Across the world, people with mental health issues like depression and anxiety are on the rise. 

According to the WHO World Mental Health report published earlier this year, depression and anxiety rose 25% in the first year of the pandemic, bringing the total number of people living with a mental disorder to nearly 1 billion people.

“What’s more, mental health services have been severely disrupted in recent years, and the treatment gap for mental health conditions has widened,” a WHO spokesperson explained.

Mental health issues like depression and anxiety on the rise globally | Science | In-depth reporting on science and technology | DW | 10.10.2022

 Peter Sands, the executive director of the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, said the combined death toll from the diseases could be halved in the next four years in the countries where the fund invests. Without enough money, Sands warned, governments on the frontline of the fight will be forced to prioritise “basic life-saving essentials” over more sophisticated efforts to curb the diseases once and for all.

However, he said that “extraordinary opportunity” would only be possible with sufficient financial resources to allow badly affected countries to use new scientific tools such as Oxford University’s promising malaria vaccine and a groundbreaking HIV prevention drug developed by a British pharmaceutical company.

Britain has been the third-largest donor to the Global Fund, which provides two-thirds of all international financing for malaria programmes and three-quarters of the money for TB programmes. But at a recent conference aimed at securing the fund’s resources for the next three years, Britain failed to make a pledge. The government has until late October, when the fund will begin the process of allocating its resources to the countries in which it invests.

“The challenge is that if most of the money is just going on delivering … essentials [such as antiretroviral treatment and insecticide-treated bed nets] there’s very little resource to enable the rapid introduction of the newer tools that will actually win against the disease,” Sands explained.

Pledge aid or deprive Commonwealth’s poorest in diseases fight, UK warned | Global development | The Guardian

 World Economic Forum warns of the cataclysmic consequences of climate change. 

The 2030s:

Ice caps and crucial ice sheets continued to melt, swelling sea levels by 20 centimeters [7.87 inches]

90 percent of coral reefs are threatened by human activity, while around 60 percent are highly endangered

Dwindling crop yields have pushed more than 100 million more people into extreme poverty

Climate change-related illnesses are killing an extra 250,000 people each year

The 2040s:

The world has already shot past its 1.5-degree Celsius [2.7-degree Fahrenheit] Paris Agreement temperature rise limit

Bangladesh, Vietnam, and Thailand are threatened by annual floods, sparking mass migration

Eight percent of the global population has seen a severe reduction in water availability

The Arctic is now ice-free in summer

Sea levels have risen 20 centimeters [two feet] in the Gulf of Mexico, where hurricanes now deliver devastating storm surges.

 Research by two thinktanks, Common Wealth and the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), showed investors had benefited from a boom in dividend payouts since the Covid pandemic at a time of meagre growth in workers’ pay. The value of dividends paid to shareholders in UK-listed companies has returned to 2017-18 levels after a drop during the Covid pandemic, without an equivalent increase in wages for workers.

Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng is pushing ahead with a multimillion pound tax cut for wealthy individuals with a reduction in the rate of income tax on dividends. Dividend tax will be reduced by 1.25 percent.

Chris Hayes, a senior data analyst at Common Wealth, who wrote the report, said: “It is a shame that the chancellor’s U-turn does not extend to his tax cuts on dividends, which benefit the very wealthy and are already subject to very generous treatment. For two decades, shareholders have been enjoying ever greater payouts that could have been invested productively or paid to workers. Further tilting the balance in favour of shareholders will not unleash economic dynamism. It will only deepen our stagnation.” 

Among firms currently listed in the FTSE All Share index dividends steadily climbed in value at a faster rate than employee earnings during the decade from the 2008 financial crisis up to the Covid pandemic, up from £17.3bn in 2014 to £28bn in 2019.

Share buybacks, an alternative form of corporate payout whereby companies purchase shares from their investors to raise the price of the stock, have also risen sharply. The research showed share buybacks more than doubled from £3.4bn in 2015 to £8.2bn in 2019, and have since more than quadrupled from 2015 levels to reach £16.2bn in the second quarter of 2022.

George Dibb, head of the Centre for Economic Justice at the IPPR, said the rise in dividend payments and share buybacks since the pandemic showed companies were prioritising shareholder payouts over productivity-boosting investment and higher wages for workers.

“It raises serious concerns for the prospects of increasing the UK’s low levels of investment. Companies engage in share buybacks when they are unable to identify investment opportunities better than driving up their own share price. This is a symptom of an economy where firms don’t lack funds to invest – they lack the stable environment to invest in.”

Kwasi Kwarteng’s tax cuts will benefit richest amid dividend boom – report | Economic policy | The Guardian

 New audio uploads for Summer School 2022 – ‘The Class Divide’, held at Fircroft College, Birmingham, 19th-21st August 2022.

Sadly, due to technical difficulties only three of the talks were recorded, and none of the Discussion sessions.

https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/audio-index/spgb-summer-schools/

1) ‘Let Them Do Yoga! Inequality, Mental Health & Social Revolution’, Brian Gardner

2) ‘The Class Divide and The Role of Trade Unions‘, Howard Moss

3) ‘How Middle Class Are You?’, Mike Foster

 In a recent report, the International Rescue Committee (IRC)  chronicled Afghan refugees’ difficulties in Greece and the serious impact on their physical and mental health.

After Ukrainians, Afghans account for the second-largest group of asylum applicants in the EU and by far the biggest in Greece, where more than 37,000 – more than a third of the total number registered nationwide – have filed asylum claims.

“Many Afghans fleeing conflict and persecution in their own country think their troubles will be over once they reach Europe. This is simply not the case,” says Dimitra Kalogeropoulou, the IRC’s Greece director. “Instead, people face the stark reality of violent pushbacks from Greek borders, months or years living in fear of being sent back to Turkey or Afghanistan, where they could face untold horrors, extended periods trapped in prison-like reception conditions, far from towns and cities and an alarming lack of support to begin rebuilding their lives,” she says.

For the estimated 70,000 Ukrainians who have sought refuge in Greece, it has been a different story. After Russia’s invasion on 24 February, the EU moved quickly to issue a temporary protection directive to safeguard the rights of people desperate to leave the war-torn country. Although relatively few Ukrainians have headed to Greece, the reception they have received there has been unusually warm, with senior officials often referring to the newcomers as “real refugees”.

Sofia Kouvelaki, who heads the Home project, an NGO that supports unaccompanied minors, said: “Ukrainian refugees have proved a point. In Greece, and in the EU, they have shown that if we want to integrate we can, and if we want to welcome people with a human face we can do that too.”

 “While the Greek government has welcomed refugees from Ukraine, by efficiently registering them, issuing legal documents and allowing immediate access to employment, Afghans in Greece, alongside other asylum seekers and refugees, continue to be isolated from the Greek society in which they seek to rebuild their lives,” the report’s authors wrote.

The biggest barrier for Afghans claiming asylum is the Greek government’s controversial decision to label Turkey a “safe third country” for people not only from Afghanistan but also from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Somalia and Syria. The decision has prevented thousands of people from being able to explain why they need international protection. . In September, the migration minister, Notis Mitarachi, noted that the country had blocked about 50,000 migrants from entering Greece in August alone. International bodies have echoed the IRC in rebuking Athens for resorting to tactics of brute force to keep asylum seekers out.

Concluding a 10-day fact-finding tour of Greece in June, Mary Lawlor, the UN special rapporteur for human rights defenders, accused the Mitsotakis government of creating a “climate of fear”, not only for refugees and asylum seekers fleeing poverty and persecution but also for groups defending migrants’ rights on the ground. Illegal evictions of asylum seekers at land and sea borders had become a general policy in Greece, she said.

 Inflation in Turkey has climbed above 83% – a 24-year-high. The transport, food and housing sectors have seen the biggest rise in prices. Independent experts the Inflation Research Group estimate the annual rate is actually 186.27%. The transport sector saw the sharpest increases in annual prices at 117.66%, followed by food and non-alcoholic drinks at 93%.

  In Sudan, the United Nations estimates that at least three million children under five are malnourished. UNICEF says 20 percent of them suffer from severe acute malnutrition. Without treatment, about half will die, the UN agency says in a report.

A poor harvest has made the humanitarian crisis worse. Food prices have skyrocketed, leaving many more families struggling to feed their children. Staple food prices are 250 to 300 percent higher than they were last year.

As food prices in Sudan soar, malnutrition worsens | News | Al Jazeera

 In the United States the game called either football or soccer in the rest of the world is always called soccer. American football is very different. In fact, I don’t see why it should be called foot-ball at all, because the ball is not kicked around the field, as in soccer, but carried. 

The ball carrier can be ‘blocked’ or ‘tackled’ by a member of the opposing team. Let’s number the players shown in the photo from left to right. No. 1 is tackling No. 2. He can grab him around any part of the body below the neck and throw him to the ground. (A change to the rules in 1976 barred ‘initial contact with the head or face while blocking and tackling.’) No. 2 is said to be ‘taking a hit.’ He may be able to hand the ball to his team mate No. 3 before he is thrown. No. 4 seems to be readying himself to tackle No. 3 if that happens.

Over 4 million boys and young men play American football each year. Of these 100,000 are college students and over a million attend high school (age 16+). The majority are even younger. Some are only 5. 

Injuries are frequent. Some are fatal. According to the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research, there were 16 deaths in the 2014 season. However, I easily found half a dozen reports of football deaths of school students down to age 10 in local newspapers for the month of September 2022 alone.   

The most common cause of death is severe concussion or other injury to the head or spinal cord. But death can result even from minor injuries like a gashed knee, because players ignore them and continue to play. By the time they are treated infection has set in.

It is often claimed that rule changes and protective equipment have greatly reduced the risks of the game. The effects of equipment are mixed: while it may protect the wearer, it can also harm players with whom the wearer grapples. This is especially true of plastic helmets (the earliest helmets were made of leather) and metal plates over sensitive areas like the shins.

Kathleen Bachynski has written a fascinating history of American football (No Game for Boys to Play: The History of Youth Football and the Origins of a Public Health Crisis, University of North Carolina Press 2019). Institutional football began in the late nineteenth century at elite Ivy League colleges in the northeast and at military academies. From there it spread to other colleges and after World War Two to high schools. Schools for younger children refused to organize games, but their place was taken by junior football leagues.

Football was controversial from the start. It was opposed by some physicians, theologians and mothers (the historical record rarely conveys the voices of concerned mothers directly, but contains numerous attacks on their ‘overprotective’ attitudes). In 1905 Professor Shailer Matthews of Chicago’s Divinity School urged that football be abolished: a game, he exclaimed, should ‘not require the services of a physician, the maintenance of a hospital, and the celebration of funerals.’ (Ivy League colleges hired physicians and built hospitals nearby to ensure that medical assistance would be immediately available. When the game was adopted by less wealthy schools this was no longer the case: an injured player might lie on the field for 45 minutes before an ambulance arrived.)

Supporters praised football above all as ‘a mimic battlefield’ — an ideal means of preparing boys for war as well as for the vicissitudes of life in a highly competitive society: ‘Where better could students experience the thrills of success and the agony of failure?’ The idea of football as training for war has a long pedigree: the Duke of Wellington supposedly said that ‘the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton’ (the most prestigious British school for upper class boys). And even today successful high school football players are given nicknames like ‘War Daddy.’ 

As socialists we encourage boys to muster their moral courage, refuse to play American football, and defy any who hypocritically call them ‘sissies’ – you can go to hell with your stupid games and you can go to hell with your stupid wars!

A Note on Girls and Women in Football

Most football players (97%) are male, but some are female. The main role of girls and women in football remains cheerleading, which also causes many concussions and other injuries. I am not aware of any academic studies of the subject.   

Football and War – World Socialist Party US (wspus.org)

Stephen Shenfield

 The latest figures from the Bureau for Economic Analysis show that the profits of the U.S. coal and oil industry increased 340% between the first and second quarters of 2022.

 Companies selling petroleum and coal products made an estimated $49.7 billion in profits from April to June, compared with $11.3 billion from January to March.

Meanwhile, executives in the nation’s transportation and warehousing sector enjoyed a nearly 40% increase in profits during the same time period, pocketing $124.4 billion in the second quarter after taking home $89.4 billion over the first three months of the year.

Chevron made $11.6 billion in Q2, up from around $6 billion last quarter, and up from 247% a year ago.

‘Their Price Strategies Are Bearing Fruit’: Oil and Coal Profits Surge 340% (commondreams.org)

Are they going to surrender their wealth for a green world?