...after this morning’s post, here’s confirmation that Seoul is impatient to cut the Gordian knot and resolve the BDA funds issue so it can get on with the business of rapprochement.
Yes, it looks like South Korean expressions of frustration with the US strategy of ostracizing North Korea are becoming ever more explicit.
First, the leak:
A senior South Korean government official on Monday admitted that Seoul is reviewing the option of letting the state-run Export-Import Bank handle North Korea’s funds in a Macau bank.
...
[An unnamed “senior South Korean government official”, maybe the guy who handles the Unification portfolio—ed] hinted the government is prepared to take the flak if the EXIM Bank’s credit rating suffers from handling what the U.S. Treasury says is money from North Korea’s illicit activities. “What’s wrong with considering anything we can do? We can’t sit by and just watch (U.S.-North Korea negotiations) without taking any steps of our own,” he said.
Then the pissy editorial:
All banks around the world must go through a depository bank in New York when it comes to dollar transfers. And the U.S. Treasury Department regulates this process. If that’s the case, then it would only be proper for the U.S. government to handle the matter transparently through an American bank, rather than trying to dump that responsibility on an unwilling country and an unwilling bank.
And finally the news, with some more interesting detail about a meeting attended by just about every key South Korean government official, sending a public message that Seoul doesn’t want to see the BDA farce go on a moment longer:
Thursday’s meeting discussed enabling North Korea to open an account with an overseas branch of EXIM so it can withdraw its funds from BDA and move them to an Italian or Russian bank via the bank. A senior security source said the government proposed the measure since North Korea insists on having the money transferred rather than withdrawing it in cash. According to the source, the U.S. has agreed to Seoul’s suggestion and promised not to take issue with the bank over what would by Washington’s own earlier determination amount to abetting money-laundering.
According to a diplomatic source, North Korea is nearly done combining the money from its 52 accounts in BDA into a single one ready for transfer. The epic issue hit the latest snag when, after the U.S. gave the green light to unfreezing the funds, no bank in the world proved willing to receive the funds. That problem would be resolved if EXIM plays the intermediary role. The U.S. has already reassured countries concerned that the transfer will be an exception from its blanket ban on transactions with BDA. [emphasis added]
So it looks like the United States has finally capitulated 100% and issued the waiver on accepting BDA money that, as I wrote on April 8, Daniel Glaser should have granted during the ten days he spent in Beijing in late March--early April accomplishing, apparently, nothing.
This involves more than seven weeks and counting of wasted time (from March 14, the date that the BDA matter was supposed to be "resolved").
The belated concession makes us look foolish. More disturbingly, it makes our diplomacy look at best unreliable and at worst duplicitous.
Monday, May 07, 2007
This is more like it...
... more plausible, anyway, than North Korea’s reported demand that the BDA money be remitted to a new North Korean account in a New York bank...
From the May 7 Washington Post:
Under South Korea's plan, the Export-Import Bank of Korea will act as an intermediary between BDA and a North Korean bank account at a third country, a high-ranking national security source was quoted as saying by the Chosun Ilbo newspaper.
"The United States has agreed to the government's plan, and I understand it has conveyed the position that it won't raise issues if the Export-Import Bank of Korea mediates the transfer of BDA funds," the source was quoted as saying.
Nothing in the WaPo article about the interesting element that South Korea is once again undercutting the U.S.-led campaign to isolate Pyongyang financially...
But if you’re paying attention, in early April South Korean Red Cross officials boarded a freighter to deliver $400,000 in cash to North Korea.
And USA Today reported on May 5:
South Korea has agreed to send 500 tons of polyester fiber to North Korea next month as an initial shipment of promised goods in exchange for rights to develop mineral resources in the North, officials said.
Is this some old agreement or a new initiative? A little bit of both. According to the article, last year South Korea promised to provide $80 million worth of raw materials for the North Koreans to produce clothes, shoes, and soap.
In the first shipment of the promised raw materials, South Korea will send the fiber in June, the country's Unification Ministry said in a statement issued late Friday after three days of talks with the North.
In any case, the South Koreans displayed no qualms about executing a barter deal that makes a mockery of US attempts to strangle Pyongyang by cutting it off from the international financial system.
I think we can toss Western coverage of South Korean opposition to U.S.-led financial and economic sanctions, Seoul’s concrete efforts to circumvent them, and how this figures in the State Department’s diplomatic calculus, in the “underreported” file...
...underreported, that is, except by Onefreekorea, which fulminates against South Korean appeasement and Chamberlains in the State Department, and labors to spook Seoul with the threat that U.S. bases in South Korea may not be long for this world:
Conservatives watched the ascendancy of the Korean left, its inexhaustible apetite for appeasing North Korea, its general diplomatic incompetence, and its delusional fulminations of America-hate that reached the highest levels of its government. They watched the Korean right fall silent, barely admitting to its support for America or pointing out the benefits that the alliance brings (it stands for nothing and is paying the political price). Overall, South Koreans are as anti-American as many Muslim populations. American conservatives have come to resent this deeply, and on a more detached level, have come to realize that the two countries no longer share enough common goals, interests, or values to support a military commitment as large, expensive, and risky as USFK...
... Conservatives won’t repeat the mistake of leaving men like Chris Hill, Nicholas Burns, George Tenet, and Jack Pritchard with the run of their camp to sabotage them again. Plenty of liberals may be sympathetic to South Korea’s instinct to appease, but they won’t expend political capital to keep more of our troops posted in Korea.
Well, then.
Judging from Onefreekorea’s tone, it looks like the party’s over, at least for the time being, for hardliners on North Korea policy.
It’s another indication that the BDA money will make it to North Korea at long last and the Six Party process will limp forward, with efforts to harass, pressure, and destabilize Pyongyang subordinate to engagement, instead of the other way around.
From the May 7 Washington Post:
Under South Korea's plan, the Export-Import Bank of Korea will act as an intermediary between BDA and a North Korean bank account at a third country, a high-ranking national security source was quoted as saying by the Chosun Ilbo newspaper.
"The United States has agreed to the government's plan, and I understand it has conveyed the position that it won't raise issues if the Export-Import Bank of Korea mediates the transfer of BDA funds," the source was quoted as saying.
Nothing in the WaPo article about the interesting element that South Korea is once again undercutting the U.S.-led campaign to isolate Pyongyang financially...
But if you’re paying attention, in early April South Korean Red Cross officials boarded a freighter to deliver $400,000 in cash to North Korea.
And USA Today reported on May 5:
South Korea has agreed to send 500 tons of polyester fiber to North Korea next month as an initial shipment of promised goods in exchange for rights to develop mineral resources in the North, officials said.
Is this some old agreement or a new initiative? A little bit of both. According to the article, last year South Korea promised to provide $80 million worth of raw materials for the North Koreans to produce clothes, shoes, and soap.
In the first shipment of the promised raw materials, South Korea will send the fiber in June, the country's Unification Ministry said in a statement issued late Friday after three days of talks with the North.
In any case, the South Koreans displayed no qualms about executing a barter deal that makes a mockery of US attempts to strangle Pyongyang by cutting it off from the international financial system.
I think we can toss Western coverage of South Korean opposition to U.S.-led financial and economic sanctions, Seoul’s concrete efforts to circumvent them, and how this figures in the State Department’s diplomatic calculus, in the “underreported” file...
...underreported, that is, except by Onefreekorea, which fulminates against South Korean appeasement and Chamberlains in the State Department, and labors to spook Seoul with the threat that U.S. bases in South Korea may not be long for this world:
Conservatives watched the ascendancy of the Korean left, its inexhaustible apetite for appeasing North Korea, its general diplomatic incompetence, and its delusional fulminations of America-hate that reached the highest levels of its government. They watched the Korean right fall silent, barely admitting to its support for America or pointing out the benefits that the alliance brings (it stands for nothing and is paying the political price). Overall, South Koreans are as anti-American as many Muslim populations. American conservatives have come to resent this deeply, and on a more detached level, have come to realize that the two countries no longer share enough common goals, interests, or values to support a military commitment as large, expensive, and risky as USFK...
... Conservatives won’t repeat the mistake of leaving men like Chris Hill, Nicholas Burns, George Tenet, and Jack Pritchard with the run of their camp to sabotage them again. Plenty of liberals may be sympathetic to South Korea’s instinct to appease, but they won’t expend political capital to keep more of our troops posted in Korea.
Well, then.
Judging from Onefreekorea’s tone, it looks like the party’s over, at least for the time being, for hardliners on North Korea policy.
It’s another indication that the BDA money will make it to North Korea at long last and the Six Party process will limp forward, with efforts to harass, pressure, and destabilize Pyongyang subordinate to engagement, instead of the other way around.
Sunday, May 06, 2007
Now, this is going too far...
According to Reuters Tokyo:
- North Korea has demanded the United States allow it to open an account at a bank in New York and its funds at a Macau bank be transferred there, a Japanese daily reported in Sunday.
Quoting an unspecified source in Washington linked to relations between the United States and North Korea, the Mainichi newspaper said the United States had rejected Pyongyang's demand.
...
"The United States hurt the credibility of North Korea by imposing financial sanctions. The United States must correct this," the source quoted an unnamed North Korean official as saying, according to the Japanese daily.
"We can prove to the international community the funds are clean by transferring them to a bank in the United States."
North Korea was believed to have made the demands when the Bush administration's top Korea expert, Victor Cha, contacted North Korean representatives at the United Nations on April 24, the Mainichi newspaper said.
A couple things here:
First, this looks like an indirect confirmation that the U.S. did back down on its protracted efforts to tie up the North Korean funds in BDA, and agreed to some kind of lump-sum repatriation.
The North Koreans are, as a result, emboldened to take the provocative step of demanding that the lump-sum remittance be made to a bank in the United States.
Second, I can’t imagine that the US will acquiesce to this humiliating demand, since it has spent almost two months insisting that these funds were too dirty for any bank in the world to accept—let alone a US bank.
Also, beyond the amusing spectacle of the Treasury Department sullenly allowing the Norks to open an account in New York, it’s a little premature for the US to openly welcome North Korea back into the world financial community. That’s a concession that should be part of a general strategic rapprochement between Washington and Pyongyang.
President Bush is no friend of the Pyongyang regime, so this episode of overreach by the North Koreans might arouse his deep resentment and poison the well for a broader engagement between the two countries.
Perhaps the North Koreans feel that the possibilities of a “Nixon Goes to China” moment for Kim and Bush is so remote that their iron-assed diplomats will concentrate on wringing as many concessions as they can from the current BDA imbroglio, even if it means antagonizing President Bush.
Maybe the BDA affair will just drag on and on, reflecting the fundamental stalemate in US-North Korean relations.
That’s a dismal, dreary prospect, even for this writer, who has made a specialty of blogging the BDA matter into the ground.
Maybe that’s why Victor Cha decided to go back to Georgetown.
- North Korea has demanded the United States allow it to open an account at a bank in New York and its funds at a Macau bank be transferred there, a Japanese daily reported in Sunday.
Quoting an unspecified source in Washington linked to relations between the United States and North Korea, the Mainichi newspaper said the United States had rejected Pyongyang's demand.
...
"The United States hurt the credibility of North Korea by imposing financial sanctions. The United States must correct this," the source quoted an unnamed North Korean official as saying, according to the Japanese daily.
"We can prove to the international community the funds are clean by transferring them to a bank in the United States."
North Korea was believed to have made the demands when the Bush administration's top Korea expert, Victor Cha, contacted North Korean representatives at the United Nations on April 24, the Mainichi newspaper said.
A couple things here:
First, this looks like an indirect confirmation that the U.S. did back down on its protracted efforts to tie up the North Korean funds in BDA, and agreed to some kind of lump-sum repatriation.
The North Koreans are, as a result, emboldened to take the provocative step of demanding that the lump-sum remittance be made to a bank in the United States.
Second, I can’t imagine that the US will acquiesce to this humiliating demand, since it has spent almost two months insisting that these funds were too dirty for any bank in the world to accept—let alone a US bank.
Also, beyond the amusing spectacle of the Treasury Department sullenly allowing the Norks to open an account in New York, it’s a little premature for the US to openly welcome North Korea back into the world financial community. That’s a concession that should be part of a general strategic rapprochement between Washington and Pyongyang.
President Bush is no friend of the Pyongyang regime, so this episode of overreach by the North Koreans might arouse his deep resentment and poison the well for a broader engagement between the two countries.
Perhaps the North Koreans feel that the possibilities of a “Nixon Goes to China” moment for Kim and Bush is so remote that their iron-assed diplomats will concentrate on wringing as many concessions as they can from the current BDA imbroglio, even if it means antagonizing President Bush.
Maybe the BDA affair will just drag on and on, reflecting the fundamental stalemate in US-North Korean relations.
That’s a dismal, dreary prospect, even for this writer, who has made a specialty of blogging the BDA matter into the ground.
Maybe that’s why Victor Cha decided to go back to Georgetown.
Friday, May 04, 2007
BDA: The Beat Goes On...and On...and Onandonandon
From the May 3 Financial Times:
A senior US official said Pyongyang had encountered several problems in consolidating all its accounts at BDA. In addition to not realising how many accounts it held at the bank, the official said North Korea appeared to be having difficulty getting the necessary signatures to release the funds.
Once Pyongyang had consolidated its accounts, officials said it could withdraw the money from BDA. South Korean and US officials confirmed that North Korea wanted to transfer the money to Italian and Russian bank accounts. (Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington and Anna Fifield in Seoul, N Korea still to recover frozen $25m, Financial Times, May 3, 2007)
So it looks like the lump sum approach is going ahead, no doubt to the chagrin of Bush administration hardliners who hoped to force North Korean account holders to present themselves (if they could or dared) to withdraw their funds in person with a suitcase.
And I’m not surprised that North Korea is “having difficulty getting the necessary signatures to release the funds”.
Especially since one of the signatures they will presumably need is Colin McAskill’s, since his group purchased the Daedong Credit Bank. About $8 million in Daedong’s accounts were frozen when Treasury announced its Patriot Act Section 311 action.
Pushing for a logical resolution to the BDA mess, McAskill had wanted the legitimacy of his accounts confirmed, and acknowledgement that he could move the money without restriction or fear of potential sanctions for whatever bank handled the funds.
From the April 15 International Herald Tribune:
Colin McAskill, a British businessman who represents Daedong Credit Bank in negotiations over its frozen funds, said he would insist on using legitimate banking channels to shift money from the newly freed account. "I am not going to stand in a queue behind other North Koreans with a suitcase and try to move it," McAskill said. "We will move it through the banking system."
Good luck with that, Colin.
The point at issue here seems to be that the United States does not want the BDA settlement to signal a breakdown in U.S. efforts to impose an international financial embargo on North Korea.
Reviewing what the international community had agreed to do concerning North Korea, I reviewed UN Resolution 1718, which sanctioned North Korea’s WMD and proliferation-related activities.
In the process, I came across a classic piece of Boltonianism:
The resolution also provides for a regime of inspections to ensure compliance with its provisions, building on the existing work of the Proliferation Security Initiative.
One thing that jumps out is Bolton’s reference to “building on the existing work of the Proliferation Security Initiative”.
In fact, the UN has repeatedly refused to endorse the PSI, the US-led security operation that could be construed as giving Washington and its allies license to conduct unilateral interdiction activities with UN approval.
Bolton, as I’ve written before with enormous corroborating detail, had been indefatigable in asserting UN support for the PSI when no such support existed, a point that mush-minded supporters of PSI—who apparently misconstrue the PSI as a piece of muscular multi-lateral dogooderism—have stubbornly refused to grasp.
Second entry in the John Bolton “I said it loudly and confidently so you must believe it is true” pantheon is:
This resolution also targets other illicit activities of the regime in Pyongyang, and includes a ban on trade in luxury goods. It targets the way Kim Jong Il finances his weapons of mass destruction programs through criminal activities like money laundering, counterfeiting, and selling of narcotics. It imposes a binding requirement on all member states to take action against those activities and freeze the assets of entities and individuals of the DPRK involved.
Actual references in UNSC Resolution 1718 to targeting Kim Jong Il’s criminal activities as part of the anti-WMD sanctions action:
Zero
Nada
Bupkus
Nothing there about moneylaundering, Supernotes, meth, phony cigarettes, or counterfeit Viagra.
For those of us who care, there are about 200 pages of UN-approved documents here describing the nuclear, ballistic missile, and WMD-related trade with North Korea that the international community had agreed to embargo.
The "illicit activities" enjoined by the UN relate to trade in these particular embargoed items.
UNSCR 1718, that celebrated expression of international unanimity was, of course, not enough for John Bolton.
Just as he did with the PSI statement, Bolton took the back door (or “signing statement” approach), declaring a unilateral interpretation that added new elements to an agreement that has already been negotiated and signed.
Here, his purpose was to establish a spurious link between the UN resolution—designed specifically to sanction North Korea’s WMD efforts—to US efforts to ostracize the North Korean government and economy as a whole from the international financial system.
For the United States, the necessary conceptual link—as David Asher, one of the primary architects of Washington’s anti-Pyongyang effort, defined it —was to regard the North Korean government as an essentially criminal enterprise.
Therefore, any and all international financial activities could be construed as buttressing the essential criminal activities of the North Korean “Soprano state”, including its signature racket—acquisition of a nuclear capability.
This conception certainly made dealing with North Korea easier for the heavy thinkers in the Bush administration—there was no North Korean activity that was licit and unrelated to WMDs, so we could go after everything.
However, it was not an idea that was embodied in the UN resolution, nor was it one that the world at large had endorsed.
Now, the United States has gone overboard in imposing the North Korean financial sanctions.
It is not only trying to force the international community to participate in a unilateral sanctions regime that goes beyond the wording and intent of the UN resolution.
It is attempting to maintain that regime even when it conflicts with the agreements made by its own State Department to denuclearize North Korea under the Six Party Agreement.
It’s come to a point where I think that many countries are getting sick of the US preoccupation with the $25 million in BDA.
More dangerously, it threatens to discredit the pretensions of the Patriot Act Section 311 regime to legitimacy and effectiveness in the eyes of the international community—in fact, making it look like another piece of dangerous, stubbornly and incompetently executed idiocy by the Bush administration--just as we wish to use it as the vehicle for our anti-Iran diplomacy.
A senior US official said Pyongyang had encountered several problems in consolidating all its accounts at BDA. In addition to not realising how many accounts it held at the bank, the official said North Korea appeared to be having difficulty getting the necessary signatures to release the funds.
Once Pyongyang had consolidated its accounts, officials said it could withdraw the money from BDA. South Korean and US officials confirmed that North Korea wanted to transfer the money to Italian and Russian bank accounts. (Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington and Anna Fifield in Seoul, N Korea still to recover frozen $25m, Financial Times, May 3, 2007)
So it looks like the lump sum approach is going ahead, no doubt to the chagrin of Bush administration hardliners who hoped to force North Korean account holders to present themselves (if they could or dared) to withdraw their funds in person with a suitcase.
And I’m not surprised that North Korea is “having difficulty getting the necessary signatures to release the funds”.
Especially since one of the signatures they will presumably need is Colin McAskill’s, since his group purchased the Daedong Credit Bank. About $8 million in Daedong’s accounts were frozen when Treasury announced its Patriot Act Section 311 action.
Pushing for a logical resolution to the BDA mess, McAskill had wanted the legitimacy of his accounts confirmed, and acknowledgement that he could move the money without restriction or fear of potential sanctions for whatever bank handled the funds.
From the April 15 International Herald Tribune:
Colin McAskill, a British businessman who represents Daedong Credit Bank in negotiations over its frozen funds, said he would insist on using legitimate banking channels to shift money from the newly freed account. "I am not going to stand in a queue behind other North Koreans with a suitcase and try to move it," McAskill said. "We will move it through the banking system."
Good luck with that, Colin.
The point at issue here seems to be that the United States does not want the BDA settlement to signal a breakdown in U.S. efforts to impose an international financial embargo on North Korea.
Reviewing what the international community had agreed to do concerning North Korea, I reviewed UN Resolution 1718, which sanctioned North Korea’s WMD and proliferation-related activities.
In the process, I came across a classic piece of Boltonianism:
The resolution also provides for a regime of inspections to ensure compliance with its provisions, building on the existing work of the Proliferation Security Initiative.
One thing that jumps out is Bolton’s reference to “building on the existing work of the Proliferation Security Initiative”.
In fact, the UN has repeatedly refused to endorse the PSI, the US-led security operation that could be construed as giving Washington and its allies license to conduct unilateral interdiction activities with UN approval.
Bolton, as I’ve written before with enormous corroborating detail, had been indefatigable in asserting UN support for the PSI when no such support existed, a point that mush-minded supporters of PSI—who apparently misconstrue the PSI as a piece of muscular multi-lateral dogooderism—have stubbornly refused to grasp.
Second entry in the John Bolton “I said it loudly and confidently so you must believe it is true” pantheon is:
This resolution also targets other illicit activities of the regime in Pyongyang, and includes a ban on trade in luxury goods. It targets the way Kim Jong Il finances his weapons of mass destruction programs through criminal activities like money laundering, counterfeiting, and selling of narcotics. It imposes a binding requirement on all member states to take action against those activities and freeze the assets of entities and individuals of the DPRK involved.
Actual references in UNSC Resolution 1718 to targeting Kim Jong Il’s criminal activities as part of the anti-WMD sanctions action:
Zero
Nada
Bupkus
Nothing there about moneylaundering, Supernotes, meth, phony cigarettes, or counterfeit Viagra.
For those of us who care, there are about 200 pages of UN-approved documents here describing the nuclear, ballistic missile, and WMD-related trade with North Korea that the international community had agreed to embargo.
The "illicit activities" enjoined by the UN relate to trade in these particular embargoed items.
UNSCR 1718, that celebrated expression of international unanimity was, of course, not enough for John Bolton.
Just as he did with the PSI statement, Bolton took the back door (or “signing statement” approach), declaring a unilateral interpretation that added new elements to an agreement that has already been negotiated and signed.
Here, his purpose was to establish a spurious link between the UN resolution—designed specifically to sanction North Korea’s WMD efforts—to US efforts to ostracize the North Korean government and economy as a whole from the international financial system.
For the United States, the necessary conceptual link—as David Asher, one of the primary architects of Washington’s anti-Pyongyang effort, defined it —was to regard the North Korean government as an essentially criminal enterprise.
Therefore, any and all international financial activities could be construed as buttressing the essential criminal activities of the North Korean “Soprano state”, including its signature racket—acquisition of a nuclear capability.
This conception certainly made dealing with North Korea easier for the heavy thinkers in the Bush administration—there was no North Korean activity that was licit and unrelated to WMDs, so we could go after everything.
However, it was not an idea that was embodied in the UN resolution, nor was it one that the world at large had endorsed.
Now, the United States has gone overboard in imposing the North Korean financial sanctions.
It is not only trying to force the international community to participate in a unilateral sanctions regime that goes beyond the wording and intent of the UN resolution.
It is attempting to maintain that regime even when it conflicts with the agreements made by its own State Department to denuclearize North Korea under the Six Party Agreement.
It’s come to a point where I think that many countries are getting sick of the US preoccupation with the $25 million in BDA.
More dangerously, it threatens to discredit the pretensions of the Patriot Act Section 311 regime to legitimacy and effectiveness in the eyes of the international community—in fact, making it look like another piece of dangerous, stubbornly and incompetently executed idiocy by the Bush administration--just as we wish to use it as the vehicle for our anti-Iran diplomacy.
Thursday, May 03, 2007
The Empire Strikes Back?
China Matters Goes Another Round on the Matter of the City Journal
In the comments to my previous post concerning the City Journal’s media blitz to the China/India blogosphere concerning Guy Sorman’s The Empire of Lies, Billz1981 quoted from a 2001 article in The Nation:
"...let's accept for the sake of discussion that the right-wing foundations are outgunned in dollar terms. Why, then, are we living in a policy landscape determined by their ideas?. . . Maybe it's because the conservative foundations have spent their somewhat more limited funds--the Manhattan Institute, for all its influence, gets by on ... the equivalent of pocket change for any of the larger, more progressive foundations--quite strategically..." Gara LaMarche, The Nation, April 19, 2001
I am assuming that Billz1981 is employing the honeyed words of the left-friendly Nation to challenge my description of the Manhattan Institute (whose house organ the City Journal is) as “well-heeled” and “battening on the Koch-Olin-Scaife teat.”
If so, Billz1981, prepare to taste my steel.
I went back and read the article in question, Compassionate Aversionism.
If Billz1981’s intent was to advance the reputation of the Manhattan Institute with some selective quotation, in this case failure is the only outcome.
The full quote reads:
Maybe it's because the conservative foundations have spent their somewhat more limited funds--the Manhattan Institute, for all its influence, gets by on a budget of $6.2 million, the equivalent of pocket change for any of the larger, more progressive foundations--quite strategically, eschewing demonstration projects for well-promoted shibboleths about the evils of government like--well, like Heather Mac Donald's [the Manhattan Institute author whose book Gara Lamarche is critiquing—ed]. As Edwin Feulner, longtime president of the Heritage Foundation (a model for the Manhattan Institute), which provided the blueprint for the Reagan Administration in 1981, told the American Legislative Exchange Council late last year, "It is telling that much of the left's distress about our success is aggravated by the skills we've acquired in marketing ideas." Given the success of the right's agenda, the pervasive whine about its marginalization that Mac Donald typifies is particularly galling. She complains about the professional victimhood of welfare rights and minority advocates, but nobody plays the role better than Mac Donald.[emphasis added--ed.]
The point of the article is that the Manhattan Institute is not a grant-dispensing foundation dispensing funding and administering programs as the Ford Foundation and other “liberal” institutions do.
The Institute is an advocacy group purpose-built to discredit state-run social programs and attack government intervention in the market place.
Based on this narrow mission—that of a pro-business lobbying group seeking to shape public opinion—and the relatively low cost involved in producing, procuring, and recycling anti-liberal polemics, my description of the Manhattan Institute as “well-heeled” still stands.
The interesting larger issue is the one raised by Feulner of the Heritage Foundation in the quote above: the “marketing” of ideas.
There is apparently an inexhaustible demand for simple ideas, especially if they benefit rich and powerful groups who don’t want their advantages taxed, regulated, or scrutinized. And the most powerful and marketable idea for the Right has been that liberalism is not just harassing the rich—it’s destroying the world.
It’s a simple idea, one that can be quickly and inexpensively propagated. When there’s serious money involved—both for the lobbying groups and the individuals and enterprises who will benefit from the lobbying—it’s an idea that can take wing, at least on the editorial pages, 24-hour news networks, and blog networks.
The author of the Nation piece, by the way, is not particularly impressed with the “well-promoted shibboleths” that the Manhattan Institute propagates with its “strategically” allocated “pocket change”:
...in the parallel universe in which Mac Donald, Magnet and other City Journal writers dwell, government can't do a thing right. What's most striking about this, from authors who claim to celebrate old-fashioned virtues, is its fundamental dishonesty. It's hard to take seriously intellectuals who, in their ideological zeal to discredit government, ignore all contrary evidence...
Perhaps more accurate truth in packaging for the Manhattan Institute would be "The Gold-Plated Megaphone for Right-Wing Anecdotal Bullshibboleth", but I guess that's not the gateway to corporate and foundation funding.
The consolation for the Left, I suppose, is that the Bush administration has done such an effective job of driving the country into a ditch that the simple idea that the source of all our problems in the Right and solution for all our problems is stripping away its political power has gained a certain amount of traction.
But, to paraphrase Napoleon, God is on the side of the big balance sheets, so I expect that the Manhattan Institute and the City Journal will continue to find ready funding, clever advocates, and eager collaborators for their efforts.
In that context, I’d like to admit that I’ve finally figured out what those Blogger tags are for.
They’re used to help place the Google Ad-sense ads which appear at the top of the site that nobody apparently clicks on.
As soon as my post on City Journal went up, the banner filled with ads promoting the Wall Street Journal, conservative websites, and a passel of organizations offering services to non-profit foundations. Even, bless her, Ann Coulter chose to promote her e-mail service on my humble blog.
All this attention has turned my head.
Therefore, I am tagging this post with references to the City Journal, the Manhattan Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Weekly Standard, the American Enterprise Institute, the Scaife Foundation, the Olin Foundation, and the Koch Foundation. And, of course, Ann.
I urge all my readers to click on the resultant banner ads at least a couple gazillion times to show you care about these admirable institutions and the wonderful corporations that choose to affiliate with them.
I'm not selling out. I'm buyin' in!
In the comments to my previous post concerning the City Journal’s media blitz to the China/India blogosphere concerning Guy Sorman’s The Empire of Lies, Billz1981 quoted from a 2001 article in The Nation:
"...let's accept for the sake of discussion that the right-wing foundations are outgunned in dollar terms. Why, then, are we living in a policy landscape determined by their ideas?. . . Maybe it's because the conservative foundations have spent their somewhat more limited funds--the Manhattan Institute, for all its influence, gets by on ... the equivalent of pocket change for any of the larger, more progressive foundations--quite strategically..." Gara LaMarche, The Nation, April 19, 2001
I am assuming that Billz1981 is employing the honeyed words of the left-friendly Nation to challenge my description of the Manhattan Institute (whose house organ the City Journal is) as “well-heeled” and “battening on the Koch-Olin-Scaife teat.”
If so, Billz1981, prepare to taste my steel.
I went back and read the article in question, Compassionate Aversionism.
If Billz1981’s intent was to advance the reputation of the Manhattan Institute with some selective quotation, in this case failure is the only outcome.
The full quote reads:
Maybe it's because the conservative foundations have spent their somewhat more limited funds--the Manhattan Institute, for all its influence, gets by on a budget of $6.2 million, the equivalent of pocket change for any of the larger, more progressive foundations--quite strategically, eschewing demonstration projects for well-promoted shibboleths about the evils of government like--well, like Heather Mac Donald's [the Manhattan Institute author whose book Gara Lamarche is critiquing—ed]. As Edwin Feulner, longtime president of the Heritage Foundation (a model for the Manhattan Institute), which provided the blueprint for the Reagan Administration in 1981, told the American Legislative Exchange Council late last year, "It is telling that much of the left's distress about our success is aggravated by the skills we've acquired in marketing ideas." Given the success of the right's agenda, the pervasive whine about its marginalization that Mac Donald typifies is particularly galling. She complains about the professional victimhood of welfare rights and minority advocates, but nobody plays the role better than Mac Donald.[emphasis added--ed.]
The point of the article is that the Manhattan Institute is not a grant-dispensing foundation dispensing funding and administering programs as the Ford Foundation and other “liberal” institutions do.
The Institute is an advocacy group purpose-built to discredit state-run social programs and attack government intervention in the market place.
Based on this narrow mission—that of a pro-business lobbying group seeking to shape public opinion—and the relatively low cost involved in producing, procuring, and recycling anti-liberal polemics, my description of the Manhattan Institute as “well-heeled” still stands.
The interesting larger issue is the one raised by Feulner of the Heritage Foundation in the quote above: the “marketing” of ideas.
There is apparently an inexhaustible demand for simple ideas, especially if they benefit rich and powerful groups who don’t want their advantages taxed, regulated, or scrutinized. And the most powerful and marketable idea for the Right has been that liberalism is not just harassing the rich—it’s destroying the world.
It’s a simple idea, one that can be quickly and inexpensively propagated. When there’s serious money involved—both for the lobbying groups and the individuals and enterprises who will benefit from the lobbying—it’s an idea that can take wing, at least on the editorial pages, 24-hour news networks, and blog networks.
The author of the Nation piece, by the way, is not particularly impressed with the “well-promoted shibboleths” that the Manhattan Institute propagates with its “strategically” allocated “pocket change”:
...in the parallel universe in which Mac Donald, Magnet and other City Journal writers dwell, government can't do a thing right. What's most striking about this, from authors who claim to celebrate old-fashioned virtues, is its fundamental dishonesty. It's hard to take seriously intellectuals who, in their ideological zeal to discredit government, ignore all contrary evidence...
Perhaps more accurate truth in packaging for the Manhattan Institute would be "The Gold-Plated Megaphone for Right-Wing Anecdotal Bullshibboleth", but I guess that's not the gateway to corporate and foundation funding.
The consolation for the Left, I suppose, is that the Bush administration has done such an effective job of driving the country into a ditch that the simple idea that the source of all our problems in the Right and solution for all our problems is stripping away its political power has gained a certain amount of traction.
But, to paraphrase Napoleon, God is on the side of the big balance sheets, so I expect that the Manhattan Institute and the City Journal will continue to find ready funding, clever advocates, and eager collaborators for their efforts.
In that context, I’d like to admit that I’ve finally figured out what those Blogger tags are for.
They’re used to help place the Google Ad-sense ads which appear at the top of the site that nobody apparently clicks on.
As soon as my post on City Journal went up, the banner filled with ads promoting the Wall Street Journal, conservative websites, and a passel of organizations offering services to non-profit foundations. Even, bless her, Ann Coulter chose to promote her e-mail service on my humble blog.
All this attention has turned my head.
Therefore, I am tagging this post with references to the City Journal, the Manhattan Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Weekly Standard, the American Enterprise Institute, the Scaife Foundation, the Olin Foundation, and the Koch Foundation. And, of course, Ann.
I urge all my readers to click on the resultant banner ads at least a couple gazillion times to show you care about these admirable institutions and the wonderful corporations that choose to affiliate with them.
I'm not selling out. I'm buyin' in!
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
Did You Get an E-Mail from Paul Beston?
Guy Sorman and City Journal Rock the China Blogosphere
I got an e-mail from Paul Beston, Associate Editor of the City Journal, directing my attention to an article about China in its current edition, Guy Sorman’s "The Empire of Lies."
Flattered, I sought out the article (note to City Journal: the link in the e-mail didn’t work. Get some interns working on that!).
I found that the City Journal is a publication of the Manhattan Institute, a well-heeled right wing think tank battening on the Koch-Olin-Scaife teat.
How well heeled? Wikipedia tells us:
The Manhattan Institute received $19,470,416 in grants from 1985-2005, from foundations such as the Koch Family Foundations, the John M. Olin Foundation, Inc., the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Scaife Foundations, and the Smith Richardson Foundation. The Manhattan Institute does not disclose its corporate funding, but the Capital Research Center listed its contributors as Bristol-Myers Squibb, Exxon Mobil, Chase Manhattan, Cigna, Sprint, Reliant Energy, Lincoln Financial Group Foundation, and Merill Lynch.
It also has a reputation of serving as Rudolph Giuliani’s brain trust.
The Journal’s editor, Brian Anderson, proudly lists several articles extolling the virtues of Fox News (By steering right, Fox News speaks for ignored millions) on his resume. The masthead features endorsements by various people whom I, as a liberal, don’t particularly like, such as Peggy (“God sent the dolphins to save Elian”) Noonan.
I wasn’t particularly taken with the article. Although based on considerable first-hand reporting—and apparently mined from Sorman’s full length book, Year of the Rooster--I found it to be another entry into what I mentally file as the China: It’s Worse Than You Think! genre.
These cautionary tales are perhaps on one level a necessary antidote to the China Rising optimism, which hopes that, just because the Chinese are currently eating our lunch economically and geopolitically, something good is going to come out of it for the world.
But China’s post-Tian An Men run of success has been long enough that I think we have to take a serious look at the positives and negatives of a genuine Chinese post-Communist developmental and political model, and not just collate anecdotal evidence for Cassandra-esque warnings that China is a tottering tyranny rotting from the inside.
Having said that, we’re probably going to be hearing a lot from Mr. Sorman, especially if Sarkozy wins the French presidential election.
Mr. Sorman is a big deal in France, a conservative public intellectual, apostle of free markets, and much more sympathetic to India than to China.
Perhaps because his country hasn’t committed a colossal cock-up in the Arab world for about 40 years, he seems to still have a childlike faith in the power of capitalism and its little buddy democracy to miraculously transform human behavior and society at large.
Talking about how France is shaking off the mental and social chains of liberalism, Sorman wrote in the Wall Street Journal:
The immigrant population does not wait for the central government to find a solution for their economic problems. Leading of our rap singers with Arab or African origins , have become entrepreneurs in entertainment and fashion ; they openly advocate capitalism in their lyrics.
Hmmm. The Rap-Based Economy. Maybe “Le Bling...c’est moi!” I smell a book deal, or at least a WSJ op-ed.
With the elevation of a pro-American center-right Sarkozy regime in France, French diplomacy will probably be more in sync with whatever diplomatic intiatives the lame-duck Bush administration is able to muster up, and we can expect to look to Mr. Sorman to promote the shared agenda to us through the pages of the Wall Street Journal, the City Journal, and various sympathetic blogs.
The Wall Street Journal opinion page—the bellweather of hardcore conservatism—excerted the City Journal article, and also carried his musings on the French presidential elections this month.
The Manhattan Institute seems to have a strong Francophile (at least francophile-droit) tilt, making it a most suitable venue for introducing America to the new, conservative face of Old Europe.
The City Journal's editor, Brian Anderson, wrote a biography of one Raymond Aron, a French thinker very much in Sorman’s conservative vein.
And the Journal is apparently getting behind Sorman in a big way.
The City Journal's e-mail blast to the India and China blogs at large is an interesting indication that the Right, at the very least, is getting its act together to set the China/India agenda in the blogosphere.
Of course, I found the e-mail interesting for another reason.
Because I got one too.
My little blog, which ranks somewhere between plankton and whalesh*t in the lowest reaches of the China blog food chain, is residing in a right-wing database somewhere, together with ESWN, China Digital Times, China Confidential, the twenty-odd or so other China and India blogs that already linked to the article, and...
...who knows who else.
Did you get an e-mail from Paul Beston?
I got an e-mail from Paul Beston, Associate Editor of the City Journal, directing my attention to an article about China in its current edition, Guy Sorman’s "The Empire of Lies."
Flattered, I sought out the article (note to City Journal: the link in the e-mail didn’t work. Get some interns working on that!).
I found that the City Journal is a publication of the Manhattan Institute, a well-heeled right wing think tank battening on the Koch-Olin-Scaife teat.
How well heeled? Wikipedia tells us:
The Manhattan Institute received $19,470,416 in grants from 1985-2005, from foundations such as the Koch Family Foundations, the John M. Olin Foundation, Inc., the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Scaife Foundations, and the Smith Richardson Foundation. The Manhattan Institute does not disclose its corporate funding, but the Capital Research Center listed its contributors as Bristol-Myers Squibb, Exxon Mobil, Chase Manhattan, Cigna, Sprint, Reliant Energy, Lincoln Financial Group Foundation, and Merill Lynch.
It also has a reputation of serving as Rudolph Giuliani’s brain trust.
The Journal’s editor, Brian Anderson, proudly lists several articles extolling the virtues of Fox News (By steering right, Fox News speaks for ignored millions) on his resume. The masthead features endorsements by various people whom I, as a liberal, don’t particularly like, such as Peggy (“God sent the dolphins to save Elian”) Noonan.
I wasn’t particularly taken with the article. Although based on considerable first-hand reporting—and apparently mined from Sorman’s full length book, Year of the Rooster--I found it to be another entry into what I mentally file as the China: It’s Worse Than You Think! genre.
These cautionary tales are perhaps on one level a necessary antidote to the China Rising optimism, which hopes that, just because the Chinese are currently eating our lunch economically and geopolitically, something good is going to come out of it for the world.
But China’s post-Tian An Men run of success has been long enough that I think we have to take a serious look at the positives and negatives of a genuine Chinese post-Communist developmental and political model, and not just collate anecdotal evidence for Cassandra-esque warnings that China is a tottering tyranny rotting from the inside.
Having said that, we’re probably going to be hearing a lot from Mr. Sorman, especially if Sarkozy wins the French presidential election.
Mr. Sorman is a big deal in France, a conservative public intellectual, apostle of free markets, and much more sympathetic to India than to China.
Perhaps because his country hasn’t committed a colossal cock-up in the Arab world for about 40 years, he seems to still have a childlike faith in the power of capitalism and its little buddy democracy to miraculously transform human behavior and society at large.
Talking about how France is shaking off the mental and social chains of liberalism, Sorman wrote in the Wall Street Journal:
The immigrant population does not wait for the central government to find a solution for their economic problems. Leading of our rap singers with Arab or African origins , have become entrepreneurs in entertainment and fashion ; they openly advocate capitalism in their lyrics.
Hmmm. The Rap-Based Economy. Maybe “Le Bling...c’est moi!” I smell a book deal, or at least a WSJ op-ed.
With the elevation of a pro-American center-right Sarkozy regime in France, French diplomacy will probably be more in sync with whatever diplomatic intiatives the lame-duck Bush administration is able to muster up, and we can expect to look to Mr. Sorman to promote the shared agenda to us through the pages of the Wall Street Journal, the City Journal, and various sympathetic blogs.
The Wall Street Journal opinion page—the bellweather of hardcore conservatism—excerted the City Journal article, and also carried his musings on the French presidential elections this month.
The Manhattan Institute seems to have a strong Francophile (at least francophile-droit) tilt, making it a most suitable venue for introducing America to the new, conservative face of Old Europe.
The City Journal's editor, Brian Anderson, wrote a biography of one Raymond Aron, a French thinker very much in Sorman’s conservative vein.
And the Journal is apparently getting behind Sorman in a big way.
The City Journal's e-mail blast to the India and China blogs at large is an interesting indication that the Right, at the very least, is getting its act together to set the China/India agenda in the blogosphere.
Of course, I found the e-mail interesting for another reason.
Because I got one too.
My little blog, which ranks somewhere between plankton and whalesh*t in the lowest reaches of the China blog food chain, is residing in a right-wing database somewhere, together with ESWN, China Digital Times, China Confidential, the twenty-odd or so other China and India blogs that already linked to the article, and...
...who knows who else.
Did you get an e-mail from Paul Beston?
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
BDA Funds: Free At Last?
There’s been a flurry of rumor and activity on the BDA front, with indications that the fat lady, if not ready to sing, is at least clearing her throat.
Rumors are circulating that the $25 million in unfrozen but heretofore unremittable funds in Banco Delta Asia will be remitted to Russia...Italy...Singapore...Vietnam...and/or Mongolia.
I also read a rumor that a South Korea’s Asset Management Corporation (whose normal brief is buyouts/bailouts of busted South Korean enterprises) would take over BDA, with the assumption, I suppose, that the North Korean funds would be reborn on a higher, purer plane together with a reorganized and resurrected BDA.
There are rumors that the funds from the 52 accounts released separately according to account-holder.
The report I found most interesting (NHK via Phoenix TV), is that the funds will be remitted in a lump sum to the (North) Korean Foreign Trade Bank.
The element that interests me is not the proposition that the Norks are possibly getting their dirty money back.
What I find interesting is the idea of “lump sum”.
I’m sure Colin McAskill finds the idea interesting—and appalling—as well.
After all, McAskill bought a controlling interest in Daedong Credit Bank, which apparently had $8 million of rather licit funds frozen in BDA. He hoped his accounts would receive a clean bill of health and be returned directly to his bank. If the NHK report is true, he’ll just have to talk to Kim Jung Il about his money.
I found the “lump sum” report interesting and plausible because it dovetails with one of David Asher’s preoccupations.
David Asher is the hardliner, now at the Heritage Foundation, who claims to have conceived and designed the BDA Patriot Act Section 311 investigation as part of his operation at the U.S. State Department to financially isolate North Korea.
In his testimony before a House subcommittee on April 18 (which I blogged about here), Asher played up a particular consequence of the Patriot Act sanction against BDA and his much wider effort to ostracize North Korea from the international financial community.
Asher talked about how he had labored to get banks throughout the world to freeze accounts and transactions and refuse to remit moneys on behalf of North Korean account holders.
Asher demurely gloated concerning how discomfited the North Koreans would be to have to present themselves personally in order to claim their funds.
And that got me to thinking about America’s baffling obsession with tying up the North Korean money in BDA even after we had promised they could get it back—and we had a denuclearization deal hanging in the balance.
And it occurs to me that perhaps the U.S. Treasury Department was insisting to Macau and anybody else that received money from the North Korean accounts inside BDA would have to require that the account holders claim the money from the bank in person—thereby getting beyond the nominees, aliases, and shell companies to find out whose money it really was.
The big fish would be Kim Jung Il, who undoubtedly had some of his private coin tied up in BDA.
Perhaps the hardliners were looking forward to Dear Leader shuffling into BDA’s ornate headquarters to furtively empty his personal accounts...
...only to be told he couldn’t have the money until he came back with a certificate of permission from the U.S. Treasury Department and two forms of picture ID!
BWWWWWWWWAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHA!
Just kidding.
But I think the U.S. might have been hoping to score some points with the international financial community by zeroing in on what unsavory characters showed up to claim their funds—and how much money was left behind by miscreants unwilling or unable to show their faces.
Just a thought.
But, if the money is going back to North Korea in a lump sum, the glorious prospect of a serial perp walk through the doors of BDA by the North Korea’s shadowy elite will have to be abandoned.
I had also speculated that America’s campaign against Macau was to deny that territory to Kim Jung Il and his government and companies as a venue for foreign exchange transactions that were a priori illicit according to America’s reading of North Korea as a criminal state.
However, these same transactions would be considered licit—if not especially commendable—if North Korea was granted the benefit of the doubt as a legitimate sovereign state, as South Korea is apparently ready to do.
Significant elements of South Korea’s checkbook diplomacy with the North were conducted through Macau, most notably the colossal US $500 million payoff that paved the way for the 2000 North-South peace summit.
But if the United States was determined to deny the Koreas the use of Macau as a facilitator of checkbook diplomacy, it looks as though the South Koreans came up with a creative alternative: suitcase diplomacy.
From Joong Ang Daily via NKeconwatch:
South Korea hand-delivered $400,000 in cash to North Korea yesterday [April 7, 2007] for Pyongyang’s purchase of video communication equipment. The North will spend the money to buy computers and display screens to reunite families separated for more than a half century by the demilitarized zones through video conference calls.
Two South Korean Red Cross officials boarded a cargo ship in Incheon for Nampo of North Korea Thursday morning. They carried a suitcase containing 40 bundles of one hundred, $100-dollar bills. The ship arrived in North Korea yesterday morning.
...
“It is sad that the North Koreans do not have a proper bank account that we can wire money to,” a Roh administration official said. “It shows the unfortunate reality of North Korea as an outsider of the international community.” (Lee Young-jong and Ser Myo-ja, Cash delivered to North Korea for video reunions, Joong Ang Daily, April 7, 2007)
Maybe the world lost its appetite for vigilante financial justice American style and decided it wanted to let North Korea get the $25 million and give diplomacy a chance.
In order to see where the international united front against North Korea crumbled, it may not be necessary to look much further than South Korea.
Rumors are circulating that the $25 million in unfrozen but heretofore unremittable funds in Banco Delta Asia will be remitted to Russia...Italy...Singapore...Vietnam...and/or Mongolia.
I also read a rumor that a South Korea’s Asset Management Corporation (whose normal brief is buyouts/bailouts of busted South Korean enterprises) would take over BDA, with the assumption, I suppose, that the North Korean funds would be reborn on a higher, purer plane together with a reorganized and resurrected BDA.
There are rumors that the funds from the 52 accounts released separately according to account-holder.
The report I found most interesting (NHK via Phoenix TV), is that the funds will be remitted in a lump sum to the (North) Korean Foreign Trade Bank.
The element that interests me is not the proposition that the Norks are possibly getting their dirty money back.
What I find interesting is the idea of “lump sum”.
I’m sure Colin McAskill finds the idea interesting—and appalling—as well.
After all, McAskill bought a controlling interest in Daedong Credit Bank, which apparently had $8 million of rather licit funds frozen in BDA. He hoped his accounts would receive a clean bill of health and be returned directly to his bank. If the NHK report is true, he’ll just have to talk to Kim Jung Il about his money.
I found the “lump sum” report interesting and plausible because it dovetails with one of David Asher’s preoccupations.
David Asher is the hardliner, now at the Heritage Foundation, who claims to have conceived and designed the BDA Patriot Act Section 311 investigation as part of his operation at the U.S. State Department to financially isolate North Korea.
In his testimony before a House subcommittee on April 18 (which I blogged about here), Asher played up a particular consequence of the Patriot Act sanction against BDA and his much wider effort to ostracize North Korea from the international financial community.
Asher talked about how he had labored to get banks throughout the world to freeze accounts and transactions and refuse to remit moneys on behalf of North Korean account holders.
Asher demurely gloated concerning how discomfited the North Koreans would be to have to present themselves personally in order to claim their funds.
And that got me to thinking about America’s baffling obsession with tying up the North Korean money in BDA even after we had promised they could get it back—and we had a denuclearization deal hanging in the balance.
And it occurs to me that perhaps the U.S. Treasury Department was insisting to Macau and anybody else that received money from the North Korean accounts inside BDA would have to require that the account holders claim the money from the bank in person—thereby getting beyond the nominees, aliases, and shell companies to find out whose money it really was.
The big fish would be Kim Jung Il, who undoubtedly had some of his private coin tied up in BDA.
Perhaps the hardliners were looking forward to Dear Leader shuffling into BDA’s ornate headquarters to furtively empty his personal accounts...
...only to be told he couldn’t have the money until he came back with a certificate of permission from the U.S. Treasury Department and two forms of picture ID!
BWWWWWWWWAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHA!
Just kidding.
But I think the U.S. might have been hoping to score some points with the international financial community by zeroing in on what unsavory characters showed up to claim their funds—and how much money was left behind by miscreants unwilling or unable to show their faces.
Just a thought.
But, if the money is going back to North Korea in a lump sum, the glorious prospect of a serial perp walk through the doors of BDA by the North Korea’s shadowy elite will have to be abandoned.
I had also speculated that America’s campaign against Macau was to deny that territory to Kim Jung Il and his government and companies as a venue for foreign exchange transactions that were a priori illicit according to America’s reading of North Korea as a criminal state.
However, these same transactions would be considered licit—if not especially commendable—if North Korea was granted the benefit of the doubt as a legitimate sovereign state, as South Korea is apparently ready to do.
Significant elements of South Korea’s checkbook diplomacy with the North were conducted through Macau, most notably the colossal US $500 million payoff that paved the way for the 2000 North-South peace summit.
But if the United States was determined to deny the Koreas the use of Macau as a facilitator of checkbook diplomacy, it looks as though the South Koreans came up with a creative alternative: suitcase diplomacy.
From Joong Ang Daily via NKeconwatch:
South Korea hand-delivered $400,000 in cash to North Korea yesterday [April 7, 2007] for Pyongyang’s purchase of video communication equipment. The North will spend the money to buy computers and display screens to reunite families separated for more than a half century by the demilitarized zones through video conference calls.
Two South Korean Red Cross officials boarded a cargo ship in Incheon for Nampo of North Korea Thursday morning. They carried a suitcase containing 40 bundles of one hundred, $100-dollar bills. The ship arrived in North Korea yesterday morning.
...
“It is sad that the North Koreans do not have a proper bank account that we can wire money to,” a Roh administration official said. “It shows the unfortunate reality of North Korea as an outsider of the international community.” (Lee Young-jong and Ser Myo-ja, Cash delivered to North Korea for video reunions, Joong Ang Daily, April 7, 2007)
Maybe the world lost its appetite for vigilante financial justice American style and decided it wanted to let North Korea get the $25 million and give diplomacy a chance.
In order to see where the international united front against North Korea crumbled, it may not be necessary to look much further than South Korea.
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