The North Korean Mess

Here.

Man goes to North Korea and interviews his North Korean tour guides about what is happening there. They are surprisingly intelligent and well informed.

First of all, I would like to say that I support North Korea 100% in their confrontation with the US. However, they are not going to shoot a nuke at us. What is bothering them is the yearly, in this case highly aggressive, war games that the US is playing South Korea right now. This always sets the north off. We really ought to stop these belligerent war games and quit antagonizing them.

North Korea is not going to start any kind of war with anyone and they are not going to shoot any missiles, nuclear or otherwise, at anyone. So we might as well calm down. But the response of Obama, to send B-1 bombers loaded with nuclear weapons to fly up and down the South Korean peninsula, was an extreme provocation. There was no need for this.

Why did the North Koreans build nuclear weapons? Because the lesson they learned after Serbia, Iraq and Afghanistan is that countries without nuclear weapons tend to get attacked by the United Snakes. This lesson was absolutely correct.

The US has been threatening to attack North Korea ever since the end of the Korean War in 1953. The US presently has an incredible 1,000 nuclear weapons in South Korea now, including nuclear artillery, nuclear missiles, nuclear bombers and nuclear mines. The US has had these nuclear weapons in South Korea for decades, and they have been threatening to attack the North with them all this time. Under nuclear control treaties, all nations being threatened with nuclear weapons have a right to develop nuclear weapons to defend themselves. Therefore, the North has a right to develop nuclear weapons as a deterrent against constant nuclear threats by the US. This is right and proper.

How many nukes does the North have? At the moment, they may have around 3 working nuclear weapons, however, they have enough material for more. And thankfully, they have just started up some of their nuclear reactors so they can make more fissile material and hopefully more bombs. The bombs seem to be small, and the general theory is that they are around 1/3 the size of a Hiroshima bomb. They are apparently plutonium bombs and not uranium bombs. Keep in mind that the North also wishes to develop nuclear power for peaceful purposes and they have that right under nuclear treaties.

The north also has missiles, but they don’t work very well. They often fall apart in mid-air. Their longest range missile can hit the eastern part of Alaska. The north has no missiles that can reach the US mainland. Missile technology is however rapidly improving.

The most important thing that we do not know is whether the north has mastered the technique of putting a nuclear warhead on a missile in such a way such that it can be detonated. You need a detonation device to do this and it must be accurate down to the thousands of a second. If you don’t get it right, you will shoot your nuke, and it won’t even blow up. Getting this detonation device correct is maddeningly difficult for any nation. However, with this latest underground test, observers feel that the north may have an operational warhead.

The US embargoes the North, and now the whole world has leveled sanctions on the North via the UN, which is just a tool of US imperialism anymore (I strongly supported the Iraqi resistance car bomb attack on the UN headquarters in Baghdad in the early days of the Resistance.). These sanctions have been strengthened three times now.

These are “dual use sanctions” of the sort that completely devastated Iraq, murdering 500,000 Iraqis, mostly children, via the US and the UK sanctions. Remember how utterly devastated the Iraqi economy was due to dual use sanctions, especially Iraqi medical care? Iraq didn’t have a Communist government, and the sanctions ruined them. These sanctions will destroy the economy of any state.

Under the dual use rubric, most medical supplies and drugs coming into the North are banned under sanctions rules. This is the same mess that devastated Iraqi medicine and the water supply. North Korean medicine has been completely devastated by these dual use sanctions.

In addition, the sanctions mean that most countries have to decide if they are going to trade with North Korea or they are going to trade with the rest of the world. That is because the sanctions also apply to any nation trading with North Korea. The US threatens and punishes any nation who tries to trade with North Korea. Most of the world has decided to trade with the rest of the world instead of trading with North Korea alone, so the North is completely isolated. Almost all of their trade is with China alone.

It is true that agriculture has collapsed, but North Korea fed themselves just fine for 40 years under the same collective agriculture. Soviets ate very well under collective ag until 1991. Cubans eat just fine under a system of collective agriculture. So it’s dubious that collective agriculture can be blamed for North Korea’s food problems.

The US has repeatedly withheld food aid to North Korea, and then they scream that people are harmed or killed by malnutrition. So the US is basically deliberately starving North Koreans to death. In addition, the US bullies and threatens any other country or group who tries to provide food aid to the North. The US’ reason for withholding food aid to the North is that most of it is diverted to the military, but this is not true, and at any rate, the military has to eat too, and obviously they get first priority.

The US under Democratic and Republican Presidents has torn up every agreement that they ever signed with the North. Clinton demanded that the North stop developing nukes in return for providing them with a light water reactor. The reactor was never forthcoming because Clinton was trying to make the regime collapse. Along the same lines, sanctions and suspension of food aid are all intended to cause the collapse of the North Korean regime. It hasn’t happened.

The North’s position is completely reasonable, and I support them 100% in their resolve to stand up to US aggression.

Korean Kpop, “Ring Ding Dong”

Interesting Kpop video by SHINee, a Korean Kpop group. I am wondering why these Korean Kpop bands all look and act so faggy. What’s the point? They are all trying to be David Bowie 1972? Is this androgyny or just sheer fagginess? They are kind of sexy, like Bowie was back in the day, but what’s the point of all this queeriness? Is all Korean Kpop so queery and faggy like this?

A guy called Taemin shows up at :08. The Asian girls in the comments are all raving about him. He’s a very nice looking guy, and he isn’t as faggy as the rest of them. Tell the truth, I used to look something like that myself when I was a young man. I had the same hair.

Warning for males on the site. Viewing this video may turn you into a homosexual!

The Ugliest Woman in the World

Interesting story about about Lizzie Velasquez, a woman who has a terrible and rare genetic disorder that effects her adipose tissue. Only two people in the US have this condition, which she was born with. At one point, the illness caused her to go blind in one eye. It was also disfigured her to a large degree and it makes her look pretty homely.

A short 9 second video of her called The Ugliest Woman on Earth was made a while back and became a hit on Youtube. The comments were filled with all sorts of nasty remarks, many advising her to kill herself. She read through all the comments, though it was quite a painful exercise.

Then she decided to fight fire with fire, made her own video channel and decided to go public. She also authored a book and wants to become a motivational speaker.

In this video, she talks about bullying, which she has had to experience a lot of. Now it is mostly stares when she goes out, but when she was growing up, she was treated very cruelly by other kids in school. Even now there are whole websites devoted to bashing her and ridiculing her. There are a lot of folks involved in hating on her. They are mostly kids, but there are a number of adults in on it too.

I hope that if I knew her, I could be her friend and be a good friend to her. She seems like a pretty cool person, and I bet she would be a good friend.

It really all boils down to what kind of a society you have. This is one reason I am a socialist.

I remember a Bruce Cummings article about North Korea. He spoke about a man who was badly burned over much of his body by US bombs in the Korean War. The wounds gave him an ugly, monstrous and horrific appearance. There are many North Koreans with war wounds derived from the Americans like this man.

Cummings once accompanied this man around town. He said once they were in an elevator and a South Korean man completely freaked out upon being stuck in the elevator with the wounded man, treating like he was some kind of a circus freak who might contaminate him. He could hardly wait to get away from the burned man.

But Cummings said that everywhere they went, all North Koreans were very kind to him and treated him like he was a normal person, even doting on him. The burned man told Cummings that South Koreans always freaked out when they saw him, and his fellow North Koreans were always very good to him.

Cummings chalked this up to the different set of values fostered in Communist North Korea as opposed to the super capitalist South.

Japanese and Blacks

Tulio comments:

Virulent racism of Japanese towards blacks is something I always doubted. It seemed to contradict what black friends that have visited and worked there have told me. They said it’s absolutely fine and they have experienced little racism and what racism they do experience is stuff that tends to be directed toward foreigners in general such as being denied entry into Japanese only places.

Now one place I thought would be extremely racist to black people is Korea. But according to this black guy living there, he said he’s experienced nothing but hospitality and warmth. That even shocked me.

First of all, I am very happy that well behaved Black Americans can have a great experience in Korea and Japan. Black people really ought to be free to travel to and have fun in as many countries as I could. That a Black American is afraid to travel to some country because they will treat him badly simply because he is Black is very painful for me to contemplate. Maybe we Whites don’t realize how lucky we are.

However, a lot of Japanese Americans, both male and female, have very racist attitudes towards Blacks. I knew a Japanese American, and he was quite racist against Blacks.

You see where these Black guys run around and have like 8 different kids by 8 different women and don’t support any of them. That’s profoundly offensive to Japanese people, especially Japanese men. In East Asian society, a man may father children with more than one woman, but he absolutely must support all of his kids. If he does not, he is just a lowdown dirtball.

When these Black guys have 8 kids by 6 different women and don’t support any of them, to a Japanese man, you are little more than an animal. You’re basically a dog. Because that’s what a dog does. A dog just knocks up any bitch he can or as many bitches as possible, then runs away and leaves her and doesn’t help her raise any of the young.

Is It Fair to Compare the US Education System With Those of East Asian and European Countries?

Car Guy asks:

Would it be fair to compare the US education system with that of countries such as Japan, South Korea and Germany?

No!

People are always comparing US test scores with those of all Asian countries in East Asia and nearly all White countries in Europe. When the US falls behind say Finland, Taiwan or Singapore, rightwingers screech that the US public school system is failing and therefore we need to dismantle it in various ways such as charter schools, vouchers, defunding, etc.

These comparisons are all false due to differential IQ’s between ethnic groups in the US and those of other nations.

Japan and South Korea = pure East Asian. Higher IQ (105) than white majority US (98).

Germany = all White. German IQ is ~103; US IQ is 98. The US is only 66% White, and the rest is largely Black and Hispanic with much lower IQ’s than Whites. Totally unfair comparisons with all of them.

                 IQ
US Ethnic group

Whites           103
Hispanics         90
Blacks            87.2*

*Black estimate is my estimate. Others would put it lower at around 85. The White and Hispanic estimates seem to be pretty much valid. There may be some upward movement on the order of 1-2 points in both Black and Hispanic IQ’s in the last few decades for unknown reasons.

As you can see, Blacks and Browns score much lower on IQ’s than Whites, pulling the whole US average down, which will be reflected on test scores. Due to differential IQ’s US students will tend to score poorer than those of all White European nations and all-Asian Asian nations.

Which Countries are Socialist? Which Are Not?

I don’t know if I can agree that Germany is a socialist country. Its got a government and a public sector and a welfare system but its got a large private sector. I don’t know what percentage of the workforce work in the private sector for capitalist employers but its a lot. I might look it up. The means of production aren’t socially owned, right?

(Is America a socialist country by your definition?)

My position is that social democracy is a form of socialism. The social democrats call themselves socialists and their parties are typically called socialist parties.

America surely has socialist elements, but we don’t have any big socialist parties in this country. We don’t have a social democratic party or a party calling itself socialist in power in the US. We don’t have a ruling or large party that is a member of the Socialist International, as is the case with possibly most of the countries on Earth.

America has always been a Hard Right country as far as any kind of socialism goes. It’s basically a place for neoliberal experiments. Of all of the world’s richest countries, it is generally agreed that the US is by far the least socialist.

I realize that any social spending or social welfare projects are part of the social democratic project, but I doubt if many social democrats would describe the US as a social democratic country in spite of our meager and tattered safety net.

Now most of Europe is socialist. Canada, Australia and New Zealand are socialist. Japan is socialist. Vietnam, Laos, Cuba, China, Mongolia and North Korea are socialist. 40% of the Nepalese government is held by Maoists. Most of the Arab World and Iran are more or less socialist. Most of the CIS is socialist.

Venezuela, Brazil, Uruguay, Peru, Argentina, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Paraguay, Bolivia and some Caribbean countries are at the very least run by socialists. Quite a bit of Africa is run by socialist parties. You can look at the list of the Socialist International and you will see that many countries have ruling or major parties that are part of the SI.

Which places are not socialist? Latvia, Estonia, Turkey, Afghanistan, India, Colombia, Panama, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Gabon, Pakistan, Myanmar, Cambodia, Philippines, Indonesia and Hong Kong at the very least.

Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea are uncertain. Singapore has a lot of social democratic elements. Much of the housing is public housing for instance. That’s a socialist project. Taiwan and South Korea both underwent huge land reforms, and Taiwan now has national health care. Further, South Korea has huge state involvement in the economy, and I believe that Taiwan traditionally did too.

Neither Taiwan nor South Korea is run by neoliberal rightwing hardline free marketeers. Both of them seem to be following the Japanese model. The Japanese model is considered to be noncapitalist mode of production. No one really knows what it is. Some call it state capitalism. Others call it national socialism along WW2 German lines.

The Survival of North Korea

Here.

Nice and actually sane review of a book called The Survival of North Korea in Foreign Policy in Focus. They are one of the few sane American groups writing about foreign policy. As the review points out, legions of idiots have been predicting the oncoming doom of the North Korean regime for the past 20 years. They’ve all been wrong, over and over. Various US Administrations have also been predicting the looming demise of North Korea. The Bush Administration actually had a policy designed to make the regime collapse.

There is one thing I would like to say.

Yes, there is malnutrition in North Korea. At its worst, it was at the exact same level as India’s malnutrition and starvation is year in and year out. You never heard that in the capitalist press, now did you?

If North Korea’s food problems are evidence of the failure of Communism (despite the fact the Communist nations generally did an excellent job of providing basic caloric intake for their citizens), then why is the capitalist world’s chronic malnutrition and starvation crisis (capitalism starves 14 million humans to death every year, mostly in South Asia) not evidence of the failure of capitalism?

But one thing makes me absolutely sick. And that is that the US, the West and South Korea have been playing politics with food aid to North Korea. At the same time that the West is screaming that North Korea is starving its people (A lie – the regime is not deliberately starving its people – there is just not enough to go around), the West is cruelly withholding food aid to the nation, frankly killing and sickening North Koreans. What bullshit is that?

I would also like to take this opportunity to come out in strong support of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. They should absolutely not dismantle this program, and they need to expand it greatly. They also need to come up with some missiles that have a long enough range to actually hit the mainland US. The problem is that this is the only thing that US imperialist dogs will listen to.

Western imperialists are intent on regime change. In general, regimes have a right to national sovereignty and certainly have a right to resist regime change by Western imperialism. North Korea watched with dismay as one regime after another – Serbia, then even worse Iraq, and most recently Libya, fell to imperialist regime change for the simple reason that they did not have nuclear weapons. The only way to head off Western regime change imperialists is to get yourself some nuclear weapons.

So this is what North Korea has done. That decision was correct, proper and above all moral. A nation has a moral duty to preserve its state from enemy invaders, which is what regime changers are.

Continued cooperation with South Korea will result in many benefits for both nations.

American English Teacher in Korea Goes Nuts on Bus, Attacks Korean Couple

Video on the video site here.

Interesting video. This Black English teacher in Korea got into it with an older couple on a bus. The Korean man said something in Korean that sounds like “nigga” but really it just means something totally different. The older man had no idea that “nigga” in Korean means something bad in English because he doesn’t speak English. The English teacher goes totally nuts, starting screaming and yelling at the Koreans, and then starts manhandling both the man and the woman. The Korean man wants to fight back but is afraid to.

This American guy totally blew it on the bus. He totally lost it. What a moron. I hope the Koreans send him home for this. That’s all I can say.

This video is getting a lot of play on the Net and making the rounds.

North Korea Downs US Spy Plance With Electronic Warfare

Good.

Serves em right.

The Paradox of Capitalist Regulation

Repost from the old site.

James Schipper writes in the comments section:

The historical record shows that wage increases eventually follow productivity growth. For instance, in 1960 South Korea was dirt-poor, and naturally wages were extremely low. By 1990, SK had become a prosperous country, due to massive productivity growth, and wages were also much higher.

As workers become much more productive on average, they become more valuable to employers, who are therefore willing to pay them higher wages, for the same reason that a dairy farmer is willing to pay a higher price for a cow which gives 10,000 liters of milk per year than for a cow which gives 5,000 liters per year.

It seems to be true that wage increases in the US have not kept pace with productivity growth in the last 3 decades. I have no explanation for it.

It can’t be doubted that the transition to a market economy in Russia was handled very badly. Such major changes should be introduced gradually. Just compare China’s performance with Russia’s in the 1990′s.

The problem with Chile between 1973 and 1983 was that the country was completely opened to foreign economic influences almost overnight while the exchange rate was kept fixed. They liberalized the entire foreign sector, except the exchange rate. If they had also brought in flexible exchange rates, the results would have been less catastrophic.

I hate neoliberalism as much as you, but I’m a moderate economic liberal. I believe that durable prosperity is not possible without considerable private ownership of the means of production and free markets. The motto should be: the market when possible and the state when necessary.

The Chicago boys are like a doctor who always prescribes the same medicine and then argues that the medicine wasn’t taken properly when some patients get worse.

Inflation is not bad for all capitalists. As a rule, inflation, or at least unexpected inflation, is bad for lenders and good for borrowers. Most companies are borrowers. Inflation tends to reduce the real wealth of lenders and increase the real wealth of borrowers.

Suppose that I lend you 10,000 for a year at 5% interest and on the assumption that inflation for the coming year will be 0%. Instead, inflation is 20%. After a year, I get my 10,000 back, but their real value is only 8,000. I lost 2,000 and you gained 2,000.

It is a libertarian myth that big government equals oppressive government. In what way do I become less free because in Canada the state provides most health care for free? I can’t just demand any treatment that I like, but I wouldn’t be able to that either if I were privately insured.

There is something fraudulent about neoliberalism. They constantly talk about freedom, but what they really mean is that they are opposed to economic egalitarianism. The freedom that they are most interested in is the freedom to make lots of money. Still, hostility to neoliberalism should not blind us toward the virtues of free enterprise, which are considerable.

I respond:

I really dislike capitalism, but I am the first to admit that pure socialism has some very serious problems. Socialism has done great at building economies for a while, but after a few decades, it starts bogging down into bureaucracy. Furthermore, while alleviating poverty, we have only been able to provide a low standard of living for the people. Social capital only goes so far – people want stuff too.

My attitude is that some capitalism may be necessary, like death and disease, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing by any means. Lots of nasty stuff is necessary.

Class war is continuous under capitalism.

Owners are continuously waging war against workers to take more of the profits generated by their enterprises. If there is X amount of profits from an enterprise, owners must decide how much to take out for themselves and how much to give to workers. Clearly they wish to give as little as possible to workers. So there is a battle between workers and owners to divvy up the profits from the enterprise.

Owners oppose increased % of profits going to workers since that means less for them, so they are always trying to cut down on the workers’ % to get more for themselves. The tendency among capitalists would be to take 100% of productivity increases if they could get away with it. The only reason that workers get any % of productivity increases at all is when they organize to fight for it.

During the period you mention, the South Korean labor movement emerged and became extremely combative. This is probably the reason for the wage increases you mention. Capitalists will never give a wage increase just to be nice. Their whole project, in part, is to screw the worker to the greatest extent possible and even kill him if they can get away with it.

Indeed, capitalists kill millions of workers every year in the world, which is exactly what their project is designed to do. Workers and management are de facto enemies in capitalism, and if workers do not organize, they don’t get much of anything.

I’m sure there were productivity increases in housing construction from 1975 to today and the prices of houses have certainly gone through the roof. At the same time, wages for construction workers have probably collapsed by anywhere from 50-80%. 100% of that vast surplus and probable productivity increase went into the hands of owners. Workers got less than zero. In a time of booming profits and probable productivity raises, instead of getting even a meager slice, they got a massive pay cut.

Builders reaped massive benefits from declining wages and from increased prices for their homes. Many industries have seen declining wages in the US since 1980 due in part to the busting of unions and their replacement typically with illegal immigrant or H-1B guest worker labor.

During a 15-year period in Guatemala from 1948-1963, the economy grew by 5% per year. During that same period, the % of the population living in poverty actually increased from 87% to 93%. 5% economic growth over 15 years equals a 75% increase in the size of the economy. 0% of the benefits of this economic growth went to the vast majority of the population.

This is how capitalism is supposed to work.

Every capitalist on Earth wants to live in a country like that – where owners, the rich and the upper middle class reap all or almost all of the benefits from economic growth and the workers get little, nothing, or even lose money. To avoid this, workers must organize into unions, since workers usually never get anything from capitalists without a fight. In the the 3rd World where murders of trade unionists are par for the course, it’s often a deadly fight.

I repeat, capitalism is evil, but pure socialism doesn’t seem to work very well.

I don’t have much issues with small businesses, who often seem to really care about their employees and consumers (customers) and even in some cases, the environment and the society they live in. But Organized Small Business is always profoundly reactionary.

But big business is just bad. Whatever benefits it gives us in terms of jobs and decent products, good service or reduced prices is typically vastly outweighed by the havoc it wreaks on society, the environment, the workers and consumers.

It’s true that regulation and organized workers and consumers can ameliorate a lot of this downside, but in capitalist nations, the capitalist classes buy all the media and institute a Gramscian cultural hegemony over society with their media and cultural control. At the same time, they use their money and media and cultural power to buy the state itself which ideally ought to be regulating them in the interests of workers, consumers, the environment and society itself.

So you have a state that will do nothing in the face of the bulldozer of capital. The result is a flattened social society, a wrecked public sector, slums, homelessness, disease, early death, environmental devastation, harmed consumers and crippled workers and nothing in government to stop any of this.

The housing crisis is a case in point. Contra your assertion that the New Deal failed (which is actually rightwing revisionism against the New Deal), in fact, the New Deal, in particular the financial reforms – the FDIC which restored confidence in the banks, the SEC that regulated the stock market and Fannie Mae to bring back the mortgage market – is what finally got the economy going again.

This was one of the greatest accomplishments the US government ever did, it was wholly socialist in nature, and it was opposed ferociously by the Republican Party and the entire US business sector at the time. After Roosevelt rammed it through anyway, the business class vowed to wage struggle, for decades if they had to, to overturn these things.

Finally, by the 1990′s, much of this regulatory structure had been whittled away.

Whittling away this structure had been a project of Capital since this regulatory apparatus had been put in place. Now that the regulation is a shadow of its former self, we have another Depression-like phenomena with the housing crisis, all the way to failed banks, bank runs, loss of deposits, etc. As one might expect.

This is the problem. The only way to keep capitalism from being completely nightmarish is to regulate it, and the capitalist sector reflexively fights to the death any attempts to regulate it.

Furthermore, they grab the media and culture itself to brainwash gullible workers and consumers to support their elitist agenda and to get the workers, consumers and society itself to oppose their own interests and support the contrary interests of Capital. Then they grab the state itself and prevent it from enacting those very regulations necessary for a civilized capitalism.

This is one of my primary problems with capitalism. Regulation is mandatory to keep capitalism halfway civilized, but the nature of the capitalist system, as described above, works in such a way as to make such regulation often extremely difficult or impossible.