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Beware - you or someone you know might unwittingly buy Israeli blood diamonds this Christmas
international |
rights, freedoms and repression |
opinion/analysis
Wednesday December 09, 2009 17:48 by Sean Clinton - Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign
Israeli blood diamonds will be forever ....on your conscience. With exports worth 16.7 billion US dollars in 2006 (1) , accounting for 35% of total manufacturing exports, diamonds are Israel’s best friends. In the same year Israeli arms sales were valued at 4.2 billion dollars (2) and total agricultural exports amounted to just over 1 billion dollars. The significance of the diamond industry to the Israeli economy can best be appreciated when one considers that the budget of the Israeli Ministry of Defence in 2008 was 13 billion dollars (3). |
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Jump To Comment: 1 2The true wonder of the diamond is its plenty - there are really are so many of them on the planet that they ought not be as expensive as they are. But the cartels which control their supply ensure that they their prices stay elevated. Anyone who wants to understand late capitalism and the dichotomy between commodities which are fungible and those which are not (such as diamonds) should do a bit of reading on the history of the diamond corporations and take note how De Beers removed its components from publically listed companies (traded and bought and sold in shares) to ensure its cartel continued - just about the time the international community started bleating on about stopping blood diamonds.
quite - not because of the blood. oh no. more because the diamond market could have been flooded by the post soviet reality. for even the soviets had played the cartel game.
All those workers' dreams put on ring for betrothal mean nothing.
Coal - now there's a commodity which is finite, non-renewable and when you think about it - really quite fungible weight for weight.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungibility
(oddly enough nobody vandalises the fungibility page)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Beers
(predictably people are always manipulating the history of diamonds)
All Diamonds are Blood Diamonds as every lump of coal surely carries a spleen wrenching cough
interesting that you conveniently omit the fact that israel chairs the Kimberley process committee