Children should not pay for the sins of their parents. But in some cases, a healthy suspicion of the offspring is needed, notably when it comes to profiting off ill-gotten gains. It is certainly needed in the case of Filipino politician and presidential candidate Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr, who stands to win on May 9.
Bongbong’s father was the notorious strongman Ferdinand Marcos, his mother, the avaricious, shoe-crazed Imelda. Elected president in 1965, Ferdinand Marcos indulged in murder, torture and looting. He thrived on the terrain of violent, corrupt oligarchic politics, characterised by a telling remark from the dejected Sergio Osmenã Jr, whom he defeated in 1969: “We were outgunned, outgooned, and outgold.”
In 1972, martial law was imposed on the pretext of a failed assassination attempt against the defence secretary, an attack which saw no injuries nor apprehension of suspects. It was only formally lifted in 1981. Under the blood-soaked stewardship of the Marcos regime, 70,000 warrantless arrests were made, and 4,000 people killed.
The Philippines duly declined in the face of monstrous cronyism, institutional unaccountability and graft, becoming one of the poorest in South-East Asia. While Marcos Sr’s own official salary never rose above $13,500 a year, he and his cronies made off with $10 billion. (Estimates vary.) When revolutionaries took over the Presidential palace, they found garishly ornate portraits, 15 mink coats, 508 couture gowns and over 3,000 pairs of Imelda’s designer shoes.
Fleeing the Philippines in the wake of the popular insurrection of 1986 led by Corazon “Cory” Aquino, the Marcoses found sanctuary in the bosom of US protection, taking up residence in Hawaii.
Opinion polls show that Bongbong is breezing his way to office, a phenomenon that has little to do with his personality, sense of mind, or presence. A Pulse Asia survey conducted in February showed voter approval at an enviable 60 percent. This would suggest that the various petitions seeking to disqualify him have had little effect on perceptions lost in the miasma of myth and speculation.
All this points to a dark concatenation of factors that have served to rehabilitate his family’s legacy. For the student aware of the country’s oligarchic politics, this is unlikely to come as shocking. For one, the Marcoses have inexorably found their way back into politics, making their way through the dynastic jungle.
Imelda, for all her thieving ways, found herself serving in the House of Representatives four times and unsuccessfully ran for the presidency in 1992. Daughter Imee became governor of the province of Ilocos Norte in 2010, and has been serving as a senator since 2019. Marcos Jr followed a similar trajectory, becoming a member of congress and senator and doing so with little distinction. In 2016, he contested the vice presidency and lost.
Bongbong has already done his father proud at various levels, not least exhibiting a tendency to fabricate his past. On the touchy issue of education, Oxford University has stated at various points that Marcos Jr, while matriculating at St. Edmund Hall in 1975, never took a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics. According to the institution’s records, “he did not complete his degree, but was awarded a special diploma in Social Studies in 1978.”
A statement from the Oxford Philippines Society remarks that, “Marcos failed his degree’s preliminary examinations at the first attempt. Passing the preliminary examinations is a prerequisite for continuing one’s studies and completing a degree at Oxford University.” The issue was known as far back as 1983, when a disturbed sister from the Religious of the Good Shepherd wrote to the university inquiring about the politician’s credentials and received a letter confirming that fact.
Outgoing President Rodrigo Duterte, whose own rule has been characterised by populist violence and impunity, has played his role in the rehabilitative process. In 2016, almost three decades after dying in Hawaii, Duterte gave permission for Ferdinand Marcos to be buried with full military honours in Manila’s National Heroes’ Cemetery. The timing of the burial was kept secret, prompting Vice President Leni Robredo to describe the ceremony as “a thief in the night”.
A coalition of Jesuit groups claimed that the interring of Marcos in Manila “buries human dignity by legitimising the massive violations of human and civil rights… that took place under his regime.” Duterte would have appreciated the mirror-effect of the move, a respectful nod from one human rights abuser to another. Under his direction, thousands of drug suspects have been summarily butchered.
Bongbong has also taken the cue, rehabilitating his parents using a polished, digital campaign of re-invention that trucks in gold age nostalgia and delusion. Political raw material has presented itself. The gap between the wealthy and impoverished, which his father did everything to widen, has not been closed by successive governments. According to 2021 figures from the Philippine Statistics Authority, 24 percent of Filipinos, some 26 million people, live below the poverty line.
Videos abound claiming that his parents were philanthropists rather than figures of predation. The issue of martial law brutality has all but vanished in the narrative. Social media and online influencers have managed the growth of this image through a coordinated campaign of disinformation waged across multiple platforms.
Gemma B. Mendoza of the Philippine news platform Rappler has noted the more sinister element of these efforts. Even as the legacy of a family dictatorship is being burnished, the press and critics are being hounded. The only movement standing in the way of Family Marcos is Vice President Robredo, who triumphed over Marcos Jr in 2016. Her hope is a brand of politics nourished by grassroots participation rather than shameless patronage.
The same cannot be said of the political classes who operate on the central principle of Philippine politics: impunity. This, at least, is how the political scientist Aries Arugay of the University of Philippines sees it. “We just don’t jail our politicians or make them accountable … we don’t punish them, unlike South Korean presidents.” The opposite is the case, and as the voters make it to the ballot on Monday, the country, if polls are to be believed, will see another Marcos in the presidential palace.
On Sunday, the BBC published the national broadcaster’s latest state of the nation pandemic piece, written by health editor Hugh Pym.
“Learning to live with the virus in the UK”, informed by government propaganda on the one hand and by serious science on the other, is an article at war with itself. Uncritically citing official policy, “Ministers have told the public they need to live with coronavirus and treat it like flu”, it goes on to set out in as muted terms as possible the key reasons why this is such criminal strategy, without ever drawing that conclusion.
Clinical staff care for a patient with coronavirus in the intensive care unit at the Royal Papworth Hospital in Cambridge, England, May 5, 2020 [Credit: Neil Hall Pool via AP]
Under the heading, “Risk of the virus”, the article notes, “Covid can still kill”, before stressing that “the chances of getting seriously ill and not surviving are much lower than in earlier waves.”
“Pressure on the NHS [National Health Service] has eased,” Pym writes, but notes that “the number of patients with Covid in hospital” is still “about 11,000 compared with more than 20,000 in early April.”
The devil is in the unprovided detail. Despite the reduced ratio of deaths to infections, a comparable number of people have been killed in the Omicron wave to the earlier Delta wave—over a much shorter period of time and with higher levels of vaccination. Breaking COVID deaths down by different waves of infection, the Independent SAGE group reports 18,350 Delta deaths and 16,000 Omicron deaths to April 22.
As for “eased” pressure on the NHS, the figure of 11,000 patients with COVID is roughly nine times higher than the number a year ago. The normalisation of this demand on the health service has driven it to the point of collapse.
These figures are the product of the unprecedented spread of COVID in recent months. Pym states that the government’s “message is to stay off work or away from vulnerable people if you have symptoms”. This is nonsense.
Hugh Pym (Credit: Hugh Pym/Twitter)
According to the Financial Times (FT), based on the findings of a YouGov survey, “only 55 per cent of people in England were aware they should avoid contact with vulnerable people if they have Covid, and just 63 per cent realised they should work from home if they have symptoms.”
This is entirely down to the government’s relentless insistence on “living with COVID” and minimisation of even the most inadequate, face-saving “guidance”. To this must the added the immense financial pressures to come into work, and the impossibility of avoiding vulnerable people in crowded houses.
The real meaning of the government’s policy is there for all to see in the repeated surges of infections since “Freedom Day”. An analysis by the FT of infection surveys puts the proportion of people in England who have at some stage been infected at close to 90 percent, having shot up from around 50 percent this January.
Infections are now falling rapidly, due to a combination of the warmer weather meaning more time spent outside and the increased levels of immunity in the population from the swathe of recent infections. As ever, this is being used by the familiar crowd of right-wing reactionaries and pseudo-scientists who tout government policy as an opportunity to declare the pandemic (for the fourth or fifth time) as good as over.
Reality proves the opposite. The BBC article notes, “The return of people from holidays to work and study after summer holidays, and the onset of cooler autumnal weather could create conditions for another uptick in infections.
“More immediately, new strains of the Omicron variant could cause problems.”
It quotes Imperial College London’s Professor Peter Openshaw who explains, “Everyone is thinking of sub-variants—we just don’t know whether they will cause a surge in infections and where they will go in the UK.”
Two subvariants, BA.4 and BA.5, currently driving a new wave of infections in South Africa, are present and showing initial signs of growth in the UK.
The BBC also references Professor Mike Tildesley from the University of Warwick warning, in the broadcaster’s words, “the next two to five years will be uncertain.”
What will those years look like? As Pym admits, a new variant of the virus “is the possibility which makes experts nervous… there is no guarantee it will be milder than Omicron.” The BBC then fudges the point, citing Professor Paul Hunter to argue “it is unlikely that a new killer variant will suddenly materialise” and his belief, given vaccines, that “we will see less severe disease”. The opposed possibility is not discussed.
In addition to this future danger, the current variants already pose a serious risk to large numbers of vulnerable people, primarily the 600,000 severely immunosuppressed across the UK.
Professor of immunology at the University of Birmingham Alex Richter told the FT the government’s COVID strategy amounted to a “game of Russian roulette” for these people. The BBC chooses to reference Gemma Peters, chief executive of Blood Cancer UK, to make the patronising point that “ministers and NHS leaders could do more to reassure” the vulnerable.
They could begin by protecting them instead! Just 46 percent of severely immunocompromised people are fully jabbed. More than 10 percent have had two or fewer doses.
A study carried out in Canada published last week found that pregnant women are also at increased risk 5.46 times more likely to be admitted to intensive care with COVID and 2.65 times more likely to be hospitalised than similar-aged women. Infection during pregnancy increased the risk of preterm birth by 63 percent.
Again, this vulnerable group has been left under-protected. Of the just over half a million women who gave birth in 2021, a shocking four in five had not received a vaccine at the time.
The findings from Canada speak to the broader harms of COVID still being uncovered by scientific research. Teams at the University of Cambridge and Imperial College London recently found a severe case of COVID could cause cognitive degeneration equivalent to 20 years of ageing. Investigations are ongoing into possible links between prior COVID infection and a sharp increase in cases of hepatitis among children.
What is known for certain but suppressed in the media and government announcements is the terrible burden of Long COVID. According to the latest Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures, released last Friday, 1.8 million people (2.8 percent of the population) were suffering the debilitating condition as of April 3. Nearly 800,000 had been experiencing symptoms for a year or more and nearly a quarter of a million for more than two years.
The BBC presents these figures with the introduction, “Case numbers have fallen sharply, but however low they get there will always be a small proportion with symptoms which last more than a few weeks, and sometimes many months.” It cites University College London Professor Christina Pagel as saying, “estimates suggesting 5% of those who have been jabbed and then get the virus will go on to get long Covid are concerning.”
In fact, as Pagel has tweeted, around 8-9 percent even of triple vaccinated people report Long COVID symptoms at least four weeks after their first infection, with most reporting activity-limiting symptoms. Data is still being collected on the rates for subsequent infections.
The BBC, along with the corporate media, the Labour Party and the trade unions, helped to propagate the myths used by the government to enforce its “living with COVID” strategy. Now fully in place, its disastrous implications are exposing the lies used to justify it. The working class is being brought face-to-face with the consequences of persistent infection, illness and death caused by a virus allowed to spread freely by the ruling class. It can only rid itself of this disease with a political fight to implement its own policy for the suppression and eventual elimination of COVID-19.
In what amounts to an about-face, after weeks of assuring Americans that all is well with COVID, endorsing the White House’s wholesale dismantling of all pandemic measures, Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House COVID response coordinator, took a much more sober and cautious stance during an appearance on ABC’s Sunday interview program “This Week.”
Dr. Ashish Jha, now the White House COVID coordinator (AP Photo/Elise Amendola)
He said, “You know, if you take a step back and look at the last two winters, we’ve had relatively large surges of infections. We’re looking at a range of models, both internal and external models. And what they are predicting is that if we don’t get ahead of this thing, we’re going to have a lot of waning immunity, this virus continues to evolve, and we may see a pretty sizable wave of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths this fall and winter.”
The apparent change in tone came after a Friday background briefing by “a senior administration official” forecasted more than 100 million possible COVID infections this fall/winter based on several modeling scenarios, according to the Washington Post. Experts at the briefing agreed that a significant wave could be expected under conditions of waning immunity and a return to pre-pandemic social norms.
Though no mention was made in the Post’s report, the scant information released was, in part, consistent with reliable modeling published in March 2022 by Fractal Therapeutics. This R&D model-based drug developmental company has also turned its expertise to provide insight into the social dynamics of the pandemic.
Dr. Arijit Chakravarty, COVID researcher and CEO of Fractal Therapeutics, explained that the world had entered a dangerous phase of the pandemic. The sole reliance on the current COVID vaccines to end the pandemic was infeasible, they warned.
In November 2021, before the emergence of Omicron, in a reportpublished in PLOS One, they warned that the vaccine-only strategy, with a rapid return to pre-pandemic social norms, would promote new variants of SARS-CoV-2 that could escape immunity. They wrote, “In this work, we demonstrate that a return to pre-pandemic conditions following modestly high levels of vaccination will efficiently select for pre-existing vaccine-evading viral variants within the population, causing a high level of infection and potentially death.”
Indeed, from December 1, 2021, to February 28, 2022, more than 80 million infections were estimated, based on seroprevalence studies, and more than 170,000 people died, including more than 52,000 who were previously fully vaccinated.
A report by Chakravarty et al. published on the medRxiv preprint server on March 30, 2022, was provocatively titled “Endemicity is not a victory: the unmitigated downside risks of widespread SARS-CoV-2 transmission.” They wrote, “Our modeling suggests that endemic SARS-CoV-2 implies vast transmission resulting in yearly US COVID-19 death tolls numbering in the hundreds of thousands under many plausible scenarios, with even modest increases in the IFR [infection fatality rate] leading to an unsustainable mortality burden.”
They noted that no evolutionary pressure favors reducing the SARS-CoV-2’s virulence. A Harvard-based study has recently corroborated that, intrinsically, Omicron remains as severe as previous variants of concern. The US could expect 50 million to 100 million COVID cases per year, under various scenarios, for years to come. And if vaccine protection against infection declined to 50 percent, this “would result in a staggering infection burden approaching 300 million US infections annually,” meaning almost the entire US population could expect to become infected every year.
Under the assumption that vaccine efficacy against mortality remains at 90 percent under all scenarios, using (1) the best estimate of reproductive number (R0) of 5 [the Ancestral strain was 2.5 and Omicron is over 10]; (2) 70 percent vaccination rates in the population [the US is 66 percent fully vaccinated]; (3) a 50 percent infection reduction risk with vaccines; and (4) “best estimate parameters for IFR, the model predicts approximately 420,000 US COVID-19 deaths annually.” They stated that under many of their scenarios, COVID could become the leading cause of death in the US.
Sequencing COVID-19 Omicron samples at a research center in South Africa. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay)
The report added, “The high level of endemic disease propagation will prove challenging for healthcare systems to manage effectively, jeopardizing the ability of healthcare professionals to detect disease when it is most tractable to antivirals, identify patients at risk for severe outcomes, and optimally distribute treatment. … Overly optimistic predictions about the ending of the ongoing pandemic have tremendously complicated the public health response to the crisis.”
They warned that the SARS-CoV-2 virus could become more virulent through improved transmission by increasing its viral load and improving its “innate” immune evasion characteristics, leading to a higher burden of severe disease despite previous infections and vaccines.
In a statement on their COVID research, Fractal Therapeutics warned, “From early on in the pandemic, we identified three major challenges. 1. That SARS-CoV-2 was likely to evolve quickly in response to spike-targeting antibodies. 2. That rapidly waning natural and vaccinal immunity meant that vaccines alone could not control the disease. 3. That individually rational choices (refusal to mitigate SARS-CoV-2 spread) would lead to a high disease burden in society.” Additionally, they predicted school reopening would lead to widespread disease transmission.
Indeed, these hair-raising estimates seem to have staggered the Biden administration, which has been keen on bringing the pandemic and all the measures that mitigate against infection to an end. Any attempt to reinstitute mask mandates, restricting the size of social gatherings, going back to online classes, or limiting the operation of large public venues would lead to severe economic repercussions on Wall Street and a political maelstrom. But not heeding the advice of principled public health officials means death on the scale seen in previous surges, leading to the complete disintegration of the health system and provoking mass rebellions of health care workers.
Jha’s attempt to shift the blame for the exhaustion of pandemic funding onto the backs of Republicans is another diversion. There has been a bipartisan effort to place the needs of the financial markets ahead of human life throughout the pandemic. Vaccination rates are on the decline, and funding has essentially dried up for testing. States across the country have dismantled their COVID dashboards. The CDC metrics camouflage the actual dangers posed by the circulating strains of Omicron, ensuring the country is flying blind into another pandemic storm.
Not once has Jha or his master Biden taken responsibility for the current state of affairs, which is set to see the third year of the pandemic horrifically unrelenting in its assault. The policies of both capitalist parties have provided the virus leeway to mutate into evermore dangerous versions, killing more than 1 million in the US alone and more than 15 million across the globe.
If the German government has its way, the working class will pay for the cost of its participation in the Ukraine war and the biggest rearmament programme since Hitler with mass poverty and the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs.
PCK refinery in Schwedt (Photo: Ralf Roletschek/Roletschek.at)
Decades of social cuts, the enrichment of the financial oligarchy as well as exploding inflation and inhumane pandemic policies have already led to an unprecedented social crisis.
In its latest issue, Der Spiegel asks the anxious question, “Is Germany going to the barricades?” “Food and fuel prices are rising, heating is becoming more expensive, the social crisis is coming to a head,” the article says. “Lower income groups are being hit particularly hard.” What is different is that “the acute social need is increasingly catching up with new population groups. Not only those who are going to the food bank. In the meantime, things are getting tight for people who have somehow managed to make ends meet with their money up to now: Single parents, single earners, pensioners, students.”
The sanctions with which Germany and the EU are trying to ruin Russia economically are exacerbating this social crisis. They affect not only the people of Russia, but also those of Germany and all of Europe. The consequences of the sanctions are being dumped on the working class, while energy and arms companies are swimming in money and the danger of a third world war is growing.
The EU Commission is finalising a sixth package of sanctions against Russia, which will see a complete ban on imports of crude oil and oil products from Russia by the end of the year. Only Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic will be subject to longer deadlines. The embargo became possible because Germany gave the green light for it. A year ago, the EU had still purchased a quarter and Germany as much as 35 percent of its oil imports from Russia.
The economic consequences of the embargo are devastating. Economists agree that it will further fuel inflation, which is already at 7.4 percent. Back in March, when discussions about a possible embargo drove the price of oil to $140 a barrel, Gabriele Widmann, commodities expert at Dekabank, warned in an interview with broadcaster RTL/ntv: “In extreme cases, we may have to pay up to three euros per litre of fuel.” Cheap energy from Russia is now a thing of the past, he said. Car drivers would have to get used to diesel and petrol prices of more than €2 per litre in the long run.
However, price increases are not only affecting petrol, heating oil and other oil products, which have already become horrendously more expensive, hitting households on low and medium incomes particularly hard. Since oil also serves as a raw material in the chemical, pharmaceutical and other industries and the price of energy determines transport and production costs in all sectors, prices are also rising there. Food is becoming more expensive due to rising fertiliser and transport costs. Energy-intensive industries such as steel and glass production are threatened with collapse.
The east of the country—whose oil supply, dating back to the days of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), is completely dependent on Russia—is particularly hard hit. The PCK refinery in Schwedt an der Oder, on the border with Poland, for example, is threatened with complete closure. This would directly destroy 1,200 jobs and indirectly thousands more in the structurally weak region in northeastern Brandenburg.
The refinery began operation in the GDR in 1960, and from 1963 until today has processed oil from the 3,000-kilometre-long pipeline Druzhba (Friendship), which runs to the Ural region. It is technically equipped to process heavier Russian oil. Switching to other types of oil, which would have to be transported by ship from the Polish port of Szczecin, would be very costly. Moreover, the refinery’s majority owner, the Russian oil company Rosneft, is unlikely to be interested in making such investments.
The second East German refinery in Leuna (Saxony-Anhalt) is also used to process crude oil from the Druzhba pipeline. Annually, Schwedt and Leuna each processed up to 12 million tonnes. However, at the Leuna refinery, which is owned by the French energy company TotalEnergies, a technical changeover is considered easier.
If both refineries cease production, all oil products would have to be imported from western Germany, which would make prices much more expensive and endanger many more jobs. The East Brandenburg Chamber of Industry and Commerce warns that if the refinery in Schwedt no longer supplied raw materials for further processing, road construction, the chemical industry and plastics processing would be affected.
Brandenburg’s State Economics Minister, Jörg Steinbach (Social Democratic Party, SPD), said that Schwedt “supplies northern Germany, BER Airport and regions in western Poland with diesel, petrol and paraffin. Without PCK, there would largely be a standstill there.” State Premier Dietmar Woidke (SPD) warned that a sudden oil embargo “would have catastrophic regional effects that we cannot cushion in any way in the short term.”
Deutsche Welle reported on the mood in the city: “I know from my friends who work at the plant that they are afraid for their jobs,” the broadcaster quoted a young woman as saying.
“The closure of the refinery would not only be terrible news for the people who work there, but for the whole town,” according to the owner of a small grocery shop. “We are talking about thousands of employees of the plant and various suppliers, and many of them are my regular customers. If they leave to find work elsewhere, I can close my shop.”
The federal government has promised help, but it is completely unknown how this will happen. Schwedt is directly affected by the oil embargo, but hardly a day goes by without other, indirectly affected companies announcing mass layoffs.
For example, the detergent manufacturer Henkel (Persil, Schwarzkopf, Schauma, Pattex, etc.) announced 2,000 job cuts. The reason given was the increase in raw material prices by more than 20 percent and the withdrawal from Russia, where the company had operated 11 production sites.
Far more devastating than the oil embargo would be a gas embargo against Russia, which Germany and the EU are also seeking in the longer term. It is also possible that Russia will react to the oil embargo by turning off the gas tap on its own initiative.
The Leibniz Institute for Economic Research Halle (IWH) has calculated the consequences of an immediate Russian gas supply stop. According to this, the economy would shrink by 2 percent in 2023, net domestic product would fall by €200 billion, which would correspond to the loss of 2.7 million jobs.
The German government and the EU justify the oil embargo by saying that “Putin’s war chest” should not be financed. But this hides the real reasons.
The official narrative that NATO is defending freedom and democracy in Ukraine against an imperialist aggressor is false and mendacious. In reality, it is waging a proxy war in which the Ukrainian population serves as cannon fodder.
The Russian attack on Ukraine is reactionary and must be rejected. But it was systematically provoked by NATO—through the wars in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, which were contrary to international law and with which the US wanted to secure its world domination, and through the systematic advance of the most powerful and aggressive military alliance in the world towards Russia.
NATO has not only provoked the war, it is doing everything to prevent a ceasefire and negotiated peace. It is flooding the country with weapons and supporting the Ukrainian army with advisers and intelligence information. Its goal is the complete defeat of Russia and regime change in Moscow to gain unhindered access to the country’s vast land mass and valuable raw materials. Geostrategically, the war against Russia serves to prepare for war against China, which the US and the major European powers regard as their most important economic and political rival.
Economically, the consequences of the oil embargo for Russia are rather minor. Although many Western traders stopped buying oil from Russia in April, the country shipped more oil than usual. India, which urgently needs it, bought large quantities. Thanks to the high world market price, Russia was even able to grant discounts without making losses. Although the EU wants to ban tankers flying the flag of an EU member state from transporting Russian oil, this will have little effect.
The real reason for the oil embargo is that Germany wants to disentangle and reorganise its global economic relations—as the former editor-in-chief of finance daily Handelsblatt, Gabor Steingart, put it—to make a world war “manageable.”
“Whoever wants to make the world war manageable must first unbundle world trade,” Steingart stressed in his Pioneer Briefing. “Economic independence is more important than more billions for the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces). So, it is not only the soldiers and their military equipment that must be gathered into an offensive formation, but also the economic resources.”
Since the 1970s, Germany and the Soviet Union—and from 1991, Russia—maintained a so-called privileged partnership, with energy relations at its core. Germany began to break with this as early as 2014, when together with the US, it supported the right-wing coup in Kiev. Now, as in 1914 and 1941, it is again using military force to pursue its imperialist interests in the East.
To do this, the German ruling class must also declare war on the working class, which is to bear the costs and burdens of militarism, while arms and energy companies and other profiteers enrich themselves from the war and high energy prices.
Shell announced record profits on Thursday. The oil giant earned $9.13 billion in the first quarter of 2022, 43 percent more than in the same period last year. BP posted a quarterly profit of $6.2 billion, up 138 percent from $2.6 billion a year earlier. BP CEO Bernard Looney called the energy market a “money machine.” Exxon Mobil, Chevron and TotalEnergies also reported profits in the billions. Their shares rose by an average of 58 percent last year.
Only the defence industry did better. The shares of the German arms company Rheinmetall have risen by 150 percent since the beginning of the year.
The results of the election staged on Monday in the Philippines are still being tabulated, but nearly all precincts have now reported, and it is clear that Ferdinand Marcos Jr., son of the country’s former dictator, has been elected president with a substantial lead over his nearest rival.
Over 50 million people queued in the scorching heat to cast their ballots. Problems with polling machines meant that many had to stand for four or more hours in line order to vote. There were reports of election violence and broken voting machines, but no more than is standard for national elections in the country.
Partial results from the Commission on Elections (Comelec), with 93 percent of precincts reporting show Marcos receiving 29.8 million votes. His nearest rival, current Vice President Leni Robredo, has 14.2 million votes, while the third, boxer-turned-senator Manny Pacquiao, trails with a distant 3.3 million.
The president and vice president are voted for separately in the Philippines, and Marcos’ running mate, Sara Duterte-Carpio, daughter of the current president, Rodrigo Duterte, is on track to win by an even larger margin. She currently has 30.1 million votes to the 8.8 million of her leading competitor, Kiko Pangilinan, running mate of Robredo.
Ferdinand Marcos Jr. (Wikimedia Commons)
The senatorial slate of Marcos and allied political forces is poised to secure a substantial majority of the 12 available seats. It is too soon to tell, but it appears possible that as many as three of Robredo’s candidates will win seats. Among those assured of Senate seats are movie star and right-wing populist, Robin Padilla, and the fascistic shock radio journalist Raffy Tulfo.
The top vote-getter among party-list organizations competing for seats in Congress, with over 2 million votes, twice as many as any other party, is ACT-CIS (Anti-Crime and Terrorism through Communist Involvement and Support). ACT-CIS is a fascistic party, associated with the Tulfo family, that was founded by former police chiefs. It is dedicated to creating anticommunist vigilante organizations with government funding.
The Duterte Youth—an organization deliberately modeled after the Hitler Youth organization with black uniforms, red armbands and the Duterte raised-fist fascist salute, advocating violent anticommunism and mandatory military training—received over 500,000 votes. Its election statement in the 2019 election, when it received 350,000 votes, warned allegedly “communist” youth that “We will finish you in the streets along with your rapist, criminal and terrorist comrades.”
The outcome of the 2022 election in the Philippines represents an unqualified victory for the most reactionary forces in Philippine politics.
What does a Marcos presidency bode?
First, in terms of geopolitics, Marcos has explicitly stated his intention of continuing the policies of the outgoing Duterte administration of improving diplomatic and trade relations with Beijing. This strategy runs afoul of Washington's openly bellicose moves against China and has placed Manila largely outside the geostrategic ambit of its former colonial ruler.
In 2016, as Duterte took office, the outgoing Benigno Aquino III administration had concluded a deal with Washington, known as the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement that effectively returned US military bases to the country after a more than 20-year absence. The ruling handed down by the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) in The Hague, invalidating much of China’s claim to the South China Sea, was poised to be a weapon in the hands of a US proxy to increase pressure on China.
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte shows ink on his finger to mark that he has finished voting at a polling center in Davao city, southern Philippines on Monday May 9, 2022 (Credit: Malacanang Presidential Photographers Division) [AP Photo/Toto Lozano/ Malacanang Presidential Photographers Division]
Duterte’s geopolitical reorientation meant that these prepared weapons were removed from Washington’s hands for six years. Marcos’ election consolidates Washington’s diminishing hold over its former colony.
This is expressed in the alignment of ruling class forces behind Marcos’ candidacy. The political kingmaker, who brokered the deal that saw Sara Duterte take the vice presidential slot on Marcos’ ticket, was former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Arroyo now stands as the single most influential political force behind the scenes of the Marcos presidency. It was under her presidency that the Philippines began to reorient its ties toward China.
She is joined in this by a man who had been her mortal enemy, former President Joseph Estrada. Arroyo took office after ousting Estrada through a constitutional coup with the backing of the military. They share a common alignment toward China, however, and common relations with the Marcoses, and Estrada has publicly pledged his enthusiastic support for Arroyo.
There are growing signs that a majority of the Philippine ruling class favor the country’s orientation to China at the expense of Washington. They have expressed alarm at Washington’s war drive in Ukraine and fear that similar moves against China could see the Philippines caught up in a bloody global war. Significant sections of the business community, particularly those based outside the capital city of Manila, favor relations with China, as they see possible infrastructure investment from China as a means of improving their access to the world market.
Second, Marcos represents advanced political preparations in the ruling class to carry out the repression of growing social unrest in the country, including the stripping away of basic constitutional rights and the possible imposition of open military dictatorship.
Fifty years ago, in 1972, Ferdinand Marcos Sr., citing the danger of “communism,” imposed martial law on the country to suppress an immense social crisis—demonstrations in the streets and a growing strike wave in the working class. The overwhelming majority of the ruling class backed Marcos in this, even his political opponents.
Marcos Sr. used his military dictatorship to ban all strikes. Under martial law over 70,000 people were arrested without warrant; nearly 4,000 were killed, and thousands more were tortured by the military. This brutal dictatorial rule continued until 1986, when Marcos was ousted in a popular uprising, coupled with an attempted military coup, which led to the installation of Corazon Aquino, the candidate of the bourgeois opposition. Marcos and his family, including Ferdinand Jr., were given a comfortable life in exile in Hawaii by the US government, which had backed his dictatorship from the day it was declared.
Marcos Jr. has made the claim that martial law was a “golden age” in Philippine history will be the center of his campaign. This is not just a lying attempt to use his family name to secure votes, it is a promise as well. Marcos is telling the ruling class that he is running as the candidate of dictatorship.
When Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos were ousted in 1986, their rule was detested. They were corrupt, they were brutal. They were guilty of mass murder and the theft of billions of dollars. This was symbolized in popular consciousness by Imelda’s thousands of pairs of shoes, in a country where most people are lucky to afford a single pair and treat them with great care.
How is it possible that 36 years later, Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has won election on the basis of the preposterous lie that his parents’ dictatorship was a golden age?
Marcos bought a good deal of his support, deploying the stolen wealth that his family still possesses. It is obvious from numerous grassroots accounts throughout the country that the crowds gathered at his rallies were brought in with the promise of envelopes of cash. The average sum of 500 pesos (about $10 USD) per person is widely reported. There is a long established tradition of vote buying in the Philippines, and there can be no doubt that Marcos engaged in this practice.
The purchase of support extended to the use of online troll farms. Marcos was backed by a systematic network of disinformation, creating videos and posts circulated on TikTok and Facebook that claimed to demonstrate that Marcos’ rivals were secretly communists, that martial law improved social conditions of the Philippines, that Marcos was personally possessed of immense wealth that he intended to redistribute if elected, and so on.
Vote buying and the production of disinformation cannot alone account for the election results. The question must be asked regarding disinformation, in particular, much of which was quite crude, why did it spread? Why did it find a mass audience which deemed it credible?
When Corazon Aquino took office in 1986, there were immense illusions placed in the social changes that her government would carry out. After two decades of Marcos rule, things would finally change for the better. Aquino, one of the largest landowners in the country, changed very little. She incorporated many of the leading criminals of the martial law regime into her cabinet. By the end of her six years in office, she found it expedient to allow the Marcoses to return to the country.
No truth commission was ever set up; no investigation of the nature of the dictatorship was conducted. Aquino covered up the crimes of those who are now her allies. History textbooks were written on this basis. No one was taught what martial law had been. For a good many years, people repeated the phrase “never again,” but it gradually lost its meaning.
Much of the country now suffers from a systematically cultivated historical illiteracy. The Duterte administration has removed the teaching of history from high schools entirely, replacing it with the abstract and largely empty Araling Panlipunan (Social Studies).
This historical illiteracy makes possible the influence of disinformation, but it does not explain its appeal.
As it has for workers around the globe, the living standards of the Filipino working masses has declined over the course of the past three decades. Real wages have fallen. The immense social crisis gripping the country finds expression in the mass export of migrant labor. Fully 10 percent of the country’s population has been compelled to seek work overseas. Families are riven apart. There are very few working families that do not have a father or a mother, sister or son torn from them to work in Singapore or Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia or Taiwan.
The illusions in liberal democracy under the rule of the successors of martial law were shattered irretrievably. Leni Robredo, the leading opponent of Marcos and chair of the Liberal Party, long associated with the Aquinos and the ouster of Marcos, was the inheritor of these shattered illusions. That she knew that her own banner was tattered and tainted was manifested in her decision to run as an independent and avoid public affiliation with her own party.
There is a degraded character to much of official democracy in the Philippines. Elections are conducted as public spectacles, nothing more. They are marked by singing, dancing, fireworks and the absence of coherent political thought. Elite politicos deliberately make fools of themselves in pursuit of votes.
Robredo did not break with this tradition but within its parameters staged a deliberately conservative, even right-wing campaign. She presented democracy as a question above all of civility and effectively counterposed herself as the decent, kindly opponent of Marcos. Day after day she staged rallies of hundreds of thousands, who wore pink and danced to the music of her campaign.
Doubtless the millions who voted for Robredo did so out of hostility to Marcos and all that he represents, but she had no concrete appeal to the tens of millions who sought not civility but an end to their poverty.
And while presenting herself as a quietly democratic force, Robredo met with the leading generals and pledged support for the continuation of the McCarthyite anticommunist apparatus, the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC), created under Duterte.
The Stalinist Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) played an integral role in the victory of Marcos. The various legal organizations that follow its political line, operating under the umbrella organization BAYAN, campaigned alongside Marcos in 2010, when he ran for Senate, and they shared a slate behind real estate billionaire Manny Villar. The CPP enthusiastically promoted Rodrigo Duterte for president and claimed that the fascist political leader was a “socialist.” The far-right atmosphere that hangs over the country today has been made possible by the role of the Stalinists.
The Stalinists threw themselves into support for Leni Robredo, campaigning for her with an intensity without precedent in the history of the party. On May 1, 2022, the Kilusang Mayo Uno (May One Movement), the labor union umbrella of the Stalinists, instructed their members that they were not to wave red flags nor were they to denounce the NTF-ELCAC. They did not want to offend their bourgeois allies.
There is a democratic tradition in the Philippines with deep historic roots in the revolutionary struggles of the working masses, but it has no connection with the country’s constitution and elections. These democratic traditions were hard won in the nation's formative anti-colonial struggles against Spain and the United States.
The democratic tradition that persists in the Filipino masses consists of a passionate commitment to freedom of speech, a courageous willingness to jeer the powerful and, above all, a highly developed belief in the need for social equality.
The constitution and the parliamentary politics of the Philippines, however, were set up by the United States in a quest to stabilize the rule of their elite partners in the country. The representatives of American imperialism wrote martial law as an executive power into the country’s legal code and kept trial by jury out. Formal democracy has proven to be nothing but the apparatus of elite rule.
The Stalinists make no effort to build upon the democratic tradition of the Filipino working class; they seek to prop up the formal democratic rule of their bourgeois allies.
The victory of Marcos in the Philippines is a stark manifestation of a global trend. Marcos has political counterparts around the world: Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Marine Le Pen, Narendra Modi. Their rise expresses the fact that formal democracy has been hollowed out by social inequality. Confronting the intensifying growth of social unrest, driven by immense crisis now exacerbated by the pandemic, the ruling class is turning to authoritarian forms of rule.
For more than four decades, the traditional liberal parties of the bourgeoisie have had nothing to offer, no progressive social measure of any substance. As the social crisis intensified over these decades, they lurched further and further to the right. It is this patent bankruptcy of bourgeois liberalism, aided and abetted by the pseudo-left, in the context of intense social crisis, that enables the rise of far-right forces basing themselves on populist lies.
Foreign lenders continue to saddle Ukraine with billions of dollars of debt, even as experts predict that the country’s GDP will fall by 45 to 50 percent this year. While massive amounts of arms and money to purchase weaponry are flooding Ukraine free of charge, the financing Kiev needs to stay afloat and address extensive damage to infrastructure is a fraction of what is required, primarily aimed at paying off current debts, and frequently coming in the form of relatively short-term loans.
In early March, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) announced a $1.4 billion assistance package for Ukraine. Since the invasion, the EU and the World Bank have respectively pledged financial support of $1.2 and $3 billion, with funds being released in stages.
IMF Headquarters, Washington, DC. (Credit: IMF)
The IMF has additionally created an international account through which other states, thus far including Canada, Poland, and the Scandinavian and Baltics countries, can funnel money to Kiev in the form of “loans and grants.” The World Bank too has set up a “Multi-Donor Trust Fund” that is drawing in financing from the UK, Japan, Austria, Switzerland and elsewhere. Ukraine is also tapping into a $2.7 billion tranche of IMF funds released late last year.
The pledges of these institutions and foreign governments are nothing compared to Ukraine’s needs. Experts expect the cost of the damage to Ukraine’s infrastructure to be from $220 billion on the low end to nearly $600 billion. The School of Economics in the capital city estimates that about $4.5 billion of destruction is happening every week. In mid-April, the Zelensky government declared that without receiving $7 billion each month through the summer, it could no longer function.
Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), told the BBC, “We found [the money] for the first and second month,” but not yet for subsequent months, as the lending agency is banking on an economic recovery in parts of Ukraine outside the war zone and “remittances from those who now work somewhere else starting flowing.”
In other words, the millions of refugees fleeing Ukraine—overwhelmingly women, children, and elderly men because adult men under the age of 60 cannot leave the country—are, having become a low-wage labor force across the EU, expected to bear the cost of the destruction of the already impoverished country in a war provoked by the US and NATO.
Even prior to Russia’s invasion, Ukraine was already shouldering massive external debt. It was built up over the course of three decades of endless borrowing, with every new cycle requiring the imposition of austerity measures that made millions destitute and opened up new profit-making opportunities for foreign investors.
According to World Bank data, the country owes external lenders $129 billion in prewar debt, the equivalent of 78.8 percent of its GDP. Kiev expects to repay $16 billion this year. In addition to outstanding loans and accumulated interest, Ukraine is also coping with various penalties and fees for failing to meet criteria set by international lenders. In 2022, Ukraine is supposed to fork over $178 million in loan surcharges to the IMF.
In an April 20 article in Deutsche Welle, Ukrainian economist Oleksandr Kravchuk objected to the fact that the “sums [from international lenders] are clearly not enough for financial stability,” noting that “the country's debt dependence and debt burden will only grow,” even if interest rates are low. He called for, as have some other political figures and commentators in the West, the cancellation of Ukraine’s debts. No such measure has been forthcoming.
The terms of the current IMF agreements with Ukraine clearly state that all of the loans are subject to the requirements of “precautionary and liquidity lines,” “stand-by agreements,” “financial credit lines,” and other restrictions and obligations. These include an escalating series of financial punishments when the debtor exceeds certain dollar thresholds and time frames. In short, interest rates increase as the loan amount grows and the length of the time that it takes the borrower to pay it back extends. The loan recipient has at most five years to extinguish his debt.
The EU announced a few days ago that it would suspend imports on Ukrainian goods for one year and work to speed up progress on a free-trade agreement in an effort to help the country’s economy. With a GDP that is falling by half, what exactly Ukraine is supposed to sell to the EU is unclear.
Ukraine’s debt is growing with private lenders, both individuals and institutions, as well. So far Kiev has sold $1 billion of war bonds. They are to be paid, with an interest rate of 11 percent, in a year’s time. According to CNN Business, the Zelensky government is now appealing for crypto-currency donations and seeking funding with “non-financial tokens.”
The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and other major lenders all see the war as a means to dramatically extend their control over the resources of Ukraine and force the country to further cut social spending and open up its economy to outside investors. Ukraine is, for instance, home to one-third of the world’s “black earth” soil, among the most fertile land to be found.
Writing in the Atlantic on April 11, David Frum, a well-known political commentator and former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, insisted that the measures taken by the West to help Ukraine “prove not a burdensome gift to charity but a mutually beneficial investment.” He insisted that the country would have to address “internal corruption” and “predation” and endorsed the suggestion of the leading economist Anders Aslund that Ukraine “overcome the deficiencies of its judicial system by opening new trade courts, staffed by foreign judges who earn international salaries but apply Ukrainian law.”
About a week later, former US Ambassador to Georgia and Kazakhstan and currently a fellow at the RAND Institute, William Courtney, penned a piece with colleague Khrystyna Holynska in the American newswire UPI underscoring similar themes. The authors castigated Ukraine for inhibiting investors and having “backtracked” on previous promises to the IMF to liberalize Ukraine’s economy. They demanded that the rebuilding process come with extending “an efficient market for private land” and speeding up the privatization of 3300 state-owned enterprises. They also insisted on the full implementation of “gas price reform,” a euphemistic way of demanding that Kiev completely end all price controls on home heating and cooking fuels.
While a tight grip is being kept on economic aid to Ukraine, NATO countries are tripping over themselves on a nearly daily basis to announce the dispatch of ever-more lethal weaponry to the country. As of mid-March, according to the US State Department, Washington alone had sent $2 billion of “security assistance” to Kiev since President Biden took office. Congress is now on the verge of approving the White House’s request for another $33 billion in aid, of which more than $20 billion will be of a military character. The UK, France, Germany, and every other EU state are rushing weapons to the east European country and areas near Russia’s border. They have not the slightest qualms about turning the region into a wasteland, a factor that might figure into their calculations as to the wisdom of handing the Kiev government a great deal of “no-strings-attached” money.
