THE GLOBAL RULING CLASS

BILL VAN AUKEN—Defense Secretary Gen. James Mattis Monday indicated that the more than 2,000 US troops presently deployed inside Syria would not be going anywhere anytime soon. “We do not want to pull out before the diplomats have won the peace,” he said. “You win the fight—and then you win the peace.”

DANNY HAIPHONG/ Randi Nord—Although Iran does not support Ansarullah with military equipment and weapons, the US SAYS they do. The real problem is that they don’t want an anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist government on the Arabian Peninsula controlling the Red Sea and giving the civilian population in the monarchies any ideas. The mere possibility that a Yemeni government could ally with the Iran axis is enough for the US to say they already do and carry out military intervention accordingly.

ERIC ZUESSE—We are now getting closer and closer to what, quite possibly, could turn out to be a war between U.S. and Russia — a world-ending World War III — and, therefore, I, as an investigative historian, am trying to understand, as accurately as I can, the historical origins of this potentially world-ending conflict, the ‘new Cold War’. In this regard, I am examining the event, the 2012 Magnitsky Act, in the United States (and then copied in the EU), which imposed the first set of economic sanctions against Russia, and thus may reasonably be said to have sparked ‘the new Cold War’.

MOON OF ALABAMA—The British government insinuates that Russia is the only country that could make ‘Novichok’ agents and must therefore have attacked the Skripals. This is obviously nonsense. The U.S. and the UK were deeply involved in the ‘Novichok’ issue. They certainly tried and succeeded to re-create these substances. After the formulas of the nerve agents were published by Mirzayanov the U.S. and the UK suppressed discussion of the issue.

ERIC ZUESSE—In a democracy, the public perceive their country to be improving, in accord with that nation’s values and priorities. Consequently, they trust their government, and especially they approve of the job-performance of their nation’s leader. In a dictatorship, they don’t. In a dictatorship, the government doesn’t really represent them, at all. It represents the rulers, typically a national oligarchy, an aristocracy of the richest 0.1% or even of only the richest 0.01%. No matter how much the government ‘represents’ the public in law (or “on paper”), it’s not representing them in reality; and, so, the public don’t trust their government, and the public’s job-rating of their national leader, the head-of-state, is poor,