Chaebol progress?

The current chapter in the history of the chaebols continues to develop in exceedingly interesting ways.

As we have been discussing on a regular basis at this site in recent weeks, these massive, heavily diversified, internationally famous, and family-run conglomerates – which have dominated the South Korean economy since shortly after the Korean War, raising the nation up from indigence to prosperity even as its government moved gradually closer to real democracy – have hit on challenging times. Once engines of growth, the chaebols are now barriers to further growth, so large and powerful that they’re capable of crushing, with little effort, the development of new firms and stifling the spirit of entrepreneurship.

As a result, in South Korea there is hardly any way to make a respectable career in business other than to find a job at one of the chaebols. And however talented and motivated one may be, there is no way to rise to the very top of one of the chaebols unless one happens to have been born into the right family. This state of affairs has led to growing resentment toward the chaebols – a resentment intensified by the corrupt ties between the chaebol dynasties and the country’s political elites, and, perhaps most bizarre of all, by the fact that the people who hold tight to the reins of power in these conglomerates are not necessarily the same people who own the lion’s share of their stock. On the contrary, it is rare indeed for the stockholders in the chaebols to have much say at all in their actual management.

As we’ve discussed here, and as Kim Jaewon noted in a recent article for Nikkei, South Korean Moon Jae-in, upon his inauguration in May 2017, promised major chaebol reform. To be sure, it is a tradition for newly installed South Korean presidents to vow chaebol reform. But Moon spoke so insistently about the matter that he persuaded a good many citizens of his country that he really meant to do something. As the weeks and months have gone by since he took power, however, fewer and fewer have looked upon his assurances with confidence; and, as the usual arrests for corruption have taken place, followed by the usual pardons for the chaebol executives involved and the usual prison terms for the politicians, once again cynicism about the chaebols has been on the upswing.

Lee Kung-hee, chairman of Samsung Electronics

It is in this atmosphere that a few bold chaebol shareholders are finally standing up to the perverse power arrangement that they have quietly accepted for so long. These activist investors, observed Jaewon, “have scored minor victories at Samsung and Hyundai, while the parent of Korean Air Lines has been called to account by a domestic fund.” At the head of the list of these investors, wrote Jaewon, is the New York-based Elliott Management, the world’s largest activist fund, which has been campaigning “to force Samsung Electronics and Hyundai Motor to increase shareholder returns.”

This campaign by activist investors has already begun to bear fruit. In early December, Samsung Electronics “retired 7% of its common stock and 8.9% of its preferred stock worth 4.9 trillion won ($4.4 billion)” in an effort to provide shareholders with greater benefits. Hyundai Motor recently announced plans to “buy 2.8 million treasury shares worth 254.7 billion won by the end of February to boost its stock price and shareholders’ value.” In December, it even took the action – surprising within a South Korean context – of “promoting several foreign executives to senior roles, a first step toward the management diversification long demanded by minority shareholders.”

Posted on December 27, 2018December 17, 2018 by usefulstooges 1

Lin-Manuel Miranda, terrorist supporter

He’s the biggest name on Broadway in a generation, and one of the most admired multi-hyphenates in show business since Orson Welles. He’s also an activist. The composer, lyricist, librettist, and star of Hamilton, the hottest ticket on the Great White Way in recent years, Lin-Manuel Miranda has supported a number of the left-wing causes to which famous performers are inclined to flock.

But so be it. That’s nothing unusual. What is rather special, as David Hines noted in a December article for The Federalist, is that Miranda is “an avid supporter of the Puerto Rican nationalist terrorist Oscar López Rivera, ringleader of the 1970s terrorist group FALN (Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional Puertorriqueña / Armed Forces of Puerto Rican National Liberation), which murdered at least five and probably six innocent New Yorkers.” There is no decent way of defending their action. López and his followers were not just Puerto Rican nationalists; they were Communists who wanted to free Puerto Rico in order to turn it into a carbon copy of Castro’s Cuba.

López was sentenced to 55 years in prison, only to be released by President Obama at the end of his presidency in late 2016. López went on to be celebrated as a hero. He was, as we noted at this website, honored at last year’s Puerto Rican Day parade, an action that led several politicians and corporate sponsors of the parade to back out, along with many ordinary Puerto Ricans who were appalled at the apparent hijacking of their day, and their event, by supporters of Communist terrorism. Mayor Bill de Blasio, however, marched in the parade as scheduled.

How did López come to be the hero of last year’s parade? Among the top figures behind this disgraceful action were New York City Council speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito and her aide Luis Miranda. And who is Luis Miranda? None other than the father of Mr. Broadway himself.

And how does Lin-Manuel Miranda feel about López? When the terrorist was released from prison, Miranda, who at the time had more than a million Twitter followers, hailed his freedom with a tweet in which he referred to López respectfully as “Don Oscar.” He also gave him a ticket to Hamilton and escorted him to the performance. As Hines wrote, wryly: “It turns out that there’s actually an answer to the question ‘Who do you have to kill to get a ticket to “Hamilton?”’ and the answer is ‘Harold Sherburne, Frank Connor, James Gezork, Alejandro Berger, and Charles Steinberg.’”

The first four names are those of the innocent people whom López and his crew killed in a bombing at New York’s legendary Fraunces Tavern on January 24, 1975; the fifth, Steinberg, died in another bombing two years later.

That wasn’t all. As Hines pointed out, in this era when a slip of a tongue can destroy a showbiz career, Miranda, who has continued to post tweets in support of López, and who now has more than 2.5 million Twitter followers, has never suffered any unpleasant consequences as a result. On December 19, his latest film, Mary Poppins Returns, opened. When big-budget motion pictures have their premieres, the stars are subjected to endless hours of interviews by entertainment journalists. As far as we know, not a single one of them has asked Miranda about his support for “Don Oscar.”

Posted on December 25, 2018December 25, 2018 by usefulstooges 1

Marriage, chaebol style

Yes, they are royal families.

There’s nothing quite like them anywhere else in the world. The clans that run the South Korean chaebols – the relatively small number of sprawling, internationally famous conglomerates that have dominated that country’s economy since not long after the Korean War – have long been viewed as royal families. The top executive positions at these companies pass down from generation to generation; the men (they are almost invariably men) who hold these offices wield enormous power over the nation’s political class; and the sons and daughters of these bosses are celebrities, whose social lives are followed closely in the popular media, and who are often, indeed, described as princes and princesses.

One thing that these chaebol families have in common with actual royal dynasties is the high level of intermarriage between them. According to a new survey, 49.3% members of the founding generation of the chaebol clans – the people who actually established these firms in the second half of the last century – are or were married to spouses who also belonged to families that founded chaebols. Among members of the second generation of chaebol ruling families,the figure is even higher: 52.7% of the people whose parents founded chaebols married other people who parents also founded chaebols.

In South Korea, just as the management of chaebols is almost universally dynastic matter, politics is also very often a family game. Former President Park Geun-hye, for instance, who is currently behind bars because of her involvement in chaebol corruption, is the daughter of former President Park Chung-hee. Many chaebol family members who do not marry into other chaebol families have, instead, married into powerful political families, which both reflects and reinforces the intimate ties that bind chaebol CEOs and Chairmen to officials at the highest level of the South Korean government. Among members of the first generation of chaebols, 23.4% were or are married to members of “powerful” political families; in the second generation, this figure declined to 7.4%.

The survey produced some other interesting findings. Of all the chaebols, the GS Group, had the highest number of “in-law relations” with other chaebols, namely seven. GS, like most of these conglomerates, is highly diversified, although in its case there is a particular emphasis on oil, gas, and other energy-related products. The second chaebol on the list, with six “in-law relations,” was the LS Group, which manufactures power cables, electrical equipment, machinery, and other such products.

Why does any of this matter? Because these statistics serve to reinforce the perception, on the part of many ordinary South Koreans, that their country – in which democracy has, admittedly, made great strides over the last several decades – is still, to a deplorable extent, governed by a network of business and political kingpins, people who are tied to one another not only by shared financial interests and systematic corruption but, yes, by the most intimate of family bonds.

Posted on December 20, 2018December 14, 2018 by usefulstooges 2

Cuba’s deadly disrepair

We’re so accustomed to seeing America’s mainstream media celebrating Havana as “exotic” and “quaint” and “unspoiled” that it came as something of a surprise to see USA Today, on December 2, running a piece headlined “How Havana is collapsing, building by building.”

A couple of Havana’s “architectural gems”

Reporters Tracey Eaton and Katherine Lewin didn’t pull any punches. They talked to one Rafael Álvarez, who “was up at 6:30 a.m. to warm milk for his baby daughter when he heard the sound of pebbles falling.” Next thing he knew, in his words, “the floor below us came loose. We were left hanging in the air, then fell into the abyss.” He ended up “buried in rubble to his waist.” But he was the lucky one. He lost his mother, daughter, and two others in the collapse of his apartment building. It was 101 years old.

They talked to Carlos Guerrero, who lives with his family in another building that looks as if it’s about to go any minute. “Neighbors tell them, ‘Get out of there! It’s going to collapse!’” They talked to Yanelis Flores, who says her own flat, where “daylight shines through terrifying cracks in the walls,” is “worse than a pig pen.” A staircase collapsed last year, stranding people on the upper floors. And they talked to Magaly Marrero, who “said her apartment is so bad that she showers in the kitchen and relieves herself in a bucket.”

And they talked to others. Plenty of others. They provided statistics showing that these anecdotes were only the tip of a massive iceberg. “In Havana,” they wrote, “some of the same architectural gems that draw tens of thousands of American tourists crash to the ground every year.” Their piece amounted to a powerful indictment of Communism.

Except for the fact that Eaton and Lewin didn’t really focus on Communism as the ultimate cause of all this decay. No, when it came to causes they turned coy. Here, in fact, is how they put it: “Causes [for all these building collapses] range from weather and neglect to faulty renovations and theft of structural beams.” Well, yes, those may be the immediate causes. But the reason why these “architectural gems” haven’t been properly maintained over the decades – or torn down and replaced by safer structures – is, quite simply, Communism.

If you’d taken a stroll around East Berlin just before the Wall fell, you’d have seen the same kind of miserable dilapidation – derelict blocks of flats that had pieces missing and in which you could still see bullet holes dating back to World War II. Venezuela, of course, is headed down the same road. Meanwhile in the U.S., we have a younger generation that’s been brainwashed into thinking that socialism is just dandy and that is sending the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Washington. Congratulations to USA Today, then, for documenting the dire consequences of Communism, but please: next time, be more up front about what’s really behind all this deadly disrepair.

Posted on December 18, 2018December 19, 2018 by usefulstooges 1

Surprise! Another chaebol brat.

When South Koreans hear the word “chaebol,” which refers to the massive, family-run conglomerates that dominate their economy, they think about power, money, and corruption. They also think about the children of the chaebol CEOs, those princes and princesses who – not to overgeneralize – are often notoriously spoiled and inclined to abuse underlings.

Just last week we recalled the infamous “nut rage” case of 2014, when Heather Cho, daughter of the chairman of the Hanjin Group, ordered a Korean Air flight (Hanjin owns the airline) back to the gate at JFK because she’d been served macadamia nuts in a bag rather than on a dish. This is only one of many such episodes that, for many ordinary South Korean citizens, have underscored the excessive degree of privilege that, in their view, poisons the chaebol dynasties.

On November 24 came another such story. According to the Straits Times, the ten-year-old daughter of Bang Jung-oh, president of the cable network TV Chosun, had been recorded some weeks earlier “verbally attacking and threatening” her chauffeur, a man in his fifties.

Apparently the driver had asked her to sit down. Apparently she refused. And apparently he insisted. Whereupon she said: “I told you I don’t want to….Why should I sit down? This is my car, not yours!” The driver replied by telling her to fire him; in response, she is reported to have asked (and let’s just preface this by saying that the English translation here could be a bit more felicitous): “Do you think I would get embarrassed? I’m not such a person who freaks out with this.” She went on to call her driver “a crippled guy – crippled without arms, legs, face, ears and mouth…especially devoid of mouth and ears….You are insane.”

Just wondering: do bratty American ten-year-olds come up with such bizarre insults? Or is this sort of thing unique to South Korea?

At some point the girl also told the driver, “I will speak to my mum today…in order to make you lose your job.” Then there was this: “You are fired! You are really insane.” And here’s another patch of awkward translation: “Hey, I’m speaking to you with good words. Perhaps I’m the only person who treats you like this.”

Just a bit more. “Hey, your parents taught you wrong,” she taunted. “All of your family members taught you wrong.” And here’s the coup de grace: “I really hate you. I want you to die. It’s my wish.” Charming child.

In fact, the chauffeur did end up being fired. In October. Without any explanation.

Then, in November, MBC TV released a recording of the girl’s rant. The worm turned. Her father – who, by the way, is the younger son of Bang Sang-hoon, president of South Korea’s largest daily, Chosun Ilbo – not only apologized to the chauffeur but announced his resignation.

So he’s out of a job. No word as to whether the chauffeur found new employment. Let’s just hope the child was appropriately punished and taught something about respect. We’re not betting on that one, though.

Posted on December 13, 2018December 5, 2018 by usefulstooges 0

Another Muslim woman in the U.S. Congress? Hurrah!

As we noted last week, the state of Minnesota has given us a new Muslim Congresswoman – namely, 37-year-old Ilhan Omar, who represents Minneapolis and surrounding urban areas, and who, after her election, publicly announced that, contrary to the impression she had left during the campaign, she is a firm supporter of the anti-Israeli BDS movement.

Elected to the U.S. House the same day was another female Muslim – Rashida Tlaib, age 42, who represents parts of Detroit and Dearborn Heights as well as several smaller municipalities. Tlaib, formerly a member of the Michigan House of Representatives, was the first Muslim woman ever elected to any U.S. state legislature. And she and Omar are the first two Muslim women elected to Congress. (Omar wears a hijab; Tlaib doesn’t.) Suitably enough, they represent all or part of two of the most heavily Islamized cities in the United States – Minneapolis and Dearborn Heights.

Like Omar, Tlaib was celebrated by the international media throughout the campaign for being all these wonderful things: young, attractive, female, Muslim. What’s not to love? As with Omar, moreover, those same media have reflexively bought Tlaib’s self-characterization as a “progressive,” which of course even adds to her lovability in the eyes of the media. As evidence of her progressivism, they point to her membership in the Democratic Socialists of America.

Yet Tlaib is also a devout Muslim – in 2014 and again on November 17 of this year, she spoke at banquets held by the Los Angeles branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations – and of course there is nothing at all progressive about CAIR, a Muslim Brotherhood front group, or about orthodox Islam generally. until recently, moreover, Tlaib professed support for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian question; in an August interview, however, she stated that she was in favor of a one-state solution and a Palestinian right of return. Like Omar, she has also recently come out as a supporter of the BDS movement. At her victory party on Election Night, she danced while waving a flag. Not an American flag. A Palestinian flag.

The eagerness of Democrat voters in the upper Midwest to put people like Omar and Tlaib in office is disconcerting. But of course they’d already sent Keith Ellison, the current holder of Omar’s House seat, to Washington, despite his background in the Nation of Islam and his chumminess with Louis Farrakhan. And left-wingers all over America have embraced Linda Sarsour, a supposed feminist and leftist who has made clear her support for sharia law and for jihad. At this point, it seems safe to predict two things. One, the number of Muslims on Capitol Hill will continue to rise, despite their failure to distance themselves from some of the more uncomfortable aspects of their faith. Two, apropos of Omar’s and Tlaib’s switcheroos on Islam, it seems a fair bet that these are only the first of many about-faces that these two women will carry off as their careers advance.

Posted on December 11, 2018November 18, 2018 by usefulstooges 2

Finally: street protests against chaebol corruption!

On this site we’ve been reporting for some time on the lavish vows by South Korean President Moon Jae-in to reform the chaebols, those massive family-run conglomerates that have served as the foundation of that country’s economy since not long after the Korean War – and that have increasingly been viewed with disfavor by that country’s citizens because of their extraordinary levels of corruption, nepotism, and impunity, not to mention their power to choke potential competitors in the cradle.

We’ve introduced our readers to Kim Sang-jo, not exactly intimidating man who was supposedly delegated by Moon with the task of challenging chaebol corruption and who, laughably, calls himself the “chaebol sniper.” And we’ve discussed the chaebol shareholders who, after years of biting their tongues, are finally starting to rebel against the bizarre system whereby clans that own only a small percentage of their companies nonetheless rule them with an iron hand.

Now comes some encouraging news. On November 21, with the backing of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), more than 150,000 South Korean workers walked out of factories at firms like Samsung and Hyundai in protest against the utter failure of Moon’s government to come across with the chaebol reforms he promised.

The KCTU did not mince words in describing the situation in South Korea. “There has not been any real progress in chaebol reform,” it said. The KCTU added: “We think our labour rights as well as corporate reform have actually worsened under the Moon administration.”

The KCTU further noted that the chaebol kingpins Lee Jae-yong (Samsung) and Shin Dong-bin (Lotte) had recently been arrested, tried, and convicted of bribing former President Park Geun-hye (who left office in disgrace because of the scandal) only to be given suspended sentences. Such special treatment for chaebol top guns is a longstanding tradition in South Korean politics and jurisprudence, and one that is making the nation’s citizens increasingly restive.

Hence the worker walkout.

That November 21 protest, moreover, was only one part of a growing nationwide uprising against President Moon. Every weekend of late, South Koreans have poured into the streets of Seoul in huge numbers to express their rage over Moon’s failure to keep his pledges. Describing these demonstrations as “raucous,” the Financial Times noted that while President Park and another former president, Lee Myung-bak, have ended up behind bars for corruption, the chaebol masters who were involved in the same acts of corruption still seem to be above the law.

According to FT, the probability that a chaebol boss convicted of corruption will get a suspended sentence exceeds 70% – while the comparable rate among non-chaebol leaders is 40%. As for poor schlubs who are found guilty of “street crimes,” such as petty theft, only 20% of them can expect to have their sentences suspended, even though the scale of their crimes is, of course, outrageously trivial compared to the monstrous malfeasances routinely committed by chaebol royalty.

Posted on December 6, 2018December 5, 2018 by usefulstooges 1

Capitol Hill’s newest anti-Semite

Among the new Members of the U.S. Congress elected on November 6 is one Ilhan Omar. Previously, she was a member of the Minnesota House of Representatives. She was the first Somali American legislator to hold elective office in the U.S. She is now the first Somali American in the U.S. House. She and Rashida Tlaib, who was elected to the House on the same day, are the first Muslim women in the U.S. Congress. Representing a district that includes Minneapolis and several smaller cities, Omar will succeed another Muslim, Keith Ellison, who left Congress in order to run for State Attorney General of Minnesota, a race that he, too, won.

Now 37 years old, Omar denied during her campaign – specifically, at an August debate at a synagogue – that she supports the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. This was not a minor question, since her district, the fifth, has a sizable Jewish population. It is also by far the most Democratic district in the state, and has not voted for a Republican since 1960.

Since her election, however, Omar has come out of the BDS closet. After the news came out, Avi Olitzsky, the rabbi who sponsored that August debate, expressed the hope that he could “have a dialogue with her” and thus clarify her stance. Ah, dialogue. Credulous persons who have had pleasant encounters with this or that individual Muslim are often shocked to find that that individual actually believes certain things that don’t seem terribly pleasant at all. Their initial response is often to assume that there has to be some kind of misunderstanding, because, after all, the Muslim in question seems so charming. Surely a brief friendly talk will clear it all up.

Such, alas, is the way in which many Westerners are forced to confront the largely dark reality of Islamic belief.

To be sure, it’s not as if Omar entirely hid her contempt for Israel during the election campaign. In July, Haaretz reported that she had called Israel’s government an “apartheid” regime. She had not explicitly given a thumbs-up to BDS, but she’d opposed a proposed state law banning BDS. In 2012, Omar wrote a tweet in which she expressed the hope that “Allah” would “awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.”

A halfway sensible observer might have guessed from all this that Omar is, indeed, a BDS advocate, but all too many voters – especially, perhaps, in places like Minnesota, which is known for its “niceness” – are eager to dismiss such suspicions as the product of subconscious Islamophobia, for, after all, such a lovely young woman could not possibly hold such ugly thoughts. Despite the evidence that Omar is, in fact, a nasty piece of work, the national media ran predictably glowing profiles of her, with a particularly hagiographic one appearing in The New Yorker. On Election Day, Omar won her House seat with a remarkable 78% of the vote.

This, then, is the new representative whom the voters of Minneapolis and environs have chosen to send to Washington, and will have to live with for the next two years. Perhaps her constituents can take comfort in the fact that, so far anyway, there is no sign that she is any more virulent an anti-Semite than Ellison, whose longtime ties with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, perhaps the nation’s most prominent Jew-hater, did not prevent him from being re-elected to Congress five times.

Posted on December 4, 2018November 17, 2018 by usefulstooges 2

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