Angela Davis, human-rights heroine?

In June 2016, when the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art presented Angela Davis with an award for “women who are first in their fields,” we provided readers with a brief account of Ms. Davis’s accomplishments.

To wit: a card-carrying American Communist Party member from her youth, she attended Communist May Day celebrations in East Berlin when it was still East Berlin, joined the Black Panthers, and studied at Humboldt University, also in East Berlin. Later teaching at UCLA, she was fired twice – the first time for her Communist Party membership, the second time (after a judge ordered her rehired) for giving “inflammatory” speeches in which, for example, she called police officers “pigs.” After her then husband, George Jackson, a fellow Communist and Black Panther leader, was sent to Soledad State Prison for pulling off five armed robberies, Davis masterminded an effort to spring him. As we wrote in 2016:

On August 7, 1970, Jackson’s 17-year-old brother, Jonathan, entered a Marin County courtroom in which another punk, James McClain, was on trial for murdering a prison guard. Jonathan brought with him plenty of weapons, which he handed to Clain and to two other convicts who were present in the courtroom as witnesses. Jonathan and the three jailbirds then took hostage the presiding judge, Harold Haley, a father of three, along with the prosecutor and three of the jurors.

Jonathan and the convicts took their hostages out of the courthouse and drove off with them in a van. Jonathan’s goal was to hijack a plane, fly the hostages to Cuba, and exchange them for his brother’s freedom. But he didn’t get that far. At a roadblock, he and his pals got into a shootout with police. Jonathan, Judge Haley, and the two convicts were killed; the prosecutor was paralyzed for life; and a juror was injured. It was soon discovered that some of the guns Jonathan had brought into the courtroom had been purchased by Davis only days earlier. Charged with conspiracy, kidnapping, and murder and placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List, Davis took it on the lam; after a few months underground, she was tracked down by cops at a Howard Johnson’s motel in Manhattan.

Her husband George having died in an escape attempt (in which he cut the throats of three prison guards), Davis was tried for her part in the attempt to spring him. The Kremlin led a worldwide campaign to paint her as mounting a courageous challenge to the capitalist system. Useful idiots like Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou fell for it hook, line, and sinker. Despite ample evidence of guilt, Davis was found not guilty. Her acquittal was later compared to that in the O.J. Simpson murder trial, in that both defendants had lawyers who successfully painted them as victims of racism.

Now world-famous, Davis spent a few years in Cuba, went to Moscow to accept the Lenin Prize, and twice ran for vice president of the U.S. on the Communist Party line. For many on the left, she served as a feminist icon and a symbol of brave resistance to racist oppression. She has taught at many major universities and is now a “Distinguished Professor Emerita” at the University of California, Santa Cruz. And her distinction has been ratified by awards, including the 2016 honor from the Brooklyn Museum.

She was scheduled to receive yet another accolade next month – namely, the Fred Shuttlesworth Human Rights Award, which is presented annually by a civil-rights organization in her hometown of Birmingham, Alabama. But during the first week of January came a shocking announcement: Angela Davis wouldn’t be getting the award after all. What happened? We’ll get to that on Tuesday.

Posted on January 31, 2019January 24, 2019 by usefulstooges 1

Wherein we take yet another snipe at the pathetic “chaebol sniper”

Now here’s a new twist.

As we’ve recounted in some detail on this site, South Korea is going through a rough patch, economically speaking. In the decades after the Korean War, the country grew with remarkable rapidity from an undeveloped backwater into an international powerhouse. Leading this spectacular advance was a relative handful of family-run conglomerates, known as chaebols (the plural in English is often rendered as “chaebol”), whose names – Samsung, Hyundai, etc. – have become famous around the world.

For decades, the chaebols were the engines of the South Korean economy. The nation’s populace looked up to them. The dearest hope of South Korean parents was that their kids would someday go to work for one of the chaebols. In recent years, however, there has been a discernible shift in public attitudes toward the chaebols. For one thing, they’ve increasingly been seen as crowding out new businesses and thus stifling both competition and innovation – thereby making it hard for the South Korean economy to grow even further. For another thing, as ordinary South Korean citizens have grown more and more accustomed to the idea of democracy and equal treatment under the law, they’ve also grown tired of the shameless double standards that have allowed the chaebol dynasties to get away with corruption on a massive scale.

When Moon Jae-in became president in 2017, he promised to clean up the chaebols. Other presidents before him had made the same promise – among them his immediate predecessor, Park Geun-hye, who is now in prison because of illegal transactions with chaebol kingpins. But Moon insisted he really intended to tackle chaebol corruption. To prove it, he put the nation’s Fair Trade Commission in the hands of a fellow named Kim Sang-jo, who called himself the “chaebol sniper.” One gathered that President Moon had put the toughest guy he could find on the job – a sort of cross between Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry and the Charles Bronson character in Death Wish. A fella who would make the bigwigs at Hyundai and Samsung tremble in their office towers and give them nightmares in their lavish mansions.

In fact, when it came to scaring the heck out of South Korea’s industrial giants, Kim turned out to be more like Kim Novak than Clint Eastwood. As we’ve noted, Kim, who at first came out with guns blazing, has more recently presented himself as a “reasonable reformist” who wants to nudge the chaebols, ever so gently, toward “evolutionary reform.” On January 3, in response to an extensive interview with Kim that appeared in the Korea Herald, we concluded that Kim was now yet another public official in Seoul whose posture toward the chaebols was that of a “servile brownnoser.”

Samsung honcho Jay Y. Lee being arrested last year for massive corruption; in accordance with time-honored South Korean practice, he was later given a suspended sentence

Well, it turns out that the Korea Herald story wasn’t the last word on Kim Sang-jo. On January 17, Kim Jaewon and Sotaro Suzuki reported in the Nikkei Asian Review that the sometime “chaebol sniper” was now – gasp – actually taking an adversarial position toward the chaebols. Or, at least, toward the people who run them. The ruling chaebol families, said Kim, “have lost the aggressive entrepreneurship that was shown by the generations of their founding grandfathers and fathers.” The current chaebol bosses, Kim continued, “were born as if they were princes in a kingdom. As the character of the families has changed, the decisive and quick decision-making process of the past has been replaced by a policy that focuses on the status quo to preserve their established power.”

True enough. Funny it took him so long to say so. Everybody else already had.

Kim went on to suggest that the people who have inherited their positions of power at the chaebols need to step down – or at least step away – from their posts, perhaps exchanging the title of CEO for that of Chairman, and choosing to concentrate on long-term strategy while allowing professional managers to make day-to-day decisions.

It doesn’t sound like a bad idea, at least to start with. But is Kim going to use his power to pressure the chaebol dynasties to do this? Or was this simply meant to be a modest suggestion from a man who, with every major media exposure, seems more and more determined to project a modest image? Apparently the latter. For Kim then went on to say: “If you thought I am a chaebol killer, you misunderstood me. The only way to succeed in chaebol reform is to make it predictable and sustainable.” Meaning what? Well, one’s first reaction is that this comment seems to have been formulated in such a way as to mean just about anything to just about anybody. It’s not a policy statement but a political slogan, every bit as empty and meaningless as “hope and change” or “stronger together.” No wonder both Moon and Kim are plunging in the polls.

Posted on January 29, 2019January 24, 2019 by usefulstooges 2

An end to chavismo?

Venezuelans queue up to buy groceries that may or may not be on the store shelves

Since we’ve devoted so much space at this site to the plight of Venezuela under chavismo, it’s only right for us to acknowledge – and celebrate – an extraordinary turning point in the history of that country.

We need hardly go into detail here about the devastation wrought upon Venezuela, once one of the richest nations in the world, by hard-core socialism. That the land with the world’s largest oil reserves should decline into such terrible poverty – to say nothing of the steady erosion of individual liberty and human rights – is a classic lesson in the horrible consequences of socialist policies.

On January 5, Juan Guaidó, a fierce opponent of chavismo, was sworn in as President of Venezuela’s National Assembly. Five days later, Nicolás Maduro, who had succeeded his mentor, Hugo Chávez, as President of Venezuela, in 2013, was inaugurated for his second term after being re-elected in what was widely considered an illegitimate election. The next day, Guaidó led a massive rally, attended by hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans, at which it was announced that, in accordance with the Venezuelan Constitution, he would be assuming the presidency. On January 15, the Washington Post ran an op-ed by Guaidó headlined “Maduro is a usurper. It’s time to restore democracy in Venezuela.”

“We are living in a crisis without precedent in Venezuela,” the op-ed began. “We have a government that has dismantled the state and kidnapped all institutions to manipulate them at will.” Truthfully enough, Guaidó called Maduro a dictator, but a dictator with a difference, who had “ties to drug trafficking and guerrilla groups,” but whose nation continued to have “a functioning, democratically elected parliament, the National Assembly,” which enjoyed “the backing of the international community and the majority of Venezuelans.”

On January 23, Guaidó formally declared himself President of Venezuela. Almost immediately, he was recognized as the country’s legitimate head of state by U.S. President Donald Trump. By the end of day, he had been recognized as President by the Organization of American States as well as by the governments of Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay, and Peru. In all of Latin America, only Communist Cuba and socialist Bolivia reiterated their full support for Maduro, while Mexico’s new left-wing leader, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, criticized Guaidó but instead of totally backing Maduro called for “dialogue.”

The swiftness with which so many Latin American governments endorsed Guaidó’s ascent to power is a reflection of the degree to which socialism in that region has, in a relatively short time, given way to a renewed wave of democratic capitalism. A few years ago, for example, Cristina Fernandez, then President of Argentina, would surely have stood behind Maduro; now, her successor, Mauricio Macri, took to Twitter and explicitly cheered on “all efforts toward rebuilding democracy in Venezuela and reestablishing conditions of life worthy of all its citizens.” Likewise, in Brazil, the new president, Jair Bolsonaro, widely known as the Trump of Latin America, tweeted that “Brazil supports politically and economically the transition back to democracy and social peace in Venezuela.”

To be sure, it’s all easier said than done. At this writing, Maduro seems determined to stay in Miraflores, the White House of Caracas. He still enjoys the support of the military, of the Supreme Court (which he has packed with cronies), and of the powerful and notoriously corrupt national oil company, PDVSA. So it will be interesting to see how things develop in the days and weeks to come.

Posted on January 24, 2019January 24, 2019 by usefulstooges 4

A rocky start for 2019 in South Korea

In South Korea, the year has kicked off with a bang. On January 8, the South China Morning Post reported that President Moon Jae-in had made some drastic changes in his administration. Moon, who was scoring big in the polls in the months after his inauguration in May 2017, has seen his popularity erode along with his country’s economy.

How to turn things around? Fire some people. Moon has dismissed his chief of staff, his senior political affairs secretary, and his senior press secretary. No sign, however, of him doing what he actually promised to do when he took office – namely, tame the chaebols, the corrupt, family-run business empires that are at one the engines and the anchors of the South Korean economy.

On January 10 came another tidbit of news from the Blue House (which, of course, is Seoul’s answer to the White House). While Trump was slashing taxes and regulations, reported the Australian Financial Review, Moon was trying to cure his country’s economic ills by doing the opposite. Surprise! “So far,” wrote Michael Schuman, “it has not worked out as planned.”

Joblessness is up. Growth is down. Wages are flat. Both employers and employees are restive. And small businesses are suffering. Their costs are rising, but they’re not in a position to pass those costs on to buyers. Consequently, they’re shedding employees and finding other ways to cut corners.

All this might have been prevented if Moon had kept his promises and tackled the Great White Whale – the chaebols. But he chickened out. He would probably reject that characterization, pointing out that his budget for 2019 contains policy changes that are intended to reduce the power of the chaebols and help out smaller enterprises.

Others might argue that these initiatives are too little, too late. That Moon, take him for all in all, is essentially kicking the ball down the field. And allowing the South Korean economy to continue experiencing the consequences of his relative inaction.

Then, on January 11, Choe Sang-hun of the New York Times reported on a unprecedented development in South Korea. Yang Sung-tae, a former justice of the Supreme Court, had been confronted by prosecutors over charges that he had “conspired to delay a case that could upset relations with Japan.”

The case was brought by a group of South Koreans who, during the Japanese occupation, were subjected to forced labor by such firms at Mitsubishi. Yang will probably be indicted – a first in the voluminous annals of modern South Korean corruption.

Moon’s government, then, is on shaky ground. The South Korean judiciary has experienced a major embarrassment. The country’s small businesses are even more precariously positioned than they were a couple of years ago. And the ordinary citizens of South Korea are having more and more trouble making ends meet.

But amid all this loss and insecurity and scandal, the chaebols, as always, continue to stand strong.

Posted on January 22, 2019January 12, 2019 by usefulstooges 2

A new Moon

It’s a new year – and a new Moon Jae-in. Before he became president of South Korea, Moon referred to the chaebols – those hugely successful but profoundly corrupt and immensely powerful family-run conglomerates that dominate that country’s economy – as a “deep-rooted evil.” When Moon rose to the presidency in May 2017, he promised a serious campaign of chaebol reform. Yes, several of his predecessors had made similar promises, but Moon said his promises were for real. He appointed a so-called “chaebol sniper,” one Kim Sang-jo, whom he tasked with bringing the chaebols to heel.

In the more than year and a half since his inauguration, however, the South Korean people have seen very little in the way of reform. Once again, the promises have proven empty. As we saw a couple of weeks ago, Kim, in a recent interview, presented himself not as an anti-chaebol warrior but as a “reasonable reformist” who respects the chaebols and, far from cutting them down to size, seeks to render them competitive through “evolutionary reform.”

Now Moon, too, is singing a new tune. As the Korea Times reported on January 6, “the President appears to be expanding communication channels to win backing from the country’s leading industrial conglomerates.” According to a spoksman for Moon, the President planned to meet with chaebol leaders some time in January and would ask them “to hire more and spend more,” in exchange for which his government would provide increased “tax benefits and administrative support.” Partly in order to win votes from younger members of the electorate who are in the job market, according to top government officials, Moon needs “to reach out his hands to Samsung, LG, SK and Hyundai,” the country’s “top four family-controlled businesses.”

That’s quite an about-face, even by high-stakes political standards. The man who vowed to be an anti-chaebol crusader is now going to the chaebols, hat in hand, and begging them for what is essentially a political favor – and, in response, offering to cut their taxes. In other words, it’s back to business as usual in South Korea, with the head of state and the chaebol kings scratching each other’s backs.

Already, reported the Times, “chief presidential policy chief Kim Soo-hyun met with senior executives at Samsung, LG and SK in a Seoul hotel late last year” in order to set the groundwork for the shift in approach. The question, it seems, is not whether Moon plans to woo the chaebol bosses; it is how the bosses will respond to his bootlicking.

You see, they’re not all that happy with Moon, partly because of the aggressive anti-chaebol rhetoric with which he started his administration, and partly because his hike in the minimum wage has blunted their competitiveness abroad. It’s predicted that South Korean economy will grow only 2.5 percent this year, and the chaebols put a lot of blame for that at Moon’s feet.

The worm, then, has turned. The sometime chaebol slayer has become a servile brownnoser, trucking to the big boys at the “big four” – Samsung, Hyundai, LG, and SK – and hoping that they’ll respond positively to his kowtowing.

Posted on January 17, 2019January 9, 2019 by usefulstooges 0

Communism’s great, if you’re a Castro

Earlier this month, the world was reminded that even though Communism is a great way to destroy an economy and to impoverish a nation’s inhabitants, there are always a few people who live luxuriously under the system: namely, the rulers, their cronies, and their families.

Tony Castro, who is a grandson of Fidel Castro, is on Instagram, where he has about 1300 followers. Until recently, ordinary citizens of Cuba weren’t allowed Internet access at all. But those rules don’t apply, of course, to members of the ruling dynasty.

Recently, the Miami Herald and other south Florida media published some photographs that young Tony (he’s reportedly in his twenties) has posted on his Instagram account. One of them shows Tony sunbathing on a yacht. Of course, ordinary Cubans can’t afford yachts – and if they boarded one, they’d be arrested pronto because the assumption would be that they were about to escape the island prison set up by Tony’s grandfather sixty years ago.

Another of Tony’s Instagram snaps showed him celebrating the birthday of an uncle at what looks like a pretty swanky bistro. He and his uncle raise a toast with champagne glasses. We’re talking here, of course, about the princeling of a country where basic food items are in extremely short supply.

In yet another picture we can see Tony at the wheel of a BMW. Need we comment?

Other pictures show him in Panama City, Panama; in Barcelona and Madrid; and at a Mexican beach resort, Ciudad del Carmen, which is located on the Gulf of Mexico and is known as “the pearl of the Gulf.” Needless to say, ordinary Cubans aren’t allowed to exit their own country under any circumstances, and certainly could never afford to visit places like these.

It’s been a long time since the Castros took over Cuba, but the rhetoric of revolution has never ceased. The people of Cuba may not get much in the way of good food, but they’re fed a huge daily diet of propaganda about the wonderful benefits of their glorious revolution and about the evils of capitalism. And more than a few suckers in the democratic capitalist world – some of them working for major media organizations – buy into this baloney.

Take Karl Vick of Time Magazine, whom we wrote about in August 2015. This credulous jackass describes Cuba as a “security state” in order to avoid such unpleasant terms as “dictatorship” or “police state.” He has written: “People enjoy life in Cuba as in few other places.” When he claimed in a radio interview that Cuba could boast of certain achievements, he was asked to name one such achievement. “Social equity,” Vick said, and went on to assert that nobody in Cuba is “much higher than anybody else.”

Vick isn’t alone in believing that – and in thinking that this supposed equity is enough to justify any disagreeable aspects of the Cuban regime. Of course, over the decades there has been ample testimony to the fact that the Castros live like kings and that the whole equity thing is a sham. But Tony Castro’s pictures – coming to light only days after the 60^th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, and at a time when a frightening number of young Americans consider socialism cool – provide a neat reminder of just what a lie Communism is.

Posted on January 15, 2019January 9, 2019 by usefulstooges 0

A bad year for the chaebols

The verdict is in. Briefly put, 2018 was a bad year for the chaebols. A very bad year.

This news should not come as a big surprise to regular readers of this site.

In recent months, we’ve seen that entrepreneurs in South Korea have become increasingly outspoken in their resentment toward the giant family-run conglomerates, whose massive power enables them to smother competitors in their cradles.

We’ve seen that the chaebols’ continued dominance of the South Korean economy, by preventing the flowering of major new firms, has kept that economy from growing as fast as it used to.

We’ve seen that South Koreans generally are getting more and more tired of the privileged position of chaebol families, one consequence of which is that corruption in their ranks routinely goes unpunished.

Not least, we’ve seen that foreign chaebol stockholders who have begun to challenge the distinctively South Korean policies that deny those stockholders the ability to influence major chaebol decisions, even if they own bigger shares of the companies than the ruling families do.

Now all of these critics of the chaebols have more ammunition to use against the system. On December 27, 2018, it was reported that South Korea’s ten largest chaebols experienced a twenty percent reduction in market value over the course of 2018.

That’s a stunning number, especially given how robustly other Western economies – such as that of the U.S. – performed during the same year.

By the end of 2018, the combined value of the top ten chaebols was $173 billion. All by itself, Samsung, the largest of the chaebols, accounted for half of the loss. One of the companies that make up the Samsung Group, Samsung Electronics, dropped a full 30 percent in value.

But Samsung wasn’t alone in bleeding badly. LG Group lost 21 percent of its value. SK and Hyundai also posted huge losses. Only two major chaebols – Hyundai and GS – had a good year.

Obviously, these lousy results aren’t good news for the legendary families that run the chaebols. On the contrary. They also mean that shareholders in these firms lost a lot of money. And given the central importance of the chaebols to the South Korean economy, these figures will have a negative impact on South Koreans as a whole.

Then again, this isn’t entirely bad news. A dramatically poor showing almost all the way across the chaebol board may well help speed efforts at substantial systematic reform. One South Korean president after another has promised such reform and failed to deliver. The current president, Moon Jae-in, installed a so-called “chaebol sniper” who has proven to be a paper tiger.

Repeatedly, critics of the chaebols have been told that the chaebols are simply too vital to the South Korean economy to justify major overhauls. Break up Samsung? Knock the chaebol dynasties down a peg or two? Impossible! But numbers like the ones we’ve seen here may open up more people in power to the possibility of real change. South Koreans won’t endure too many years of chaebol contraction without accepting – indeed, clamoring for – radical transformation.

In short, 2019 promises to be an interesting year for the chaebols. Stay tuned.

Posted on January 10, 2019January 8, 2019 by usefulstooges 0

AFP whitewashes the Castros

From time to time on this site, we’ve examined various public figures who had a soft spot for the Castro regime in Cuba and media organizations whose reports from Cuba routinely focused on its purported charms rather than its totalitarian government. We’ve written about director Bob Yari, who filmed a movie in Cuba; designer Karl Lagerfeld, who used Havana’s crumbling buildings as a backdrop for a glamorous fashion show; and celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, who, notwithstanding his own wealth, made a point of castigation capitalism while celebrating the Castros. We’ve told the tale of Fidel’s affair with compliant ABC reporter Lisa Howard, noted the chummy relationship between Jesse Jackson and the Castros, and, not least, the shamelessness and fatuity with which Time Magazine, again and again, has glorified the island prison.

On January 2, Agence France Press demonstrated that the perverse impulse to whitewash the Cuban regime is not dead in 2019. Under the headline “Cuba celebrates 60 years of revolution amid challenges and change,” AFP described Cuba as a longtime “source of inspiration for leftist Latin American governments,” but added that the nation faces “increasing isolation in a region dominated by a resurgent right,” notably the new Brazilian government led by “far-right President Jair Bolsonaro.”

AFP reported that Bolsonaro had “made a point of not inviting” the new Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel and Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro to his inauguration, a decision that some of us might consider principled but that AFP seemed to want readers to regard as churlish.

Typically, AFP labeled Bolsonaro – a pro-American, pro-Israeli conservative who has been dubbed the Latin American Trump – as “far-right,” and characterized Argentina, Chile and Peru as having “all swung to the right in recent years, unseating leftist governments.” A more objective media outlet might have put it a bit differently – might have said, that is, that the voters of those countries have rejected socialism in favor of democratic capitalism.

Meanwhile, in its references to Cuba’s leaders, AFP was careful to avoid the word “dictator,” obediently referring to Raul Castro as “[e]x-president” and as “first secretary of the Communist Party,” identifying the late Fidel Castro as “Cuba’s revolutionary leader,” and giving the current thug-in-chief, Miguel Diaz-Canel, his official title of “President.” AFP also reported that Maduro had “paid tribute to the ‘heroic Cuban people,’” whom he praised for their “’resistance and dignity’ in the face of ’60 years of sacrifices, struggles and blockade.’” In addition, according to AFP, “[a]nother surviving leftist leader, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, said Cuba’s revolution gave birth to ‘the light of hope and invincible will for the liberation of the people.’” This effusive rhetoric by Maduro and Morales was presented by AFP without context, so that an ill-informed reader would never know that the Cuban people have spent the last six decades not as stalwart patriots who have bravely resisted a U.S. blockade but as downtrodden subjects of a totalitarian tyranny.

To be sure, the word “dictator” did eventually appear in the AFP article – but only as a means of describing Castro’s predessor, Fulgencio Batista. To its credit, moreover, AFP also mentioned, toward the end of its article, that Cuba is a communist state. It also quoted a dissident, but that dissident, as it happened, was not an anti-Communist who opposed the Cuban Revolution from the start but a diehard Communist named Vladimiro Roca, whose father was a sidekick of Fidel Castro, who himself had run afoul of authorities and spent several years in prison, and whose complaint was therefore that the Cuban Revolution “died a long time ago.”

Moreover, while AFP acknowledged that Cuba “has faced heavy criticism” abroad, it presented the Cuban people not as decades-long victims of a brutal autocracy but as having “had to contend with an increasingly hostile administration under Trump these last two years.” There’s no hint that the Trump administration is hostile not to the Cuban people but to their unelected masters. In 2019, alas, such full-scale misrepresentation continues to be par for the course for all too many Western media.

Posted on January 8, 2019January 8, 2019 by usefulstooges 1

The clueless “chaebol sniper”

Kim Sang-yo: almost as tough and scary as Kim Novak

On December 18, the Korea Herald published the most extensive interview we’ve seen yet with Kim Sang-jo, who was appointed to a three-year term as head of South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission in June 2017 and who, tasked with reining in the power of the chaebols – the family-run conglomerates that are at once the engines of that country’s economy and the greatest hindrances to its growth – calls himself the “chaebol hunter.” Shin Ji-hye, the Herald’s reporter, maintained that Kim had made some progress, proposing key revisions to the Fair Trade Act that were approved by the Cabinet in November and await ratification by the National Assembly. Shin also sought to portray Kim as a sympathetic man in the middle, criticized from both sides, one of which assails him for failing to bring about promised reforms and the other of which accuses him of going too far in his purported war on the chaebols.

In the interview, Kim also sought to depict himself as a man of balance – a “reasonable reformist,” who appreciates the value of the chaebols to South Korea and who seeks not to blunt their economic impact, let alone destroy them, but to make them competitive. In fact, it turns out that Kim no longer calls himself the “chaebol sniper” but, rather, wants to be known as an “evolutionary reformer” who “walk[s] the middle line.”

According to Kim, the key to proper chaebol reform, in Shin’s paraphrase, is “to put an end to ‘gapjil,’ unfair business practices employed by market monopolies, as well as undue inter-affiliate trading. Doing away with both is the main objective of the FTC’s proposed bills to amend the Fair Trade Act.”

Yet when it came to one of the major issues involving the chaebols — the most prominent of which include Samsung, Hyundai, and LG –Kim was as stubborn as any chaebol CEO. Noting that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and four of its counterparts in other countries had signed a statement in November challenging South Korean regulations as well as the FTC’s approach to investigation, Kim defended the chaebol system and argued that it wasn’t reasonable for U.S. businesses to expect other countries to model their corporate structures on its own.

As for American investors who are major chaebol shareholders but who, in keeping with the antiquated traditions of the system, have been denied the kind of influence on corporate decision-making that they would enjoy in Western firms – and who, of late, have been raising their voices more loudly to complain about this unfair state of affairs – Kim said, “This is a sensitive issue,” then said of the most prominent of those investors that “its understanding of Korea still remains insufficient.”

In fact, when Kim swipes at a major international investment firm for its supposedly “insufficient” understanding of Korea he is confessing to the very provincialism that lies at the heart of the chaebol problem. It is no exaggeration to say that Kim’s remark is by far the most telling part of the interview, indeed the only part that really matters. It underscores the fact that chaebol reform has been placed in the hands of a man who, however well-intentioned he may be, just doesn’t get it.

He doesn’t grasp, in short, that halfway measures, parochial measures, are just not enough; he doesn’t realize that he’s thinking inside of a very narrow box, a South Korean box, when what is called for in this situation is a major adjustment in South Korean business practice and business thinking — an adjustment that will result in a system that conforms to international norms and will allow for international investment on the same terms that obtain elsewhere in the developed world. Kim’s interview leaves the unfortunate impression that, until South Korea puts the future of the chaebols in charge of another individual, someone with a more global perspective, hope for real chaebol reform will be entirely in vain.

Posted on January 3, 2019January 9, 2019 by usefulstooges 2

Yvette Felarca, anti-fascist heroine?

Doubtless, from one perspective, we have devoted more attention to Yvette Felarca on this site than she deserves. She’s just one local activist, after all, who’s far from an international figure or a woman of great power. Nonetheless, she is the near-perfect example of a certain type that is a preoccupation of this blog: an almost thoroughly clueless tool, brainwashed to a fare-thee-well by totalitarian ideology and driven to violence by her utter fanaticism.

As we’ve explained before, Felarca is a teacher at a Berkeley, California, middle school. She is also a leading member of BAMN, short for “The Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration & Immigrant Rights, and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary,” founded in 1995 as a front group for a Trotskyist party called the Revolutionary Workers League. Based in California, BAMN has participated in actions that range from blocking highway traffic to outright acts of violence; it was a gang of BAMN thugs that, in February 2017, stirred up the ruckus that prevented Milo Yiannopoulos from giving a presentation at UC Berkeley. Both the FBI and the Defense Department consider BAMN a terrorist group. As for Felarca, she is a diehard true believer who considers any critic or opponent a genocidal Nazi and who seems capable of committing any atrocity in cold blood in the name of the Communist cause.

Over the years, Felarca has run up quite a record. In 2016 she led a demonstration in Sacramento that has been described in some media as a rally and in others as a riot. When her pupils’ parents got wind of her extracurricular activities, they tried to get her fired. But it takes more than that for the public school system in the city widely known as “Berserkeley” to dismiss a teacher. “We don’t have any authority or business to judge what an employee does in her off time,” a spokesman for the Berkeley Unified School District told the media before sending her back into the classroom. Next thing you know, there she was closing down the Milo event, ordering around a bunch of hoods who broke windows, threw fireworks and Molotov cocktails, and beat innocent citizens with fists and poles.

After the Milo fracas, Felarca was arrested, and gave an interview to Tucker Carlson in which it became utterly clear to viewers just what a fanatic she is. Still, she kept her job.

Delusions of grandeur: Trump’s most famous enemy?

On this past December 19 came the latest update on Felarca’s radical journey. As it happens, her antics in Sacramento in 2016 resulted in charges of felony assault and misdemeanor inciting a riot. Now described as an associate not only of BAMN but also of Antifa – of course she is the sort of woman who makes sure to keep up with progress on the “progressive” front – Felarca has finally had to answer in court for her behavior on that day. In a vain attempt to get the charges against her dismissed, she has accused her accusers of engineering a “political witch hunt,” suggested that the video evidence against her was fabricated, argued that her prosecution is motivated by racism and by politics, and claimed that she has been victimized because she’s “the most publicly known opponent of Donald Trump in the state of California.”

These arguments, alas, haven’t saved her from a judicial reckoning. “Two judges so far have failed to dismiss the case against her stemming from the 2016 riot,” reported the Daily Caller, “and in October, a judge dismissed her lawsuit meant to block conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch from obtaining emails regarding her involvement with both Antifa and BAMN.” She was scheduled for a hearing on December 18, but the judge delayed it until this coming January 22. Irked at the judge for not simply dismissing the charges against Felarca, Mark Reichel, a prominent attorney who is representing one of Felarca’s Antifa/BAMN cohorts, accused the Sacramento County district attorney of “selectively prosecuting people that fought fascists.” Reichel actually added: “We used to call them heroes in World War II.” Yes, you read that correctly: he was comparing Felarca, a savage Commie nut of the first water, to the Allied soldiers who risked their lives to defeat the Third Reich.

This is the way these people think. And this is precisely why Felarca is so worth paying attention to. And it’s why we’ll make sure to see what happens when she has her day in court on January 22.

Posted on January 1, 2019December 23, 2018 by usefulstooges 5

Useful Stooges