CT Blue

We learn in this morning’s New York Times that inequality is growing in North Korea, further proof of the failure of their system.

DANDONG, China — On her weekly shopping trips to downtown Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, a 52-year-old pig farmer who gave her name as Mrs. Kim tries to ignore the dusting of prosperity that has begun to transform the city in recent years: the newly built apartment blocks, the increasing number of Mercedes-Benzes that zip along once-empty boulevards, the smartly dressed young women who conspicuously gab on their newly acquired cellphones. She has never been to the Rungna People’s Pleasure Ground, a new amusement park where children of the elite howled with delight this summer as they shot down a waterslide.

“Why would I care about the new clothing of government officials and their children when I can’t feed my family?” she asked tartly, wringing her hands as she recounted the chronic malnutrition that has sickened her two sons and taken the lives of less-well-off neighbors.

In the 10 months since Kim Jong-un took the reins of his desperately poor nation following the death of his autocratic father, North Korea — or at least its capital — has acquired more of the trappings of a functioning society, say diplomats, aid groups and academics who have visited in recent months.

But in rare interviews this month with four North Koreans in this border city on government-sanctioned stays, they said that at least so far, they have not felt any improvements in their lives since the installment last December of their youthful leader — a sentiment activists and analysts say they have also heard. In fact, the North Koreans said, their lives have gotten harder, despite Mr. Kim’s tantalizing pronouncements about boosting people’s livelihoods that have fueled outside hopes that the nuclear-armed nation might ease its economically ruinous obsession with military hardware and dabble in Chinese-style market reforms.

(via NYTimes.com)

If only the leaders of North Korea would emerge from their isolationist lairs and take a page from the U.S. to learn how to do things right. Right now, at least according to the picture in the article, North Korean rich enjoy the fruits of exploitation by going bowling. If they would only open their minds and hearts soon they too could have their own car elevators.

Such a backward country.