Murder Inc.

Billion$ have been lost, governments falter, cities close but capitalism will not collapse. Indeed in some regards it is business as usual. And businesses concerned with booting people out of 'their' homes or bombing them are booming. Yes, just ask any arms trader and they will say killing is my business and business is good. Boom or bust, billions suffer and millions starve: every two years more people die of starvation and diseases than in the whole of World War II. Take Burundi, for example, where according to the UN's latest report, about a million of children under five years of age suffer from chronic malnutrition. Some two-thirds of the 7,600,000 people there suffer with dire poverty. 300,000 were murdered during 14 years of conflict. Children are conscripted and sold for sex. AIDS is rife. The activities of charities and NGOs prolong such suffering. They attempt to treat symptoms, not the disease. History shows this again and again: "The futility of trying to make the present system work is best revealed in the present instance by remembering Henry Kissinger's promise to the World Food Summit some 25 years ago. There were then 400 million chronically malnourished, a 75 million increase over the previous ten years, and Kissinger vowed world hunger would be eradicated within the next decade. That number has since doubled, and with the best efforts the experts believe the statistics will not improve in the next 25 years." (Socialist Standard, July 1998)