For every $100 of crude taken out of the Ecuadorian rain forests, the oil companies receive $75. Of the remaining $25, three-quarters must go to paying off the foreign debt. Most of the remainder covers military and other government expenses - which leaves about $2.50 for health, education, and programs aimed at helping the poor. Thus, out of every $100 worth of oil torn from the Amazon, less than $3 goes to the people who need the money most, those whose lives have been so adversely impacted by the dams, the drilling, and pipelines, and who are dying from lack of edible food and potable water.

The 1999 Human Development Report ... noted that the assets of the world's richest three individuals exceeded the combined Gross National Products of all the least developed countries, with a population totalling 600 million people.

Every day more than 100 million dollars is transferred in debt repayments from the poorest countries on earth to the richest. It is a debt that can never be paid back.

Rich countries impose tariffs on manufactured goods from poor countries that are, according to one study, four times as high as those they impose on imports from other rich countries. The WTO itself has pointed out that the rich nations subsidize their agricultural producers at a rate of $1 billion a day, or more than six times the level of development aid they give to poor nations.

* Work to re-equip UK and US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan has helped profits to soar at defence group BAE Systems.
* The UK's largest defence firm, BAE made a pre-tax profit of £657m ($1.4bn), compared with £378m a year earlier.
* Overall sales at BAE's Land & Armaments business, which includes everything from tanks to munitions, rose 43%.

On 14 August, you are invited to "an audience" with Bill Clinton in London. You have a choice. You can attend the "breakfast and speech" or the "brunch buffet and speech". These will take place in the white elephantine Millennium Dome, where a place in the "Kings' Row" will cost you £799. Last year, Clinton made more than £5m granting "audiences".

Intimately linked to the debt crisis is the enormous burden that capital flight from Africa has imposed on this poorest continent. Recent work by Léonce Ndikumana and James K. Boyce of the University of Massachusetts reaches the conclusion that Africa’s wealthy have, during the period from 1970 to 2004, exported a total of $420 billion, nearly double the total debt burden of Sub-Saharan Africa in 2004, which in 2004 was $227 billion. Most of this money was not acquired legally. With the interest this capital could have accumulated over the 35 year period, the authors estimate the total loss to Africa at $607 billion.

The number of millionaires and billionaires, including now four in India, has escalated steadily so that now there are about nine and a half million people, or about one for every 700 people on earth, that the brokerage house Merrill Lynch calls High Net Worth Individuals who together possess, in liquid funds, some 37 trillion dollars-that is 37 followed by 12 zeros. This is about three times the GDP of either the United States or of Europe and more than a dozen times the GDP of India.

Today the three richest people in the world control assets exceeding the GDPs of the 48 poorest countries. The 225 richest people in the western world control over $1 trillion, equal to the annual income of the poorest 47 percent of the total world population. The wealth/income ratio between the 20 percent of people living in the richest areas of the world and the 20 percent of people living in the poorest areas of the world has grown from 30 to 1 in 1960 to 74 to 1 in the late 1990s.

it seems safe to estimate that the entire disposable wealth of the Irrawaddy Delta before the storm, that of its 3.5 million residents, could have been less than that of one table-full of diners at New York's Four Seasons Grill Room...

Working with figures from Forbes magazine, the IMF, and the UNDP, it's possible to estimate that there are between three hundred and a thousand individuals whose accumulated wealth is so vast that any one of them alone could pay each person in the Irrawaddy Delta for a year, and in the case of the richest, like Warren Buffett, could do it for six decades running and still have billions left.

19 years have passed [since the Exxon Valdez oil spill, but] ExxonMobil still refuses to pay all of the court-ordered, $2.5 billion in damages...

This is the same company that reported the largest annual profit in U.S. history in 2006, with $39.5 billion. It followed up 2006, by besting its record of the previous year by reporting $40.61 billion in profit for 2007. And as the Washington Post noted, ExxonMobil's 2006 "revenue of $377.6 billion exceeded the gross domestic product of all but 25 countries."

So what does ExxonMobil do with all of the money it rakes in? Former CEO Lee Raymond knows, and it isn't anything that provides the customer relief at the pump. Raymond was the beneficiary of a "$69.7 million compensation package and $98 million pension payout" when he retired in 2006.

There is plenty of food. It is just not reaching human stomachs. Of the 2.13bn tonnes likely to be consumed this year, only 1.01bn, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), will feed people...

While 100m tonnes of food will be diverted this year to feed cars, 760m tonnes will be snatched from the mouths of humans to feed animals. This could cover the global food deficit 14 times.

Do you know the difference between Tanzania and Goldman Sachs? Tanzania is a country that has a GNP of 2.2 billion dollars and shares it between 25 million people. Goldman Sachs is an investment firm which has annual profits of 2.2 billion dollars, and shares it between 161 partners. That's the world we're living in now.

An EHM should “...encourage world leaders to become part of a vast network that promotes U.S. commercial interests. In the end, those leaders become ensnared in a web of debt that ensures their loyalty. We can draw on them whenever we desire—to satisfy our political, economic, or military needs. In turn, they bolster their political positions by bringing industrial parks, power plants, and airports to their people. The owners of U.S. engineering and construction companies become fabulously wealthy.”

- More than 1.2 billion people - one in every five on Earth - survive on less than $1 a day
- The top 1% of the world’s richest people earn as much as the poorest 57%
- During the 1990s, government development assistance dropped from 0.33% to 0.22% of donor countries’ gross national income. The target is 0.7%
- Of the 49 least developed countries, 31 receive less aid today than they did in 1990.
- The annual dairy subsidy in the EU amounts to $913 per cow per year; EU’s aid to Africa is $8 per African per year

Half the population in Britain today, taken together, earns only one-third of the combined income of three per cent of our fattest cats.

According to the 1999 Human Development Report, in 1820 the fifth of the world's population living in the world's richest countries collectively received three times the combined income of the fifth of the world's population living in the poorest countries. A century later this raio had increased to 11 to 1. By 1960 it was 30 to 1; by 1990, 60 to 1; and by 1997, 74 to 1.