Search Results for: "Great Confiscation"

June 11, 2011

Open Sources: We Are All Neocons

One of us: It has become almost impossible to imagine a positive outcome to the long-festering problems that center on North Korea as long as the Kim dynasty reigns, enforcing the disastrously failed policies of the late “Great Leader,” President Kim Il Sung. [….] So why not just come out and say it? Not only would perennially hungry North Korea benefit from the removal of the founder’s son and heir Kim Jong Il, the “Dear Leader. But so would most...

Categories Anju Links
February 24, 2011

Is the paradigm shifting on hunger in North Korea? (Also, fiskings of Chris Hill and Selig Harrison)

OFK regulars should all know how much regard I have for Christopher Hill. So are my own preconceptions causing me to find something vaguely repellent in the way Hill frames the issue of food aid, or do others see things the way I do? Would food aid help to ensure the survival of a state whose treatment of its own citizens is among the most abysmal in the world? If so, and if denying food aid would result in a...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Fiskings/Useful Idiocy
February 15, 2011

The Sanctions Are Working

In April of 2009, I laid out a series of ten tough non-military options that I didn’t believe President Obama would have the spine to apply to North Korea. At the time, North Korea was about to test our new president by launching a Taepodong II missile in the general direction of Hawaii. I can’t fail to begin this article without conceding that Executive Order 13,551, signed on August 30th of this year, ought to count as full or partial...

Categories Sanctions/Uncategorized
January 25, 2011

Kim Jong Il Can’t Feed His Army this Winter

The last 12 months have been unusual, even for North Korea, on several levels. There has been the rise in aggression against the South, the accelerating loss of economic control by the regime, an unusually cold winter, unusually severe electricity shortages, and now, an apparent erosion of control over the military. I’ve read a lot of stories about this being a hard year for North Korean soldiers, and for the most part, this is something new. In the past, the...

Categories NK Military
October 19, 2010

The Boy Who Cried “Sheep!”: One Man’s Mass Murderer Is Selig Harrison’s Reformer

For someone who judged the evidence of North Korea’s uranium enrichment program so skeptically, Selig Harrison sure doesn’t set a very high bar to perceive evidence of “reform” in North Korea. But Harrison’s latest op-ed in the Boston Globe is in equal parts breathless and baseless, and might just extend his dismal predictive record into the next decade. In his desperation to find some sign that North Korea’s new Inner Party is a hothouse of reforms, Harrison pounds the square...

Categories Humor/Satire/Kremlinology/The Camps/Useful Idiocy
October 15, 2010

Lack of Money Is the Root of All Evil

While most of the media are fixed on the movement of stage props on reviewing stands in Pyongyang, mine remains in North Korea’s outer provinces, markets, and ratlines across the Yalu. These, after all, are the things that will drive real change in North Korea. A new report from the Korea Times suggests that increasingly, money smuggling has become an engine of regeneration for North Korea’s free markets: It is common for North Korean defectors here to send money to...

Categories NK Economics/Refugees/Subversion
September 9, 2010

Hard Times for North Korean Restaurants in Asia

Via The Diplomat, the restaurants’ setbacks defy their limitless supply of morally retarded clientele: The Pyongyang eateries are known for being friendly but a little pricey and it’s unclear where exactly any profits go. Still, the ultimate destination of the cash spent in the restaurants hasn’t put customers off visiting. “˜I didn’t object to paying (what I did) for my meal, or feel that I was supporting a tyrant,’ says Don Douglas, an American NGO worker who recently ate at...

Categories Money Laundering
July 16, 2010

Good Friends serves up the irony — that, or disinformation — in its penultimate update: This past June 1st, the Pyongsung City police succeeded in arresting 7 people involved in a professional counterfeiting operation. 4 out of 7 were women. Working out of a hidden location within the city, they were counterfeiting travel documents, Pyongyang residency proofs, Renminbi, dollars, and the new North Korean currency. Among those arrested included an employee of the Pyongsung currency printing press. After searching through...

Categories Anju Links
June 19, 2010

WaPo: North Korea Lifts Market Restrictions

In Part Three of my capitalist manifesto, I’d documented North Korea’s efforts throughout 2009 to destroy the markets on which most of the North Korean people had come to rely on for their survival. The efforts included with bans on imported goods, the closure of large markets, the imposition of restrictions on who could sell in others, and finally, the Great Confiscation, which wiped out the savings of millions of families, along with the working capital of the traders who...

Categories Capitalism/Famine & Food Aid
June 9, 2010

The Apprentice: Pyongyang

The Chosun Ilbo reports that Kim Jong Il’s appearance at a surprise session of the Grand People’s Assembly was the latest chapter in the largest purge in North Korea for almost two decades: Some 100 senior officials were ousted in the latest purge, including Pak Nam-gi, the director of the Workers Party’s Planning and Finance Department, who was executed by firing squad over the botched currency reform late last year. That was Kim’s fifth massive purge. A South Korean security...

Categories Kremlinology
May 24, 2010

Overthrowing Kim: A Capitalist Manifesto

[Originally published at The New Ledger, May 2010; edited for brevity in October 2017] Within the next 48 hours, South Korea is expected to announce that North Korea torpedoed and sank the warship Cheonan and killed 46 of her crew. Among the evidence the multinational investigation will cite will be the North Korean serial number on the torpedo’s propeller, recovered from the ocean floor. The sinking of the Cheonan may be the most serious North Korean provocation since 1968 —...

Categories Capitalism/Regime Change
May 13, 2010

Cheonan conclusions will mean tougher N. Korea policies … for a while, anyway

It certainly looks like every government official outside Beijing who has seen the evidence now believes that North Korea sank the Cheonan and killed 46 members of its crew. Among those who have drawn their conclusions are the South Korean government, the Obama Administration, and the Republicans in Congress. The multinational investigation is now sufficiently advanced that the official Yonhap News Agency says that the findings could be released as early as next week. One interesting leak references a stray...

Categories Cheonan Incident/North-South/Sanctions/Terrorism (NK)/U.S. Politics/Washington Views
April 14, 2010

Götterdämmerung Watch

The Wall Street Journal has two must-read op-eds on the decline of North Korea’s capacity to control the flow of food, money, and information within its territory. Marcus Noland, sounding very much like Kushibo, sees a “tipping point” after The Great Confiscation: Once broken, the economy may prove difficult to repair. Prices for goods such as rice, corn and the dollar rose 6,000% or more after the reform. And while prices have come down from their peak as the government...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/NK Economics/Subversion
April 9, 2010

North Korea and China Feast Amid Famine

As the food situation in North Korea continues to deteriorate for its most vulnerable, a South Korean NGO is sending 300 tons of flour and other supplies to help feed 12,000 “marginalized” people, including kids in 50 orphanages. The article mentions nothing about monitoring or nutritional surveys, so pray to a God they can’t that there will be a few dollops of gruel left for their begging bowls after all of the theft, diversion, and corruption. Note, by the way,...

Categories Appeasement/China & Korea/Famine & Food Aid/Six-Party Talks
April 6, 2010

6 April 2010

Are you happy to see me, or is that just a cargo train? _______________________ Make that two officials executed over The Great Confiscation. Just to show that North Korea hasn’t lost its flair, it forced a crowd of economic officials to observe the proceedings. How many executions does it take to make this officially a purge? _______________________ Some surprisingly interesting observations from Hwang Jang Yop, via Don Kirk. _______________________ The collapse of North Korea’s educational system is creating a lost...

Categories Anju Links
April 5, 2010

North Korea Reaffirms Plans to Close Markets

If you’ve read a spate of recent reports and op-eds in places like the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal recently, you might have acquired the impression that The Great Confiscation was a fiasco that caused panic, chaos, and an unprecedented swelling of discontent. The North Korean government wants you to know that all of this is all a brigandish, flunkeyist fabrication: ”In the early days immediately after the currency change, market prices were not fixed, so markets were...

Categories NK Economics/Resistance
April 5, 2010

Götterdämmerung Watch

Writing in Foreign Policy, Marcus Noland writes about discontent and dissent in North Korea, and the impact of The Great Confiscation as a catalyst for it. The surveys’ results suggest that the regime’s discomfort might be well founded. Countries such as North Korea, where people routinely hide their true opinions, are prone to sudden, explosive political mobilizations like the ones that swept Eastern and Central Europe in the late 1980s. Those mobilizations happen when nascent expressions of discontent cascade —...

Categories NK Economics/Propaganda/Regime Change/Subversion
March 24, 2010

Fear and Loathing Across the Tumen, Part 2

Two new reports today describe the accelerating outing of dissent in North Korea. The first, from the Washington Post’s Blaine Harden, cites this new study by Marcus Noland based on surveys of refugees from 2008, this study by the International Crisis Group, which I’d previously blogged, and more recent reports since The Great Confiscation: There is mounting evidence that Kim Jong Il is losing the propaganda war inside North Korea, with more than half the population now listening to foreign...

Categories NK Economics/Resistance