This week: • DPRK • Trawling • Iraq •
• Dow Jones • Spinoza • Stuff •

 

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Economic Catch 22 snares Pyongyang

When the sh*t goes down in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea we always turn to our old comrade Paul French to spill the beans. This week, as ever, he doesn't disappoint.

Among all the slush and slurry talked about the DPRK in the last couple of weeks one element appears to be missing. The theory (which incidentally, and for what it’s worth, I hold) that one deciding factor for Kim in deciding to loose one off was the fact that several possible doors to reform have been slammed in his face recently.

First, the freezing of DPRK bank accounts in Macau, China and elsewhere at American insistence has cut the regime of from sources of finance. Now the Americans would have us believe that all this money is used to buy chemical weapons technology and the like — and some of it may be — but most is used to facilitate deals — import/export deals and buying in essential things from abroad such as medical equipment and spare parts for machinery. This is now problematic.

Secondly, the South Koreans (and indirectly Pyongyang) had hoped that America would recognise goods made in the Kaesong Industrial Zone in the recent Free Trade Agreement (FTA) negotiations with the South. Kaesong is a zone of South Korean owned factories producing light industrial goods using North Korean workers. The American FTA negotiating team flatly refused to consider this and stubbornly insisted that Kaesong goods remain outside the FTA. Incidentally China does recognise Kaesong goods in its trade agreement with the South. Hence one shaft of light for the DPRK economy and export earnings — light industrial goods manufacture — was switched off.

The combination of the rejection by the Americans of Kaesong goods and their insistence that bank accounts be frozen leave any nascent economic reformers in Pyongyang (that may, the evidence suggests, include Kim Jong-il himself) with nothing. Hence the return to the nuclear bargaining chip. That the DPRK suggested it would suspend further tests in return for a softening of the clamp down on its bank accounts is proof of this argument.

Conclusion — America is both calling for the DPRK to reform its economy while at the same taking active and vocal steps to prevent this from occurring.

Now here’s the interesting bit. The sanctions package voted through at the UN recently includes a lot of guff about luxury goods and ship searches but not much about bank accounts and trade finance. However, last Friday (while Rice was in Beijing) all four major Chinese state-owned banks and British-owned HSBC said they had stopped financial transfers to the North — a step beyond what the UN sanctions require. So much for HSBC being the global bank — and also why has HSBC decided to move beyond the sanctions package and impose its own sanctions on the DPRK above and beyond anything it has so far been asked to do? Could it be anything to do with HSBC’s growing network of operations in America and China?

 

• Paul French is the author of North Korea The Paranoid Peninsula (Zed Books, 2005) Click here, here and here for previous little red articles involving our DPRK specialist. He will be speaking on the state of play in North Korea at a lunch organised by the Asia Society in Hong Kong on November 22 at the JW Marriott Hotel. For more details contact: (+852) 2103-9511.

 

 

Trawler trash: the true cost of seafood

Making his debut in the little red email this week, Lone Shark wonders where all the turtles went.

One of the great things about living in coastal Asia, especially in such a place as Hong Kong, is the abundance and variety of seafood available in the restaurants, shops and markets. Just about anywhere you go you are able to order from an exotic menu of marine life forms, sometimes local, though often not. For those of us who are made increasingly aware of the dangers of eating too much fatty food the option of being a ‘pescatarian’ is an attractive one. Not only can we console ourselves with the fact that this form of protein is far better for us nutritionally than your average hamburger or hot dog, but also the sea life itself is culled from its natural environment before being served up on our plate, which has got to be better than all that factory farming with all its inherent cruelty, right?

Unfortunately, the answer is not as easy as that. Aside from the extremely damaging fishing methods used in and around coral reefs just to catch the more exotic marine life itself, including the demand to have those fish still ‘fresh’ and swimming around in the restaurant’s tank until minutes before they are consumed, there is the problem that many species of fish simply cannot reproduce fast enough and are being caught before they can mature, which hardly helps the future fish stocks.

There is also the little matter of the ubiquitous shrimp. Where would the restaurants and noodle shops be without this staple source, and who amongst us gives much of a thought as to what is actually entailed in getting these still reasonably plentiful and fast reproducing invertebrates onto the average plate in the first place? Well, a fair amount it would appear, and these methods have been concerning marine scientists for some time, though relatively little has been done to address the issue. As for the general public, it’s a case of ‘out of sight, out of mind’ for most of us.

Amongst the different methods used to catch shrimps (and other similar marine forms) is the use of traps, or ‘pots’, which are baited cages lowered down to the sea floor. They are loaded with bait and left to soak, and in time bottom dwellers like crabs and shrimps will become trapped whilst other, small forms can escape through holes in the mesh. Otherwise, when the pot is hauled to the surface the fisherman can choose to keep or not to keep the catch he already has. There is also shrimp farming, first developed in Japan, and a response to the very destructive shrimp ‘drift netting’ that was common in the Pacific but banned in the early 90’s, though farming itself can also damage the eco-system and the shrimps still need to be fed on other fish. Another method is ‘long-line’ fishing, much more destructive. It has been estimated that fleets using this practice set some 2 billion hooks per year in all the world’s deep oceans, and some 40,000 turtles, 300,000 seabirds and millions of sharks are accidentally caught and dispensed with.

This is still not the most ecologically damaging method, however. The biggest danger is from bottom trawling (Ed. Note: a rather unpleasant sounding phrase right off the bat), and the price that is being paid by other marine life forms makes horrific reading. Estimates of more than 250,000 loggerhead and 60,000 leatherback turtles (The School of the Environment and Earth Sciences, Duke University) give an idea of the price being paid to satisfy the demand for the more popular species of shrimp. The Pacific leatherback turtle was estimated to have had 91,000 breeding pairs in 1980. Last year that figure was estimated to be about 5,000. Around 3/4 of the world’s catch during shrimp trawling is estimated to be other species and most of this is unwanted and thrown back dead or dying into the sea. This is referred to as ‘by-catch’ — for that you can read ‘bio diversity’. All this because the fishing gear cannot discriminate between want it wants and what it gets, resulting in an unacceptable waste.

Recent studies by the Chinese and also in Latin American waters have shown that the incidence of wasted by-catch is decreasing, with a growth in recent years of industries which use this by-catch for human consumption. With regard to shrimp fishing the figure may well be higher in terms of the ‘collateral damage’. Elliot Morse of the UN Marine Conservation Biology Institute thinks so; he believes that for every pound of shrimp caught in this fashion worldwide as much as 20 pounds of ‘by-catch’ may be thrown back. Whether this is the case or not, all those other marine life forms are taken out of the local environment not to mention not growing to become a source of income, let alone nutrition. No wonder then that the incomes of fishermen on coastal West Africa and other parts of the world are steadily falling. It is crucial that the world maintains better management of its fish stocks. The methods of deep sea trawling (and we are trawling ever deeper as we deplete over fished areas and then move on) involve dragging huge nets weighted down by metal balls across large swathes of the ocean bed. These WMDs could be compared to dragging scores of huge metal balls connected by netting across a forest in the search for a single land species, dredging up a large variety of them and discarding all but the one you want. The result is an instant desert as far as bio diversity goes.

With regards to Hong Kong and the local fishing areas, obviously reclamation, pollution, dredging and dumping have taken their toll on the local marine environment. The result has been that fishery resources in and around Hong Kong have greatly declined over the last century with huge changes in the fish stocks and the marine eco-system. The high demand for, and value of, shrimp trawl fishing may lead to even more serious degradation as the prices of invertebrates have continued to rise. Shrimp trawling has been sustained in a depleted eco-system by a reduction in the number of large predatory species due to their over fishing. Perhaps in response to this there has been a moratorium in the South China Sea on industrial fishing in June and July since 2004, and there are longer term plans for 30% of Hong Kong’s waters to be designated as ‘no-take’ zones in the future. In order to help restore the eco-system in the short term there needs to be a reduction in the number of trawlers, especially shrimp trawlers, if not a ban on shrimp trawling itself (except in designated† areas where shrimp productivity is greatest). It might also be wise to buy out those vessels that have been laid off so that they cannot be used again in future.

If all this sounds depressing, there is some light at the end of the tunnel. As of August 7th, 2006, twelve nations are taking part in a joint UN and World Bank pioneering new project to improve harvests for shrimp fishermen whilst incurring less damage on other unwanted species. New methods of trawling are currently under development, using innovative types of nets, and these include ‘TEDs’ — Turtle Excluder Devices — designed to give the turtles and other more intelligent creatures a fighting chance of escape. These have been around for a while but many operators have refused to use them, claiming that their gear and their yields will suffer. Whilst US law requires the use of TEDs and permits imports from only those nations that have adopted them, this has led to some problems with the WTO.

None of these measures are before time. The world’s great oceans are facing a crisis, and our long held notions that the seas are so large as to be almost inexhaustible are being shown to be folly. About 70% of global fish populations are believed to be over fished or on the brink of it. Several species are starting to disappear, or already have done, from certain regions and there is no guarantee that once they are gone they will ever come back again. As with so many issues affecting the planet and our role in its future what we do about it now will make the difference.

 

• Next week we’ll look at that other thing killing off fishes in their millions – marine pollution and the emergence of so called dead zones.

 

 

655,000 dead and still they live in denial

Medical research can be a fairly dry subject. However when it sheds light on the deaths of over half a million people in Iraq, the little red email suggests you should take notice. Our medical correspondent, Dr Jim, has reviewed the evidence in The Lancet, and presents his take on the article this week.

Over the last four years a team of investigators has been at work across Iraq to try and assess the impact that The War on Terror™ has had on its citizens. One word springs to mind when describing the results — devastating. To put things in context, in a situation where a country is in all out war, civilian casualties are unfortunately par for the course. In the Vietnam War three million civilians died; in the Democratic Republic of Congo, conflict has been responsible for 3.8 million deaths; and an estimated 200,000 of a total population of 800,000 died in conflict in East Timor.

The figures in Iraq are no less shocking. This study estimates that 655,000 people have died, over and above the number that would have been expected to die had the coalition forces not invaded. This represents 2.5% of the population within the study area.

How did they reach this figure? The team conducted a house-to-house survey of 50 clusters of 40 households in 16 different areas throughout the country, between 2002–2006. This meant that the team interviewed the inhabitants of 1,849 households totaling 12,801 individuals. They directly asked these people for their own experiences of the war, and if any members of the household had died during the conflict. If there had been fatalities, more details were requested. No money changed hands for this information, and selection was random within the survey areas.

Armed with the information from the people on the ground caught up in the conflict, the team broke the information down into violent and non-violent deaths. Causes of the violent deaths are fairly predictable — gun shots, explosions etc. 31% of these were directly caused by the coalition. The actual numbers of violent deaths rose significantly year by year in the study period. Many more died indirectly from the social fallout of living in a war zone.

What are our politicians saying about this startling piece of research? Bush has rejected it out of hand saying “I don’t consider it a credible report”. The US commander in Iraq, General George Casey was similarly scathing. Others have questioned the figures that are many times greater than previous estimates. The Brookings Index, relying on the UN (which gets figures from the Iraqi health ministry — see Stuff) and the Iraq Body Count, estimates the civilian death toll at about 62,000.

However, those in the research community have embraced the paper. There has been a lot of support for its methods among the statistical community. For example, stats.org at George Mason University has an article by Rebecca Goldin who says: “While the Lancet numbers are shocking, the study’s methodology is not. The scientific community is in agreement over the statistical methods used to collect the data and the validity of the conclusions drawn by the researchers conducting the study.”

Death on this scale constitutes a humanitarian crisis. The conflict in Iraq is the deadliest of the 21st centaury. The authors of the report have called for an international body to monitor compliance with the Geneva Convention, and other humanitarian standards. They made the same plea to the international community after publishing a similar piece of work in 2004, but to date there is no such protection for the citizens of Iraq. Operation Keep Mohammed Down continues in full swing, supported by the denial black ops PR team.

 

 

Dow Jones Vs reality

So the Dow Jones breaks a record, cracking through the 12,000 mark, and industrialists, politicians and the media alike are conjoined in hoopla over this exciting development that seemingly means the US economy is rattling along just fine. CRAP! This record is hugely misleading and the reporting of it as something representative of the whole US economy is the blind leading the blind.

The broaching of the 12,000 point barrier is testament to George W Bush’s stated aim of making the rich richer. Remember this: the Dow Jones Industrial Average only follows the top 30 companies in the land.

Under Bush the rich have indeed got richer but the divide between the haves and have-nots has never been greater the precarious state of the economy is likely to leave a lasting legacy for the next two decades to pay for Bush’s economic immaturity.

There are more people living in poverty in the US than ever before.

The whole massive dichotomy of the American economy between the stratospherically rich and the impoverished really began to accelerate during the brash, Yuppie ‘80s of the Reagan administration and has been a one way street ever since.

By cutting taxes to the rich, and engaging in a multi-front war Bush has turned the financial surplus he inherited from Bill Clinton into the largest deficit in history. As we reported earlier, Dubya — the US’ 43rd president — has borrowed more money from overseas than the previous 42 presidents combined.

While his administration continues to paper over the financial abyss, sooner or later economic reality will settle in and successive generations will have to pay for Bush’s economic short sightedness. The Dow Jones hitting 12,000 is about as representative of the real health of the US economy as Hollywood actors are indicators of the average American’s waistband.

 

 

Spinoza and the day job

So, I say to the English students, Teacher Ms Chen said bring some THING to class. On the whiteboard, I draw Xia Yi presenting to the class her elder sister Xia Xia, a university student, and I spend too much time getting Xia Xia’s fashion sense down, a lavender top, long Asian skirt with jungle trees, Big Hair that is come by honestly, and a peek of tummy since Xia Xia unlike Xia Yi doesn’t have to wear a school uniform!

Xia Yi is winding up an impassioned speech that Hong Kong needs a Two Daughter policy and, holding aloft the Little Red Book, cries, let a thousand Elder Sisters bloom, because she admires her smart and fashionable Elder Sister.

I draw Peter, holding his cat, Fish Food. Peter is my son when he was a little kid. He was good!

Evil Chuckie is demonstrating how to synthesize Methane Sulphide (fart gas) and poor Ms. Chen is gagging. Evil Chuckie’s father gave him a carton of cigarettes for Christmas as a joke, and Chuckie Senior always votes for Bush.

The joke, and the lesson, is that it is quite wrong to say even unto little children that a Noun names a Person, a Place, or a Thing.

This reifies animals and ignores an important grammatical distinction that even little kids relate to: an animal in the wild is gonna sting me and is referred to in the neuter mode. But if like Peter we take home a stray, it becomes a she or a he after the Vet has examined “it” and acquires a Name such as Fish Fart, unless it is taken from lower phyla.

Nouns also name animals, events, texts: Ten Thousand “things”. Linguists know this, so why keep it a secret from the rug rats?

Caliban told Miranda, thou taught’st me language, and, my profit on it, is I know how to curse. Language teachers try to teach a value free science, but knowledge without anger is dead on arrival.

In a Pure land of rectified Names, where adults were truly role models, grammar would have, I think, a strong moral component. It wouldn’t be grammatical for Peter put Fish Food into the garbage when Peter tired of playing with the cat, for an animal is an entity with a different set of relations to the world.

Like Paul Goodman, the forgotten American edumocator who wrote Growing Up Absurd about the origins of teen angst in adult dysfunction on the personal and social level: like Orlando Freire, the Brazilian educator who realized that the teacher needs to humble himself before the pre-existing knowledge of the worker peasant, I ponder the distance between the Pure land and reality, and reflect that the next step is anger, wherein the teacher cannot teach without a Rectification which in context is always a whiff of left-revolutionary grapeshot.

Absent a moral organization which in a society whose gods are Money and Power becomes a revolutionary praxis, school is boring because no moral or revolutionary connection can be found between a series of unconnected rules followed out of terror.

Which means teachers worldwide are in the deepest of doo-doo. Recently an art teacher in Texas trooped off with her mob to a required, sanctioned and approved Field Trip to the Houston museum. Parents complained because there were nekkid statues. The teacher hadn’t parked her charges in front of the works, but the parents were infected with that fear of infection which is a virus of Fascism, and the teacher lost her job.

Indeed, in a society infected with the fear of infection pile on the teacher becomes the rule. Jack Straw, I am now convinced, nailed a harmless and no doubt underpaid teacher’s assistant for the hijab who spoke perfectly well through her veil, because in fact nothing galvanizes dysfunctional TV-brained parents who have failed as people, let alone parents, than the Great Game of kill the teacher.

 

 

Stuff we like

A hotchpotch of stuff we’ve found and enjoyed recently on the Weird Wide Web.

Get your lovely T-shirts while they’re hot!
Everybody loves a winner. Nobody likes a loser. Nobody likes to be a loser. So with this in mind, Canned Revolution have set it up so that you can now buy your own Canned Revolution T-Shirt, and pretend that you won it in our competition. We’ll back up any claims to being a lucky winner by anyone who purchases a freshly tinned t-shirt to help the cause.

Owning your own Canned Revolution shirt could be a great way of life for you — imagine the friends, the opportunities, the fame, the copious offers of gratuitous sex.

Don’t delay! Buy your way into coolness today by clicking here.

 

Iraqi civilian casualties hidden from UN
Following on from Dr Jim’s article, here’s a interesting report from the Sunday Telegraph in Australia, which highlights a Le Monde report stating that the Iraqi Government has told medical authorities not to reveal to the UN the true extent of civilian casualties in the country’s conflict.
The Guardian published this comment from Daniel Davies on detractors of the latest Lancet study.

 

Video Textbook case of lunacy
This is weird. Really weird. We couldn’t make this sort of nonsense up if we tried. The Republican candidate for state superintendent of education in Oklahoma has come up with a genius idea to help protect kids against school shootings: using thick old textbooks as a shield. Not content with sounding foolish, he made a video, presumably so he could look foolish too.

 

The art of exit strategies
Here's Martin Rowson and Steve Bell's takes on exit strategies from Iraq.

 

Video Unprecedented: the 2000 election
Robert Greenwald’s documentary Unprecedented on the 2000 US presidential election and how it got stolen. On a related note check out this amazing testimonial to congress.

 

Video Can We Save Planet Earth?
Uncle Dave Attenborough weighs in on global warming in the second of two documentaries looking at climate change. After looking at the evidence, his answer is a qualified maybe — but we’re in for a rough ride whatever we do.

 

Chaos, Discord, International Relations and Borat
If you don’t know Borat here’s a sample of his work. A character created by Sacha Baron Cohen, AKA Ali G. He pokes fun at bigotry in the UK & US, by going one step further, and relies on people’s ignorance of Kazakhstan to get away with all manner of extreme behaviour, to comic effect. The US & UK have not always taken kindly to Borat: He was extremely unpopular at a rodeo in Virginia, when he said “I hope you kill every man, woman and child in Iraq, down to the lizards… and may George W Bush drink the blood of every man, woman and child in Iraq” and went on to do a mangled version of the Star Spangled Banner.
Kazakhstan is definitely not a fan either: in 2005 they shut down his .kz website, and they threatened legal action after his hosting of the MTV Awards in Lisbon: “We do not rule out that Mr Cohen is serving someone’s political order designed to present Kazakhstan and its people in a derogatory way. We reserve the right to any legal action to prevent new pranks of the kind. We view Mr Cohen’s behaviour at the MTV Europe Music Awards as utterly unacceptable, being a concoction of bad taste and ill manners which is completely incompatible with ethics and civilized behaviour.” Borat denied links with Cohen, and fully supported Kazakhstan’s bid to “sue this Jew.”
Kazakhstan has since spent vast amounts of money on a PR campaign, including TV adverts. This may be to no avail, however: Borat is back, denying the adverts are from Kazakhstan and promoting his movie, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. In reply, Kazakhstan are trying the softly softly approach.

 

Video Nanjing UFO
For all those who want to believe, here’s a little something from Nanjing, a nice video of a flying saucer.

 

Video Ferguson on Bush’s drinking
The little red email has on occasion wondered what ever happened to Scottish stand-up comic Craig Ferguson. Apparently he is alive and well and working in the US, taking the piss out of Bush.

 

Video Bringing a whole new meaning to a Donald Duck
This video proves that even Disney animals succumb to base desires.

 

Video Iraq sans spin: fiasco-tastic
Sean Smith, the Guardian’s award-winning war photographer, spent nearly six weeks with the 101st Division of the US army in Iraq. Watch his haunting observational film that explodes the myth around the claims that the Iraqis are preparing to take control of their own country.

 

Audio Over at axis of evil central
While the world demonises the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, this fantastic radio documentary from 2004 provides a different point of view. Sit back and enjoy the first ever radio programme recorded in this isolated and extraordinary country. Andy Kershaw, world music dj extraordinaire, has described this as the “last great adventure on planet Earth”. Even with all the restrictions and supervision, Radio 3 managed to record the music of local musicians. And Andy gets constantly wrecked on soju. Great stuff

 

Moderates in Kansas GOP jump ship
There are nine former Republicans on the November ballot as Democrats in Kansas. If it wasn’t in Kansas, we’d say we weren’t in Kansas anymore. The implications are bad all round: The Republicans may have lost their moderates, and possibly Kansas; but for the Democrats, the country has shifted so far right, that they are now having to become moderate Republicans to win.

 

Coup on the cards for Iraq?
Tom Dispatch posits that the US may be toying with the idea of replacing democracy with some sort of dictatorship instead, giving the government the sort of iron fist needed to run Iraq and impose security. We know just the chap, and he’s not doing anything at the moment, either: Saddam Hussein!

 

Worst congress ever?
Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone thinks so, and he gives examples of the 5 steps to the most craven congress ever becoming “a stable of thieves and perverts.”

 

Saddam’s verdict rescheduled to fit mid-term elections
Tom Englehardt of The Nation joins the dots thanks to Scott Horton, and asks why the Iraqi court trying Saddam Hussein for the killing of Shi’ite villagers in the 1980s could deliver a verdict on November 5. A date that Horton points out “is the last full news-cycle day in the US before the elections. It’ll be Monday. And the American public will see Saddam condemned to death and see it as a positive thing.” We’re sure it’s just a lucky coincidence.

 

The good sort of holocaust deniers
Robert Fisk highlights in his latest piece how Turkey still denies the first holocaust of the 20th century. According to the US government, however holocaust deniers are good people to sell F-16s to. It’s not like they’d use them to bomb one of their ethnic minorities — like say the Kurds — or anything.

 

Conspiracy of the Week UK’s inaction over Lebanon invasion pays off
$104 million dollars worth of exclusive contracting for UK firm Ultra Electronics to build the Israeli Litening system for the RAF’s Eurofighters. The deal was signed July 20th, eight days into the invasion.
Five days after the deal was signed, a report was released showing the UK exported £22.5m worth of arms to Israel in 2005, almost twice the amount in 2004.

 

Go here, now
Why? Because we haven’t told you to go here for a while. And it’s great.

 

Adbust McDonalds to serve man
The Billboard Liberation Front and Ron English joined up to create this anti-ad aimed at everybody’s favourite unprincipled megacorp.

That’s right! You too can get one of our t-shirts. Simply brush up your Photoshop skills and send your corporate subversion images to adbusting@cannedrevolution.com, such as the one above to stand a chance of being selected the weekly winner of our brand new little red adbuster of the week competition. The winner will be chosen by the revolutionary collective here on our own Fantasy Island. Alternatively, for those who don’t fancy your chances of winning but are still budding anti-establishment artists and hanker for one of our shirts, you still have hope. Simply send us five of your designs in five consecutive weeks and, so long as the images, are yours (and we have ways of checking!), a t-shirt will be winging its way to you.
Adbusting — the choice of a new generation. For more on adbusting, click here.

 

The Meteor-illogical Office report
This week, we ask: if the “there’s no global warming honest, no, really, we might be funded by big energy, but trust us” brigade are right, then then how come Guangzhou had over 250 millimetres of rain in two hours?