Great Confiscation Updates

A DAY AFTER I excoriated the New York Times for its awful North Korea coverage (well, it is …) their Ideas blog links and recommends my New Ledger post about the Ajumma Rebellion. I prefer to think they’re trying to appease me.

NORTH KOREA SANCTIONS ITSELF: So, exactly how much of a North Korean economy is still left if you suddenly and arbitrarily confiscate private savings and eradicate private markets?

South Korea’s Hankyoreh newspaper quoted sources in China’s border city of Dandong as saying private transactions — which supplement the faltering state distribution system — have come to a virtual halt.

“The road linking Pyongyang and Sinuiju has been shut down. It’s been hard to get through to partners in the North by phone,” a Chinese businessman told the independent daily in Dandong, across the border river from Sinuiju. [AFP]

This is typical of the brutal, clumsy incompetence that has made North Korea the wretched failing state it is today. Only the North Koreans would think to weed a garden by drenching it with Agent Orange. I look forward to Christine Ahn’s calls for Kim Jong Il to lift these sanctions, which really are going to hurt the North Korean people, and just as the food situation was already looking bleak.

AMID THE CHAOS the Great Confiscation has wrought, party officials have been called to a flurry of meetings to reset wages and prices.

THERE IS ONE GROUP of people to whom the old North Korean money still has value: Chinese souvenir collectors.

AS I PREDICTED, North Korea is already showing signs of hyperinflation.

CLAUDIA ROSETT ON THE AJUMMA REBELLION:

It is hard to overstate just how bold a move that is. North Korea’s military “is on alert for a possible civil uprising,” according to a major South Korean newspaper, the Chosun Ilbo. Reports have been filtering out of North Korea that the country’s markets have become arenas of protest, with traders–many of them women in their 40s and 50s–publicly cursing the North Korean authorities. [….]

That is exactly why these signs of unrest are so important. Dissent in North Korea carries individual risks even worse than the horrors that street protesters have been braving in Iran. But the stories are credible, and they suggest that North Korea’s regime is approaching a fragile moment. This comes on top of Kim’s questionable health, following what is believed to have been a stroke in 2008.

President Barack Obama, and other leaders of the democratic world, have a choice. They can dismiss the rising murmurs of North Korea’s stricken people, and stick with the sorry tradition of bailing out and propping up the North Korean regime via yet another round of nuclear talks and payoffs. Or they can leave Kim to struggle with this nightmare of his own making, and maybe even notch up the financial pressure to nudge North Korea’s totalitarian regime toward its rightful place in history’s unmarked graveyard of discarded lies. [Forbes]