Hypocrisy Illustrated

If you want an ideal illustration of why I believe the political tide is turning in Korea, you couldn’t do better than this picture of this anti-free trade demonstration in Washington (Yonhap, via the Joongang Ilbo, now Korea’s best daily). It’s a real Where’s Waldo of illogic and double standards rooted in vitriol, and I’m compelled to warn you that if you stare at this picture too long, you will get a brain aneurism.

Before we zoom in on this and move on to more consequential things, a couple of opening observations. First, this picture also makes a great case for denying South Korea visa waiver, because it was all the easier for the U.S. to deny visas to those with a history of violence, thus preventing the kind of melee the Korean left created at Camp Humphreys, or in Hong Kong. Second, and as a result of the aforementioned fact, most of those in attendance were the from the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition, which reflexively adheres to all enemies of the United States irrespective of principle, and without respect for the human lives and freedom stolen by the terrorists and tyrants they serve, and about which I’ll have more to say below. For now, have a look at Exhibit A, the first zoom.

You must be fucking kidding me.

* Fact 1: One of the main differences between the U.S. and South Korean positions on the FTA is the Kaesong Industrial Park in North Korea. South Korea wants its products included in the FTA. The U.S. takes strong exception to Kaesong because of . . . the lack of workers’ rights!

* Fact 2: Kaesong is a corporate gulag where workers earn 5 cents an hour and have zero rights to even think about organizing a union or bargaining collectively. The North Koreans have all the power in Kaesong and run it Kim Jong Il’s way. South Korea’s job is to keep the money running into Kim Jong Il’s coffers.

* Fact 3: That same corporate gulag is a darling of the anti-free trade, anti-American left.

The worst possible thing that this FTA could do to workers’ rights will only happen if the South Korean position prevails over the U.S. position. These idiots are protesting in the wrong country — actually, the wrong hemisphere, unless they’re so stoned they actually think these guys are in more need of their protection than these guys:

My second zoom is simply here to remind you of the severe toxicity of a diet of lead paint chips and bong resin, lest you become too lazy to actually make, bring, or even recognize a sign that’s appropriate for the occasion. Maybe they should get flip charts, or really big post-its.

======== They’re Stealing Our Oxygen ========

I’m not done with the rabid A.N.S.W.E.R. head cases yet. A.N.S.W.E.R. is a coalition of groups — there seem to be more of them than there were protestors on June 4th — like the International Action Center/Korea Truth Commission. The IAC consists of a group of bitter thugs who disrupt events for human rights in North Korea, shout down those who simply want to express contrary views in public, and brazenly support Kim Jong Il’s privilege to commit genocide, imprison hundreds of thousands of innocents in concentration camps, and starve millions of “class enemies.” Read for yourself why they’re opposing the FTA and try to make sense of it.

I’m not going to waste much time on an analysis of the A.N.S.W.E.R. position, because getting a good fisk off against A.N.S.W.E.R. is ultimately about as self-fulfilling as “scoring” in a Patpong brothel. Anyone with a complete set of appendages can do either, but neither is really worth the icky feeling you’ll have when you’ve consummated the act. So why are they opposing the FTA? One claim is that it will, among other things,

# Allow the U.S. to dump cheap imports on the Korean people. Unable to compete, 3.5 million peasants stand to lose their livelihoods.

Whatev. My suspicion is that the dumping mainly goes the other direction, but time is short and the point isn’t terribly relevant. In the narrowest sense, it’s true that some inefficient Korean industries and some inefficient American industries would be losers in a free market that would generally benefit the majority of people in both countries.

# Get rid of worker protections. Practically overnight 15 million workers will become a dispensable and highly exploitable contingent labor force.

How odd that I should end up agreeing with the first sentence of the second of these points, since South Korea wants this FTA to include the makings of Kaesong’s corporate North Korean slaves (they hate that word, “corporate”). I doubt that this is what A.N.S.W.E.R.’s friends in the Korea Truth Commission have in mind. Doubtless it hasn’t occurred to them that sending well-paid South Korean union jobs to a famished tyranny where workers reportedly earn 5 cents an hour might be a “race to the bottom,” or a free-fall. For all of A.N.S.W.E.R.’s accomplishments in creative hyperbole, it can’t even apply the words “slave labor” to a place where workers have absolutely no choice in what they will do or what (if anything) they’ll receive for their labor.

========== Conspiracy Theory Alert! =========

I’ve already concluded that there will be no FTA this year, and applying Occam’s Razor, opted for the simplest explanation: that Roh was failing to make his case out of a combination of political incompetence and fear of offending his base. That’s what I thought, until I read this piece by the Dram Man, whose views must be taken very serious because (1) he’s an intellectual property lawyer attorney who does intellectual property law, and (2) more importantly, he’s from South Dakota:

Combine all this [protectionism] with the anti-American sentiment in Korea these days and you have a potent and explosive mix. In fact if I were Roh Moo-Hyun I would be trying my damnedest to find a way out without looking like a bumbling idiot. “Lets see what to do”¦what to do”¦”

This gets me to the reason why Korea is making a big issue of Kaesong Industrial Complex (made in North Korea) being included into the FTA. They know that this will poison the talks, the US will give up, AND it allows them to take the moral highroad out. Korea does not have the change anything, gracefully allows them to back out, still they can be seen as for free trade, and panders to the anti-American part of the electorate to boot. Pretty neat trick!

Of course the downside to this all is the US is left holding the bag, and I wonder what the backlash would be. A failure will defiantly end up being at least one more straw on the back of the fragile alliance.

Remember: even paranoid people have enemies. This theory has the merit of making as much sense as anything else.