra from top to bottom, much like the Pentagon’s approach to the Islamic State. But that option was rejected as too resource-intensive. Many of al-Nusra’s fighters are Syrians who joined the group because of its ample supply of weapons and cash, and its commitment to defeating Assad, not to plot against the West.

Officials said the strikes on leadership targets were meant to send a message to more-moderate rebel units, including those backed by the CIA, to distance themselves from the al-Qaeda affiliate. At critical moments during the five-year-old civil war, moderate rebel units have fought alongside al-Nusra in ground operations against Assad’s forces. In fact, U.S. officials credit those rebel campaigns in the spring of 2015 with putting so much pressure on the Syrian government that Russia and Iran decided to double down militarily in support of Assad.

U.S. officials who opposed the decision to go after al-Nusra’s wider leadership warned that the United States would effectively be doing the Assad government's bidding by weakening a group on the front line of the counter-
Assad fight. The strikes, these officials warned, could backfire on the United States by bolstering the group’s standing, helping it attract more recruits and resources.

Officials who supported the shift said the Obama administration could no longer tolerate what one of them described as “a deal with the devil,” whereby the United States largely held its fire against al-Nusra because the group was popular with Syrians in rebel-controlled areas and furthered the U.S. goal of putting military pressure on Assad. Russia had accused the United States of sheltering al-Nusra, a charge repeated Thursday in Moscow by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

“The president doesn’t want this group to be what inherits the country if Assad ever does fall,” a senior U.S. official said. “This cannot be the viable Syrian opposition. It’s al-Qaeda.”

Officials said the administration’s hope is that more-moderate rebel factions will be able to gain ground as both the Islamic State and al-Nusra come under increased military pressure.

A growing number of White House and State Department officials, however, have privately voiced doubts about the wisdom of applying U.S. military power, even covertly, to pressure Assad to step aside, particularly since Russia’s military intervention in Syria last year.

U.S. intelligence officials say they aren’t sure what Trump’s approach to U.S.-backed rebel units will be once he gets briefed on the extent of the covert CIA program. Trump has voiced strong skepticism about arming Syrian rebels in the past, suggesting that U.S. intelligence agencies don’t have enough knowledge about rebel intentions to pick reliable allies.

[Intelligence community is already feeling a sense of dread about Trump]

Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter and other Pentagon leaders initially resisted the idea of devoting more Pentagon surveillance aircraft and armed drones against al-Nusra. In White House Situation Room meetings, Carter and other top Pentagon officials argued that the military’s resources were needed to combat the Islamic State and that it would be difficult to operate in the airspace given Russia’s military presence, officials said.

While Obama, White House national security adviser Susan E. Rice, Secretary of State John F. Kerry and special presidential envoy Brett McGurk agreed with Carter on the need to keep the focus on the Islamic State, they favored shifting resources to try to prevent al-Nusra from becoming a bigger threat down the road.

A senior defense official said additional drone assets were assigned to the JSOC mission. Carter also made clear that the Pentagon’s goal would be to hit al-Nusra leadership targets, not take strikes to try to separate the moderate rebels from al-Nusra, officials said.

“If we wake up in five years from now, and Islamic State is dead but al-Qaeda in Syria has the equivalent of [the tribal areas of Pakistan] in northwest Syria, then we’ve got a problem,” a second senior U.S. official said.

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Putin And Trump Hold Phone Conversation, Agree To Normalize Relations

Moments ago the Kremlin released a statement in which the Russian presidency reported that Putin and Trump held a conversation, in which the Russian leader congratulated his American counterpart again on his victory in the presidential election, wished him "success in the implementation of the pre-election program, and noted his willingness to build a partnership dialogue with the new administration on the principles of equality, mutual respect and non-interference in the internal affairs of each other."

During the conversation, Putin and Trump "not only agreed to assess the current unsatisfactory state of bilateral relations, but also spoke in favor of active joint work to normalize relations and aim for constructive cooperation on a wide range of issues. The call emphasized in particular the importance of creating a solid foundation of bilateral ties through the development of trade and economic relations.

In the call, it was also noted that that "next year marks 210 years since the establishment of diplomatic relations between Russia and the United States, which in itself should stimulate a return to pragmatic, mutually beneficial cooperation, which would meet the interests of both countries, stability and security throughout the world."

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Originally posted by G:

Aricept - ask your Dr.

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Originally posted by G:
I said looooong ago that your's and KIKI's squawking and whining about Hillary starting WWIII was obvious bullish*t because that doesn't benefit anyone.

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Originally posted by second:

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Originally posted by G:

Aricept - ask your Dr.

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+100

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President-elect Donald Trump has said his first 100 days will be dedicated to restoring “honesty, accountability and change to Washington” through the following seven steps:

1) A Constitutional Amendment to impose term limits on all members of Congress

2) A hiring freeze on all federal employees to reduce federal workforce through attrition (exempting military, public safety, and public health)

3) A requirement that for every new federal regulation, two existing regulations must be eliminated

4) A five year ban on White House and Congressional officials becoming lobbyists after they leave government service

5) A lifetime ban on the White House officials lobbying on behalf of a foreign government

6) A complete ban on foreign lobbyists raising money for American elections

7) Cancel billions in payments to U.N. climate change programs and use the money to fix America’s water and environmental infrastructure http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-11-14/soros-and-liberal-mega-donors
-plot-war-donald-trump

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Originally posted by G:
Which reminds me: if Soros is such a powerful, evil b*stard billionaire satan, how come his candidate lost? He's not all that?

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Originally posted by 1kiki:

Oh, and second-rate: How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?

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Originally posted by second:
I could ask 1kiki to explain why Americans rejected the Democratic Party many, many, many times before and voted twice for Nixon and twice for Bush, two very infamous Presidents. Didn't Americans learn anything the first four years? Yes, they did!

The short answer is that Americans very much learned to love Nixon and Bush for what I see are fundamental flaws that are part of the DNA of the GOP and the DNA of a majority of American voters. Something that will always and forever escape 1kiki’s understanding is that voters are not the same as eligible voters.

There happens to be about a hundred million eligible voters who did not vote. I don't know what is in their DNA except for obliviousness and pathological political apathy. We could find out if the non-voters's DNA is GOP, but only if the GOP allowed mandatory voting. I know the GOP does not want to know the answer, but 1kiki probably wants to know the answer even less than the GOP does.

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Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Who loves Nixon or Bush (either Bush)?

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Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Are you REALLY happy with where we're at right now? The last 8 years? They are really just an extension of the previous 8 years that I'm sure you weren't happy with.

Two of the worst Presidents we may have ever had.

Two Presidents who in only 8 years raised the National Debt nearly double of all of the Presidents before them.

Two Presidents who got us into unconstitutional wars in the Middle East without Congressional Approval.

Two Presidents who combined have ushered in such a decline for the Working Man of all colors that more than half of us are in Poverty.

As bad as it was for African Americans under GWB, the amount of Blacks on Food Stamps has doubled under Obama.

Home Ownership for Millenials is almost non existant.

The average American Debt is at record levels.

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Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

What does the amount of people who vote matter, Second?

I think Mandatory voting would be a nightmare.

Of 120 million Americans who actually did vote this time around, we're lucky if 20 million of them were actually Knowledgeable and Unbiased enough to actually deserve a vote.

120 Million voters, and at least 100 Million Useful Idiots for either side.

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Originally posted by second:
I just checked. To my absolute amazement Hillary won by a half million votes, but the Republican Party stole the electoral college.

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1kiki will fire back, as many times before ...

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... without having ever understood and never willing to try ...

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... that this is how a democracy works.

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And I will reply that Alexander Hamilton and James Madison forcefully spoke out against how the states violate the purpose of the college by coercing their delegates to the electoral college. Were Hamilton not killed in a duel, he'd challenge the Florida secretary of state to . . . a duel.

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I could ask 1kiki to explain why Americans rejected the Democratic Party many, many, many times before and voted twice for Nixon and twice for Bush, two very infamous Presidents. Didn't Americans learn anything the first four years? Yes, they did!

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The short answer is that Americans very much learned to love Nixon and Bush for what I see are fundamental flaws that are part of the DNA of the GOP and the DNA of a majority of American voters.

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Something that will always and forever escape 1kiki’s understanding is that voters are not the same as eligible voters.

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There happens to be about a hundred million eligible voters who did not vote.

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I don't know what is in their DNA except for obliviousness and pathological political apathy.

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We could find out if the non-voters's DNA is GOP ...

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... but only if the GOP allowed mandatory voting. I know the GOP does not want to know the answer, but 1kiki probably wants to know the answer even less than the GOP does.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_voting

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Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Imagine how great a country we would have been if only Land Owners had a vote, without the Useful Idiots.

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War Breaks Out Between Neo-Cons And Libertarians Over Trump's Foreign Policy

In late October, when it was still conventional wisdom that Hillary was "guaranteed" to win the presidency, the WaPo explained that among the neo-con, foreign policy "elites" of the Pentagon, a feeling of calm content had spread: after all, it was just a matter of time before the "pacifist" Obama was out, replaced by the more hawkish Hillary.

As the WaPo reported, "there is one corner of Washington where Donald Trump’s scorched-earth presidential campaign is treated as a mere distraction and where bipartisanship reigns. In the rarefied world of the Washington foreign policy establishment, President Obama’s departure from the White House — and the possible return of a more conventional and hawkish Hillary Clinton — is being met with quiet relief."

The Republicans and Democrats who make up the foreign policy elite are laying the groundwork for a more assertive American foreign policy via a flurry of reports shaped by officials who are likely to play senior roles in a potential Clinton White House.

... the so-called establishment camp, many of whom disavowed Trump during the campaign, is made up of the same people who effectively ran Hillary Clinton's tenure while she was Secretary of State, fully intent on creating zones of conflict, political instability and outright war in every imaginable place, from North Africa to Ukraine. This group is pushing for

Stephen Hadley, who served as national security adviser under George W. Bush.

Another Bush ally, John Bolton whose name has been floated as a possible secretary of State, also falls into this camp.

According to The Hill, other neo-con, establishment candidates floated include

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.),
Outgoing Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.),
Rising star Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), and
Senior fellow at conservative think-tank American Enterprise Institute and Former Sen. Jim Talent (R-Mo.)



“At the very least, they should wait to see who gets the top jobs. Until then, let the Trump team fill the deputy assistant secretary and assistant secretary jobs with civil servants, retired military officers and diplomats, or the large supply of loyal or obsequious second-raters who will be eager to serve,” [Eliot Cohen, a former Bush State Department senior adviser] wrote.

Some saw the op-ed as good news, believing it signified a radical turn by Trump from a foreign party establishment that should be ignored. “The first encouraging news I've heard in days. If a leader of #NeverTrump is saying this, that means the establishment hasn't won. Yet,” said Christopher Preble of the CATO Institute.

[OTOH] ... Lindsey Graham, a prominent foreign policy hawk in the Senate, issued an endorsement of Bolton on Thursday, saying: "He understands who our friends and enemies are. We see the world in very similar ways." He also slammed Paul's criticism of Bolton: “You could put the number of Republicans who will follow Rand Paul’s advice on national security in a very small car. Rand is my friend but he’s a libertarian and an outlier in the party on these issues."

Funny, that's exactly what the experts said about Trump's chances of winning not even two weeks ago.

.... And then there are the wildcards: those Trump advisers who are difficult to peg into which camp they fall into. One example is retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, who was selected by Trump as his national security adviser. Flynn is a “curious case,” said Daniel Larison, senior editor at The American Conservative. The retired Army general has said he wants to work with Russia, but also expressed contrary views in his book "Field of Fight." According to Larison, Flynn writes of an “enemy alliance” against the U.S. that includes Russia, North Korea, China, Iran, Syria, Cuba, Bolivia, Venezuela, Nicaragua, al-Qaida, Hezbollah, and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. From that standpoint, he is about as "establishment" as they come.

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USA-Obama suspend la procédure de ratification du TPP https://www.zonebourse.com/actualite-bourse/USA-Obama-suspend-la-proce
dure-de-ratification-du-TPP--23386520/

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As TPP falters, Malaysia looks to China trade pact to bolster trade
Malaysia said on Tuesday it would focus efforts on wrapping up a multi-nation trade pact led by China, as the Southeast Asian country braces for the possible collapse of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), spearheaded by the United States.

The comment comes after U.S. President Barack Obama's administration suspended efforts to win congressional approval for TPP before President-elect Donald Trump takes office, saying the pact's fate was up to Trump and Republican lawmakers.

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Good News For China? No TPP For The U.S., And Now Vietnam

“Vietnam has prepared to join the 12-nation TPP. However, as the U.S. has announced to suspend the deal, there would be no sufficient conditions for Vietnam to submit its proposal for ratification,” said Vietnam’s Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc.

... Countries have two years to ratify this more than 2,000-pages pact ... None of the 12 countries have completed the ratification process so far. Japan, the second-largest economy after the U.S in this treaty, voted to ratify the deal this month. Prime Minister Abe is meeting Trump in New York today, where TPP is likely to be discussed....

China was not sitting on the sidelines during TPP negotiations. Along with 15 other countries, China has been negotiating a region-wide trade deal since early 2013, covering around 50% the world’s population and 30% of global GDP. The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), a less ambitious treaty than TPP, which aims to tackle some highly sensitive aspects of trade, has finished its 15th round of negotiations this month. A TPP member, Peru, expressed its interest in joining this week.
.... some [other] countries like Australia are signaling they would support a China-led regional trade deal,

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Angela Merkel Sounds Death Knell for TTIP—But Don't Thank Donald TrumpGerman Chancellor Angela Merkel said Thursday at a joint press conference with U.S. President Barack Obama that negotiations over the corporate-friendly TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between Europe and the United States "will not be concluded now" that Donald Trump has been elected to succeed Obama.

It is a victory for the millions of people on both continents who voiced opposition to the massive deal. But social justice campaigners across Europe refuse to give the credit to Trump, saying that thanks to public outcry, the TTIP was "already dead" long before November 8.

Indeed, a coalition of European civil society groups and trade unions just this week warned that Trump merely exploited economic unease in order to win the presidential election, and that "[d]espite his rhetoric, Trump fully believes in deregulation, privatization, and putting profit before people."
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/11/17/angela-merkel-sounds-death
-knell-ttip-dont-thank-donald-trump

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
And the Atlantic version of the TPP, called the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is dead.

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Angela Merkel Sounds Death Knell for TTIP—But Don't Thank Donald TrumpGerman Chancellor Angela Merkel said Thursday at a joint press conference with U.S. President Barack Obama that negotiations over the corporate-friendly TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between Europe and the United States "will not be concluded now" that Donald Trump has been elected to succeed Obama.

It is a victory for the millions of people on both continents who voiced opposition to the massive deal. But social justice campaigners across Europe refuse to give the credit to Trump, saying that thanks to public outcry, the TTIP was "already dead" long before November 8.

Indeed, a coalition of European civil society groups and trade unions just this week warned that Trump merely exploited economic unease in order to win the presidential election, and that "[d]espite his rhetoric, Trump fully believes in deregulation, privatization, and putting profit before people."
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/11/17/angela-merkel-sounds-death
-knell-ttip-dont-thank-donald-trump

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Of course, there were many activist groups in the EU struggling to stop TTIP. One of the most pressing concerns was over biotechnology, either as introduced GMOs or as the paired Monsanto chemicals+ chemically resistant GMOs. I have seen some very concerned videos about the effects of glyphosate on root-strength and long-term field yields, animals and people, for example. The individual EU nations would have been powerless to stop Monsanto if TTIP had been ratified. But I feel that had Hillary been elected, TTIP would have been pushed through no matter what the individual nation objections, just like CETA bulldozed the objections of Wallonia.

In any case, the deal is officially dead: Merkel said so.



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"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake

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So NOT an example of how Trump is already succeeding (thread title). In fact, an example of a European rebuke of his win.

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