Guam Diary

Five 16 year old North Korean accordionists make a splash on YouTube

2012-02-11T07:04:00.000-08:00

Yep, whilst the US and it allies pooh pooh anything about North Korea, five 16 year old accordionists from North Korea's Kum Song School have hit YouTube in a big way: appearing at Norway's Barents Spektakel in Kirkenes [8-12 February 2012], three boys and two girls' version of A-ha's 'Take on me' catapulted to 'instant world attention'.

GuamDiary suggests watching the 4 minute version which clearly shows the five caught up in spirit and verve and captivating rhythm of a pop song that the Western mind does not associate with North Korea. How parochial!

The group's programme has a Mozart piece, jazz, Korean folk tunes, ending with a rousing rendition of 'Take on me'.

Forget about politics, the five North Koreans in less than 4 minutes lit up YouTube, thanks to their amazing talent.

We know of the musical talent from South Korea, but we hardly know little of the musicality of North Koreans, owing to a tight blackout in the West, broken only by moments when it serves western propaganda to display hundreds of North Koreans dancing like robots, to underscore the monotonous uniformity of a 'cruel regime'.

Yet, during the New York Philharmonic concert in Pyongyang, televised worldwide on 8 February 2008, it was obvious in master classes the NYP held that students at the musical academy displayed talent worthy of concert halls in Europe, Asia, and the US, for example.

That one moment of 'detente' with the US had no follow up, sorry to say. And the west's forged steel curtain crashed down again.

What should surprise us, but doesn't, that Norway, an founding member and active member of NATO, has welcomed these North Korean youth to participate in a cultural festival. The main street western media nary breathes a word of it, nor existing Norwegian cultures ties with North Korea. Curious, isn't it?

BR Myers 'Cleanest race: how the North Koreans see themselves and why it matters' paints the usual picture of a people whose every moment is staged and choreographed by big brother. An easy and obvious observation after eight years of reading everything he could about North Korea with occasional trips to the DPRK.

Were the shoe on the other foot, a North Korea scholar could return the favour by compiling a long laundry list of 'staged' and culturally managed, say, Americans. In fact, in a US State Department tour of the US after V E day, Jean Paul Sartre wickedly commented on the faceless conformity in America.

'Take on Me' is the payoff for Kim Il Sung. North Korea flattened to a heap of dust by US bombers during the Korean War; as it was being rebuilt, the founder of North Korea saw to it that the children of his country should and would learn a musical instrument, and the accordion became part and parcel of North Korean education. And here we are more than a half century later in Norway that five accordionists from the DPRK are displaying the fruit of a well rounded education. In this sense, North Koreans have nothing to envy in this world.

And what's more, the immediate embrace of these three lads and two lasses forces open further the doors of exclusion that the US and its allies have tried to keep shut on North Korea.

Growing class divide in the US

2012-02-10T07:27:00.000-08:00

Years ago 'Hidden injuries of class' by sociologists Sennett and Cobb, hit the book market. In its way, it pooh poohed the idea of an even playing field in the US.

Toqueville banged the pots and pans of the indelible imprint of equality on the American soul, a sort of safety value to dampen war among the classes. The Horatio Alger myth holds strong still.

The working class and the poor know where they stand, and always and have internalised the shame of who and where they are: the hidden injuries of class, in other words.

In today's America, the class divide has sharpened. 'Occupy Wall Street', in a way, brought discussion of class warfare into the arena of respectability by shining the light of power and corruption on the 'one percent' who own 34 or more percent of the country's wealth, and that percentage is increasing. Money is power and the entire political class suckles at its breast. The recent Supreme Court ruling enshrines and blesses it.

The respectable media now publishes investigative articles on the sinking of the children of the shrinking middle classes, the working class, and the poor who remain disadvantaged by the growing class divide.

Consider New York City, the mecca of finance capital. A billionaire mayor has seized control of the public schools and has begun to dismantle them in favour of more or less private charter schools, usually owned by investment bankers or real estate barons. And early results show, charter schools have done hardly little to improve reading and math scores. What is behind this attack on public education is busting the teachers' union.

In the City, the rich vie fiercely for places in private academies. There are too many applicants for a seat at the richly appointed table that will ultimately lead to Harvard, Yale, and the schools that count. It is interesting to note that the rich breed larger families on the whole...no 2.1 children but 3 to 5 is more like it. And they can afford to pay us$40.000 a year for elementary and secondary schooling. Do the sums for 12 years at least for two children...us$980.00. Could a working class family afford that amount?

As the class divide grows so does the narrowing of the route of the pulling oneself up by the bootstraps to fulfill the American dream.

In a not so odd way, the pattern mirrors Huxley's '1984' with its Alphas, Betas, and the like. In other words, we have a class and caste system.

The rule of corporate America is showing signs of incipient fascism: already, the US is a prison culture for its underclass, and now, more and more, the subversion of constitutional rights to expression and thought are being thinned out as the laws permit intrusive invasion into the thoughts and ways of everyday life of Americans.

US support for Syrian opposition

2012-02-06T07:30:00.000-08:00

Now that the US campaign in the UN Security Council to knock Syria's strong man Bashir al Assad off his pedestal of power has failed, what will it do to achieve it aims by other means?

If America's record is anything to go by, you can bet your bottom pence that it will fund in liquid and military training and supplies the armed Syrian resistance in what everyone is saying is turning out to be a civil war in Syria.

Goldman Sachs CEO backs same sex marriage

2012-02-06T07:17:00.000-08:00

Far be it from us to question Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein's decision to back same sex marriages at a time when the powerful investment bank is heavily contributing to Republican candidates for the party's nomination for president in 2012. They all condemn such marriages as an anathema. Blanckein may be sincere in his support of civil rights and full equality before the law of all citizens regardless, in this instance, of sexual preference.

Yet, you have to wonder that this man who has become the poster boy for everything that is wrong on Wall Street, has chosen this moment to 'come out' in support of gay marriage. He who is the embodiment of what Matt Taibbi called 'the vampire squid' with tentacles sucking the economic blood globally for the greater glory of Goldman Sachs' principals and stockholders.

Let's see how much clout Blankfein can bring to the fight for same sex marriages through his affiliation with the number one investment banking house on Wall Street.

US Israel obsessed billionaire supports buys Republican candidates

2012-02-05T07:41:00.000-08:00

Sheldon Adelson, billionaire casino owner, has already thrown us$15 million to keep alive Newt Gingrich's bid as the Republican candidate for the presidency in 2012.

Now, if Gingrich stumbles in the race for the nomination, Adelson is willing to pump more millions into Mitt Romney's super Pac.

Old Newt and Adelson go back a long time: Adelson, American born, is, at heart, an 'Israeli firster'. He is willing to pour, almost all plugs pulled out, his money to be a king maker in determining US policy towards Israel. He shouldn't worry too much, owing to the heavy tilt of America's support for Israel since 1948. He doesn't see it that way as the balance in opinion shift in letting Palestinians have their own homeland, in spite of Israel's illegal land grab and colonisation on the West Bank.

Newt first got Adelson attention when he was speaker of the House of Representatives in the 1990s by proposing to shift the US embassy to Jerusalem. It didn't happen. And more recently, the 'trained historian' that he is, proclaimed loud and clear that there is no such thing as a Palestinian people. And Gingrich has been generously rewarded by Adelson in contributions to his campaign and use of the power the Las Vegas mogul exercises in opening doors for his friend from Georgia.

Adelson supports confiscation of Palestinian land in territory Israeli Zionists call 'Judea and Sumaria'. In other words, if there is no such thing as a Palestinian people, Israel has the right to claim hoary biblical claims to all the land from the Mediterranean to the Jordan river as its own.

Unfortunately Barack Hussein Obama doesn't share Adelson's standpoint. So, Adelson will do any and everything to deny him a second term in office.

Even though he's an American citizen, Adelson first and foremost concern is not the welfare of the land of his birth, but the welfare of Israel.

Ironically, as GuamDiary has often pointed out, it looks as though Israel is leading the American dog by its tail, and the Republican candidate whoever he will be, is willing to put ambition before country for another country.

US crocodile tears at UN Security Council

2012-02-05T07:23:00.000-08:00

No one ca say Syria's Bashir al Assad is a poster boy for the boy scouts, yet the gnashing and wailing and riling of the US in the UN Security Council against the double whammy veto of the Arab League's resolution for Assad to step aside by Russia and China is hypocritical in the extreme.

'You betrayed the Syrian people', the US in the persons of secretary of state Hillary Clinton and ambassador to the UN Susan Rice seemingly imply. Cynical, hard hearted, cold blooded...figure on the list of condemnation of Moscow and Beijing.

The eye that has not followed the 'Sturm und Drang' in the Council or the corridors of the UN would blink in surprise that after tweaking the failed resolution to condemn Assad, Moscow and certainly the unexpected China had not come around to support the American position.

Are we living in the world of juvenile story telling? Seems so. What naivete on the part of the Obama administration. It shouldn't have tried so hard to pin the tail of rebuke on the Russian bear. Moscow veto immediately assured condemnation far and wide.

Saying that, GuamDiary wonders at the sheer gall of America. In this instance, they weep at the violence visited on the Syrian people, but in its endless use of the veto in the well of the Security Council, it casts a thumbs down with no feeling or emotion when it comes to the aspirations of the Palestinian people.

The US has cast 76 vetoes so far, and mostly to protect Israel's illegal land grabbing and settler colonies on Palestinian land in the West Bank.

Bradley Manning is left out to dry

2012-02-04T12:43:00.000-08:00

A general court marshall for Bradley Manning, that is recommendation of the military tribunal cum department of justice panel, in December 2011.

Now two generals signed off on the tribunal's expressed verdict, and Bradley Manning will go before a general court martial.

Were he tried in a civilian court, circumstances of his imprisonment, treatment, humiliation, and cruel and [un]usual punishment might have been such to throw his case out of court.

In a court martial, his witnesses for the defence may very well be denied testifying on Manning's behalf for any number of reasons, most of which would be flimsy at best.

As GuamDiary previously suggested 'military justice is to justice as military music is to music'.

In essence, don't expect a fair trial for Manning, he's condemned in advance. And, he will be convicted and left out to dry during many years if not life in prison.

Russia and China torpedo US effort for Iran sanctions

2012-02-04T12:34:00.000-08:00

US secretary of state Hillary Clinton made a passionate speech calling for the tyrant Bashir al Assad to step down at a meeting in Germany. She, along with her French ally and the Arab League, thought by tweaking a much rewritten resolution calling for the Syrian president's withdrawal from power, among other items, Russia who, from the word go, opposed any such step, would roll over and sign on to the seemingly modified resolution which, in essence, called for regime change in Syria.

Clinton & co. saw a red lining of hope on the eve of the vote in the UN Security Council, Russia had not suggested further emendations. But the Russkis fooled her. Russia, joined by China, cast a veto killing the resolution.

The US can huff and puff all they want, but they've little cause to complain: simply look at the number of vetoes they used when it was question of condemning Israel!

America does not take rebuffs lightly, yet, like it or not, they may think that they are the cock of the walk but, in truth, they do not always get their way.

Lighten up Lee Myung bak

2012-02-03T07:39:00.000-08:00

South Korea's president Lee Myung bak's regime has indicted Park Jung geun, 22, an activist and photographer of babies for violating the country's National Security Law.

His crime: the 'alleged' posting of tweets from North Korea's uriminzokkiri.com, which, reporter Choe Sang hun writes "South Korean news media regularly cite".

The NSL is controversial; it infringes on freedom of expression; Park's imprisonment has been taken up by Amnesty International.

Is Park a Communist? Most likely not. Yet, his posting of uriminzokkiri messages brands him as 'benefitting the enemy'. How? we ask.

If that is so, then why does the Lee keepers of the anti North faith gag the South Korean press? It dare not, fearing as it does, a firestorm of protest inside and out of the ROK.

Lee's thought police are not efficient in their work: a documentary on the protest movement against the building of naval base in Jeju island has a punch of rockers sarcastically using the name of Kim Jong il, the very crime Park is accused of.

It is time to think of scrapping the vague, faulty NSL which can be used by a hard line regime like Lee's in pursuit of his mad policy to rollback the North and force it to collapse; not only that he is using it to cower his own people and rolling back their basic freedoms of expression.

It is also time to release Park Jung geun from prison and drop all charges against him.

And it is time to scrap a vague, faulty law which attack basic freedoms of South Koreans and of course, immediately release Pakr Jung geun from detention and drop all charges against him.

Not only that: do the right thing and release Park Jung guen immediately.

Lighten up Lee Myung bak, old dour puss that you are. Anyone reading the press from the North cannot but be hit over the head with its wooden language and exaggerated expressions, which are the grist for much sharp and often satirical treatment.

Perhaps it is time to scrap the faulty, vague law which is an instrument in a hard line regime like Lee Myung bak who looks to quash basic freedoms of South Koreans.

If there is fascination with the North, the blame is laid at the doorstep of Lee himself and his mad policy for regime change in North Korea.

Israel pushes bombing forward to Spring 2012

2012-02-03T07:20:00.000-08:00

Israeli war drums are increasing in tempo and outrage. Moshe Ya'lon, deputy prime minister and minister of strategic affairs, is floating the rumour that Iran's advanced rocketry can now deliver a long range missile, possibly with an atomic payload, to hit the US 6000 km away.

Although this is seemingly patently untrue, Ya'lon is turning the screws on the US to caution Israel's attack on Iran in the next few months.

The Obama administration is playing down this Zionist hawk's assertion; its defense depart and intelligence services put little sock in Ya'lon's words. Nonetheless, Washington is feeling the heat behind the scenes. How can did stop Israel's mad designs to ignite yet another war in the Middle East, one obviously doomed to failure, and one that the crazy trioka of Netenyahu, Barak, and Ya'lon placed bets on the US coming into the fray to protect and fight for Israel's mad forward designs on Iran.

GuamDiary has already commented on investigative reporter Ronen Bergmann's article detailing Israel's push to get the US into an Israeli war with Iran that is from the beginning a failure. It recalls the Imperial Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in thinking.

This Zionist gambit is done with malice of foresight: it is a presidential year and as GuamDiary has always contended, Israel is also an American domestic issue. If Obama does stay Israeli designs in a crass way, he will lose his bid for a second term, so goes the evil trioka's reasoning.

Obama should do what Eisenhower did at the time of the 1956 Suez crisis, quietly threaten to immediately end all economic and military aid to the Zionist state, no matter the costs, and save Israel from itself.

For an attack on Israel will prove a disaster for its own civilians, and may even destroy it as a state. And of course, we can never rule out that Israel will nuke Iran.

Pakistan goes huffy puffy over leaked NATO report

2012-02-01T07:04:00.000-08:00

Who does Pakistan think its kidding? A leaked NATO report rips the veil of deniability that its intelligence service the infamous ISI and its own military and civil government have played hanky panky in the maintenance of Pakistani dominance in Afghanistan.

Foreign minister Hina Rabbani Khar can jolly well dismiss the report as 'frivolous', but its contents simply connect the dots of Pakistan's collaboration, collusion, protection, and favouring the Taliban in Afghanistan at the same time its own home grown version is tearing the country's own loins by accelerating its own brand of fanaticism and terrorism.

Let's not forget, Pakistan intelligence services and military have kept Mullah Omar under wraps for the last 10 years in or around Quetta. It offers 'sanctuary' to Afghan Taliban in the tribal regions of Waziristan. And more insulting to its paymaster the US, it allowed Osama Bin Laden breathing space in Abbotabad before US Navy Seals took him out of action.

What a rum little mess the US and its NATO allies find themselves in. In a way, the chickens have come home to roost for America.

GuamDiary has already recommended the reading of Mohammed Hanif's wonderful novel, 'the Case of exploding mangoes' which in an engaging way tells of the tight collaboration of the US and the then dictator General Zia ul Haq who wound up the Islam toy lorry and set it on its way; today, we are witnessing the results of this incestuous political alliance which is causing Washington much 'agita'.

And what has it gained the US taxpayer? A colossal burden to prop up a dirty military and spy network that works to sabotage America's war against terror to the tune of billions of dollars. And then it was the Pakistani top rogue atomic scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan who sold nuclear technology to the US' nemesis: Iran, Libya, and North Korea. He got off scot free and the Bush White House had to swallow its pride on that one because Pakistan has a stockpile of atomic weapons and is thought of as a 'good' ally even though it does everything to screw its paymaster.

The US, during the Cold War, made a Faustian bargain with Pakistan because India opted for neutralism [remember Bandung?] and cooperation with the Soviet Union. And now the US is reaping the whirlwind its has sown.

Here we go again in the battle of territorial claims and name changing

2012-01-30T07:36:00.001-08:00

Yep, here we go again. Japan has 'dibs' on East China Sea islands they call 'Senkaku'. China and Taiwan claim them as their own, and to them, they are the 'Diaoyu islands'.

These three countries are not only talking of national pride and of course, appeal to history to justify claims of theirs. There, however, is an overarching economic reach in pinning names on maps to these islands. We're talking of fishing rights as the fishing wars grow sharper owing to overfishing and depletion of fish that make up everyday diets. And of course, the potential pot of gold of oil and gas deposits that lie, it is said, under the sea floor.

Somewhere or the other, South Korea will enter the territorial fray as both China and Japan lay claim to offshore islands Seoul says that it has right and title to.

US, Philippines reenforce military ties

2012-01-30T06:52:00.000-08:00

It seems as though it were yesterday that the Filipino government refused to renew a basing agreement with the US. Actually it was 20 years ago when America abandoned Clark Air Force base and Subic Bay naval base, hang ons from US colonial occupation of the Philippines and the Cold War in Asia.

The evacuation of bases did not signify abandonment of military consultation and cooperation, only at a diminished degree.

China's claims to the South China Sea, with its rich oil and gas deposits, infringes on Filipino claims to a portion of the Sea which falls in its territorial waters. For an poor country like the Philippines revenue from oil and gas would go a long way in lightening the heavy economic baggage it carries.

Beijing has bold as brass pushed its claims to territorial waters that Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia, and the Philippines lay claim. To make the point clear, China has not only uses threats but sent its naval into the SCS to stress its determination to have its way either through intimidation or brief naval encounters, as it has done with Vietnam.

The US has not stood idly by as China's star has risen higher and higher in the Asian firmament challenging America's hegemony in the Asia Pacific theatre.

Already the Bush administration had given Manila strong words of support. But it is the Obama White House that has come designed at forward military dogma for the Asia Pacific area, with a single goal in mind: thwart and tame China's territorial ambitions.

As such, the Filipino government has been willing to hold joint combat drills at oil rigs in Filipino waters in the SCS as well as undisclosed sensitive areas. The return of open military presence in the Philippines has injected new blood into a 'keep America out' movement which is always close to the surface in that country's history.

Here, it is useful to recall that the US has been active in Manila's fight against the Moro insurgents in Mindanao as well as in the long war against the Communist New People's Army in the Visayas.

Consequently the Philippines has a role to play in Obama's forward military and political policy in Asia. And the stakes are high since it involves oil and gas hidden riches in the SCS.

Israel's hand in American politics

2012-01-28T11:26:00.000-08:00

GuamDiary has always contended that Israel was an internal American problem. In the last few weeks, two events underscore this assertion.son injected us$5 million into Newt Gingrich super PAC, which worked wonders to upset Mitt Romney's applecart in South Carolina, and a week later, Penny Adelson pumped $5 million more into that super PAC as Gingrich geared up to deny Romney the nod from Florida in his run for the Republican party's nomination for the presidency.

Now, a wag may point out that Gingrich and the casino owner Adelson know each other for a long time. No dispute there, but the money tap was turned on when 'historian' Newt boldly declared that there was no such thing as a Palestinian people. Translation, Israel has every right to occupy and extend its border to the Jordan river in what it calls 'Sumaria and Judea', but which is poaching on the legally recognised land of what would be a Palestinian state, no longer under the jackboot of Israel occupation for the last 45 years.

And then there's the 'Third Jihad' scandal rocking New York City's police department. 'Third Jihad' is a malicious piece of propaganda that was showing in loop fashion to high ranking police officers: funded by the Clarion Fund which is a front for the right wing Israeli organisation Aish Ha'Torah which favours illegal land grabs and illegal Jewish settlement in the West Bank, which it claims to be the God given land to the Jews as Sumaria and Judea. Raymond Kelly the chief of police actively cooperated in the making of film that claims that all American Muslims are a Fifth Column of potential, if not actual, terrorists.

This idea is in agreement with not only the New York police's policing of racial profiling Muslims but is an echo of what is happening among law enforcement across America.

GuamDiary has already blogged on the potentially disloyal behaviour of Eric Cantor, the House of Representative leader of the Republicans, who openly swore fealty to Israel's prime minister Netenyahu, and who arranged for him to speak to a joint session of Congress where he heaped scorn of president Obama's plan to bring a two state solution to the Israeli einian problem.

And then, there the Hebron Fund which already claims Hebron is already a part and parcel of the Zionist state, even though it is recognised as part of Palestinian although under 45 years of Israeli occupation. The US look the other way as the Fund raises money for an organisation which favours occupation and terrorism against Arabs. And yet whereas the US finds no pangs of heart at listening Muslim charitable organisations in the US as 'terrorists', it remains blind to Israeli organisations which are fundamentally terrorist.

As we say, Israel is an American problem, and potentially a headache and has always to pull Israel's chestnuts out of the fire diplomatically, politically, and, yes, militarily.

Israel itching to bomb Iran?

2012-01-28T10:41:00.000-08:00

In the Sunday 29 January 'New York Times Magazine', veteran Israeli investigative reporter Ronen Bergman's 'Israel vs. Iran' is featured.

Bergman is no stranger when it comes to Iran and the Mossud. His 'Secret war with Iran' came out in an English translation in 2008, and is now available on the web for the lowly price of US$0,99 plus shipping fees.

You have to wonder whether Bergman's article saw it way into print through the good offices of a public relations firm. On one hand, it weightily tilts towards Israel attacking Iran in 2012 around the time the Republican and Democrat conventions meet, as a means to force the US, once more, to do Israel's bidding. Bergman is firmly convinced that the right wing Likud led government of 'Bibi' Netenyahu will attack Iran, and he ably supports his arguments through interviews of Ehud Barak, the Zionist's state defence minister and Moshe Ya'alon, vice prime minister and minister of strategic affairs; the views of these two men reflect perfectly the thinking of Netenyahu.

Israel has been banging pots and pans for bombing Iran more loudly and more often of late: its intelligence establishment sees the 'window of opportunity' narrowing fast before Tehran has developed a nuclear weapon. These 'wise' old men of the Israeli establishment see a striking parallel between Nassar's closing of the Straits of Tiran in 1967 and Ahmadinejad's threat to close the Straits of Hormuz. In 1967, Israel attacked, and in 2012, it may very well drag the US into war with Iran and setting off a firestorm of war that will threat the Zionist's state's own existence. Is Israel willing to use its nuclear arsenal? No one can rule that option out.

Baruch willingly talks of narrowing identity of views with Washington, but can we be so sure? The Obama administration is not in the mood for yet another war in west Asia after the mess it made in Iraq, yet the Israelis, come hell and high water, are intent in making the White House pull Israel's chestnuts out of the fire after it bombs Iran.

Yet, according to CIA estimates Iran is not developing nuclear weapons; the spy agency has often quoted its own findings. Bergman does give an opposing Israeli standpoint which bolsters the CIA reports by citing the former head of the Mossad as well as retired senior Israeli officers and cabinet holders. These 'realists' think that the 'impending' attack on Iran is shortsighted if not reckless since it would expose the Israeli civil population to heavy rocket attacks, to destruction of infrastructure, and in a curious way, to the devastation that Israeli 'tsahal' [defence forces] visited on Gaza during 'Operation Cast Lead' in December 2007.

And then there are the tactical problems which aerial warfare brings: noteworthy is that the long distance from Israeli bases to Iran requires refueling in air, thereby leaving the Zionist air force vulnerable to Irani aeroplanes. More, an Israeli 'manu militari' thrust would give the green light to Israel's hostile neighbours to attack it.

And yet, owing to the media blitz of Netenyahu & co., the Israelis live in growing and constant fear of rockets from Iran descending on their heads. And as such, the 'realist's' argument has lost more and more of an audience.

Bergman concludes that he does feel Israel will bomb Iraq. What he doesn't say: given the logistical difficulties the Zionist's military will have, it would surprise anyone were Netenyahu's hawkish government give the 'go ahead' to use Israel's atomic weapons.

Washington has grown more ill at ease at Israel's propaganda war. It dispatched the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Martin Dempsey to talk sense and turkey with Netenyahu & co. Obama is fingering his worry beads for the US can never be certain Israel will not carry out its aggression against Iraq and drag the US screaming and kicking into an unwinnable war that would guarantee the collapse of the US and European economies which remain after the 2008 global recession in the doldrums.

Israel, if we believe Bergman' is hellbent on self destruction and doesn't give a royal fart it it takes everyone down with it. The example of Samson comes to mind here.

And yet, can we trust the 'wisdom' of Ehud Barak and the other other hawks--Netenyahu and Ya'alon? It is important to point out that Barak sent Israel into Lebanon, and that invasion forced the Zionist state to retreat with its tail between its legs. There is little reason to give a failed prime minister and general a reasonable doubt. There is more to fear from the warmongering they preach and the willingness to send young men and women to death and in a holocaust of their own making destroy the state of Israel

New York's mayor Bloomberg likes spy stories

2012-01-27T07:06:00.000-08:00

Billionaire mayor Mike Bloomberg likes John LeCarre. He said as much whilst visiting a Bronx high school English class. As self styled 'education mayor', the man who spent more than $100m for a third term in office and with a narrow margin of 4 percent got to stay mayor. [So much for the power of money when the electorate does not think highly of you!]

The object of Bloomberg's pitch is to encourage students to read more since reading scores of New York's public and charter [read private] and parochial schools remain disappointingly low.

Of course, the mayor eats up financial publications, he has a business to run as a financier, as well as biographies, non fiction best sellers with a history slant.

His admission that enjoys a rattling spy novel, particularly LeCarre's 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy' sought to send a message to 'underachieving' young readers to read more. A laudable goal. Bloomberg had also gone with his squeeze to see the film based on the LeCarre book which is currently playing in New York to a good gate. Saying this, it makes you wonder whether a high school student would rather plonk down $13 to see Gary Oldman as George Smiley, LeCarrer's relentless hero than sloughing through more than 400 pages of prose?

You have to hand it to Bloomberg wanting to pitch the value of reading books. And yet, fiction takes last place among the books he reads. 'Johnny Tremain', a 1943 patriotic children's story about the American revolution, is the only other book the mayor endorses.

Has Bloomberg made a 'Freudian slip' in his choice of reading matter? Maybe. The no nonsense mayor likes to think of himself as fair minded and running a ship of the city on even keel. He is and can be moralistic, as he has a big ego for running a police department with ties to the FBI and CIA, and backing up his police chief Raymond Kelly who is under fire for racial profiling, massaging the truth until he is caught in the act and forced to admit the truth and apologise, and other questionable practices. Consider his participation in the Israeli financed 'Third Jihad' which questioned the loyalty of all law abiding American Muslims.

Bloomberg, intoxicated as he is with LeCarre, fancies himself as head of New York's combined equivalent of Britain's MI-5 [read, FBI] and MI-6 [CIA], as well as general of commando attacks in full riot gear against 'Occupy Wall Street'.

Is old Mike New York's George Smiley, the mild manner, savvy bureaucrat who nabs the bad guys? You better believe it: his actions speak louder than his quiet words: he has tasted the power of male fantasy and may even think under the cover of a gentle, reasonable mien, he's really James Bond.

Bill Mardo sportswriter dead at 88

2012-01-27T06:36:00.000-08:00

Bill Mardo is not a household name. And certainly a forgotten figure in the fight for racial equality. He was a sports writer for 'The Daily Worker', the organ of the Communist Party USA. That alone should make him forgettable or infamous. And yet, from 1942 until the closing of the paper in 1968 he wrote a much read sports column. He joined Lester Rodney who broke ground as sports writer and editor in 1936.

Say what you will about the sins of CPUSA but you cannot deny that pioneering sports journalists like Rodney and Mardo fought racism in American sports, particularly baseball. They both championed integration of all white National and American League teams. And followed the career of Jackie Robinson.

After Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers, Mardo and Rodney publicly called on the owners of the 15 other teams in the two Leagues to sign up black players.

CPUSA has been accused of many things, some true, some not, but one thing is certain: it was in many respects in the vanguard for racial equality in Jim Crow America.

Consider the Scottsboro Boys case. A recent Broadway revival of Kander & Ebb's musical, opened to excellent reviews, and once more brought to the broad public's attention of the framing of nine black boys and young men accused of rape in 1931 Alabama by two white women, even though the women recanted. It was the involvement of the International Labor Defense that hired the left wing lawyer Samuel Leibowitz to defend them, at a time when the more mainstream civil rights organization hesitated. Only after ILD and Leibowitz managed to draw national and international attention to this miscarriage of justice, did the ACLU and NAACP join the battle. And yet in spite of it all, it wasn't until 1976 was the last Scottsboro Boy released from prison. The case shone the light of even the Supreme Court's upholding segregation in a ruling on whether the rights of the nine 'Boys' had been violated. It also, despite the snipping at the CPUSA, made more lustrous the party's unrelenting policy and struggle for racial justice and against the oppression of America's minorities.

No one has written a book about Mardo, but the late Irwin Silber wrote 'Press Box Red' about Lester Rodney.

GuamDiary encourages the reading of Silber's book, so that a little known but important slice of the fight for racial justice and equality by CPUSA and its newspaper wont be entirely forgotten.

The rise of Neo-knownothingism in America

2012-01-26T06:53:00.000-08:00

This years slate of Republican presidential candidates are living proof of the rise of 'know nothings' in American politics.

Quickly many might object to this characterisation: Romney is a Harvard man with an MBA and law degree; Gingrich holds a ph.d. in history; Ron Paul is a medical doctor, and Rick Santorum is a University of Pittsburgh MBA. Put all the learning together does not make for smartness. In fact, what all these men of politics and influence peddling and business exploit is the masses popular fears of a US in serious economic trouble in a world which challenges America's ideal of itself as a swaggering superpower with the right of a seigneur to deflower [read regime change] any country that goes against its will.

Romney, Gingrich, Paul, and Santorum play all too willing, by any and all means necessary, on xenophobia, anti Muslim sentiment, and the popular fear that undocumented Spanish speaking immigrants will overwhelm, if not drown, the once predominantly white USA in a sea of brown. In this they pick up the dropped stitches of the largely middle-class Tea Party, financed by the super wealthy, who see in foreigners, American Muslims, and Hispanics hostile elements to American values as they see them.

And eager to defeat a black president, all the candidates will embrace ideas which are more or less patently questionable if not false. So out of the window goes any learning worth a damn in favour of appealing to the basest popular sentiment of the growing immiseration of the middle classes who standard of living is greatly challenged by the 2008 global recession brought about by Wall Street bankers; of stirring the fires of fear that children and grandchildren of Baby Boomers will not live the 'good life' of their parents born in the luxury and comfort of post world war two America.

The endless debates among the Republican candidates vying for their party's nomination for the presidency in 2012 have given rise to dimness and dumbness in ideas as though these very men, very comfortable if not very much, had been seized by madness. In their pursuit of power, they have dusted off the much discredited notions 'nativism'.

Obama's State of the Union

2012-01-25T07:26:00.000-08:00

Well Toto, Obama's no longer in Kansas. His 'ubi et orbi' address in the well of Congress shows him in fighting spirit. He has no other choice in this presidential election year.

Obama's record is so so at best, big ticket items like health care and tepid financial regulation notwithstanding.

His language, calling for fairness, reinforces solid Yankee virtues of hard work, self-reliance, and fair play.

He put a moss back Republican dominated Congress on notice in rebuilding an economically wounded economy: jobs, jobs, jobs are needed to rescue the shrinking middle classes and hard working poor from the return of robber barons who pay little for their wealth, and for whom the Republicans, in the main, protection their privileges and sybaritic life style.

Yet nowhere did Obama utter the word 'poverty'. Mitch Daniels the Republican governor of Indiana, a state where he is leading the charge to crush unions, did when he referred to Obama's decision to not approve the Keystone project which would bring dirty Canadian oil from tar sands across the length of the US to refineries in Texas; there this sludge would be refined then shipped abroad. The shooting down of Keystone denied 10.000 or more jobs to unemployed Americans, so the hype goes.

Obama's language reflects how much the 'Occupy Wall Street' movement has shifted the political winds. The American president spoke of the '98 percent' who should the tax burden of the rich, very rich, and super rich. In this, the publication of Mitt Romney's tax returns for 2010 and 2011 proved a clinching argument for Obama's indictment. The dim and dumb slate of Republican candidates vying for the Republican nominee for the White House has give Obama more breathing space and put more arrows in his quiver for reelection.

'I will work with any member of Congress who will work with me', says he, 'but if Congress doesn't cooperate, Obama will use executive powers to do what he says he wants to do'. And the line is neatly drawn, as the Republicans sat on their hands knowing full well any booing and shouting will drive their 9 percent public approval rate even lower.

The American president talks a good talk even though he zigzags in his walk. Nonetheless, his metaphor of the military as an institution where all American gather regardless of race, creed, colour, or political convictions, brought the Houses of Congress up on their feet to rousing cheers. It is further proof that the US is the embodiment of the 'garrison state', it is the triumph of the military industrial complex. If anything under Obama the US is pursuing a more seemingly efficient hard nosed foreign cum military policy, and thus reclaiming its right to rule the world as it sees fit.

'Uncle Sam needs you' cries out a recruiting poster, say, from world war two, and that is the message and the prescription for job creation and pumping more blood in the US economy and checkmating unrest from below.

Bombs bursting in Nigeria

2012-01-24T06:55:00.000-08:00

'Boko Haram' has come out explosively in Nigeria. The rigid Muslim group deals in terrorism with a single goal in mind: the establish sharia'h law as the guiding principle in ruling Nigeria.

The name itself tells all: 'no Western learning'. Reject everything coming from the 'West', rely on strict Muslim tradition and law. In that, BH is not a trend setter; an immediate example of the disastrous rule of the Taliban in Afghanistan comes to mind, and although in another tradition the genocidal rule of the Khmer Rouge.

Fight the West [read, the modern world] is not something from today. In Korea, China, and Japan such movements arose and ultimately failed.

Some may ask how could such a phenomenon like BH arise in Nigeria of all places? A country awash in oil wealth, one of the largest countries in Africa, a nation that promised much at the time of independence in 1960?

Well the promise of a bright future was quickly dashed. Within a handful of years, a breakaway Biafra challenged the unity of the country. The rule of law was scuppered in favour of a coalition of the North and the West, ably assisted by the military against the mineral rich East.

Military rule bred corruption and unrest, so much so that the central government in an attempt to control if not checkmate the breakdown of the state, agreed to rely on Sharia'h law in an unruly North.

As such, the can of worms was cut open and we see its poisonous fruit in BH.

Korean war film: 'The front line'

2012-01-20T07:34:00.000-08:00

Among the films vying for this year's Oscar for best foreign film is Jang Hun's Korean War film 'The front line'. The story line is straightforward: on the eve of the signing of the 1953 Armistice Agreement, effectively freezing the lines of the then three year old war in place, a South Korean unit is sent to hold a piece of land which in the last 18 months of the war had changed hands 30 times. In other words, strategically speaking, it had little military value other than a 'baroud d'honneur' or a desperate fight, perhaps lost before it happened, carried out to save the honour of the army or the ROK. ['Hamburger Hill' should come easily to mind for film buffs.]

What strikes the eye of the non Korean viewer is at least two things: a nuanced view of the North Koreans and the fact, often hidden or denied in the US narrative of the war, the 'front line' is a last ditch battle in a 'civil war'.

1965: Year of living dangerously in Indonesia

2012-01-20T07:11:00.000-08:00

Almost 50 years ago, a group calling itself the September 30 [1965] movement, with strong man Suharto, initiated a coup against the Communist Party of Indonesia, which, they claimed had orchestrated a putsch against Bung Sukarno, then president.

A bloodbath ensued: more than a quarter million and perhaps more Indonesians, especially those of Chinese ancestry, fell under the fire of G30S, who had already killed six top generals and seized control of the army. As such, Suharto & co. rounded up and mostly did away with anyone suspected of being Communist or at least sympathetic to the PKI.

Chinese indonianised their names, to avoid suspicions of ties to Mao's China. Sukarno, the father of Indonesian independence, and host of the 1956 Bandung Conference of non aligned nations who chose neither Washington nor Moscow, fell since he had long fallen out of favour with the American government and its falling dominos policy in southeast Asia.

Should GuamDiary readers forget, in the background was the falling US undeclared war in Vietnam. Sukarno was lucky he escaped the assassin's bullet which fell South Vietnam's Diem, the US handpicked president.

The CIA was particularly active in Indonesia at that time, and of course, the Americans courted Suharto who replaced Sukarno. American influence increased in that island republic and with US corporate and military aid, Suharto remained in power for 30 years or more until he was turned out of office for corruption.

As the G30S 'putsch' of 1965 a veil of enforced silence reigned until now when publicly some discussion is being heard. Will the true story ever be told? That remains to be seen. Not many are the studies of what happened in the 'year of living dangerously'. The more critical appraisals got ignored, for they indicted the military and the US government.

Hollywood, under the skillful hand of Peter Weir, made a film of Christopher Koch's 'Year of living dangerous', which catapulted a young actor Mel Gibson to stardom and won Linda Hunt an Oscar for best supporting actress in 1982. The book and film are worth reading and seeing, for Koch got the story right until he fudged the end.

Enough time has passed for the Indonesians to come clean about the G30S coup, the massacre of 250.000 or more Indonesians, and for the US to open its archives so that the light of day can expose its encouragement and hand behind the G30S.

Israel's attack on Iran is not for tomorrow?

2012-01-19T07:41:00.000-08:00

Knuckling under pressure from Washington and other capitols, mainly in Europe, Israel is running around trying to mend fences: it is not going to bomb Tehran's nuclear facilities today or tomorrow maybe the day after, we cannot say for sure.

Instead, bully Israel is bombing Gaza, the home of Hamas, a weaker target which can and does play its cards well since the Zionist state, despite a preemptive war 'Cast Lead', assassination squads, and the killing and maiming of civilians in Gaza, trumps successive Israeli governments by not only surviving but growing support abroad.

Israel's ability to construct the narrative of the 44 year occupation of Palestinian lands and history and aspirations has shown wide cracks: two examples will suffice--UNESCO granting full membership to the state of Palestine even though it is occupied, and the attendance of a Hamas official at a recent meeting, in Switzerland, of the International Parliamentary Union.

Even though officially the Zionist state is denying that it is going to bomb Iran, Israel will continue the use of assassination squads to kill Irani nuclear scientists through Pakistani Sunni proxies, or under the cover of fake American passports, will use Mossad agents for black tasks implicating its ally the US who may very well be unaware of what its 'perfidious' ally is doing in its name. So vigilance is much called for and calling Israel to account for its illegal actions a must.

North & South Korea 'detente' in Cambodia

2012-01-19T07:13:00.000-08:00

On the online version of 'The New York Times', Thomas Fuller filed his story: 'Where Koreans go to reunify [hint: it's not the Koreas].

In a way, it's not a 'new' story since the heart of the reporting described a North Korean venture in restaurants appropriately called 'Pyongyang', with waitress who sing, dance, and play drums, the accordion, synthesiser, and the like. The food is prepared by North Korean professional cooks.

The restaurant is part of a chain which extends to Bangladesh, Dubai, Laos, and Nepal.

North Koreans are nothing but 'entrepreneurial', a quality which the US, South Korean, and western press overlook at their own peril since they are more engaged in a propaganda war against the DPRK. Of course,

'Pyongyang' is a means to earn hard currency that onerous and mean spirited sanctions deny North Korea.

What Fuller does tell us: Cambodia, more specifically Siem Reap, the home of the famous temples of Angkor Wat, is a pole of attraction for South Koreans. 'Pyongyang' allows them to rub shoulders with fellow Koreans from the North, something which, under the 'revanchist' regime of Lee Myung bak is denied them. Like the 'forbidden fruit', the North intrigues the Southerners who are not only curious about the North, but cherish the hope that one day North and South will be finally reunited. If anything, the 'fraternisation', no matter how superficial, indicates a desire for a thaw on a 'person to person' basis on the part of the South Koreans.

'Pyongyang' does not engage in heavy handed propaganda but appeals to common Korean identity ethnically and historically between the two Koreas. As such, it might not come as a surprise that a modified 'Sunshine Policy' could be restored after the 2012 presidential elections if the GNP loses which it very well might.

Westerners might blink at the thought of a North Korean restaurant, say, in Cambodia. Why Cambodia? Well, if the western media had been on their toes, they would have found out that the Kingdom of Cambodia and the DPRK have long standing good relations. A son of Norodom Sinhanouk studied there; Kim Il Sung offered refuge to the former prince and king during the American and Vietnam invasions of his kingdom, when he was much vilified by the US and afterwards by the Vietnamese in Hanoi.

In spite of sanctions and threats of war, it may come as a surprise to Americans in particular, North Korea is not unwelcome in Asia and Africa and spottily in Latin America, as well as in some countries in Europe.

Fuller's article does not dwell on these details since they do not add colour to his story of South Koreans thoroughly enjoying themselves at a North Korean owned and run 'Pyongyang' in Cambodia.

US strategy towards Iran and North Korea

2012-01-18T07:22:00.000-08:00

The Bush and the Obama administrations hyperventilate when it comes to Iran and North Korea, two 'axis of evil' states, so defined by Condi Rice.

Is the US sniffing 'pixie dust'? Is it like Peter Pan, the boy who never wanted to grow up?

Grandiose is a policy towards Tehran and Pongyang that is doomed to failure. The big policy guns, civil and military, believe in the myth that bluster, saber rattling, and invasion will bend the leaders of these two countries to Washington's will?

In the real world, it doesn't work like that: consider Bush 43's war in Iraq. It may have toppled Saddam Hussein but it left the country in shambles, and now what's more humiliating, the hand picked prime minister is doing everything to humiliate his American masters who put in power. And even more bruising to Washington's ego, Bush's war strengthened Iran's presence in the region, like it or not; t'was a notion that was blithely ignored by the 'tough minded' advisors who gave no thought of what is the US going to do when Saddam was chased from power. And boy, do we know: the body count, Iraqi and US and the corpses of the coalition of the willing speak powerfully from the grave.

The US is like the big bad wolf of the Grimm fairy tale: he huffs, he buffs, he blows the house down but he does get to eat his prey. They outwit him.

Somehow the occupiers of the White House think like hucksters; they can get away with Madison Avenue hype. In this life, as good capitalists that they are, you have to pay, and pay is a word that apparently doesn't exist in their vocabulary.

As such, the US is always threatening war or sanctions or boycotts to bring Iran and North Korea to their knees. And that flimflam rarely works.

The words of the late leader of Guinee Sekou Toure make no impression on the self satisfied policymakers in Washington: 'better to be a free man standing on his own two feet than a slave on his knees'. Toure utters these words when he refused Degaulle's offer to defer independence for a union of French controlled countries more than a half century ago. His refusal cost the country dearly, for the French stripped the independent country of Guinee of everything they could before leaving, including the light bulbs. But Guinee was decolonised, free, and stood up on its own two feet.

Israel: America's loose cannon ally

2012-01-17T06:23:00.000-08:00

Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman has announced the long awaited joint military manoeuvres with the US has been postponed. Originally conceived as a massive display of naval, air, and army might to frighten Iran in giving up its nuclear programme, the Obama administration, learning that the right wing Netenyahu Likud dominated government might speed up the timetable to go it alone in attacking Tehran's deep earth nuclear facilities, has sent stern messages of warning to it trigger happy Zionist ally, to scotch any such plans.

Hence the quashing of the joint military exercises.

President Obama is not interesting in another war in west Asia, certainly not one in an election year. Israel knows this but wild poker player that it is, it is willing to play 'chicken'.

It now turns out that Israel's Mossad agents have been posing as CIA agents in Pakistan, recruiting 'Taliban like' elements to sabotage Irani nuclear plans by any means necessary. With this nugget of information, Iran's claim that Israel cum America has had a hand in the assassination of its nuclear scientists. Wily Mossad is playing on the Sunni Shia hostility to achieve its ends.

Curiously enough by pushing for a hit on Iran, the Zionist state has stirred a feeling of great discomfort among its own citizenry. A recent poll showed that a growing number of Israelis think that Israel should give up its own nuclear weapons if that will induce Iran to cease its 'rush' to developing nuclear weapons. The turn in public opinion reveals a realisation inside Israeli that a war with Iran can 'destroy' Israel as we know it for aggressive political and military symmetries which more oft than not turn out to be based on false presumptions.

In a way, Israel as an ally is America's worst nightmare. The Zionist state can and has played the world's only 'superpower' for a chump when it can get away with it. It did attack the USS Ashland, killing 34 and wounding 171; it got off with a slap on the wrist. It spies on the US, playing on American Jews religious identity: Jonathan Pollard is languishing in prison for more than 20 years.

America tends to forget Israel does not share views up and down the column of state interests with the US. An incident involving North Korea has been conveniently swept under the carpet: to buy off Pyongyong from supplying DPRK scud missiles to Iran, no other friend of the US Shimon Peres was willing to pay more than a billion dollars, as well as help the North develop its mineral industry, at a time the US was yet once more threatening the DPRK with attack. In the end, Washington slapped the Israel hand so hard Peres dropped the deal.

Iran's threat of closing the Straits of Hormuz sent Israelis back to its nostalgic hope chest of plans to 'destroy' it enemies one way or the other. And what do we find, the Zionists dusted off a plan that they tried and failed at a time Nasser's Egypt closed the access to Eilat by sea in the 1950s. Egypt's move sparked the 1956 invasion of the Suez Canal by Israel, England, and France which ended in failure and threats both from Eisenhower and Nikita Khrushchev. Israel's mad design brought the Soviet Union into the Middle East, and gave the push to bury the British and French colonial influence in the regional. Israel got away with the occupation of the Sinai peninsula, though.

What did not work in 1956, will not do in 2012. Nevertheless, the Obama administration has to tread lightly since as GuamDiary has posited, Israel is a domestic issue in US elections.

By refusing to handle more roughly and rudely Israel, the US is perceived in some quarters as helpless in stopping Israel. Its inability to stop illegal seizure of Palestinian land and implantation of Jewish settlements in the West Bank is an excellent case in point.

Among America's many worries, the US should show little tolerance for an ally that has run amok and may in the end bring the pillars of the temple down on its own head, and perhaps justifiably so.

Associated Press opens fully accredited bureau in Pyongyang

2012-01-17T06:20:00.000-08:00

The American News Agency, The Associated Press, has opened a full bureau in Pyongyang. A welcome development. Yet, AP’s British based video news arm has operated in North Korea since 2006, a detail long kept under wraps in the US media. Forgotten or simply lost between the cracks is the equally ignored presence of a British embassy in the North Korean capital.

A fully accredited American agency in the DPRK, a country where the US is not the flavour of day, does raise eyebrows, a month after the death of Kim Jong il.

Much will not doubt be made of this: it signals a new initiative of a new leader possibly. Surely, Kim Jong eun has given it his caution. Still, North Korea does not make decisions rashly. The US and South Korean press will see this move as conformation of Washington’s and Seoul’s hardnosed policy. But, that is a self serving assessment, the establishment of a US, if not a western, news agency in Pyongyang has been in the works for a while, subject to much negotiation, as well as benign neglect on the part of the Obama administration. Kim Jong il’s stamp is on the deal even if no one is willing to admit it.

As GuamDiary has long insisted, the late ‘Dear Leader’ had never lost an opportunity to talk to the US on an even playing field without preconditions. And 2012 is year 100 of Kim Il Sung’s birth: an excellent moment of reporting for the North.

Not to be downplayed is AP’s presence will provide Pyongyang with an opening to the wider world so that its story can be told from the horse’s mouth without the usual spin the US and South Korea put on it for their own ideological and political purposes.

In a way, North Korea has assailed the Cold War propaganda machine that has functioned with a never ending of treacle. Of course, AP will not quiet that war, but now the field is clearer and the advantage is no longer the preserve of Washington and Seoul, even though ironically the AP bureau in Seoul will compete with its sister bureau in Pyongyang

Bain is Romney's bane

2012-01-14T10:39:00.000-08:00

Willard Mitt Romney cannot escape his past, try as he might. His time at Bain Capital is his bane, a spoiler in his race for the Republican Party's candidate for president in 2012.

The former governor from Massachusetts is tone deaf in campaigning. He is ham fisted in dealing with people and thought in what he says. 'I like to fire people' is not a slogan in a campaign when the US is suffering from a high rate of unemployment. His offer of a 'us$10.000 bet' with fellow rival Rich Perry who has a long track record of selling Texas' public offices to private high rollers, signmatises Romney as an elitist and a unthinking member of the 'one percent' that 'Occupy Wall Street' has skillfully branded the very rich who buy politicians, the media, and pull the strings behind the scene, for their own greedy interests.

And yet, Romney goes merrily along, creating a scenario that is easily disproved by the facts. Obama infused American automakers with capital so that they wouldn't go bankrupt nor fail. Romney's dad ran American Motors Corporation and was a three term governor of Michigan, the home of the auto industry. And yet, his son preached the gospel of letting the American automakers fail. And he says, he's a businessman. No, he's a vulture capitalist who lives off the carrion of companies Bain bought, loaded with debt, sucked out high fees, and left to rot or perchance they survived, fend for themselves. So much for his acumen; he never ran a company; he advised and like Newt Gingrich left with his pocket filled for advice worth not very much.

Romney's record this there for all to see. It makes his deep pockets supporters queasy because finance capitalists like vampires do their worst in the dark and behind the scenes. The light of transparency, like Count Dracula fear of garlic or a crucifix, exposed them to public scrutiny, and like Dorothy's dog Toto pulling the green velvet curtain hiding the Wizard of Oz, it reveals that the game is up and the Wizard is a fraud using blue smoke and mirrors.

So, Mitt has to wear the bane of his tenure at Bain Capital like a Hester Prynne wore her Scarlet letter. He has little else to fall back on since he has lied or repudiated any position he espoused as governor or a moderate in his mad desire to become president.

North Korea tests rockets

2012-01-14T10:18:00.000-08:00

North Korean watchers in Washington and Seoul exhibit uninterested concern in the DPRK's testing of short range missiles. They dismiss it without much fanfare when before they would be ringing the tocsin that Pyongyang might very well be preparing a rain of terror something not short of Nazi V-2 rockets falling on London.

Why this display of unconcern when hardly 10 days ago Washington and Seoul were banging pots and pans of warning that the rise of Kim Jong eun was a prescription for regional instability and possibly war?

These nervous nellies have come to the conclusion that, one, the transition to power has gone on without a hitch; two, there is hardly cause for crying wolf since the only ones who through the sky was falling were the US and its ally and client South Korea; and three, short range rockets do not make for a war now.

Of course, context is missing, for, unlike US media, we, the audience, do not hear the other side of the argument. It may come as a surprise that North Korea is a leader in advanced rocketry. In the past, even America's 'trusted' ally the Egyptian military upon whom us$3 billion in taxpayer contribution is lavished on it, has bought advanced DPRK rockets. How could this happen without the knowledge, if not the tacit consent of Washington?

Nonetheless, we do hear that Pyongyang has sold rockets to another 'axis of evil' state Iran. GuamDiary has no need to flesh out the fodder that this accusation feeds the propaganda mills.

An interesting question comes up: if North Korea is consolidating gains inside the country a month after the death of Kim Jong il, why aren't Washington and Seoul coming up with a policy which nurtures a new direction in North Korean affairs?

On another front in the propaganda war, North Korean refugees in South Korea are floating rumours that the North is ferreting out and punishing North Koreans who showed insincerity in their display of sorrow for the passing of Kim Jong il. Looking at the footage shown worldwide on television, how can you discern in a sea of tearful mourners the real mourners from the false?

'Self inflicted wounds'--US military

2012-01-14T09:54:00.000-08:00

Editorials lament the black mark the video of four Marines urinating on the bodies of Taliban in Afghanistan that 'stained yellow' the honour of the US military.

Now a general will now conduct an inquiry of this sordid affair. War is hell, we all know, but an army with low moral, questionable superiority in fighting skills, and a military which allows, if not encourages, dehumanisation of the enemy so that he is no longer human but a feral animal ripe for killing, spell disaster and criminal activity.

US troops in war in Afghanistan or Iraq vent their spleen not only on the enemy but even on fellow Americans. The death of private Danny Chen is instructive. A Chinese American who enlisted right out of high school, he was sent to Afghanistan. There, he suffered the slings of blatant racism and humiliating behaviour which drove him to take his own life.

Seven soldiers and one junior officer are under investigation for manslaughter and willfully engaging in conduct worthy of barbarians.

My Lai, Abu Gharib, Guantanamo...names and places which dredge up heinous conduct of US misconduct and, yes, crimes, in wars undeclared.

Punishment in the case of the Marines and Chen's tormentors will be quick, but the problem is one which hang like an albatross around the US high command.

The US has an all volunteer army. Saying this, it should have in place a rigorous programme of training and instruction in the dos and don'ts of war. Superficially, it probably does; fundamentally, it does little to foster a fighting force with high morale and excellent fighting skills. The Marines are a proud lot and boast of such virtues, but the four Marines who 'pissed' on dead Afghans are symptomatic that the 'esprit de corps' or 'semper fidelis' has broken down.

Two cases are indicative of behaviour exhibited by mercenaries.

'Why do we fight?'

2012-01-13T07:22:00.000-08:00

'Why do we fight' is the title of a series of propaganda films from the US war department during world war two. The famous Hollywood director Frank Capra was 'enlisted' to direct this effort which was aimed solely at the men and women in the US military to fight the country's enemies in Europe and the Asia Pacific. The Roosevelt administration realised that broadly speaking the American public had little or no idea why they were waging war, the attack on Pearl Harbour notwithstanding.

Capra's series had many faults: the segment on Japan played heavily on racial stereotypes and prejudices.

Why does GuamDiary bring up Capra's 'why do we fight?' Look at today's headlines in the US and foreign press: a photo of four marine urinating on the bodies of dead Taliban fighters.

The horror and the endless discussions which either, one way or another, excuse the soldiers although everyone agrees they should be punished, or simply sidestepping an endemic problem that has plagued the US military and any administration occupying the White House.

During Vietnam, we had 'My Lai', in Iraq, Abu Gharib and Guantanamo, and in Afghanistan, well ...

The US military in no way has an adequate programme to 'educate', some say 'indoctrinate' its troops in 'why do we fight?', other than a raw gut appeal to the meanest instincts of stereotypes, skimming the edges of racialism, which has but one goal--total dehumanisation of the enemy. Since the 'enemy' is no longer human, well, anything goes, and boy does it. And when the YouTube exposes the results of US pride the Marines engage in acts stripped of any human qualities, well, the whole bandwagon of excuses and inadequate explanations pump up the hype that deserves no further explanation.

Yep, the four Marines will be disciplined, but not the officer corps going all the way to the top for condoning, perhaps encouraging, this 'way we fight'. And in the end, the question 'why do we fight?' is no clear than Capra's attempt 70 years ago to give cogent reasons why.

Bradley Manning: on the way to jail

2012-01-13T06:37:00.000-08:00

GuamDiary cannot think of anyone who thought the military tribunal that heard evidence against Bradley Manning wouldn't recommend a general court martial. And that's exactly what the military commission did recommend. The verdict is a foregone conclusion: long years, or maybe life, in prison under the strictest of conditions. If anyone thinks that military justice mirrors civilian justice, well, we recommend the reading of Robert Sherrill's 'Military justice is to justice as military music is to music', if he can still find a loanable copy in a public library or take his chances on ordering it on the web for a reasonable price. ['MJJMMM's origin is found in the Vietnam War, but Sherrill's argument obtain even today.]

Bradley Manning is 'alleged' to have supplied a quarter million diplomatic cables to 'Wikileaks' Julian Assange. The full publication of these documents, many declassified and others of a low order of classification, greatly embarrassed the US government. Yet, in spite of getting egg on its face and bruising an inflated ego, little harm was done. In fact, the public got a good whiff of commonsense of behind the scenes assessment by US diplomats of the countries to which they were accredited, even when, for reasons of state, the US looked the other way on violations of human rights, corruption, and the like, so long as these less than 'kosher' governments marched to the tune of US foreign and military policy.

Since the Obama administration cannot get its hands on Assange who is fighting extradition to Sweden from England, Bradley Manning is a convenient surrogate. And the White House intends to take full advantage in prosecuting him and then locking him up and throwing the key away.

To many, the 24 year old intelligence analyst is a 'hero', and in his name a lot of small donations have flowed in to defray his court costs. He doesn't stand a tinker's chance: consider that the military tribunal who recommended a general court martial denied Manning's defence team to call 48 witnesses, allowing only two. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that the cards are stacked against Manning.

There is a slightly bright note in this affair: Obama had signed the NDAA before Manning's arrest. Otherwise, he wouldn't even get a court martial, only sequestration for an undetermined period without recourse to the rights of an American citizen. The NDAA is yet another step in America's quick march to an American form of 'gleichschaltung' which the Nazis used to silence dissent and trample on the rights accorded under the Constitution. Money and military power, not honour or honestry, rule the American Republic, it seems.

Kim Jong eun wants to talk

2012-01-12T07:53:00.000-08:00

Whilst the main street media in the US and ROK and elsewhere harp on the threat a 'nuclear' North Korea poses for the world as Kim Jong eun assumes leadership, it blithely downplays his willingness to pick up his father's moves to talk to the US.

North Korea's desire to talk should quiet the nervous nellies in the US and ROK, but it doesn't, the more especially as GuamDiary has long documented these two allies with a single minded purpose to topple the rulers of North Korea press unreasonable demands.

The Obama administration and the revanchist South Korean regime, headed by the lame duck Lee Myung bak have tied food aid to political demands. Translation, they are pressing an 'advantage' to stare North Korea into submission through sanctions and bad faith in negotiations limited as they are. Not only that, the US pledged us$900 million in food aid which it dropped on hearing the news of Kim Jong il's death. Instead of honouring it, the US announced that new talks are needed with the new North Korean leaders? Why? In order to take advantage of a situation where Washington thought it could bully the new kid on the block as US North Korean clerics call Kim Jong eun. If such is the thinking of those who advise Obama & co., they misread the will of the North Korean leaders and people. And they always have. Instead of living up to its promises of food aid, as a gesture to a change in leadership in Pyongyang, and thus signal a willingness towards a new tack, the Obama administration reverted to its old tricks of going back on its word.

As GuamDiary has never stopped saying, Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong il, and now Kim Jong eun wants to negotiate with the US, but the US has mulishly resisted reversing engines and sailing in fresher channels.

Still, North Korea has not stopped trying to talk to the US. And by resisting, the US has not moved from A to A prime in dealing with the DPRK.

And the loser is not so much North Korea but the US and its 'client' South Korea.

Class in America

2012-01-12T07:12:00.000-08:00

Maybe in universities Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb's 1973 'Hidden injuries of class' is still be read and discussed, but until 'Occupy Wall Street' came along the issue of class in America was conveniently swept under the carpet.

Fed on the pap that America is the land of opportunity and by the dint of hard labour, you could spring up the social ladder is no more than dregs in a bottle of wine that has turned sour.

Today, if anything that myth rings hollow. You know it; I know it; everyone knows it.

Recent studies, governmental or private, document the growing economic and social inequality existing in today's America, still the richest country in the world. Social mobility is stagnant as the 'middle classes' lose traction and find that the worst fears are realised: they're being forced down into the rungs of the hardworking poor and the impoverished. A fertile ground for the growing anger and cheap change for the right wing demagogues to pick up.

Today's young---the country's future--will live less well than their parents unless they come from wealth or marry into it [highly unlikely].

It is astounding to note that Americans know little of the world outside and care less, so brainwashed are they.

Corporate America rules supreme, it seems. Take media. It's all glamour and glitz and the life style of the rich and famous. PBS' second installment of 'Downtown Abby' has stimulated the appetite for books by maids and footmen and butlers who worked for the titled, parasitic British titled class. And the sales soar. Kaching, kaching, kaching sings the cash register!

Public radio and television shine the shoes of the capitalists with programmes on finance, the market, stocks and bonds, and the like. But, pray tell, where are the shows devoted to labour or to the working classes? Unimportant! Why devote time and money to a class of wage slaves who have to sell their sweat for the ruling classes? Tis better to shock and awe them with celebrity and life styles as though they were visions of sugar plums and fairies that they will never hope to live, unless by a fluke of nature. Let them eat 'pie in the sky', by and by, as the Woody Guthrie song goes.

Yet the immiserisation of America's working classes are there to see in every town and hamlet, in every city large or small. You taste it in the bitterness of your morning coffee.

And if the Republican battlefield for the party's nominee in 2012 presidential election is an indicator: jobs are 'hors de sujet', but not social issues or belief in a god or hollow boasts of returning the US to the mighty past. The candidates are rich men and even the lone woman who dropped out of the race is hardly one of the 'hoi polloi'. The watch word is not the nation's honour or its promise, but money, money, money. The programme is reactionary up and down the line, and yet the Republican party has attracted into its fold, the angry white men and women who are more ordinary working stiffs and remember an America which was predominantly white and had digested and assimilated millions of eastern and southern Europeans, once considered 'children of the dust'. And these very people want jobs for their children whom the plutocrats who hold the purse strings of the party do not give a tinker's damn for. The mixture is explosive in the medium run and it is little wonder that the party has embraced an Dixiecrat mentality.

GuamDiary uses the Grand Old Party or the moss backed Republicans as a bellwether, for it is the more revealing of a country that has turned its back on the commonweal and bribed by the finance capitalists who brought us the 2008 global recession, defend resolutely a class that would abandon them in a thunder storm.

Thanks to 'Occupy Wall Street' class has risen from the muck and mire of a concerted campaign to push the old pieties which today sound as hollow as a drum. OWS shifted the political course back to the working class. And rightly so. Class is a 'hidden injury' to the workers but not the rich. It is time for the working class to boldly organise and proclaim their due for it is they who create the wealth.

Occupy Wall Street returns to Zuccotti Park

2012-01-11T07:01:00.000-08:00

New York's mayor Michael Bloomberg may deny it: he and his praetorian guard the New York City Police have suffered a stinging setback.

In November in the first hours of the morning the police used stormtrooper tactics to evict OWS from Liberty Plaza or Zuccotti Park. The cleansing of the park clearly violated the law and raised constitutional issues such as freedom of assembly and speech.

With much satisfaction the billionaire mayor and his plutocratic friends on Wall Street smile and winked, for had they not crushed OWS? Wrong.

OWS did not take the ousting sitting down, even though cities throughout the land employed police in riot gear to shut down peace protest.

Now, Bloomberg and the police will have to think twice: the courts have ruled in favour of OWS to 'occupy' Zuccotti Park; thus, once again the very presence of protesters in Wall Street, an open indictment of the rule of finance capitalism which brought the world to the brink of economic ruin; the presence of OWS on Wall Street's very threshold will cause ill ease in the stock exchange and the boardroom of the big bracket banks and venture capital firms, because the call for economic justice and jobs will redound when they thought that the police had done their work for them. Wrong again, old darlings!

Now that the spot light is on Romney as a finance capitalist, the laser beam of searing disclosure will singe hot firms like Bain and McKinsey and the like. And although Romney & co. talk of the economy, they hardly mention jobs, and the record shows venture capitalists and the Wall Street financiers thrive on throwing people out of work.

So welcome back OWS to Wall Street!

Mitt Romney: vampire capitalist

2012-01-11T06:36:00.000-08:00

Goldman Sachs can never escape Matt Taibbi's labeling them 'a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity'.

Will Bain Capital share the same opprobrium? Mitt Romney spent a goodly amount of time at Bain, a venture capital company, using little of its own money to buy and sell and like vultures pick apart until the bones are exposed to the winds the companies they bought and cannabilised.

Romney, like it or not, will probably be the Republican Party's standard bearer in the upcoming 2012 elections. He talks a good talk about how he, honed in business, can save the US economy from itself.

Now his rivals for the nod of the GOP spot for presidency have brought up Romney's business experience and his lackluster track record as a 'jobs creator'. Four words suffice to brand him as a vulture capitalist: 'American Pad and Paper', a company Romney trashed but walked away with millions for Bain whilst leaving hundreds out of work. Not only that, the man hungering for the White House is no businessman in the true sense of the word. He's never run a company, built anything, only found money to buy, ravage, and sell the wreck he and Bain made of it. More, he is now taking credit for companies like Staples who are thriving even though he left Bain long ago when the retailer was floundering.

So, Romney is one and the same time a vampire squid and a vulture capitalist.

More damaging are the attack ads against Romney and the exposure to the public of the inner workings of venture capitalists like Bain Capital. Already there is much unease among its partners and in its boardroom. Like vampires, Bain cannot thrive in the light of day.

God bless the 'New York Times' long investigative piece on Romney's payoff from Bain which until today and seemingly to the day he dies, his personal wealth increases by millions a year from proceeds of Bain's funds. And the 'Wall Street Journal' has also stepped into the fray by its coverage of the workings of Bain.

The superfund tied to Romney's campaign trashed Newt Gingrich in the Iowa causes, killing his chances to come out top dog instead of number 4 in the polls. Gingrich has denounced Romney's dirty money but that hasn't stopped him from using funds in attack ads in South Carolina to strip Romney of his pure white toga of ethical business practices. In fact, both in its short and long version, Gingrich's ad is a denunciation of Bain and its ilk and the corruption finance capital have brought on the US financial and global stage.

Like Banquo's ghost, Romney cannot escape his cannibal business past!

'Amnesty' in North Korea

2012-01-10T07:03:00.000-08:00

Kim Jong eun is hitting the ground as he begins exercising leadership. 2012 offers him a golden opportunity: it is year 100 birthday of the DPRK's founder Kim Il Sung and year 70 of what would have been Kim Jong il's . And so, to mark the occasions a general prisoner amnesty will take place, although the North Korean news agency did not spell out details.

Had Kim Jong il not died, it is probable that a general amnesty would be in the cards to mark the centenary of his father.

Saying this, the announcement marks a promising new direction in the DPRK. The foreign press will seize on this news with a good dollop of cynicism and comic relief befitting 'doubting Thomases'. Already the Pyongyang watchers have already picked up hints of slight movement of the economy towards embracing a market orientation but at a pace and a degree of comfort that the North Koreans themselves desire. [This trend is hardly new: Rudiger Frank, early on in the 1990s, pointed to the existence of savvy economists who were slowly encouraging the North Korean economy towards reform, and that at a time when everyone in the US, South Korea, and Europe were waiting for the crumbling of the DPRK. Didn't happen though to their general disappointment.]

North Korean watchers have been quick to stress that Kim Jong eun's physical appearance has been altered to resemble his grandfather, a man much revered 16 years after his death. Be that as it may, the 'young general' has a winning smile and appears to fit easily into his new role as a hand fits into a glove.

And at the beginning of his 'reign', he has the advantage of bringing new wine to old bottles. However, he also has to defend his country against the hostile intentions of the US and South Korea who want nothing better than regime change in the North. He is a general of an a million man army or more who is on the 'qui vive' since it is in a state of war in Korea which has never been formerly ended by a peace treaty but only frozen in time by a 1953 armistice. He is the leader of a country hit by the vagaries of global warming: floods, heavy rains, bad weather that have ruined North Korea's agriculture, and at the same time, that has seen the malicious tying of denial of food aid by the US, the EU, Australia, and South Korea to unacceptable political demands, a coordinated policy whose ultimate aim is to starve North Korea into submission.

Yet, like his father, Kim Jong eun will nonetheless seek talks with the US with no preconditions which for ideological reasons is an anathema to the White House.

Still, the announcement of a general prisoner amnesty is a welcome sign. It should alert Washington and Seoul and Tokyo and Canberra and other western nations that business is not going to be conducted in old ways. And these capitols no longer have an excuse in taking refuge in wooden language that they had not seen change coming, reinforcing the stereotype that North Korea is unpredictable, they only have themselves to blame for their own blindness and deafness to change.

Kim Jung eun's birthday

2012-01-09T07:15:00.001-08:00

9 January 2012 North Korea celebrated its new leader Kim Jung eun's 28 or 29 or 30 birthday hardly a week after the entombment of his father Kim Jung il.

The celebration was more a manifestation of the seamless transition of power than an explosive demonstration of the popular will.

Kim's birthday gave his critics in the west another opportunity to 'belittle' North Korea, the extravagant stories of the 'Young General's' mental and physical prowess notwithstanding, which leave him open to ridicule.

Surprisingly BR Myers, author of the 'Cleanest Race: how North Koreans themselves--and why it matters', in an opinion piece in Sunday's 'New York Times' took the 'West' to taks for 'continu[ing] paying ... little attention to North Korean ideology' like he does. In fact, Myers spent eight years reading anything he could lay his hands on coming out in the DPRK. After close and diligent examination of text, he differs radically from the 'comic relief' the birthday offers his colleagues in the press and in scholarly circles.

For the director of the international studies department at Busan's Dongsoo University, the germ of North Korea's dynastic succession lies not in Korean history but a slavish knockoff of aggressive Imperial Japanese pre world war two militarism and colonialism exemplified in the figure of Hirohito.

Such an interpretation is patently absurd in the light of the DPRK's 80 year struggle against Japanese militarism and mating of US UN led and South Korean forces during the 1950 Korean War. North Korea is a hyper nationalist state which prefers its own way and independence before submitting to foreign domination.

In the 'subdued' blaze of pageantry of Kim Jung eun's birthday, we see not only cultural misunderstanding but a misreading of Korean history. The birthday fanfare is understandable in the North Korean context, so that leadership would not be made or unmade by disputing cliques in the party backed up by factions in the army. Instead, in the Asiatic mode, the leader was set apart, made 'holy' in the eyes of his people by awe inspiring rituals, thereby reducing the temptation of factions within the party and the army to treat the 'Dear Leader' with facile contempt. Little wonder, the 'loss at sea' and the simplistic and crude mockery. How else could they explain the awe in the faces of the North Koreans or the Max Reinhardt like theatricality of the event?

Furthermore, since his choice of his third son to succeed him, Kim Jong il did impose his will on the party and the army and the core cadre to support Kim Jung eun. Consequently, the easy succession on Kim's death that so stunned the US and the ROK.

Washington and Seoul are fingering worry beads that Kim Jung eun will engage in military adventurism to firmly secure his leadership. Is that the right question to ask? Maybe. Yet the record shows that North Korea responds defensively to threats from joint US ROK military exercises on the edge of its territorial waters.

2012 is year 20 of ROK China recognition. Lee Myung bak is in Beijing on an official business, the Chinese wont lift a finger to box in North Korea, its neighbour and ally, unless Lee is willing to compromise: which is unlikely. Timothy Geithner will shortly land in the Chinese capital for the same reason; he will get absolutely nowhere, the more especially in the light of the new Obama military doctrine which draws a bead on China itself.

Again, the making fun of Kim Jung eun's birthday is yet another example of the US North Korean clerisy shortsightedness--they take the tree for the forest. As such, they have to go back to school to relearn history.

South Korea's less than a free press

2012-01-09T06:52:00.001-08:00

A logical outcome of South Korea's Lee Myung bak militarily and economically hardline policy towards North Korea is the fear of invasion of spies and body snatchers as well as unKorean elements in the media who wittingly aid and abet the North.

Like the Red Scare in the US, the public libraries and bookshops have become targets for vetting of books deemed 'subversive' or 'unKorean'. Now, the Lee regime is threatening with prison journalists and political cartoonists. In other words, it is engaging in a war against freedom of expression and dissenting standpoints.

A case in point is the government's intent in indicting, as the 'New York Times' put it, 'a man who parodied a North Korean propaganda poster' for aiding the enemy. What holds the regime's purpose up to ridicule is that, instead of brandishing a weapon, the artist substituted his own face and in his own hands, he's ostentatiously displaying a bottle of high end Scotch whisky.

The death of Kim Jong il has unhinged and upended Lee's revanchist 'Drang nach Norden' policy, which he has closely coordinated with the Obama administration, to 'rollback' the DPRK to the point of collapse. It hasn't happened and wont anytime soon, it seems.

So, the Lee regime has beefed up its campaign of finding a 'Red Korean' under any bed. Yet, something else is happening in South Korea: a growing and important segment of the public is aching for relaxation of tensions with North Korea, and this is event in the books and articles and in the playful banter found on television shows by younger performers who openly make fun of Lee's attack on freedom of expression. Not only that, as the 2012 presidential election looms larger on the horizon, there are signs that Lee's GNP will not capture the Blue House, and in the case they do, the new government, through popular pressure, will have to fall back on a revived, but modified, Sunshine Policy which Lee killed upon assuming the presidency in 2008.

Meanwhile, in 'democratic' South Korea, the press and freedom of expression are under attack.

Obama's military doctrine

2012-01-07T10:32:00.000-08:00

Obama's military doctrine, focussing on the Asia Pacific theatre, is bound to cause unease in the Chinese, Russians, North Koreans, Iranians, Syrians, and Pakistani and off shots of Islamic terrorist groups. It, however, will be welcomed in southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and various client Arab states.

Despite the soothing noise emanating from the White House, the target all sublime for the moment is less Iran than China. It isn't for nothing that a high ranking Chinese naval officer, in an official publication, denounced the 44 American president's 'military adventurism'.

And in a way, at first blush, it is a reworking of the 'Open Door Policy', this time stretching from west to east Asia and the islands in the Pacific.

No excuses can mask the Obama doctrine's intent towards a rival nation like China that just got in America's way, huge infusions of venture capital and outsourcing factories and jobs that would accelerate China's short march to capitalism notwithstanding.

Of course the US scholars, policy makers, and chattering classes overlooked one thing: Chinese nationalism and the not so guarded humiliation of the years this middle country suffered under the heavy hand of foreign powers, including America's.

With the rise of a powerful Chinese economy pulling the world's economic train, it is unsurprising that Beijing began flexing its muscles and reasserting Imperial Chinese claims to neighbouring states as well as poaching in carved out areas the US thought as its own natural reserve.

This 'new' doctrine has the potential for making much mischief, it goes without saying. And from the get go, it has set China's teeth on edge. The Obama administration requires China's help and assistance financially, and geopolitically when it comes to 'dealing' with North Korea. Little wonder, then, Beijing will play hard ball and remain inscrutably coy.

We should all be prepared for a bumpy ride.

US North Korea policy: don't send a boy to do a man's job

2012-01-06T07:07:00.000-08:00

In less than a fortnight, president Obama, South Korea's president Lee Myung bak, and Japan's prime minister Noda Yoshihiko will put heads together to figure out how to deal with Kim Jung eun.

Already, Lee is off to Beijing, hat in hand, to ask China's leaders to pressure North Korea for engaging in 'adventurism' in northeast Asia.

The US has sent an assistant secretary of state Kurt Campbell to Beijing with the very same mission: twist your ally in Pyongyang's arm to avoid destablising the region during the transition to power in North Korea.

Well, they could have same themselves much shoe leather for the very idea of instability in northeast Asia exists in the coordinated 'patient restraint' policy Washington and Seoul have been conducting for the last three years.

From GuamDiary perspective, Lee's visit and Campbell's mission, to put it bluntly, and in plain idiomatic English, is 'sending a boy to do a man's job'.

Obama or his secretary of state Hillary Clinton has to step up to the plate and face and deal with the new North Korean leader and his team on equal footing. America's use of surrogates, read China, simply won't wash, for it is shortsighted and founded on false arguments.

The Bush administration did everything it could not to talk to North Korea, finding a face saving solution in the six party talks in Beijing which were from day one set to fail; they did, and although Washington is willing to go back to the green negotiating cloth, it has thrown up a wall of conditions that have sent the talks to limbo for the last two years. GuamDiary suggests its readers to look at Mike Chinoy's 'Meltdown', for a good account of US sleight of hand diplomacy.

Seoul's and Washington's assumption that China has a 'controlling' hand in North Korea does not pan in reality. It is true that, as North Korea's neighbour and ally, China supports the DPRK, but its influence is at best not as great as the US and the ROK think. Another reason Beijing may not be willing to 'help' Obama lies in his move to challenge diplomatically and militarily China's dominance in the north and southeast Asia.

So whilst Washington and Beijing may bow and smile at each other, China has little incentive to play 'suitor' to Pyongyang for the US. Let's not forget, China holds a huge swarth of US debt and almost in many instances dominates sales of its products in America, with the eager assistance of finance capitalists and US corporations always on the prowl for quick and growing returns on a US dollar invested.

Beijing may go through the motions, but it certainly will not nor cannot pull America's North Korean chestnuts out of the fire for it. Washington, in sum, has to talk directly to Pyongyang, and there is no other way out for them.

Dealing face to face discussions with North Korea is no insoluble riddle, let alone a mystery. They are the key to ending the seemingly never ending 61 year old Korean War by concluding a peace treaty, which would involve China but not South Korea that refused to sign the 1953 Armistice Agreement; a peace treaty would immediately reduce tensions in the divided Korean peninsula, allowing for steps leading towards denuclearisation.

However, that is not the way the US sees it: if you listen to the podcast of the US North Korean clerisy at the New York Korea Society, you wonder in what universe they are living. The media in the US and South Korea talk about the transition of power and the rise of Kim Jung eun as supreme leader as though it were unsettled, and what's more, they wonder with childlike naivety who planned it. Dah! Kim Jong il is the immediate and obvious answer.

It may churlish to say, Obama and Lee are the victims of their own wishes. The two allies rewrite minute by minute North Korea's history to hide the blemishes of their ignorance thereby compounding self confessions of their own country's intelligence failures.

More likely than not, as the Obama military doctrine shifts to northeast Asia, it will exacerbate tensions since the logic of the newly advocate policy require beefing up military forces on the ground [28.000 US military are already stationed in South Korea and the US is indirectly funding a naval base in Jeju islands for giant and perhaps nuclear warships, which China and even Japan consider a threat to territorial waters of theirs and the mineral rights under the sea].

So, in a way, the US and South Korea put forth circular arguments that have hardly varied yea these last seven decades. It would take bold leadership to cut this Gordian knot, and there is not. Consequently the US will continue to send boys to do the job only a MAN can do!

Why didn't David Gregory correct Rick Santorum?

2012-01-05T07:14:00.000-08:00

The rising star among the Republican slate of dim lights vying for the GOP's nomination for the presidency, Rick Santorum waxed threatening on the 'influential' during an interview with 'Meet the Press' moderator David Gregory.

Bold as brass he promised, that if elected president, he would 'bomb' Tehran if Iran refused to allow UN inspection of its nuclear sites. You would think the former senator would have his facts straight. He doesn't. UN monitors do inspect Iran's nuclear sites!

More troubling, though: media star Gregory didn't challenge Santorum on misstating the truth. This omission speaks volumes over the fecklessness of the US media; they are there to be handmaidens of the power elite, not the derring dos who speak truth to power.

Oil Embargo on Iran: a version of old fashioned gunboat diplomacy

2012-01-05T07:02:00.000-08:00

As the European Union follows into lockstep with the US on inching towards an embargo on Iran oil, we are witnessing a dusted off version of old fashioned gunboat diplomacy.

An EU embargo is a serious step to take: the consequences of such a move could and would threaten fragile economies of its members, already in deep debt. An embargo would shoot up the price of a barrel or oil, some say to a benchmark price of us$150 or more, thereby not only exacerbating social tensions but encouraging strikes and possibly serious attacks on property and the government itself in member countries.

So, it is not a move to be taken lightly. Moreover, an embargo increases the chances of missteps which could lead to military action in the Straits of Hormuz, threatening friend and foe alike. Even the reactionary monarchy in Saudi Arabia shies away from such a manoeuvre.

We are witnessing the blind pursuit of a policy that could bring down the economic house of cards of the US and the EU as it would challenge China's surging economy.

It is obvious the tack in the winds of political taken by the US and the EU is the triumph of ideological stupidity over commonsense.

'New York Times' suggested North Korea reading list

2012-01-04T07:10:00.000-08:00

Two days after the death of Kim Jong il [17 December 2011], John Williams' 'Toward a North Korea Reading List' appeared in the 19 December edition of the 'New York Times'.

'Looking for insight into North Korea', he offered the same old same old list of books which hardly break new ground; the list conforms to the official line of how horrible the DPRK is.

Well, that's hardly new: it is a refrain that the US has sung for the last 60 years.

North Korea is not an earthly paradise, yet the list offers no historical understanding of its history or the intense nationalism North Korea espouses.

Most titles Williams selected tell of the hidden daily life of North Koreans, much documented by refugees who have suffered economic hardship and some years spent in gulags. The accounts are moving, yet they are devoid of historical context.

Bruce Cumings, a Korean scholar, is an exception. But since his award winning writings are critical of North Korea and, say, Kim Jong il, he fleshes out Korean history--north and south--which depart from the pieties of the US North Korean clerisy. Although Williams doffs his hat at Cumings' 'Korea's place in the sun' [1997], he significantly omits his 'North Korea: another country' [2004], as well as Random House's Modern Library's edition 'Korean War' [2010].

In fact, missing from Williams' bird's eye view on 'insights into North Korea' is any mention of the Korean War which has never ended but is frozen in time by a 1953 armistice awaiting a peace treaty. In other words, the US and North Korea remain at war. This omission may help explain why North Korea remains a country armed to the teeth, and will remain so until the US enters into negotiations without preconditions for a peace treaty and an end to stated US policy, coordinated with Seoul' of 'rolling back' the North to the point of collapse.

On the contrary, the scholarly and popular critical works of Cumings is an occasion by the usual suspects like BR Myers who read every imaginable North Korea publication for eight year and came up with the naive conclusion Kim Il Sung was a second rate copy of the militarist Japanese emperor Hirohito whom the US transformed into a mild manner constitutional monarch. And the more gentle Nicolas Kristof who reviewed Cumings' 1997 book who nonetheless, whilst disagreeing with the Korean scholar's conclusions found his arguments 'engaging'.

Cumings is the whipping post of the US North Korean clerisy simply because he begs to walk a different path in studying North Korea, and has drawn his own conclusions through visits and yes interviews with 'defectors', the source of most of the books on Williams' list. Since Cumings adheres to an 'independent' standpoint, he is game in an never ending open season. Rarely do you see him on the mainstream media! Best ignored seems common wisdom.

For the detective reading public there are the four books in the Inspector O series, written by James Church [an nom de plume of an intelligence agent who regularly visits North Korea]. Some rare gems of insight, for sure, but one must never lose sight of the glaring fact that the US and the ROK intelligence services have miserably failed in cracking the 'mystery' of North Korea.

Finally, an ironic mention of two books by Kim Jong il on the art of cinema and the art of opera, the cheapest copy on Amazon is us$128.45 plus handling charges! Williams' dig simply conforms to the laughter that the West shows on the notion that Kim Jong il has any brains.

Well, the old darling, left out the chapter in Madeleine Albright's meeting with the 'Dear Leader', and why not, since her appreciation might set off alarm bells in minds which threaten simple minded stereotypes.

Lee Myung bak goes to Beijing

2012-01-04T06:42:00.000-08:00

South Korea's hang dog president Lee Myung bak is packing his bags for a trip to Beijing. Weeks ago, he announced it at the time of Kim Jong il's death. There is no mystery as to Lee's motives: he like his partner in squeezing North Korea to the point of surrender to their aims or to the edge of collapse US president Barack Obama, is to persuade China to pressure Kim Jung eun indirectly to heed the joint US ROK demands.

In fact, after North Korea's rebuff of Lee, he sort of made nice although the thrust of his reply could hardly be interpreted as 'friendly'. Somehow, the 'revanchist' South Korean lame duck president is under the impression his promises of lessening tensions with the North came wash away four years of a pointed policy of trying to overthrow it through denial of food aid, fertilisers, sanctions, so on.

As Lee prepares his trip to China, Beijing has thrown it full support behind Kim Jung eun, and has invited him for a state visit, one hears. What, then, GuamDiary wonders will Lee have to offer the Chinese?

Already in South Korea the winds of 'glasnost' have stirred a growing sector of South Koreans calling for a return of sorts to the 'Sunshine Policy' that Lee scuppered the moment he took office in 2008 in favour of confrontation with the DPRK. The record of his tack has proven disastrously dangerous, and almost sparked a renewal of the frozen Korean War in November 2010.

So the question remains: what does Lee want? Does he wish Beijing to act as an intermediary in negotiations with the North to talks with Seoul? Is his visit a smokescreen for a meeting with Kim Jung eun's representatives, even though the DPRK has publicly declared that it has no intention of dealing with him. In brief, what gift of concessions, if any, is the ROK president offering? And then there the possibility, he is playing for time so that he can defer on past pledges of food aid to the North and easing tensions?

One way or the other, China has to look with a jaundice eye at Lee's intentions. By building a naval base on Jeju island to accommodate US war [atomic?] ships is an open threat to China's territorial waters in the Yellow Sea, as well as Beijing's claims to undersea oil & gas and mineral deposits. Of course, Lee's trip may be a self promotion tour: you see, I tried, but no one is willing to give me a chance type of excuse when he returns empty handed to South Korea.

Still, Lee has to quiet his own citizens lack of support for returning his party to power in the 2012 presidential elections, in spite of the growing odds they wont. Already, public grumbling over his policy towards North Korea and his 'unKorean' response to allowing people to offer condolence to Kim Jong il has branded him, sotto voce, a 'traitor' to the goal and cherished hope of reunification.

Lee Myung bak: will the cowardly leopard change his spots?

2012-01-03T07:46:00.001-08:00

Responding to North Korea's military authoritative December announcement [30 December 2011] that the DPRK will not deal with the Lee Myung bak regime in Seoul, ROK's 'revanchist' president tried to smooth the sharp elbow reply with 'vanilla' observations that a new leader in the North offers the South opportunities in 'talking to' a Kim Jung eun & co.

Harvard's John Park read into Lee's word a 'high road ' appeal to reducing tensions in the divided Korean peninsula. GuamDiary questions Park's assertion. We look at Lee's openly broadside attack against Kim Jong il from day one of his ascension to the Blue House, beginning with the suppression of the 'Sunshine Policy', followed by denying fertilisers and food aid, and a propaganda war the person of the 'Dear Leader'; the South Korean president's assault, closely coordinated with the Obama administration, had revived the harsh winds of the Cold War which Lee's two predecessors Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo hyun tamed and quieted. Not only that, he pushed the envelope so that either the North would implode or it would commit a warlike action that the ROK and US could take advantage of. Unfortunately for 'revanchist' Lee, the DPRK called joint US ROK's bluff during joint military exercises along the Northern Limit Line within a spittle of DPRK territorial waters in November 2010. Obama took fright that it would have to engage America in a third war in Asia; to his South Korean ally, the US president stayed Lee's hand, settling for 'rollinb back' the Northern regime through 'patient constraint'

Broadly speaking, GuamDiary has to restate the known history that the US and South Korea media conviently ignore in favour of the mystical veneration of hoary slogans from the last 60 years at least.

So we ask can the lame leopard as president of the ROK change his spots? Possibly, but we wont hold out breath.

Lee like Obama lost a golden opportunity to engage Kim Jung eun by sending food aid to the North. He did not; he only offered hollow buzzwords of 'new opportunities'.

2012 is an election year in South Korea. And there is a general dissatisfaction with Lee and his party. They lost the import post of mayor of Seoul Lee used as a springboard to win the Blue House in October 2011. His aggressive policy towards the DPRK has galvanised a broad swath of opinion in South Korea that considers Lee 'a national traitor' for abandoning the 'Sunns, shine Policy'.

Lee dropped another stitch by severely restricting an unofficial delegation of 18 South Koreans, headed by the widows of Kim Dae Jung and Hyundai's founder, to venture to Pyongyong to convey their condolence at Kim Jong il's bier. Were Lee 'sincere' in reducing enmity with the North, he could have easily allowed ordinary citizens in the South to do the same. Yet, he dare not! The feet that would have wended their way to the North would have been a referendum of the failure of his hostile policy towards Kim Jong il & co.

So, the cover the egg on his face, Lee peppered a hardline response to the North with empty pious hopes of opportunities to turn a new page on inter Korean relations. Will he? That is the question! Is he a leader who can and does grow? Judging by his record, prospects are indeed dim.

'Patient Restraint': US' narrow and naive policy towards 'rolling back' North Korea

2012-01-03T07:44:00.000-08:00

Streaming PR's 'News Hour', GuamDiary, at last, a strong expression of why the death of Kim Jong il provided an opportunity to depart from the disingenuousness of 'patient contraint', otherwise known as 'rolling back' North Korea.

Every idea behind 'rollback' is masked in larger consideration which is dishonest in a framework of 'realism' that tend to stave North Korea into submission to the non negotiable aims of the US and aided and abetted by a revanchist Lee Myung bak regime in South Korea.

Donald Gregg, chairman emeritus of the New York Korea Society, former ambassador to Seoul, former national security advisor to George WH Bush, and a 30 year veteran of the CIA, is a voice of reason in a level of discussion, thought, and implementation of 'pattient restraint' that is a willing acceptance of failure in the corridors of power in Seoul and Washington.

With a minimum of words, Gregg suggested that the death of the 'Dear Leader' is an occasion to lump the sinking of the 'Cheonan', the shelling of 'Yeongpyeong' military base, and the second nuclear test into the legacy of Kim Jong il. The advent of his son Kim Jong eun, furthermore, offers the US the opportunity to show maturity by making a gesture to the DPRK to lessen the tensions in the divided Korean peninsula.

A new opening! Sound advice you would think? Hardly. The US North Korean clerisy, as well as the Obama administration and the revanchist Lee Myung bak regime, view it as a weakening of the two countries' spirit. It was as though Gregg, who in some policy making quarters may be seen as a 'heretic'. Gregg's reputation and long government service do protect him from the direct criticism, if not condemnation, yet the failure of 'patient constraint' lies in US Korean history. More, Gregg put it bluntly, he is against holding a starving population hostage to the denial of promised food aid, a comment which Bobolina Hwang, now professor at Georgetown, former advisor in the Bush fils White House, and before that wrote policy on Korea at the right wing think tank, the American Enterprise Institute. She disagrred mostly with Gregg in that polite but sharp elbow difference of opinion. A hard liner she embraced 'rollback' forcefully, praising president Obama. Her standpoint is hardly surprising, since any opening to the North, would bring down the temple of orthodoxy that the past 60 years had thrown up against talking to the DPRK, even though Kim Jong il never tired signaling to Washington for talks with no preconditions which he transmitted through two former US president and any number of Americans and westerners visiting North Korea.

A thaw in relations would cut the ground from under a cottage industry of US North Korean clerics, thereby threatening jobs and fat salaries and overheated reputations. Unlike Gregg, Hwang, like her cohorts, is no risk taker, embroiled as they are in the byzantine politics and reflexes learnt and perpetuated during the heady days of the Cold War against the Soviet empire.
By steadfastly holding on the past, they got the answer they wanted by Kim Jong eun. No opening, no changes in DPeRK policy.

Tis a pity, Gregg is preaching to the deaf and dumb and dumber.

Obama & Lee renege on food aid to North Korea

2012-01-03T07:42:00.000-08:00

Kim Jung il's sudden death on 17 December 2011 allowed president Obama and his sidekick in Seoul the revanchist Lee Myung bak to wiggle out of pledges of hundreds of millions of dollars of food aid to North Korea.

These two defenders of 'democracy' and deep believers in the teachings of their professed saviour Jesus Christ took coward's courage in the gnomic formula first ennuciated by Donald Rumsford: 'unknown knowns', as well as the long cherished fear of the bogeyman they created in the image of the DPRK. In ordinary English, 'unknown knowns' means the truth is as plain as the nose on your face, yet Obama and Lee chose to ignore to ignore or not know it.

The demise of the 'Dear Leader' called for stability at home so that the passing of the baton of power to Kim's anointed successor the young Kim Jong eun could and would proceed without the slightest burp; which did happened to the distaste of the clerics and advisors in Washington and Seoul whose silly

predictions of collapse and doom proved manifestly wrong. Another black mark in the poverty of

their 'scholarship' that the poor taxpayer's pence pays for.

The 'young general' Kim Jong eun put the US and the ROK on warning as the two countries raised the tone of Cold War rhetoric and pursued the coordinated policy of 'patient constraint' to topple the DPRK.

What Obama and Lee did not expect, and what Kim Jung eun did was to announce the need for food aid

to tide a deeply undernourished North Korea.

Kim's appeal was an indictment of the Obama Lee policy, and showed the egg on the US and ROK's face for

not living up to pledges of food aid.

As former US ambassador to Seoul strongly suggested that the ascension to the supreme posts of power in North Korea offered an excellent opportunity to open lines of communications to the new regime, and that food aid should never be tied to food.

Obama and Lee dropped the stitch. GuamDiary finds it doubtful whether they ever had the foresight to seize the moment to offer food aid to North Korea, and thus live up to their hollow promises of better relations at the beginning of Kim Jong eun's reign, thereby easing the DPRK's resistance to rejoin the six party talks in Beijing to denuclearise the divided Korean peninsula.

Instead Obama and Lee head of two strong economies and military industrial complexes, feigned weakness. Consequently, they turned themselves into Pyongyang's cat's paw, for as the weaker , North Korea used its strength to stymie the US and ROK who are too cleaver by half . Sooner than later, Obama and Lee will have to put their money where their mouth is and supply food relief to the people of the DPRK. But before that, these two 'powerful' men had to show the world what fools they aure when an extended hand to Kim Jung eun would and could have perced the abcess of heightened tension.

Kim Jong il's funeral Magnified foreign commentary, over the top rumours

2011-12-28T06:40:00.000-08:00

As North Korea conducts a two day elaborate ceremony before entombing Kim Jong il, the uninvited foreign press continues to magnify over the top coverage and perpetuate rumours that may or may not have any ties to reality.

Since the announcement of the 'Dear Leaders' death, the western media and South Korea's have mutilated his corpse and his country as though they had lopped, scrapped, and tied the operation by a blunt knife.

The media coverage has been incomplete: it has dropped many stitches in a loose fitting garment that barely clothes the body of North Korea's history.

Consider the zeroing in on the misery and starvation of North Koreans. Barely mentioned is the ill luck global warming has visited on the DPRK: sudden flooding wiping out the rice harvest, or the unwelcome affliction of unexpected frost. Furthermore, there is the willful sanctions by the US, the European Union, Australia, and South Korea cutting off food aid and fertilisers, especially since 2008 when Obama and the revanchist Lee Myung bak came into office.

Now these countries, lecture North Korea verbosely and windily on the virtues of democracy and reform that from their bully pulpit they enact policies which not only contradict the high moral tone they have adopted but expose to the world the heartlessness and truly lack of concern for the very people of North Korea they are wanting to rescue from starvation and general misery.

This sleight of hand is cloaked in the false language of promoting human welfare and philanthropy. At the bottom of all this claptrap is a paramount political aim of 'rolling back' North Korea to the point of collapse, internal revolt; in plainer terms: regime change.

As GuamDiary has commented, intelligence agencies in the US and South Korea have a sorry record when it comes to North Korea. Like a Diogenes with a candle burning down to its end, they search in the dark for any hint of what's really going on in the DPRK.

It is a guessing game, and this is no more evident than in resurrecting of the old game of poring over photographs as to who is standing a Kim Jong eun's side or who is absent. We are 'rolled back' to the days of primitive of Kremlinology. And still, the kernel of truth is elusive and even if it is there, you can bloody well count on the US and South Korea to either miss or misinterpret it.

An easier way out of their predicament is to open talks with North Korea. One thing you can say about Kim Jong il is that he never tired in making overtures for talks without preconditions with the US. And each time he made them, the US rebuffed him and heaped on 'preconditions', which when examined were really terms of surrender of national sovereignty, something Kim Jong il would never accept for his country. Not only are the US and ROK insistence on their talking points but they are so framed that the North could not in all good conscience accept them.

As GuamDiary has already pointed out, the US and ROK have a garbled understanding of North Korean history going back 80 years to the day Kim Il Sung began his guerrilla war against the Japanese colonisers. These two countries and allies who have rigorously coordinated their policies towards the DPRK have deliberately pushed the envelop to the extremes: they have revived the Korean War in Cold War techniques in the hope that North Korea will collapse on its own fragility and weight. Wrong!

The pendulum does swing back, and in the end, the US and the ROK, especially the ROK after the 2012 presidential elections, will have to revive in some form or the other the 'Sunshine Policy' which the revanchist Lee Myung bak scuppered within the first few hours he occupied the Blue House. It is not for nothing that the 'unofficial delegation from the South' to pay respect to Kim Jong il had Kim Dae Jung's widow as well as the widow Hyun of the man who founded Hyundai and funded projects in North Korea.

The US still has the chance to release us$900m in food aid and begin thinking of calling a conference on a peace treaty ending the Korean War, a conference which will result in mutual diplomatic recognition as well as modalities to denuclearise the divided Korean peninsula. Is the Obama administration savvy to do this or will it remain prisoner to the Korean War already in its seventh decade?

Occupy Wall Street: the New York Times rewrites history

2011-12-28T06:39:00.000-08:00

As is it wont at year's end, 'The New York Times' its 'Sunday Review' featured a photo essay on the major events of 2011. In featuring 'Occupy Wall Street', the reader's eye got a jolt at the way not only of the way 'the Grey Old Lady' fudged the historical record but chose to rewrite history.

Here's how the 'NYT' saw the end of OWS' occupation of Liberty Plaza [Zuccotti Park]: when the cold weather came, the tents folded, and like caravans of old, moved on. Now, at that a kick in the head?

The newspaper of note in a few words repudiated its own stories and photographs of what was happening on the ground; it simply massaged the record by spinning out a Disney cartoon.

The editors simply came down on the side of the 'one percent', which is not surprising since the 'NYT', a multimillion corporation, listed on the New York Stock Exchange backed up the plutocracy of Wall Street that saw in OWS a direct challenge to its crimes of precipitating the global economic recession of 2008, the widening of economic inequality, and the spread of the sybartic and decadent life style of the coupon clippers, the buying of elections, and ultimately the subversion of American democracy by the rise of a police state at the beckon and call of the corporatisation of the economy and the decadent rule of finance capital.

As every school child know, OWS was uprooted violently by an early morning assault by New York Police at the orders of the billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg who acted on behalf of his class. The tents were uprooted and trashed by the Sanitation department; heads broken by police batons or the raw fists of a police with little respect for the law it is supposed to obey and respect. There were arrests, occupiers roused from sleep in tents, so reminiscent of Nazi storm troopers, the trashing of a 5000 volume lending library, destruction of a medical unit, so on. In sum, the mayor and his thugs acted as though they were in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan, and saw in the peaceful OWS as 'terrorists' cut from the same wood as the Taliban or the Vietcong.

And what happened in New York in November 2011 has happened again and again at Occupy protests through out the land smashed by the steel fist of a militarised police force.

Realty has a way of unmasking the 'NYT's' big! lie [shades of Josef Goebbel]. Did Corporate 'NYT' think that it could through sand in the historical eye? Apparently, yes!

GuamDiary cannot leave it at that. It is time to protest and demand that the 'NYT' admit its fudging of history and offer an apology for its primative, crude sleight of hand of 'correcting history' [an old totalitarian trick!]

US North Korea Policy: reckless and ill discipled!

2011-12-27T07:01:00.000-08:00

The death of Kim Jong il has shown to the world and to North Korea the superficial nature of America's DPRK policy, a policy founded in the confidence of shop worn cliches and the certainty of platitudes that have the skirt the real nature of dealing with North Korea.

The danger in the US attitude, as it often happens, is its swing to the extreme, and the Obama administration's embrace and reenforcement of the George Bush tack towards Kim Jong il. As a result, Obama & co. have taken no chance by closing hewing to the holy writ of keeping the door slammed shut to dealing with the DPRK.

Before considering two flat footed and tone deaf responses to the demise of Kim Jong il, let's set out once more the policy that the Obama administration, in coordination with the revanchist South Korean Lee Myung bak regime, as it pertains to North Korea. One the message to the people of North Korea as a by your way excuse of condolence and the pounding of the war drums when it comes to the North's 'songun' or military first policy with an odd touch of 'Chicken Little...the sky is falling'.

As Guamdiary long commented on the Council on Foreign Relations' special report on Korea, unanimously adopted by the leading US North Korean clerisy from the government, military, universities, think tanks, and the like. Its conclusions have staked out the narrow limits of US North Korea policy. Briefly, they called for 'rolled back of the DPRK', a Cold War term which failed during the Korean War. Furthermore, if anyone was then 'rolled back', it was the US UN led troops by the North Korean army and the Chinese Volunteers. So, the policy of 'roll back' is an indication of the intellectual and moral bankruptcy among the US elite influencing North Korean policy.

Saying this, let's look at the diplomatic gaffe in the US message of condolence, addressed not to the North Korean government but to the North Korean people. How flat footed can that approach be. Obviously, some wag might have thought that it would bolster internal discontent. Wrong. If anything, the Obama administration has never followed the red thread that has run through North Korean history for the last 80 years: the DPRK is an extremely proud and highly nationalistic people and nation. A slight to its leadership is an insult to the North Korean people, no matter how they feel towards their leaders.

Once again, GuamDiary sees proof of the manner of low esteem it holds North Korea, as though it were not an equal in the comity of nations, but as though it were a child whose complaints and desires you listen to with half an ear. Not only is the US tone deaf, it is immured in its own prison of impossible dreams.

How insulting is the Obama administration's gesture in 'dissing' North Korea's leaders, people, and the new head of state Kim Jong eun? The American president's 'bevue' is of the same order as George W Bush calling Kim Jong il a 'pygmy', a remark hardly worthy of a leader of the so called Free World. And then the 'fearless' Bush had to scramble to eat his words when the very same Kim Jong il's country tested a nuclear device! Which all goes to show how anachronistic is US thinking when it comes to North Korea: like a big power trying to make a satellite of an unwilling, proud people, confident in its culture and destiny, in spite of the US' plans of regime change and forcing North Korea to collapse!

We segue now to the endless rhythmic rapping and riffing on the DPRK's reliance on 'songun' or military first policy, which, from the US perspective, endangers of the stability, serenity, and peace of northeast Asia. Nowhere in this scenario of the Goliath that the US, seconded by South Korea, sees in North Korea, menacing its neighbours and pushing the region towards war, do we get the slightest hint that the US is and has been at war with the DPRK since 1950.

Historical memory has faded on the extent of America's bombing of North Korea which flattened the North to the Stone Age. [In fact, visitors to Pyongyang are constantly shown a single building that survived the aerial assault on the North Korean capital, the fire power of which was greater than the destruction of Rotterdam and Dresden!]

So, it is not unreasonable that the DPRK should have ready a large standing army against a hostile US and revanchist South Korea, the more especially in the light of US policy of provoking Pyongyang to trip the wire of war. We saw that in the joint exercises of the US and South Korea along the Northern Limit Line in November 2010 when South Korean shells fell in North Korea's territorial waters and surprise, surprise, the North riposted.

The reactionary Lee Myung bak regime wanted to push the envelope but the US panicked lest it have a third war in Asia on its hands, and stayed the South from further military adventurism.

'Songun' offers internal stability to a regime that has suffered badly economically and that the US and the ROK have sworn to starve to death to hasten its downfall.

So much for sophisticated US North Korean policy: it is bathed in willful ignorance and malice and is stick in the mire of its own narrow ideology and prejudices which keeps the past out of hearing and 'bonne intelligence' out of the ken of its own rationality

Obama the grinch who at Christmas time is denying North Koreans food aid

2011-12-23T07:28:00.000-08:00

There is little to say about president Obama's decision to rethink the long promised us$900m in food aid to starving North Koreans on the heels of the death of Kim Jong il.
The role of a Grinch does not suit the US president, but it seems that he gladly welcomes it at this Christmastide.
For a leader of the 'free' world, who at the drop of the hat, extols the virtues and benefits of democracy, tying food aid to political gains is hardly worthy of the man.
He exhibits more the 'bah, humbug' posturing of Ebernezer Scrooge in Dicken's 'Christmas Carol'.
GuamDiary does not expect a last minute reversal of Grinch Obama's decision to withhold much needed food aid. It won't worry one whit his conscience as he luxuriates in his Christmas holidays on the beaches of Hawaii.
He is in league with the purveyors of want and ignorance at this time of giving. And you can bet it won't disturb his good Christian conscience!

If we remember: the Grinch's heart grows five times touched as it is by Christmas tide; Grinch Obama's, on the contrary, has shriveled five times to the size of hard lump of coal.

Can we really trust US & South Korean intelligence on North Korea?

2011-12-23T07:06:00.000-08:00

Both the US and South Korea spend millions on intelligence, especially following North Korea.
In the wake of much breast beating about how the two countries intelligence failure on having the finger on the pulse of what's going on in the DPRK, we truly have to wonder about and put under a laser beam the information put out by the two governments, acolytes in the press, the universities and think tanks, business circles & the like. On a cost benefit analysis, neither country is get a big bang for its dollar or won spent.
Yeh, we know the intelligence community has a job to do: we question its quality and output for the results are often sloppy, of inferior analyses, and wandering into the celestial stars.
The death of Kim Jong il proved that the whole ball of intelligence wax had more to do with lunar green cheese than realty. The media and the White House and Blue House keep banging the drums of fear and instability in northeast Asia, if not implying that an outbreak of war is on the horizon owing to a power struggle within North Korea's senior military leaders.
What GuamDiary sees is that the US and ROK intelligence network is being payed to mouth the hoary propaganda of the governments that pay them. You get what you pay for, the saying goes, and forced timelines and hothouse nuturing of bankrupt ideologies are what the US and South Korean people are being asked to swallow.
If instability is on the horizon, look to Washington and Seoul for military adventurism and kick 'em in the stomach when it comes to North Korea. The Obama administration and the revanchist Lee Myung bak government in Seoul have bet on the collapse of the DPRK with the death of Kim Jong il. And, surprise, surprise, that ain't going to happen. GuamDiary scratches its head and wonders aloud 'haven't the US and ROK spooks have the slightest klew as to the motor which has driven and continues to drive North Korean history and behavior, yea, these past 80 years?'
The only logic answer is that they are obvious to anything but their own fears, projections, and scenarios which Freud would 'wish fulfillment'.
So, in the end, can we truly trust US and South Korean intelligence on North Korea? We do not deny that the end product of their work has a pinch of salt of versimilitude, but on the whole, we have to read more widely and weigh their conjectives with a cold, critical eye. So we have more reason to distruct US and ROK intelligence, in the final analysis.

Does the DPRK deserve US contempt?

2011-12-22T10:47:00.000-08:00

GuamDiary, observing the US North Korean clerisy's response to the death of Kim Jong il, holds its nose at the noxious odour of scorn that the demise of the North Korean leader has set off.

More to the point, the US & co.'s attitude considers the DPRK not only a failed state, but an inferior nation worthy of its contempt.

It is then little wonder that American scholars, diplomats, intelligence, lawmakers, journalists & the like's haughtiness put them at a disadvantage. Seeing only the tree, they miss the dense growth of trees, plants, and underbrush that make North Korea the country that it is.

As GuamDiary observed, the US and its allies feel threatened by North Korea more out of self styled fear than on actuality. They quake at the thought of having been outmanoeuved in negotiations or hoodwinked by a 'Wizard of Oz', who has humiliated them time after time, which may not be the case.

The incessant tattoo, America's North Korean clerisy beat that 'the DPRK should not be rewarded for bad behaviour' has more to do with their own ideological shortsightedness, if not blindness. They whittle their opinions to a prevailing code of ideas which has not changed much in the last 65 years.

Such intellectual rigidity is its own worst enemy. To these clerics on whom so much money has been wasted in educating them for service to the US government, the return on the US dollar invested is quite meagre.

If you regard North Korea as a wayward child who only understand punishment, to correct its way, well, you've only yourself to blame. Furthermore, the DPRK is not an infant; its leaders do not suggest, by far, a lack of maturity, but rational and calculated thought.

In dealing, say, with the US, it weighs America's undue confidence and smugness, which North Koreans have learnt to exploit to their own advantage, sanctions and saber rattling notwithstanding. It is not for nothing that the US and the present revanchist government of Lee Myung bak in Seoul quiver and quake in formulating policy to North Korea. Their offensive self righteousness lulls them into positions so that they are blind to the danger of failure.

And fail they must for the plain and simple truth they do not view North Korea as a worthy equal in the comity of nations. As such, the DPRK uses the arms of the despised and the wretched of the earth in America's eye, to not only to elude, frustrate, thwart, and ultimately outsmart the US' high handed and the ghetto of diplomatic inaction, to its own advantage.

Consider North Korea's explosion of a nuclear device: in dealing with, for the lack of a better description, the inarticulate and blustery Bush administration, Kim Jong il had put forth a reasonable set of ideas to deal with the North's nuclear programme. But the Bush administration had other ideas: it sought to humiliate North Korea and blew Kim & co. away by dissing them. Well, the next thing you knew, North Korea had the bomb, and that sent Bush's emissaries scurrying back to paper over the damages. And like all the kings men, the couldn't put the Humpty Dumpty of the 'status quo ante' back together again.

And thus it was and thus it is under the Obama administration, which like Bush's before it, with a gaggle of experts and intelligence know next to nothing about North Korea. Is it a lack of trying? Maybe. More likely, the US is led by its nose by its own arrogance, pious belief in the sanctity that it is God's gift to the universe, and dubious moralism.

In other words, the fault lay not in the stars and even less with North Korea, but in the exhibition of contempt it has for the DPRK and its leadership.

US analyses on North Korea: the pits!

2011-12-22T06:45:00.000-08:00

You have to wonder where the arrogant, cock of the walk, shameless claims of US intelligence on the DPRK is going. GuamDiary already commented on the banner headlines that America's wide network of technical gadgets and reliance on inhouse and out analysts, scholars, journalists, and debriefing almost anyone who has gone to North Korea, including friendly foreign diplomats, has compounded the feeling that North Korea is the US' greatest intelligence failure.

Don't take our word for it: listen to what Donald Gregg--senior CIA officer, national security advisor, former ambassador to Seoul, and past president and CEO of the New York based Korea Society--has been saying for the last 15 years or perhaps more. In any number of the KS' public gathering, he never shied away from saying the wide net of US intelligence has come up with next to nothing on what's going on in the DPRK.

And in spite of Gregg's step by step approach of building 'confidence measures' to the North, his work is more or less scraped by the Society, yet he labours on through a programme at Cornell's Maxwell School in keeping a toe in the almost closed door of US DPRK 'private' contacts.

Gregg, however, is the exception. A more cautious approach to intelligence failure got some relief on the PBS News Hour: Margaret Warner interviewed former CIA analyst Robert Carlin, now of Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute. No stranger to North Korea--30 visits, Warner mentioned, he, let's say, was more modest in answering her 'vanilla' questions on why the US knows next to nothing about the DPRK. 'I don't know' or 'I cannot say'.

Carlin thought technically speaking in the field of spookery, the US is quite on top, but it suffers from a poverty of good analyses, even when what's going on in the DPRK, at times, is as plain as the nose on your face. An example, Carlin along with Siegfried Hecker, eminent nuclear scientist, visited North Korea's Yongbyon nuclear complex in 2010. To the US visitors surprise, they found an up to date, state of art reactors in an advanced state.

Hecker's findings has to give one to pause since, surely, wot, a panoply of spy satellites, drones with cameras, & the like, the US should have detected fieverish activity at Yongbyon. Maybe they did bring home the bacon, maybe they didn't. Still, you cannot hide behind national security, to tar and feather the DPRK without proof.

Let's now consider the very below level of analyses, beginning with Victor Cha's opinion piece in the 'New York Times' [20 December 2011], 'China's newest province?' The Georgetown scholar and former Bush White House advisor on Asian Affairs postulates, and repeats the buzz that has been making the rounds in the black rooms of northeast and southeast intelligence, that by the next Lunar or Chinese New York, that is, within the fortnight of the auspicious year of the Dragon [23 January to 6 February 2012] that high ranking, senior DPRK cadre will dump Kim Jong eun, institue a trioka of leadership, and turn to China for support and guidance.

Cha's 'analysis' contradicts what's happening in North Korea: Kim Jong il laboured long and hard to assure his succession by his youngest son, Kim Jong eun; he knitted together a consensus of the military, the core cadre, and the party faithful to this end, long before his death. The matter of succession and from the ground up education of Kim Jong eun had been assured. Notwithstanding, Cha and his ilk's disbelief in anything North Korea says, report after report from Beijing, Seoul, Tokyo, Singapore, etc. outline the modality of succession and the regency of the young Kim, about whom little is known.

As for China, strategically speaking, it always supported North Korea, and no better proof of this is the sending in of Chinese volunteer fighters to struggle alongside North Korea troops to 'rollback' the US UN led troops to the 38 parallel during the Korean War, which, technically never ended, found a 'pis aller' solution in an armistice agreement which is entering its 60 year.

Even China, who patiently and at times grows stays moments of short temper with its neigbour and ally, even China was kept in the darkness of Kim Jong il's death until it was annouced on DPRK television. So, to say, as Cha asserts, Cha has great influence over North Korea, is an exaggeration; China has influence for sure but not as wide and as deep as Cha and other Pyongyangologists like to think.

As to why China backs up North Korea, GuamDiary suggest a reading of Alan Whiting's 1960 Rand Corporation study, 'China crosses the Yalu'. Whiting's analysis is spot on, and in spite of China's improved relations with the US and South Korea, it solidly remains cogent and meaningful today. Russia, too, has revised its assessment of North Korea, and argues for the West's accomodation with Pyongyang, to little success.

You have to wonder, too, how the US and South Korea can shake in their boots at the death of Kim Jong il. Is their fear real? or feigned? It is more or less predicated on self fulfilling claims that North Korea is irrational, and what's more armed with advanced rocketry and primative nuclear devices will set the region on fire and reignite war in the divided Korean peninsula. Hence the endless flow of ink by the US North Korean clerisy's setting off bells and whistles of warming. Give us a break! The image intelligence analyses comes up with, based on the heavily subsidised industry of scholars, spooks, journalists, so on, is one of what the former US senator William Fulbright labelled, 'the US as a cripple giant'.

The fear may be real but unfounded. And any good Freudian would simply say it 'projection' of what the US and the ROK would like to do to North Korea. And there is truth in that: the riposte of North Korea in November 2010 to live fire, joint US South Korea military exercises along the Northern Limit Line within spitting distance of the DPRK's territorial water. Despite a stern warning from Pyongyang that it would answer any violation of its sovereignty, Washington and Seoul dismissed the claim without a by your leave. And what happened: the North replied in kind shelling the military outpost on Yeongpyong island. And quickly did the US stay South Korea's aggressive hand, lest a war broke out.

And therein lies a tale. So distrustful are the US and its ally South Korea, they are unwilling to take, say, Kim Jong il at his word. Like his father, Kim Il Sung, before him, he pushed for negotiations with the US without preconditions, only to be rebuffed. Moreover, North Korea with a hand of low cards, is better at playing poker on the 'tapis vert' of the bargaining table. So unsure is the US of its abilities to negotiate skilfully, they prefer to threaten to the point of opening hostilites with the North.

And this attitude is no more better reflected in the opinion and editorial pages of the right wing 'Wall Street Journal'. They brought out two heavy hitters: Melanie Kirkpatrick, former deputy editor of Murdock's WSJ and now senior fellow at the very conservative Hudson Institute, and John Bolton, whom Newt Gingrich would nominate as his secretary of state were he elected president. These two dance on the grave of Kim Jong il. Doomsday scenario play in their minds, as they descend into belittling a man they disliked if not hated. The language borders on the cartoonish, and does little else but not advance a policy other than fire and brimstone.

Kirkpatrick and Bolton are not so extreme as you might think, they simply say what others do in milder language, but the message remains the same: throw brickbats and vituperate in the comfort of policies that do not and cannot work, or change. And taking a new tack is out of the question for now.

Then there's Lee Sung yoon, research fellow of the National Asia Program, at Princeton and Sue Terry, a senior research scholar at Columbia's Weather East Asian Institute, calling for 'containing the young Kim'. Hidding behind the ready excuse of 'not rewarding North Korea for bad behaviour', you wonder how more successful they in their reading of the innards of US metaphysics of North Korea, could be than in those who long trod this hoary road of failure when they faced Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong il.

You don't reward North Korea. The death of Kim Jong il allows the Obama administration to deny food aid to relieve starvation in North Korea. Why? It's a new ballgame. Is it really?

Or the tin marshal approach of George W. Bush which resulted in allowing the DPRK to test a nuclear devise, solely on the pig headed analyses and mule headed insistance that only the terms the US poses are acceptable, to put it crudely.

Where is the understanding of North Korean history? or the fiercely, proud ulta nationalism that keeps the country alive and behind the Kims & co.?

And what do American taxpayers get for the billions squandered on intelligence services when it comes to North Korea? A mess of potage coloured to a cul de sac ideology. And ain't that the pits?

Kim Jong il

2011-12-21T07:01:00.000-08:00

Don't expect a critical appraisal of the late North Korean leader Kim Jong il. In the global and US media, he has been pilloried and made fun to the point of caricature.

And yet, the very same punditry and chattering classes and extensive networks of intelligence agencies, in the end, have admitted they fail to understand the DPRK. Understandably so, since they are motived and blinded by ideology.

Kim Jong il was no saint, but he was true to the defence of his country and his people who valued freedom and independence than subservience to foreign powers.

North Korea is a country on war standing as it should be: it is at war with the US led UN coalition and South Korea which waged battle against it 61 years ago during the Korean War. A 1953 Armistice Agreement froze the lines of combat that North Korean troops and Chinese volunteers managed to roll back the US to the 38 parallel. And the US and South Korea [who refused to sign the armistice] have not been in the mood to sign a peace treaty since then.

Kim Jong il took over the reins of power after the sudden death of his father Kim Il Sung; he assumed leadership at a time when his Soviets ally disappeared, leaving North Korea short of foreign aid; this linked with natural disasters resulted in widespread starvation which took a heavy tool on North Korea.

Still, he managed to bell the US cat which threatened nuclear war and enter into talks with the Clinton administration which had a rocky history. Washington expected Kim to fail and North Korea to implode. How wrong they were and even now the punditry is wide off the mark mainly out of self imposed ignorance on what's happening in the DPRK.

Yet, Kim never ceased to call for direct negotiations with the US. The Bush and Obama administration have stubbornly proved deaf to his appeals, betting that through denial of food aid, fertilizers, and sanctions, they could bring North Korea to its knees. Wrong again.

The foolish Bush bet on the wrong strategy: the DPRK joined the nuclear club owing to his stupidity and inflexibility, and the US and the revanchist South Korea under the presidency of Lee Myung bak have to live with that!

Up until his death, Kim pushed for ending the Korean War and better relations with Washington. He was not a boy scout in any sense as George W. Bush is not by his war in Iraq, but one thing he was not: he wasn't a clown nor the monster the editorial pages, say, of the 'Wall Street Journal' or the endless babble of the US North Korean clerisy make him out to be.

And yet, there is a body of commentary that try to rationally appraise Kim Jong il, but they are frozen out of the discourse because they would unmask the 'Wizard of Oz' sleight of hand of those who tirelessly work to 'roll back' North Korea.

And that policy has proven and is manifestly bankrupt.

America's 'democratic capitalism' sets a new low

2011-12-21T06:29:00.000-08:00

The US preaches to the world at large that it is the future in everything from soup to nuts.

Well, world take notice: every third American under the age of 23 will end up spending time in prison! In fact, the US has the largest percentage of its population incarcerated in publicly and privately run prisons, mainly the poor, blacks, and browns.

More, as the elites push to cut back on social programmes, in the midst of economic hardship and high unemployment [officially pegged at 8.9 percent, unofficially at 24 percent], popular movements of protest like 'Occupy Wall Street' have tapped into the growing restlessness of the masses, resulting in the unleashing of the police to stifle protest by the use of methods used by US troops and mercenaries in Iraq, Afghanistan, and, yes, Vietnam. New laws are on the books that aim not so much at the already aimed at minorities or the poor but white middle class, young and old, who are more or less better educated and well able to articulate more clearly democratic aims and aspirations guaranteed by the Constitution and common law, which the power elite is trying hard to cripple, restrict, or simply gut. Now, protesters can and will be labelled 'terrorists', and without a by your leave will be put under lock and key without redress. Think Dickens' 'Tale of two cities' and the Bourbon kings recourse to 'lettres de cachet'.

On the other hand, protest movements like the Tea Party underwrite and reinforce the use of draconian laws to preserve, superficially, a way of life [baby boomers] that is fast crumbling before their eyes as they sink into the economic swamp which favours the plutocracy. Religion, for these people, play a role of safe harbour in a tsunami they cannot control.

The plutocracy that buy and sell politicians have succeeded partially in turning back the clock to the days of the age of Robber Barons. They live for privilege and interests that serve their class of bloodsuckers, coupon clippers, and the morally and criminally corrupt who get away with nothing more than writing a cheque and a slap on the wrist, allowing them to continue dancing around the barn fire that ultimately will consume their class...and the rest of us, alas.

Americans are unaware that the ruling class is pursuing a policy of 'gleichschlatung' [bringing into line] laws and controls that best serve the interests of Corporate American and finance capitalism. In a way, the country is going through its own version of Orwell's 'Animal Farm' and Huxley's 'Brave New World'.

Hillary Clinton's empty words

2011-12-20T10:37:00.000-08:00

The death of Kim Jong il caught the US flat footed. So much for the billions the US spends on its intelligence network, which, today, is becoming more focussed on spying on its own people.

Hillary Clinton, grandly, cynically, and falsely, proclaimed that Kim's death has suddenly left northeast Asia strategically problematic. Translation: the Obama administration has a klew how to interpret the rise of the 'Dear Leader's' chosen successor, Kim Jong eun. Plainly put, it knows less about him than you can fill a thimble full of water.

Now, Mme. Clinton knits her broad brow: Kim Jong il's death has put the US, its right wing ally Lee Myung bak in Seoul's Blue House in a bind. Regional stability is threatened, she opines. Wrong. Kim Jong il did not challenge regional stability; Clinton is shoeing the wrong horse. She would do better to look towards Washington and Seoul whose clearly defined and stated policy is and has been 'rolling back North Korea' to the point of its internal collapse, starvation, or making a false step by heating up the frozen Korean War.

Don't take GuamDiary's word for it. Check out the facts: the seemingly endless joint military manoeuvres along the Northern Limit Line with live ammo. In November 2010, in spite of the North's warning that it would respond were the South's live shells falls into its territorial waters, the DPRK forces lived up to its threats. Suddenly the arrogant teeth in the White and Blue Houses were set a chattering, lest war really did start anew in the divided Korean peninsula. And Obama's hand stayed mad Lee Myung bak's hand from responding.

Consider the tying of food aid which Obama and Lee to an over the top political agenda to which the North would never agree. The US and ROK were not in the least concerned with the immiseration and near starvation conditions in the DPRK, brought about by global warming. They held famished North Korea hostage, egging it on to rise up and overthrow Kim Jong il & co.

Clocking her words in deep concern for the physically weakened North Koreans subsisting on a subnormal diet, Clinton captiously thrust out her chest by saying the us$900m in food aid that the US was considering grandly showering the DPRK, owing to the current situation, calls us to reconsider our options. What hypocrisy!

GuamDiary wonders what in God's world does the US spend its money on in funding a gaggle of US North Korean clerics who haven't the least hint of what drives North Korean history. What about the war in Korea where the US led UN troops carpet bombed the North back to the year zero? What about a DPRK, under Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong il and soon Kim Jong eun, motivated by a fierce pride in its independence after fighting Japanese colonialism and visiting a stinging defeat on US designs to wipe out the DPRK during the Korean war?

GuamDiary suggests a look into the very recent past: Clinton scurrying off to Myanmar, not so much to encourage 'democracy' but to cut ties of friendship of Myanmar and North Korea, which she failed to do. The US is keeping to its agenda for regime change in North Korea, do not forget.

You'd think with the death of Kim Jong il, who stubbornly tried to open negotiations with the US with no preconditions, the Obama administration would seize the opportunity for a thaw in the Cold War it unrelentingly pursues against the North. Forget about it!

In the end, Clinton's words ring hollow and false. Yet the winds of change will knock out the rabid anti North Lee Myung bak in 2012 and it looks as though a rewarmed version of the 'Sunshine Policy' will breathe new life. The war in Afghanistan will consume America's energies more than they are worth and the US economy will sink lower and lower on the horizon.

'Jaw, jaw, jaw rather than war, war, war', it is useful to recall Churchill's words. But the US, right now, is a warfare state and remains blind to rewards of negotiation and true regional stability in the Korean peninsula and northeast Asia.

Empty headed thoughts of two North Korean watchers

2011-12-20T08:34:00.000-08:00

The sudden death of Kim Jong il has provided us with an orgy of mindless commentary.

The PBS nightly news hour on Monday 19 December 2011, which boasts that it is the best American news hour in the US, invited two of the 'best and the brightest' of the US North Korean clerisy: Jennifer Lind, professor of government at Dartmouth with ties to the department of defence and CIA-linked Rand Corporation, and the old war horse Dr. Victor Cha.

Lind is a 'Barbie Doll', who wound up will spout the same old tired, hoary speech that Americans have heard about North Korea for a half century or more. She's pretty, smiles, and pouts occasionally but the best that she who dwells on national security matters could come up with was a not so smooth rehash of the what the 'New York Times' lead stories on the demise of Kim Jong il and the scant noise the press could cull on his heir apparent and youngest son Kim Jong un. Her incite on the 'little general', I hear he likes American style basketball...a line straight out of a press release.

Victor Cha has gone to North Korea any number of times and often as part of official White House delegations. Fluent in Korean, you would think that he would know the lay of the land better. Wrong! He let flow the usual psychobabble on the army crushing the young Kim [Wait till after the burial!] when indications in the foreign press point to a settlement on Kim Jong un as his father's successor! So much for a Johnny on the spot observations. Why then should Cha extend himself? His reputation and livelihood are tied to the apron strings of the US government and conservative interests that fund him.

As for the PBS News Hour, they are hardly adventurous: they continue to draw from a list of hired hands who won't depart from the script.

Which leads GuamDiary to conclude with a lead headline on the 'NYT' online paper: 'In Kim's Death, an Extensive Intelligence Failure'. And that bout sums it up for the millions of taxpayer dollars that go into sustaining, maintaining, and training a vacuous class of US North Korean clerisy!

BBC coverage of the death of Kim Jong il

2011-12-19T07:11:00.000-08:00

Moral judgment notwithstanding, Dan Damon's coverage of the death of Kim Jong il is an exercise in negative reporting. Interviewing a photographer who travelled widely in the DPRK, Damon accused him of being 'besotted' by what he saw as the poor man, who had a more critical appreciation of his time in the DPRK, attempted to give a more nuanced view.

Speaking to a prominent Russian Orientalist from the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, Damon cut him off when the scholar offered a different interpretation of the US ROK strategy of regime change in North Korea. A curt thank you very much, and on to the cartoonish view from Seoul or the US on the axis of evil state in Pyongyang.

In other words, Kim Jong il, bad, South Korea and the US good!

Although the BBC marshaled a small army of analysts, writers, talking heads, diplomats, and the like, the major key was to highlight the ignorance of what the West and its extensive network of spies do not know of what's really going on in the DPRK. Listeners are treated to the hoary scenarios of nuclear destruction, threat of advanced rocketry raining down on the innocent and unsuspected neighours of North Korea. The script echoes the B Films Hollywood churns out endlessly with an end of the world denouement. And that is not from today: consider that gem of Cold War cinema 'the Manchurian Candidate', not the remake but the original with Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, and Angela Lansbury, for a quick study in the perfidious nature of North Koreans.

Kim Jong il was a more complex leader and he did not wear the mantle of leadership lightly. He worked diligently for his people who had suffered the crushing burdens of rolling back US UN led forces during the Korean War; are living under an US led embargo for the last 61 years of a war which has to end yet by the signing of a peace treaty; and are the object of a vindictive US and ROK seeking nothing short of regime change in North Korea and the regime complete destruction.

It is to his credit that he was able, despite bad weather which destroyed crops and deaf appeals to agriculturally rich countries for food aid to feed starving North Koreans, to 'outwit' his 'enemies'. Were it not for the utter idiocy of George W. Bush, the DPRK would not have been forced to explode a nuclear device. Were it not for the unfulfilled promises of the Clinton administration to help build light water nuclear reactors to modernise North Korea's power grid so that economic modernisation as the North Koreans see it to progress, the DPRK would not be forced into a corner as its opponents see it.

Kim Jong il had always held his hand out for negotiations without preconditions. But the US, say, did everything it could not to talk to him directly; instead US administrations hid behind the veil of collective discussions in Beijing that from the get go proved that they would lead to nothing but stalemate.

As for the reaction of the man on the street, the BBC chose to broadcast two voices in Seoul: both saying the same thing and fueling the doomsday book of Armageddon that the DPRK would visit on the 'weaker' ROK. Ain't that a kick in the head?

Damon is a writer in residence at the BBC, so it is not impossible that he wrote much of the misleading info during his time slot on BBC radio.

Episcopal Church Real Estate Mammon and Occupy Wall Street

2011-12-18T08:44:00.000-08:00

To the surprise of many, the Episcopal diocese of New York owns a lot of real estate going back to land grants given by the Stuarts more than 300 years ago. Since then its property portfolio has grown fatted like the biblical calf.

During the two months Occupy Wall Street squatted at Liberty or Zucotti Park within a stone's throw from Trinity Church on Wall Street, the Episcopal church allowed occupiers bathroom privileges and bestowed upon them the mansuetude of its Christian calling.

Once OWS was chased out of Zuccotti park by Herr Bloomberg's storm troopers in November 2011, occupiers have been looking for a spot to regroup, gird battle scarred wounds from New York police, and a piece of land to carry out its campaign to stigmatise and bring the one percent of the US population who feast royally on the body of the 99 percent. In plain English, make the rich and the superrich who own in wealth as much as 140 million Americans pay their fair share and end feeding off the middle and working classes and the poor.

OWS found such a haven at Duarte Park on the edge of sprawling Chinatown and the rim of the posh Tribeca, on the junction of Canal Street and the Avenue of the Americas, also known as Sixth Avenue. The land is owned by the Episcopal diocese of New York; it is prettified with shrubbery and some benches. To OWS petition to use this minuscule pinch of land of one of New York City's largest landowners, the Church came down on the side of Mammon and refused permission that was backed up by New York's police ever itching to crack OWS heads.

Nobel laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu as well as other bishops and Episcopal clergy sided with OWS, but the Church firmly held to its firm refusal. And thus, opened marches, civil disobedience, and unwanted publicity on the Church's vast real estate holdings in New York City.

On one hand, had the Church authorities negotiated with OWS on the dos and don'ts if it allowed protesters to squat at Duarte Square, confrontation and bad publicity could have been avoided. On the other, for the Church thinking in dollars and cents and not Christian charity and as Christmas tide approaches in the message of its founder Jesus Christ, it put out a sign 'No room at the inn'. More practically speaking, such things as lawsuits, assurance, legal responsibilities and the like do come into play, yet good lawyers on both sides could have come to a reasonable understanding. The Episcopal diocese thought otherwise, placing its chips on the side of the true string pullers and power elite of New York--the real estate mafia and the banks who got away with plummeting the world in 2008 in a global recession that has not ended yet.

OWS does recognise that Duarte Park could never replicate Zuccotti Park but at least it would have a presence and a visibility the plutocracy and Herr Bloomberg and his storm troopers headed by Raymond Kelly want to deny it. The powers that be think 'out of sight, out of mind' would do quick work of OWS. How wrong they are!

As for the Episcopal church, money means more than the Christian message of charity. How easily is it for these good, fat cat clergy to forget: 'though I speak with the tongues of men and angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal...and without

charity I am nothing'. To OWS, at Christmas time, the Church has answered resoundingly with a 'bah, humbug!'

Customer service

2011-12-18T07:48:00.000-08:00

Ah, customer service. It is a service to cater to customers, seemingly.

The plain two cents truth of the matter is that the service you pay for buys you cold comfort no matter how good and loyal customer you are.

The companies do not care, simply put. Complain, threaten, gather steam in stress and headaches, the service you get on the other end of the telephone is: suck up and get over it. Read: the companies that sop up your money, fees & the like, do give a bloody damn!

The push a pie in the face attitude of poor service comes down to the companies you rely on for service do not care one whit whether you like it or lump it.

And recourse is limited, so they think. You need us more than we need you, they say with insouciance. Is that true? Our diminishing buying power translates into a slimmer bottom line, higher bonuses of senior manager notwithstanding.

Well, tickle me Elmo! If you're not satisfied with the service you're getting...you've a choice. And if you can live without it, simply cancel your subscription or put your money on another horse.

In a society which relies heavily on the consumer, the consumer is king. It's is high time for customers to form a 'union' of their own and vote with feet and purses. If that doesn't improve service, well, the company is the loser and down the tube will it go.

More on Zionist fundamentalism

2011-12-16T06:29:00.000-08:00

Egypt's Salifists have nothing over Jewish fundamentalists living illegally on occupied Palestinian West Bank in trashing a religion they hate. In Egypt, the Copts are the target; in occupied Palestine, its the Arabs Muslims or Christians.

Lately the Jewish extremists trashed and defaced a mosque in Ramallah. 'Bibi' Netenyahu's government could only come up with 'crazy' to explain what had happened.

The explanation is not good enough: it is owing to the Zionist state core beliefs that foster and encourage Jewish extremism in the hopes of driving Arabs off their land so that a 'greater Isreal' will come into being from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River. No rocket science here.

Like it or not, Zionism takes a leaf out imperialist expansion of the 19 century; it is root and branch founded in racialism which the Jews found themselves victims in Hitler's plans of 'lebensraum'. Today, Israel is carrying out its own 'lebensraum' [living space], to clear occupied Palestine of its inhabitants for Jewish settlement.

There is an element of truth in equating Zionism with racism. Netenyahu & co. have much to answer for. Ultimately the spread of Zionist fundamentalism is eroding the very foundations of Zionism in favour of a theocracy based more on politics than religion.

No, the defacing of the mosque in Ramallah is not 'crazy', it is part and parcel of Zionism itself.

One only has to think of the Brooklyn born Baruch Goldstein who with his Uzi to kill and wound the faithful inside the Ibrahim Mosque at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron in 1994.

Goldstein was a follower of Brooklyn born Meir Kahane who elaborated a philosophy which can only best be described as a page out of Nazi ideology. That poison has infected Zionist fundamentalism...how could it not, the more especially since its wood is cut from the same tree.

Almost 50 percent of Americans are poor or low income

2011-12-15T07:27:00.000-08:00

Three cheers for the much abused 'Occupy Wall Street' movement that shone light on the growing inequality in the US.

And now, the latest US Census data not only confirm that assertion but indicate that soon more than half the US population will fall into poverty or diminish income brackets which mean the same thing.

Listening to the dim and delusional Republican candidates jostling for the nod to the Elephant's party's nomination for president in 2012, the poor only have themselves to blame.

Listen to Newt: abolish child labour laws; let the young learn what it means to work! as he feeds high on the hog on lavish government handouts and falls all over himself to please his much young, third wife in bathing in holy water and sucking up to the reactionary Catholic hierarchy.

And then there's Mitt who has experience in running a company: go tell that to the Marines. You bought and sold companies and whistled all the way to the bank with millions whilst you destroyed companies and threw thousands out of work with little to fall back on.

The US is watching the last gasp of the baby boomers who with age have turned to religion and hold tenaciously to privileges they're unwilling to pass on to the next generations. Children of parents who suffered through the Great Depression, they, too, are victims to the balm of the one percent or one tenth of one percent who own a good 40 percent of the country's gross domestic product. And they willing become the plutocrats' cat's paw as they are assailed by an economy that takes no victims unless they are from the ruling class.

Yes. Virginia there is a Santa Claus for the rich but not the poor.

Israel cracks down on the religious extremists settlers

2011-12-15T06:58:00.000-08:00

The chickens have come home to roost in Israel: the Zionist state's policy to remove Palestinians from their own land in favour of illegal land grabs and settler colonies has backfired.

The extremist religious zealots have now attacked the Israeli army which has over 44 years of occupation of the West Bank has done everything to come to their aid and comfort.

Right wing Likud head 'Bibi' Netenyahu has to find it galling to his vision of an Israel from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River that he is viewed by Jewish terrorists who dare attack the iron fist of the Zionist state--the 'Tsahal'.

Now Netenyahu & co. have decreed that the same laws that apply to Palestinians will and shall apply to Jewish extremists. The kid gloves are off, it seems.

Forced into this decision, Israel is weathering a further indication of the decline of the Zionism: is it a bellwether of the implosion of Israel?

US leaves Iraq militarily but leaves a light on

2011-12-15T06:34:00.000-08:00

No matter how much spin Barack Obama puts on the 'stupid war' GW Bush & co. visited on Iraq, he cannot escape the fact that it was the wrong war at the wrong time at the wrong place. In four words it best can be summed up: it was a colossal failure.

It weakened the US militarily, economically, and what's more corrupted its 'democratic' soul. Today's 'New York Times' tells a horror story of the degenerate and dehumanising behaviour of American troops [and hired mercenaries], based on documents which the departing US military threw away for dashing for an early exit.

Accounts of the no holds bared interrogations, torture, and violent death of innocent Iraqi civilians, in the name of a civilising mission which was anything but high minded or refined or morally elevating. They are testimony to rise of a mercenary state, a terrorist state that tarted up in the language of hype and spin and in this year end holiday season of wet dreams of sugar and spice and everything nice.

Obama's welcoming home the troops is an example of 'I am alright Jack!'. A cheer for a job well done and all that jazz.

Yet the US leaves behind an embassy fortified by the presence of 16.000 Hessians motived by private gain and fat salaries the impoverish US man on the street without work and a prayer of ever finding one has to sustain and support. And for what? To tart up a botched failure of a war and to protect access to Iraqi oil and maintain an imperial presence in the Arab world which will further bankrupt America.

Let's face it: America's imperial Rome aspirations and pretensions are unsustainable as the country teetered on the rim of depression. The US' need to dominate is not so surprising mimicking Hitler's policy of 'gleichanshaltung', a policy of imposing a tightly coordinated and no wiggle room totalitarian rule on all aspects of American society. Consider the trampling of the Bill of Rights [which today are 220 years old!], the enacting of the Bourbon kings' 'lettres de cachet' whereby any American can be thrown into the slammer for good and with the key to his cell thrown into the drink.

Such are the dire consequences of the demands of US corporatism!

Lee Kwan Yew's bilingualism journey

2011-12-14T07:07:00.000-08:00

Launched at the end of November 2012, the aging and ailing power behind the throne of Singapore Lee Kwan Yew's latest musing has appeared in Chinese and English: 'My lifelong challenge Singapore's bilingual journey'.

On one hand raised in a household where English and Malay were spoken, English educated Lee struggled as head of the People's Action Party to learn Chinese--a dialect Hokkien and Mandarin. For him, learning them as an adult, no matter how fluent he became, psychologically it challenged a man of strong ego like him that he never was complete master of his Han ancestors' languages.

On the other hand, in 2009, he openly admitted that he was wrong to impose mastery of English as a common language for the plain and simple truth the Chinese young had become alienated from their language. Before imposing English as a common language which eminently made good common sense since not all Singaporeans are of Chinese origin. To create a new nation and a national identity, the PAP had to consider the Malays and Tamil speaking Indians who also are Singaporeans.

Lee's apology shrouds even more the hidden history of early Singapore. One to break the hold of the Chinese left wing and cultural nationalists, he suppressed the use of dialects in favour of Mandarin as a second language for Chinese. By doing this, he broke with his allies in his own party and adopted the recommendations of the British colonial authorities faced with a growing militancy among the Chinese educated who had funded and supported the Chinese language Nanyang University which Lee as prime minister emasculated and turned it into another university following the paradigm of bilingualism.

Now Singapore is beset by a falling birthrate among its own, reliance on infusions of Chinese from Communist China is a major source of keeping the dominance of the Chinese in Singapore. From here to there, it is not surprising to hear Lee crow eloquent about bilingualism and embrace of Mandarin. It has to be a crushing blow to his ego that as his 10 decade of life looms large, he has to made a volte face on Mandarin and encouraging a better Chinese educated Singapore--a goal he forcefully fought against to attain and maintain PAP dominance of Singapore's power elite.

Haddad's 'Palestine'

2011-12-13T07:23:00.000-08:00

Alas Tunisian born Hubert Abraham Haddad's poignant novel 'Palestine' is not readily available in an English translation.

Haddad is a Jew living and writing in France. His literary accomplishments are long and varied as truly he is gifted.

'Palestine' has won two prizes: 'Prix des cinq continents de la francophonie [2008] and 'Prix renaudot' [2009].

Haddad dwells on the violence and repression of the Israeli occupation in Hebron as seen through the eyes of an Israeli soldier taken prisoner by a Palestinian terrorist cell. 'Palestine' is one and at the same time, not only a young woman who tends to his wounds but also the embodiment of the suffering and humiliation of 44 years of Israeli occupation.

Cham who becomes Nessim physically resembles Palestine's brother; he is the mirror image of the cancer of oppression that the Zionist state and settlers are visiting in the occupied West Bank, specifically here in Hebron, the site of the Tomb of the Patriarchs, commonly revered by Jew and Muslim alike.

As Nessim, Cham is psychologically transformed as he witnesses the mindless and deliberate effects of Israel's policy to drive Palestinians off their land and destroy, unsuccessfully, their soul. Empathy takes hold of his heart and soul towards Palestine as he submits to the daily routine of occupation.

The story's denouement is explosive as it conveys the state of Israel's lawlessness and absence of humanity.

If anything Haddad's 'Palestine' is a testament to Palestinians who are not an invented people.

Guamdiary thinks that were Haddad's novel rendered in English, it would take a courageous publish willing to lose money in the current, mad climate of US politics and utterly intellectually and morally ignorant culture. Yet, we feel that is worth the try!

David Cameron's Jimmy Cayne moment in Brussels

2011-12-12T07:29:00.000-08:00

Jimmy Cayne is the disgraced banker who brought down Bear Stearns in 2008, a forerunner of the global markets crash. What has David Cameron have in common with the pot smoking Cayne?

Rewind the film of history to 1998, to the crash of the debacle of Long term Capital Management which almost brought down finance capitalism. The big bracket banks, under the pressure of the Clinton administration, met to rescue the markets by shelling out of deep pockets of theirs LTCM. Jimmy Cayne was the sole exception: he is famously heard to say his hands did not reach to his pockets.

The mighty wizards of American financial capitalism never forgot Cayne's arrogance. So in 2008 when Bear Stearns' head was on the block, Hank Paulson & co. let the rough and tumble brokerage die an ignoble death.

Fastforward to the meeting of the 27 European countries in Brussels. David Cameron like Cayne refused to go along to rescue the Euro and stabilise the shaking pillars of finance capitalism. He held out for special privileges for the City in London which played its shameful part in provoking the 2008 global recession, and on which Cameron as prime minister continues to support and rely on, whilst his government's programmes are driving the UK to wreak and ruin.

Continental Europe will not forget Cameron's perfidy. And soon the day will come, as it surely will, when he is going to come hat and hand for a bailout. And then, continental Europe will judge him severely and humiliation. The UK owing to Cameron's petty mindedness will sink to the rank of a fifth class power and feast on salted crow!

'Light on the Lotus Hill': an episode in Singapore's forgotten history

2011-12-10T10:27:00.001-08:00

The island city state of Singapore boasts of its first world economy, fine universities, think tanks, and the genius of its peoples--its only resource. Yet, during almost a half century of independence, its universities have produced little in the way noteworthy of its past, other than endless boasting of the PAP.

Unearthing Singapore's forgotten history is seemingly left to amateur history buffs. 'Light on the Lotus Hill' is one notable example. Originally published as a book by Chan Cha Wah, holder of a master's in anthropology from the London School of Economics, in 2009, it follows the life of the Venerable Pu Liang, the eight about of the Shang Lin monastery, who gave aid to and support of Nanyang Volunteers who left Singapore to work on the Burma Road, the only link to the outside world to supply the land locked Chinese resistance to the Japanese armies.

The good abbot was a living example of the virtues of his religious calling and worked closely with the China Relief Fund during the Sino Japanese war that began in 1937. He opened the monastery to fleeing Singaporeans from the Japanese bombing of Singapore in year end 1941, as well as using its large grounds then on Ballestier Road as a school for drivers and mechanics of trucks that they would use in maintaining and services and transporting supplies in American made trucks on the Burma Road.

From 1937 to the entry of Japanese troops in Singapore in 1942, Chinese in Nanyang [Singapore] raised funds, educated the public to advancing imperial Japan's designs on China and beyond, recruited volunteers notably for the Burma Road, through the China Relief Fund.

The Venerable Pu Liang played his part. During the infamous 'Sook Ching', the Japanese occupiers arrested him and two monks; they were executed in Changi beach.

It is to Chan's credited that he not only documented the eight abbot of the Shang Lin monastery's life but also his support of aiding and comforting the victims of Japanese aggression, raising money--donation of the faithfuls' contributions at Vesak day--and opening the monastery grounds as a school and training ground of Nanyang Volunteers for the Burma Road, he has written, produced, and directed a riveting documentary on the life of Pu Liang--the light on the lotus hill.

Chan's documentary is currently entered in the Imperial War Museums competition.

Were it not for the intellectual curiosity of Singaporeans like Chan Cha Wah, the hidden history of Singapore would remain for too many years more under the morass of time.

'Light on the Lotus Hill' reclaims its rightful spot in Singapore's history. It is only hoped that others follow Chan's inclinations. It is a sad commentary that the Merlion island's history is left fallow.

lbion Cameron plays the Perfidious card

2011-12-09T05:42:00.000-08:00

It should come as no surprise that UK prime minister David Cameron played the traditional role of 'Perfidious Albion' at the talks in Brussels to save the European Union.

Traditionally, the UK has always stood aloof from continental Europe but for the times when conflict--usually war--challenged its interests.

Consider the Great War: Britain fought the rising Hun that challenged it economically as well as militarily. Once vanquished, thanks to the intervention of the US, London quickly picked up its marbles, withdrawing into the comfort of its own 'Little England'. Continental Europe was left to its own devices thank you very much.

Now, Cameron is playing the same old game with the Euro, which the UK refused to support, unless Germany and France would recognise London's special rights. Germany's Angela Merkel demurred, and France's Nicolas Sarkozy tersely remarked that the British prime minister missed the golden opportunity to keep his mouth shut.

Cameron simply wanted to protect London's parochial designs. By drawing the line in the sand, he has marginalised the UK and is hastening the decline of the UK where the sun never set on its empire, to a fourth rate power. Even his American allies have loosened the ties of their special relations, thereby multiplying the effect of diminishing the UK's role in Europe. Now, thanks to Cameron, London is a backwater, London being a financial centre notwithstanding.

The UK's austerity vise has also contribution to breaking social peace through strikes, riots, and growing impoverishment.

By upholding the banner of 'Perfidious Albion', Cameron is being crushed by his small mindedness and myopic view of Europe.

Littered with books

2011-12-08T07:30:00.000-08:00

'Littered with books' is a wonderful, award winning, independent bookshop in Singapore's Duxton Road in the Tanjung Pagar district.

A quiet retreat, it is well stocked and don't be surprised if a cat or two finds its way among your feet.

LWB has the ambiance, say, a Barbara Pym would find congenial.

Anyone going to Singapore should not deny himself a visit to LWB.

Is the PAP the only political party in Singapore?

2011-12-08T07:19:00.000-08:00

Anyone reading 'The Straits Times' would come away with the impression that the only game in town is the People's Action Party. Yet in the 2011 General Election Singaporeans sent six opposition candidates to Parliament, causing consternation among the ruling elite.

Still, the 'Times' hardly breathes a word on the Workers' Party which broke PAP's stride, especially in Aljunied where the longtime PAP favourite and minister George Yeo went down to defeat.

WP's significant showing has sent PAP into soul searching, and the 'Times' prints endless articles in the ruling party's intentions of trying harder in order to respond to the changing tastes and aspirations of Singaporeans.

You have to go to social networks to hear the opposition parties for they are steadfastly denied any space in the media which PAP has erected a firewall to keep them out of public view.

Mme. Clinton goes to Naypyidaw

2011-12-01T17:47:00.000-08:00

Without fanfare, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton has come to Myanmar.
Her visit was carefully choregraphed as a result of president Obama's meeting with Burmese authorities in Indonesia during a meeting of Asian Pacific states.
A secretary of state has not visited Myanmar or Burma since John Foster Dulles in 1956.
Clinton met with president Thine Sein at Naypyidaw, the new Burmese capital. According to reports, she handed him a letter from Obama and discussed means to open full relations with a Myanmar where the generals have taken to wearing civilian cloth. As a result, reforms are in the air to widen avenues to a civil society, as well as opening a window to a wider world within, it has to be stressed, from a Birman standpoint.
The US is badly informed about what's happening in Myanmar. It, however, does want to seize an opportunity to twist the Chinese tiger's tail. China has never boycotted Myanmar; it has 'rectified borders' with Burma a half century ago, thereby establishing friendly relations. More recently, Beijing's dynamic economy has moved in swiftly overwhelming Myanmar's industries. And the Chinese have acted arrogantly and crudely prompting Naypyidaw to cancel a dam project which China sorely needs.
Although Thein Sein's motives remain unclear, one thing is certain, he's looking to wiggle out from under China's heavy hand. His desire is welcome by the US that is looking to mate China in the Asia Pacific region. Which brings us back to Clinton's presence in Myanmar. In a way, it's a mutal Christmas gift these exploratory talks.
Another concern of Obama is Myanmar's relations with North Korea. Before flying in to the Birman capitol, Clinton had talks with her South Korean allies in Seoul. Isolating North Korea is top priority for these two countries. It is doubtful that Myanmar will distance itself from the DPRK, the more especially since things on the ground there have evolved without the guiding hand of America's bienfaisance. If the US' track record is any signpost, Washington will soon prove as heavy handed as the Chinese in dealing with Birman sensibilities on the matter of North Korea.
For the moment, prospects look bright, but has US diplomacy improved since Foster Dulles visit in 1956?

Arrogance & disconnectedness

2011-11-20T12:18:00.000-08:00

In South Korea, younger members of the Grand National Party called up its leader Lee Myung bak, president of South Korea, and party elders to apologise for being arrogant and disconnected from ordinary South Koreans in the wake of the GNP's loss of Seoul to Park Woon soon.
The 25 young GNP lawmakers sensed an impending defeat of their party in the 2012 presidential elections. A major cause of popular disaffection is the growing inequality of income and opportunity and unemployment.
It boogles the mind that, say, a group of 25 US Republican members of Congress calling up Mitch McConnell and John Boehner and Eric Cantor to apologise for arrogance and the growing disenchantment with the Republican party that has sold its soul to the banks and Corporate America and fill pockets of their with kickbacks and huge donations. In other words, the Republic party has become the shill of the one percent that own 40 percent of GDP and pull the strings of the puppets they buy in Washington.
Such a scenario is unimaginable until the party of Elephants go down in blazing defeat at the polls or percipate a depression so that the rich and the super rich pay as little taxes they are obliged to by law. And even then....it is difficult to envisage breast beating, public apologies, and the donning of political sack cloth!

Herr Bloomberg's police state

2011-11-18T05:30:00.000-08:00

Speaking in measured tones, Herr Bloomberg has quietly been setting up a police state in New York, to crush 'Occupy Wall Street'.
No better example is the 1:15 am police attach on the OWS at Zuccotti or Liberty Square.
OWS has shaken the pillars of New York's finance capitalism and has posed a serious challenge to Corporate America that pulls the strings in Washington so that the puppets they buy in Congress willingly do their bidding thanks to infusions of big bucks.
With each day, the protesters have increased the ill ease of the plutocrats and power elite and their rag tag army of camp followers to such a point something had to be done with an iron fist.
Herr Bloomberg's police has resurrected a network of surveillance of not only the protesters but any New Yorker who expresses a favourable opinion of OWS, as well as expresses keen criticism of his disgraceful manner of governing which can only favour the monied classes making up the one percent who own 40 percent, and perhaps more, of America's wealth. Could Herr Bloomberg act otherwise, a billionaire himself?
The New York mayor has curtailed press coverage of OWS marches, protests, and events, even going so far as to having reporters arrested by his Blue Shirts, headed by the swollen headed Ray Kelly who boasts of the New York Police Department's ties to the CIA and other spy organisations, We call this intimidation, but it's much more. Herr Bloomberg and his storm troopers are trampling on the US Constitutions and the right of citizens to protest and expression their opinions. He is practising 'prior restraint' which the US Supreme Court has struck down as illegal.
But does Herr Bloomberg care? Hardly. He is there to wage class warfare with his police in battle gear as though they were fighting in the marshes of Iraq or the mountains of Afghanistan or the jungles of Vietnam.
Herr Bloomberg's attacks on the fundamental rights of New Yorkers reminds us of the policy of 'augleichung' which Hitler imposed on Germany 80 years or so ago.
Strip the seemingly reasonable veneer off Herr Bloomberg's persona, you will find the fascist in the making.
The economic crisis of 2008 has exposed the corruption and decadence of America; OWS' voice has resonated loudly across the land and the global, saying we won't take it any more and we denounce and challenge the war Herr Bloomberg & his crowd are waging against the poor, the working and middle classes.
And look at Herr Bloomberg's language: first responders translates into his army of Blue Shirts batons drawn, pepper spray and rubber bullets ready for use, to put down any citizens' challenge to the system.
Herr Bloomberg may get cheers from his fellow coupon clippers and plutocrats and the decadent ruling class, but he and they are on the losing side of the battle!

Israeli style, NY police disperse Occupy Wall Street

2011-11-15T07:50:00.000-08:00

At 1:15 am, with heliocopters hovering overhead, flashing blinding lights, more than 500 New York police in battle gear, tinted visors, baton in hand, with gas sprays ready, order the protestors at Zuccotti or Liberty Park to vacate immediately and take belongings with them. Those who resisted would and were arrested. The police had id badges hidden. Already barriers had been thrown up in a wide area that even stopped people leaving or going to work with no other alternative to body searches.
Hardly had the command been given the police forcefully evicted the protesters even though the majority were leaving.
Some 70 [perhaps more] practising civil disobedience were arrested and manhandled, including a member of the New York City Council. Others avoiding arrested were hit on the head by batons and roughly herded out of the immediate area on the eve of the third month occupation in the city's financial district.
News of the eviction had spread through the social network; supporters came rushing to the expelled protesters' aid. Media were on the spot: the better coverage is found on WBAI-FM a New York affiliate of the Pacifica Foundation, Amy Goodman's 'Democracy Now', Al Jazeera English, the BBC; the local New York media more or less, accepted mayor Michael Bloomberg's sophistry: the early morning raid had one and only one object: sanitation and fire prevention. Really...................
The Israeli style assault falls into a coordinated pattern within the last 48 hours to hyperactively close down OWS sites in Portland, Oregon, Salt Lake City, Utah, and New York. The military style action violates Constitutional rights and is closer to the expulsion of Palestinians from their land, Afghani from villages, Iraqi from homes, and Vietnamese 40 years ago. Yes, the Occupiers had hit the ruling classes exposed, corrupt nerves, and they reacted brutally, savagely, and with a by your leave ruthlessness.
Tonight a forum at the elite Council on Foreign Relations on OWS should prove interesting. The US mayors who front for the banks, chamber of commerce, and corporate America have behaved spectacularly stupid. As such, they have and will continue to help expand the message of the Occupiers. OWS has changed the national discourse: already thanks to their call, hundreds of millions have gone from big bracket banks into credit unions. OWS has shaken up the status quo and stressed the bankruptcy of America's political system. They are to be feared, but they seem fearless in the face of growing government repression.
Good luck to OWS as they shake the pillars of Corporate America and finance capitalism who are picking on the bones of the working and middle classes and the poor.

US still hopes for the 'conversion' of North Korea?

2011-11-12T07:01:00.000-08:00

During the post ww2 years, the reactionary pope Pius xii urged his faithful to pray for the conversion of Russia and all the countries that had fallen under its long, Communist shadow.
When it comes to North Korea, the US and its North Korean clerisy walk in the path Pius trod. And they have spectacularly failed: North Korea has not imploded; it has not collapsed; it has not had an epiphany to see the error of its ways, repent, and convert to American style 'democracy'.
You would think with a path of failure, the US and its talking heads, advsiors, ivy leagued ph.d.s, slush funded foundations and think tanks would take a different tack. GuamDiary had alerted its readers of the single minded pursuit of the blind hound that is US policy in its blog on Victor Cha's opinion piece in the 'Financial Times of London'.
You may scratch your head as to the drop of US policy that triggered the DPRK testing of a nuclear device. There's no need to dwell long on the cause: look at George W. Bush's 'principled', kick 'em in the labonza' approach to North Korea. And boy did he and his minions backpaddle fast. Saying this, like thee Bourbons, Bush & Obama for that matter, have learnt nothing in elaborating a 'realistic' North Korea policy: they have learnt nothing,forgotten everything!

The New York Times & North Korea

2011-11-09T07:41:00.000-08:00

Is there something about the slight shift in 'The New York Times' coverage of North Korea that we should know?
NYT in stories, analyses, and editorials has walked lockstep with hard line US policy.
Well, today, it has a 'pictorial essay' of North Koreans at a football match, well dressed students descending a stair well, and a reveler in a night club at a Kumgang san [Diamond Mountain] hotel having a swell time at karaoke.
A few weeks ago, the Grey Lady of American journalism was warning in an editorial of the dangers of North Korea's reckless nuclear programme, as well as its intransigence in boycotting the six party talks in Beijing. And then, there are the articles filed from Seoul, of the DPRK's collapse, famine, lack of hard currency, and so on.
Is the NYT now telling us of a softening of the Obama administration's tack? Maybe the decision of the hard line government of South Korea's president Lee Myung bak to deliver much needed medical supplies to the North is a clue?
Lee is a fierce adversary of Kim Jong il, and a self styled fancier of pushing the North Korean leader to the edge of war, if not starvation, and regime collapse. Ironically, the ROK leader's strategy backfired when he and the US conducted war exercises with live ammo within spitting distance of North Korea's territorial waters in the Northern Limit Line in November 2010. The saber rattlers' shells landed in the DPRK which riposted hitting an ROK military base on Yeongpyeong island. That moment of braggadocio gave Obama food for thought. The US was unwilling to restart the quiescent 67 year old Korean War and stayed Lee's plans for more military exercises. Washington was in no mood for a third war in Asia, nor would China nor Russia stand for it.
So what's happening at the present moment? Will Obama deliver on his promise of us$900 million in food aid, in order the relieve famine in the DPRK? Will there be an announcement of a reprise of talks in Beijing?
GuamDiary cannot say for sure. Nonetheless, it keeps an alert eye open.
Once before the US and the world had a more sympathetic and nuanced appreciation of the DPRK in February 2009. At that time, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra preformed an all 'American' programme in Pyongyang, to much acclaim. The good will that the event displayed had the half life of a yet unknown element, and then nothing but the same old hard cheese of US foreign policy urged on by the hardliners among the US North Korean clerisy.
Is another opening on the horizon?

Netenyahu 'menteur', Bibi the liar

2011-11-08T07:24:00.000-08:00

Overhead at the recent G-20 meeting at Cannes, the following exchange between presidents Sarkozy and Obama: The US chief executive was warily asking the French president why France cast its vote to allow Palestine into UNESCO as a full member. Sarko replied to words of this effect: 'Je ne peux le blairer. C'est un menteur!' or 'I cannot stand the man, he's a liar!'. To which Obama with heavy heart responded, 'you may not like him, but I have to deal with him every day'.
So, the cat's out of the bag: the US is Israel's toy to play with as it sees fit.
Netenyahu has gone off on a lunatic binge, as GuamDiary sees it. He's willing to go to war with Iran from a safe distance of firing ranges in the Negev, but what boots can he put on the ground to 'bell his nemesis Iran's cat?' None to speak of, unless he's counting on the US, UK, and the European Union to come to his assistance. Dream on little man.
As GuamDiary reminds its readers, this is not 1956 when Israel spearheaded the Anglo French Israeli invasion of Egypt to seize the nationalised Suez Canal.
At that time, president Eisenhower sent Menachem Goldmann World Zionist chair to Ben Gurion with a warning unless Israel withdraws, the US will cut off all economic and military aid. Also at that moment thanks to the dirty three's invasion to topple Nasser, Russia gained a foothold in the Arab world, much to Israel's sorrows. Ben Gurion withdrew but it held the Sinai as booty, and England and France's designs withered away to ashes.
Today, the US is Israel's captives: the US Congress is Israel's 'wooden horse": you've evangelical Christian Zionists and Jews like Eric Cantor and Howard Berman and Joe Liberman who profess allegiance first and foremost to the Zionist state, then to the US. The Israeli lobby has tonnes of cash and a good propaganda arm to defeat many a candidate who dares to criticise Israel's self aggrandising policy at the expense of the Palestinians whose land it is occupying for the last 44 year and has illegally seized a good swath of its for implanting illegal Jewish immigrants, in order to turn Palestine into Greater Israel with segregated pockets for Palestinians.
Anything Netenyahu says is suspect and lacks the ring of truth. In a way, he has turned himself into the stereotype of the anti Semites. And he's willing to self destruct along with the world to realise his impossible dreams.

Why isn't Israel labelled a 'pirate state'?

2011-11-07T07:16:00.000-08:00

The Israeli navy prevented an Irish and a Canadian boat from reaching Gaza on 5/6 November 2011. Israel rough handedly seized the two ships with a total of 27 passengers--peaceniks, former parliamentarians, journalists--from breaking its illegal blockade of the Gaza Strip.
No one calls the Zionist state's seizure, which almost sank the boats, on international waters, on the high seas 'an act of piracy'. Why? For that is what Israel is 'a pirate state' with little or no regard for international laws and conventions, except when it favours Israel aims and designs.
The 'mini Peace Flotilla' failed, but that won't stop others from trying until the blockade is broken. Israel's stupid spat with Turkey gave an edge to the 'blockade runners': one, it could bring little pressure on Ankara to stop the vessels from steaming out of Turkish ports; two, the 63 years of friendship and cooperation are broken, thereby allowing Turkey a free hand to extend its influence in the Arab world, central Asia, and move closer to Iran. Not only that, alienating Turkey has put Israeli plans on warning since Turkey is claiming rights to an area off Israel and Cyprus that may contain billions of cubic litres of natural gas, which Israel now has to import from Egypt to meet at least 40 percent of its energy needs. And to make matters worse, the gas pipeline from Egypt since the fall of Mubarak has been blown up five times.
The pirate's reach is long and extends into the houses of the American Congress: consider the bill before a lower house committee to label any participation in Peace Flotillas as an act of terrorism. Translation: peaceniks are now to be considered 'terrorists'.
The logic is perverse if not insane. Yes, it's a case of blaming the victim.
Rather than labelling peaceniks 'terrorists', it would be better to tar and feather Israel for piracy on the high seas and bring plaint against the Zionist state before the International Court of Justice.
Hillary Clinton is so willing to do Israel's dirty business which simply makes the case that the US never can be a disinterested party in the creation of a two state solution in Israel/Palestine.
Wait there's more, the Obama administration is sweating purfusely, a very cold sweat of fear that Israel will bomb Iran without telling it beforehand. The implications, as GuamDiary has commented, will throw the region into turmoil and drag the US into another war of disastrous consequences. As we noted, 2011 is not 1956 when Israeli forces invaded Egypt along with the UK and France.
Israel has gone insane under its right wing ideologues.

China buys North Korean coal

2011-11-06T12:24:00.000-08:00

Pouring over Chinese data, South Korea's IBK Economic Research Institute has concluded almost a tripling of North Korea's anthracite coal to China this year. In other words, coal export rose from 3,04 million tonnes to 8,42 million tonnes, worth us$852 million.
The US and South Korea have tried every trick in their grab bag of foul and fair means to punish North Korea until it accepts demands of theirs that Kim Jong il & co. deem unacceptable.
Hear the gnashing of teeth in Washington and Seoul as China benefits from the DPRK's vast wealth in minerals which through the US and South Korea's spectacularly stupid foreign policy they have no access to.
Smug and self righteous, the US and ROK are not punishing North Korea, you can say, only themselves,to help develop the DPRK. And China laughs as does North Korea the recipient of hard foreign currency that escape the US ROK embargo.
Who has the last laugh, we ask you?

Israel prepares to bomb Iran

2011-11-06T08:20:00.000-08:00

Is the right wing Likud Israeli prime minister 'Bib' Netenyahu's announcement that Israel is contemplating attacking Iran's 'nuclear' installation more than a ploy to scare the Iranians? You better believe it.
Now the grand old man of Israeli politics, president Shimon Peres has begun beating the drums of war. His message his tam taming is beating out says 'it looks more and more likely Israeli is going to attack Iran'. Yet, he covers himself by saying, we should not neglect alternatives.
The Zionist state is playing with fire: it is trying to square the circle by swinging a club of fear on one hand, and on the other, offering soothing balm to ease the sting of Israel's threats.
Objectively speaking, the aggressive Zionist politicians are feeling entrapped, owing to their inflexibility to adapt to changing conditions in West Asia and in the Arab world. They are taking advantage of economic crisis in Europe which threatens the US banks and the American economy by rapping on war, as if they think that the US and the European Union will go to war with Iran if Israel makes the first move.
We are no longer in 1956 when Israel grabbed the Sinai and went into Egypt, precipitating the Anglo French Suez Crisis. We are 55 years later with a nuclear Israel, ready to declench a mushroom cloud on Iran.
GuamDiary has already expressed its feeling that as Israel's prestige in the Middle East has declined, the Zionist state's elite has gone mad, their G-d will destroy them if they attack Iran. The tragedy, however, is that Israel's self 'Goetterdaemmerung' will bring down the rest of the world.

Gangarene alerte chez Murdoch

2011-11-06T08:06:00.000-08:00

Media Mogul Rupert Murdoch's empire is stricken with spreading gangarene. Already he has had to lop off the money making 'News of the World' to stave off the spreading disease of scandal that in the longer run will topple him and his family.
The 'fer de lance' which is 'The Guardian' announces that as a reward to 'NOTW's' editor Rebekah Brooks a severence packet of us$2,7 million for her loyalty? as a guarantee to keep her mouth shut?
Younger son James has soon to testify again before a parliamentary committee to answer new evidence which strongly challenges his original business school blather when he first appeared before the parliamentarians in summer 2011.
More, it looks that more and more journalists are willing to talk to authorities about the widespread telephone hacking of royals, missing and dead youth, elected officials peccadillos, so on. The rot has spread to the profitable British 'Sun' and may as well become noticeable in the 'Sunday Times', which Murdoch owns.
Investigation of hacking of 9/11 victims and families in the US appear quiescent at present, but there is no indication that the enquiry has been abandoned.
Murdoch is no choir boy, but even he has to wonder how the scandal has darkened him in the eyes of his centenarian mother in Australia. He may very well be his father's son, but has he betrayed his highly respected mother?

Douglas Feith Israel's shabbat goy

2011-11-03T07:52:00.000-07:00

Douglas Feith had opinion piece in 2 November 2011 issue of the 'Wall Street Journal'. Feith is Israel's 'shabbos goy', you know the guy who turns on the lights for pious Jews who cannot during the sabbath lest they violate G-d's commandments as the rabbis define them.
Feith argues that Israel should become a presidential issue in 2012. Blimey, Israel is a US political issue that no one running for office an evade, given the tentacles and influence of the Israeli lobby represented notably by AIPAC.
A long time Republican insider, as a lawyer, he has connexions with an American Israeli law firm with headquarters in Tel Aviv.
Feith is not Jewish and that makes him a prize to front for the Zionist state in America's political establishment and ruling classes and Republican party.
Better known for his hand in creating false info on Bush's invasion of Iraq, like all 'failed' bureaucrats, he is on the faculty of the Georgetown's prestigious school of foreign services and is a fellow at the right wing New York based Hudson Institute and a director of the Center for National Security Strategies.
As is his assigned role of Israel's 'shabbos goy', he plies his trade in trying to influence US policy towards Israel or upend any attempt to expose Israel's sins of omission and commission and interference in American political life contrary to US law.

Canada and Ireland attempt to break Israeli blockade of Gaza

2011-11-03T07:33:00.000-07:00

As the mad men governing Israel test long range missiles, elaborate plans to bomb Iran, and continue illegal occupation and settlement of Palestinian lands with Zionist settlers, peace boats continue setting out to break Israel's illegal blockade of Gaza.
This time only two boats from Ireland and Canada are heading for the Strip from Turkish ports. Each vessel is carrying much needed medicine that the Zionists do not let entry into Gaza, as well as letters of greetings and solidarity to the Palestinians landlocked into a prison of Israel's making.
Now, they are in international waters. Will Israel engaged in yet another act of piracy on the high seas to stop them? More likely than not. The US does support Israel's violation of the laws of the sea, but this time is too concerned with matters economic to use its clout to stop this mini Peace Flotilla, as it did a few months ago by sitting on the Greek and Turkish authorities.
As GuamDiary sees it, Israel is like a rabid dog attacking anyone or anything that challenges its dying power in the Middle East; internally the growing disparity of wealth has thrown up tents of protests in the streets of Tel Aviv; externally, Egypt can twist its tail to extract advantages since the fall of Mubarak, Turkey is challenging the Zionist state's hegemony in the region, and the Israeli ruling classes have shredded the image of Israel as a democratic state as they move to authoritarian rule...a rule which foists upon Jews the claustrophobic do's and don't's they use on Arabs.
The Peace Flotillas challenge Zionist hegemony peacefully. Saying this, it is a challenge that hastens the erosion of any disguise that Israel is for peace. No, it is for the use of brute force to realise its goal of a 'Greater Israel' without Palestinians. Such megalomanic plans are doomed to failure.

Occupy ....

2011-11-03T06:59:00.000-07:00

Occupy Oakland closed down the very active Port of Oakland during a General Strike, the first in the Bay Area city's since 1946. The GS kept businesses and banks closed. Almost everything came to a standstill. The police were nowhere in sight until the dark of night when with smoke bombs, they charged demonstrators and took prisoners. Thus ended a 'momentous day'.
Have the US ruling classes begun absorbing the fact that the 'Occupy Wall Street' movement that has spread across the length and breath of the US is not going away?
They can no long dismiss the rising tide of 'hatred' of the 99 percent to the finance capitalists who pull the strings of Authority in Washington, in state capitols, and the thousands of municipalities across the 50 states. They would be wrong not to 'reform' the stifling climate that has cut out the 'middle classes', the working classes, and the poor from the luxury the plutocrats and their lap dogs in political office enjoy.
The tide of discontent is rising, but the waters threatening the ruling classes are now lapping at their feet. Nor can the coupon clippers and financial wizards dismiss, scornfully, the 'occupiers' & friends as disorganized, with no agenda nor plan of action, and the like. The American ruling oligarchy continues to dully manoeuvre to keep power at its own peril.
Already the political mechanisms of power are broken. The politicians who front for the big bracket banks turn out to be mindless idiots: you only have to look at the string of Republican candidates vying for the Elephant party's nomination for president in the 2012 elections, to realise that they are second or third or fourth rate, and what's more, brain dead.
Obama is a schil for Wall Street.
Little wonder the 'occupiers' & friends are going outside 'business as usual' ways of doing things. Their message, simple and direct, has given expression of protest to the downtrodden peons that finance capitalists engendered through political manipulation, mad speculation, and so on, resulting in the global recession of 2008.
The 'occupiers' & co. are showing that the ruling classes can no longer disguise their 'crimes'. The string pullers of Wall Street forget that the 'occupiers' & friends are well educated; have been taught the small secrets of working the system, and know how to fashion that knowledge into to weapons to use against the one percent who try to pass themselves off as finance capitalism's feudal lords.
'Occupiers' & friends are willing to be arrested, go to jail, and possibly to spend some time there, in order to foster and expend the growing army of followers. That resolve more than anything should sound the alarum to the plutocrats & their camp followers that their days are numbered.
As the overused slogan says: 'the people united can never be defeated' [in the longer run]. It is not for nothing that songs like 'Solidarity forever' or 'the banks are made of marble, there's a guard at every door' have come back as common coin of the protesters.

Netenyahu has gone ballistic

2011-11-02T07:26:00.000-07:00

If any proof need be shown that Israeli prime minister 'Bibi' Netenyahu has gone completely mad, consider his decision to bomb Iran. In this, he is aided and abetted by his defence minister Ehud Barak, the man who lost the last Israeli war in Lebanon. Will Avigdor Liberman, the foreign minister, sign on to this lunatic plan?
Bombing Iran will throw not only the Middle East but the world into turmoil for much is at stake, not the least oil. The US has no such stomach for Zionist adventurism, let alone another war in Asia. Yet will Obama have the 'guts' to muzzle mad dog Netenyahu a year before he stands for reelection?
Israel has lost its sanity. It is more isolated than ever, yet it is forging ahead under Netenyahu to seize all Palestinian land and to incorporate it into a Greater Israel.
And yet UNESCO has come to Palestine's rescue by welcoming it as a full member. As such, the Palestinians can and will challenge Israel's illegal land grab of, and planting illegal Jewish settlements on their land on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem.
Netenyahu's cries that he is working towards a two state solution are hollow: he is accelerating settlement building and removing more Palestinians from their land. So much for his lies! Alas the feckless US backs him up.
Netenyahu has gone beyond the horizon ideologically: he is in Dr. Strangelove land. In his pursuit of extremist Zionist designs, he is willing to destroy Israel as though it were the Valhalla in Wagner's 'Goetterdaemmerung'.
Who will rid us this lunatic?

Railroading Julian Assange

2011-11-02T07:10:00.000-07:00

After much deliberation, London court has ruled that Julian Assange "should" be extradited to Sweden to answer questions about date rape, even though the founder of Wikileaks has never been charged with a crime.
You have to wonder what went on in the court's chamber to deny him the right to remain in England. Assange has offered other options to answer questions about charges brought against him: at first they were dropped; his alleged 'victims' owned up the sex was consentual; nonetheless, another district attorney in another part of Sweden reinstated them.
Aussange, willing to cooperate with the Swedish authorities, fears that should he go to Sweden, Sweden would ship him off to the US on the basis of an extradition treaty.
The Obama administration is looking for the Australian's blood since 'Wikileaks' began publishing US diplomatic cables that have embarrassed the US and caused reparable damage with its allies.
There is an odour of collusion in the London court's pronouncement: did it buckle under 'foreign pressure'? No doubt, details will emerge concerning how the decision was rendered.
So far the US has 'bankrupted' 'Wikileaks', which has temporarily shut down its business; the Obama administration has used laws to deny ordinary Americans and government workers access to information Assange's outfit leaked on pain of pursuit in the courts for reading lowly classified or declassified information, only available now on foreign websites.
The hunt for Assange's blood has driven the US to extra legal means; Obama & co. won't be satisfied until they've Assange's head on a stick.
Yet Aussange's lawyers have recourse to higher courts to overturn the London court's dodgy verdict.

Anonymous? The common man

2011-10-28T05:42:00.000-07:00

'Anonymous' has a silly premiss: Shakespeare 'fronted' for the talented, 17th earl of Oxford Edward de Vere. The film asks the question how could a commoner be so talented as to leave the world a treasure trove of plays and poety of the highest literary value?
De Vere's name pops up during the 1920s as the man who wrote Shakespeare. Long caught as a red herring, this piece of invention has been brought to the screen, and alas will scratch the eye's with a trace of falsity: for now say 'Shakespeare', think Edward De Vere. Consequently the genius of the Bard of Avon is tarnished by falsehood and historical fanciness.
Yes, how could a man of the people have the imagination to be a Shakespeare? is a good question to raise in our age of gross and growing disparity in wealth and privilege in an age of financial capitalist domination, mayhem, and disaster for the working classes and the poor.
The rich believe, they, and only they, are to the manor born [even though they will spend millions to falsify family origins], with rights and privileges that only come down from the gods; the poor, well, though the bible may say 'they are the salt of the earth' are only there to serve the plutocrats, coupon clippers, and the riff raff that hang on to their coat tails; they are destined to 'serve in silence', accept their lot, slave away for only one purpose: to serve the gods' ordained rich who are, they are told, their betters.
There is nothing fanciful in saying this. Government report after government report firmly establishes that the divide between the top one--some say 0,001--percent has grown wider and deeper in its share of a nation's wealth. In the US, for example, the self satisfied rich own as much wealth as 140 million households! And the difference in earnings of, say, a CEO and a worker on the line is as much as 425 percent.
How then did these blood suckers gain wealth? You haven't to go far for an answer: on the backs of the working classes and the poor, who are the true creators of a country's wealth. You don't need to read Marx to get it, the answer is blowing in the wind!
Today with the world teetering on the brink of an greater economic recession than the one the big bracket American banks created and induced in 2008, it is on the backs of the working classes and the poor that the rich will be bailed out, and sustain a class of parasite and leeches in the style of living they claim is natural to them! Eyewash!
It is the old sorry: the economic royalists rob and plunder the wealth the workers create. And in doing this, they have planted the seeds of their own destruction, believe it or not.
Already in the spread of 'Occupy Wall Street', the stirrings of the people, or as they say the 99 percent, are causing heartache and heartburn in the boardrooms of the plutocrats, ill ease among the politicians they buy for a pittance, etc.
Remember the old union saying, an open hand has little clout, but close it into a fist, and ... well that is the message that is being heard. How long will the working classes, the white collar drones, and poor have to submit to such peonage and serfdom to a worthless, tiny sliver of a ruling class? That is the question? And oddly enough 'Anonymous' says it well?

Occupy Oakland becomes America's 'West Bank'

2011-10-27T08:02:00.000-07:00

Just before dawn on Tuesday, 26 October 2011, the Oakland police along with 16 other police enforcement agencies [unnamed and underreported] swept down on 'Occupy Oakland". Discharging tear gas and rubber bullets, they came in swinging batons and fists to rout the 'Occupy Oakland' protesters in a park opposite City Hall.
Thanks to cellphones and independent media on the spot, images of this 'war zone' are available on YouTube and other social networking channels.
The Oakland police, infamous for its brutal, no questions tactics, had taken a page out of the Israeli occupiers of the West Bank by the use of rubber bullets and tear gas and charging peaceful protestors. Not only that the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have come to 'Occupy Oakland' big time.
By miracle, Scott Olson, a single casualty: a two tour Iraqi veteran who returned home without a scratch got hit in the head with either a rubber bullet or more like a tear gas canister. Suffering severe trauma to his head, he lies in a coma in an Oakland hospital. His doctors hope that he will not have brain damage when he regains consciousness, but they cannot say for sure.
This incident recalls the same scenario that happened on the occupied West Bank a few years ago. Then, the Israel defence forces aimed gas canister at the head of a free lance US journalist. He spent long months in a hospital with severe head injuries before returning home in poor health.
The police act on the orders of the powers that be. Oakland police's use of force has a historical trail going back to the days of the Black Panthers and the great strike of 1946.
Their attack on 'Occupy Oakland' met by passive resistance on the part of the protesters has won the 'occupiers' new friends and aroused some revulsion in the larger population.
The assault is symptomatic of how sacred the plutocrats who pay the politicians and run America are!
And two days later, the occupiers have returned to reclaim their camp in Oakland. The spectacular stupidity of the police, servants of the ruling classes, has given the 'Occupy...' movement new energy to press further with demands to transform and change unruly free market, casino, capitalism!

Want to laugh? The US and South Korea say that they don't link humanitarian aid to political issues!

2011-10-25T13:27:00.000-07:00

In the face of the mounting evidence, the US and South Korea deny that they do not link food aid and other humanitarian to North Korea to political issues.
Whom do these two smug governments think they are kidding? Washington and Seoul are grand practitioners in the use of eyewash.
With effrontery, each country contends that North Korea is not suffering 'a nationwide food crisis of the kind that killed many thousands in the mid 1990s', wrote Nick Cummings Bruce and Choe Sang hun in today's 'New York Times'.
Yet, hunger and starvation there is in North Korea today, owing to a spate of bad weather that ruined crops and rice output through heavy rains and floods, very cold weather, etc.
US based NGO, Mercy Corps has reported a team of theirs, on recent trips to the DPRK, that there are pockets of starving North Koreans, and that 'people there have starved to death'.
It is useful to again alert GuamDiary readers, Mercy Corps used to distribute US donated food in North Korea from port of entry to point of distribution to the needy without hinderance by the DPRK authorities.
In 2008, when Obama and South Korean president Lee Myung bak assumed the presidency in their respective countries, aid was summarily cut off.
Although in 2010, Washington and Seoul agreed to furnish aid in kind, neither delivered on its promises, thereby making a dire situation worse by tying food to accepting US and ROK demands that amounted to capitulation of North Korean sovereignty.
The US' gesture was not true food aid but aid in the form of blankets, cots, tents, and the like. It rationalised this kind of 'aid' by saying had they given food, it would go to the army. Mercy Corps on American television challenged this idea; they knew better since they had long standing experience with North Korea and channeling food to the needy and not the army!
Lee withdraw his offer of food because North Korea would not repent for the sinking of its corvette 'Chainan' and the shelling of Yeognpyeong island. In each instance, the origin of these incidents belonged ot South Korea, not the DPRK.
Therefore to say with a bold face, neither the US nor South Korea wed food aid to political demands is an example of the Goebbels' 'Big Lie'.

Can "they" stop Julian Assange?

2011-10-25T13:06:00.000-07:00

Julian Assage, fitted out with an ankle bracelet without being criminally charged, announced 'Wikileaks' may wind down for lack of contribution.
In a peak of hot rage, the US government has put pressure on the likes of Via, Mastercard, Amex, Pay Pal, Amazon, and the like to not accept contributions to 'Wikileaks' for outing the US by making public US diplomatic cables. The opinions expressed in these cables have make live uncomfortable for the hegemonic US by revealing what American diplomats reported on the spot from world capitols, without the polite veneer of diplomatic 'langue de bois'. The revelations did bruise the American government's ego and caused much anguish and some soul searching among its allies.
Since some of the cables were 'classified' on the lowest level, inside the US, the Obama administration quickly airbrushed internet links to 'Wikileaks', threatened government employees with stiff sanctions if they were caught reading the cables on line, and pulled down the curtain on information which the world press, but not necessarily the US mainstream media, commented on the cables' info.
So the ordinary man on the street was kept in ignorance, reading only what media cleared with government censors what they could publish. Outside the US, the curious American would have to look at, say, the British 'Guardian' for a complete list of some quarter million documents.
If the Obama administration couldn't abduct Assange and bring him to trial in the US, it used other means: economic blockade on contributions, trumped up charges of Assage's sexual misconduct in Sweden, even though the evidence was found wanting, and pressuring the British to extradite the man to Sweden, the lack of criminal charges notwithstanding.
And the economic blockade has borne fruit: 'Wikileaks', impoverished, might shut down if it cannot raise cash to continue operations. Suppose 'Wikileaks' does close, it has already proved it was a 'giant killer' against the world's only superpower.
Obama & co. may pat one another on the back for a job well done, but do they really believe they could silence Julian Assange.
Let's suppose 'Wikileaks' does shut down, you can bet your last pence, it will come to life in another form, for multiple are the ways of circumventing the censor! And in the end, Assage will have the last laugh.

No absolution for Rupert Murdoch

2011-10-22T10:46:00.000-07:00

"I'm sorry", no longer cuts for Rupert Murdoch. No one thought at News Corp's annual meeting Murdoch and his two sons would have been rejected for another term on the board of directors. The family owns 40 percent of the voting shares.
What is new: the growing unrest and rebelliousness among News Corp's institutional investors. After a well earned grilling from the floor, old Rupert apologised for the phone hacking scandal and the damage to the company's reputation. He tried to assure the restive assembly of investors that he is conducting an in depth, thorough investigation of the matter and is intent in rooting out the circumstances and keen practices that threatens Murdoch us$63 billion empire. No independent enquiry, thank you very much!
Should one trust Murdoch's promise and word? Hardly. The phone hacking cancer is spreading throughout the empire. Now, rumour mongering staff, it now turns out, had access to MI-5 files of the royal family. Ain't that a kick in the head? Sure enough!
The News Corp has breached secrecy laws, and when younger son James Murdoch again appears before a parliamentary committee will have a lot to answer for. Will he be more truthful?
Poor Rupert, he may crawl, he may weep buckets of tears, he may beat his breast murmurring 'mea, mea, mea maxima culpa', but it is a stretch to think he is sincere or telling the whole truth.
Sorry, old cock, no absolution for you.

Obama doctrine

2011-10-21T10:43:00.000-07:00

'No boots on the ground' proved effective in Libya. Now, Barack Obama has announced the full military withdrawal from Iraq, which lays to rest the horrible and costly war that a lying George Bush foisted on the American and Iraqi people nine years ago.
The sudden appearance of secretary of state Hillary Clinton in Kabul is another indication of tactical disengagement of what is now emerging as 'the Obama doctrine'.
Clinton encouraged Afghani president Karsai to continue talks with the Taliban, in spite of the assassination of Burhanuddin Rabbani, the head of his government's peace council. Clearly, the US is looking to find a short cut from the 10 year war in Afghanistan that in a way recalls the Vietnam quagmire.
The tough talks Clinton is having with Pakistan is a hook to engage a foot dragging ally to fight its own Taliban as well to collaboration with Pashtun Taliban in Afghanistan. The goal is clear: relieve the pressure of US and NATO troops so that they can if not defeat the Afghani Taliban, at least push them to negotiating a peace with Karsai to end the long war in Afghanistan.
In another hot spot, North Korea, the Obama administration is switching horse in midstream by replacing the stern Stephen Bosworth with Glyn Davies, US ambassador to IAEC in Vienna and a nuclear expert. This move points a finger at a possible delinking of US ROK hard line policy towards the DPRK. The White House is moving towards a resumption of the three year stalled six party talks in Beijing. The lack of progress on decommissioning North Korea's nuclear programme has given Obama more wool than he needs to thread. ROK president Lee Myung bak is a lame duck, and the US bought him off with a FTA; not only that the Lee team is being hit with revelations of corruption, thereby rendering more a burden than an asset. And what's more, Lee's successor in the Blue House will be more flexible in reconnecting with Kim Jong il's government.
Iran remains the fly in the ointment; an opening to Tehran would challenge, in a way, coordinated policy with Israel.
So what then is the Obama doctrine? Militarily speaking, it is a joint venture with other states to defeat an enemy who has taken up arms in hot spots deemed essential to maintain US hegemony. Diplomatically, it is a return to 'soft power' to quiet matters that do not require military solutions. In other words, Obama recognises the value of traditional diplomacy as a step before pursuing its with arms to paraphrase Clausewitz.
Anyhow, it is a doctrine in progress: strategically, it allows the US to pursue its 'global' interests without resorting to knee jerk responses that inspired George W. Bush.

US DPRK talks

2011-10-20T07:27:00.000-07:00

The US and North Korea will enter into exploratory talks soon in Geneva. The object all sublime is how and when to restart stalled six party talks.
The DPRK's demands are simple and straightforward: no preconditions. The Americans have laid out a list of conditions, among which is call for proof of sincerity, whatever that means. The US has hitherto now rejected the DPRK's insistence on no preconditions.
The Obama administration has replaced its point man to North Korea Stephen Bosworth with Glyn Davies, a nuclear expert, and ambassador to IAEC in Vienna. This change in emissaries might lead somewhere beyond the usual script of recriminations and threats, it is hoped.
The US North Korean clerisy has already reacted to any flexibility in dealing with North Korea, to bring it back to the green carpet in the Beijing talks.
As GuamDiary commented, hard liner Victor Cha in a 'Financial Times' opinion piece entitled 'Kim Jong il must see the dark path that follows failing talks' waves a stern lecturing finger at the DPRK leader for his lack of commonsense in not conceding to demands that are, in substance, surrender. And now the American Enterprise Institute's Michael Mazza has come up with recommendations which in the short run promise nuclear confrontation, and in the longer run overthrowing the North Korean regime by any other means.
You've got to wonder if the lunatic asylum has opened its doors and let inmates out? As GuamDiary has long shown, the US North Korean clerisy--policy advisors in and out of government, talking heads, and the like--are a ragtag army of the mindless and in ideas bankrupt. Although highly educated technocrats, they lack the ability to think critically and prefer ideological blindness to commonsense and pragmatism.
Will the up coming talks in Geneva lead to a breakthrough? That is the question.

Prisoner swap

2011-10-20T07:16:00.000-07:00

Gilad Shalit is free and has returned to his family which long sought his release. After five years of captivity, he returned to a hero's welcome. The world press celebrated his liberation.
And what about the freed Palestinians? The Arab press hailed their release; otherwise, the stigma of 'terrorist' stick to them. Weren't they worthy of a 'hero's welcome', as much as Shalit? Are they not 'soldiers' in a dirty war that Israel has been waging against Palestinians who want a homeland of their own, free of the Zionist state's black boot of occupation and illegal land grabbing and implantation of Jewish colonizers on their land in the West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem?
Israel has done much to airbrush the fact that terrorism in the Middle East began with the Irgun and Shtern gang in the war against the British mandate authorities 70 odd years ago. Itzhak Shamir, a wanted terrorist, even became an Israeli prime minister.
So GuamDiary wonders why then should Israel be hailed as a beacon for the west but not the Palestinians who like the Jewish terrorists in the Irgun and Shtern gang are fighting for a homeland of their own?

Stand-off at Zuccotti [Liberty] Park

2011-10-14T05:45:00.000-07:00

You've got to give it to New York City's Michael Bloomberg. He acts in the best interests of his class: the plutocrats.
Yet since his fall from public grace during the massive snow storm whilst he gamboled in the heat of the Caribbean sun and New Yorkers suffered from a less than responsive City Hall, his political fortune has been sinking.
Like the brain dead elite of America's ruling class, he is at a loss as to how to deal with the 'Occupy Wall Street' protests. He has flipped and he has flopped on the matter. 'You cannot say', then 'you can occupy Zuccotti Park--a private park owned by Brookfield Office Properties, which received the taxpayers relief by offering a space to the public.
Bloomberg like the class he fronts for, doesn't get it: in less than four weeks OWS has changed the political discourse and climate by mobilising popular anger and discontent brought to them by the Wall Street bankers and corporate America, and sustained by the members of Congress--especially Republicans--who dance to their tune.
So, when the mayor turned up at Liberty Park on Wednesday night [12 October 2011] on behalf of the park's owners, protesters would have to temporarily evacuate the premises for a thorough cleaning after which they could return but under new conditions.
OWS occupiers and day demonstrators saw the mayor's gambit as a way to kill the growing protest that has had echos worldwide.
Was Bloomberg prepared for the OWS response: 'we will clean up the park with you. Send us dumpster, so on'. The protesters appeal fell on deaf ears? For on early Friday morning with a cordon of New York City's police, the park would be cleared like it or not.
You have to wonder how dumb Bloomberg and the plutocrats he serves, can be. Had they not had a good tasting of the OWS nimbleness and ability to adapt? GuamDiary does not think.
As the sun began to rise on Zuccotti Park, the crowd in the park swelled to thousands to protest the mayor's plans, and the police with batons ready, word came from City Hall the mayor's order was put off 'sine dia'.
Bloomberg and his cronies in finance did not count on the call of the unions and even elected city officials who put out a call to join the protesters in defending the right to assemble and exercise free speech.
More importantly, the police are aching to teach OWS a lesson that would cause more damage to Bloomberg, his reputation, and the ruling class.
For now, OWS has won. Saying this, the protesters will have to be fully vigilant to checkmate any move by City Hall to kill OWS!

The Barack Myong bak show

2011-10-13T07:12:00.000-07:00

South Korea's president Lee Myung bak is in the US to celebrate the passage of a US ROK Free Trade Agreement, which has finally passed in the US Congress in a rare display of 'bipartisanship'.
President Obama has pulled out the stops to welcome Lee. For his administration thinks the man in the Blue House in Seoul is a good team player, especially when it comes to dealing with North Korea.
It matters little that 'Bulldozer' Lee brought the two Koreas to the precipice of war in November 2010 when in joint US ROK military exercises along the Northern Limit Line, South Korea live ammo fell into North Korean territory. The North riposted immediately by targeting the military base on Yeongpyong island within spitting distance from the DPRK's territorial waters.
Pyongyang's answer to Lee's and Obama's taunting North Korea, spooked Washington which had to stray hard liner Lee from reopening the Korean war, long dormant for the last 48 years.
Obama is giving Lee the five star treatment since he is the right kind of guy to make trouble against a North Korea that is willing to negotiate its nuclear programme but not at the cost of crying Uncle! to America's demands.
US ROK policy towards North Korea is joined to the same hip, and once again, America's diplomatic palsied hand has little freedom of action to pursue policies which would lessen tensions in a tripwire divided Korean peninsula.
Such a policy make make sense ideologically but it fails the test of reality.

Iranian terror plot: can you believe the hoopla by the people who brought you Iran Contra scandal or Saddam Hussein's WMD?

2011-10-13T06:52:00.000-07:00

The bungled plot by Iran to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Washington has almost as many holes as a colander. It gives one to pause. We know little or nothing but what the Obama administration tells us. The feckless American media, as is their wont, swallows the story hook, line, and sinker as it did over the Tonkin Bay incident or the yellow cake from Niger or Saddam Hussein's WMD. For sure, some voices are heard about the shakiness of the story line; the primitiveness of its logic, and what looks like the fudging of evidence.
Since the whole 'truth' may never be known--national security you know, GuamDiary remains skeptical. We have a right to be questioning the details as the US government has presented as well as the banging of pots and pans of secretary of state Hillary Clinton in the chancelleries of the world, to gain international support in condemning Iran. Iran, of course, denies any fingerprints on the plot to kill the Saudi ambassador.
What heightens our sense of doubt is the appearance of the usual list of suspects who have long been itching to take out Iran in a preemptive nuclear act or in an exercise in medium tech warfare: the US and Israel.
So we wonder about the grand hoopla that is fueling America's forward policy to bell the Iranian cat one way or the other, including war.
Can we trust the same US who brought up the Tonkin Gulf set up or Iran Contra or Saddam Hussein's WMD. American history is replete with clerics and jurists who will go to extreme lengths to forge documents to make sure its ends justify its means!