14 March 2010: Here We Go Again

Whoop-dee-doo: Rumor has it that North Korea will return to six-party talks next month, and if that’s true, it will only be under the duress of sanctions, and for the sole purposes of demanding that the sanctions be loosened and to issue a new list of demands that are mostly designed to prevent us from ever getting to the matter of its nuclear disarmament. The good news is that the sanctions must be working. The bad news is that our State Department’s stupidity is so limitless that it will probably relax the very pressure that brought North Korea to the talks, without having achieved anything of real value.

Remember, kids: having an embassy in lovely Pyongyang is a privilege with paying tribute for:

North Korea has demanded a hike in rental fees for embassies and international organizations in Pyongyang, diplomats said Friday, in what could be a move to raise foreign currency amid tightened international sanctions. [….]

North Korea informed embassies and international organizations last year that it would raise rental fees for their offices and living accommodation by 20 percent beginning in January, a diplomat, who has knowledge of the matter, told The Associated Press.

The rent increases were being opposed by the missions. “It’s under dispute at the moment,” the diplomat said, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue and because it remains unresolved. Another diplomat, in Pyongyang, said the North cited rising oil prices as the reason for the increase, but all diplomatic missions and international organizations protested the hike, the first in about 20 years.

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LiNK will hold a screening of Lisa Ling’s excellent “Inside North Korea” in Hoboken, New Jersey. By the way, here’s a friendly reminder to vote for LiNK.

Japan’s left-leaning government is instituting a new free tuition system, but it looks like the Chosen Soren juche schools will be excluded from the system. Me: you mean those backward, capitalist Japanese make people pay for high school tuition? But every civilized country knows that education is a fundamental right … like health care. And housing. And food. And clothing. And a car. And basic cable.

The BBC has more from Kim Jong Ryul, Kim Il Sung’s personal shopper, who lived and later faked his own death in Austria. As it turns out, Austrian businessmen were always happy to help the North Korean dictatorship evade sanctions:

We found that Austria was easy to handle. We could purchase embargoed goods here. We labelled and packaged them and then shipped them from Vienna. That is how it worked. Austrian businessmen are very good at that kind of thing. North Korea always paid 20-30% extra and Austrian firms were quite interested in that. We used this interest.

We bought all sorts of things – such as Geiger counters, fingerprint readers from America and encrypted telephones for the two dictators [Kim Jong-il and Kim Il-Sung] to talk to each other on. Also, gold-plated pistols, hunting rifles and furniture and fittings for villas.

Because this would have been around the time of The Great Famine, I kept waiting for the part where Kim secretly bought infant formula to feed all those starving North Korean babies Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il couldn’t get because the Yankees were blockading and trying to starve the North Korean people. Maybe the BBC left that part out, you know, because the BBC is run by neocon lap-dog of the Pentagon.

There’s audio there, too.