Day: June 26, 2024
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NPR News: 06-26-2024 9PM EDT
The recent meeting of Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un in North Korea marks a new stage not only in their alliance but in their ideological convergence. This is no mere marriage of convenience. The two leaders have become so much closer in their political and economic sympathies over the last two decades that they now qualify as a compatible couple.
In this most recent meeting, Putin’s first trip to North Korea in 24 years, the two leaders acted very much like two spurned lovers in a rebound relationship. Putin has turned his back on the West and sees his political and economic fortunes in the East. Kim is giving up on reunification with South Korea and views Russia as a more likely partner for economic and military cooperation.
During the Cold War, of course, North Korea and the Soviet Union were close allies. In the 1990s, however, no one could have predicted that the two countries would ever resurrect that Cold War romance.
Rekindling the Love
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia was beginning its experiment with democracy and its transition to a market economy. It was opening itself up to the world after decades of relative isolation within the Soviet sphere.
North Korea, meanwhile, was slipping backwards into economic collapse and famine. Although forced to accept humanitarian assistance, the government in Pyongyang remained very skeptical about the intentions of Western governments.
Coming out of those very different experiences, Russia and North Korea arrived at similar conclusions: The West was not to be trusted. The West, after all, provided economic advice that helped to wreck Russia and refused to offer the Kremlin anything but a junior security partnership as NATO expanded eastward. With North Korea, meanwhile, the West dangled carrots to persuade Pyongyang to forgo nuclear weapons but never delivered on the promises, and promoted a human rights agenda that sounded a lot like regime change to North Korea’s political elite.
Today, having turned their back on the West, the two countries look more and more like mirror images. The both face similarly steep sanctions and have increasingly similar corporatist economies. They both now spend a sizeable percentage of their GDP on their military (8 percent for Russia; about double that for North Korea).
Russia, once a shaky democracy, has become an autocracy centered around a single leader who has effectively made himself president for life. North Korea, never a democracy, has managed to keep its dynastic autocracy going for nearly 80 years. Both leaders insist on their absolute sovereign right to do whatever they like within their borders (and sometimes outside their borders).
Apart from the ideological convergence, Russia and North Korea receive concrete benefits from their burgeoning relationship.
North Korea is providing Russia with millions of artillery shells for its war in Ukraine. As much as half of these shells reportedly;don’t work, perhaps because of their age, but they at least contribute to Ukraine’s sense of being outgunned. Ukraine has also;reported;evidence of Russia using North Korean ballistic missiles, which gives Pyongyang an opportunity to test its weapons in battlefield conditions. Kim Jong Un has offered to send troops to fight in Ukraine and even help with the reconstruction of areas of the country occupied by Russian troops.
In return, North Korea is reportedly receiving food and energy as well as Russian technology that it can use for its satellite program and perhaps its nuclear arsenal as well. Russia has also;offered to build a hospital;in North Korea.
The new bilateral relationship has risen to the level of a military alliance. The two countries have pledged, if either one is attacked, to pursue “all means at its disposal without delay” to provide “military and other assistance.” That comes with a significant asterisk – the aid must conform to the laws of the two countries and to the UN Charter. But still, it’s a return to the relationship the two countries enjoyed up until 2000, when ties weakened considerably.
The New Multipolarism
The two countries also agreed to work toward a “just and multipolar new world order.” The word “multipolar” used to mean an alternative to the bipolarism of the Cold War era and the unipolarism of the U.S.-dominated post-Cold War era. This multipolarism was reflected in the “rise of the rest,” represented by the BRICS grouping (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), pressures to change the composition of the UN Security Council, and new trade patterns in the Global South.
But today, multipolarism has acquired a new meaning. Particularly under the influence of Russia, multipolarism now represents a challenge to the rule of law, the rights enshrined in the UN Charter and subsequent treaties, and the very notion that some principles take priority over the national preferences of any given country (or leader).
Russia and North Korea have already been coordinating with other nations on the outs with the international community like Iran, Syria, and Nicaragua. So far, the axis doesn’t have anything near a critical mass. Russia would like to recruit China, but Beijing at the moment is too invested in the global status quo to side entirely with these rule-breakers.
Perhaps Russia and North Korea are contemplating not just building up an alternative world order but further disrupting the current state of affairs. North Korea wanted the approval of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin before launching its attack on the South in 1950. With this latest meeting with Putin, could Kim Jong Un again be seeking a green light to invade the South, which some influential Pyongyang watchers;believe is in the offing?
Kim has certainly escalated its rhetoric toward the South in recent months and destroyed some obvious symbols of reunification, like the Monument to the Three Charters for National Reunification. It would be quite nearly suicidal for the North to invade the South again. But countries will sometimes do unpredictable things, as Russia proved when it invaded Ukraine in 2022.
More likely, Russia and North Korea will just bide their time and hope to draw in more allies, particularly China. With the rise of far-right politicians elsewhere—Hungary, the Netherlands, perhaps again in the United States—the West may well be too divided and too isolationist to mount a challenge to the new axis anchored by Russia and North Korea. At least that seems to be the plan being hatched by Kim and Putin, with the expectation that China will soon decide to decouple from a West that is already in the midst of cutting ties with China.
So, this new alliance is not just a pact of outsiders. From the point of view of Russia and North Korea, it truly is the beginning of a whole new world order.
- Source: This article was published at FPIF and originally appeared in Hankyoreh.
By Kevin Van Elswyk
On January 14, the White House issued an emotionally charged bulletin on overdraft fees. It outdid itself, packing the release with vituperative claims that overdraft fees were sneaky, hidden, just plain wrong, and exploitative, that they raked in excessive profits for the wealthy and padded the banks’ bottom lines, all at the expense of hardworking families.
“Junk fees may not matter to the very wealthy, but they matter to most folks in homes like the one [Greek, Jewish, and Puerto Rican] I grew up in,” Joe Biden said in;March. “They add up to hundreds of dollars a month.”
In his homage to class warfare, and imaginary;ethnic experiences;as a child, Biden promised in a January 2024;presidential statement;to curb or slash junk fees in banking: “This is about companies that rip-off hardworking Americans simply because they can.”
He claimed that Republicans defend exploitative fees, give way to wealthy and big corporations, and undermine competition among banks, punishing hardworking families. It is an election year; expect more blathering.
The administration postulates that junk fees amalgamated with greedy profits are at the root of impoverished, oppressed Americans. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) director Rohit Chopra;provided;this declaration of war: “Today’s rule ends the era of big credit card companies;hiding behind the excuse of inflation when they hike fees on borrowers and boost their own bottom lines.”
This inflation deflection is playbook propaganda. This is not a campaign trail whopper from President Pause, whose staff must clean up what he meant. This is an official communiqué of the White House, written by staff, reviewed before release, and echoed in other pronouncements. It is composed of four shameful lies and a storm of curated half-truths designed to condition headline grazers that federal intervention is necessary.
Anachronistic dialogue from the;2010 Consumer Protection Act, passed after the major recession, contained three invasive banking regulations. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Dick Durbin as well as their tribe imposed more regulations on banks. Debit card charges, credit card premiums, and banking fees came under attack. This recent bombast is taking thirteen-year-old banking practices and attacking them as current 2024 procedures. The next target is buy-now-pay-later offers from retailers.
A common, working definition of propaganda is the “dissemination of information—facts, arguments, rumors, half-truths, or lies—to influence;public opinion. It is conveyed through;mass media.”
Faustian reporting by;mass media;is the echo chamber for the lies and curated half-truths influencing;public opinion. Using headline news captions from this presidential statement,;main street media outlets parroted the allegations. MSNBC, CNN, Axios, the Associated Press, the;New York Times, CNBC,;Barron’s, and the;Wall Street Journal;reported “facts”;from the releasewithout comment at the time.
Four lies, or abject confusion, comprise the alleged savings for typical families.;The new rules would supposedly save a typical;family $150 a year for a total of $3.5 billion every year and encourage competition.
Reporters seeking a byline repeated logical impossibilities as factoids, inviting a click past the paywall.;The media stories all contain a “could” clause, which are word bunkers to hide in when information blows up the original statement. The claims were all modified in the last lines of the articles: CNN used “potentially, as much as”; Reuters said, “could save”; AP used “could lower”; CBS used “could limit”; and so on.Hannah Arendt;wrote in “Lying and Politics” that “the trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wish to hide.;In early 2022, the CFPB published a report that families who pay “junk” fees pay $150 a year. The CFPB had isolated a cohort of families for this application. Typical families do not pay overdraft fees. The word “typical” substitutes for the report’s “who pay” phrase to imply broader perils to a larger cohort. This reworded statement is a lie.
The current overdraft charges are an average of twenty-seven dollars. To reach $150 for a typical family, it would need six violations. Claiming an average fee savings of $150 per year, the typical family rescued by the act gains three dollars a week.
The savings claimed are worth nine eggs a week at my grocery store, so tighten your belt for one less soufflé this week. It does not impact the 21 percent rise in the entire typical market basket for all typical consumers.
“Banks are hiking fees” is the second lie. According to the CFPB reports, bank fees have;decreased;over the last four years, dropping over;50 percent for the period of 2019–23.
The third lie is about the overdraft and nonsufficient-funds charges. Account holders claim that the;charges are a surprise. Banks contract with consumers to cover insufficient funds. This is not an arbitrary action by the bank. All banks use CFPB wording in their contracts. Account holders agree to overdraft actions instead of an exchange refusal. Overdraft fees have dropped in two years from thirty-three to twenty-six dollars, and further reductions will occur.
That Republicans undermine bank competition is the fourth lie. Major banks have adopted features that prevent overdrafts. The more common service is waiving fees or reducing them to ten dollars if there is a linked account (savings) to the checking or debit account. This benefit is offered by eight of the top ten banks. Multiple overdraft charges for the same day are waived. Other banks allow a dollar amount overdraft, most often fifty dollars.
These improvements are from competition between banks. Banks also compete on banking services such as phone apps, interbank cash machine costs, and maintenance fees. This competition will continue to cut costs as the recent charges are adopted by more of the banking community.
In;Weapons of Math Destruction, Cathy O’Neil addresses bellicose campaign fallacies. She posits that comparisons and conclusions drawn from sloppy math are destructive. We need to view the remainder of this campaign fallacy in the context of;Weapons of Math Destruction: “Problematic mathematical tools share three key features: they are;opacity (opaque), scale (difficult to contest) and damage.”
The greatest weapon is using curated data to create “averages.” The widespread repetition by the media gives scale to the underlying fallacy, making it difficult to contest.
Opacity and unregulated analysis appear frequently, encouraging us to think the consumer is at the mercy of banks and needs federal rescue. By shifting the comparisons in CFPB databases, mathematical congruence between reports is impossible. We could try to relate the weaponized numbers to validate the claim of saving $3.5 billion. However, it is all;blarney. The purpose of these misstatements is to bewilder or condition the public to accept more controls.
Cohorts are contradictory. An estimated twenty-three million people;pay overdraft charges. The twenty-three million annual number is 27 percent of all families.A;later report;claimed that 9 percent of account holders who had more than ten overdrafts annually paid 80 percent of the combined fees, or $720 dollars each. Are overdrafts affecting a small or large subset of all families?
Comparison predicates are incongruent. CFPB used opaque comparisons of unregulated averages to report that a quarter of the eighty-three million families making less than $65,000 frequently pay overdraft fees.;Among households that made $30,000 or less, more than a third said that they had been;charged;an overdraft fee six or more times in 2022. Are those with lower income impacted, or are the fees profoundly affecting middle-income customers?
More confusion in propaganda supports a federal rescue.Fees and charges are dropping and will continue to shrink. The words “typical” and “average” will continue to misconstrue facts. Lies will resurface. Incongruent statements will suspend reason for emotive headlines.
Inflation squeezes the cash flow of lower-income and single families, pushing these families to overdrafts, but there is no relief in Biden’s baloney or Chopra’s calumny.
- About the author: Kevin Van Elswyk is a graduate of Wheaton College (Illinois) with a BA in Literature and a minor in Philosophy. He received an MBA from City University and has completed post grad and certification courses over his career. After 36 executive years with International Commercial Casualty & Risk Management Companies Kevin retired in 2018. Kevin is a 10-year adjunct associate professor most recently with University of Maryland’s Global Campus. He lives in Brookfield Wisconsin and happily has time to read, think, write, and wait for fishing season.
- Source: This article was published by the Mises Institute