Kim Jong Un - Supreme Leader of North Korea - via: The Economist
Here’s the face of Kim Jong-un, the new Leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). Kim Jong Un is the son and heir of Kim Jong Il who passed away on Saturday December 17, 2011. Jong Un is in his twenties and has inherited the control of what many consider to be a Communist Dictator system of leadership. Lets see what history comes from this new, young and small powerful dictator and soon new Supreme Leader (General Secretary of the WPK).
As his father did, this young men would be in charge of a territory of 120,540 km2 and of 24,051,218 million people (the 51 most populated country).
North Korea is also a proven nuclear power and nuclear weapon country since 2006 that has consistently menaced the world with the use of its weapons in retaliation against South Corea and Japan. Diplomacy and food supplies to its dying population has been the methods used by countries in the United Nations to stop their menaces.
Video of original footage of the Declaration of War to Japan
This footage of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was shot by CWO4 Clyde Daughtry. The attack occured at exactly 7:55 a.m. Hawaii Time. The original footage has since been lost, and the poor quality of this footage is due to the fact that it is a copy, and believed to be the best remaining version of this film in existence. Among the many valuable portions of this footage are shots of USS Nevada (BB-36) underway and firing back at Japanese aircraft, USS Oglala (CM-4) rolling over and sinking, and USS St. Louis underway (CL-4). Naval History and Heritage Command, Photographic Section, UM-10.
The foreign policy of the richest countries has always depended in controlling the world’s monetary systems. As a continuation of the postcolonial systems, they continue holding the power to grant credits to poorer countries, to rescue their economies in periods of crisis and in pushing for an increase in world “reserves” and international “liquidity.” The end result of this policies resulted in creating world inflation and enriching those central banks that controlled the dice of this international game (just as it had been done in the previous colonial period).
Colonialism may seem to many an ‘old history’ that was overcome with the modernization of the world and the decolonization processes after World War II. Nonetheless, in the following postcolonial period many already institutionalized strategies continued working and are still present today. The IMF, for example, was one of the institutions born as a result of the decolonization process. Its results (far distant from their founding vision) were to keep the postcolonial countries in monetary and economic dependency.
For long the world’s centralized banking and monetary authorities, headed primarily by the International Monetary Fund, collaborated to initiate a period of surveillance, aid, and guarantees for the world’s financial markets as Philipp Bagus and David Howden explained in the post “The IMF and Moral Hazard“. However, the long-term results of theses policies fostered the dependency of postcolonial economies and, as such, empowered the populist leaderships in the former colonies that pursued expansive social programs that couldn’t be supported without their foreign aid and long-term indebtment.
Video: The Plan To Collapse Iran’s Central Bank
Today, I saw a video titled “The Plan To Collapse Iran’s Central Bank” in which analysts in the U.S.A. are evaluating the possibilities of collapsing Iran’s economy and disenabling them to continue researching their nuclear programs. Strategies as these may seem as “bogus” to many; however, the long history of international monetary intervention of the economies in postcolonial countries is long and influential (see: Pastor, Manuel (1989). Latin America, the Debt Crisis, and the International Monetary Fund. Latin American Perspectives). The results of any of these strategies always end up creating inflation and as Henry Hazlitt mentioned in his essay “End the IMF” in the year 1963 the only solution for and end to inflation (an as such for peace and economic recovery) is to eliminate the IMF and the interventionist international monetary system that has proved, in practice, a gigantic machine for world inflation.
I just got my hands in a great article on Southeast Asia issues. Here’s the abstract for the article (via Project MUSE) and I hope you’ll get to enjoy it too,
Conventional geography’s boundary line between a “Southeast Asia” and an “East Asia,” following a “civilizational” divide between a “Confucian” sphere and a “Vietnam aside, everything but Confucian” zone, obscures the essential unity of the two regions. This article argues the coherence of a macroregion “Sino-Pacifica” encompassing both and explores this new framework’s implications: the Yangzi River basin, rather than the Yellow River basin, pioneered the developments that led to the rise of Chinese civilization, and the eventual prominence of the Yellow River basin came not from centrality but rather from its liminality—its position as the contact zone between Inner Eurasia and Southeast Asia.
In a sense . . . the frontier of Southeast Asia has retreated slowly from the line of the Yangzi (in what is now central China) to the Mekong delta (in what is now southern Vietnam).
—Charles Holcombe, The Genesis of East Asia
[T]he Vietnamese-Lao wars of the seventeenth century were resolved wisely when the Le rulers in Vietnam and the Lao monarch agreed that every inhabitant in the upper Mekong valley who lived in a house built on stilts owed allegiance to Laos, while those whose homes had earth floors owed allegiance to Vietnam.
—The Emergence of Modern Southeast Asia: A New History [End Page 659]
The question of boundaries is the first to be encountered; from it all others flow.
In conventional geography, the largest division of the human community is the continental or subcontinental scale “world region.” World regions are the most useful as concepts when their boundaries can be seen as enduring, immobile, and, above all, easy to map. Yet, in the first quotation above, we see a border between two world regions, Southeast and East Asia, that rolls southward thousands of miles over thousands of years. In the second quotation, we see a border between two kingdoms within the same world region, Southeast Asia, that cannot be traced as a simple line on the ground, being created by the contrasting cultural preferences of inextricably mixed populations. The moving boundary and the undrawable boundary are actually the same, the frontiers between Sinified Vietnam and its un-Sinified neighbors.
As his father did, this young men would be in charge of a territory of 120,540 km2 and of 24,051,218 million people (the 51 most populated country).
Globalization & Capitalism 