Channel Islands: Up to 12 people killed in explosion at Jersey apartment block

Steve James

As many as 12 people are thought likely to have been killed when an explosion collapsed a block of flats in St Helier, Jersey. At the time of writing, five people were confirmed dead, and four residents were still unaccounted for. An uncertain number of visitors were still thought to be missing.

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The huge blast, captured on CCTV and heard across the island, occurred at 4am Saturday morning. Social media clips and press photos show the modern three-storey Haut du Mont apartment building, off Pier Road, as completely destroyed, with debris scattered and cars damaged over a wide area. Neighbouring blocks of flats have also been damaged. Pockets of flame continued to burst from the wreckage for hours. Residents in nearby flats have been evacuated to St Helier Town Hall.

Chief Fire Officer for Jersey's Fire and Rescue Service, Paul Brown, told a press conference Saturday that the fire service had been called out to the building the previous evening. The island's police chief, Robin Smith, confirmed to the Jersey Evening Post that the callout related to reports of residents smelling gas at the property, owned by state-controlled housing provider Andium Homes. Gas on the island is provided by Island Energy. Investigation of the incident is likely to take weeks.

Pier Road, the roofs of Commercial Buildings, and the harbour, St. Helier, Jersey [Photo by Dan Marsh - Own work / CC BY 3.0]

Should a gas buildup be confirmed as causing the tragedy, it would not be the first major gas related emergency on the island. In 2014, Jersey Gas, forerunner to Island Energy, pled guilty in health and safety breaches after a huge gas holder fire in 2012, also in St Helier. The fire, which started during repair of a gas leak, resulted in large scale evacuation of nearby streets, a 400-metre exclusion zone, and the eventual demolition of the gas holder. Jersey Gas were found to have sent poorly trained and equipped workers, lacking even a fire extinguisher, to deal with the leak in an area which had not been risk assessed. One worker suffered burns when their equipment started the potentially catastrophic fire. The company was fined just £65,000.

Three years later, Island Energy Group, which also provides gas on Guernsey and the Isle of Man, was taken over by infrastructure asset managers Ancala Partners. Ancala's “diversified portfolio” also includes solar, wind and anaerobic power generators, Liverpool Airport, the largest private rail company in Scandinavia Hector Rail, Portsmouth Water and the Holmleigh Care Group which runs 48 care homes and 3 hospitals.

The St Helier explosion, if gas is confirmed as the source, will be the latest in a series of gas related blasts across Britain and Ireland.

October 7 this year, 10 people died in a huge explosion in the tiny village of Creeslough, County Donegal, in Ireland. Eight more were injured by the blast which destroyed apartments that collapsed onto the Creeslough Applegreen service station. Among those killed were residents of the apartment, shoppers, a staff member at the service station and motorists parked outside. The youngest victim was only five years of age. Two teenagers died. The population of the entire village numbers 400.

While gas is suspected to have caused the disaster, a huge police operation has been launched into its origins. Donegal is one of only three counties in the Republic of Ireland not on the country's natural gas network. Liquid petroleum gas (LPG) is frequently used for heating and cooking. As of late November, gardai (police) are reported to have taken 300 statements and are following 500 lines of enquiry. DNV, a company specialising in testing energy systems, has been mobilised. A huge mound of debris and wreckage was excavated from the site to a nearby undisclosed location.

While Northern Ireland has four natural gas operators, the main provider in the Republic, Bord Gáis Energy, does not offer a service to isolated Donegal. The company was owned by the Irish state until its sale was forced as part of the terms on the European Union/IMF bailout of the Irish banking system following the financial meltdown of 2008/9. Bord Gáis Energy is now owned by the British service giant Centrica, part of the former British Gas privatised in 1986.

On August 8, a gas explosion destroyed one house and damaged several others in Thornton Heath, south London. A four-year-old child, Sahara Salman, was killed. The explosion forced the evacuation of hundreds of people from the surrounding area and generated immense anger, particularly as many had called gas provider Southern Gas Network (SGN) to report a smell of gas in the area. On August 12, SGN operations director, Martin Holloway was shouted down at a meeting with residents who accused the company of having “blood on its hands”. ITV reported a resident telling Holloway, “A little girl lost her life because of you lot taking your time, and how many people have been telling you that there’s been a problem.”

On October 21, local Labour Party MP, Siobhain McDonagh, spoke in an adjournment debate in Westminster about the incident. She quoted Sahara's mother Sana, who was one of those who called SGN and was also injured. Sana said, “What did I get as a result of this phone call? I tried to help and warn of a possible gas explosion and my own daughter and in turn our family are victims of such an explosion just days later.” McDonagh said that insurers were refusing to compensate residents whose property was damaged. She noted that the 36-inch cast iron gas pipes in the area were supposed to have been replaced under an emergency programme following an explosion in Scotland. The work was stalled and many of the cast iron pipes due for replacement remain operational.

On October 18, last year, a gas explosion destroyed four houses in the Kincaidston area of the town of Ayr, Scotland. Four people were hospitalised and a large area cordoned off. After nearly a year, following a Freedom of Information request, the BBC reported that the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) had found “numerous localised spots of corrosion” in pipework under the destroyed housing. Damage on the plastic coating of the pipes, which dated from the 1970s, could have led to a gas buildup. The HSE found no blame could be attributed and speculated that the coating was damaged when the estate was built. Scottish Gas Network, also the owner of Southern Gas Network, has subsequently replaced all the piping in the estate.

In 2001, according to the Daily Mail, following a 1999 explosion in Larkhall, South Lanarkshire that killed a family of four, the HSE reported that 56,500 miles of metal pipework in Scotland, some dating to the 19th century, should be replaced with plastic piping. As of 2021, just 125 miles was being replaced annually, although SGN’s annual report claimed it had replaced 849 kilometres (527 miles). The replacements will take decades. In 2021, the group reported an operating profit of £526 million.

Catastrophe in care at German children’s hospitals

Tino Jacobson & Markus Salzmann

A wave of infections in Germany is pushing hospitals and their staff to the limit. In addition to the strain of the coronavirus pandemic, now in its third year, seasonal sickness from influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) have increased the burden on health care. Children’s hospitals in particular have their backs to the wall and can no longer cope with the current tide of RSV infections.

Healthcare high-rise of the Charité Hospital [Photo by Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 4.0]

The dramatic situation is a result of the government’s disastrous health care and pandemic policies. Its rigorous policy of mass infection, recently taken to extremes with the lifting of the most minimal protective measures—such as masking in public areas and compulsory isolation for those infected—as well as the opening of schools and day-care centers without any mitigation measures, has intensified seasonal infections and drastically increased the risk of multiple reinfections. This affects children in particular.

RSV is a virus that affects the upper and lower respiratory tract. In principle this disease can be contracted at any age but is one of the most common pathogens in infants and young children. The incidence of RSV disease worldwide is 48.5 cases and 5.6 severe cases per 1,000 children in the first year of life.

Children, as well as adults with immunodeficiency or pre-existing lung and heart conditions, are particularly afflicted by severe courses. In recent weeks, physicians and health experts have warned of a sharp increase in RSV infections in children. Typically, the cold season does not begin until early December. The peak of the infection wave therefore still lies ahead.

The situation in children’s hospitals has been catastrophic for years and continues to worsen. A major problem is the shortage of staff on the one hand and the lack of intensive care beds in children’s hospitals on the other. Michael Sasse, senior physician in charge of pediatric intensive care at Hannover Medical School, summed up the deadly consequences saying, “Children die because we can’t take care of them.”

A survey conducted by the German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine (DIVI) in late November described the situation as follows: “Of 110 children’s hospitals, 43 facilities recently no longer had a single bed free in the normal ward. Only 83 vacant beds remain in total in pediatric intensive care units across Germany—that’s 0.75 vacant beds per hospital.”

According to the survey, one in two of 130 children’s hospitals said they had been unable to admit at least one child in the last 24 hours following a request from the ambulance service or emergency department. As a result, critically ill children had to search for available intensive care beds at other children’s hospitals, traveling long distances and losing vital treatment time.

According to the secretary general of the DIVI, Florian Hoffmann, the situation has been getting worse from year to year to the detriment of critically ill children. The health care system has been “driven to the wall” for years, says Jakob Maske, federal spokesman for the Professional Association of Pediatric Doctors (BVKJ).

The president of the German Child Protection Association (DKSB), Heinz Hilgers, also attributes the catastrophic situation to “decades of neglect” by politicians. “Because of the exclusively business orientation of the system, which is designed for full capacity utilization,” no improvements have been attempted, he said.

Three pediatricians associations and several hospital physicians criticized the “irresponsible conditions” in Berlin in an open letter to the Berlin Senator for Health Ulrike Gote (Green Party). The letter states: “The health as well as the life of our children and young people is massively threatened.”

This is the reality in the German capital, governed by a coalition of Social Democrats (SPD), Left Party and Greens. Many days Berlin hospitals entirely lack free beds and parents cannot find pediatricians for their newborns. Moreover, emergency rooms are heavily overloaded. Back on January 24 of this year, the initiative sent a first urgent letter and on September 20 a second one to Gote and Federal Minister of Health Karl Lauterbach (SPD).

It is not surprising that these appeals fall on deaf ears. The current situation is the result of a deliberate policy pursued over years and decades by the established parties.

It was, after all, the federal coalition government of SPD and Greens from 1998 to 2005 that created this miserable situation in the health care system with the introduction of flat-rate payments per case (DRG system). An architect and proponent of the introduction of flat rates per case was Karl Lauterbach himself.

Dominik Schneider of Dortmund Hospital describes the consequences of this system for children’s hospitals as follows: “In the last 30 years, including the introduction of the DRG system in Germany, the number of children’s hospitals has fallen by a fifth and the number of beds by a third. At the same time, the number of children requiring inpatient treatment has increased by about 10 percent.”

As a consequence of the catastrophic situation in children’s hospitals, Lauterbach cynically demands that the nursing staff of other hospital departments, already working at their limit, should jump in to assist the intensive care units of the children’s hospitals. Jakob Maske rightly criticizes this proposal to transfer staff as “complete humbug,” since assignment in the children’s ward requires special proficiencies.

In addition, Health Minister Lauterbach plans to suspend the staffing limit for nurses, which will lead to even greater understaffing in the wards and amounts to further overloading nurses. Due to staff shortages and the transfer of existing nursing staff to pediatric wards, many health care facilities are postponing planned surgeries.

Last week, the federal coalition of the SPD, the Greens and the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) passed a legislative package to ease the burden on nursing staff and hospitals. The result is a new instrument for setting staffing levels in clinics, which remains vague and is not to be implemented until 2025. The Verdi trade union, which in recent negotiations has locked-in the precarious situation of nursing staff for the coming years with so-called relief collective agreements in several federal states, played a key role in drafting the bill.

In addition, a small amount of financial relief for children’s hospitals was legislated. These facilities are to receive an additional €300 million in both 2023 and 2024. This is no more than the proverbial drop in the bucket since pediatric hospitals and wards have been bled dry for decades.

Lauterbach recently announced, to great media fanfare, that the flat rate per case system in children’s hospitals would be abolished. “In the future, it will no longer be economic constraints but medical necessity” that will determine treatment in the clinics. He himself described his reforms as a “revolution.”

In fact, the opposite is the case. The DRG system will not be touched, and the central element of the reform is the reduction of inpatient stays. This means not only a decline in the quality of care, but also a deterioration in the financial situation of small- and medium-sized hospitals. In the end, therefore, even more “economic constraint” will prevail.

The lack of importance attached to the lives and health of the population by the federal and state governments is shown not only by the more than 158,000 deaths caused by the unscrupulous profits-before-lives policy pursued during the pandemic, but also by the 2023 budget adopted by the federal government. While military spending will increase from just under €50 billion to €58.6 billion, the health budget, which was temporarily increased during the pandemic, will be cut from €64.3 billion to €24.5 billion.

BIS warns of dollar debt ‘black hole’

Nick Beams

In its latest quarterly review issued last week, the Bank for International Settlements has identified a potential black hole for financial markets that could play a major role either in setting off a financial crisis or accelerating one.

The BIS, an umbrella organisation of the world’s central banks, said that “embedded in the foreign exchange (FX) market is huge, unseen dollar borrowing.”

Bank for International Settlements (BIZ) in Basel, Switzerland [Photo by Wladyslaw Sojka (Free Art License 1.3)]

The report, entitled “Dollar debt in FX swaps and forwards: huge, missing and growing,” focusses on the central role played by the dollar in the foreign exchange markets.

The amounts are enormous, around $80 trillion, and involve the daily transactions in currency markets of around $5 trillion. Each day, financial entities, pension funds, insurers and banks undertake deals centering on the dollar as the key global currency. At any given point there are myriad deals involving currency swaps between the dollar and other currencies.

For example, the review notes, “an investor or a bank wanting to do an FX swap from say, Swiss francs into Polish zloty would swap francs for dollars and then dollars for zloty.”

But the problem identified in the review is that there are no statistics covering these operations. The various dollar payment obligations “do not appear on balance sheets and are missing in standard debt statistics” and are recorded “off-balance sheet in a blind spot.”

Reporting on the review, Financial Times columnist Gillian Tett, posed the question: “Does it matter if you lose track of $80 trillion?”

The BIS clearly believes it does because, while dollar swaps and transactions proceed smoothly and routinely in “normal” times, it is a very different matter when a crisis erupts.

“The FX markets are vulnerable to funding squeezes,” the report said.

“This was evident during the Great Financial Crisis and again in March 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic wrought havoc. For all the differences between 2008 and 2020, swaps emerged in both episodes as flash points, with dollar borrowers forced to pay high rates if they could borrow at all. To restore market functioning, central bank swap lines funneled dollars to non-US banks offshore, which on-lent to those scrambling for dollars.”

According to the BIS, the lack of information regarding dollar debt because it is off balance sheet makes it “harder for policymakers to anticipate the scale and flow of dollar rollover needs. Thus, in times of crisis, policies to restore the smooth flow of short-term dollars in the financial system (e.g., central bank swap lines) are set in a fog.”

This meant that when panic was quelled, as the Fed allowed other central banks to supply dollars and backstop markets in 2008 and 2020, they acted on little information about who owed the debt.

The BIS warnings that the institutions supposedly in charge of the financial system are flying blind will be passed over by those who point to the fact the markets continue to function, ignoring the fact that two major crises have erupted in the past decade and a half.

This was the essential content of a discussion on the Bloomberg channel on the BIS review. In other words, nothing much to see here.

But, tasked with trying to secure the stability of the financial system as a whole, the BIS is clearly concerned and has called for the development of statistics that track outstanding short-term dollar obligations, conscious of the enormous disruption that took place in this area in 2008 and March 2020.

It noted that it was “not even clear how many analysts are aware of the existence of large-scale off-balance sheet obligations” and sounded a warning to those who might try to ignore the problem.

“Off balance sheet dollar debt,” it concluded, “may remain out of sight and out of mind, but only until the next time dollar funding liquidity is squeezed. Then ‘hidden leverage’ and maturity mismatch in pension funds’ and insurance companies’ portfolios … could pose a policy challenge. And policies to restore the flow of dollars would still be set in a fog.”

The issues highlighted by the BIS are by no means the only area of concern.

Last week, the FT published an article entitled “Financial Stability: the hunt for the next market fracture,” consisting of a series of short comments from various journalists pointing to areas of growing concern.

It noted that after a decade of falling interest rates “global financial markets are facing a reckoning” because of the tightening interest rate regime being imposed by central banks, led by the US Fed. This was sucking liquidity—the ability to transact without dramatically moving prices—out of markets.

The result was that “violent” and sudden moves in one market “can provoke a vicious loop of calls and forced sales of other assets, with unpredictable results.”

Elaine Stokes, a portfolio manager at the investment firm Louis Sayles, told the FT the market was “illiquid”, “erratic” and “volatile”. It was “trading on impulse and we just can’t keep doing that.”

Various shocks in the market, such as the closure of the nickel market in London at the start of the pandemic, the bailout of European energy providers and the September-October pensions crisis in the UK were “being scrutinised as oracles of wider dislocations to come.”

A contribution by another journalist noted that while liquidity had long been a hallmark of the $24 trillion US Treasury market, it had “dried up” because of higher interest rates and reduced buying by the Fed and the Bank of Japan.

In her comment on the BIS findings, Tett noted that another area of “fog” was the US Treasury market which, like dollar swaps, underpins much of the financial system.

“During the dramatic market turmoil of March 2020, it became clear that secondary market trading structures have big vulnerabilities that were not understood—or reported—before.”

While the US Treasury and Securities and Exchange Commission was trying to fix the problem “progress is slow.”

Of course, like all financial commentators and analysis, while providing some insights at times, she did not draw out the essential conclusion: that the “problems” are inherently unsolvable because they are rooted in the contradictions of the capitalist economy and financial system itself.

This is why the very measures aimed at stabilising the financial system after the crises of 2008 and 2020 by pouring in trillions of dollars have only created the conditions for the eruption of an even deeper crisis.

Australian “energy relief” plan to subsidise business while household bills continue to soar

Mike Head

Australia’s Labor government unveiled an “Energy Price Relief Plan” last Friday that will pour more money into the pockets of business, including coal producers, while promising households only token reductions in sky-rocketing electricity and gas bills.

Eraring coal-fired power station on the shores of Lake Macquarie, southeast of Newcastle, NSW. [Photo by CSIRO / CC BY 3.0]

Facing seething working-class discontent and breakouts of strikes, the government is desperate to appear to be offering some relief to ordinary people, who face the greatest reduction in living standards since World War II due to surging inflation and loan interest rates, and ongoing cuts to real wages.

After a meeting of the extra-constitutional and bipartisan “National Cabinet” of federal, state and territory leaders, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese claimed that the plan would take an average of $230 off the expected rise in a household energy bill for next year. 

However, this is from a government that barely scraped into office in May after pledging to reduce typical electricity bills by $275, only to immediately drop the promise and deliver price hikes that are already about double that amount.

Even if the $230 claim eventuates—and that is by no means likely—it would make little difference to the cost-of-living crisis confronting the working class, which sees prices for essentials such as food, petrol and energy rising by around 8 percent annually, on top of home mortgage payments increasing by thousands of dollars a month.

According to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s latest estimate, released last Wednesday, households between April and October suffered a $300, or 23 percent, leap in their typical, annual electricity bill. 

In October, the Labor government’s first budget revealed that electricity bills were expected to jump by 20 percent this financial year and 36 percent in 2023-24, for a staggering increase of 63 percent. As a result of the “relief” package the growth next year is supposed to be 23 percent, but is still producing a predicted combined jump of 47 percent over the two years.

Gas bills, which Labor’s budget forecast would soar by 20 percent this financial year and 20 percent in 2023-24, for a combined increase of 40 percent, are now forecast to increase by 18 percent this year and 4 percent next year, for a combined jump of 22.7 percent. On both electricity and gas bills, households on the government’s sub-poverty level welfare payments have been promised a further 10 percent reduction—a puny $23 or so.

Yet even these pledges are based on vague “Treasury modelling” and depend on deals that remain to be haggled out with the state and territory governments, which can regulate energy prices in their jurisdictions. The promised bill reductions will not be paid as rebates, but as slight decreases in power prices, which will not start until June at the earliest.

Even more obscure is how much of this “relief” will go to businesses, rather than households. Deliberately, no figures were provided for this. Instead, there were deeply-buried references to special assistance for “manufacturers” and “small business,” with eligibility yet to be settled by the various governments.

Businesses that are reliant on electricity and gas have far larger bills than households and would therefore take a big share of the $3 billion said to be on offer from the federal and state governments for the subsidies. Some idea of the expected corporate benefit could be gleaned from Energy Minister Chris Bowen, who said the package would save businesses from going bankrupt.

Albanese also spoke about “keeping industry going.” Asked by a journalist how the scheme would work for business, including how a “small business” would be defined and how much they would receive, he evaded the question. “That will be worked through by the treasurer and the state and territory treasurers in coming weeks,” Albanese said, with a report back to the National Cabinet early next year.

The Sydney Morning Herald estimated that the government would spend up to half a billion dollars compensating coal producers in New South Wales and Queensland for imposing price caps, on top of the government’s $1.5 billion share for bill relief to households and businesses. “A federal government source” said the total federal contribution could be just over $2 billion when including compensation for coal producers, but this was yet to be finalised.

The plan proposes temporary one-year price caps—$12 per gigajoule for gas, and $125 per tonne for black coal. These caps will have only a marginal impact, if any, on energy giants’ profits. Almost all domestically contracted coal is under that cap already, and the highly-profitable gas price was below $12 before the US-NATO proxy war against Russia. In fact, the package is designed to protect the war super-profits these conglomerates are making on their exports. “We’re not capping export prices,” Bowen emphasised.

Albanese also stressed that the scheme would not affect gas or coal contracts overseas. On the contrary, gas exports would expand. He said the deal included the fast-track development of the $1.5 billion Santos Narrabri gas field in NSW, which would involve up to 850 coal seam gas wells being drilled. The Liberal-National state government of Premier Dominic Perrottet has now declared the project to be “Critical State Significant Infrastructure,” in order to sideline environmental legal challenges to its approval.

Albanese’s government has ruled out any measures that would impinge on the massive war-profiteering by the energy companies, such as imposing a windfall tax to fund household relief or requiring gas to be set aside for domestic use, rather than export. 

The existing petroleum resource rent tax touches only a tiny fraction of the super-profits. Analysis by the Australia Institute recently estimated that despite reaping profit increases of between $25 to $40 billion a year, gas companies are paying only an extra $1 billion in tax.

Nevertheless, the Greens have offered to help the government rush through the necessary legislation for the “relief” plan via a sudden one-day recall of parliament this week. Labor may need the Greens’ support to get the bill through the Senate. Greens leader, Adam Bandt, said he opposed compensating coal companies, and nominally proposed a two-year freeze on electricity bills funded through a windfall tax. But he was confident the Greens could “find a way through” to a compromise position with the government “in good faith.”

Last Thursday, the Albanese government also announced what amounts to billion-dollar subsidies for companies producing “green energy.” It reached agreement with the state governments on a “capacity mechanism” that will pay renewable energy providers to have their capacity available during certain periods to ensure there are no power shortfalls. Energy Minister Bowen said the scheme would “unleash” $10 billion in investment in wind, solar and battery projects.

These are just the latest profitable deals that the Labor government has struck with energy giants. In September, liquefied natural gas exporters promised to make 150 petajoules of uncontracted gas available to domestic users in 2023, but only at export prices, which have surged to double their previous levels.

Regardless, mining company and financial market representatives denounced the price caps last Friday, rejecting any intervention whatsoever into their lucrative markets. Credit Suisse energy analyst Saul Kavonic said the plan represented “a declaration of war on the gas industry” and would likely trigger a major industry advertising campaign against the policy, like the one against a minimal mining tax a decade ago.

US COVID death toll surges in third winter of the pandemic

Benjamin Mateus

The United States is entering its third COVID winter with a new surge of COVID cases, hospitalizations and deaths being reported on the few COVID dashboards that continue to provide a glimpse into the state of the pandemic. The seven-day average of cases has nearly doubled since mid-October to 61,570 cases, although these figures remain unreliable and woeful undercounts. 

Even worse, the seven-day average in COVID deaths has turned sharply upwards again. While pre-Thanksgiving figures were trending under 300 per day, they surged to over 560 per day on a seven-day average after the holidays. Specifically, Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center logged more than 1,000 COVID deaths on December 7. 

Hospitalizations have followed the same trend seen in deaths, having surged 25 percent to almost 38,000 admissions in the last two weeks. These are only compounding the strain on health systems from the flu and RSV epidemic.

As COVID deaths turn upward from an already unacceptable level, one major demographic issue is coming more and more to the fore: the elderly, despite being the most heavily vaccinated age group, are dying in massively disproportionate numbers.

For the week ending November 19, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that Americans aged 65 and older accounted for 92 percent of COVID fatalities.

In the summer of 2021, when the vaccination campaign had attained its peak among the elderly, that figure was only 58 percent, and most of these were unvaccinated. This figure demonstrated the life-saving aspects of vaccines, particularly for those over 65. However, as the virus has continued to evolve, it has become more immune-evasive and is killing the elderly at an alarming rate, regardless of their vaccination status.

Overall, those 65 and older, who make up 16.8 percent of the population, have accounted for 75 percent of the 1.07 million COVID deaths in the US, or 808,113, as of the latest figures from Statista.

Those 65 to 74, who represent 10.1 percent of the population (33.67 million), accounted for 22.7 percent (244,086) of COVID deaths, or a rate three times higher than their representation. COVID wiped out 0.7 percent, or 1 in every 138 in this age group.

The 75-to-84-year age group represent 4.9 percent of the population (16.21 million) and accounted for nearly 26 percent of all COVID deaths (279,276), a rate five times higher. There was one COVID death for every 58 people in this group.

Those who are 85 and older paid the highest price. With around 6 million in this age demographic, representing just 1.8 percent of the US population, they accounted for 26.5 percent of COVID deaths (284,751), a rate of nearly 15 times their representation in the population. Almost 5 percent of all those over 85 and older have been killed by COVID so far, one in every 20.

The meaning is clear: COVID disproportionately kills the oldest in society, and the older the person infected, the more likely the infection will be fatal. The bipartisan Trump-Biden policy of promoting mass infection of COVID amounts to “geronticide,” the deliberate culling of the elderly on a massive scale.

This is not an accident, but a deliberate policy, and it is viewed as having significant benefits for capitalist society, disproportionately removing those who are regarded as a “drain” on “society’s resources,” by which the capitalists mean people who can no longer work and contribute to their profits.

That COVID is “forever” is not a byproduct of the adaptation of the virus, whatever its ability to evade immunity. It is the product of policies that prohibit any constraints on economic activity, and which demand the public minimization of the continuing COVID danger by the White House and the CDC.

Political hacks like Dr. Ashish Jha and Dr. Rochelle Walensky have failed in their public heath duties to put into place measures to protect the population against what is still a life-and-death threat. 

Uptake of the bivalent boosters—the centerpiece of the White House’s COVID response—has been abysmal. Only 13.5 percent of all eligible people have received the bivalent boosters since they became available in September. Among the elderly, little more than a third have taken these jabs. This is not some failure of personal initiative on their part.

The lifting of all mitigation measures across the country, the reopening of schools to in-person instruction without the infrastructure initiatives to ensure safe clean air, and the infamous remark by Biden in September that the pandemic was over and it was time to put the pandemic behind us and return to normal, have created the conditions that continue to give the coronavirus free rein. 

When COVID deaths were evaluated through the microscope of socio-economic indices, a study published in April 2022 found that COVID mortality was five times higher among adults in low socioeconomic positions, 72.2 per 100,000, compared to the richest with only 14.6 per 100,000. Furthermore, 72 percent of these differences were attributed to a job that was never performed remotely, “particularly blue collar, service, and retail sales workers.”

These differences were not racial in character, but occupation-linked, with the COVID death totals for whites, blacks and Hispanics corresponding roughly to the proportion of each group in the population.

A study published in JAMA Network not only demonstrated that life expectancy disparities existed before the pandemic between those in low versus high socioeconomic groups, two years into the pandemic, the poorest saw nearly a five-year decline in life expectancy while those in the richest deciles held on to their privileged life expectancy well over 85 years of age. As such, the working class can expect to retire and fall immediately into the grave.

With the surge in COVID cases, once more, the most vulnerable in nursing homes are being placed at risk. The latest estimates by the Kaiser Family Foundation on deaths in long-term care facilities. Fewer than half of them are up to date on their COVID vaccinations and only 23 percent of nursing home staff are. Additionally, primary care physicians and prescribers are wary of ordering them anti-viral therapeutics like Paxlovid when they are infected.

Meanwhile, with the world’s population recently passing the eight billion mark, discussions in the bourgeois press have turned to the issue of the cost of caring for the elderly. The Economist recently posted a glossy, high production video titled “the true costs of ageing,” that opens with the lines, “When people retire, they start costing more money and the cost will soon be unsustainable. The current approaches for the care of the elderly are a drain on society’s resources.” 

The editors go on to discuss that with a reduced work force the cost of paying out pensions and health care will be catastrophic because the elderly “spend less, pay less in taxes, and cost more,” driving down GDP and leading to economic stagnation. They add, “If you look at it from an economic perspective, we are spending too much money doing the wrong thing … and the mistakes cost more than just money.”

According to RBC Wealth management, “the projected lifetime cost of care for a healthy 65-year-old is $404,253—and that doesn’t factor in long-term care costs, which could be as high as $100,000 a year.” The removal of 800,000 such people (the number of over-65s killed by COVID in the US) would save the American government $320 billion, plus another $80 billion a year, plus additional “savings” from additional deaths. Such calculations are undoubtedly being made in government and Wall Street offices.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has reported that the “cost of aging” means high-income countries will have to drop their population’s consumption considerably due to the “new demographic realities.”

The pandemic has been a boon to the financial sectors, and the working class, as reflected in the massive decline in life expectancy, has paid the price.

Orion spacecraft splashes down, completing Artemis I mission

Bryan Dyne

The uncrewed Artemis I mission came to a conclusion Sunday morning after the Orion spacecraft successfully completed a parachute-assisted splashdown off the coast of Mexico’s Baja California peninsula at 12:40 p.m. Eastern Time. The landing was the final major milestone of the Artemis I mission, which is being hailed by the Biden administration and the corporate media as the precursor to new crewed missions to the Moon and possibly Mars.

The mission came after several setbacks, including a two-and-a-half-month delay after technical difficulties halted the initial launch attempt on August 29. Additional engineering issues cropped up in early September, including a leak in the rocket’s fuel line, pushing the launch date back to the end of the month. Further delays caused by weather threats from Tropical Storm Ian and Hurricane Nicole forced NASA to push back the launch several more weeks.

NASA’s Orion spacecraft for the Artemis I mission splashed down in the Pacific Ocean at 9:40 a.m. PST on Sunday, Dec. 11, after a 25.5 day mission to the Moon. [Photo: NASA]

Artemis I finally launched on November 16, beginning a mission that lasted more than 25 days. The first part of the mission, from launch to about 90 minutes after liftoff, was a test of the Space Launch System (SLS), a super-heavy launch vehicle designed by NASA to lift Orion to lunar orbit. Its primary task during Artemis I was completed after its upper stage, the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage, fired for 18 minutes to put Orion on a trajectory to the Moon. It then separated from Orion, deployed 10 miniature satellites (CubeSats) and then completed a final burn into an orbit around the Sun, effectively being disposed.

The rest of the Artemis I mission consisted of testing the Orion spacecraft. It entered the Moon’s gravitational influence on November 20 and began a series of complex orbital maneuvers designed to enter orbit around the Moon on November 25, while minimizing fuel use. After several orbits, the spacecraft performed a burn on December 5, just after its closest approach to the Moon, just 128 kilometers (80 miles) from the lunar surface, to set itself on an earthbound course.

Orion’s final test was just before splashdown when it performed a “skip entry.” Similar to how one can skip a rock off the surface of a pond, a spacecraft oriented properly can skip off Earth’s upper atmosphere. The technique, when employed correctly, is designed to bleed off the spacecraft’s velocity in two stages rather than one to reduce the stress on astronauts returning to Earth.

A view of Earth and the Moon from the Orion spacecraft when it was at its maximum distance from Earth on November 28, 2022. [Photo: NASA]

While the technique was first theorized during the Apollo era, it was never implemented because the calculations to perform the maneuver were too complex for the computers aboard the Apollo Command Module. Orion, however, is fully capable of making the calculations needed to skip off Earth’s atmosphere just enough to reduce its speed but not enough to bounce back into orbit. The rest of the descent happened as expected and the capsule was ultimately recovered by the US Navy after landing safely.

The next task of the scientists and engineers on the Artemis program will be to analyze the data collected by the instruments on board the spacecraft. Orion carried a variety of acceleration, vibration and radiation sensors to gather data about the various stresses that astronauts will face while traveling aboard the spacecraft.

Several of these were mounted on three mannequins to better simulate a human’s experience during spaceflight. One of the most important experiments involved two mannequins, nicknamed Helga and Zohar, and measured radiation exposure on different points of the body, with and without shielding from a radiation vest. These are among the more important measurements taken during the Orion mission and will inform future missions about dangers to humans from prolonged radiation exposure as they travel far beyond the protection provided by Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field.

There were, however, at least three unexpected issues that cropped up during the mission that had to be resolved in flight. The first was an ongoing glitch in Orion’s star tracker, one of the systems used for spacecraft navigation. There were also instances of one of the current limiters from the solar panels to the command module opening erroneously, and which had to be ordered to close. And during the final flyby of the Moon, four devices “responsible for downstream power,” specifically propulsion and heating, turned off and had to be turned back on again.

The issues, which in the end did not end the mission, raise several potential problems for a crewed mission. Problems involving navigation, power, propulsion and heating bring to mind the Apollo 13 disaster and the near loss of astronauts James Lovell, John Swigert and Fred Haise. The next Artemis mission is scheduled to be launched in May 2024 and these problems will have to be resolved in the next seventeen months if the spacecraft can ever be considered as safe as possible.

This first high-resolution image, taken on the first day of the Artemis I mission, was captured by a camera on the tip of one of Orion’s solar arrays. The spacecraft was 57,000 miles from Earth when the image was captured, and continues to distance itself from planet Earth as it approaches the Moon and distant retrograde orbit. [Photo: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Office of Communications]

And there are even more problems with the Artemis missions on the horizon, foremost among them being that while Orion is capable of orbiting the Moon, it is not designed to land on it. Instead, NASA has contracted Elon Musk’s SpaceX to develop the Starship Human Landing System (HLS), a variant of the fascistic billionaire’s Starship spacecraft. In theory, the HLS will launch before Orion, be fueled by propellant launched into orbit by between four and fourteen other Starship missions, transition to lunar orbit, rendezvous with Orion, receive the crew, land on the Moon, take off and transfer the crew back to Orion for their return to Earth.

Not only is such a scheme not at all efficient for landing on the Moon’s surface, it is not complete. Design of the HLS only began in March 2020, when NASA awarded nearly $3 billion to SpaceX to design the vessel rather than develop a modern analog to the Apollo-era lunar module. And while Musk has claimed that the HLS will be reusable, which will ostensibly cut costs, that will require great expenditures of money and fuel just to refuel the vessel. The entire concept is absurd.

The Starship HLS does, however, exemplify the profit-driven character of the Artemis program. Landing on the Moon is not primarily seen as an endeavor of human exploration, but a means to shovel billions of dollars into the pockets of the already super-rich. A genuinely renewed space program is only possible when the constraints of capitalism on spaceflight are eradicated.

An addendum: Why going to the Moon is not a “gateway” to Mars

One of the many claims about Artemis by NASA and echoed by the corporate media is that going to the Moon will be a stepping stone for Mars missions. In particular, much is made about the proposed Lunar Gateway, a still conceptual space station that will orbit the Moon and supposedly prepare astronauts for a trip to Mars.

In reality, going from Earth to the Moon and then from the Moon to Mars, in two stages, offers nothing other than wasted fuel. The main limiting factor across all spaceflight is the needed change in velocity, the delta-V, to enter and exit orbits and to land and take off from celestial bodies. For example, one needs to change one’s velocity by 9.4 kilometers per second to leave Earth’s surface and enter low orbit around our planet. In contrast, one only needs a delta-V of 1.73 kilometers per second to take off from the Moon, which is why the rocket on the Apollo lunar lander could be so much smaller than the colossal Saturn V.

To go from Earth’s surface to Moon transfer, where one could go to the Moon, requires a total delta-V of 12.52 kilometers per second. It takes another 0.82 kilometers per second to actually enter low lunar orbit and rendezvous with the Lunar Gateway at one of its potential orbits. And one has not even yet left the full gravitational influence of Earth!

In reality, there is no reason to go to the Moon before heading to Mars. To go from Earth’s surface to being captured by Mars’ gravity requires a delta-V of 13.67 kilometers per second, less than what is needed to land on the Moon and only a little more than what is needed to orbit the Moon.

The orbital mechanics are clear: the claims that going to the Moon is a “gateway” to Mars are absurd. There are commercial, political and military interests that drive such conceptions, but not scientific ones.

The World Cup and human rights: Qatar 2022 and Argentina 1978

Cesar Uco & Don Knowland

Qatar, a country with no tradition in the game of soccer but possessing trillions of Petrodollars, was selected by FIFA (the Fédération Internationale de Football Association) to host the 2022 World Cup. This was in the main due to the Qatari regime’s extensive business relations with the largest world economies, and its services to US imperialism, which maintains up to 10,000 troops at the Qatar’s Al Udeid Air Base. Along with naked political pressure, FIFA’s long history of payola and corruption played their part.

Argentina's Mario Kempes celebrating goal against the Netherlands at 1978 World Cup in Buenos Aires. [Photo: El Gráfico]

Over the years, FIFA has been transformed into a mafia-like cartel. FIFA officials have gone to jail for filling their pockets with millions of dollars, making a mockery of the billions of people who cherish the World Cup. FIFA alone anticipates revenues of over $7.5 billion, while Qatar expects the games to add $17 billion to its economy.

This year’s World Cup has been overshadowed by the gross oppression and human rights violations committed by Qatar’s despotic ruling monarchy, including in the preparations of the games themselves, which required the building from scratch of stadiums and other facilities. The work was done by South Asian migrant workers, forced to work under slave-like and dangerous conditions for starvation wages. In the decade following FIFA’s selection of Qatar to host the World Cup in 2010, a total of more than 15,000 migrants lost their lives, according to Amnesty International. Many more suffered life-altering injuries, for which few have been compensated.

The role played by massive amounts of money and sinister political forces in corrupting and discrediting the “beautiful game” is nothing new, as has been spelled out with the release of a trove of documents on the hosting of the 1978 Cup by a country then ruled by one of the most brutal dictatorships on the face of the planet, Argentina.

On November 25, 2022, as the Qatar World Cup soccer games were underway, 27 declassified documents on the 1978 Argentina World Cup were made public by human rights organizations, Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, el Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (CELS) y Memoria Abierta. The 27 documents, in English, are part of a cache of thousands of documents put together as a three year project by the human rights groups, with the assistance of students and academicians. They can be accessed through the portal desclasificados.org.ar (by scrolling down to Colección Mundial 1978).

The documents reveal the joint strategy of the military dictatorship and US imperialism to exploit the games in order to “preserve” Argentina’s ruling military junta’s “image in the international order.”

Under the military regime that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983, at least 30,000 workers, students, trade unionists and left-wing activists were “disappeared” and murdered. Many tens of thousands more suffered torture and imprisonment.

The declassified documents reveal that months before the 1978 World Cup began, a US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report had shown the Carter administration’s concern that public information from foreign press sources about the brutal repression going on in Argentina could ignite riots across the world, and suggested that this major sports event should be a priority for the military and security forces, as a form of what today is known as sportswashing, or shifting international public opinion with the World Cup spectacle.

The objective, according to the declassified files, was to “defuse criticism of human rights.' To this end, the military junta headed by Gen. Jorge Rafael Videla invited the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) to make a special visit to the country. It hinted at the possible release of arrested union leaders and the suspension of some restrictions on freedom of the press.

At the same time, in the name of national security, the dictatorship had organized special units to arrest and threaten to wipe out any organized opposition which could endanger the holding of the World Cup in Argentina.

The Argentine butchers were clearly afraid that hosting the World Cup could backfire, further exposing its brutal repression. Such fears were fueled by a global campaign for a boycott of the games, which were compared to the Berlin Olympics held in Nazi Germany in 1936.

The documents also expose the concern by the Pentagon and US intelligence agencies over the threat of an eruption of the class struggle in Argentina, ignited by a potential railroad strike in the midst of the World Cup. One DIA document warned that a walkout by rail workers could “lead to other sympathetic strikes” and noted with apparent sympathy the “difficulties the government has is identifying where the actual [railroad workers’] leadership exists. This is being closely watched.”

Argentina’s military dictator General Videla and his advisor, the war criminal and former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who today faces an arrest warrant that prevents him from leaving the US for crimes against humanity, directly intervened to influence the outcome of the 1978 World Cup, which crowned Argentina as world champion.

The chances of Argentina making it to the final were extremely low after Brazil had beaten Poland 3–1. This result gave Brazil an advantage of five goals. The Argentine squad had to defeat Peru by at least five goals in the semi-final match.

What followed was one of the most shameful events in the history of the sport, the visit of Videla and Kissinger to the Peruvian locker room.

As former Peruvian soccer player José Velásquez later recounted, “Videla went into the dressing room with US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, supposedly to wish us luck. What did they have to do there? It was a way of pressuring us and seeing those who had sold out.”

Another player, Roberto Moquera, declared: “I saw [Videla] in the locker room and it disgusted me. I was 20 years old and I didn’t shake his hand. When a president enters the locker room with that kind of arrogance, they are abusing you, because you can’t do anything. He is using his power to subdue you psychologically. You feel assaulted and abused.”

Even the Argentine players were ashamed by the presence of the butcher president after the 6–0 victory over Peru.

Leopoldo Jacinto Luque, a member of the Argentine soccer team, who personally scored two goals against Peru, recounted at the time how the jubilation over the victory was suddenly cut short by Videla’s abrupt entrance into the locker room: “With his cowardly macho voice he told us ‘Very well, boys, we’ve reached the final. The World Cup closes with us. The goal was to reach the final and now we are going for the title.’ Not a word more, not a word less.”

Years later, in testimony before an Argentine special human rights court, former Peruvian senator Genaro Ledesma declared that the Peruvian government had agreed to throw the match as part of a deal with the Videla junta to assist in “disappearing” Peruvian political prisoners. Ledesma, a trade union organizer in Peru, recounted that he and 12 other Peruvian trade unionists had been shipped to Argentina to be imprisoned and tortured.

River Plate stadium, where the 1978 Argentina-Peru match took place, is only 10 blocks from the Navy School of Mechanics (ESMA), the main clandestine detention center in Buenos Aires, where political prisoners were tortured and exterminated. From there many of the prisoners would be drugged, loaded onto helicopters and dumped into the ocean. Pregnant women were held there, only to be murdered after giving birth, their babies handed over to the families of military officers and regime supporters.

The macabre proximity of the games to one of the junta’s principal torture centers meant that prisoners could hear clearly the football chants. Some were even invited to join their torturers to view the games on television, and even go out for a ride among the celebrating crowds, only to later be murdered, tossed either semi-conscious or already dead from aircraft into the sea.

ESMA is now a museum in memory of the victims of the Videla dictatorship. In 2018, at the opening of an exhibit marking the 40th anniversary of the Argentina World Cup, an ESMA survivor described the day of the Argentina-Peru game:

I remember that we saw the Argentina-Peru game in the basement. I was with a comrade, another witness, a word that I prefer because the word ‘survivor’ brings up so much suffering. We won 6-0 and obviously we were happy. At that moment we heard the sound of slamming doors —which used to happen when they brought in another kidnap victim. As we left, we went from that small euphoria to seeing one of our comrades on the floor, dead, quickly bringing us back to the reality of where we were.

The newly released files on the 1978 Buenos Aires World Cup add to the already existing information on the crimes against humanity committed by the Argentine dictatorship and its US allies: documents on the disappeared, the appropriation of their children and Operation Condor, the CIA-backed coordination by Latin America’s military dictatorships in hunting down and killing their opponents.

The mass killing, repression and torture that were carried out in Argentina and throughout much of Latin America in the 1970s is the bitter legacy of US imperialism’s domination which is still felt to this day. The deepening crisis of Latin American and global capitalism combined with the upsurge in the class struggle once again raises the threat that the region’s venal ruling classes backed by Washington will return to the bloody methods that the 1978 World Cup was meant to whitewash.