To all of our special friends in Japan, we are with you and we pray for you.  She will stand again.

Ganbare, Nippon! Ganbare.

(More here at http://davidfday.com/)

While we might see this as a strengthening yen ….

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http://bit.ly/cXyvN6

Ho Chi Minh at the independence day of Democratic Republic of Vietnam, September 2, 1945

Most Americans do not know that it was on this date, as the formal Japanese surrender ceremonies were taking place aboard the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay, that Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam’s independence from colonial rule. He stepped up to a rostrum in Hanoi’s Ba Dinh Square and, carefully borrowing the key portion of the precise text of Thomas Jefferson, delivered the Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

The English translation of this portion his exact text is as follows:

” ‘All men are created equal. They are endowed by their
Creator with certain inalienable rights, among these are Life,
Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness….’

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The senior judicial official for the huge metropolis of Chongqing in Southwestern China was executed by lethal injection during the first week of July, 2010. Wen Qiang’s indictment, arrest, trial, sentencing and now execution this Spring and early Summer exploded into the public consciousness and media, opening up the dirty underbelly of China’s corruption-plagued legal system. Wen was convicted of multiple rapes, protecting underworld gangs & mobsters, bribery and had large unexplained amounts of cash and luxury villas. He was emblematic and symptomatic of big political bosses in the Judiciary and the CCP on the take. His sister-in-law, Xie Caiping, known in Chongqing as “The godmother of organized crime in Chongqing,” was sentenced to 18 years for running illegal casinos.

China’s corruption has become so rampant that the credibility of the CCP …

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For a short preview of a televised program on this topic, click on this picture.

Kim Jong Un (This is one of the few existing images of Jong Un)

North Korea’s Jang Song Thaek, Kim Jong Il’s brother-in-law , was recently promoted to vice-chairman of the powerful National Defense Commission. This is significant because the heir-apparent in North Korea, Kim Jong Un, is Jang’s nephew and, as a top North Korean military official, Jang provides a critical KPA military brass support network for Jong Un.  To stabilize the transistion of power from Kim Jong Il to his youngest son, Jong Un, it must be remembered that Jong Un has no military leadership experience; he does not have the “smoke of the revolution” about him, and will need the military support network provided by his uncle, Jang Song Thaek, if he is to carry any credible authority with the KPA.

Read more here…

See, also Blog article called, North Korea: “The Cheonan Was Bait for an Internal Propaganda Frenzy “ also located below on this Blog.

For Vietnam, stepping onto the world stage in recent years has meant admission to the WTO, a Nonpermanent seat on the UN Security Council, launching the country’s first telecommunications satellite (Vinasat 1 built by Lockeed Martin) and hosting the APEC Summit in Hanoi.

Vietnam continues to weather the global recession in reasonably well with foreign investment possibly doubling to $15 billion this year. Its largest export market is now the U.S. with over $12 billion last year. This Fall will see Intel’s new $1 billion chip assembly plant open outside Ho Chi Minh City.

Vietnam is now poised for yet another breakthrough.

Read More here…

On the receiving end of any spanking from Seoul and the U.S., North Korea actually has a split personality disorder. On the military side, it is like a wounded tiger. On the economic side, with an economy stumbling at roughly the Zimbawe level, North Korea is akin to a crippled,weakened child. Depending upon where you decide to spank, the policy types in Washington and Seoul get to choose between slapping the wounded tiger or kicking the already crippled child. They must understand clearly, if they choose to hit–the “where” and “how” have very different consequences and, like many North Korea issues, the correct strategy is not always obvious.  

The Cheonan sinking is an important internal propaganda victory that Pyongyang  created. With the loss of 46 South Korean sailors, Washington and Seoul had no choice. They took the bait.  In so doing, they have predictably teed up the opportunity now for Kim Jong Il to do a little defense of the homeland frenzy. This internal, “Defense of the DPRK” propaganda barrage that now follows the Washington Seoul “spanking” is  extremely valuable to the regime to enhance its stability at this delicate and difficult time of transition. The Dear Leader and his elite, inner circle know full well that, given Kim Jong Il’s 2008 stoke, his clock is already in overtime.

While we may never know for sure, the sinking of the Cheonan appears to be part of a deliberate teasing to coax a limited military response out of Seoul and Washington. Given the sophisticated, Kasparov-like chessmaster moves made by Pyongyang (typically outgunning U.S. negotiators concentrating on their checkers board), the Cheonan incident is just one of several moves coming up. Brinksmanship?  Hardly.  Pyongyang knows full well that at worst it faces a limited spanking response like perhaps joint military exercises (for show) or perhaps beefed up security between U.S and ROK forces on the peninsula combined with some rhetoric. Nothing more. Should Seoul engage in even the most benign cross-border military skirmish, Kim Jong Il can  then get away with his slash back and propagandize that as blocking the aggressor from the South, no matter how minimal the “deterrent” response is from Washington and Seoul.

There is another piece to this already complicated puzzle. Kim Jong Il needs a leadership-anointing opportunity to assist his youngest son, the Swiss-educated  Jong-Eun, to obtain some kind of military leadership, albeit limited, in defense of the fatherland. He also needs to cinch down the military power base for Jong-Eun. So how would this work? Whip the country and the KPA into a war frenzy, organize rallies in Pyongyang, put the KPA on alert, cut off trade and communications with the South. Perhaps even give “Brilliant Comrade ” (Jong-Eun) a military leadership role in the slash back exercise which can then be internally propagandized and then jerk him back to safety once the slash back has been undertaken. Military anointment completed and the internal film and propaganda machinery can then be unleashed.

But before “Brilliant Comrade” is placed in the limited line of fire, the Dear Leader needed to test the waters and set up the U.S. an South Korean response. Hence, the Cheonan incident. The timing of this Cheonan chess move is not coincidental—the DPRK Party Congress is set to meet in a few weeks and it is likely that Kim Jong il will confirm then that the baton will pass to Jong-Eun.

Pyongyang plays by a vastly different rulebook. Economic sanctions vis.a.vis the DPRK only serve as political pablum for constituencies in Seoul and in the U.S. The North Korean philosophy of Juche (originally created by North Korean academic Hwang Jang-Yop who later defected) as modified by Kim Jong Il into Kimilsungism will never permit Pyongyang to knuckle under to economic sanctions imposed by outsiders. If you thoroughly understood that philosophy you would know that economic sanctions are an exercise in futility. In fact, the Dear Leader just demonstrated for the world last year that the regime was all too ready, and did, in fact, shoot itself in the economic foot by completely shutting down the economic zone at Kaesong and trade with South Korea in the wake of its 2009 missile and nuclear tests.

The burden of economic sanctions will not scratch the elite ruling class in Pyongyang or the DPRK military—it will be borne by the North Korean people. They are the weakened, impoverished child that will have to take the brunt of any further economic spanking.

June 6,  2010 by davidfday

Some commentators suggest that this Cheonan incident may have created be the perfect storm to elbow the regime over the cliff. The consequences of such a “Diem” strategy towards the DPRK would be disastrous. Even without being elbowed, the regime is still going to implode. It is not a question of whether.  It is simply a question of when—and and serious economic sanctions run the terrible risk of shoving the DPRK right over the edge.

A DPRK implosion will cause a massive disaster crisis on a scale the likes of which the world has never seen before. On the human side, the disaster will involve hundreds of thousands of refugees seeking to breach the Chinese and Russian borders in the Northern part of the country and even greater numbers attempting to cross the heavily- mined DMZ to get to Seoul. There are multi-million numbers involved in human relief efforts that will have to be sustained for a lengthy period of time since there is no economy. Then there are the WMD weapons, expertise, nuclear materials, and rogue military issues also in the equation which will have to somehow be handled with lightening speed before being spirited away into undesirable hands. The current regime is already unstable and approaching a delicate leadership time—a collapse risks an implosion of epic proportions, making Haiti look like a garden party. Russia and China understand this and will not buy into any serious, biting economic sanctions that shove North Korea closer to the brink.

There are two critical points here. The first is that there can never be stability on the Korean peninsula until the DPRK can create a modicum of economic progress. Every day that the country can move a bit towards its 2012 economic goal of “A Mighty and Prosperous Nation” is a win and pushes the implosion nightmare back a notch or two. This will require heavier involvement of the private sector, not less. As a policy goal, Seoul and Washington must find ways to get more of the private sector underway in North Korea. The heroine for peninsula stability last year was Hyun Jung-Eun, chairwoman of South Korea’s Hyundai Group who successfully negotiated the reopening of North-South trade after the Dear Leader shut it down. Hyun Jung-Eun personifies the type of private sector leadership that can brunt or possibly block the implosion nightmare– if given enough time.

The second point is that the current disaster relief efforts in Haiti and the Gulf of Mexico do not even rise to the level of dress rehearsals for a collapse of North Korea. Seoul will have to bear the brunt of the implosion nightmare. Unless the Blue House is sufficiently satisfied watching Washington’s current response to the crises in Haiti and with the BP oil spill, and is convinced that Washington is fully capable of handling a multiple-fold Haiti with lightning speed and minimal hiccups, it would be well-advised to get a massive, DPRK disaster master plan in place yesterday. This means strategic disaster planning, the staging of huge amounts of supplies, disaster management training and development, and repeated, coordinating rehearsals. The response time will need to be in hours, not days or weeks and a blistering fast disaster response cannot be cobbled together on this massive scale when it occurs. It will be way too late.