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OIL AND WEAPONS

OIL AND WEAPONS

Who gains from the energy crisis? Arms manufacturers of course. The new yearbookStockholm International Peace Research Institute is out.
The numbers speak clearly: the increase on the world market in the prices of minerals and fossil fuels has helped the growth in military spending in the world.
You can see this straight away in Algeria, Azerbaijan, Russia and Saudi Arabia, where the increase in receipts from mining has caused an increase in the military expenditure.
This is spending on a world scale that has reached 1,118,000,000,000 dollars (the previous year it was 975,000,000,000). It’s as though every human in the world is spending 173 dollars on arms. And everything finishes up in the pockets of a few people who are getting fewer.
How much has your salary gone up in the last year? The sales of the 100 biggest arms producers went up by 15% reaching 268,000,000,000 dollars. This goes to about 80 companies that are American or from Western Europe.
All this power is concentrated in the hands of the few. In 1990 the top five in the charts had 22% of the receipts, now that is at 44%.
Do you want to know where this money lands up? Go and look at the list of those financing politicians in the whole world.
Do you want to know where all these armaments finish up? Impossible. Data on the life cycle of armaments is scarce and above all it’s of poor quality. The value of information depends on its availability and its trustworthiness. And rarely do the data match up to these requirements at each phase from production to destruction.
A perfect mechanism: petrol finances arms, arms producers finance the politicians who buy the arms to defend the interests of the petrol companies with beautiful wars of liberation.

Originally from Beppe Grillo's Blog

Originally from
ReBlogged by silvia on Jun 21, 2006 at 10:15 AM Posted by silvia on Jun 21, 2006 at 10:15 AM

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