Germany is one of the richest countries in the world, yet signs of increasing poverty are becoming increasingly visible across the country. Homeless people sleeping rough, mothers forgoing meals in order to feed their children, pensioners looking for discarded bottles to trade for the deposit.

As inflation skyrockets in Germany, more and more people will find themselves unable to make ends meet without assistance. It is becoming increasingly difficult for many to afford bread, milk, fruit, and vegetables, which are over 12% more expensive than they were a year ago. In 2020, around 1.1 million people made use of food banks. That number is now closer to 2 million.

According to the Paritätische Wohlfahrtsverband, Germany’s umbrella organization for welfare organizations, 13.8 million Germans either live in poverty or are at risk of slipping below the poverty line. 

The term poverty in this context does not mean that millions of people in Germany are at risk of starving or freezing to death. Instead, it refers to relative poverty, which is measured by the average living conditions of the society in question.

In 2021, Germany was ranked the 20th richest country in the world, measured by GDP per capita. This means that if you add up the value of all the goods and commodities produced in a country and divide the figure by the number of inhabitants, you get $50,700 (€52,200) per person per year in Germany on average. By comparison, that number is $136,700 in Luxembourg, the world’s richest country, and $270 in the poorest, Burundi.

In Europe, although relatively few people live in absolute poverty, millions are affected by poverty relative to the national average. This means they live with severe material restrictions, and can only make ends meet by restricting their lifestyles in a way that the majority of the population takes for granted. In the EU, a person is considered to be at risk of poverty or poor if their income is less than 60% of the median in their respective country. If it is less than 50%, it is considered extreme poverty. For Germany, this means that single people who make less than €1,148 in net income a month are considered below the poverty line. For single parents with one child, that figure is €1,492, and for a household of two parents and two children, €2,410.

Anyone in Germany who cannot find a job, or is unable to work, receives basic social security — a system still known colloquially as Hartz IV. This money is meant to cover basic living expenses such as rent, heating, and water, and well as health insurance. Under this system, individuals and single parents have only €449 a month for food, clothing, household goods, personal hygiene products, and bills such as the internet, telephone, and electricity. For each child, a parent or a couple receive between €285 and €376, depending on age. Hartz IV and other public welfare programs have been repeatedly criticized in Germany for covering only the barest of necessities. In response to this, the federal government has proposed raising the standard rate to €503 per month, beginning in 2023, and changing the name to Bürgergeld, or “citizens’ money.”

However, according to social scientist and poverty researcher Christoph Butterwege, even that will be far from enough. Butterwege told DW that at least €650 is necessary for people to live “with dignity” and, for example, to eat healthy food for every meal. Under the current system, only €5 per person per day is earmarked for food, leaving poorer households to either buy less food or food of lesser quality.

Poverty is also on the rise amongst the elderly. Even after decades of work, a monthly pension is often not enough to cover all expenses. Women in particular are feeling the strain, as they are more likely to have worked part-time and been paid less. According to a new study from the Bertelsmann Foundation, old-age poverty is expected to affect 20% of Germans by 2036. People with pension payments below a certain threshold are allowed to claim government assistance. However, many shy away from doing so out of a reluctance to be seen as needy. Studies show that two-thirds of those entitled to claim benefits are ashamed to do so. Older people often prefer to try to work longer, or collect cans and bottles with a refundable deposit from rubbish bins, in order to put a few more euros in their wallets.

 The number of people who cannot live on their income despite having a full-time job is also rising — even with a recent increase in the minimum wage. At €12 per hour, a single person with no children who works 40 hours a week would receive a net income of around €1,480 per month. Although this is nominally above the poverty line, the excess has been eaten up by inflation.

Students are also greatly affected by the situation, especially recipients of federal funding. These students receive a maximum of €934 a month, which includes money for housing and health insurance. This amount puts students well below the poverty line.

Life in Germany will remain expensive for the foreseeable future, and this will be felt above all by those who have no financial buffers and little savings.

Germany: What poverty looks like in a rich country | Germany | News and in-depth reporting from Berlin and beyond | DW | 10.10.2022

 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 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.

 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 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

 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?

 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

  At the U.N. General Assembly 66 countries called urgently for diplomacy to end the war in Ukraine through peaceful negotiations. 

Bangladesh – “We want the end of the Russia-Ukraine war. Due to sanctions and counter-sanctions, …the entire mankind, including women and children, is punished.”

India – ” We are often asked whose side we are on. And our answer, each time, is straight and honest. India is on the side of peace and will remain firmly there…We are on the side that calls for dialogue and diplomacy as the only way out. We are on the side of those struggling to make ends meet, even as they stare at escalating costs of food, fuel and fertilizers.”

Senegal – “We call for de-escalation and a cessation of hostilities in Ukraine, as well as for a negotiated solution, to avoid the catastrophic risk of a potentially global conflict.”

Saint Lucia – We call upon all parties involved to immediately end the conflict in Ukraine, by undertaking immediate negotiations to permanently settle all disputes in accordance with the principles of the United Nations.”

66 Nations at UN Say ‘End War in Ukraine’ – Consortium News

 “Syria is fast becoming a forgotten conflict”, says Lukas van Trier, Country Director for War Child’s Syria Response.

The 11-year conflict remains one of the largest humanitarian crises in the world. Millions of Syrians have fled across borders, making them also the largest group of refugees globally. Many of those who remain live in squalid, overcrowded conditions and are routinely exposed to all forms of violence. 

Violence has intensified in recent months. Over 100 people – including children – have been killed by airstrikes since June, resulting in the largest displacement recorded since March 2020.

“Airstrikes – often on buildings where displaced families are sheltering – have become more regular”, says Adel Aldahien, War Child Child Protection Specialist. “People are living by the day, in a constant state of fear. Children are dropping out of school and going out to work in a desperate bid to feed their families”, she continues.

Children Paying the Highest Price of Increase in Violence in Syria – Syrian Arab Republic | ReliefWeb