![]() ![]() |
||||
|
Breaking News from America's Progressive Community... 1999
Releases
The press releases posted here have been provided to NewsCenter by the one of the many progressive organizations we have selected to participate. If you would like more information about this press release, you should contact the organization directly. |
||||
| FEBRUARY
23, 1999 8:00 PM FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: Mother Jones Magazine Richard Reynolds reynolds@motherjones.com Eric Umansky umansky@motherjones.com 415/665-6637 |
||||
| Mother Jones Spotlights Clinton-Era Arms Deals - www.motherjones.com/arms | ||||
| SAN
FRANCISCO
- February 23 - The MoJo Wire, Mother Jones magazine's online sister, today posted the
first comprehensive, user-friendly online resource to spotlight the United
States' growing dominance in the world arms trade, a trend that has accelerated under the Clinton administration.
The MoJo Wire Action Atlas on U.S. Arms Sales - www.motherjones.com/arms - features: * Reports on recent U.S. arms sales to 46 countries-what's being bought, how the weapons are being used, details on the country's human rights record, and how the transactions have affected the regional peace and U.S. taxpayers. Each country report includes bar graphs illustrating year-by-year U.S. arms sales from 1993 to 1997. * Profiles of the 12 major U.S. exporters-what they're selling, who they're selling to, the dollar value of their sales, and highlights of their political contributions during the Clinton years. * A "clickable" map of the world highlighting U.S. arms customers guilty of human rights violations, facing insurgencies, involved in regional conflicts, or reselling U.S. arms to other countries. * An analysis of the Clinton administration's "chamber of commerce" role in the promotion of U.S.-made arms abroad-how the administration has smoothed the way for exporters and helped increase the U.S. share of the world arms market from 33 percent in 1990 to 55 percent in 1996. * Pop-up windows defining key concepts and linking readers to other places in the report where the terms appear. * Links to nearly 40 organizations worldwide that are working to rein in the international arms trade. Some of the trends focused on include: * Corporate welfare: Under a Defense Department policy instituted after heavy industry lobbying, U.S. taxpayers must cover the merger costs for the consolidation of defense corporations. The cost to U.S. taxpayers since the policy was initiated in 1993: $856.2 million. Meanwhile, the 1996 Defense Export Loan Guarantee program will leave taxpayers holding the bag if cash-strapped countries like Romania default on their payments. * Shipping jobs overseas: According to the Pentagon, the defense industry laid off 795,000 American workers between 1992 and 1997. But many of these corporations have sweetened their arms deals to foreign countries by offering "offsets"-lucrative incentive programs that often include agreements to manufacture some or all of the products in the purchasing country. In 1992, for example, General Dynamics entered into an F-16 offset deal with South Korea and brought 400 Koreans to its Fort Worth, Texas, plant for training, after having laid off 10,000 workers in the previous two years. * Selling to both sides: Two of the biggest customers for U.S. weaponry are Greece and Turkey, which have been threatening to go to war with each other over Cyprus. In 1997, the U.S. sold (or allowed U.S. corporations to sell) more than $270 million worth of weapons to Greece and nearly $750 million worth to Turkey. Meanwhile, Richard Holbrooke, Clinton's nominee for U.S. ambassador to the U.N., has visited Cyprus three times on peace missions-but no agreement is yet in place. ### A magazine of investigation and ideas, Mother Jones is in its 23rd year of publication. Mother Jones has three National Magazine Awards to its credit, has been a National Magazine Award finalist eight times, and is a perennial winner of the American Journalism Review's "Best in the Business" Award for Investigative Reporting. The magazine's Web site, the MoJo Wire - www.motherjones.com , connects politically minded Web browsers with the hottest social and political news on the Web. In addition to the articles published in Mother Jones, the MoJo Wire features extensive original content, including several comprehensive searchable databases on money and politics. |
||||
© Copyrighted 1997-1999. All
rights Reserved.
NewsCenter is a project of Common Dreams