Wag the Dog: The Syrian Airstrike Charade

The news is rife with the Syrian airstrikes and the theatrical narrative: the united coalition of brave allies against the despotic Assad to secure the blessings of liberty, etc., etc. The reality: The U.S. threw more than 100 missiles against soft Syrian targets with Britain firing rockets from four aircraft as France flew planes around and cruised the waters with a few ships. The target (a suspected but not verified chemical weapons facility) was destroyed…before chemical weapons use, or manufacture could be verified. Once again, the Western Hegemony “showed” that bad ‘ol puddy-tat, that anti-Saudi Arabian, anti-Petrodollar Assad…showed him that his “Clorox Bleach” assault on mannequins as verified by white hat “Light-Brite” technicians would not be tolerated! “Mission accomplished!” in the words of US President Donald Trump.

Yet the brave allies didn’t screw with the Russians directly, now, did they? 

If each of those Tomahawks cost an even $1 million, the US spent over $100 million plus the cost of the operation…five times that? More than half a billion dollars, right? To accomplish what?

To accomplish much, in this order more or less:

1. To wipe out any and all traces of an alleged chemical weapons facility to cover up the fact that there was never anything manufactured there and used against any civilians. The excellent tactical logic: “We’ll use the guise that it poses a threat, blow it up, and we’ll use intelligence reports and a puppet (such as Dunsford) to say the threat was real…target destroyed, and nobody can prove otherwise.”


2. Saudi Arabian Interests: Tyler Durden of Zero Hedge published an article on 4/15/18 “Overthrow the Syrian Regime, but Play Nice with Russia.” That article provides a copy of a Wikileaks cable released in 2015 by the Saudis specifically directing the US to carry out a regime change in Syria, without involving or instigating the Russians. Saudi Arabia has wanted this for years.


3. “Justification” to do it again, but this time for an invasion…as Iran (the main target) cannot be taken without first taking or negating Syria.


4. UK’s Theresa May is facing opposition for her Brexit position. Much in the manner that Thatcher’s sagging popularity in the early 1980’s was bolstered by the Falklands War; May’s hawkish stance helps her ratings.


5. President Trump’s approval ratings are up.


6. Deflects attention from the “Stormy” Daniels fiasco and the other woman involved with one of the President’s associates.


7. Deflects attention from Mueller’s actions and the ongoing battle with the White House.


8. Deflects attention from the fact that National Guard troops were deployed to the US border in keeping with the “in the interests of national security” mantra, but in direct violation of Posse Comitatus…for the real reason of conditioning and accustoming the American people to a “regular” sight of a military presence patrolling the streets of “Fisher Price Land.”


9. Justification of continued troop presence, with naval and air assets remaining in the theatre until regime change in Syria is obtained.


10. Justification of defense expenditures.

There are plenty of sources that clearly point to all of this scripted orchestration by the coalition of allies. Hal Turner published a slew of photos showing canisters of chlorine gas found at the alleged Douma atrocity site…but the canisters were manufactured in Germany, not Syria. Durden’s previously-cited article has a collage of photos showing children laying on the ground for photos as “casualties” and then posing smiling with fake blood and makeup-created wounds. The photo shows casting photographers with film “takes” and a studio with costumes and makeup supplies.

Something seriously “wrong” happened this past weekend. Quietly, almost unnoticed and certainly underreported, on Thursday, 4/12/18 an article surfaced entitled Lawmakers say Trump exploring rejoining Pacific trade talks, by Ken Thomas and Kevin Freking of the Associated Press.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership surfacing again, eh?

Here’s an excerpt from that piece:

“I’m sure there are lots of particulars that they’d want to negotiate, but the president multiple times reaffirmed in general to all of us and looked right at Larry Kudlow and said, ‘Larry, go get it done,"” said Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb.

Eleven countries signed the agreement last month. Trump’s rejection of the deal has rattled allies and raised questions at home about whether protectionism will impede U.S. economic growth.

Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts, the chairman of the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee, said he was “very impressed” that Trump had assigned Kudlow and Lighthizer “the task to see if we couldn’t take another look at TPP. And that certainly would be good news all throughout farm country.”

That last sentence was great, wasn’t it?

“Good news all throughout farm country.”

Have you ever heard a line so freaking ridiculous in all your life? What farm country? Is this “Senator” Roberts looking at one of those “Fisher Price” farms on his desk? The one with the barn that “moos” when you pull the barn door open? The one with all the happy, clean, interchangeable-body figures with hats, hair, and faces to differentiate them by their roles…farmer-father-figure, plastic-braided-hair farmgirl figure, etc.  A plastic cow with a tail that swivels, minus the dung. Plastic fences that bound the farm. And all the figurines fit neatly inside that cardboard silo with the metal bottom and the plastic cap.

That “farm country” has been engulfed by Agribusinesses such as Cargill and Monsanto. Farms feeding the millions with produce harvested by illegal aliens and robots. These crooked, thieving politicians lie to our faces and paint a Potemkin picture for the camera and stage, while they roam the countryside in the night, pillaging and enslaving the country with rapacity and protected by immunity they conferred upon themselves. Last bill passed into law? People: They, the Congress, voted themselves pay raises, and bonuses!

Obama’s TPP died by the President’s hand: now he’s pulling the stake out of its heart.

So, as you may deduce, there is plenty to be seen behind the scenes while “Operation Clorox” was conducted in Syria. Examine the information before you take a drink of that Grape Kool-Aid and blindly fall for the rhetoric. The Deep State is fully in control and moving ahead with their own agenda. They just “wagged the dog” this past weekend, and not only did most Americans fall for it…all Americans paid for it as well. Eventually when the Globalists’ plans escalate further into war, payment will be rendered in lives.

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Jeremiah Johnson is the Nom de plume of a retired Green Beret of the United States Army Special Forces (Airborne).  Mr. Johnson is also a Gunsmith, a Certified Master Herbalist, a Montana Master Food Preserver, and a graduate of the U.S. Army’s SERE school (Survival Evasion Resistance Escape).  He lives in a cabin in the mountains of Western Montana with his wife and three cats. You can follow Jeremiah’s regular writings at SHTFplan.com or contact him here.

This article may be republished or excerpted with proper attribution to the author and a link to www.SHTFplan.com.

The TPP is Not Dead

(ANTIMEDIA) While many are still breathing a sigh of relief that President Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal, some are noting that the world is nowhere near out of the woods yet. There’s another deal being negotiated right now, and this one may be even scarier than TPP. And like the TPP, it’s been quietly cobbled together behind closed doors for years.

The Trade in Services Agreement (TISA), which governments began crafting in 2012, represents 50 participating countries around the world. Before examining the text of agreement, however, it should be noted that TISA is largely a U.S.-E.U. deal and excludes some notable global players, as Glyn Moody highlighted for Ars Technica in 2015:

“Significantly, all the BRICS countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — are absent, and are therefore unable to provide their perspective and input for what is essentially a deal designed by Western nations, for the benefit of Western corporations.”

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As TISA is described on its page at the European Commission’s website:

“TiSA aims at opening up markets and improving rules such as licensing, financial services, telecoms, e-commerce, maritime transport, and professionals moving abroad temporarily to provide services.”

But many analysts are concerned that TISA’s aim of “improving rules” is really only about corporations tightening their grip on their respective industries. Deborah James, writing for the Center for Economic and Policy Research, concluded in November of last year:

“The TISA is intended to lock in a system of rules to allow multinational companies to operate in a borderless digitized environment with minimal regulation and maximum rights regarding the treatment of labor, capital, inputs, and the new key element of data.”

Continuing, she states:

“As promoted by the multinational financial, logistics, and big data corporations through Team TISA, the agreement would set severe limits on the ways that governments can regulate domestic economies, removing key tools of economic management and the ability to shape the service economy while providing an extensive corporate bill of rights for multinational companies’ operations across the globe.”

A corporate bill of rights.

The fact that we know anything at all about TISA is due largely to a series of data dumps from WikiLeaks beginning in 2014, then another later publication from Bilaterals.org, an organization dedicated to shedding light on trade negotiations taking place outside the scope of the World Trade Organization (WTO).

For their part, governments participating in TISA have been reluctant to post updates on the status of negotiations — if they decide to inform their citizens about the deal at all.

Canada’s last update, for instance, is from June, and it says vaguely that “Parties conducted a stocktaking session to assess the level of progress on all issues.” On the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative site, TISA is still described as being “part of the Obama Administration’s ongoing effort to create economic opportunity for U.S. workers and businesses by expanding trade opportunities.”

Given that TISA would do things such as prohibit regulation of the financial industry, including proven-harmful instruments like derivatives — and even, shockingly, instruments and products that have yet to be invented — curtail efforts to safeguard online and digital privacy, and effectively eliminate net neutrality, it’s not surprising that governments haven’t been advertising the deal.

In fact, many are noting that TISA is nothing more than an updated — and reinforced — version of the TPP. Bilaterals.org, noting that despite its unpopularity, the TPP is still being used as the model for TISA, explains:

“Several proposed texts from the failed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement have been transferred to TISA — including state-owned enterprises; rights to hold data offshore (including financial data); e-commerce; and prohibitions on performance requirements for foreign investors.”

While these proposals originated in the U.S., which has since pulled out of the deal, Bilaterals.org points out that “they appear to be supported by other members of the TPP” and, as such, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, through the Trade in Services Agreement, still has the potential to become the “new norm.”

And to that idea, the organization concluded quite succinctly:

“TPP cannot be allowed to become the new ‘default’ position for these flawed agreements.”

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TISA Ready to Take the Place of TPP

TISA’s Worse Than TPP—Kiss Internet privacy and national sovereignty goodbye  – National Economics

We got rid of TPP and now they’re bringing it back with TISA. In some ways it’s even worse that TPP.

TPP was killed because Congress wasn’t going to go along with it and US President Donald Trump withdrew the county from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) as soon as he got into office.

But now we’re finding out that it lives on through the Trade In Services Agreement (TISA). TISA has actually been around for a long time, some 21 rounds of negotiations since April 2013.

And while many things can be said about TISA, it was obviously designed as a back up to TPP. In fact one can speculate that TPP was actually expected to fail and TISA was developed to take its place.

What is TISA? It’s another version of corporate globalism that further deregulates banks, reduces Internet privacy and turns various kinds of manufacturing into services to make internationalization ever easier.

Not only is TISA similar to TPP, it’s a lot bigger, including the US, the European Union and numerous South American and Asian countries. It’s actually a good deal more inclusive than TPP.

Article 9 of TISA’s draft legislation makes sure nations cannot create separate, domestic rules for banks that are not their own. Small, local banks would thus be thrust into competition with overseas multinationals.

Additionally it demands that individual countries allow all sorts of financial products to be sold, including derivatives.

And, like TPP, it allows corporations to sue counties that have passed legislation that would adversely affect corporations. Just as with TPP, disputes would be handled by an as-yes-to-be-created international system.

This was perhaps the most disputed part of TPP, and here it is once more, coming right back again.

They call TISA free-trade, but just like TPP and other recent agreements it’s nothing but managed trade, designed to get corporate advantages.

TISA doesn’t seem to be going anywhere at the moment. The Trump administration claims it wants bilateral trade  talks, not multi-lateral ones. So perhaps it will be on the back burner for a while.

On the other hand, Trump can recreate TISA-TPP with bilateral agreements, so the danger is not over. The next globalist step is to make large corporations equal to nation states or even superior to them. That is what these agreements are supposed to accomplish.

People should be careful about what kind of bilateral agreements Trump wants to make. He already seems to have potentially endorsed a one-world currency in talks with China,

Certainly Trump is no libertarian. He’s not seeking to roll back anything in terms of increasing authoritarian structures, like Homeland Security, that have been erected in the last 20 years.

He seems fine with the structure as it is. He just wants to make sure he can use it for his own purposes.

It’s not clear where Trump is going with TISA. He may well let it die. But he could resurrect it bilaterally if he doesn’t have negative feelings about the larger corporate versus nation-state debate.

Trump may be comfortable giving corporations more power. We would not be, for  reasons stated many times before. Modern corporations are pumped up on the steroids of court decisions that have handed them their monstrous size.

Essentially what we have is a form of corporate fascism that is directly related to the vast structure of these corporate entities. Let them collapse to normal size rather than being inflated by intellectual property rights, corporate personhood, and various regulatory constructs, and we would be much more amenable to letting corporations do as they choose.

But then again, if corporations were merely normal sized, they wouldn’t be the chosen vehicle of the elites. That’s what this is all about really. The top banking elites have created modern corporations from government power, and now they want to extend their control.

Conclusion: They call these agreements “free trade” but the vehicles they use are developed by government not competition. They are supposed to represent the next stage of capitalism. But they are nothing of the sort.

Here’s How Trump Killing The TPP Benefits China

January 24, 2017   |   Darius Shahtahmasebi

(ANTIMEDIA) — Newly inaugurated President Donald Trump has done plenty to provoke all manner of conflict with China. He has made it clear that he will not be pressured into accepting their One-China policy, nor will he accept their territorial claims in the South China Sea. For some commentators, his position is incredibly confusing given his support and admiration for Vladimir Putin, a staunch ally of China.

More confusing is Trump’s decision to dismantle the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP), as this is seen to be a huge victory for China. China was notably left out of discussions and negotiations of the TPP even though China is the world’s second-biggest economy, making up 30 percent of the world’s GDP.

The TPP was, therefore, an integral part of Obama’s China containment strategy (known as the “pivot to Asia”). When the TPP was finalized in 2015, Obama stated: “TPP allows America – and not countries like China – to write the rules of the road in the 21st Century.”

Given his strongman approach to China, why would Trump not support such an initiative?

The TPP was negotiated in secret, behind closed doors with some 600 corporate representatives involved. The deal was seen as largely benefiting the corporate elite, particularly because of its investor-state dispute clause, which allows corporations to sue governments for loss of profits they haven’t even acquired yet — something that has already been attempted in a number of countries. Supposedly, the Trump administration does care about the impact of such an agreement on the American working class, as there was no guarantee that corporations would spend their increased profits on hiring or wages.

However, now that Trump has effectively killed the agreement, according to CNN, Chinese leaders are already angling to take the United States’ place in the agreement and expand their influence in the region notes:

“Obama had pitched the TPP as a way to counter China’s growing influence by imposing US-backed labor, environmental and patent protections. China is unlikely to seek or support such protections in its own trade negotiations — allowing those countries to produce cheaper goods, but with fewer worker protections.”

But how well will the other individual parties welcome China’s emerging role in their agreement? Apparently, quite well. Forbes stated that countries like Australia are already signaling they would support a China-led regional trade deal.

The Washington Post commented:

“Economists have warned that many of Trump’s proposals — including suggestions that he would impose blanket double-digit tariffs on goods from Mexico and China — could backfire on the American economy by causing prices to rise or igniting a trade war. And business groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had lobbied extensively for passage of TPP, touting the deal as an engine of job growth and an important check on China’s growing ambitions.” [emphasis added]

However, President Trump has made it clear that the TPP is only dead in its current form, and he will negotiate free trade agreements with the individual parties to the TPP, instead. What those agreements will entail remains to be seen; perhaps each agreement will pose an even more direct attack on China’s position in the global economy and force the individual countries to rely more on the United States than the Asian market. If that is the case, China’s ability to capitalize on Trump’s withdrawal from the TPP may prove harder than anticipated.

As such, amid concerns of what’s to come, China has cautioned itself not to gloat following Trump’s withdrawal from the TPP. That being said, New Zealand has said it is not going to “sit around and wait” for a free trade agreement with the Trump administration and is looking to keep the TPP alive with the original members. Neighboring Australia has stated that Indonesia, South Korea, and China are still capable of joining.

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This article (Here’s How Trump Killing The TPP Benefits China) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Darius Shahtahmasebi and theAntiMedia.org. Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11 pm Eastern/8 pm Pacific. If you spot a typo, please email the error and name of the article to edits@theantimedia.org.

TPP is Officially Dead — Trump Signs Executive Order Withrawing US from Trade Deal

Washington, D.C. – The much maligned Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a darling of the neoliberal establishment on both the left and the right, is dead in the water after President Trump signed an executive order withdrawing the US from the controversial free-trade pact.

The TPP was the largest global trade agreement since NAFTA, and would have included the United States, Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam. Essentially the TPP was a policy move by the U.S. meant to create a trade bloc as a means of countering rising Chinese economic might — under the guise of an “Asian pivot” – but that was seen by many Americans as a give away to large multinational corporations.

Here is a short primer on the TPP and its partner legislation the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which reveal exactly how these deals were meant to operate:

Much of what the public knows about this secretive trade pact comes from leaks provided by the whistleblower organization WikiLeaks. If not for the information Wikileaks has provided, the public would be even more in the dark than they currently are, as to the details included within these trade deals.

Hillary Clinton was a supporter of the TPP, before later claiming to be against it, while her rival in the for the Democratic presidential nomination, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, railed against the trade pact on a regular basis as something that would hurt American workers.

Opposing the TPP was one of the central tenets of the Trump presidential campaign, as Trump attempted to tap into the angst of the blue collar working class that Senator Sanders had so effectively coalesced in his failed primary run. The new administration called the trade pact a “potential disaster” for the United States, and said they would instead prefer to engage in bilateral deals with the individual states involved in the trade deal.

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Critics of the TPP argue that it gives unfair competitive advantages to large multinational corporations. They also say that it takes away sovereignty from countries and gives it to small decision-making bodies that are not beholden to the public – thus further helping the rich get richer on the backs of the poor.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation laid out a succinct case against the TPP that revealed the far-reaching scope and dangers inherent to the trade deal:

In a joint letter to Congress released today, more than 250 technology companies and user rights organizations say that the extreme level of secrecy surrounding trade negotiations have led to provisions in agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) that threaten digital innovation, free speech, and access to knowledge online, and the letter calls on Congress to come out against the Fast Track, also known as Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), bill for legitimizing this secretive process…

The letter specifically identifies the TPP’s threats based on leaked texts of the agreement—how it threatens fair use, could lead to more costly forms of online copyright enforcement, criminalize whistleblowing and investigative journalism, and create investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) courts that would further jeopardize user protections in domestic laws.

Negotiations for the European-focused parallel trade deal, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), also have come to a sudden end.

Additionally, it appears the Trump administration has it sights set on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which eliminated commercial barriers between the US, Canada and Mexico during the Clinton administration.

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“We are going to start renegotiating on NAFTA, on immigration and on security at the border,” Trump said on Sunday, after the swearing-in ceremony for senior White House staff.

It appears that this decision is one that many Americans, who aren’t part of the establishment-elite, were rooting for since long before Trump came onto the scene. Activists across the world have fought tirelessly to expose and defeat what they see as a give-away to industry and business at the expense of the average person.