Your Money or Your Life!

250/YOUR MONEY OR YOUR LIFE!

economy. The goal is not autarchy but regulation - to stabilise
exchange rates, to ensure trade contracts over long periods of time,
to guarantee prices, to de-link interest rates from the going market
rate, and so on.

The Arms Trade

It is pure hypocrisy to claim that cancelling the Third World debt
would be catastrophic for the world economy. It is a way to obscure
the need for lasting solutions that necessarily involve a challenge to
wealth and privilege. Such lasting solutions do indeed exist, this book
has made recommendations in this regard. A large body of literature
has already made the case for another such recommendation: the
need for a drastic reduction in the arms trade.
The overwhelming majority of arms are manufactured in the
industrialised countries of the North. Through generous export
credits, the countries of the North press Third World countries to buy
arms - whatever their hypocritical pronouncements to the contrary
might suggest. The US, for example, is currently making a pitch to the
countries of Latin America to modernise their military hardware,
especially their air forces. A major reduction in arms spending and
steps towards total disarmament would produce a huge peace
dividend to be shared out in everyone's benefit. Efforts aimed at
finding the funds for genuine development cannot overlook demands
for total disarmament and the reconversion of war industries.

Indispensable Complementary Measures

If they are to produce the desired results, the core solutions put
forward thus far must be accompanied by a series of further
measures.
These are:

• the establishment of authentically democratic governments.
  This means free elections, the freedom of assembly and of
  expression, the right to demonstrate and strike; respect for and
  promotion of the whole array of cultural expression present
  within a country's borders;


• the restoration of full political and economic sovereignty;