Hajo on the North Korean Communist-Dictatorship-Family-Monarchy
I was thinking about posting a review of a book I just finished but have not found the time. But I did find another excellent cartoon, this time by Hajo, a cArtoonist from the Netherlands (yes, the capital A was intentional).
I loved this cartoon (you can access the gallery here) as it really gets to the heart of North Korea. The communist country is one of the few remaining dictatorships that clung to a very old (and crude) method of rule and produced very traditionally totalitarian propaganda, right out of the 1930s. The country is an absolute mess, ruled by a likely insane leader who inherited his position from his father and now is passing it on to his own son. North Korea is more of a totalitarian-monarchy, and is a good example of the idea that someone, anyone, can lead (even insane or inbred individuals) but where the most important thing is that someone must rule in order to keep the regime in power.
At any rate, this is a most excellent cartoon. And I really like Hajo’s style: it is often very abstract and relies on interpretation as to the meaning. Many are just an image without text… check out the Israeli flag with barbwire (very effectively summarizing the predicament of the Jewish state in the midst of the Middle East) and the image of Obama caught in an oil slick.
BTW. I came across this cartoon in the North Korea ‘Pass the Torch’ section at Cagle’s site which is really interesting (especially for how so many of the artists came up with similar imagery).
So, check out Hajo’s cartoon gallery for some other great artwork.
PS. The capital A better symbolized Hajo’s status as an artist which the word cartoonist might not get across all that well.
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Economic Warfare: The U.S. vs. Toyota (Japan)
Even though I am not at all knowledgeable about autos or the auto industry, I have been baffled as to why the woes plaguing Toyota have been so prominently featured in media coverage and taken up so stridently by politicians in the U.S. and even in Canada. At first, I thought it might just be a way of distracting public attention away from the economy and increasing public/government debt, especially the role that politicians have played in the whole mess (mostly thought negligence, deficit spending and deregulation). But I also think there are deeper forces at work, and it must surely revolve around the politics of the bailout and how this related to economic competition between countries; that is, economic warfare.
Economic warfare is not as exotic as it might sounds. Even though the Soviet Union is no more, the Cold War has reheated up again and some of the goings-on in countries like the Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan are combinations of geo-politics and economic competition between Russia and the U.S.
Consequently, I am, more and more, convinced that what is going on with Toyota is really a veiled attempt to destroy the number one Japanese automaker, at least in the North American market. With all of the bailouts, North American governments have invested billions of public dollars into a doomed industry. Politicians probably know that and the fear is that the North American auto companies might not, even when backed by billions of tax-payer dollars, be able to compete with the imports. So, the odd over-reaction on the part of U.S. politicians to the Toyota recalls and alleged cover up is probably best seen in this context. In the past, politicians and government regulators have often turned a blind eye toward automakers and recalls. Just think about the whole, sordid history of the SUV and rollovers during the past two decades. Thousands of people died in North America as a result of the design of the SUV and its tendency to roll over (in the sense that a light truck chassis, which was the basis for the SUV, is inherently unstable and not at all suited for normal city or highway driving). (For more on this see: Rollover: The Hidden History of the SUV at PBS Frontline or Keith Bradsher’s book, High and Mighty: SUVs – The World’s Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got that Way (2002).) But politicians and regulating agencies in the U.S. bent over backward to protect the auto industry–especially the U.S. automakers–because the SUV was a cash cow for GM, Ford, et al. And, it isn’t like Bush or Obama have heralded in a new era of tough regulation or anything like that.
So, it would appear that there is much more going on with respect to Toyota. With Japan still trying to recover from their ‘lost decade’ and the U.S. economy in shambles–especially since billions of public money was poured in the that giant cash-hole that is the U.S. auto industry–it makes sense that the unusual adversarial stance taken by U.S. politicians toward Toyota might be a veiled attempt to destroy the market share of that company in North America. By extension, that is economic warfare and I am not alone in thinking that way. For more, search for “Toyota Economic Warfare” on your favorite search engine or you can start here:
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What happened to Russia after the Cold War?
I have been reading a book where the following report was cited and discussed. I finally got around to taking a look at it. Interestingly, the report describes what happened in/to Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ‘end’ of the Cold War. (I say ‘end’ because it really appears that Russia was pretty well dismantled by U.S. interests and so this could be also viewed as economic warfare and, hence, the continuation of the Cold War but by different means.)
Yeltsin and Clinton in 1995. U.S. National Archives.
So what replaced Communism in Russia after the U.S., initially under the guidance of Clinton administration, took on the mission to convert the former U.S.S.R. to a modern, democratic and capitalistic country? It appears that what replaced communism were good, ol’ fashioned corruption and plundering o’ the economy. So, I guess that means that the major tenets of capitalism must then be corruption and economic plunder by certain well-placed individuals and corporations. Given the recent events over the past couple of years, there seems to be more data to support that conclusion. Hmmm.
Anyway, the details about the report are:
RUSSIA’S ROAD TO CORRUPTION: How the Clinton Administration Exported Government Instead of Free Enterprise and Failed the Russian People. Speaker’s Advisory Group on Russia. United States House of Representatives 106th Congress, Hon. Christopher Cox, Chairman. 19 September 2000.
I have just skimmed it over but it looks very interesting. The contents of the report are summarised in the overview:
The manifold failures of both Russian and U.S. government policy are surveyed: the early corruption of the non-market “privatization” to insiders; the spread of organized crime; the eventual complete collapse of the Russian economy in 1998; the rise of weapons proliferation as a means of generating hard currency; and the increasing estrangement of Russia from the United States, essentially reversing the trends that existed in 1992.
Who would have imagined that the triumph of capitalism over communism would have led to such unfortunate events.
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G.E. President to Pentagon: “A permanent war economy”
GE President Charles Wilson in 1950, Life image via Google
I recently came across this interesting statement from Tristram Coffin’s book on militarism in America. It was written in 1964, just a few years after U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s famous warning about the ‘military-industrial complex’ during his farewell adress:
In 1944, the campaign had progressed so splendidly that the president of General Electric, Charles E. Wilson, advocated to the Army Ordinance Association a working arrangement between the military and industry and “a permanent war economy.” Each company, he proposed, should have an executive with the reserve rank of colonel to be a liaison with the Pentagon. “This must be, once and for all, a continuing program. Industry’s role in this program is to respond and cooperate…. Industry must not be hampered by political witch hunts, or thrown to the fanatical isolationist fringe with a merchants of death label.”
Tristram Coffin, The Armed Society: Militarism in Modern America, 169.