Ben Merens’ guest, after four, breaks down the North Korea nuclear test, from Kim Jong-il’s rationale for the weekend blast, to the likely response from the US, the UN, and neighboring countries.
Guest: Charles Armstrong, Director of the Center for Korean Research, Columbia University
Many of us are aware that more than forty-million Americans are without health insurance, but few of us can put names and faces to this largely anonymous group. After five, Ben Merens guest identifies some of the uninsured and tells their stories. Guest: Susan Sered, author, “Uninsured In America: Life and Death In The Land of Opportunity” Senior research associate, Center for Women’s Health and Human Rights, Suffolk University.
posted by At Issue with Ben Merens @ 7:36 AM
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1 Comments:
Today in the 4:00 o’clock hour, Professor Charles Armstrong of Columbia University missed the opportunity to clearly and succinctly define the North Korean nuclear weapon test issue while At Issue listener-callers wasted our time with blind hatred of President Bush, hypocritical contempt for the United States, and unrequited sympathies and accolades for all cultures not American. From the father of a U.S. Marine, a U.S. Naval Service veteran, earning degrees in Political Science, Economics, Public Policy, and History from the University of Wisconsin, and more than six years as a USAID contractor filling a passport twice over from Latin America, Africa, Central and Eastern Europe, to Asia, here are the facts.
1. It is the month of October and winter is rapidly approaching, North Korea desperately needs food and home heating fuel above and beyond the Chinese stipend, and they want U.S. dollars to supply it. What does this mean? Like a common, inner-city thug, they are attempting to rob the local 7-11 convenience store to survive the winter. Holding a gun (nuclear bomb) to the head of Asian tigers, North Korea wants unmarked food and fuel.
2. Mr. Armstrong suggested that North Korea wants “access” to US aid programs (i.e. USAID and USDA Food for Peace) to improve or “grow” their economy internally. US law now requires that only donations through aid, whether humanitarian or economic are labeled and placarded by the delivering agency as a gift “from the people of the United States of America.” This prohibits with North Korea’s need to repackage and re-label food and aid with the North Korean falling star. This is the impasse of needed food aid.
3. Mr. Armstrong went on to suggest that North Korea demands a security guarantee, which the US will not act aggressively. North Korea argues that the denial of aid—free food and fuel oil to prop up a failed communist regime—is in fact an act of aggression.
4. Finally, Mr. Armstrong concluded his comments that North Korea wanted to demonstrate its power and take advantage of declining US power. This equates power to weapons—conventional, nuclear, and military. The US is the most powerful nation in the world and North Korea the least because power is food—power is the ability to feed your population and others.
North Korea cannot feed or house its population because it is operating under a failed and inoperable government and economic system. While denying personal and economic rights to its people, it demands the right to exist at the expense of productive US taxpayers or it will nuke the democratic states of Asia and the Pacific Rim. It is a failed state robbing the local 7-11, demanding a subsidy for its oppressive regime. Instead, on WPR during At Issue, we heard the regurgitated, tired verbal assaults on the Bush administration, and no moderator to press the conversation to the real issues—the North Korean communist experiment is entering into the violent death throes of historical obscurity, and threatening to go out with a bang—to take the dynamic economic Pacific Rim with it.
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