Your Pension: “Perfect for Situations Where Maximum Blast and Explosion Is Required”

What’s more boring than your 401(k) statement? And what’s more viscerally compelling than having a 2,000-pound bomb dropped on your house?

Malachy Browne, managing editor of Reported.ly (which, like The Intercept, is owned and published by First Look Media) has used documents leaked by the “Yemen Cyber Army” to unravel the intimate connection between these two things — pension and retirement plans around the world on the one hand, and the vicious war Saudi Arabia is waging on Yemen on the other:

An exclusive investigation by reported.ly has traced the manufacture and shipping of bomb components from the European Union to the United Arab Emirates, and also discovered the use of bombs made by the European manufacturer in attacks by the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, where potentially unlawful civilian deaths have been documented. The Germany-based manufacturer of the bomb components, Rheinmetall AG, is a publicly traded company whose major shareholders have included a host of US financial firms, as well as the New York state pension fund, Virginia’s 529 college savings program and the sovereign pension fund of Norway …

The packing list for the shipment details six 40-foot containers holding the MK82/MK84 bomb components manufactured by RWM Italia … Burkan markets its MK80-series bombs – including the MK82, 83 and 84 – as “perfect for situations where maximum blast and explosion is required.”

(This post is from our blog: Unofficial Sources.)