Marathon Petroleum Corp: What are oil workers fighting against?

Jessica Goldstein

After national contracts for 30,000 US oil refinery workers expired February 1, the United Steelworkers has kept rank-and-file workers in the dark about negotiations with Marathon Petroleum Corp., the lead corporate negotiator in this round of contract talks. The corporation is demanding workers accept pay increases of just 2 to 3 percent, a major pay cut considering the average inflation rate of 7.5 percent across the US.

The Marathon Petroleum Corp. refinery is shown in Detroit, Tuesday, April 21, 2020. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)

Workers must know the enemy which they are up against. Marathon (MPC), based in Findlay, Ohio, is the largest independent market refiner by market value in the US. It operates 16 refineries with a crude oil throughput of 2,913,900 barrels on average every day of the year. It has seen its refining margins increase more than double from last year and revenues have exceeded analysts’ estimates by 37 percent, according to Bloomberg. Its fourth-quarter profits in 2021 beat expectations by over double.

Billions in bailout money, mass layoffs for workers

Marathon reported $6.61 billion in profits in 2021, far outpacing 2020 profits of $671 million and approaching profit levels from 2018. Two important contributing factors to the rise of its profits far and above those reported in 2020 were the injection of bailout money from the US federal CARES Act and the corporation’s strategy to increase the exploitation of the working class to pay off this debt through mass layoffs.

According to the Guardian, Marathon cut 9 percent of jobs at US oil refineries in 2020, laying off 1,920 workers and throwing their families into financial uncertainty in the wake of a deadly pandemic. The cuts were announced as Marathon accepted a $1.1 billion tax refund under the CARES Act which “gave companies tax benefits based on net operating losses.” Marathon also spent $2.6 million lobbying the US government to increase tax deductions under the CARES Act in 2020.

Marathon received a total of of $2.1 billion in federal bailout money, including another billion dollars in tax benefits from federal programs intended to protect businesses from the pandemic-induced economic downturn. The website Bailout Watch estimated that in total, Marathon received about $1.1 million in federal money for every worker who was cut from its payroll that year.

Marathon also idled two refineries in 2020 in Gallup, New Mexico, and Martinez, California. The company cited the fall of oil prices and demand for gasoline as the deciding factor behind the job cuts, although the corporation had amassed over $18 billion in gross profits over the years 2018 and 2019 combined.

The United Steelworkers union, which supposedly represents workers but acts as an arm of management in Marathon’s US refineries, did nothing to prevent the layoffs which affected hundreds of workers in Texas, Louisiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Minnesota, California and Illinois. Nor did it stop the layoff of nearly 60,000 workers at another 77 oil and gas companies in the US, including major producers Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron and ExxonMobil, after the industry received a total of $8.4 billion in CARES Act tax refunds.

In 2019, the USW also avoided a nationwide strike and pushed through a set of concessions contracts behind the backs of workers that did not include substantial protections for workers’ safety or demands for such measures as preventative maintenance, which workers would have fought for to prevent deadly explosions and fires. In 2016, a fire at Marathon’s Galveston Bay refinery in Texas City, Texas, injured three contract workers. Marathon settled lawsuits for the damages for $86 million in total, a drop in the hat considering its profits. The Galveston Bay refinery is its most productive operation, where workers produce 585,000 barrels per day.

Marathon’s global operations

Across the oil industry, refineries have increasingly relied on the use of cheaper contract labor. Contractors earn lower wages on average and have fewer benefits and job protections than employees of the companies, thus increasing the profitability of the companies. The USW has allowed the corporations to continue this exploitative practice with successive contracts.

Marathon invested much of the federal aid money in aggressive stock buyback programs. Earlier this month, Bloomberg reported that Marathon had completed 55 percent of a $10 billion share buyback program and was “authorized to purchase another $5 billion in stock” this year.

In 2021, Marathon sold its Speedway convenience stores for $21 billion to Japan’s Seven & i Holdings Co. Ltd., which also owns majority shares of the 7-11 convenience chain. Before the sale, Speedway CEO Timothy Griffith was compensated $5.8 million in total in 2020.

Marathon sources the majority of petroleum from the US in operations which stretch from the Eagle Ford Group rock formation in Texas to the Bakken formation in North Dakota. A significant supply, about 20 percent as of 2020, is sourced from Equatorial Guinea, a country on the west coast of central Africa which is an important hub for the continent’s emerging oil industry.

Equatorial Guinea is the most unequal country in the world, with a tiny elite grown wealthy through the country’s oil wealth while much of the population leads a subsistence lifestyle. The country’s president, Teodoro Obiang, came to power in 1979 after deposing his uncle’s presidency in a coup d’état which killed up to 400 people, and is widely suspected of skimming off the top of the country’s oil wealth to add to his personal fortune of some $600 million.

Marathon’s global operations

Marathon’s Board of Directors is a roster of super-rich corporate executives and faithful servants of US imperialism and the interests of US energy corporations.

Marathon President and CEO Michael Hennigan’s total compensation was $15.5 million in 2020, more than doubling his 2019 compensation of $7.7 million before taking the position as Marathon’s CEO. Before that, he was CEO of Marathon’s logistics, storage and natural gas processing subsidiary MPLX.

In 2018, Marathon acquired Andeavor for $23 billion, an independent refinery and oil company based out of San Antonio, Texas, with operations in the western US. After the acquisition, Marathon became the largest petroleum refinery operator in the US. Kim Rucker, former executive vice president, general counsel and secretary of Andeavor, now has a position on Marathon’s board of directors.

Also on Marathon’s board is lobbyist and career Democratic Party politician Evan Bayh, an Indiana senator from 1999–2011, Indiana governor from 1989–1997 and former secretary of state of Indiana. When he left politics to pursue corporate lobbying, Bayh’s wealth soared to between $13.9 and $48 million.

During his time in Congress he served on several boards including Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs; Armed Services; Energy and Natural Resources; and the Select Committee on Intelligence. Bayh is now a shill for banks and the energy corporations, lobbying in the interests of top executives for tax breaks and loosening of environmental and financial regulations.

Another member of Marathon’s board with interests tied to American imperialism and its wars abroad is Abdulaziz Alkhayyal, retired senior vice president of industrial relations of Saudi Aramco who worked for the company from 1981 to 2014. Saudi Aramco is a Saudi Arabian public petroleum and natural gas company that is one of the largest companies in the world by revenue and owns the world’s second-largest proven crude oil reserves. The company’s business interests were served by the American-led offensive Operation Desert Shield in Iraq from 1990–91, during which it began to expand into the Asian market.

Alkhayyal also has a position on the board of directors of Halliburton, a major oilfield services company. The company was made infamous for its nepotistic and highly profitable ties to the Bush administration through its former CEO-turned-US Vice President Dick Cheney. In 2013, Business Insider reported that Halliburton was given a total of $39.5 billion in contracts related to the US invasion of Iraq over the course of the war.

The geopolitics of the oil and gas industry

Control of the world’s oil and gas resources is no less a central objective of American imperialism today than it was in the decision to launch the war in Iraq in 2003. Just as claims of “weapons of mass destruction” served as a screen to seize Iraq’s oil wealth, a major factor in the campaign by the United States against Russia is not its nonexistent respect for the national sovereignty of Ukraine or any other country, but control over the immense oil and gas resources of Russia, the world’s largest exporter of natural gas.

In particular, the United States is determined to sabotage the Nord Stream 2 pipeline connecting Russia with Germany, which would provide capacity to nearly double Russian gas exports to Europe. This is unacceptable for the United States not only because it would undercut American competition but because it would also threaten US dominance in Europe.

A war in Ukraine could virtually halt Russian gas supplies to Europe, causing massive shortages. Biden has attempted to reassure Europe by claiming that US suppliers could help make up the difference. In a speech last week, Biden declared that his administration was “taking active steps to alleviate the pressure on our own energy markets and offset rising prices.” He continued, “We’re coordinating with major energy producers. We’re prepared to deploy all the tools and authority at our disposal to provide relief at the gas pump.”

This statement must be taken as a warning by refinery workers that the Biden administration is prepared to intervene on behalf of Marathon and the other oil companies in order to keep production going, including by moving against a strike. There can be no doubt that not only the White House but the Pentagon is following the contract talks between the USW and Marathon extremely carefully.

Conclusion

This is what workers are up against. Marathon is a powerful company, but oil workers are more powerful. The global scale of the oil industry’s operations mean that they have allies all over the planet among the international working class. Just as Marathon has its own international strategy, workers must develop their own international strategy based on the unity of the working class across the world.

Elections in Colombia: Prospects for Change and Lack of Guarantees

Lautaro Rivara

The Latin American and Caribbean electoral calendar for 2022 promises to be no less hectic than that of the previous year. Among the upcoming elections and referendums that are slated for this year—Costa Rica, Mexico, Chile, Peru, perhaps Haiti—two contests that are expected to attract the most attention, due to the specific geopolitical weight of these respective countries, are the general elections in Brazil, which are supposed to take place in October, and the Colombian parliamentary and presidential elections, slated for the first half of 2022.

After 20 years of governments that have supported the Uribism movement—named after Álvaro Uribe Vélez, who was president of Colombia from 2002 to 2010—and with the eternal backdrop of the armed conflict, Colombia is not only playing for change but also for the future of an unfinished peace process.

What Will the Electoral Process in Colombia Look Like?

The electoral agenda in Colombia will begin with the parliamentary election on March 13, in which citizens will have to elect a total of 108 senators and 188 members of the House of Representatives. In the Senate, 100 seats will be chosen by national constituency; two by the special constituency for Indigenous peoples; one will go to the presidential candidate who gets the second-highest number of votes—the so-called “opposition statute”; and five will automatically correspond to the political representation of the Comunes party—which was created in 2017 by members of the former FARC party (Common Alternative Revolutionary Force) following the 2016 Havana peace accords.

As for the House of Representatives, 161 seats will be elected by territorial constituencies in the 32 departments of the country and in Bogota, the capital district. One seat will go to the vice presidential candidate who receives the second-most votes under the opposition statute; two will go to Afro-Colombian peoples; one will be for the Raizal community of the archipelago of San Andrés, Providencia and Santa Catalina; one will go to Colombians living abroad—estimated to be around 4.7 million people according to the 2012 figures provided by Colombia’s Foreign Ministry; one seat will be for Indigenous peoples; five seats will again be for the Comunes party; and 16 seats will be for the special constituency for peace, by which 167 rural municipalities will participate to elect candidates who will represent the 9 million victims of the internal armed conflict officially recognized by the state.

In addition, coinciding with the parliamentary election on March 13, the various parties in Colombia will also elect the presidential candidates during the internal consultations of the coalitions that will go to the polls, in a scheme that seems to increasingly blur the traditional liberal-conservative bipartisan scheme present throughout Colombian history. Elections for the positions of president and vice president, both of whom will hold office until 2026, will take place on May 29. If no ticket wins more than 50 percent of the votes, there will be a second round of voting on June 19.

The Crisis of Uribism and the Favoritism of the Historic Pact

In Parliament, the ruling Democratic Center, which is the party formed by former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe Vélez, could lose its present first minority in the Senate, with 19 seats, and second minority in the House, with 32, due to the high disapproval ratings for President Iván Duque (whose disapproval ratings reached 75 percent, according to an Invamer survey of September 2021) and for his mentor Uribe (who had a disapproval rating of 68 percent). The latter is accused of being responsible for a notorious case of witness tampering that led to a judge placing him under house arrest for two months in August 2020. And he has also been associated with the “alleged electoral corruption” scandal also called “ñeñepolítica,” according to which the renowned drug trafficker José “Ñeñe” Guillermo Hernández had contributed drug money for the purchase of votes in the 2018 presidential election in Colombia, as was revealed by journalists Julián Martínez and Gonzalo Guillén of La Nueva Prensa.

But the fact that best explains the electoral panorama in Colombia, which was unthinkable just a couple of years ago, is the national strike of 2021, accompanied by a series of massive protests in rural areas and in some of the main cities of the country, such as Bogotá and Cali, in rejection of the tax reform bill presented by Duque. The escalation of repression by the Armed Forces, the ESMAD (Colombia’s Anti-Disturbance Mobile Squadron) and even the deployment of paramilitary groups in several departmental capitals contributed to the crisis and provided visibility to these protests at the international level.

According to the nonprofit organization Temblores—which “[documented] practices of police violence” during the national strike in Colombia—between April 28 and June 26, 2021, there were 44 homicides allegedly at the hands of the security forces (another 29 homicides remained undetermined with regard to the exact cause of death); 1,617 victims of physical violence; 82 cases of violence resulting in eye injuries to the victims; 28 victims of sexual violence; and 2,005 arbitrary detentions against the demonstrators. Providing varying figures, Human Rights Watch, Indepaz and the Ombudsman’s Office, along with other nonprofits and agencies, also validated the numerous cases of human rights violations during the demonstrations that took place in Colombia.

In the midst of this crisis, and after a long dance of seduction and rejection with the right wing that was not associated with Uribe, the candidate chosen by the ruling party, former Minister of Finance Óscar Iván Zuluaga, stated in January 2022 that he will run alone on behalf of the Democratic Center, a move that will most likely diminish the electoral prospects of the Democratic Center.

In addition to the governing party, there will be three other coalitions that will “aim to define single candidates among different political forces” on March 13. From the left to the center-left is the Historic Pact Coalition, which brings together “presidential pre-candidates,” such as former mayor of Bogotá Gustavo Petro for the Colombia Humana and Afro-Colombian social leader Francia Márquez for the Soy Porque Somos (“I am because we are”) movement. Other “political movements” that form part of the Historic Pact Coalition are Patriotic Union—a party that has survived the “genocide for political reasons” of more than 5,000 of its militants and leaders in the 1980s; the Colombian Communist Party; the Alternative Democratic Pole; the Indigenous and Social Alternative Movement (MAIS); the People’s Congress; and the party of former Congresswoman Piedad Córdoba, Movimiento Poder Ciudadano, among others. Even figures who used to be part of Uribe’s Democratic Center party, such as Roy Barreras and Armando Benedetti, have come out in support of the Historic Pact.

Few doubts remain about the favoritism of Petro, the coalition’s main builder, who started his electoral campaign on January 14 in the locality of Bello, in the department of Antioquia—a historic bastion of Uribism—under the slogan “if Antioquia changes, Colombia changes.” Petro, a former militant of the guerrilla group known as the April 19 Movement in the 1970s and 1980s, built his political capital as a senator when he was elected in 2006 and as a denouncer of the so-called “parapolitics”—the collusion of politicians and paramilitaries during the demobilization process of the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC)—during Uribe’s first term as president. Petro revalidated his capital later, in his tenure as mayor of Bogotá, until his removal by Attorney General Alejandro Ordóñez in 2013, in one of the region’s first lawfare cases. As a presidential candidate, Petro received promising poll numbers from Invamer: 48.4 percent of voting intention, very close to victory in the first round, and a comfortable 68.3 percent in the second round.

In second place is a centrist group, the Hope Center Coalition, which includes the Dignity Party, the Revolutionary Independent Labor Movement or MOIR, New Liberalism and Citizens’ Commitment, the party of the best-positioned candidate of the coalition, the former mayor of Medellín and former governor of Antioquia, Sergio Fajardo.

Lastly, and to the right of the political spectrum, is the Coalición Equipo por Colombia (Team for Colombia), a league of former mayors and governors of conservative orientation. The coalition consists of Creemos Colombia, the party of the former mayor of Medellín Federico Gutiérrez; País de Oportunidades, the party of Alejandro Char, the powerful politician and businessman of Syrian and Lebanese descent who was formerly the governor of Atlántico and mayor of Barranquilla, in Colombia’s Caribbean coast region; the Partido de la U, who declined the candidacy of its president Dilian Francisca Toro and will support the former mayor of Bogotá Enrique Peñalosa; and finally, with less competitive candidacies, the traditional Colombian Conservative Party and the MIRA Movement Party.

The Armed Conflict and the Absence of Political and Electoral Guarantees

Due to the multicultural approach of the pioneering 1991 Constitution, Colombian electoral law provides for special ethnic representations, according to local considerations. In addition to the political and economic exclusion of Indigenous, Black, Afro-Colombian, Raizal and Palenquero communities, and the postponement in the inclusion of entire regions in Colombia, such as the Pacific, the Orinoco and the Colombian Amazon, there is an urgent need for the representation of victims and former combatants of a conflict that only seems to be worsening, despite the partial and formal achievement of peace five years ago under the Havana peace accords.

The worst consequences of the “decades of conflict” in Colombia have been the death of more than 600 social leaders and human rights defenders since the Havana agreements, according to the 2020 figures provided by the United Nations; the 6,402 so-called “false positives,” a state crime that involved the murder of civilians presented as guerrillas killed in combat; the continued armed activity of FARC dissidents, the National Liberation Army (ELN) and, above all, of numerous paramilitary formations such as the Gulf Clan; the more than 90 massacres committed in 2021 and 14 massacres that have been reported so far this year, according to the Institute of Development and Peace Studies (Indepaz); and, finally, the rising tensions on the Colombian-Venezuelan border, particularly in the Colombian departments of Norte de Santander and Arauca. In the latter area, the Ombudsman’s Office established that 33 people were killed and 170 families were displaced by the actions of irregular groups.

The continuity of the conflict in Colombia, and the fact that the so-called “anti-subversive” policy has historically been the main workhorse of Uribism, explain some of the uncertainty that governs the Colombian political and electoral panorama. The same happens in relation to electoral guarantees, as seen during the allegations of fraud and vote-buying in 2018. And even in relation to the personal safety of the candidates, considering the death threats that the paramilitaries of the Águilas Negras-Bloque Capital made to Petro on December 4, 2021, or to the contemporary history of a country in which, in the last century alone, seven presidential candidates have been assassinated.

It remains to be seen if arguably the “oldest democracy in Latin America” can, in the times to come, manage to consolidate the most precarious and recently achieved peace in the continent.

Fossilized dinosaur egg discovered to have fully-intact remains of oviraptor embryo

Ronan Coddington

In paleontology, major discoveries are oftentimes made long after a fossil is physically acquired from the field. The recent finding of the headline-grabbing embryonic Oviraptor named Baby Yingliang last month in Ganzhou, China is one such example.

While the findings were published in Cell on December 21 of last year, the fossils themselves were originally discovered in a mine in 2000. Nearly 20 years later, the construction of a new natural history museum prompted Chinese paleontologists to examine many of the specimens they had collected, among them the eggs.

A close-to-hatching oviraptorosaur dinosaur embryo found in Ganzhou, Jiangxi Province, southern China. Photo: University of Birmingham/Lida Xing. 

When reexamined, there were minute amounts of fossilized bone visible on cracks in the egg. The egg was opened, and the fossilized remains of a developed embryo were uncovered within.

Finding an intact fossilized dinosaur egg is rare, finding a dinosaur egg with an intact embryo is rarer. Before this discovery, only eight species of dinosaurs have yielded fossilized embryos. To put this in perspective, there are currently over 700 recognized species of dinosaurs.

A discovery of this nature can reveal much about the lives and evolution of dinosaurs and modern birds.

To understand the importance of this discovery, we need to look at the group this developing animal belonged to: the Oviraptorids. The most famous species of the group is Oviraptor. Present in Mongolia 75 million years ago, this dinosaur lived alongside the more renowned Velociraptor.

When initially discovered by an expedition to Asia by the American Museum of Natural History, Oviraptor was assumed to act like its Greek namesake, egg thief. Its remains were first discovered next to a nest that was presumed to belong to the Ceratopsian, Protoceratops.

It was impossible to determine at the time what species the egg belonged to, as the contents were simply not preserved in the fossilization process. However, many years later another expedition located a similar egg, this time with the developed embryo of an Oviraptor contained within.

There were also two small skulls belonging to a relative of Velociraptor. These skulls were either predators who had failed to raid the nest or were preyed upon by one of the parents and brought back to the nest like a modern eagle does with its prey. This demonstrated that the Oviraptor “was, it now turns out, simply trying to hatch its own offspring,” stated a 1994 report in the New Scientist .

This discovery further helped paleontologists realize the connection between dinosaurs and modern birds, as the discovery of the nest demonstrated that this animal was not a brainless, cold-blooded monster, but rather a creature that exhibited parental care much like a modern bird.

The largest member of the group was a species known as Gigantoraptor. While most Oviraptorids would rarely exceed proportions similar to that of an emu, Gigantoraptor was larger than any land-dwelling animal alive today, reaching lengths of over eight meters and weighing over two tons.

Much like Oviraptor, Gigantoraptor is known only from the late Cretaceous period in Mongolia. In fact, every single known species of the group is known from the late Cretaceous of Asia. The first representatives of the group appeared around 84 million years ago and the group disappeared along with the rest of the non-avian dinosaurs during the KT (Cretaceous/Tertiary) mass extinction 66 million years ago.

A popular misconception is that birds are descended from dinosaurs. This is analogous to saying bears are descended from mammals. Like bears in relation to mammals, birds did not evolve into their own separate group of organisms but are rather one branch of a larger family tree we call dinosaurs.

To contextualize their relationship, we need to look at a group of dinosaurs called theropods. This group can be divided into two major subcategories: avian theropods and non-avian theropods. Non-avian theropods include animals such as Oviraptorids and more renowned creatures such as Tyrannosaurus rex and Velociraptor. Avian theropods contain such organisms as ostriches, pigeons and bald eagles.

This means that dinosaurs never truly went extinct; one lineage survived the KT mass extinction and became one of the most successful vertebrate groups of all time.

The newly discovered Oviraptorid eggs only reinforce this relation between non-avian and avian theropods.

Modern reptile and bird embryos maintain different postures during development in eggs. Baby Yingliang’s embryo more closely resembles postures found in modern bird eggs. This embryonic position is known as “tucking” and is crucial for a young bird’s survival during hatching as the embryo positions itself to break through its eggshell with the use of its mouth.

The Ganzhou findings also suggest that the movement of bird embryos within an eggshell was originally a behavior that developed in non-avian theropods and was likely present within this entire branch of the dinosaur family tree.

The discovery of a fully intact Oviraptorid embryo is just one of many findings from China that have helped dramatically further our understanding of our planet’s past. The country has experienced a renaissance in the field of paleontology and there is no doubt that we have only scratched the surface of China’s contributions.

This comes alongside more disturbing developments facing Chinese and global populations in the social realm. Among these are the expending commercialization of fossilized specimens and the attacks on funding for research across academia.

For thousands of years in China, the remains of extinct animals have been utilized in ineffective home health remedies. This practice has destroyed countless specimens and continues well into the present. Fossils have also become a valuable commodity internationally with the fossil trade booming, much to the detriment to the field of paleontology.

In addition, tensions between the United States and China have impeded research around the globe in countless fields. The United States has done everything from blocking Chinese grants to American scientists to preventing high-profile and accomplished Chinese scientists from attending conferences in the US by withholding short-term visas.

Brazil’s return to classrooms fills pediatric ICUs

Eduardo Parati

While the media and the Brazilian government have highlighted the decrease in occupancy rates for adult ICU beds, pediatric intensive care units are receiving an explosive number of new admissions. Children are being terribly impacted by the spread of the Omicron variant of COVID-19.

In Santa Catarina, the occupancy rate of pediatric ICU beds for COVID-19 treatment increased 433 percent in the first 15 days of February; and between December and January, hospitalizations for children under the age of 15 rose nearly 12-fold. The state of Rio de Janeiro registered an 850 percent increase in the occupancy of pediatric ICU beds between December and January, with the number of children between 6 and 12 years old hospitalized jumping from 6 to 57.

Return to in-person classes in September 2021 in Olinda, Pernambuco (Wikimedia Commons)

A CNN Brazil report revealed that on February 8, only 8 pediatric ICU beds were available for the entire state of Rio de Janeiro, all concentrated in only two hospitals in the capital. Similar situations are reported throughout the country.

Reports from health care workers show that the new variant, promoted as “mild” by governments around the world, is driving child hospitalizations to unprecedented levels.

At a pediatric hospital in Goiânia, the capital of the state of Goiás, the intensivist physician Fernanda Peixoto reported earlier this month that there has never been such a large number of children hospitalized. Children with COVID-19 can remain hospitalized for more than a month.

In the state of Ceará, pediatric intensivist physician Manuela Monte, who works at a children’s hospital in the capital, Fortaleza, told the BBC, “We are a hospital of reference, and our pediatric COVID ICUs were full in January, while adult care was relatively under control.” She added, “Children of all age groups have been admitted with COVID. And we have had severe cases in children who had no health problems at all. Because of the immune system being compromised by COVID, they ended up getting a bacterial infection, pneumonia, or meningitis before they got to the hospital.”

According to the epidemiological bulletin of the Health Secretariat of the capital of Rio de Janeiro, the number of hospitalizations of children in January was about five times higher than during the second wave caused by the Gamma and Delta variants last year.

The surge in hospitalizations is occurring while millions of children remain unvaccinated, with states registering disparities in vaccination rates, delays and missed doses. In February 16, while Paraná, São Paulo and the Federal District have respectively, 28.1 percent, 28.6 percent and 34.6 percent of children between 5 and 11 years old vaccinated with the first dose, most of the states that provided data have less than 20 percent coverage. This is the case of Amapa, Mato Grosso do Sul and Pernambuco, which vaccinated 5.4 percent, 12.9 percent and 12.5 percent, respectively. On Thursday, the health secretary of the state of Rio de Janeiro announced the interruption of vaccinations for a week due to lack of pediatric doses.

Although hospitals are already overloaded, the beginning of classes in state school networks across the country since February 7 has yet to have its full potential impact on health care systems. With the reopening of schools, millions of unvaccinated students and education workers are being placed in crowded schools and on public transportation, which will directly drive new outbreaks of the pandemic.

In Manaus, capital of Amazonas, a world epicenter of the coronavirus in 2020 and 2021, and where school reopenings were a decisive factor in the generation of the Gamma variant, Fiocruz epidemiologist Jesem Orellana warned on local radio 18 Horas: “The return to face-to-face classes on February 14, 2022 for 5- to 11-year-olds can be considered premature and puts at risk the well-being and even the life of the students, and also of an extensive chain of possible contacts, inside (education workers, in general) and outside of school (collective transport, cafeterias, LAN houses, for example), as there are still tens of thousands of unvaccinated or incompletely vaccinated people in Amazonas.”

On Thursday, three days after school reopenings in the state network and in the capital, the Amazonas government announced the demobilization of the Nilton Lins hospital, focused on COVID-19 treatment, which was activated in January 2021 during the Gamma variant outbreak.

School reopenings are happening at the same time as it is declared in the media, on the one hand, that Omicron has reached a plateau, and, on the other, that the abrupt surge in the number of cases would imply a subsequent equally abrupt drop.

Contrary to what the government and the media are stating, the situation remains ominous, and the risk of new outbreaks is not over. On February 15, the Fiocruz Observatory released a note pointing out that in 4 states and 7 state capitals, ICU occupancy rates remained above 80 percent, with the Federal District registering 99 percent occupancy. Another 14 states and 12 state capitals remained above 60 percent occupancy.

In February, the first cases of the Omicron subvariant BA.2 were reported in Brazil. A study conducted by four Japanese universities, not yet peer-reviewed, indicated that this version is more aggressive than the original, highly resistant to vaccines and able to reinfect people already affected by the BA.1.

In an interview with Globo, Salmo Raskin, a geneticist and director of the Genetika Laboratory in Curitiba, Parana state, declared: “This study serves as a warning. Much has been said about the risk of BA.2 overtaking BA.1 as the dominant strain, as has already occurred in Denmark, India, the Philippines, and Singapore. A possible spread of this subvariant in Brazil could interrupt our beginning of decline in cases, generating new peaks and deaths.”

The outbreaks of cases, the admission of large numbers of patients to hospitals and the abandonment of any policy to control the spread of the disease by the state and federal governments mark the open adoption by all sections of the Brazilian political establishment of the fraudulent “herd immunity” policy through mass infection of the population. With the recurring record of over 1,000 deaths daily since the beginning of the month, the response of the ruling class is to promote the “new normal” of large-scale infections and deaths.

Late last year, Brazil’s fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro began a campaign of attacks on childhood vaccination, declaring it to be an individual choice by parents, adding that he would force them to obtain a prescription to vaccinate their children. Meanwhile, his Health Minister Marcelo Queiroga delayed the start of vaccinations for children between the ages of 5 and 11, holding a “public hearing” that gave voice to fascistic antivax figures promoted by the government. This campaign continues, with Bolsonaro’s ministers in recent weeks attacking the vaccination of children as a human rights violation.

Meanwhile, the response to the pandemic by state governments, including in states ruled by the Workers Party (PT) and its allies, is becoming indistinguishable from that promoted by the fascistic president.

Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo had announced in October the end of mandatory masking, and only backed off in the face of the new outbreak of infections. The states are aggressively promoting school reopenings, discarding any vaccination goal and declaring that the schools are “prepared” to receive the students.

The governor of Bahia, Rui Costa of the PT, promised in January not to implement any more COVID-19 restrictions that would affect the economy. “At this moment, we will not interfere with any other economic structure.” He added: “Schools will return on the 7th, face to face; it will not be hybrid or virtual.” Meanwhile, the governor of Ceará, Camilo Santana, also from the PT, limited himself to the “recommendation” of postponing classes for 15 days, limiting the public in stadiums to 30 percent of capacity, and the mandatory use of N95 masks in pharmacies, schools and supermarkets.

The president of the Brazilian Society of Immunizations (SBIm), Renato Kfouri, took on the sordid role of promoting in-person learning in several newspapers and on television. In an interview with CNN, after stating that the risk of children developing severe illness and even death from COVID-19 is “much higher than pneumonia, influenza, measles, infantile paralysis,” Kfouri advocated the return to classes, stating: “I think we shouldn’t fear the return to classes without vaccine. In fact, if one should wait for the vaccines to begin to work ... we are talking about a return to school in May for children over five years old, because below we won’t have the opportunity yet. There is no justification today for us to keep children out of in-person schools waiting for the vaccines.”

The response of the federal and state governments to the pandemic reveals that there is no concern for the “mental health” and “education” of children, as was propagated in the corporate media throughout the pandemic to justify the deadly reopenings.

During the periods of remote and hybrid education, everything was planned not to ensure the learning and health of the students but to enrich the large corporations, with several states making deals with mass education platforms setting up contracts of hundreds of millions of reais with mobile phone operators, while most children did not even have access to digital equipment and adequate learning environments. Since the beginning of the pandemic, hundreds of thousands of young people have been forced to abandon their education to guarantee income for their families, a reflection of the massive growth of poverty in Brazil and the criminal neglect of its ruling class.

The main concern of the ruling elite has always been to ensure that parents return to the workplace to guarantee the profits for the large corporations.

The ruling class in Brazil is attacking the public health measures necessary to eliminate the virus, the only viable strategy to preserve millions of lives in the coming months and years and promoting instead the mass infection of the population ever more openly. This deadly policy, aimed at ensuring the profits of big business and the obscene enrichment of billionaires, must be answered by the Brazilian and international working class with a strategy to eliminate the virus and save lives.

The vaccine is a decisive component of a set of measures to combat the pandemic and must be combined with temporary lockdowns, testing and contact tracing, the mandatory wearing of masks, the control of travel and the guarantee of full income for all affected workers.

Prince Andrew and a monarchy in crisis

Paul Bond

The British royal family has been cultivated for centuries as a constitutional monarchy, providing a critical pillar and head of the bourgeois state. As such, a major royal crisis always indicates a sharpening crisis of bourgeois rule.

It is not accidental that the current royal debacle centred on Prince Andrew unfolds under conditions of factional warfare within the Conservative Party, the pre-eminent parliamentary vehicle of the bourgeoisie, and another over the leadership of the Metropolitan Police, Britain’s largest force.

Prince Andrew [Credit: commons.wikimedia.org]

Prince Andrew’s settlement of up to £12 million to Virginia Giuffre was intended to draw a line under his connection with the sex trafficking of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. But it has only bought a brief period of silence from Giuffre, who has agreed not to tell her story until after the queen’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations this summer.

The 95-year-old Queen Elizabeth II, who has just been reported as infected with COVID-19, was looking to restore some stability to the institution, making efforts to minimise the possible reign of the heir to the throne, Prince Charles. Her illness points not only to the lie that the pandemic is over, but also emphasises the precarious position of the monarchy as an institution. Her successor Charles is widely seen as a pampered buffoon, whose ecological posturing cannot hide a sense of entitlement built on a declared belief in the feudal Divine Right of Kings that led his namesake, Charles I, to lose his head.

The settlement not only failed to lift the taint of scandal from Andrew, but also triggered questions about who will be footing the bill. Reports are that the queen and Charles have made bridging loans, under conditions where nearly a fifth of British workers are already living in poverty.

The royal family have sought to distance themselves from Andrew, the queen’s second son, but the rot is widespread. A charity set up by Charles is enmeshed in a police inquiry into “cash for honours” also involving Charles’s younger son, Prince Harry. Harry’s own ongoing dispute with the monarchy has now reached a court appeal over allowing him to provide his own private security during visits to Britain.

Britain's Queen Elizabeth II is joined by Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales, and at rear, from left, Kate, Duchess of Cambridge, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, Prince William, Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex during a reception at Buckingham Palace, London to mark the 50th anniversary of the investiture of the Prince of Wales. March 5, 2019 file photo (Dominic Lipinski/Pool via AP, File)

Giuffre accused Andrew of sexually abusing her when she was 17 years old. The prince’s statement admitted no liability but announced “a substantial donation” to her charity for the victims of sex trafficking. This led to the filing of a stipulated dismissal of the suit against him, keeping Andrew off the stand over details of his interactions with Giuffre at Epstein’s properties in 2000-2001, again covering up Epstein’s activities.

Andrew had sought to have the case dismissed, claiming no recollection of meeting Giuffre and suggesting a widely circulated photograph of them together was faked. His attempts at public rebuttal backfired spectacularly.

A BBC interview, intended to clear his name, generated ridicule and criticism. Andrew told journalist Emily Maitlis, “If push came to shove and the legal advice was to do so, then I would be duty bound” to testify or give a statement under oath.

He evidently did not expect to be held to that. As soon as it became clear he could not prevent the case proceeding, Andrew moved to an out-of-court settlement. He has been spared a court appearance, but he will not be returning to royal duty. He was stripped of royal titles and patronages last month.

His settlement statement referred cynically to a commitment to “fight against the evils of sex trafficking,” in response to which lawyer Nick Goldstone told the Telegraph Andrew “is toxic, and this settlement will not have changed the verdict of the court of public opinion.”

Andrew expected his defence to be accepted on the basis of privilege alone, which proved a wild misjudgement. Robert Lewis, attorney for another of Epstein’s victims, attributed the delay in settling the case to Andrew’s “arrogance.” Epstein, Maxwell, Andrew, the Catholic Church, said Lewis, “all think the law on some level applies only to everybody else.”

A monarchy that used to provide bourgeois rule with an appearance of stability in times of crisis is now itself in freefall.

The overthrow and then execution of Charles I in 1649 marked the birth of bourgeois rule out of feudalism. The restoration of his son Charles II as constitutional monarch eleven years later was aimed at safeguarding the world’s first state based on bourgeois rule through a political compromise enshrining the hereditary principle on which both the old feudal aristocracy and the newly emerging capitalist class, in their own way, depended against the re-emergence of popular opposition.

Prince Andrew, the Duke of York (left), in June 2012 (Creative Commons)

The monarchy became the most bourgeois institution imaginable: the head of state during the explosive growth of the British Empire, a symbol of the nation in two world wars, and later a tool of global realpolitik in the complex relations with US imperialism, Britain’s other imperialist rivals and the newly independent states across the Commonwealth. Elizabeth has done the bourgeoisie sterling service in this regard.

But the declining international position of the British bourgeoisie has gone hand in hand with an embrace of the naked speculation of financial parasitism. The monarchy has tried to court this layer, while being forced to streamline its own activities in line with its social decline.

Charles’s former wife, Diana, Princess of Wales, blazed the trail in forming close links with the yuppie layers of the super-rich who emerged with the speculative boom of the 1980s. Following her acrimonious divorce, she aimed to shift the succession to her son William, second in line to the throne, rather than Charles.

William, groomed as a popular traditionalist who combines Elizabeth’s sense of duty with his mother’s facility with the newer layers of the elite and her “popular touch”, has stepped into this role. He is the great white hope of the monarchy, provided any reign of Charles III can be kept as brief as possible.

Faced with an efficiency drive to keep the monarchy functional as a pillar of state, those royals outside the line of succession, like Andrew, deeply resent not being as rich as the people they are courting. The richest royal, the queen, does not even make the top 300 wealthy individuals in the UK.

But the lifestyles of the lesser royals are no less lavish for that and are a major focus of public anger and loathing. Questions over how Andrew will scrabble together his £12 million come at a time when an estimated half a million people are being driven into poverty by the cut of just £20 a week from the Universal Credit social security benefit.

Andrew’s own courting of financial layers was seen in the sale in 2007 of his former home to Timor Kulibayev, son-in-law of the president of Kazakhstan. The country house in Berkshire was sold for £15 million, £3 million above the asking price. Kulibayev’s spokesman insisted this was a “commercial arm’s length transaction” using “entirely legitimate” funds.

But Andrew is now down to his last chalet as he sells off his assets. This is on the market for £17 million but is understood to be heavily mortgaged and unlikely to cover the costs of his settlement. Meanwhile, rising fuel prices this April are expected to see one fifth of British households experiencing fuel poverty.

Charles’s charity, the Prince’s Foundation, is meanwhile being investigated over allegations that it helped secure a CBE award and British citizenship for one of its donors, billionaire Saudi businessman Mahfouz Marei Mubarak bin Mahfouz.

Mahfouz also donated to a charity run by Harry, Charles’s younger son. Harry and his wife Meghan Markle have been a consistent PR thorn in the side for the Windsors. Similarly groomed to make the family appear modern, they calculated that, being some way from the line of succession, they could make considerably more money based in the US as free market operators with royal associations.

There is an air of desperation among royalists. After Andrew’s settlement and the Prince’s Foundation investigation, the Sun reported Elizabeth’s now clearly postponed return to public activity with the headline, “Thank God for the Queen.” But what do they have beyond that?

The pivotal places of Charles I and II at critical moments of bourgeois rule are known—what place is left for Charles III? The crisis of the monarchy points to the festering rottenness of bourgeois rule. It is falling to pieces, with a ruling class in crisis escalating its social plunder and devastation.