In our nation’s capitol, calls for cutting Social Security benefits and shifting the ever-rising costs of health care from Medicare onto the backs of American seniors are ubiquitous. But context matters, and these ideas are nothing short of perverse…
There's something verging on unseemly in the glee so many journalists have taken in the disastrous rollout of the Affordable Care Act and in the incontrovertible fact that the Obama administration knowingly misled the American people about "keeping your plan". Magazine covers! Feuds! Late night comedians! Pursed-lipped statements of disappointment! The "breakdown" of the ACA has made analysts bold: "The Collapse of the Obama Presidency","Why Obama's 'iPod Presidency' Was Doomed", "the entire presidency is riding" on the exchanges, the promise that "you can keep your plan" is (quoting Rush Limbaugh here) "the biggest lie ever told by a siting president." Most people do not understand the ins and outs of the ACA. Most journalists don't understand it, either – and the clearest proof of that is that Obama shouldn't have been able to get away with the blanket language that he did. He was called on it, by Politifact, Factcheck.org and ABC in particular. Instructively, the fact-checking organizations found that the statement was at least "half true", and ABC allowed that the line "isn't literally true" and that Obama acknowledged in a press conference that it would be impossible for the government to entirely prevent changes to everyone's plan. It has never been a secret that there would be Americans whose coverage would change under the ACA, that some would face higher prices or, as they correctly surmise, "better" coverage is in the lead of the Washington Post story about the bill's passage.
All those accusations about how "Obama knew there would be cancellations and still lied about it"? Yes, the administration knew. But so did any reporter that read the press releases put out be the Department of Health and Human Services. To be sure, that language favored the interpretation the administration still prefers: that policy holders would have to "transition" to "ACA-compliant" plans. But there was no subterfuge about the fact of change.
Most Americans, I'm sure, still feel they were lied to. Obama's deception will cost him and the Democratic party goodwill moving forward, and in the short term, he will face even more resistance in moving along any substantial policies. (One can reasonably ask if that's enough of a price, given that it's no different than the situation he was facing before.) But the American people have been lied to before. A lot. This is not a trait they associate with Democrats or Republicans. It is one they associate with politicians. This experience will sour them on Obama, but they were already pretty sour on the system. That said, there is little evidence that people's feelings about politicians sour them on their legislative legacies, if those policies are working. Plenty of Tea Party voters are happy with the interstate highway system. President Nixon gave us Title IX educational benefits. And, more to the point given its problems in implementation, Medicare Part D came from President Bush II. And unlike a lot of legislation, especially legislation designed to address social ills, there is a definite metric, or just a few of them, that will tell us if the ACA has done the job it was intended to do: whether more Americans will have health insurance after its full implementation than those who did in 2009. I already know the answer to this question, and so does everyone covering the story: more Americans already have health insurance today, because of the expansions to government programs that were a part of the ACA's initial phase: about 2m more people, to be exact. The highest estimate for those who will receive cancellation notices I've seen is 16m (which is probably too high). Before the ACA, there were 50m Americans without any form of insurance. That 16m estimate will include people who get better, cheaper plans. It will include people who get more expensive, better plans. It will also include people who decide to pay the fine. But if the majority of them wind up with healthcare coverage, it will still be a preferable result to the state of the system prior to ACA. Most people who don't have health insurance want it – only 1.5% of the uninsured say they don't have it because they "don't need" it. Even the "young invincibles" you hear so much about want insurance, 80% of them. The GOP will have to run a lot of "don't enroll in Obamacare!" ads to keep pace. The sob-stories flogged by conservative and non-partisan outlets alike have already proven, when investigated, to be more complicated than "Obamacare took away my healthcare" headlines would have you believe. (See , here, and here, to start.) Any story on health insurance under ACA is going to be complicated, that's one of the law's many flaws: there's a lot of moving parts to keep track of. That jerry-rigged system of subsidies, exchanges, expanded programs and penalties is one of the reasons the website crashed. Plenty of carpers bemoaned the government not bringing in better programmers and designers to work on HealthCare.gov, but the truth is that the best information architects would have seen the potential problems and could have offered an elegant solution: a government program for all that would eliminate the need for any website at all. There's been much ink and venom spilt on the irony of our "tech president" presiding over a logistical and logical failure, but I sympathize with Obama. I think he did see all these problems coming. He's a smart guy. The biggest big lie he's told about Obamacare is that he actually believes it's a better idea than single-payer.
One of the regular claims from the major labels and their representative groups, like the RIAA and BPI, is that copyright infringement is serious business, and everyone "knows" when copyright is being infringed. They always seem to brush off any claims…
During a discussion at the University of Michigan in 2010, the billionaire vice-chairman of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway firm, Charles Munger, was asked whether the government should have bailed out homeowners rather than banks. "You've got it exactly wrong," he said. "There's danger in just shovelling out money to people who say, 'My life is a little harder than it used to be.' At a certain place you've got to say to the people, 'Suck it in and cope, buddy. Suck it in and cope.'"
But banks, he insisted, need our help. It turns out that moral hazard – the notion that those who know the costs of their failure will be borne by others will become increasingly reckless – only really applies to the working poor.
"You should thank God" for bank bailouts, Munger told his audience. "Now, if you talk about bailouts for everybody else, there comes a place where if you just start bailing out all the individuals instead of telling them to adapt, the culture dies."
In the five years since the financial crisis took hold, people have been sucking it in by the lungful and discovering how pitiful a coping strategy that is. In Michigan, the state where Munger spoke, black male life expectancy is lower than male life expectancy in Uzbekistan; in Detroit, the closest big city, black infant mortality is on a par with Syria (before the war).
As such, the crisis accelerated an already heinous trend of growing inequalities. Over a period of 18 years, America's white working class – particularly women – have started dying younger. "Absent a war, genocide, pandemic, or massive governmental collapse, drops in life expectancy are rare," wrote Monica Potts in the American Prospect last month. But this was a war on the poor. "Lack of access to education, medical care, good wages and healthy food isn't just leaving the worst-off Americans behind. It's killing them."
This particular crisis, however, has also accentuated the contradictions between the claims long made for neoliberalism and the system's ability to deliver on them. The "culture" of capitalism, to which Munger referred, did not die but thrived precisely because it was not forced to adapt, while working people – who kept it afloat through their taxes and now through cuts in public spending – struggle to survive. Given the broad framing of economic struggles in the west exacerbated by the crisis, this reality is neither new nor specific to the US. "Over the past 30 years the workers' take from the pie has shrunk across the globe," explains an editorial in the latest Economist. "The scale and breadth of this squeeze are striking … When growth is sluggish … workers are getting a smaller morsel of a smaller slice of a slow-growing pie."
A few days before the bailout was passed, I quoted Lenin in these pages. He once argued: "The capitalists can always buy themselves out of any crises, as long as they make the workers pay." What has been striking, particularly recently, has been the brazen and callous nature in which these payments have been extorted.
Last Friday, 47 million Americans had their food stamp benefits cut. These provide assistance to those who lack sufficient money to feed themselves and their families. Individuals lose $11 (£7) a month while a family of four will lose $36. That will save the public purse precious little – bombing Syria would have been far more costly – but will mean a great deal to those affected. "Before the cut, it was kind of an assumption you were going to the food bank anyway," Lance Worth, of Washington state, told the Bellingham Herald. "I guess I'm just going to go $20 hungrier – aren't I?"
The cut marks the lapse in stimulus package ushered in four years ago. But while the recession is officially over, the poverty it engendered remains. Government figures show one in seven Americans is food insecure. According to Gallup, in August, one in five said they have, at times during the last year, lacked money to buy food that they or their families needed. Both figures are roughly the same as when Obama was elected. This negligence will now be compounded by mendacity. Republicans propose further swingeing cuts to the food-stamp programme; Democrats suggest smaller cuts. The question is not whether the vulnerable will be hammered, but by how much.
The impetus behind these cuts are not fiscal but ideological. Republicans, in particular, claim the poor have it too easy. "We don't want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people into lives of dependency and complacency," claimed former Republican vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan. "That drains them of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives."
The notion that food "drains the will" while hunger motivates the ambitious would have more currency – not much, but more – if the right wasn't simultaneously doing its utmost to drive down wages to a level where work provides no guarantee against hunger. In last week's paper for the Economic Policy Institute, Gordon Lafer, an associate professor at the University of Oregon, revealed the degree to which conservatives have been driving down wages, benefits and protections at a local level after their victory at the 2010 midterms.
He writes: "Four states passed laws restricting the minimum wage, four lifted restrictions on child labour, and 16 imposed new limits on benefits for the unemployed. With the support of the corporate lobbies, states also passed laws stripping workers of overtime rights, repealing or restricting rights to sick leave, and making it harder to sue one's employer for race or sex discrimination."
That's why 40% of households on food stamps have at least one person working. And the states most aggressive in pursuing these policies, Lafer points out, had some of the smallest budget deficits in the country.
Immediately after Obama's election in 2008, his chief of staff to be, Rahm Emmanuel, said: "You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that is it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before." The crisis didn't go to waste. But it is the right that has seized the opportunity. Not content with balancing the budget on the bellies of the hungry, it is also fattening the coffers of the wealthy on the backs of the poor.
Twitter: @garyyounge
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
[A child goes hungry. Photo: Shutterstock.com, all rights reserved.]
Part one of this series, “The High Cost of Low Taxes,” noted that while Americans enjoy a tax burden lower than that of other wealthy countries, we also pay four times as much as they do, on average, for out-of-pocket “social costs” in the private…
A diamond is forever' is genius marketing with no basis in relationship reality. My love isn't proportional to a ring size
Most of us are adult enough to know magic doesn't exist. And yet we're the same species that thinks fat rings are fairy-tale items which somehow "secure" another person's love, one step away from a "happily ever after".
They're expensive, useless and, worse, are insulting to notions of actual love. As anyone who's been in a serious long-term relationship knows, you don't need geology to proclaim (let alone justify) said love.
Before you take me for a cheapskate who just doesn't want to spend the money on a ring, let me explain a bit more. Many of us, especially men, have strapped our feet to the commercialised notions of what constitutes relationships. We've turned into zombies, hungry for all things red and supposedly lovey dovey. We buy into the baffling displays of romance like the nauseating crimson heart-shaped horror show we call Valentine's Day. Or the flowers and boxed chocolates we're supposed to deliver on anniversaries to celebrate monogamous tolerance and the disbelief you haven't murdered each other.
We speed through our finances and morals, enjoying the exhilaration of fitting in to societal expectation, as opposed to reflecting on whether our actions are warranted or justified. And our partners seem all too ready to go along with it.
Engagement rings – specifically expensive diamond ones – are often prime examples of this unthinking mindset. The problem isn't the rings themselves, but the justifications – or the lack of justifications – behind their acquisition.
We mustn't confuse engagement rings – given, usually to a woman, when a proposal is accepted – and wedding rings – given on wedding day. (Already, we should recognise how strange it is to need two different kinds of rings.)
Whatever the long history of engagement items – I've heard claims of it dating from ancient Egypt or Rome, for example – the focus on engagement rings should really start with De Beers, in the 20th century.
After large diamond mines were discovered here in South Africa around 1870, the mines' major investors amalgamated their interests to form De Beers Consolidates Mines. They recognised that due to diamonds having little intrinsic value, they would need to create demand via (the illusion of) scarcity and pretend worth. So began one of the most successful marketing and public manipulation campaigns of the 20th century, originating from four words: "A diamond is forever".
By convincing men their love for their future wife is directly proportional to the expense of the diamond ring, and convincing women to expect love in the form of shiny stone, De Beers and their marketers, NW Ayer, began a tradition so embedded we forget it's a marketing ploy. Genius marketing, to be sure, but marketing nonetheless.
And guess what? The prices keep going up, as if we are really loving more and deeper these days. According to the XO Group Inc 2011 Engagement Engagement & Jewelry survey, the average engagement ring cost $5,200. If you think that's bad, consider that nearly 12% of US couples spend more than $8,000 for an engagement ring. Of course, we should take such stats with some measure of scepticism, as Will Oremus highlights. Nonetheless, these are the prices at a time when the average American family earns less than it did in 1989.
The American bias of these stats shouldn't negate the overall point: diamonds – and therefore diamond rings – are expensive and the demand was created artificially for an item that's only property here is shininess (it decreases in value as soon as you walk out the store).
Any remotely logical person can see that spending several thousand on actually important items for a new couple like a place to live or putting money in an investment account will serve them far better in the future (and likely help with romantic and/or wedded bliss).
That engagement ring purchases tend to be for women – not by women – is also insulting to the cause of not viewing women as objects to be acquired. Consider that this is worthy of a headline in a respected US magazine at the beginning of this month: "Women Now Paying for Their Own Engagement Rings".
Many people will say that engagement rings are symbolic of love and devotion. Ignoring that this idea is itself manufactured by the profiting businesses, it also gives an arbitrary definition of "symbol": why can't a beautiful home be a symbol? Why can't long-term investments be a symbol? Indeed, would it not be more impressive to show off a house than a finger rock?
Tradition is another assertion when discussing almost anything to do with monogamy and marriage. But, like nature, tradition is a description not moral justification. Just because we've always done a particular action, doesn't mean it's always (or ever was) justified. Pointing to tradition means pointing to the mistreatment of different races and sexes, human sacrifices, and so on. Longevity, too, doesn't give moral immunity, or automatic goodness, to anything.
Engagement rings aren't even used to show one is married: they're used before the wedding even occurs. Indeed, even helping avoid awkward social encounters isn't aided, since there are other (and cheaper) ways of showing you're "in a relatinship" (not to mention just telling people trying to hit on you).
If you need a ring to prove your love, it's not your lack of a ring that's the problem.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
You've got to feel for McDonald's. Every time the misunderstood corporation tries to offer its' low-wage employees a hand, it backfires. First the fast food giant was ridiculed this past summer for dispensing helpful budgetary advice to its struggling workers (in a nutshell: get another job). Now the company is in hot water again after a recorded call to its' McResource helpline, in which an employee who reported not being able to make ends meet was advised to sign up for food stamps and other government assistance programs, went viral online. Strangely though, the very people who ought to be most upset about this state of affairs – small government loving republicans who don't want anyone relying on federal assistance for anything – have raised little or no objection.
When Nancy Salgado, the employee at the center of this latest storm, called the McResource line to tell them she was having to ration food and couldn't take her kids to the doctor, the helpful employee on the other end of the line didn't offer to raise her wages or sign her up for health benefits, but advised her instead about the various federal government programs she could avail of. While it's not news that hugely profitable corporations like McDonald's are only too happy to rely on the American taxpayer to subsidize the non-living wages they pay their workers, (Salgado earns $8.25 an hour) the blasé nature of the phone call still sparked considerable outrage, but not from budget conscious Republicans.
Perhaps I'm being unreasonable, but it seems to me that when Republicans are so vocal about how much they hate government programs like SNAP benefits (aka food stamps) and Medicaid and indeed anything that makes life a little more feasible for low-income or no-income Americans, they should surely be able to work up a small sweat at such a blatant example of the system being gamed. Just last month congressional Republicans voted unanimously to cut $39bn from the food stamp program, and I surely don't have to waste words here outlining their opposition to any form of government subsidized healthcare. Why then, when they have made their objection to welfare programs abundantly clear are they seemingly okay with hugely profitable corporations exploiting these programs while they underpay their workers?
McDonald's have tried to do damage control on the phone call, claiming that the recording was "not an accurate portrayal of the resource line" because it was "very obviously" edited. The full 14-minute version of the call was provided to numerous medial outlets, however, and the facts remain unchanged: Salgado was told to seek out government assistance instead of being given a raise.
It doesn't help McDonald's case either that just a week or so before the phone call, the UC Berkeley Labor Center and the University of Illinois released a joint study on the public cost of low-wage fast food jobs. They found that 52% of the families of front line fast food workers are enrolled in one or more public assistance program compared to 25% of the workforce as a whole. Overall, subsidizing the wages and benefits of employees of highly profitable fast food chains costs the American taxpayer nearly $7bn per year.
The seeming indifference to this giant corporate welfare program that low wage employers like McDonald's and most of its' competitors in the fast food world are happy to avail of might be easier to understand if the companies were struggling but the opposite is true. McDonald's 2012 annual report(pdf) was a glowing affair – in which the company enthusiastically announced a 3.1% growth in global sales, a 5% earnings per share growth, worldwide expansion plans and billions in profit. Does a company this healthy (I use the term lightly) really need federally funded public assistance programs to stay in business? Hardly, but that doesn't seem to bother the very people who generally loathe any kind of handout.
If congressional Republicans are serious about their claim that cutting government spending is their highest priority, why are they so indifferent to this flagrant abuse of federally funded benefits? The reason can only be that if they were to raise serious objections to what is effectively a corporate welfare program for the fast food industry, they might be forced to do something that would be an even bigger violation of conservative principles – raise the minimum wage.
Since 2009, the federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 an hour for non exempt employees, a figure so low that it doesn't qualify as a living wage in any state. Even Republicans acknowledge that it's simply impossible to cover basic living costs with wages this low, yet they voted unanimously earlier this year against a modest increase to $9 an hour. It seems that conservatives would rather demonize low-wage workers and find ways to blame them for their poverty instead of facing up to the fact that the only way to not be poor is to be paid more.
So for now we are stuck with a situation where one set of American workers has to subsidize the wages and benefits of another set of workers just so that certain corporations can keep their low end labor costs down and their profits way up. Fast food workers have actually come up with the most feasible way out of this unsustainable situation. They are asking their employers to raise their wages to $15 an hour, up from the average of $8 an hour. Needless to say McDonald's and their fast food counterparts will happily stick to the cozy arrangement they have going as long as their enablers in congress allow them to. They may soon find, however, that the American taxpayer is not quite so easily played.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
[Image via Tomasz Bidermann / Shutterstock.com]
For the sake of humor, I am generally a big fan of hyperbole. Miley Cyrus is cheaper than a half-off sale at the flea market. The Chicago Cubs are more futile than a company that builds igloos in Hell. See? When you're trying to be funny, hyperbole…
["Young Indonesian Woman Sitting On The Couch And Using A Laptop For The Internet" on Shutterstock]
In Arabic, "revolution" is a feminine noun. This is fitting, as without women revolutions are sterile. They have no movement, no life, no sound. Urdu, a distorter of tongues, pilfering as it does from Persian, Hindi, but largely Arabic, uses the masculine word for coup d'etat – inqilab – for revolution, rather than the accurate feminine: thawra. Perhaps that's why the Taliban were confused. Perhaps that's why they imagined that shooting a 15-year-old girl would somehow enhance their revolution.
I Am Malala, Malala Yousafzai's fearless memoir, co-written with journalist Christina Lamb, begins on Malala's drive home from school on the day she was shot in the head. "Who is Malala?" the young gunman who stopped the Khushal school van asked. None of the girls answered. But everyone in the valley knew who Malala was. Ten years old when the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan came to the beautiful Swat Valley, once the home of ancient Buddhist kings, 11 years old by the time she had established herself as an international advocate for girls' education in Pakistan, Malala was targeted by the Taliban for "spreading secularism".
Ghostwritten books pose a constant difficulty – you are never sure whose voice is leading whose. Malala's voice has the purity, but also the rigidity, of the principled. Whether she is being a competitive teenager and keeping track of who she beat in exams (and by how much) or writing about the blog for the BBC that catapulted her on to the international stage – "We were learning how to struggle. And we were learning how powerful we are when we speak" – or talking about Pakistan's politicians ("useless"), Malala is passionate and intense. Her faith and her duty to the cause of girls' education is unquestionable, her adoration for her father – her role model and comrade in arms – is moving and her pain at the violence carried out in the name of Islam palpable.
It's hardly an exact science, guessing when the ghostwriter's voice takes over from the author's, but in the description, for example, of the scale of Pakistan's devastating 2005 earthquake, the reader is told that the damage "affected 30,000 square kilometres, an area as big as the American state of Connecticut", and the stiff, know-it-all voice of a foreign correspondent resounds.
It is Malala who touches the heart of Pakistan's troubles. Speaking of Swat, she writes that it was some 20 years after partition that the Wali of the Valley renounced his power and brought his kingdom into Pakistan. "So I was born a proud daughter of Pakistan," she writes, "though like all Swatis I thought of myself first as a Swati and Pashtun, before Pakistani."
What it means to be from Pakistan – a country of 300 languages, diverse cultures, religions and identities – when real power is restricted to one province is a debate that has always raged in this country. The army and bureaucracy and indeed the functioning power are centralised in the Punjab, while the remaining three provinces – Sindh, Balochistan and Khyber Pukhtun Khwa – are unequal shareholders in the idea that is Pakistan.
Until power is fairly shared among the four provinces the threat of secession will be a cloud hanging over the country. Malala writes of her beloved father, Ziauddin, wearing a black armband on Pakistan's 50th anniversary "because there was nothing to celebrate since Swat joined Pakistan", presciently foreshadowing a deepening ethnic imbalance so profound that only an extraordinary common enemy could distract from it. The burgeoning power of the Taliban in today's Pakistan should not be much of a surprise to those who understand, as Malala does, the need to redress these ethnic wounds.
Though feted around the globe for her eloquence, intelligence and bravery, Malala is much maligned in Pakistan. The haters and conspiracy theorists would do well to read this book. Malala is certainly an ardent critic of the Taliban, but she also speaks passionately against America's drone warfare, the CIA's policy of funding jihadi movements, the violence and abductions carried out by the Pakistani military, feudalism, the barbarous Hudood laws, and even Raymond Davis, the CIA contractor who caused a diplomatic meltdown between America and Pakistan when he killed two Pakistanis in broad daylight in Lahore – "Even we schoolchildren know that ordinary diplomats don't drive around in unmarked cars carrying Glock pistols."
I Am Malala is as much Malala's father's story as it is his daughter's, and is and a touching tribute to his quest to be educated and to build a model school. Malala writes of her father sitting late into the night, cooking and bagging popcorn to sell so that he would have extra income for his project. She quotes him on all matters – from the ban on The Satanic Verses to the environmental problems facing the Swat Valley – and teases him for his long-winded speeches.
Yet, even as Malala says she does not hate the man who shot her, here in Pakistan anger towards this ambitious young campaigner is as strong as ever. Amid the bile, there is a genuine concern that this extraordinary girl's courageous and articulate message will be colonised by one power or other for its own insidious agendas. She is young and the forces around her are strong and often sinister when it comes to their designs on the global south. There is a reason we know Malala's story but not that of Noor Aziz, eight years old when killed by a drone strike in Pakistan; Zayda Ali Mohammed Nasser, dead at seven from a drone strike in Yemen; or Abeer Qassim Hamza al Janabi, the 14-year-old girl raped and set on fire by US troops in Mahmudiyah, Iraq. "I wasn't thinking these people were humans," one of the soldiers involved, Steven Green, said of his Iraqi victims.
It will always be more convenient for the west to paint itself as more righteous, more civilised, than the people they occupy and kill. But now, Malala's fight should be ours too – more inclusion of women, remembrance of the many voiceless and unsung Malalas, and education for all.
• Fatima Bhutto's novel The Shadow Of The Crescent Moon is out from Viking next month.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
A rash of sensational, context-free reporting is needlessly alarming the public about what’s happening in America’s health insurance markets as a result of Obamacare. Making matters worse, it’s set against a backdrop of relentless, intentional…
The civil war raging between the Republic establishment and the tea party movement continues to heat up, and Democrats appear more than happy to sell ammunition to both sides. Last week, Richard Viguerie, a legendary figure within the modern conservative…
Posted on 28 October 2013 by Rob Painting Key Points: In keeping with scientific expectations, the ongoing emission of greenhouse gases from human industrial activity is causing the Earth to build up heat - a process known as the increased (enhanced…
Kim Song-ju sought to escape the living hell of North Korea, but after crossing a freezing river into China was returned, like so many other defectors. He was sent to a prison camp, where he shared – with 40 other unfortunates – a cramped cell that had to be entered on all fours through a tiny door less than two feet high. They were starved – their watery soup often containing stones – and routinely beaten by guards, who told them they were no longer human.
Kim's mother died in the prison, handcuffed to her bed. Her body was never returned to her family, who fear it was used for medical experiments. Eventually Kim escaped again, and now lives in Surrey's serene suburbia. Last week, he was in Westminster Central Hall, in London, one of several witnesses telling their horror stories to a United Nations commission of inquiry investigating the hermit state's atrocities. "In North Korea the words 'human rights' do not exist," he said.
Other defectors told of hunger and torture, of forced marriage and abortions. One woman had to leave her Chinese-born son when sent back to North Korea, fearing he might be killed, given the regime's obsession with racial purity. She was chained to three other women and made to haul heavy loads after being returned. The panel has also heard of mothers forced to drown children in buckets, of men seeing brothers executed, and of families eating lizards and grass in order to survive.
North Korea is often seen as something of a joke: a strange, secretive place in the grip of cartoon communism and under the thumb of crazed dictators. Rare glimpses behind the bamboo curtain fuel the fascination, with images of mass games, military parades, rocket launches and a ski resort built by its Swiss-educated young ruler. Or there are the buffoonish antics of US basketball star Dennis Rodman, drinking tequila with Kim Jong-un and saying the "dear leader" only wants the world's most repressed people to be happy.
The UN inquiry, due to release initial findings this week before giving its full verdict early next year, will hopefully challenge such complacency. If it finds there are crimes against humanity – and it is hard to envisage any other conclusion – then there could be the establishment of a special prosecution by the international criminal court (ICC).
Such a move might be only symbolic, since North Korea is not a signatory to the treaty that created the court, and its vainglorious leaders will not risk their liberty by travelling anywhere that might hand them over to justice. But it would demonstrate belated determination to confront what is without doubt a hideously despotic regime, and put some pressure on China to stop protecting its client state and neighbour.
It would also shore up a crucial court, established to prosecute the world's worst crimes but facing unprecedented pressure over its relentless focus on African offenders. There is rightful outrage all those indicted are from Africa. But now this is being used to press for the deferral of charges against Kenya's new president, Uhuru Kenyatta, and his deputy over their alleged roles in 2007 election violence. These calls are shamefully being supported by some western nations, which fear a diplomatic rift could damage their war on terror in east Africa.
There should be no illusions over North Korea: it is a quasi-fascist state, ruled along racist lines by a highly corrupt elite. It has run giant gulags holding an estimated 120,000 people in the most inhumane conditions imaginable for half a century – yet how often do we hear them condemned by either politicians or celebrities? One camp is 31 miles long – and, as Amnesty International will reveal next month, satellite images show they are expanding.
The only exit usually is death – and it is thought that four in 10 inmates at one prison died from malnutrition. Uniquely, this is a country in which not only is life totally controlled, with circumstances dependent upon the actions of your forebears in the Korean war, but with collective punishment. If someone commits a crime, such as watching a banned soap opera or possessing a Bible, their family, friends and even children can be deemed to share guilt. So there are thousands born into slave labour who know of no existence beyond the barbed wire and brutality.
I visited North Korea last month in the guise of a tourist. The propaganda is relentless, from endless portraits of the regime's two dead leaders to a vast mausoleum holding their bodies, built of finest marble and the size of a small airport in a nation where millions are impoverished, hungry and without healthcare. Workers march to their jobs behind red flags and posters exhort people to work harder, yet this bankrupt nation is propped up by aid, black markets and China.
Throughout my trip I was escorted by two "guides" who even stayed in my hotel; they were members of the elite trusted to mix with foreigners. Their explanations for the lack of cars on the roads or goods in shops were farcical, but they were friendly and funny; one night we got drunk together in a karaoke bar. Yet despite their elevated status they had not heard of the Beatles, hip-hop or even South Korean superstar Psy – and my attempted explanation of his YouTube hit foundered on their lack of knowledge of the internet.
It was a surreal experience, like visiting a Stalinist theme park – and so baffling that I left with more questions than when I arrived. But visitors do not see the death camps, dreadful famine or grinding poverty, which has stunted growth of North Koreans by three inches and shortened life expectancy by a decade. This is an entire country imprisoned by ghastly rulers, a state of affairs both intolerable and unsustainable. The world has stood by and done nothing for too long.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
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