What happens when the North Koreans take all their marbles and go home?

A few days ago, I wrote a blog What are we going to do about Korea?. Even though I had fun writing it, this is a serious issue. RP commented that, “The North Korea problem is probably the scariest of my lifetime.”

Well … Yeah … But if the doctor gives you six months before your cancer kills you, maybe it’s an opportunity to stop worrying.

Anyway …

I was reading news articles today and I ran across this statement in a Manchester Guardian (UK) site:

“A South Korean newspaper reported that North Korea had started withdrawing money from bank accounts in Macau to prevent it from being frozen under UN sanctions.”

Ummm … yes. And then what will they do? Deposit the electrons in the Bank of Pyongyang?

What Dear Leader Kim is withdrawing is called “fiat money”. It’s worth something only because people generally agree that it is.

Dear Leader Kim is working on destroying the value of money just like he’s gnawing at the roots of civilization by using state sponsored counterfeiting to pay for his cognac. Last year, the idiot Bush’s administration caught Dear Leader Kim red handed … ummmm, maybe that should be “green handed” … counterfeiting “about $25 million … frozen by Macau authorities, with about half clearly derived from criminal enterprises”. (Washington Post, April 11, 2007) Kim threw a tantrum and Bush decided it was OK for him to counterfeit our currency after all. (This kind of thing is exactly how the value of money gets destroyed.)

According to the LA Times, “In 2006, the Treasury Department threatened to blacklist the Macao-based Banco Delta Asia for its dealings with North Korea, which in turn forced banking regulators in the Chinese-ruled territory to freeze North Korean accounts.” This is essentially the same threat that the Manchester Guardian says Kim is responding to now.

The fact is that North Korea, in spite of their widely advertised “isolation”, is not as isolated as all that. But it will take genuine cooperation from all of the world’s citizen states to make it work. Again, according to the LA Times, “North Korea gets 90% of its fuel from China, most of its consumer goods and the majority of its food.” So far, China has been willing to accept fake money as payment. (Hey! They do the same for us!) The reason all previous attempts at pressuring Dear Leader Kim have failed is that the Chinese haven’t done anything to help.

When I last checked, Macao was part of China. (It’s about like Hong Kong. They have a local administration, but nothing happens that is not approved by their masters in Beijing.) If Dear Leader Kim is actually withdrawing electrons from Macao banks, things are serious because they really don’t have any other way to “spend” their money.

It’s hard for people to appreciate just how valuable a little respect from the rest of the world actually is – for us and for Dear Leader Kim. The idiot Bush behaved a lot like Dear Leader Kim by doing whatever he wanted regardless of what anyone else thought. Our “respect” bank account with the world was in serious trouble. President Obama is commanding respect again for America by behaving like a world citizen.