UK higher education workers continue strikes over pensions, pay and conditions

Robert Stevens

Over 50,000 higher education (HE) workers are continuing strikes this week, with two days of action Monday and Tuesday. The action began on February 14 with a five-day strike.

Staff are fighting attempts by university management to cut their already devalued pensions by another 35 percent. The cuts are on top of £240,000 already lost from the average lecturer’s retirement income over the past decade.

The wages of higher education lecturers have collapsed. This week the University and College Union (UCU) noted that with the retail price index measure of inflation now at 7.8 percent, staff pay has fallen by more than a quarter (25.5 percent) in real terms since 2009.

Lecturers are also fighting insecure employment contracts, unmanageable workloads and pay inequality. The union notes, “Over 70,000 academics are employed on insecure contracts. The gender pay gap in UK universities sits at 16%, whilst the disability pay gap is 9% and the race pay gap is up to 17%.”

The Universities and Colleges Employers Association, are offering a well below inflation pay offer of 1.5 percent on existing salaries for 2021/22.

The picket line at the University of Glasgow (WSWS Media)

There has been solid backing for the strike, under conditions where the UK has suffered three nationwide storms during the first week of action. This determination to fight is in sharp contrast to the UCU bureaucracy who have done everything to curtail action from the outset and want nothing more than to see it ended with a rotten sell-out.

The UCU has divided the strike into separate disputes, with last weeks’ five-day strike over pensions only. This week, while expanding the strike from 44 universities participating to 68, over both the pension and pay cuts, action is reduced to just 48 hours. Next week, staff at 68 universities are striking for three days (February 28 to March 2) only over pay.

The 68 universities involved are attended by over 1 million students. But no joint action with students has been organised, except on the very last day of strikes on March 2, with a 'student strike for education' called by the National Union of Students.

The UCU’s real agenda despite having a mandate to strike throughout the whole of March to May 6, is to end the dispute for good as early as possible. In response to a provocation by six universities—prompted by the Universities and Colleges Employers’ Association—docking strikers pay by 100 percent, and others saying there would be partial reductions for staff engaging in action short of a strike, the UCU ensured that no industrial action was taken.

Strikers rally on Monday at the University of Leeds (WSWS Media)

Several branches voted to strike. Alarmed that the strike could then spread out of their control, the UCU bureaucracy intervened and said that instead of immediate strikes being called, staff at the universities involved should instead declare yet another separate dispute. The UCU imposed this diktat, fully aware that anti-strike laws mean that organising a strike ballot and giving the employers the necessary notice would take months, by which time this term would be over.

In a desperate attempt to avert strike action in a sector of the economy that UCU General Secretary Jo Grady noted received income worth almost £41 billion, she sent a desperate letter to Universities UK CEO Alistair Jarvis aimed at “averting widespread industrial action”. This was based on promising “a serious compromise on the part of UCU and its membership”.

The UCU proposals include increasing maximum employee contributions from 9.6 percent to 11 percent in April, along with an increase in employer contributions, until a new valuation of the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) scheme, involving riskier and higher return investments, can be issued in June. The £82 billion Universities Superannuation Scheme is the UK’s largest private pension fund by assets.

As last week’s strike ended, Grady took to the pages of the mouthpiece of the City of London, the Financial Times. She complained that despite the UCU’s best efforts, “we do not believe UUK [Universities UK] are serious about reaching a resolution. When UCU submitted its first set of proposals last summer, employers opposed even a small increase in their own contributions and refused to underwrite our suggested payments adequately.”

Grady continued, “now, UUK seem to be guiding employers to reject our latest, pragmatic attempt to resolve the dispute. In new proposals that mark a significant compromise from our members, UCU is calling for a sensible, evidence-based valuation of the scheme’s financial health as of 31 March 2022 and small one-year contribution increases for both members and employers to protect benefits…”

She pleaded, “We would like to avoid more disruptive strike action…”

Strikers on the picket line at the University of Leeds (WSWS Media)

No appeal is being made to students or other education workers. As one striking lecturer told WSWS reporters this week, “I think the marketisation of higher education is the biggest part of the picture of what we are fighting against and that’s why we should find solidarity with the students because they are those paying the cost of this marketisation.”

Instead, the UCU has launched an e-mail campaign urging its members, “If your institution is one of the 44 where strike action is taking place by UCU members over the devastating proposed 35% cuts to their hard-earned pensions, please email your [Vice Chancellor]/principal and urge them to engage with UCU.”

Another plea was made Monday ahead of further talks between the UCU and the UUK being held today at the Joint Negotiating Committee. This was after being told last week by the employers that they would tolerate only a tiny extra 0.3 percentage points in terms of contributions they will pay towards pensions. Employers also insist that inflation-linked annual increases to pensions be capped at a maximum of 2.5 percent, even if CPI inflation-the lowest measure of inflation—is above 2.5 percent. The employers also demand that the application of that cap is deferred until 2025.

The union said, “The JNC has until Monday 28 February to determine what changes to make to the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) pension. UCU has submitted compromise proposals that were confirmed as implementable by the USS trustee which runs the scheme. UUK must decide whether to push ahead with cuts of 35% to university staff's guaranteed retirement income or whether it is willing to work with UCU and resolve the pension dispute.”

This has only one endgame: another serious defeat for higher education workers which will have major ramifications for workers everywhere as the Johnson government ends all COVID restrictions and escalates its offensive against pensions, pay, terms and conditions.

Damning Auditor General report exposes failure of Canada’s government to protect migrant farm workers from COVID-19

Talia Brown

The death of an unidentified farm worker from Jamaica last month, who perished while in mandatory isolation of COVID-19 in Southwestern Ontario without receiving any treatment, reveals once again that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government has done nothing to improve the dangerous conditions that temporary migrant workers confront. On the contrary, the terrible living and working conditions faced by this particularly oppressed section of the working class have continued to deteriorate since the onset of the pandemic.

Farm Workers [credit: USDA]

A damning report prepared by the Auditor General (AG) of Canada published in early December 2021 details how inspectors working for Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC), a federal agency, have been largely negligent in their inquiries over new pandemic regulations designed to protect workers from COVID-19 on Canadian farms.

The report highlights several alarming aspects, such as the evident lack of supervision of investigators, including both federal employees and contractors, and the lack of professional expertise from the investigators, with many having no serious training provided and barely six months of professional experience. The report also questions the quality, relevance and veracity of information gathered amid budget cuts at the ESDC.

From March 2020 to June 2021, more than 79,000 workers arrived to work in Canada’s agricultural sector under the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP), which oversees the hiring of cheap labor from poorer countries by farm owners. The majority of workers on the SAWP are from Mexico and other Caribbean and South American countries. The terms of the SAWP are akin to modern-day indentured servitude, with a worker’s right to remain in Canada dependent upon them retaining their job with a specified employer. SAWP participants have virtually no hope of ever obtaining permanent residency to live in Canada, even after many years of hard labour.

Many long-standing problems for migrant workers were exacerbated by the pandemic. These include a lack of proper housing, delays in wage payments, no substantial legal rights, no medical protection amid a pandemic, and the threat of being deported to their country if they speak up about unsafe working conditions. Communal living arrangements, poor sanitary conditions, and a general disregard for the well-being of the workers combined to create a significantly higher risk of COVID-19 transmission among migrant workers.

In response to a public outcry over the high number of outbreaks on Canadian farms and the death of three migrant workers documented in a series of news reports, the Trudeau government promised a thorough investigation on farm work conditions. In July 2020, it made available over $16 million to ESDC, supposedly to strengthen its inspection regime. The AG’s report makes clear that no improvements in fact took place.

Since March 2020, all inspections have been conducted virtually and relied solely on the employers submitting pictures and videos of their facilities, as well as interviews with workers. The report notes that the problems were so troubling that the AG’s office decided to prolong its oversight into 2021. While the AG found that 73 percent of the quarantine inspections it examined in 2020 were deficient, this figure rose to 88 percent in 2021.

The list of failures by the ESDC is long. The report notes, among other things, that inspections “lacked the diligence and urgency that were needed in light of both the pandemic circumstances and the department’s own policies.”

Some of the report’s most damning findings include:

• Even though “poor-quality evidence or no evidence was collected” in most inspections, “the department assessed almost all employers as compliant with the COVID-19 requirements.” ESDC bureaucrats even gave employers a passing grade in the 16 percent of reports that discovered evidence of a violation of pandemic regulations.
• When COVID-19 outbreaks were identified on farms, the AG found inspections were initiated quickly, “but were inactive for long periods.” The report cites an example where during an interview with the inspector, the employer said they were not offering separate accommodation for workers who tested positive, and that both infected and non-infected workers were sharing a bathroom and a kitchen. After learning this, the ESDC investigator “did not follow up on corrective measures for more than one month.”
• The AG found no evidence that inspectors had acted to address concerns raised by workers, including when some workers complained to the department that they had no access to food while in isolation.

Working under the direct order of the ESDC, the inspectors’ botched work is the direct result of the indifference of the Trudeau government towards the highly exploited migrant workers who are utilized as a disposable workforce to enrich big agricultural companies. The fact that the situation worsened during the reporting period shows how employers can continue to flout health rules with impunity, keep workers in poor living conditions and impose abusive working arrangements on them.

Significantly, the AG report may be incomplete because an important portion of contract employees belonging to the audit service went on strike last year to demand better salary conditions and a pay grid system.

Syed Hussan, executive director of the advocacy group Migrant Workers for Change, sharply criticized the ESDC following the AG’s report. He said the report is “deeply, deeply concerning,” but not all that surprising. “The auditor general is saying what we already know — inspections cannot and will not protect migrant farm workers,” Hussan declared in an interview with CBC News, adding, “ESDC was not created to protect migrant farm workers. It was created to ensure a steady supply of cheap labour.”

The horrendous conditions faced by migrant workers is just one example of the criminal disregard shown by the ruling elite towards workers’ lives since the beginning of the pandemic. Employers, with the full approval of governments and the support of the trade unions, have enforced a continuation of business as usual with totally inadequate public health measures in order to safeguard corporate profits. At the request of the financial oligarchy, governments have reopened schools, universities and workplaces prematurely, leading to wave after wave of infections and death.

The Trudeau government reacted to the AG report with empty promises that it will listen to the office’s recommendations. Employment Minister Carla Qualtrough, who is responsible for ESDC, pledged to “rebuild” the temporary foreign worker inspection program and do more to support the inspectors tasked with carrying out this work in the future. “Rest assured, we’ll do better,” she claimed.

In truth, the past two years have provided ample proof that the Trudeau government represents the interests of the financial and corporate elite and has no intention of improving the safety and living conditions of migrant workers. Over recent weeks, the Trudeau government has endorsed the scrapping of almost all COVID-19 public health measures by provincial governments from coast to coast, helping implement the program of the far-right Freedom Convoy. This is paving the way for a resurgence of infections just as thousands of migrant workers arrive in the coming weeks for the new growing season.

The Trudeau government’s “pro-refugee” and “pro-migrant” pretensions have been thoroughly exposed. In the latest example of its indifference to the plight of refugees fleeing poverty and oppression, Trudeau’s Liberals concluded a deal with the Biden administration to close a loophole in the Safe Third Country Agreement with the United States in order to prevent refugees from crossing the Canada-US border outside of official checkpoints.

Meanwhile, the unions are doing nothing to defend migrant workers. In response to the Auditor General’s report, the United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW) issued a pro forma communique filled with platitudes and a clear indication that it would do nothing to improve working conditions, other than pleading uselessly to the Trudeau government to do more.

US Centers for Disease Control withheld critical statistics on COVID-19 for more than a year

Benjamin Mateus

On Sunday, the New York Times reported that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been withholding the publication of critical data that could have helped local and state public health departments better target their responses to stem infections and protect lives.

Students and parents walk to class at Tussahaw Elementary school on Wednesday, Aug. 4, 2021 [Credit: AP Photo/Brynn Anderson]

Instead, they have been cherry-picking vital information to present an upbeat assessment of the state of the pandemic, which has only further endangered lives in the process.

The author of the report, Apoorva Mandavilli, wrote, “Two full years into the pandemic, the agency leading the country’s response to the public health emergency has published only a tiny fraction of the data it has collected, several people familiar with the data said.”

Omitted from publication included data on the effectiveness of boosters in adults under 65. Without the data, health experts had to turn to international sources such as Israel to recommend the third shot. However, Israel’s definition of severe disease differs from that used in the US. (In Israel, a person with rapid breathing and oxygen levels below 94 percent is considered to have a severe illness, while the CDC reserves that category for anyone who is sick enough to need hospitalization.)

Also, the social dynamics of the two countries—public health initiatives, state of the health care infrastructure, therapeutics, etc.—are dissimilar, meaning the best decisions can only be made by using real-time data available for the region.

The Washington Post, also reporting on the CDC’s remarkable negligence, said that on July 12, 2021, Pfizer scientists had met with senior US government health officials to explain that their rationale for booster shots was based on data from Israel that showed immunity to the vaccines waned quickly, especially among the elderly and immunocompromised. The CDC indicated their “data showed something quite different.”

The Post wrote, “Other senior health officials in the meeting were stunned. Why hadn’t the CDC looped other government officials on the data? Could the agency share it—at least with the Food and Drug Administration, which was responsible for deciding whether booster shots were necessary? But CDC officials demurred, saying they planned to publish it soon.”

A month later, reports published in the US corroborated the Israeli data.

It is more likely the CDC had siloed and forgotten the information, choosing to ignore its implications and leading to the backpedaling the Post describes. But it further confirms that the CDC has become deeply enmeshed in political decisions to control the flow of scientific information to the public. The deliberate intent is science conforms to policy rather than shaping it.

Other vital data left out that has only recently been published included information on hospitalizations and death by age and vaccinations status, including breakthrough infections rates that could have warned the public about the rapid decline in vaccine effectiveness.

Another glaring omission has been data derived from wastewater surveillance across the country that could identify emerging COVID-19 hot spots and new variants. It was more than a year ago the CDC had established its National Wastewater Surveillance System. Early this month, the agency added wastewater data to its COVID-19 trackers, providing a broad perspective on the surge of infections across hundreds of communities.

CDC spokeswoman Kristen Nordlund told the Times, “The agency has been slow to release the different streams of data because basically, at the end of the day, it’s not yet ready for prime time. [The agency’s] priority when gathering any data is to ensure that it’s accurate and actionable.”

The pandemic has demonstrated that the CDC cannot handle large volumes of data while operating under political oversight. There are grave dangers to the population when the premier public health authority is unable to provide timely and vital information on the status of this or any other epidemic.

Nordlund let it be known that the agency was reluctant to share efficacy information on the vaccines with the public “because they might be misinterpreted as the vaccines being ineffective,” the Times wrote. She also said that the data represented only a small percentage of the population, which is a devious attempt to sidestep the issue.

Epidemiologists and scientists frequently utilize limited but broadly applicable data to address critical and pressing questions. The CDC had no problem generalizing that COVID-19 had little impact on school-aged children using limited data obtained from a single school or district, much that is untenable even for the CDC.

These developments are significant. Hospitals are no longer required to report real-time data on COVID-19, specifically deaths, to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), relying on the CDC to update these statistics.

As children were facing a deluge of infections due to a concerted national effort to force teachers back to the classrooms and schools be opened regardless of the cost or impact on communities, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which has been substituting as a reliable source on COVID-19 infections among children, was repeatedly asking the CDC on the granular data relating to hospitalized children. They were told it was unavailable.

Since the pandemic began, according to the limited data available on the CDC’s COVID-19 tracker, at least 1,346 children have died. Those under five make up the largest subgroup, with 434 total deaths. According to the AAP, approximately 60 percent of all child deaths occurred in the last six months. Between January 25, 2022, and February 19, 2022, 219 children died, of whom 74 (one-third) were under five. By contrast, the influenza virus has killed fewer than five children in the last two years.

Early in the pandemic, several international studies pointed to the importance of schools and children as vectors of community transmission for the coronavirus. Many principled researchers and epidemiologists defied the official pretense that children were neither impacted nor very contagious when infected. Yet, the CDC has repeatedly taken the baseless position that children are “essentially immune to the disease” and has put children in harm’s way.

Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, chair of the AAP’s Committee on Infectious Disease, speaking with the Times, said she had also repeatedly asked the CDC for an estimate on the contagiousness of a person infected with the coronavirus five days after symptoms begin. She said, “They’ve [CDC] known this for over a year and a half, right, and they haven’t told us. I mean, you can’t find out anything from them.”

Due to the massive surge of infections caused by the Omicron variant, instead of calling for an immediate shutdown and the application of stringent mitigation measures, the CDC simply shortened their isolation period to five days, claiming there was a sound scientific basis for their decision.

In late December, when the guidance was issued, Yonatan Grad, an associate professor of immunology and infectious diseases at Harvard’s School of Public Health, declared, “To me, this feels honestly more about economics than about the science. I suspect what it will do is result in at least some people emerging from isolation more quickly, and so there’ll be more opportunities for transmission, and that, of course, will accelerate the spread of COVID-19.”

Later, a human challenge trial based in the UK, where healthy volunteers were purposely infected with the coronavirus to provide the basis for future studies to test new vaccines and therapeutics, found that symptoms started within two days. Viral load increased rapidly, peaking after five days. Many still had high levels of active virus 10 days, and some 12 days following infection. And yet, the CDC director told health care workers that they didn’t have to isolate if they had the sniffles. This week she claimed it was essential to give people a “break from masks” even as new subvariants of Omicron are accelerating in the US.

Aside from the death of hundreds of children, even the CDC has had to acknowledge the catastrophic loss of life sustained in the US over the last two years. More than 80 million have reportedly been infected. Over 960,000 have died from COVID-19. Excess deaths are 15 to 35 percent higher than the officially recorded COVID-19 deaths. Close to 2,000 people die each day of COVID-19, but even these horrific figures are in question. How many more deaths are we no longer tracking?

These revelations mean that the CDC and the head of the agency, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, are complicit in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

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.