Hospitals & Asylums    

Fame, Famine and Fascism HA-10-2-05

By Anthony J. Sanders Hospitals & Asylums National Director

For the World Affair’s Council

This review treats upon the Great North Korean Famine, Politics and Foreign Policy by Andrew S. Natsios the current Administrator of USAID that was published by the Institute for Peace in 2001 the year Mr. Natsios was confirmed to serve as USAID Administrator.  To bring economic famine theory up to date selected comments from the Remarks on Adam Smith At the Adam Smith Memorial Lecture by Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan have been incorporated into this essay.  The book review is complicated by the declaration by the US Secretary of State on 10 February 2005 that North Korea actually has nuclear weapons.  Dr. Rice made it clear that the US has no intention of an aggression against the North Korean State and feels that the North Koreans are doing nothing but harming themselves.  To be completely diplomatic Dr. Rice and/or Mr. Natsios should publicly offer to begin paying $1 billion yearly to the North Korean welfare state in exchange for public IAEA or South Korean government supervised forfeiture of nuclear weapons if they really have them and/or certification of nuclear power facilities pursuant to the sanctions set forth in 22USC(79)§7207 in a strategy that could be emulated with Iran or by South Korea. 

Among the developed countries, famine is now virtually nonexistent. The famine in North Korea occurred shortly after Kim Il Sung’s death in 1994 was followed the next year by Kim Jong Il’s accession to power and was considered over in 1998.  It is the most recent declared famine.  Very high death rates estimated at 3 million in the urban and mining areas followed the replacement of the public distribution system with farmers markets as the principal means by which people obtained their food supply.  In a response to the collapse of the public distribution system Kim John Il said, “Party functionaries… merely mobilize agents from the Ministry of Public Security and functionaries from other dictatorial agencies to clamp down on the masses by law.  If we do not endlessly conduct political works amongst the people, their ideological and spiritual condition will become poorer.” (Natsios 229).  North Korea has long been its own worst enemy, it has the largest land army in Asia and a dismal history of making threats to annihilate South Korea, of continuing extravagant rhetorical attacks against the United States, of producing weapons of mass destruction and selling them without restraint (Natsios 251) much like the fascist and totalitarian (fat) Secretary of Health and Human Services himself that last month stole $4.5 billion from the state welfare institutions in a criminal pattern of political assassination and major fraud of the financial institution HA-11-1-05.  There are therefore now four orders of business that must be addressed before tackling the theory of famine.

First, we need a new USAID Administrator this 2005 as we used up the old one and the World Affairs Council and USAID are called upon to discover a replacement Administrator of USAID to assist the Secretary of State to keep the peace through democracy and uphold the Hearing AID Act of 2005 as soon as possible.

Second, the USAID Administrator Andrew S. Natsios, the author of the Great North Korean Famine has been convicted of defrauding $33 billion from private donors and not administrating the funds to the developing nations, including North Korea, as promised in the $1 Trillion copyright, he criminally infringed 18USC(113)§2319(d)(2)(a) upon from day one to accumulate these stolen goods HA-15-1-04.  The Hearing AID Act of 2005 makes provisions for this potential act of treason and terminates authorization for USAID GDS to collect private donations as the result of this account delinquency.  The Network for Good has risen to take the place of USAID as collector of tax deductible donations 26USC(A)(1)(F)I§501(c) however the Red Cross reports that they have ceased accepting donations for Earthquake and Tsunami victims HA-26-12-04.  Whereas the Federal Government can no longer be considered sovereign for the purposes of immunity from prosecution or as single state guarantor for international loans and grants that must never support terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, guerilla warfare, prosecution, public security or corporate fraud, espionage or the legally constituted armed forces US citizens, corporations and agencies must now make their tax deductible contributions to achieve the UN Millennium Development Goal.

Third, the declaration that North Korea has nuclear weapons brings Mr. Natsios record as a nuclear power plant operator into focus as a failure to be incorporated into his failing career as a senior US diplomat.  The North Korean nuclear dispute seems to be in need of settlement as the apocalyptical concluding paragraph of the book being reviewed states, “If the famine initiates a chain of explosive events, our diplomacy may be putting another group of people at risk-the 37,000 American troops in South Korea.” (Natsios 252) lending credence to the theory that the recent declaration that North Korea has nuclear weapons made public by the Secretary of State this 10 February 2005 may be a hoax to disguise the chaotic actions of the real nuclear aggressors, Chertoff and Cheney HA-31-1-05 to justify a nuclear holocaust before Mr. Cheney can be impeached by the House and Senate under the XXV Amendment mostly for crimes committed while mocking Hospitals & Asylums in part to discredit the true leader of the less than sovereign USA and Mr. Chertoff can be duly convicted for treason and disbarred from judicial office for this most recent grab for nuclear records with a prior conviction of abrupt and unauthorized use of weapons of mass destruction as set forth in Art II Sec. 4 of the US Constitution. While it is true that during the 1970’s and 1980’s North Korea engaged in several terrorist attacks on South Korea.  In 1974 an ethnic Japanese Korean sympathetic to the North tried to murder south Korean president park Chung Hee but ended up killing the president’s wife instead.  During the a 1983 state visit to Burma by South Korean president Chun Doo Hwan, North Korean agents planted a bomb that killed four South Korean cabinet members, two presidential advisers, and the ambassador to Burma,  In November 1987 a bomb planted by North Korean operatives blew up Korean air Flight 858 killing 115 people.  In between these major events, dozens of smaller military incidents initiated by the North against the South fueled the poisoned state of relations.  In the 1980’s and 1990’s, the number of troops in all North Korean forces doubled.  This placed a heavy burden on the economy and some analysts estimate that the military cost North Korea 25% of its GDP (Natsios 123-124)  The surprise launch of a Taepodong missile on 31 August 1998 caused the US to warn that a second missile test would cause aid to cease that in turn caused Kim Jong Il to back down on the second missile test (Natsios 159-160).  The North Korean State seems to have had little to do with these chaotic actions, Kim Jong Ill has demonstrated in 1998 that he can take responsibility in hostilities regarding weapons of mass destruction and is officially at peace with the world.  We must now ask him to publicly forfeit his nuclear weapons program in exchange for a $1 billion investment in the Single Korean Yearbook (SKY) for the welfare of the North Koreans whose income is 20 times less than their South Korean brothers as set forth in North Korea v. South Korea HA-31-5-04 and the English Transitional Draft Constitution of Korea.

Fourth, Paul Volcker former Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve has clearly taken it to be his responsibility to the war effort to deprive the Iraqi’s of their cash assistance under the Oil for Food Program.  He needs to be fired from the UN and stripped of his diplomatic credentials as the termination of the welfare services of the Oil for Food Program is probably the single leading cause of insurgency.  The entire closure of the Oil for Food program has clearly been the most atrocious perpetrated under the auspices of the United Nations and the social security program needs to be re-instituted within the largely oil based Iraqi state economy as called for in HA-7-2-05 . 

Having settled our breeches of the peace let us now direct our attention to answering all the questions we have regarding famine.  Thomas Robert Malthus's penetrating analysis at the end of the eighteenth century of the limits of subsistence, to which many of the classical school subscribed, proved wrong.  Malthus built his pessimistic vision on a notion that the long-evident forces of stagnation would persist: A human population with a propensity to grow geometrically would be thwarted by limits to growth in the means of subsistence. Having observed crop yields that had changed only marginally for millennia, Malthus could not have foreseen the dramatic increase in agricultural yields. In the United States, for example, corn yields--or should I say maize yields--rose from 25 bushels per acre in the early 1800s to 160 by 2004.  Moreover, those living in the early part of the nineteenth century could not have imagined that life expectancy in developed countries two centuries later would rise on average to more than twice that which they experienced. That increase directly and indirectly resulted largely from the almost twentyfold increase in average real per capita gross domestic product gained since 1820.  However, throughout the nineteenth century, notwithstanding widespread criticism of market capitalism, standards of living continued to increase, propelling the world's population to more than 1-1/2 billion by 1900. The major advances in life expectancy by the early twentieth century were attributable largely to efforts to ensure a clean water supply, the result of the increased capital stock associated with rising affluence (Greenspan).

In the nineteenth century, criticism of capitalism emphasized abuses of business practice. Aside from Marxist views of the exploitation of workers by capitalists, monopoly was seen by many as a natural consequence of unfettered capitalism. Even earlier, Smith had weighed in with his oft-quoted insight that "people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." Adam Smith's purview was broader: He sought in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, published nearly two decades before the Wealth of Nations, to delve into the roots of human motivation and interaction. He concluded that human sympathy, by fostering the institutions supporting human civil interaction and life, was a major contributor to societal cohesion (Greenspan).

20th Century theory regarding famine is founded in the Nobel Prize for Economics winning work of Amrtya Sen whose theory is that a family’s access to food determines who lives and dies. Under Sen’s theory if food prices increase rapidly at the same time wages are static or dropping, families will starve unless a coping mechanism saves them.  When the state controls food production and distribution, as it does in a totalitarian system, it inevitably uses this system to tighten its control over every aspect of life.  In the totalitarian system, those in power are rewarded and those in poverty are neglected (Natsios 90).  Sen’s work has shown that some famines have actually occurred during periods of rising harvests but rapidly falling wages.  Food is available, but the poor cannot afford to buy enough of it to survive, so they starve to death (Natsios 181).  Sen’s theory regarding famine can be considered totalitarian in that it presumes that States will fail rather than perceiving the critical importance of social welfare institutions re-invented in the 19th Century.  Private market rhetoric when a state is crippled with totalitarianism so encouraged in the 20th century has come under question for espionage as the public security frauds who run the totalitarian nation alternate the terrorist plot, known as fraud prosecution in the United States, between public and private securities so that entire sectors are not permanently destroyed in mockery of the medieval principle of crop rotation.  State failure based upon this politicization of malice and greed is of course the leading cause of famine as it is the state that is responsible for ensuring agricultural production is adequate for the nutritional needs of the people, levying taxes and administrating them equitably to the needy.  If the state goes out of the welfare business this means that the people have become indoctrinated in miserliness and they are so much less likely to give because the governmental authorities in these totalitarian circumstances direct the often unconscious mind not to give, nor is the individual or working corporation able to afford the time or resources needed to administrate to the starving people of an abandoned nation.  

In the broad sweep of history, it is ideas that matter. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. As John Maynard Keynes famously observed: "Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back." Emperors and armies come and go; but unless they leave new ideas in their wake, they are of passing historic consequence (Greenspan).

Natsios determined that the genocide convention is applicable if a particular class of people has been marked for extermination by the authorities- even if by starvation rather than outright execution.  Punitive rationing occurred in the Chinese famine of 1958-62 village families who descended from landlords wither were not fed at all or were fed a lower ration than the poorer class of peasants.  Robert Conquest’s research on the Ukrainian famine the early 1930’s proved that Stalin’s objective was to liquidate the kulak class of farmers.  Similarly, US government intelligence sources reported that as the public distribution system broke down, the North Korean authorities focused food supplies on three groups: members and immediate families of the military, of the party, and of workers in strategic industries such as mining (Natsios 211).  The public security fraud in the US of January 2005 seems similarly politically motivated against any beneficiary or institution who had ever written to the retiring Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson who must not be permitted to flee with more than a $1 million in the bank and a reasonable retirement settlement of $100,000 a year so confiscation of the secret assets of the Secretary of Health and Human Services (SHHS) would not be complicated with neglect of any legitimate personal conflict of interests regarding severance and would be informed that the Treasurer would monitor his economic activity for the rest of his life so he does not access hundreds of billions of the estimated $1 trillion reported to have been lost by CMS, so he must declare HHS holdings before he retires and explain his losses ex-relator.  Mr. Natsios could use the same retirement strategy himself so his treasure trove will be believed for at least for one day before the world’s poor have to seek their finance elsewhere.

It can be determined from the Great North Korean Famine that a total of 5 nations have suffered totalitarian famines in the 20th century – Soviet Ukraine (1930-1933), the People’s Republic of China (1958-62), Ethiopa (1984-85), Cambodia (1974-79) and North Korea (1994-98).  The dekulakization and forced collectivization in the Soviet Union killed 14.5 million people nationwide with particular focus on the Soviet Ukraine between 1929 and 1933 Stalin is particularly noted for attempting to cover up evidence of this debacle.  Mao Zedong launched the Great Leap Forward in 1958 after having begun forced collectivization of agriculture in 1956 Great Leap Forward borrowed from Stalin’s agriculture minister.  The ensuing Chinese famine from 1958 to 1962 resulted in an estimated 30 million deaths.  Another hidden famine killed several hundred thousand people in Ethiopa between 1972 and 1973 precipitating a coup by military officers in 1974 that unseated Emperor Haile Selassie.  The subsequent famine of 1984-85 which killed one million people, was reportedly a consequence of drought induced crop failure.  Robert Kaplan reported in his book on the famine however that attempts to resettle hundreds of thousands of people from the Amharic and Tigrayan highlands to resettlement camps in the fertile lowlands where they were served miniscule portions of food for 11 hours of work; hundreds of thousands of people died.  Starvation was one of the means used by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia 1974-1979 to water the killing the fields and it is estimated that perhaps a third of the casualties of resulted from deliberately planned starvation that included preventing people from scavenging for wild foods.  The North Korean famine of 1994 to 1998 after the severance of Eastern Bloc aid after the dissolution of the Soviet Union resulted as the result of the massive corruption, secrecy and greed that led to the collapse of the public distribution system (PDS) during the social transition to a market distribution system led to an estimated 2 to 3 million deaths (Natsios 49-54).

Contemporary theory directs that when confronted with famine to suspect the presence of a totalitarian regime that must be closely regulated for the domestic administration of relief to have any chance of succeeding in meeting the nation’s agricultural needs because the totalitarian state make the wealthy and politically connected overweight without so much as a grain of rice being given to the poor.  The World Food Program was established in 1963, WFP is the United Nations frontline agency in the fight against global hunger. In 2003, WFP fed 104 million people in 81 countries, including most of the world's refugees and internally displaced people. Since it was set-up in 1963, the Rome-based organisation has invested US$27.8 billion and more than 43 million metric tonnes of food to combat hunger, promote economic and social development and provide relief assistance in emergencies throughout the world.  In USAID the Office of Food for Peace administrates food relief to famished regions of the world under 7USC§1691

Certificate of Service title24uscode@aol.com 10 February 2005

 

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