Quad summit consolidates US-led military bloc to prepare for war against China

Peter Symonds

The first leaders’ summit of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue or Quad, which took place online last Friday, has dramatically raised the stakes in the accelerating US-led war drive against China. While the Quad is not yet a formal military alliance, the Biden administration clearly views the consolidation of the partnership as a central element in its efforts to undermine, encircle and prepare for military conflict against China.

Scott Morrison (left) participates in the inaugural Quad leaders meeting with the Joe Biden, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga and Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi in a virtual meeting in Sydney, March 13, 2021 (Credit: Dean Lewins/Pool via AP)

The summit not only issued a formal statement. Unusually also, Biden and the prime ministers of India, Australia and Japan—Narendra Modi, Scott Morrison and Yoshihide Suga respectively—put their names to an opinion piece published prominently in the Washington Post on Sunday. The comment is replete with cynical motherhood statements about their advocacy of democracy, action on climate change and COVID-19 vaccines, and commitment to “an Indo-Pacific region that is free, open, secure and prosperous.”

However, while China is not mentioned, it dominated the discussion at the summit. The pledges by the four leaders to pursue regional co-operation, partnership and engagement do not, of course, extend to Beijing. Buried in the various public statements were thinly-veiled references to Chinese coercion—from the US that has routinely waged war and ousted governments to advance its imperialist interests—and the need to uphold “freedom of navigation”—that is, for the US Navy to provocatively intrude into waters around Chinese-controlled islets in the South China Sea.

The Washington Post comment includes a fanciful history of the Quad—supposedly borne out of the cooperation of the four countries in response to the catastrophic 2004 tsunami in Asia. “Our cooperation, known as the Quad, was born in crisis. It became a diplomatic dialogue in 2007 and was reborn in 2017,” the leaders write. How and why it mysteriously disappeared, and reappeared a decade later, is left unexplained.

Yet the genesis of the Quad is very revealing. It did not begin with the tsunami but with the election of the right-wing Japanese politician Shinzo Abe as prime minister in 2006. He called for enhancing the US-Japan military alliance by forging close partnerships with India and Australia. The plan was driven by growing concerns in the Japanese ruling class about China, which was about to overtake Japan as the world’s second largest economy. The Bush administration, under fire from the Democrats for inaction over China, seized on the proposal and the first official meeting took place in May 2007. Its military purpose was underscored in September 2007 by the expansion of the annual US-India Malabar naval war games to include the navies of Australia and Japan.

Beijing protested against the formation of what was emerging as a military alliance in the Indo-Pacific targeting China. The Quad ignominiously collapsed months later in February 2008 when the newly-elected Labor government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, concerned about relations with Australia’s largest trading partner and the danger of war, abruptly withdrew from the dialogue. Foreign Minister Steven Smith underscored the Canberra’s determination not to join a grouping that could be construed as anti-Chinese by making the announcement while standing alongside Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi.

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard with then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2012 (Wikipedia)

Rudd’s withdrawal from the Quad was just one of the “crimes” for which he was ousted in a US-orchestrated regime-change operation in June 2010. While he was fully committed to the US-Australian alliance, Rudd’s advocacy of the US making compromises with China to avert war came into conflict with the thrust of the Obama administration’s policy to confront China. Rudd was summarily removed as prime minister by four key Labor powerbrokers, later revealed by WikiLeaks to be “protected sources” of the US embassy in Canberra, in an operation that kept, not only the public, but Labor ministers and party members in the dark.

The following year, in November 2011, Obama, who had twice called off visits to Australia when Rudd was in office, announced his “pivot to Asia” strategy directed against China. Unveiled by Obama in the Australian parliament, the “pivot” involved comprehensive diplomatic, economic and strategic plans to undermine and encircle China throughout the region. Militarily, the Pentagon foreshadowed the restructuring of US bases in the region, the strengthening of alliances and strategic partnerships and the transfer of 60 percent of its naval and air assets to Asia. While in Australia, Obama and a fawning Prime Minister Julia Gillard signed an agreement to station US Marines in the country’s north.

Biden, as vice president under Obama and former chair of the influential Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was closely involved in all these machinations. By convening last Friday’s summit, he elevated the Quad to a new level, demonstrating that his administration will intensify the aggressive anti-China stance of the Obama and Trump administrations. The Quad, which was revived under Trump, is about to play a far more prominent role, with regular ministerial-level meetings, a face-to-face summit later this year, and a further expansion of joint military exercises.

None of the strategic commentators on the Quad is under any misapprehension that it is targeting China. It is already a quasi-military alliance engaged in a range of annual war games. Australia and Japan are longstanding military allies of the US, while India has forged intimate ties through a strategic partnership that includes comprehensive basing arrangements and technological assistance.

In the lead-up to the Quad summit, Trump’s former Defence Secretary James “mad-dog” Mattis and two other military analysts wrote a comment for Foreign Policy entitled “Getting the Quad right is Biden’s most important job.” It said “the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue is the best hope for standing up to China.” It declared that Biden faced “a resurgent China, more confident than it was before the COVID-19 pandemic” and praised him for continuing Trump’s initiative in reviving the Quad.

The comment identified four areas where the Quad had to take action: to counter China in the South China and East China Seas; to ensure “supply-chain security”—that is, to guarantee access to vital imports necessary to fight a war; to maintain the technological edge over China particularly in crucial hi-tech areas; and to enhance diplomatic ties throughout Asia, “in ways not possible for Washington alone.” All four areas were referred to, if only obliquely, in the joint statement issued by the Quad leaders. Each item has been a preoccupation of the US military as it prepares to fight what would be a war between nuclear-armed powers with incalculable consequences.

Over the past decade, the US plans for war against China have been more and more evident: from the steady military build-up throughout the Indo-Pacific, including anti-ballistic systems designed for fighting a nuclear war, to the increasingly strident and bellicose anti-Chinese propaganda, featuring fraudulent “human rights” campaigns over Xinjiang, Tibet, Mongolia, Hong Kong and Taiwan aimed, above all, at weakening and fracturing China.

In the lead-up to the Quad summit, the head of the US Indo-Pacific command, Admiral Philip Davidson testified to the US Congress. He called for a doubling of the Pentagon’s budget for the region and predicted that the US could face war with China within five years. The headlong plunge toward war by US imperialism is driven by the fear in Washington that China is overtaking it economically and technologically, as well as by the need to direct the tensions fueled by the profound political and social crisis at home outward against an external enemy.

Growing anger against Biden administration’s mandate for standardized tests during pandemic

Phyllis Steele

Last month, President Biden’s Acting Assistant Education Secretary Ian Rosenblum sent a letter to state education administrators instructing them that standardized tests had to be administered to students in some form this spring, summer or fall.

Rosenblum—whose previous job was executive director of the Education Trust-New York, a pro-standardized testing and pro-business organization—said states could delay the tests but they could not be canceled like last spring and they have to be conducted as soon as possible. The spring testing window for state tests, including the PSAT and SAT, typically given to high school juniors and seniors preparing for college, has already started in the United States.

The states of Michigan, California, Illinois, Georgia, New Jersey and New York requested testing waivers for the 2020-2021 school year in December and January. Others, such as Texas, Tennessee, Florida and Indiana, are testing students regardless of the Biden administration’s decision.

Rosenblum, who currently heads the Education Department’s Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, claimed the tests were needed to “address the educational inequities that have been exacerbated by the pandemic, including by using student learning data to enable states, school districts, and schools to target resources and supports to the students with the greatest needs.”

This is nothing but a political cover. Testing is being tied to school reopenings, with the push for standardized testing coinciding with the Biden administration’s plans to open up all K-8 schools by the end of April.

“President Biden’s first priority is to safely re-open schools and get students back in classrooms, learning face-to-face from teachers with their fellow students,” Rosenblum wrote. “To be successful once schools have re-opened, we need to understand the impact COVID-19 has had on learning and identify what resources and supports students need.”

He added, “We must also specifically be prepared to address the educational inequities that have been exacerbated by the pandemic, including by using student learning data to enable states, school districts, and schools to target resources and supports to the students with the greatest needs.”

Standardized tests have been among the greatest stressors to the nation’s children, teachers and families since they were aggressively scaled up under the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB). These tests have been used to systematically defund public schools for the past two decades, and mandating them during a pandemic should be deemed cruel and unusual punishment.

At a December 2019 Public Education Forum in Pittsburgh, Biden promised that he would end the federal mandate on standardized testing. Instead, his Education Secretary Miguel Cardona is a fierce advocate of standardized testing and school reopening who provoked widespread anger among teachers when he served as Connecticut’s commissioner of education.

During his confirmation hearing, Cardona reiterated his insistence on standardized testing, stating, “If we don’t assess where our students are and their level of performance, it’s going to be difficult for us to provide some targeted support and a resource allocation in the manner that can best support the closing of the gaps.”

In an effort to posture as teachers’ allies and cultivate illusions that Cardona and Biden can be pushed to the left, the heads of the national teachers unions and various Democrats have publicly opposed the Biden administration’s mandate on standardized testing. National Education Association (NEA) President Becky Pringle stated her opposition shortly after Rosenblum’s memo was circulated.

Last week, American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten—who has played the central role in facilitating Biden’s homicidal campaign to reopen schools—co-authored an article for NBC News with New York representative Jamaal Bowman, in which they only oppose standardized testing this spring. While stating that they “understand why [standardized tests] exist,” their only objection is that “standardized testing this year will not reliably gauge student performance or identify areas in need of growth.”

Bowman, who is a member of the pseudo-left Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), also recently co-wrote a letter to Cardona opposing testing with five Democratic members of Congress, including Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rep. Thomas Suozzi of New York and Rep. Mark Takano of California. Omar and Bowman are part of the DSA’s congressional “squad” and promote identity politics to confuse workers and keep them tied to the Democratic Party.

Their letter endorses the reckless campaign to reopen schools, writing, “we must dedicate all of our efforts to a return to safe, in person learning, and we cannot divert our time and expenses to ‘teaching to,’ implementing and administering federally mandated testing.”

The manner in which this year’s tests take place is being left to the states, with each one determining testing dates and whether they will be done virtually or in-person. Cardona claims that students should not be asked to go into buildings in areas where cases are high to take tests, which begs the question why any students are going into buildings at present, as COVID-19 continues to run rampant throughout the country. According to Burbio’s K-12 School Opening Tracker, only 53.7 percent of schools are open at some capacity, with many of those only in a hybrid form.

According to a Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) study, 25 percent of students were missing for fall assessments. More broadly, there has been a loss of an estimated 3 million children from public school rolls during the pandemic. Students are missing due to loss of family members, caregivers’ loss of jobs, unstable housing, and the inability of parents to get childcare assistance for those forced to work.

Among educators, parents and students, there is widespread opposition to the continuation of standardized testing during the pandemic. A Michigan teacher commented to the World Socialist Web Site, “In mid-October, my students, now 9th graders, were given the PSAT, after over two months of virtual learning, and three months of summer where no learning took place. These scores could potentially be used for my evaluation. Students should not have been given this test. The country is in the middle of a pandemic and these students have over five months not receiving normal instruction or had accessibility issues with technology.”

A kindergarten teacher from Utah spoke about the standardized test for identifying letters and sounds, known as the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS). She said, “Here’s the thing about DIBELS: it doesn’t really give us that much information we don’t know or can’t get other ways, especially the Beginning of Year test. It takes money from the district to hire the testers and have them travel around the various schools.

“The kids take their masks off for the DIBELS testing and the testers just wear face shields. Same thing for ELL testing. It’s about 5 minutes per kid but the testers are in the same poorly ventilated room for hours at a time. And they travel between different schools. We also have standardized benchmark tests in Math and Reading given to us by the district.

“We are hanging on by the skin of our teeth. I am so burnt out. Every Friday I feel like I’m going to fall apart and every Monday I wake up dreading going to school. And I LOVE teaching!! This is just exhausting and it’s so hard to teach kindergartners and kindergarten content with the masks and attempts at distancing and extra stress all the teachers and kids are under. It’s just a lot.”

The entrenchment of standardized testing under Bush, which was escalated under Obama, followed decades of bipartisan budget cutting and the systematic destruction of working class living standards. Predictably poor results on tests were exploited to persecute teachers and close “failing schools,” which were either left to rot or converted into privately-run charter schools. Teacher evaluations and pay were also aligned with test results, further undermining a wide-ranging curriculum and converting it into mind-numbing “teaching to the test,” largely tailored to the needs of big business.

Throughout this process, there has been a continual funneling of public resources to for-profit charter schools and other school privatization schemes, which will only deepen under Biden. Significantly, at the last minute, Democratic Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (NY) inserted $2.75 billion in funding for private schools into the COVID-19 stimulus package passed last week. This reactionary and unprecedented move was endorsed by Weingarten.

The pandemic has been exploited to accelerate the attack on teachers and public education, with massive budget cuts implemented in states across the US and masses of educators leaving the profession early in response to the demand that they return to deadly classrooms for in-person learning.

Among educators, parents and students, there is enormous opposition to testing and the reckless reopening of schools. This must be combined with a political struggle against the further starvation of public education and for a radical redistribution of wealth to greatly improve the quality of public education. Until the population in inoculated and the pandemic contained, all learning must remain fully remote.

Only after a massive infusion of funds to vastly improve education should tests, designed and overseen by educators themselves, be conducted to see where improvements and more resources should be allocated.

The Perils of Military 5G

Karl Grossman

Demonstrations will be held this coming Friday and Saturday protesting the deployment of 5G—a technology that, among other issues, presents huge health risks by blanketing the Earth with radiation resulting in cancer and other illnesses, encourages satellite collisions generating space debris, causes depletion of the ozone layer by the huge number of launches planned, and is a major factor in the weaponization of space.

A key aim of the U.S. military is utilizing 5G for “re-targeting” the hypersonic missiles it has been developing—missiles that fly at five times the speed of sound so guiding their trajectories must occur with extreme rapidity.

A “5G SpaceX Satellite Protest” is to be held Friday, March 19 at the headquarters of SpaceX in Hawthorne, California. SpaceX, of which Elon Musk is founder and CEO.

Information on the California protest is available here.

SpaceX is deeply involved in launching the small satellites being placed in low-earth orbit for 5G. Last week, it launched a rocket carrying another 60 and plans to send up tens of thousands in the next few years in a program SpaceX has named “Starlink.” Also, as part of “Starlink,” SpaceX last year was given permission by the Federal Communications Commission to erect up to one million antennas on earth to serve as transceivers linked to the satellites.

On Saturday, March 20, a “5G Global Protest Day” will be held with protests planned around the world. Information on the “5G Global Protest Day” is available here.

Says Julie Levine, coordinator of the organization 5G Free California: “The planet is calling out to us. If ever there was an existential crisis on earth, we are in it now. Please join us in taking action.”

The term 5G represents what is described as a fifth-generation of wireless communication technology. The drive for it has been intense. There has been a barrage in recent times of advertising by telecommunications companies for 5G.

And, with the military component a large factor, there’s been a big Pentagon push.

Dafna Tachover, director of Stop 5G and Wireless Harms Project of the organization Children’s Health Defense, says: “Science on the health risks of wireless radiation has been accumulating for decades. Heedless of the dangers, government and the telecommunications—‘telecom’—industry continue to propagate wireless technologies and infrastructure, helped along by captive regulatory agencies and successful efforts—including legislative—to silence public debate about health effects. At the same time, media campaigns and apps designed to addict the public—and especially children—have been effective in generating consumer enthusiasm. As a result, the wireless transformation has been hugely profitable.”

Epidemiologist Dr. Devra Davis, founder and president of the Environmental Health Trust, says: “The transmissions to and from proposed 5G wireless installations are radiofrequency emissions that are an environmental pollutant found to cause cancer in both experimental animals and humans, DNA damage, neurological damage and other adverse health and environmental effects, e.g., on birds, bees, and trees, according to internationally recognized authoritative research. The prestigious institutions that have conducted these studies include the U.S. National Toxicology Program, the nation’s premier testing institute, and the Ramazzini Institute, a foremost testing center in Italy.”

Dr. Davis notes that “an immediate moratorium on 5G” has been “called for by more than 400 scientists and supported by thousands of medical doctors,” as cited in a court challenge last year by the Environmental Health Trust to the Federal Communications Commission’s actions—and inaction—on 5G.

Moreover, she says, “Wired technologies such as fiber or coaxial cable are far superior to wireless as they are faster, more reliable, resilient, energy-efficient, and more easily defended from cyber-attacks. Above all, wired connections are significantly less hazardous to our health and to other life forms with whom we share this planet.”

In a Scientific American article, Dr. Joel Moskowitz, director of the Center for Family and Community Health in the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, states: “The latest cellular technology, 5G, will employ millimeter waves for the first time in addition to microwaves that have been used for older cellular technologies, 2G through 4G. Given limited reach, 5G will require cell antennas every 100 to 200 meters, exposing many people to millimeter wave radiation.”

His article, titled “We Have No Reason to Believe 5G Is Safe,” further notes that “we have considerable evidence about the harmful effects of 2G and 3G” and “little is known about the effects of exposure to 4G, a 10-year-old technology, because governments have been remiss in funding this research.”

Dr. Moskowitz asks: “As a society, should we invest hundreds of billions of dollars deploying 5G, a cellular technology that requires the installation of 800,000 or more new cell antenna sites in the U.S. close to where we live, work and play?”

“What 5G means to the military”—was the headline of an extensive article this past December on the Military & Aerospace Electronics website. It began: “Emerging fifth-generation wireless communications—better-known as 5G—will be far more than quick-connect phone calls and fast movie downloads, particularly for the U.S. military.”

“5G holds the promise of ubiquitous high-speed data connectivity; vastly improved intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance; fast and secure command and control; more efficient logistics; swarming unmanned vehicles; and wide use of virtual reality and augmented reality,” the piece states.

“The promise of 5G is for instant situational awareness anywhere on earth, smart hypersonic weapons with re-targeting on-the-fly, rich access to mission-critical data on the leading edge of the battlefield,” the article declares.

The “re-targeting on-the-fly” is critical for the newly-developed hypersonic missiles—the first test of which occurred last March 19th from the U.S. military’s Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai, Hawaii. Hypersonic missiles fly at some 3,600 miles per hour or one mile per second. A “re-targeting on-the-fly” thus needs to happen with great quickness. The hypersonic missiles are “nuclear capable.”

The U.S. is seeking to acquire “volumes of hundreds or even thousands” of “stealthy” hypersonic missiles, reported an article last year in Aviation Week & Space Technology.

“Military experts foresee that the 5G system will play an essential role for the use of hypersonic weapons—missiles, including those bearing nuclear warheads, which travel at a speed superior to Mach 5…in order to guide them on variable trajectories, changing direction in a fraction of a second to avoid interceptor missiles,” says an article headed “The Hidden Military Use of 5G Technology.” Written by Manlio Dinucci, it first appeared in 2019 in the Italian web newspaper, Il Manifesto, with an English version published by Global Research.

The article cites a report, “Defense Applications of 5G Network Technology,” issued by “the Defense Science Board, a federal committee which provides scientific advice for the Pentagon.” It quoted the report as stating: “The emergence of 5G technology, now commercially available, offers the Department of Defense the opportunity to take advantage, at minimal cost, of the benefits of this system for its own operational requirements.”

“DOD Announces $600 Million for 5G Experimentation and Testing at Five Installations” was the heading of a Department of Defense press release. “Today, the Department of Defense announced $600 million in awards for 5G experimentation and testing at five U.S. military test sites, representing the largest full-scale tests for dual-use applications in the world,” said the press release. The term “dual-use” is common in the U.S. space program standing for a program that has both a civilian and military purpose.

“The Department of Defense is at the forefront of cutting edge 5G testing and experimentation, which will strengthen the Nation’s warfighting capabilities as well as U.S. economic competitiveness in this critical field,” the press release went on.

It identified the five 5G test sites as: Hill Air Force Base in Utah; Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington; Marine Corps Logistics Base in Georgia; Naval Base San Diego in California; and Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada.

“Pentagon Looks to Tap 5G in Space,” was the headline summing up the U.S, military’s 5G drive of an article in February 2021 on the website Defense One.

As for the military component of 5G, Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space — www.space4peace.org — said in an interview: “It is no surprise that the corporate media is pushing 5G so widely and eagerly—without the slightest bit of critical thought.”

“The Pentagon knows that faster speeds from 5G will enable greater space surveillance, targeting, and offensive military operations as a result,” he noted.

“Launches of tens of thousands of 5G satellites will ensure that every person on Earth will have a satellite over their head 24/7,” Gagnon continued. “Imagine the surveillance and targeting capabilities that would become available.  And the taxpayer is fronting much of the money. The DOD and NASA are awarding hundreds of billions of dollars to the likes of Elon Musk of Space X and other private launch corporations to hoist the 5G satellites into the heavens.”

“There is an additional downside to all of these 5G satellite launches,” says Gagnon of the Maine-based international organization. “With each launch the resulting toxic rocket fuel is punching a larger hole in our planetary ozone layer which exacerbates the climate crisis. In addition, the orbital parking lots, which are already quite crowded, are quickly filling up which will become a point of conflict in the near future as other nations become agitated that the U.S. is grabbing most of the parking spaces in the increasingly contested orbits.’

Points out Gagnon: “There is presently no national or international regulation over the use of space. Not only is this a worry, because of the resulting increase in dangerous space debris, but one must recognize that humankind is creating a deadly new arena of competition and military confrontation.”

“It is up to all of us,” says Gagnon, “to speak out and demand that NASA, the Federal Communications Commission, the United Nations and the Pentagon quickly undertake a process of fair regulation of space launch operations.  If not done immediately we will face a cascade of deadly collisions and even war in space.”

“There are many reasons to oppose 5G—health impacts, environmental impacts, loss of the night sky which is angering astronomers—but the military use of 5G is possibly the worst,” says Gagnon, “as it needlessly accelerates the already huge concern about keeping space for peace.”

The Stop 5G International announcement on Saturday’s “5G Global Protest Day” includes a “Stop5G International Declaration” which relates: “We envision and seek to ensure a world where 5G, 6G or any other ‘G’ is replaced by safe technology that has undergone scrutiny to ensure the health and well-being of all life on the planet before being unleashed. We envision and seek to ensure a world where the health and well-being of all life takes precedence over corporate self-gain.”

The announcement also states: “The Heavens, our planet’s last precious frontier, are not a commodity to be bought and sold and degraded for private commercial gain; but rather, they are Sacred and held in public trust; and we stewards here on planet Earth are legally and ethically responsible for their wise and careful exploration.”

StopG International has prepared an “Open Letter to Elon Musk & SpaceX” which it is asking individuals and organizations to sign on to. It declares: “We are writing to you at this time because SpaceX is in the process of surrounding the Earth with a network of thousands of satellites whose very purpose is to irradiate every square inch of the Earth. SpaceX, like everyone else, is treating the radiation as if it were not there….We write to you today to ask you to halt the Starlink project because it is so destructive.”

There is also a 5G International Legal Action Network led by attorneys Julian Gresser and Amber Yang which has advanced an “Healthy Heavens Trust Declaration.” It explains, “We are a professional network of lawyers and relevant experts, dedicated to redirecting the 5G Juggernaut toward balance and wisdom. Our species is rushing toward a future that feeds our addiction to speed, instant gratification, energy consumption, and disconnection from Earth. By creatively working together, we have a chance to cause a shift.”

The Simple Rules of Wealth Inequality

Bob Lord

A great deal of confusion surrounds America’s extreme inequality, what causes this inequality, and how we can check and then reverse it.

That needn’t be. Ultimately, economic inequality comes down to the concentration of wealth at the top, and we can explain the dynamics of that concentration in a few simple rules — and one not so simple, but understandable, computation.

Rule One: For those at the top, every tax is a wealth tax.

In America, we have many types of taxes. We have income taxes, sales taxes, excise taxes, property taxes, and estate taxes. For most of us, how we’re taxed matters. Sales taxes impact our spending decisions. Income taxes impact how hard we work, how much we save, and when we retire.

For those at the top, the type of tax doesn’t matter so much. From the perspective of the wealthy, every tax amounts to a wealth tax. Why should that be the case? Income, sales, and other existing taxes don’t particularly influence the spending decisions the wealthy make or such mundane judgments — to them — as how many hours they work, when they may be able to retire, or whether they need the additional income from a spouse’s job.

Our existing taxes only impact the wealth of our ultra-wealthy. Tax payments, to be more specific, only determine how fast or how slow the wealth of the wealthy grows.

Rule Two: Wealth concentrates at the top when we have insufficiently taxed wealth.

Thomas Piketty’s best-selling book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, has one core takeaway, the simple notion that the wealth of those at the top will grow at a rate faster than the rate of growth for a nation’s overall wealth, unless taxes on the wealthy reach a sufficiently high level.

The reason? The super-wealthy have built-in advantages over the rest of us when it comes to growing wealth. They hire professionals to manage their investments. They have the financial wherewithal to make high-yielding investments — provide the seed money for a promising start-up, for instance — that the rest of us don’t have the resources to make. And the living expenses of the ultra-wealthy consume only a tiny portion of their wealth compared to the rest of us.

Only stiff taxation on the rich can level the wealth accumulation playing field.

Rule Three: Wealth doesn’t concentrate when the rich pay their fair share of taxes.

Politicians and pundits often tell us that the rich must pay their fair share of tax. Nobody disputes that point. The dispute centers on how we define “fair share.”

Let’s start our defining here: Society suffers when wealth continually concentrates at the top. If the rich are increasing their wealth at a rate faster than society at large, the concentration will continue. Inequality will become more extreme, to the detriment of most all members of that society.

So when are the rich paying their fair share in tax? They’re paying that fair share when wealth is no longer concentrating at the top. Over the past four decades, unfortunately, American tax policy has offered a shining example of the exact opposite. We’ve had a tax system that has sped the concentration of wealth. Since 1980, our tax policy in the United States has taxed work more and wealth less. As a direct result, taxes on America’s wealthy have declined dramatically.

A recent Institute for Policy Studies briefing paper estimates that billionaire tax payments, as a percentage of their wealth, have dropped by an astounding 79 percent since 1980.

We can, fortunately, measure how tax policy is impacting wealth concentration and, in the process, estimate how far short of “fair share” the taxes rich people pay end up falling.

Suppose the aggregate wealth of a nation doubles over a given period and, during that same period, the wealth of the nation’s topmost group — say the top .01 percent — quadruples. Without knowing anything else, we’d know that the top .01 percent’s share of that nation’s wealth has doubled over that period. Similarly, if the wealth of the nation’s top .01 percent had increased eight-fold while the country’s aggregate wealth merely doubled, we’d know that the wealth share of that nation’s top .01 percent had quadrupled.

That’s roughly what happened in America over the last four decades. In 2018, the wealth of the average American ran about 8.4 times the wealth of the average American in 1980. But the wealth of the average top .01 percenter in 2018 ran 35 times the top .01 percenter average in 1980. Do the division: 35 divided by 8.4 matches up to slightly more than a four-fold increase in the wealth share of the top .01 percent: from 2.3 percent in 1980 to 9.6 percent in 2018.

That’s runaway wealth concentration — and increasingly extreme inequality — in action.

Things didn’t have to work out that way. They would have not worked out that way if we taxed the wealthy more heavily.

Between 1950 and 1980, we did tax the wealthy more heavily. The wealth of the average American in 1980 ran approximately five and a half times the wealth of the average American in 1950. The wealth of the average top .01 percenter in 1980, meanwhile, also ran about five and a half times the wealth of the average top .01 percenter in 1950. The end result: Top .01 percenters had the same share of the nation’s wealth in 1980 as they had in 1950: 2.3 percent.

At that level of wealth concentration, the average top .01 percenter held about 230 times as much wealth as the average American. In dollar terms today, a 2.3 percent wealth share for the top .01 percent would have fewer than 13,000 households sharing over $2.5 trillion in wealth, an average wealth of approximately $200 million per household.

American society found that level of wealth concentration far from ideal, but tolerable. The more than four-fold increase in wealth concentration since 1980, by contrast, has been intolerable.

How did that transformation occur? America’s tax policy changed radically. After three full decades at the “fair share rate”, the tax payments required of America’s wealthiest dropped precipitously. The taxes paid by top .01 percenters, as a percentage of their wealth, dropped more than four percentage points below the fair share rate — the rate that would have prevented American wealth from concentrating at the top.

Put another way, tax policy in America between 1950 and 1980 kept wealth of the average member of the top .01 percent at 230 times the net worth of the average American. Then, changes in tax policy allowed the wealth of America’s average top .01 percenter to increase to 960 times the wealth of the average American.

If we’re ever going to stop — and reverse — America’s extreme inequality, the radical tax policies of the past four decades must change and must change soon.

The University Deception: Rankings and Academic Freedom

Binoy Kampmark

Forget the global university rankings of any list.  The global university promotion exercise is filled with snake oil and perfumed refuse, an effort to corrupt the unknowing and steal from the gullible.  The aim here is to convince parents, potential students and academics that their institutions of white collar crime are appealing enough to warrant enrolment and employment at.

Writing in 2019, Ellen Hazelkorn, who has had an eye on the rankings system for some years, observed that 18,000 university-level institutions could be found across the globe.  “Those ranked within the top 500 would be within the top 3% worldwide. Yet, by a perverse logic, rankings have generated a perception amongst the public, policymakers and stakeholders that only those within the top 20, 50 or 100 are worthy of being called excellent.”

Rankings are complicated by a range of factors: methodological problems in arriving at the figure, what institutions themselves submit, their wealth (endowments, well moneyed donors, grants received) and age (old ties, networks), and, fundamentally, what is being asked of that institution.  Such grading systems have been found, as Nancy Adler and Anne-Wil Harzing describe it, to be “dysfunctional and potentially cause more harm than good”.

One factor that does not find itself into the rankings bonanza is that of academic freedom.  This surely would be one of the primary considerations in what is irritatingly called the “knowledge economy”.  None of the three most consulted registers – the QS rankings, Times Higher Education or the Shanghai Academic Rankings of World Universities – makes mention of it.

This has obvious implications.  Higher education institutions in countries where repression, censorship, surveillance and punishment of academics are condoned do not need to worry about being compromised in the climb up the ladder. An obvious example is the application of the Chinese National Security Law to Hong Kong, which has seen entities such as the Chinese University of Hong Kong sever ties with the freshly elected student union.  Campus events at both CUHK and the University of Hong Kong have also been cancelled for fears of violating the NSL.

The PRC is merely an obvious example.  Countries supposedly romping home in any academic freedom contest also face questions.  In Australia, thuggish administrators and academic turncoats are moving in on crushing the contrarians, reducing the entire teaching syllabus and research agenda to the drool of wonky projections and outcomes.  The idea is simple: You must be decent and liked, boringly acceptable in discourse and compliant in observing directives from management.  The project is guaranteed through such slime-coated documents as the “code of conduct”, which is meant to make everyone good by keeping education and incompetence in the higher echelons of university governance safe.  Discomfort is eschewed; different thoughts suppressed.

Australian learning and research institutions, as in other developed countries, have been tempted by various powerful financial incentives – money from Chinese sources, for instance – to make any campus criticism difficult.  Last year, the University of Queensland took a dim view of the protest efforts of student activist, Drew Pavlou citing 11 allegations of misconduct in a bulky 186-page document befitting any show trial process.  Pavlou was suspended for “prejudicing” the university’s reputation by, in his words, “using my position as an elected student representative to express support for Hong Kong’s democratic protesters.”  UQ’s Vice Chancellor Peter Høj was damning in silence, telling the university’s alumni in a July 17, 2020 email that UQ lived and breathed “an ongoing commitment to the protection and promotion of free speech every day.”

A number of scholars and activists have suggested an institutional corrective to the deceptive picture of rankings.  The Academic Freedom Index is one such proposal, developed by members of the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi), the Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), the Scholars at Risk Network and the V-Dem Institute.

In their report Free Universities: Putting the Academic Freedom Index Into Action, Katrin Kinzelbach, Ilyas Saliba, Janika Spannagel and Robert Quinn hope to “bring a rights and freedoms perspective into debates on higher education governance and policy.”  They make the point that academic excellence and reputation are currently considered mere functions of outputs in the current scheme.  “As a result, institutions in repressive environments have climbed the reputation ladder and now occupy the top ranks.”  Confidently, the authors make the claim that featuring an adjusted rank “would lower the chances for institutions constrained by such restrictive environments to improve their international reputations and attract academic talents”.

The AFi is also drawn from 2,000 experts who were asked to contribute on various indicators “in the de facto realization of academic freedom”: the freedom to teach and research; freedom of academic exchange and dissemination; institutional autonomy; campus integrity; and freedom of academic and cultural expression.

As with any index, questions will be asked about what is left out.  There is also something inherently artificial in the exercise of correcting a ranking using the AFi measure.  Even the contributors to the report admit to not knowing “enough about academic freedom and the factors that sustain or threaten it.”  Declining levels of academic freedom are noted in Belarus, Hong Kong, Sri Lanka and Zambia; Gambia is earmarked as being stellar for permitting scholars’ freedom to collaborate and disseminate their findings.

As Saliba explained, most states which had witnessed a deterioration of academic freedom relative to 2019 were those implementing “novel regulations that limit freedom to research, teach and publish” and initiated “repressive political acts against pro-democracy movements with a strong base among students and faculty.”  These are conventional measures, and do not consider the more subtle forms of suppression and regulation to be found in various Western states.  Australian institutions, for instance, maintain their undeservingly high rankings, suggesting that much more needs to be done to make the index accurate.

A recommendation to the collective can be suggested.  One of the most potent threats to the academy lies in the commercial and corporate bureaucratisation of the university, suggesting that the very notion of rankings, drawn from a global knowledge economy parceled in the language of outcomes, is not only misplaced but deeply flawed.  The AFi has merit on some level, but does not shed light on the more sinister policies focused on reputation management.  In its current form, the index risks becoming a tool for managers keen to show they are making changes which leave no substantive effect.

Germany: Open schools, day-care centres and businesses increase risk of new coronavirus variants

Gregor Link

New daily coronavirus infections are rising steadily again in Germany, as well as in France, Poland, Austria, Denmark and the Netherlands. Previously, the numbers of infections and deaths had fallen to a level corresponding to the peak of the first wave.

The R-value, which indicates the incidence of infection eight to 16 days ago, is currently back at 1.26 (compared to 0.96 only three days ago). Although only 7 percent of the population has received an initial vaccination and of these people only one in two is fully immunised, the federal and state governments are systematically lifting the remaining protective measures. In this way, they are setting the course for mass fatalities that goes far beyond what has happened so far.

The widespread and comprehensive reopening of primary schools three weeks ago has resulted in the incidence rate among primary school children officially exceeding the average rate for the population as a whole for the first time. Among 0-to-four-year-olds, the incidence rate has risen from 48 to 60 in 100,000 within one week, according to the RKI’s current situation report. Among five-to-nine-year-olds, the incidence rose from 54 to 72 and among 10-to-14-year-olds from 51 to 62.

School children in Frankfurt (Michael Probst / The Associated Press)

In the German capital Berlin, the incidence rate among children under four years of age has more than doubled in the past fortnight. Among five-to-nine-year-olds, it rose from 41 to 77 and in the 10-to-14-year-old age group from 32 to 75.

Robert Koch Institute (RKI) head Lothar Wieler described the increase in cases of infection among the under-15s since mid-February as “very rapid.” At the same time, he noted that more outbreaks were currently being observed at day-care centres than in the period before Christmas, when a wave of 1,000 deaths per day occurred.

A map compiled by a teacher from North Rhine-Westphalia, providing a geographical overview in which reports from parents and teachers are entered, lists a total of 147 “school clusters” for the period “from February 2021,” including 58 infection clusters with “3 to 9 infections” and at least five mass outbreaks “with 10 or more infected persons.” In the same period, 110 “day-care clusters with mutated virus strains” were reported.

In an interview with the Rhein-Zeitung, Leipzig epidemiologist Markus Scholz reported a “tripling of infections” in Saxony and urgently warned against further school openings: “In our state, not even four weeks after schools reopening, we see the number of cases exploding among children and adolescents.”

At the press conference, RKI’s head Wieler also explicitly named the B.1.1.7 variant, which is now responsible for a total of 55 percent of infections, as a possible reason for the explosion of infections at day-care centres. A recent publication in the BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal ) concludes that the virus strain is more contagious than the original type and is associated with a 64 percent higher mortality.

Yet despite the exponential spread of this highly dangerous variant and hundreds of outbreaks at day-care centres and schools, the deadly reopening policy is to be further intensified in the coming days and weeks. After the chairperson of the Conference of State Education Ministers, Britta Ernst (Social Democratic Party, SPD), declared on Friday that there was a nationwide “consensus” to bring all pupils back to school “before the end of March,” the state governments are outdoing each other with their life-threatening reopening plans.

In North Rhine-Westphalia, for example, schools are to reopen completely as early as March 15. This is despite the fact it is “quite possible” that there “will be no testing for pupils in the coming week,” as Education Minister Yvonne Gebauer (Free Democratic Party, FDP) flatly declared. For the 2.5 million pupils in the state, they plan to provide a total of 1.8 million tests by the Easter holidays.

From Berlin, the Tagesspiegel reported on Friday that the Greens, the Left Party and SPD-led education administration agree to implement “the reopening of schools to all classes” as soon as possible, i.e., without the necessary protection. By Tuesday, grades four to six are to be attending school again.

Meanwhile, in Baden-Württemberg, ruled by a coalition of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Greens, fifth and sixth graders are to return to in-person learning in full classes today, without protection against infection and without mass testing. In Saxony, too, the 240,000 pupils in secondary schools are to return to school without regular testing, although state Education Minister Christian Piwarz (CDU) had promised the timely provision of tests only a few days ago. There is not even a voluntary testing option for grades 5 and 6.

Bavaria is even planning to open primary schools in “coronavirus hotspots,” i.e., in districts and cities with a seven-day incidence above the devastating mark of 100 cases per 100,000. State Education Minister Michael Piazolo spoke of a “pilot experiment” with additional tests, but strictly rejected “compulsory testing,” i.e., a systematic investigation of the incidence of infection. In Rhineland-Palatinate, where the incidence rate is currently lower than in other federal states, the government had introduced alternate in-person and at home teaching for primary school pupils on February 22.

These policies threaten countless lives and fly in the face of any scientific assessment of the pandemic.

Virologist Melanie Brinkmann told the press on Thursday that she was “appalled” by the decision to “open up schools—without a testing concept—given the current high incidence rates in Germany.” She said the current decision was an “intellectual insult to everyone,” which would lead to “intensive care units filling us up” and the country “rushing” into a third wave. “I feel let down there as a citizen with old parents, on the one hand, and three school-age children, on the other.” Back in February, Brinkmann had warned, in the event of extensive reopenings, 180,000 people under the age of 60 in Germany would not see the next spring—including children.

The prestigious medical journal The Lancet published an open letter from scientists on Wednesday titled, “School reopening without robust COVID-19 mitigation risk accelerating the pandemic.” The letter cites modelling studies by the University of Warwick and Imperial College London that suggest the school reopening scenarios proposed in the UK will be associated with “at least 30,000 more deaths from COVID-19.” The scientists conclude, “Reopening fully in the setting of high community transmission without appropriate safeguards” provides “fertile ground for virus evolution and new variants.”

A commentary by immunology professors Daniel Altmann and Rosemary Boyton in the medical journal BMJ further warns of the risk of COVID-19’s long-term effects on children (“Long COVID syndrome”) in light of the schools reopening. The article refers to national research according to which 79,000 of those affected by Long COVID in the UK are “less than 19 years old.” The symptoms are similar to those of older people: “fatigue, shortness of breath, joint pain, rashes, headaches.”

The authors also recall the “high prevalence of asymptomatic spread” among children and adolescents and point out that the resumption of classes was always accompanied by “jumps in the R-value.” Overall, the researchers say, children play “a significant role” in carrying the virus “into the community and to older relatives.” The BMJ had called the governments’ pandemic policy “social murder” in February, citing the writings of socialist Friedrich Engels.

“I seriously wonder who doesn’t notice the connection between the day-care/school reopenings and the case numbers rising again,” educator Raphael W. told the World Socialist Web Site. “As an educator, how are you supposed to feel about working every day with children from whom you can’t keep your distance? Even before coronavirus, many children came to school or day-care sick. If I wanted to work with serious illnesses and potential risk of infection, I would have chosen a different profession. The kids are the only reason I still do the work at all.”

“Parents and educators find out a day in advance what the phase is for the next three days,” Raphael continued. “Instead of adjusting our salary to the importance of our job, we are asked to put our health, our lives and those of our loved ones on the back burner. Add to that the bad press that constantly screams ‘open up!’ and suggests that we are lazy. The fact that educators have one of the highest incidence rates, don’t keep their distance and can’t demand it because of the children doesn’t occur to them.”

Raphael’s experience is supported by comprehensive health data. Recent figures from Techniker-Krankenkasse (TK)—the largest public health insurance company in Germany—have confirmed that workers in social professions have the highest risk of contracting COVID-19.

For example, nurses, educators and occupational therapists are more than twice as likely to be on sick leave due to coronavirus than the average person with health insurance. Special needs teachers, doctors, social workers and paramedics are also particularly severely affected. Teachers, who are not covered by the TK statistics, are just below day-care workers, according to figures obtained by the authorities from broadcaster NDR. A study by health insurer AOK in October had come to comparable results.

While contact restrictions apply in the private sphere, “I am forced to have contact with 200 households per week while on duty,” says teacher Simone E. in a Facebook group for teachers from all over Germany. “Because of the lack of pre-quarantine, I was not able to celebrate Christmas with my elderly parents. I am still very angry about that.”

Before Christmas, Simone reports, “we teachers mutated into auxiliary police officers: Mask checks, supervision, toilet guard, following up contacts—with all the conflicts that entails. I won’t do that anymore, I’m not a soldier.” The few rapid tests available “provide relative safety for three to five hours and yet only serve to pull the wool over parents’ eyes,” Simone concludes. “I don’t do that kind of thing.”

Instead, Simone advocates the continuation of at-home teaching: “Distance learning is the finest hour for the quiet ones and a fiasco for class clowns. My students can learn well in distance learning. They also dare to write and say more at home than in the group.”

The devastating impact of the 10-year US-orchestrated war on Syria

Jean Shaoul

March 15 marks a decade since the start of the campaign by Washington and its regional allies to topple the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The Obama administration utilised anti-government protests in several Syrian cities that were suppressed with lethal force in March 2011, as in Libya before it, as the pretext for a large-scale operation in pursuit of its geo-strategic interests—against a regime with which it had long been at odds.

In a chorus of moral outrage, the United Nations, the US and the European Union all condemned Syria’s crackdown while issuing only pro-forma criticisms of far worse repression in allied states Bahrain and Yemen, amid the broader upsurge of the working class in the region that became known as the Arab Spring.

The U.S. launched an attack on Damascus, Syria on April 14, 2018. U.S. President Donald Trump announced airstrikes in retaliation for the country's alleged use of chemical weapons. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)

The CIA and Washington’s regional allies—the Gulf petro-monarchs, Turkey and Israel—financed, sponsored, trained and aided a succession of Islamist militias as their proxies to carry out the task of unseating Assad. These Sunni sectarian forces, some of whom like al-Nusra Front were linked to al-Qaeda, were ludicrously hailed as “revolutionaries.”

A plethora of pseudo-left groups, including France’s New Anti-Capitalist Party, Britain’s Socialist Workers Party, and the US’s International Socialist Organisation (now dissolved into the Democratic Socialists of America, a faction of the Democratic Party) and academics such as the University of Michigan’s Juan Cole and the School of African and Oriental Studies’ Gilbert Achcar, also hailed these “revolutionaries,” in many cases discredited former regime figures. No attempt was made to describe their political programme or to explain why feudal Gulf despots who outlaw all opposition to their rule at home would support a progressive revolution abroad.

Despite this assistance, these opposition forces proved unable to topple Assad, testifying to the lack of popular support for their far-right, often jihadist politics.

Today, the situation in Syria, formerly a middle-income country, is in UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’s words a “living nightmare,” where, “The scale of the atrocities shocks the conscience.”

The appalling suffering produced by imperialist warmongering—other than that in the opposition-held Idlib province—has largely been ignored by the world’s media. The fighting has led to the deaths of more than 400,000 people. It has spawned the world’s largest refugee and displacement crisis, forcing around 5.6 million people to flee the country, with another 6.1 million displaced within Syria. Nearly 11.1 million people—around 60 percent of the population—need humanitarian assistance.

About half of those affected by the refugee crisis are children. Half the children have never lived a day without war. Their life expectancy has fallen 13 years. More than half a million children under the age of five in Syria suffer from stunting due to chronic malnutrition. Nearly 2.45 million children in Syria and a further 750,000 Syrian children in neighbouring countries are out of school.

According to a recent report by World Vision, the war has cost the Syrian economy a massive $1.2 trillion in lost GDP. Worse is yet to come with 60 percent of the population likely to face hunger this year as the cost of an average food basket rose by over 230 per cent in the last twelve months.

As a reader in the capital Damascus told the World Socialist Web Site, life is a daily struggle just to get basics like food and fuel. Bread at affordable prices is in short supply. A wheat exporter before the war, Syria saw its growing areas seized by militias that prevented farmers from selling their produce to the government, smuggled wheat out of Syria, and resorted to burning the land of farmers who objected, forcing the government to import wheat. While the government has set up a smart card rationing system to distribute bread at subsidised prices, it means standing in line for more than four hours. The alternative is bread at ten times the price.

Syria used to export small amounts of oil, but after armed groups took control of the oil producing areas, it had to import oil. While gasoline and diesel are also distributed via a smart card, it means waiting for hours, often to find that supplies have run out. As a result, the streets are largely traffic free. The lack of electricity has affected production while factories have been unable to replace equipment and machines destroyed in the war, compounding unemployment and economic hardship.

Even in relatively upscale areas in Damascus, the city least affected by the war, electricity is available for just three hours at a time. Power cuts last much longer in the countryside and in other cities.

The cost of a kilo of meat has risen to 25,000 lira, equal to half the average monthly wage, while the cost of chicken, eggs, fruit and vegetable has soared due to the plummeting currency—the lira trades at 4,000 to the dollar compared to 50 in 2010—high transport costs, and rampant profiteering.

Our reader concluded, “While everything is available in Damascus for those who have money, the poor and those on low incomes, more than 75 percent of the population, suffer terribly.”

The authorities have officially recorded around 16,000 COVID-19 cases and more than 1,000 deaths. Figures are widely assumed to be a gross underestimate with President Bashas al-Assad and his wife both testing positive recently.

According to the International Rescue Committee, only 64 percent of hospitals and 52 percent of primary health care centres are functioning, while 70 percent of healthcare workers are believed to have fled the country as healthcare facilities became targets for the rival militias. Some 84 percent of healthcare workers reported that attacks on health care directly affected them, their team or their patients, while 81 percent know of patients or colleagues who were killed in attacks.

One in four health professionals witnessed attacks that left facilities beyond repair, with many setting up alternatives in places such as caves, private homes and underground cellars. The situation has been compounded by US sanctions preventing medical supplies and equipment reaching the country. All this has left 12 million Syrians in need of health assistance. Around one third require routine reproductive, maternal, neonatal and child health services.

Guterres, and almost all the western media and analysts, blamed the country’s economic collapse on a combination of “conflict, corruption, sanctions and the COVID-19 pandemic.” This is a flat out lie.

The proxy war in Syria was bound up with decades of military and covert operations, sanctions and other economic measures by the US and its allies in the resource-rich Middle East that have devastated not just Syria, but Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Yemen, as well as Iran and Lebanon.

The US-orchestrated intervention was in large part driven by Washington’s efforts to isolate Iran, Syria’s chief ally in the region, and cut it off from its ally Hezbollah, the bourgeois clerical group in Lebanon. It came amid the discovery of significant offshore oil and gas reserves in the Eastern Mediterranean, including in Syria and Lebanon’s territorial waters.

Even as Assad, with the help of Russia, Iran and Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon, regained control of most of the country, the situation did not improve. The Trump administration sought to ramp up the economic pressure on Damascus by implementing economic sanctions against Syria. This drastically increased the demand for dollars, led to a massive rise in the cost of living and prevented any aid to help with the country’s reconstruction.

The incoming Biden administration has already signaled, with its launching last month of airstrikes against Syria in violation of international and its own domestic law, that it is intent on escalating the provocative and militaristic policies pursued by its predecessor in Syria, the Middle East and internationally.

The US strikes follow the revelation that Israel has not only conducted hundreds if not thousands of airstrikes on Iranian and pro-Iranian militias and Hezbollah in Syria, and more recently similar attacks in Iraq, but also—according to the Wall Street Journal — attacked 12 ships on their way to Syria with Iranian oil and possibly also with Iranian weapons.