In the antebellum south of the United States, the planation owning slaveholders kept their power because of an economic order summed up by the slogan “Cotton is King.” In today’s international order, a small clique of western monopolists hold on to power because “Oil is King.” However, China’s new regulations pushing electric cars show an emerging challenge to this global setup.
Top Car Market Going Electric
So the Japanese experts who believed that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe would use his constitutional right to prematurely dissolve the lower house of parliament (one year before the expiration of the legitimate powers of its current members) with the mandatory holding of elections within a month have turned out to have been right.
Quite recently, we discussed the North Korean response to the UN sanctions resolution, noting that from the North Korean side, the raising of the rates was minimal. However, this was only sufficient until a new round of retaliatory moves, which, in the author’s view, increased the likelihood of a conflict on the Korean peninsula by another five percent.
North Korea is once again the big, bad, boogey man of Asia, a convenient villain Washington will use to fuel a spanking new arms race. If all-out war does not follow Donald Trump’s insane policies aimed at Pyongyang, something miraculous will have to take place soon. The American hegemony turns once again to the Far East, in a redux of the 2000 North Korean sanctions negotiations.
What if North Korea is being cut off from world markets to shore up big mining businesses in the west? As crazy as this sounds, one was of explaining the crazy logic and policy moves from Pyongyang is to think outside the box. In a geopolitical world where nothing is as it seems, anything is possible. Could Kim Jong-un just be playing his role in a game of good cop – bad cop?
Against the background of the news on the military activity of the North, the untrained reader may have a misleading impression that the Republic of Korea is like an innocent schoolgirl whose throat is held at the edge of a knife by a North Korean hooligan, and that only an American military presence can save the Republic of Korea from imminent annihilation.
In late August, German Federal Minister of Economic Affairs and Energy, Brigitte Zypries issued an official letter to the President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker in which she proposed to tighten the existing merging and acquisition principles applied in cases when a European company is to be acquired by legal entities that operate outside of the EU.
On 11 September 2017 the UN Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 2375 imposing further sanctions on North Korea in response to its latest nuclear test. This was the latest and ninth such resolution since 2006. There is no reason to believe that it will be any more successful in achieving its purported objectives than any of the other previous resolutions.
