Korea

[bandwraith at aol.com]

Right, but thank god it's not an election year.



-----Original Message-----
From: David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>
To: Keith Davis <kbob42 at gmail.com>
Cc: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Fri, Apr 5, 2013 10:53 pm
Subject: Re: Korea


$4 a day is better than starvation.  Does this criticism offer a better alternative beyond idealism?

On Friday, April 5, 2013, Keith Davis wrote:

>From Common Dreams:

e_Cadet • 2 days ago 






South Korean companies rely heavily on the slave labor ($4 a day) at the Kaesong industrial complex while the North enjoys the fistfuls of hard currency for providing the slaves at the factories. It's a win-win situation... unless you happen to be on e of those poor, malnourished North Korean factory slaves.
Meanwhile the U.S. continues to rattle its sabres as corporate America is willing to sacrifice millions of South Koreans (and North Koreans) if it is profitable to do so. The official position for years in the U.S. has been to pretend that North Korea doesn't exist by never acknowledging them diplomatically, never entering into meaningful negotiations, strangling them financially via sanctions and threatening them with annihilation if they get out of line. The six-party talks were a scam in which the North was told "do as I say unconditionally, and only then may we decide to talk." The other parties were told to promise nothing, keep their mouths shut and to keep their eye on the ball... namely to pressure the North into unconditionally dismantling its nuclear program. Naturally this didn't work which plays right into corporate America's plan to use the North Korean non-compliance as a reason to continue spending 1 trillion dollars a year on "defence" to counter the "threat" of North Korean nukes.
South Korea continues to overpay for stationing 28,000 U.S. troops there, American defence contractors continue to spew out more and more WMD's to 'safeguard democracy' and the 60 year stalemate between the two Korea's continues with no signs of a resolution in our lifetimes. Of course the entire situation could easily be resolved by pulling U.S. troops out of South Korea, ending sanctions, restarting talks about unification while giving assurances that a unified Korea would respect the North Korean leaders for stepping aside and allowing a functioning democracy to replace the current regime. Reunification would mean that South Korea could then build a railroad through the North all the way to Europe drastically reducing the time and money to export their goods abroad. Billions would be saved as the newly unified Korea could begin to dismantle its bloated militaries. Investment from the South would pour into the North as the tight housing market and lack of industrial spaces would be addressed via unification. The South Korean "Chaebol" of its main corporate entities (Hyundai, Samsung, LG, Daewoo and SK Telecom) would expand its workforce overnight with plans already in place to build new housing and infrastructure across the North in case of unification.
The losers here are U.S. defence contractors and corporations that directly compete with the South Koreans. Is it any surprise then that this scenario is rejected out right by the U.S?




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