They will blame James Comey and the FBI. They will blame voter suppression and racism. They will blame Bernie or bust and misogyny. They will blame third parties and independent candidates. They will blame the corporate media for giving him the platform, social media for being a bullhorn, and WikiLeaks for airing the laundry.

But this leaves out the force most responsible for creating the nightmare in which we now find ourselves wide awake: neoliberalism. That worldview - fully embodied by Hillary Clinton and her machine - is no match for Trump-style extremism. The decision to run one against the other is what sealed our fate. If we learn nothing else, can we please learn from that mistake?

Here is what we need to understand: a hell of a lot of people are in pain. Under neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and corporate trade, their living standards have declined precipitously. They have lost jobs. They have lost pensions. They have lost much of the safety net that used to make these losses less frightening. They see a future for their kids even worse than their precarious present.

At the same time, they have witnessed the rise of the Davos class, a hyper-connected network of banking and tech billionaires, elected leaders who are awfully cosy with those interests, and Hollywood celebrities who make the whole thing seem unbearably glamorous. Success is a party to which they were not invited, and they know in their hearts that this rising wealth and power is somehow directly connected to their growing debts and powerlessness.

The fact that Donald Trump was elected President of the USA is largely irrelevant. What is relevant is the conditions that allowed for him to be elected President of the USA.

So what drove Americans to vote for either Trump or Hillary in this week's US presidential election? Ask the mainstream media, or any Hillary supporter, and they'll probably tell you it was issues like liberal values and social justice. They'll also tell you that Trump supporters were motivated primarily by racism, sexism, and hatred. In reality, Trump voters were just as concerned about social injustice. In fact, this is the issue behind most popular votes around the world these days. And ironically, Trump voters were arguably more concerned about social justice than the liberals who voted Hillary because the social justice that drove millions to vote for Trump is very different to the 'social justice' that concerned Hillary supporters.

Here we need to note the clear distinction between the working-class 'rednecks' in the USA, and some of those in a more upwardly mobile financial position. Most people who voted for Trump were the 'rednecks' and they did so because they are feeling the negative effects of 8 years of the Obama government's 'liberal' economic and foreign policies that have continued unchanged since the 'conservative' Bush years (you might wonder why that is and how it works - hint: the president isn't the 'decider', by a long shot). Those policies coincided with the 2008 'crash' and the bank 'bailouts' that saw millions of American homes repossessed and many traditional manufacturing job losses, both of which disproportionately affected the poor.

It was precisely this marginalization of the most vulnerable in society that was behind the Brexit vote in the UK earlier this year. Both the British people's vote to leave the EU and American people's vote for Trump were not primarily votes for racism or xenophobia but votes against the neoliberal status quo under which the poor saw their living standards drop further and everyone saw war and death abroad increase.

To underline the bipartisan nature of these protest votes; in the US it was the nominally 'left' government candidate that was rejected while in the UK the protest vote occurred under the nominally 'right' Conservative government. The point being; the supposed 'left'/'right' political paradigm in Western democracies no longer exists. It has been replaced by a combination of neoliberalism and neoconservatism, two fancy words that describe ideologies that together form the 'elite' project for transnational globalization and domination of the world's resources by corporations and their political friends through the 'projection' of US military power around the world.

So while the mainstream media, largely supportive of Hillary as the establishment candidate, spent the last 12 months spreading the line that Trump supporters are 'deplorables' and that Trump himself is a raging racist, sexist, xenophobe, liar, cheat, and narcissist, this was a gross lie that hid the truth that most Trump supporters were motivated by a desperate desire for better jobs, better wages, better health care (or any health care), etc. In other words, real social justice.

When Trump was offered to these marginalized and war-weary people as the only alternative to Hillary, they took the offer without much further thought. In addition, based on emerging voter poll data, it seems that it was not only the poor who rejected Hillary and all she stands for, but 54% of white male college graduates voted for Trump. Broken down by income bracket, while 52% of voters earning less than $50,000 a year voted for Clinton, and 41% for Trump, of the 64% of American voters who earn more than $50,000 a year, 49% chose Trump, and 47% Clinton. So, far from the core voter motivation in this election being one of 'anyone but Trump', it may have been closer to 'anyone but Hillary'.

Mikheil Saakashvili, a onetime Georgian president who resurrected his political career in nearby Ukraine, has announced the launch of a new Ukrainian political party and called for early elections just days after resigning his governor's post in Odesa.

Speaking to reporters in the Ukrainian capital on November 11, Saakashvili repeated accusations that rampant profiteering and obstacles to reform are hurting Ukraine, which remains divided two years after Russia seized Crimea and Moscow-backed separatists began fighting against Kyiv's authority.

"We will create a new broad political power, a platform of new forces, and our goal is to change the present, existing, so-called political elite, who are actually profiteers and social misfits," Saakashvili told a press conference.

He said the new party would be called Hvylia, or Wave, and added, "Our goal is for early parliamentary elections to be carried out as quickly as possible."

He again lashed out at Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, a former schoolmate whom Saakashvili accused of sabotaging reform efforts in the Black Sea port region when Saakashvili unexpectedly quit the Odesa governorship on November 7.

Two partners at major law firms have likely been holding their breath since WikiLeaks released an email on November 1 showing that Obama had vetted Hillary Clinton for Vice President and the review came back "too critical," thus leading Obama to select Joe Biden as his Vice Presidential pick during the 2008 campaign. The vetting memorandum on Clinton shows in the email thread to have been transmitted with the email but WikiLeaks has not provided it - yet.

According to the email, which carries a capitalized heading of "CONFIDENTIAL," the vetting of Clinton had been done by James Hamilton, then a law partner at Bingham McCutchen LLP. Hamilton is now a partner at Morgan Lewis, a firm with a long history of ties to Wall Street. His official bio shows that he "served as the Clinton-Gore transition counsel for nominations and confirmations," "as the principal Clinton White House vetter for Supreme Court nominations," "was in charge of vetting vice presidential candidates in 2000 for Al Gore," did the same for John Kerry in 2004 and for Obama in 2008. His bio also indicates that he "vetted candidates for Cabinet, the Department of Justice, White House, and Supreme Court for the Obama administration."

While China is silently playing an important role in the mitigation of the conflict in the Middle East, which is an important market for the Chinese goods, continuously deteriorating security situation, marred by the presence of numerous jihadi groups in the region, the necessity for China to have a strong anchor in the region has become all the more evident today than it was few years ago. The so-called "Arab spring" has brought many changes in its wake. However, war being one of the most important outcomes of this "spring", certain changes in the erstwhile foreign policy orientation of many countries, big and small alike, was expected. To this particular outcome owes the growth of China-Israel relations that continue to develop stronger and deeper every year.

Facts speak for themselves : China's total capital investment in Israeli high-tech deals involving Chinese businesses is expected to reach around $500 million by the end of 2016, compared to $467 million in 2014 and $118 million in 2012. And as Times of Israel reported recently, Chinese acquisitions in Israel have dramatically increased in the last few years. In March 2015, China's Bright Food acquired Tnuva, one of Israel's largest dairy companies for approximately $2.1 billion. Similarly, in July 2016, a Chinese consortium that included private equity firm Yunfeng Capital — founded by Alibaba Group founder Jack Ma - acquired Israeli social games company Playtika from Caesars Interactive Entertainment online games unit for $4.4 billion in cash. In August 2016, ChemChina completed its takeover of Adama — considered one of the world's leading crop protection companies — for approximately $1.4 billion.

The degree of change that Trump will bring to American foreign policy is conditional on several factors, but his ideal vision is to cut a diverse set of pragmatic deals that will allow the US to more effectively multimanage its global empire, though it certainly won't erase the geostrategic contradictions between itself and its Great Power rivals.

Observers the world over are trying to figure out how American foreign policy will change under Trump's Presidency. After all, the President-elect made a lot of non-traditional and controversial campaign promises about how he wants to revolutionize the US' role in the world, but it's a lot easier to say those things than to actually implement them in practice. Let's start off by looking at the conditionals and constants of Trump's envisioned foreign policy and then briefly forecast how he hopes to implement his plan to "Make America Great Again" on the world stage.

Constants and Conditionals

Constants:

Trump would like for his Presidency to be defined by constant deal-making, both by renegotiating old agreements and clinching new ones. As for the first category, he wants to change the relationship between the US and its military vassals so that they pay a greater financial share for the perceived benefits that they receive from the Pentagon. He also wants to redefine NAFTA and the tentative TTIP/TPP overseas deals so that they're not as one-sided and detrimental to the average American worker. This basically means that Trump wants to tweak the globalist economic system that his predecessors implemented, which is most vividly epitomized by his threat to charge a 35% tariff to all American companies which outsource their production and want to sell their finished products back to their home country.

Although the Trump administration has not yet fully formed and taken office, the Republicans are drafting a more active plan to dismantle the overregulation of the US financial system in order to boost economic and business activity.

Kristian Rouz — The Republican campaign and several GOP House Representatives have repeatedly criticised the Dodd-Frank agreement during the most recent election season as excessive regulation that hampers domestic lending and curbs private incentive and economic growth potential.

Earlier this year, the GOP-controlled House put forth an initiative to "repeal and replace" Dodd-Frank, leaving it up to financial organisations to hedge against risks or take full responsibility for losses in a meltdown case scenario, ruling out the bailout option and redefining the 'too-big-to-fail' concept as a drawback rather than a privilege.

Dubbed the C.H.O.I.C.E. Act and authored by Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas, the initiative remains on its way toward implementation, but the prospective policy team of President-elect Donald Trump is already seeking to dismantle the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), paralyzed by October's court ruling, on their way on tear down Dodd-Frank.

The Syrian government has "sighed with relief" after the victory of Donald Trump and welcomes his election promises on Syria, as well on the struggle against terrorism, particularly against Daesh, George Jabbur, adviser to former Syrian President Hafez Assad, told Sputnik on Friday. At the final presidential debate with Democratic nominee Hilary Clinton on October 19, Trump said that his priority in Syria would be to eliminate Daesh and not to remove Syrian President Bashar Assad from power.

"Syria has responded positively on Trump's statements and the government has breathed a sigh of relief, because Damascus agrees with his plans on anti-terrorism struggle. Everything Trump should do is to cooperate with governments of Moscow and Damascus in struggle against Daesh," Jabbur said. Jabbur added that the most promising Trump's statement was that Assad was not the main threat and the United States would fight mostly against Daesh.

On Tuesday, Trump secured at least 290 Electoral College votes, which is more than 270 required to win the presidency. The so-called Arab Spring protests in Syria that took place in 2011 resulted in clashes between the government forces and opposition. Since then, the Middle Eastern country has been mired in a war between authorities in Damascus, numerous opposition factions, as well as terrorist groups, including Daesh, which is outlawed in the United States and Russia among others.

People have now learned and accepted that Trump is inevitably the new president of the United States. They try to figure out what that means. We do not know, neither does anyone else. A lot of rumors and speculation are circling of who will take up this or that job in a Trump administration. These rumors are mostly created by those who would like that job, or their personal lobbies. They should be ignored.

The mainstream media is barely able to issue a mea culpa for their extreme pro-Clinton campaign and total failure of reporting the real state of the union. It is now looking for obfuscations like claiming no one could have gotten it right. That is a cheap excuse for incompetence.

It is astonishing that THE media outlet that did the most to shine lights on Clinton is ignored in any of the main stream after-election reporting. I am talking of Wikileaks and Julian Assange who did their very best, under high personal risk, to report the truth about Clinton's and the DNC's utter corruption. A big thank you to them!

Opinion polls suggest Bulgaria's pro-Russia opposition candidate Rumen Radev is expected to score a victory in the upcoming presidential run-off. A survey by Gallup International showed Friday that 51 percent of the voters in the Black Sea state support Radev in the election slated for November 13.

Another opinion poll by Alpha Research gave Radev a 49.6-percent lead over ruling party candidate Tsetska Tsacheva, 58, with 39.1 percent. The Gallup survey gave parliamentary speaker Tsacheva , who is backed by Prime Minister Boiko Borisov's centre-right GERB party, 40 percent of the electorate votes.

"Mrs. Tsacheva represents the status quo" while outspoken Radev is seen as an agent of change, analyst Zhivko Georgiev of the Gallup Institute told media.