Search Results for “KCTU”

February 10, 2009

KCTU Politburo Resigns Over Rape Cover-Up

The executive board of the radical Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, a violent organization with strong links to the pro-North Korean fifth column in South Korea, has resigned to atone for trying to cover up the attempted rape of a female union member by a “senior” union official: The Korea Confederation of Trade Unions says its entire executive board is stepping down to account for a sexual assault scandal. In a press briefing the KCTU said the leadership is resigning...

The Fifth Column

January 23, 2009

As KCTU Calls for ‘All Out War,’ Rally Attendance Declines

The thugs at the Korean Confederation of trade unions see opportunity in their country’s bad economic times, reports the sympathetic Hankyoreh: The KCTU plans to launch an “all out war” against the Lee administration in February, since it has again made known its intention to have the ruling Grand National Party pass revisions to laws on irregular workers and the minimum wage in the extraordinary National Assembly session scheduled for that month. The KCTU plans to launch its offensive with...

Anti-Americanism/Korean Politics/Korean Society/The Fifth Column

February 1, 2008

KCTU Declares Jihad Against Lee M.B., Scores Meeting With Nancy Pelosi

On Tuesday, I wrote that President-Elect Lee was about to meet with the leaders of South Korea’s largest, most radical, and most violent labor organization — the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions. There was, however, the matter of KCTU Chairman Lee Sok-Haeng’s outstanding arrest warrant for an “illegal”Â rally last October. President-Elect Lee, showing more interest in public order than his predecessor, was not willing to let this slide or grant Chairman Lee the special privilege of being questioned at...

Anti-Americanism/U.S. Politics

January 29, 2007

KCTU Update: Moderation at Last!

The Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), one of Korea’s two umbrella labor unions, elected Lee Seok-haeng, its former general secretary, as the new president in a vote of representatives. Lee garnered 482 votes from 919 representatives, or 52 percent. [link] With that overwhelming mandate, expect courageous and decisive reforms. “With all my strength, I will do what should be done and won’t do what shouldn’t. I will restore our organization by studying situations on the spot, and from that...

Korean Politics/Korean Society/The Fifth Column

January 6, 2007

KCTU Thugs May Have to Switch to PVC Pipe

When I testified before the House International Relations Committee last September, one of the issues I raised was a report that the South Korean government was funding “civic groups” that habitually engaged in violence (see page 18), including the protests at Camp Humphreys last year. More recently, some of the leaders of those protests, and other violent anti-American protests, have been exposed and indicted as North Korean agents. This should not have surprised anyone.

An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/Democracy/Korean Law/Korean Politics/Korean Society/The Fifth Column/U.S. & Korea

November 1, 2018

Moon Jae-in chases Kim Jong-un while South Korea’s economy burns

Just over a year ago, Bloomberg Opinion published an op-ed under the title, “Can South Korea Save Liberalism?” It purred that Moon Jae-in was “charting an entirely contrary course in economic policy than much of the rest of the developed world” that was “unapologetically … dependent on the kind of taxing and spending conservatives loathe.” “If successful,” it hypothesized, “the experiment could alter how governments tackle the most challenging problems of our day.” As recently as June, The Diplomat published...

South Korea

September 5, 2017

Kim Jong-Un’s Moonshadow Policy is eclipsing free thought in S. Korea, and beyond

As we begin rehashing the time-worn policy arguments about responding to a nuclear North Korea, it’s useful to inform those arguments with further evidence of just how Pyongyang is leveraging its nuclear hegemony, by escalating its control over speech in South Korea. Last week, a few of us noticed that KCNA published a “death sentence” against four journalists (two reviewers and two newspaper presidents) over a review of “North Korea Confidential” by James Pearson and Daniel Tudor, asserting further that...

Books & Films/Censorship/Korean War II/Media Criticism/Terrorism (NK)

August 8, 2017

How censorship is leading Korea to ruin

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. [Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19] Last year, I wrote a post, which I fear is already becoming prescient, about how North Korea could plausibly win the Korean War. In condensed form, the strategy involves Pyongyang leveraging its nuclear, cyber, and chemical weapons supremacy...

Censorship/Propaganda

July 5, 2016

Minbyun’s frivolous lawfare terrorizes 12 young N. Korean refugees & endangers lives.

The western association of “left” with “liberal” does not hold up well in South Korea, whose political spectrum is dominated by warring factions of nationalists. These factions wield the law as an authoritarian sword against their rivals, and as a (sometimes flimsy) shield against their rivals’ authoritarian assaults. Historically, the worst authoritarianism was on the political right before the transition to democracy in 1987. The left still fuels its moral propulsion from the nostalgia of dissent dating back to this...

Defectors/Human Trafficking/Korean Politics/Refugees/Useful Idiocy

April 18, 2016

Dear President Park: Make Reunification Your Legacy

Last week was a tough week for Park Geun-hye, when her party lost its majority in the National Assembly. The simplest explanation for this is that historically, ruling parties usually take beatings in mid-term elections, particularly when their own voters don’t show up to vote. The ruling party may poll well in the abstract, but a party that enters an election divided is likely to underperform expectations. Republicans, take note. And don’t look so smug, Democrats. Something like this appears...

Korean Politics/Korean Society/Propaganda/Reconstruction/Subversion

December 8, 2015

Inter-Korean phone calls can keep the promises of the Sunshine Policy

Twenty years of state-to-state engagement between North and South Korea have not lived up to Kim Dae-Jung’s promises. Pyongyang has taken Seoul’s money, nuked up, and periodically attacked South Korea for good measure. Rather than reforming, it has invested heavily in sealing its borders. Pyongyang sustains itself on foreign hard currency, even as it cuts off the flow of people, goods, and information to its underprivileged classes. It knows that if it fails to do this, members of those classes...

Appeasement/Border Control/Capitalism/Engagement/Refugees/Sunshine

July 13, 2015

The Korea Development Institute wants to help companies “bypass” U.N. sanctions against N. Korea

Pyongyang’s latest business model for accessing hard currency despite U.N. sanctions is to rent out tens of thousands of its workers to Chinese factory owners. Those workers then labor in exploitative conditions, while Pyongyang steals most of their wages. Now, the Korea Development Institute—an “independent” think tank created under South Korean law in 1970, and “partnered” with several U.N. bodies and at least one South Korean government ministry—is urging small and medium-sized South Korean firms to join these exploitative arrangements. I’ve often argued...

Sanctions/Sunshine

December 12, 2014

South Korea’s censorship problem isn’t just about chromosomes

One of the most bipartisan political traditions in South Korea’s young democracy is the tendency of its presidents to use tax audits, prosecutions, libel suits, and state-subsidized street violence to censor their political opponents. This has always been wrong, but in America, our condemnation of it has always been selective. Nobel Peace Prize winner Kim Dae Jung used tax audits to harass conservative newspapers. His successor, the leftist* Roh Moo Hyun, sued four right-wing newspapers for $400,000 each over what...

Censorship

December 2, 2014

Sony Pictures should go after North Korean hackers’ Chinese enablers

Since the weekend, several of you have e-mailed me about “suspicions” – and really, I don’t think they went further than that – that and leaked unreleased movies to file sharers to punish it for “The Interview.” Those rumors were covered by many outlets, but frankly, the open-source evidence for North Korea’s complicity was little more than speculation, at least until I read this today: Hackers who knocked Sony Pictures Entertainment’s computer systems offline last week used tools very similar...

Books & Films/Censorship/China & Korea

November 21, 2014

South Korea’s illiberal left: authoritarians in the service of totalitarians

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. [Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19] In America, we have grown accustomed to a political polarity in which we associate “left” with “liberal.” Whatever the merits of that correlation here, it’s useless to any understanding of politics in South Korea, where very few people...

Censorship/Korean Politics/Refugees/Subversion/The Fifth Column

August 27, 2014

North Korean workers at Kaesong show symptoms of exposure to toxic chemicals …

including benzene. If you wonder why people such as myself rail against slave labor and the lack of labor rights at Kaesong, this is why. A real independent union would have stood up for the workers and raised this issue long ago. I can’t say I have much confidence in the desire of either of the governments involved — much less the employers — to tell the truth about the exposure of help the victims; after all, that wouldn’t serve the financial or...

Kaesong/Sunshine

February 6, 2014

In South Korea, a political realignment

When President Park speaks of reunification as a “jackpot,” she is seizing an issue that the left had “owned” for at least a dozen years. Ten years ago, the left could draw crowds of candle-carrying thirty-somethings to swoon about reunification, at least in the abstract. The dream was qualified, complicated, and hopelessly unrealistic, but it intoxicated them. The DMZ would have become a “peace park,”* the disputed waters of the Yellow Sea would have become a “peace zone,” and both...

Censorship/Korean Politics/Korean Society/The Fifth Column

September 4, 2013

National Assembly approves arrest of Lee Seok-Gi

South Korea’s National Assembly has voted to revoke leftist fringe party lawmaker Lee Seok-Gi’s parliamentary immunity and allow his arrest for sedition and “praising North Korea.” This makes it all sound like something a banana republic would charge an opponent with, but in fact, Lee really stands accused of leading something called the Revolutionary Organization and “conspir[ing] to storm firearms depots to secure weapons, destroy oil-storage and communication facilities and assassinate unspecified figures.” The leadership of the main left-opposition Democratic...