american military death toll in iraq passes 3000
Replacements needed has been producing these posters every week for quite a while now. I think they speak very eloquently. The more significant number, perhaps, is the 22,000 american military wounded. Or ... how about this question: How is the death or injury of 25,000 americans in iraq related to the US$28 Billion in revenues and US$1.6 Billion in profits in 2006 of the biggest arms producer in our nation, Honeywell International, which is ranked 71 in the country by Fortune 500? Hmmmm... Do Bush and co. own any honeywell stock?
We've spent $400 billion to figure out what the French could have told us for free--you can't fix centuries old civil wars in 4 years, no matter *how* much money or military power you can bring to bear. period.
On a similar note: How would you like to have this guy's nightmares, or responsibility? This is Dan Murphy, CEO of Alliant Tech Systems, the biggest small arms ammunition manufacturer in the country. ATK had sales of US$3.2 Billion in '06. As producer of ~90% of the small arms ammunition for both the US military *and* the "sports enthusiast and law enforcement" markets, they produced the ammunition which killed around 27,000 individuals who died through the use of firearms in 2004. That's based on approximately 30,000 firearms related deaths in 2004 reported by the CDC. They also no doubt produced the ammunition which killed some significant percentage of the 57,000 dead iraqi military mentioned in the poster above, whom you will probably never hear talked about on mainstream american media. You can check out their annual report here (You'll need high speed connection--it's big)
2 comments:
I understand that the world has a lot of misery and death and horror in it. I also understand that you want to pass on a lot of that information on to other people, however I would like to ask a question. Other than your web site which is a great place to get general information on all the military people who die and the thousands of people who are dying of famine and aids in third world countries...are you doing anything personnaly to help any of those people's situations improve???
Kat
It's really quite funny, because I started to feel slightly annoyed when I began reading your comment, and then I saw it was from you, and I instantly didn't feel annoyed anymore--I guess you have a rather large principal accumulated in my trust bank, if you know what I mean. And actually, it's a great question! Thankyou for asking.
Part of who I am is: I am a person who is motivated to ... bring truth balance. That is, it seems to me that we, the vast majority of us, in america and in the west, have a really skewed view of the world. Part of the enormous list of our ship is inability/refusal to even *acknowledge* that the ugly stuff exists and is ugly. I am *very* naturally motivated to help right this list.
(from the Oxford English Dictionary: list, n.5: 1. Naut. The careening or inclination of a ship to one side.)
I am rather of the suspicion that the mere correcting of the list will help the situations improve. That is, I suspect that if one person, or more than one person, receives the information from me, and is caused to ponder it (like, methinks, you have been), then that is like a seed planted, and some of those seeds will grow, and to borrow language from the archaically tranlated Jesus "bear fruit, some 10 fold, some 30 fold, and some 100 fold". So this is a big part of what I am doing personally to help. You can see more of bits of my thoughts on the question you ask in the upcoming, to be published tommorrow, edition of the porpoise diving life e-zine, toward which I will post a link at the top of my blog.
The other thing is, I'm in school, working my little ass off to get good grades, with the hope of becoming better qualified to MTWABP in other ways as well.
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