Russia's parliament has agreed to write off almost $10 billion of North Korea's Soviet-era debt, in a deal expected to facilitate the building of a gas pipeline to South Korea across the reclusive state.

...

Moscow has been trying to diversify its energy sales to Asia away from Europe, which, in its turn, wants to cut its dependence on oil and gas from the erstwhile Cold War foe. Moscow aims to reach a deal to supply gas to China, after a decade of talks, this May.

This is from 2012 and is clearly part of a larger trend of US empire decay and the fight between BRICS and the USA (especially Russia and China) over oil resources in Africa and the Middle East (Latin America has largely been lost by US incompetence - see CIA backed protests in Venezuela which even the right does not support {but that's another thread} ). I'll get into that in a bit.

Also important is the Trans-Siberian Railway, which has the potential to rapidly increase trade efficiency and lessen the important of the 38th parallel (and the Yalu border with China) as the border to the outside world for DPRK trade.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/yonhap-news-agency/140329/n-korea-russia-discuss-supporting-moscow-firms-advance-kaeso

"The (Russian) ministry reaffirmed the countries' mutual interest in joint projects with South Korea, including international connections for railways, gas pipelines and power lines," it said, adding that the minister stressed stability on the Korean Peninsula is key to achieving the goal.

Discussions of the project to connect the Trans-Siberian Railway (TSR) with the Trans-Korean Railway (TKR), dubbed the "Iron Silk Road," have been under way for more than a decade, but geopolitical obstacles have hindered it, particularly given North Korea's nuclear ambitions.

Obviously the "obstacles" here are not especially relevant with the forced isolation of Russia from the west through USA backed sanctions. Anyway, the petro-dollar is key to USA power projection, and various turns away from it (Saddam's attempted usage of the Euro, Libya's attempted usage of a gold-backed dinar, Russia and China creating trade agreements in their own currencies instead of the Dollar with Iran, Japan, India, UAE, and Africa's Standard Bank by 2015) have provoked demonization, sanctions, and war.

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-media-wont-touch-this-story-about-the-end-of-the-us-dollar-2012-4

The value of the US dollar is based on this role as the conduit for global trade. If that role vanishes, much of the value in the dollar will evaporate. Massive inflation, high interest rates, and substantial increases in the cost of food, clothing, and gasoline will make the 2008 recession look like nothing more than a bump in the road. This will be a crater. The government will be unable to finance its debts. The house of cards, built on the assumption that the world would rely on US dollars forever, will come tumbling down.

Russia and China are leading the charge. More than a year ago, the two nations made good on talks to move away from the dollar and have been using rubles and renminbi to trade with each other since. A few months ago the second-largest economy on earth – China – and the third-largest economy on the planet – Japan – followed suit, striking a deal to promote the use of their own currencies when trading with each other. The deal will allow firms to convert Chinese and Japanese currencies into each other directly, instead of using US dollars as the intermediary as has been the requirement for years. China is now discussing a similar plan with South Korea.

Similarly, a new agreement among the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) promotes the use of their national currencies when trading, instead of using the US dollar. China is also pursuing bilateral trades with Malaysia using the renminbi and ringgit. And Russia and Iran have agreed to use rubles as a means of currency in their trades.

Then there's the entire continent of Africa. In 2009 China became Africa's largest trading partner, eclipsing the United States, and now China is working to expand the use of Chinese currency in Africa instead of US dollars. Standard Bank, Africa's largest financial institution, predicts that $100 billion worth of trade between China and Africa will be settled in renminbi by 2015. That's more than the total bilateral trade between China and Africa in 2010.

South Korea is also in a tenuous position, only kept aligned to the USA because it is controlled by far-right conservatives (who are increasingly alienated from the population with every scandal and disaster, the Sewol ferry being only one of many) and it is still in it's own best interest. Once that situation changes the whole game will as well. Getting a bit off topic though.

All we need to understand is that if the Dollar loses it's ability to control the DPRK's foreign currency reserves and trade volume, the USA loses it's ability to tell the DPRK anything. Russia is leading the charge to make this happen:

http://en.ria.ru/business/20140328/188842736/Russia-North-Korea-Agree-to-Settle-Payments-in-Rubles-in-Trade.html

MOSCOW, March 28 (RIA Novosti) - Russia and North Korea have signed a new protocol to transition to using the ruble for payments between the two countries as part of an effort to boost annual bilateral trade to $1 billion by 2020, Russia's Far East Development Ministry said Friday.

The announcement came as Russian officials have expressed a desire to explore new markets for the country's businesses, following the introduction of sanctions by the West in reaction to Moscow's stance over Crimea. Russian leaders have simultaneously reassured international investors the country remains open for business, and there are no plans to restrict international commerce.

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The two sides identified areas for further cooperation, including a transshipment complex at the port of Rason and technical cooperation for the modernization of North Korea's mining sector, automobile industry and electric power plants.

Modernization of mining has the potential for tremendous growth in the DPRK:

http://japanfocus.org/-Henri-Feron/4113

North Korea’s mineral resources are distributed across a wide area comprising about 80 percent of the country. North Korea hosts sizable deposits of more than 200 different minerals and has among the top-10 largest reserves of magnesite, tungsten ore, graphite, gold ore, and molybdenum in the world. Its magnesite reserves are the second largest in the world and its tungsten deposits are probably the sixth-largest in the world.

South Korean reports have estimated the total value of the North‘s mineral wealth at US$ 7 to 10 trillion. And this was before the largest so-called rare earth element (REE) deposit in the world was discovered in the north of the country, in Jongju, with 216 MT of REEs said to be "worth trillions of dollars" by themselves.

To be sure, the experiences of countries like Mongolia, Nigeria and Russia show that it is not so much the presence, but the ability to extract and market natural resources that matters. Choi estimates existing mining facilities in the DPRK to operate below 30 percent of capacity because of lack of capital, antiquated infrastructure and regular energy shortages. And although the DPRK has expressed interest in joint ventures to develop its mining industry, foreign companies appear concerned about the legal guarantees and the general investing environment that the country can offer.

In case it isn't obvious the USA was extremely short sighted in forcing Russia's hand in Ukraine, the geopolitical consequences are vast for the USA imperialist hegemony. The instruments of USA hegemony: petro-dollars, access to foreign currency and international banks through sanctions, gas, natural resources and extraction technology, and IMF/WTO debt bondage are all falling apart (and have been for a decade), and Russia has the potential to make the USA impotent in Syria, Iran, DPRK, and Cuba.

So that's Russia and the general global situation that is following the decay of the American empire and it's increasingly desperate propaganda against the DPRK, Russia, Iran, China, etc. So what's going on at home?

In the DPRK, South Korea's stupid and bloodthirsty conservative party has already thrown away any economic leverage SK had built up during the Sunshine policy by trying to use the SK Won as a cudgel to control the DPRK's foreign currency reserves (which has completely backfired): from the Asia-Pacific Journal article:

At any rate, when hawkish conservatives came to power in Seoul in 2008, they decided to pressure Pyongyang by using inter-Korean trade as a carrot to control it . This strategy turned out to be grossly miscalculated. Pyongyang simply turned to Beijing, and trade volumes with China soon left those with South Korea far behind. Instead of increasing Seoul's influence in Pyongyang, the confrontational move drastically reduced it, wasting a decade of trust-building efforts by South Korean doves.

Obama is also very incompetent and completely botched the Leap Day agreement:

http://www.hudson.org/research/9097-unpacking-the-dprk-u-s-leap-day-agreement-

U.S. officials have claimed that they repeatedly told the North Koreans that any launch would be a problem, also making clear that Washington interpreted the phrasing at issue in the February talks to bar satellite launches too, and I have no reason to doubt this.

There is no evidence, however, that Pyongyang ever actually agreed with this U.S. position, and a good deal of evidence that they didn’t. If so, the Leap Day “agreement” may actually have been nothing of the sort: the parties perhaps agreed on the same words, but they seem to have meant entirely different things. Worse still, in all this after-the-fact squabbling about what was agreed, the North Koreans are able to say that the Americans came around to their position by dropping our previous insistence upon language that would clearly cover satellite launches. Perhaps we didn’t intend this, but it doesn’t look good, to say the least.

In such circumstances, rank incompetence is nearly as bad as bad faith, and it is hard not to be appalled by the terminological flaccidity the Obama Administration seems to have accepted in the Leap Day “agreement.“ After taking the time to make sure that UNSCR 1874 inarguably covered all launches in 2009, why on earth would U.S. officials have accepted North Korea’s purportedly satellite-exculpatory phrasing in 2012?

Vomiting any potential US influence on DPRK. The DPRK has successfully moved towards China and away from US backed sanctions and reaffirmed its socialist system by revaluing it's currency and wiping out wealth disparity that had been built up through the black market and special economic zones (which were necessary NEP (new economic policy) to recover from the Arduous March period as a result of the collapse of the USSR and a series of natural disasters) :

Fourth, a major currency revaluation came into force on the 30th November 2009, when citizens were given a certain time window to exchange old currency for new currency at a rate of 100:1, with an exchange cap eventually set at 500,000 old won. Remaining old won were to be deposited in a state bank, but deposits in excess of a million were to come with proof of a legal source of earning. This was meant to multiply the spending power of ordinary citizens (wages in new won coupled with price controls in the public distribution system) while wiping out the stashes of the nouveaux riches who had been involved in the shadow economy and who could not prove a legal source of earning, like smugglers and corrupt officials. On a macroeconomic level, it would allow the state to reassert control over the currency (curb inflation and reduce currency substitution) and over the economy (discourage imports, stimulate domestic production and replenish bank capital available for investment)

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Western beliefs that the shadow economy was so big that any attack on it would dislocate the main economy appear to have been proved wrong in retrospect as prices and exchange rates stabilized after a short period of transition. Keeping in mind that, in all likelihood, the reform partly aimed at freeing up capital and stimulating domestic production, we would have to compare nationwide production figures in all sectors before and after the reform to establish whether it actually had a positive or negative impact on the main economy. Since we don't have these figures, we cannot really pass a verdict on the reform's legacy. But note that according to Jin Meihua, a research scholar on Northeast Asian Studies at the Jilin Academy of Social Sciences writing thirteen months after the revaluation, exchange rates with the Chinese yuan, prices of rationed rice and prices of rice on the open market all more or less halved from 2009 to 2010, dropping respectively from 1:500 to 1:200, from 46 to 24 won a kg, and from 2000 to 900 won a kg. These figures imply that the turbulent period that followed the reform did not last long, and that prices and exchange rates soon stabilized enough to double the spending power of consumers of rice and Chinese imports. At the end of the day, it does seem hard to use this reform to build a convincing case for GDP drop.

Finally, consider that trying to use trade data to justify the BOK's reported recession backfires when discussing GDP growth for later years. If a reduction of Sino-Korean trade volumes from $2.79 to $2.68 billion could reduce GDP growth by 4% in 2009, where would this leave us for 2010 or 2011, when trade volumes leaped respectively to $3.47 billion and $5.63 billion? Surely this suggests that the DPRK's GDP growth should be substantial at this time. Yet BOK figures inexplicably continue to indicate negative value for 2010 (-0.5%) and only timid growth for 2011 (+0.8%). Would the SPA's revenue growth figures for 2010 and 2011 not be far more plausible in this case, at respectively 7.7% and 8.6%? These considerations leave the BOK's pessimist assessment of the DPRK economy on very shaky ground indeed.

All this makes us wonder about the extent to which the BOK judgment might be influenced by Seoul's political climate.

No shit?! To summarize , the DPRK has been doing quite well, Kim Jong-un seems to be competent and committed to socialism, and USA propaganda has become increasingly farcical. And no, the DPRK did not make racist comments about Obama, call some UN dude a long-time homosexual, or call Park Geun-he a bitch.

So what do people think about the future? Clearly the future of the DPRK is linked to the future of the global system, and I know we have experts in many different fields here.

Edited by babyhueypnewton (May 11, 2014 07:39:37)

roseweird posted:

why only male homosexuality

lol

roseweird posted:

why only male homosexuality

the idea that women could love each other or even themselves has not occurred yet to Huey, and if I were to propose it to him he would gain a blank expression and then whisper "identity politics!"

babyfinland posted:

I wish I was smart enough to understand why gay men are evil

i wish you were smart too dude