No headlines for Clinton, Trump in North Korea
their running dogs, utterly indifferent to the will and desire of the popular masses,” KCNA, the state-run news agency, reported Sept. 3. “Only moguls fully enjoy free suffrage in the U.S. Without money one can never become a successful politician in the U.S. that openly asserts ‘money fertilizes politics.’”
“Money is everything in the U.S. society,” it added, citing WikiLeaks as divulging that “Democrats got even the present chief executive involved in horse-trading with tycoons to collect more election funds from them.”
Of course, North Korea has a very different way of running elections.
There is no public debate over policy. That is decided by the rul- ing Workers’ Party and Kim Jong Un, who does nominally stand for elections to his seat in the national parliament but never has been challenged for his hereditary position as the country’s supreme leader. Voters have only one choice on their ballots. They can choose either yes or no — virtually no one votes no.
Kim, the Pyongyang office worker who spoke to The Associated Press on her lunch break recently, echoed the argument that the U.S. elections are actually less democratic than the North’s, “where the people love the leaders and the leaders love the people.”
“In capitalist countries like the United States, they buy the presidency so they never take care of their people,” she said. “Obama fusses a lot about human rights, but I heard about a lot of things like shootings and police killing black people. The U.S. should focus on its own humanitarian issues.”
“Obama is trying to force our system to collapse, but that’s just a pipe dream,” said Pang Hak Song, a 29-year-old student at Pyongyang Architectural University. “The U.S. is our enemy, and I don’t want to even say that country’s name. But if I had anything to say to the new president, it would be to give up their hostile policy toward our country if they ever want peace.”