'Unseen' News and Views – By Baher Kamal & The Like
12 August 2022 — Thousands of migrant workers lost their lives to make the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar possible. But the scale of the human rights abuse doesn’t end with these workers’ lives, nor does it end in Qatar.
A Vast River of Money
John Scales Avery
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the world spent 2.113 trillion US dollars on armaments in 2021.
Of this almost incomprehensible amount of money, the United States spent almost half the total, $801 billion.
Perhaps one reason for the disproportionately large US arms spending is that in the United States, the arms industry has been privatized, which is not the case in China or Russia. In the US, selling weapons and death is a business. It is a business, on which capitalist investors can make enormous profits, selling weapons and selling war.
The United States is by far the largest exporter of weapons in the world. The US sells weapons through NATO. It also sells weapons to dictatorships like Saudi Arabia, and these same weapons have produced a humanitarian catastrophes such as starvation in Yemen. Small arms exported to Africa deepen and prolong local conflicts.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 