What are the chaebols?

Corruption takes a variety of forms. In Brazil, as we’ve seen, innumerable politicians have grown rich by ripping off the state-owned oil firm, Petrobras. In neighboring Argentina, a gang of Kirchner cronies diverted billions from infrastructure projects into private offshore accounts. In Gabon, President Bongo plays it simple: he treats the national treasury as his own piggy bank and buys himself mansions, yachts, limos, and planes while the average Gabonese citizen scrapes by on $12 a day.

Then there’s Korea. Not Kim Jong-un’s Hermit Kingdom, which is undoubtedly the most totalitarian corner of the planet. No, today we’re talking about South Korea.

“South Korea?” you ask. “Benign, prosperous, democratic, free-market South Korea, America’s steadfast ally and Ground Zero for the East Asian economic miracle? How corrupt can South Korea be?”

samsung-headquarters — Samsung headquarters

This corrupt. In South Korea, as it happens, the power structure consists of two intimately interlocking parts: on the one hand, the president and other duly elected government leaders; on the other hand, a small number of huge family-run conglomerates that are uniquely South Korean in their origins, configuration, and societal significance, that have not been elected to anything by anybody, and that are, in effect, themselves the corporate equivalent of dictatorships.

These companies – among them such world-famous enterprises as Samsung, Hyundai, and LP – are known as chaebols, from the Korean words for wealth (chae) and clan (bol). They function like no other companies in the world.

lee_kun_hee2 — Samsung chairman Lee Kun-hee was Fortune Korea’s CEO of the Decade

“In English-speaking countries,” explains a Seoul professor of public administration, “there really are no business groups, but singular companies that own [their] subsidiaries 100 percent. In Europe, conglomerates are never as big as the chaebols and ownership and management [are] usually strictly divided.” A chaebol, by contrast, consists of “multiple companies with robust internal transactions, all controlled by a single, near all-powerful chairman that act[s] as both manager and the de facto owner of the entire enterprise.”

It’s no exaggeration to say that the chaebols made South Korea. Over the last half century, they led the way in turning a poor agricultural backwater into an international technology center and economic powerhouse. In the process, they assumed a role in South Korean society that can be hard to explain to outsiders. The members of the families that run the chaebols are national celebrities; the companies themselves are mighty, majestic, nearly mythical colossi, looming above the everyday world of ordinary citizens in such a way that their very names almost carry a touch of magic.

sk-group-headquarters — SK Group headquarters

Look at it this way: elected officials are mere mortals who come and go; the chaebol clans, like so many royal families, stay on forever, never yielding power or stepping down from Olympus.

As Iain Marlow wrote last year in the Toronto Globe and Mail, “all South Korean mothers dream of their children working at chaebol companies.” And yet even those mothers realize that the chaebols – which a generation ago were universally revered for having effected South Korea’s miraculous transformation – now pose a threat to their country’s continued growth, to its people’s economic and political freedom, and to its attempts to achieve full legitimacy and recognition on the world stage.

They realize, indeed, that these conglomerates that liberated them from poverty now – in a very real sense – are enshackling them.

How so? We’ll get around to the fascinating details tomorrow.

Posted on September 8, 2016September 7, 2016 by usefulstooges 3

It’s the totalitarianism, stupid

The New York Times hasn’t always been a totally loyal participant in the struggle against totalitarianism – note that our poster boy for useful stoogery is the Times‘s own shameless apologist for Stalinism, Walter Duranty – but now and then it comes through. It certainly did so on March 26, when it ran a splendid op-ed, entitled “Please Cancel Your Vacation to North Korea,” by Marie Myung-ok Lee.

otto-warmbier-north-korea-detainee — Otto Warmbier

Lee, who teaches writing at Columbia University, began by referring to the case of Otto Warmbier, which we’ve already discussed here. Warmbier, it will be remembered, is the American college student whose ill-advised New Year’s vacation in Pyongyang turned into a nightmare after he was caught on closed-circuit camera taking a propaganda sign off of a wall in the hotel where he was staying. This innocent attempt to snag a souvenir resulted in a 15-year sentence at hard labor in a North Korean prison.

“In photographs from the trial,” writes Lee, Warmbier “seemed utterly shocked that he was being prosecuted.” Lee adds: “I was not shocked.”

The reason? Lee’s parents fled North Korea in their teens and settled in America. Lee knows how brutal the Kim regime is. After leaving the Hermit Kingdom, Lee’s father “tried several times to return to visit his homeland, including with a medical group bringing in supplies.” He was denied entry every time. Lee, however, was able to visit in 2009 as part of a group of teachers and students. She was also able to take her mother on the trip.

“Our group,” writes Lee,

was briefed several times about the things we could and couldn’t do. We were not allowed to bring Bibles, satellite phones, cameras with telephoto lenses, notebooks, pornography. We were told to expect that our group would probably be spied on and to not bad-mouth any of the regime’s leaders, past or present, even in private.

On arriving in North Korea, as Lee puts it, “you lose control.” They take your passport. They control your movements. They select your meals. They decide whom you get to meet. And they house you in a Pyongyang hotel that’s located on an island by itself, separated by water from the rest of the city. Of course there’s no possibility of making a phone call to the family back home or sending them an e-mail.

Kim-Jong-un-Secret-Life_HD_768x432-16x9 — Kim Jung-un

The reality of North Korean tyranny is no secret in the rest of the world. But for many Americans, tyranny is simply not a reality. They can’t process the idea. Living all your life in freedom can make it difficult to realize what it really means to live without freedom. As Lee writes, “reports of ‘drunken high jinks’” on the part of Americans visiting Kim’s realm “are becoming more common.” As we’ve noted previously on this website, the travel agency Warmbier used, Young Pioneer Tours, encourages a frivolous attitude toward totalitarianism.

Lee warns fervently against such attitudes. She recalls that during her North Korean visit, a tour bus she was riding on “stopped in the middle of the countryside” and she “noticed a bicycle leaning forlornly against a tree and felt that would make a compelling photo.” But before she could take a picture, “the bus was stormed by soldiers.” Another tourist, it emerged, had already snapped a photo – which was a particularly serious offense, because, unbeknownst to the passengers, they were in the middle of a military installation. The offender, a fellow student of Lee’s, was removed from the bus. A Warmbier-like situation was averted – but only because the student was a citizen of China, North Korea’s only ally.

Posted on March 28, 2016March 27, 2016 by usefulstooges 1

Chris Hedges, legend in his own mind

He was a New York Times reporter for 15 years, and for four of those years he was the paper’s Middle East bureau chief. But he couldn’t pose as an objective journalist forever, and eventually, in 2005, he left the Gray Lady to write opinion pieces for The Nation, for the Truthdig website, and for other left-wing outlets. Soon the former Timesman became known for his extreme anti-American views – as well as for his self-righteous posturing and over-the-top rhetoric. As Christopher Ketcham noted last year in the New Republic, Chris Hedges “has secured a place as a firebrand revered among progressive readers.”

Here, from 2007, is a sample of the kind of stuff he churned out after leaving the Times:

I will not pay my income tax if we go to war with Iran. I realize this is a desperate and perhaps futile gesture. But an attack on Iran – which appears increasingly likely before the coming presidential election – will unleash a regional conflict of catastrophic proportions. This war, and especially Iranian retaliatory strikes on American targets, will be used to silence domestic dissent and abolish what is left of our civil liberties. It will solidify the slow-motion coup d’êtat that has been under way since the 9/11 attacks. It could mean the death of the Republic.

In a 2011 interview on a program broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the host, Kevin O’Leary, called Hedges a “left-wing nutbar.” And last December, in an article entitled “ISIS – the New Israel,” Hedges provided a fine example of the kind of writing that has led people like O’Leary to view him as a nutbar:

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is our Frankenstein. The United States after a decade of war in Iraq pieced together its body parts. We jolted it into life. We bathed it in blood and trauma. And we gave it its intelligence. Its dark and vicious heart of vengeance and war is our heart. It kills as we kill. It tortures as we torture. It carries out conquest as we carry out conquest. It is building a state driven by hatred for American occupation, a product of the death, horror and destruction we visited on the Middle East.

It’s easy to sum up the thrust of Hedges’s work these days. It is, quite simply, this: that pretty much every bad thing that happens on this planet it ultimately the fault of the U.S. – which, he insists, is, in its own way, as much of a totalitarian power as Nazi Germany or Stalin’s USSR ever were. Specifically, Hedges subscribes to the proposition, advanced by political scientist Sheldon Wolin, that the U.S. is developing a form of government that Wolin calls “inverted totalitarianism.” And if the U.S. is a totalitarian tyranny, what does that make Hedges? Why, of course, it makes him a courageous soul who dares to utter the dark truth about America while the rest of the nation’s journalistic community, as he depicts it, meekly echoes the U.S. government’s lies about itself and promulgates the pretense that American society is free.

Of course, to call the present-day U.S. a totalitarian state is to dismiss or trivialize the brutal day-to-day reality of despotism in countries like North Korea, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, China, Eritrea, and Cuba; and to pose as a gutsy hero who risks untold danger to speak truth to power is to insult the genuinely brave men and women who stand up to the Kims and Castros. Hedges’s demonization of the U.S. government has led to teaching gigs at Princeton and Columbia universities and won him the Pulitzer Prize and other awards; for him to present himself as the moral equivalent of human-rights activists in genuinely totalitarian or authoritarian countries – where many of them end up being arrested, tortured, imprisoned, or murdered – is the height of arrogance.

But this is just the beginning of the case against Chris Hedges. More tomorrow.

Posted on July 30, 2015July 14, 2015 by usefulstooges 3

Sic transit Gloria

It won’t be news to readers of this website that Kim Jung-un presides over a country that can fairly be compared not just to a prison – that’s far too mild an analogy – but to an extermination camp. Terror and torture, arbitrary arrests and executions, the total denial of civil rights and absence of any kind of freedom, a society perpetually starving, thoroughly saturated in propaganda, utterly cut off from the outside world, and armed to the teeth, its mad leader constantly rattling his saber: this is North Korea today. There’s only one way, of course, to bring an end to this nightmare: bring in Gloria Steinem.

On May 24, the feminist icon led a group of 30 or so women on a “walk for peace” across the border between the two Koreas, starting in the north and crossing to the south. “Our purpose,” she told the Washington Post, was “to call attention to this unresolved conflict that I suspect most people or many people have forgotten.” She and her fellow activists were going to North Korea “to listen and learn, to say we care by being physically present” because there’s “no substitute for putting your bodies where your concerns are” and “conflicts are far more likely to be solved when people sit down together.”

steinem1 — Steinem and her fellow activists at a pre-event press conference in Beijing

Yes, that’s the way to solve the North Korea dilemma: we need to “sit down” with Kim’s henchmen so we can “listen and learn.” Learn what? Asked whether she planned “to address women’s/human rights issues” while in North Korea, she replied: “Yes, we will say what our experience is and ask what their experience is and hope that one informs the other.” As if any North Koreans were free to say anything honest about “their experience”! Could Steinem’s entire premise be more naive, more misguided? “It’s hard to imagine any more physical symbol of the insanity of dividing human beings,” she said about the DMZ – as if the root problem were the division itself, and not Kim’s totalitarianism.

steinem2 — Steinem and pals crossing the border

The title of Lizzie Crocker’s article in the Daily Beast asked the right question: “Is Gloria Steinem a Propaganda Tool For North Korea?” Crocker noted that Steinem and her co-leader in the “walk for peace,” Korean-American activist Christine Ahn, were “calling on the UN to broker a peace treaty between the North and South, and asking the U.S. to lift sanctions against the North,” but had said nothing about the “executions, rape, forced starvation, and enslavement” for which the Kim regime is responsible; indeed, Steinem’s statements had “been decidedly anodyne.”

But Ahn was even worse. Lots worse. We’ll get to her tomorrow.

Posted on July 13, 2015July 13, 2015 by usefulstooges 2

Jermaine Jackson, the D-List Dennis Rodman

Hardly anybody in the Western world these days knows or cares much about the teeny West African dictatorship of Gambia, and hardly anybody in the Western world these days gives much thought to Jermaine Jackson, the older and far less talented and charismatic brother of the late Michael Jackson and member of the family musical group The Jackson Five. Yet the obscurity of the country doesn’t make the brutality of its government any less terrible to the approximately two million people who live in it, and the has-been status of Jermaine Jackson doesn’t make his grotesque kowtowing to the clownish autocrat who runs Gambia any less reprehensible.

First, a few facts about that autocrat, Yahya Jammeh (officially referred to as “His Excellency Sheikh Professor Alhaji Dr. Yahya Abdul-Aziz Awal Jemus Junkung Jammeh Naasiru Deen Babili Mansa”). He took power in a 1994 coup and has survived eight attempts to overthrow his rotten regime. He’s been described as “holding sway through a potent mixture of state brutality and mysticism.” Under his rule, Gambia has developed the “worst press rights” in west Africa, which is quite an accomplishment, and innumerable journalists have been imprisoned or assassinated or “disappeared.”

obama_jammeh — Jammeh and one of his wives with President and Mrs. Obama

And that’s just for starters. Jammeh’s also a crackpot of the first water who claims to be able to cure “a long list of maladies including obesity and erectile dysfunction.” In 2009, he accused a thousand of his subjects of being witch doctors and ordered them beaten and forced to “drink hallucinogens.” In 2000, thugs acting on his direct orders “gunned down 14 school children…who were protesting against his regime.” Last December, the European Union halted €13 million in aid to Gambia in response to its ghastly human-rights record; in the same month, the U.S. government revoked Gambia’s preferential status under the African Growth and Opportunity Act, a step hailed by a Gambian freedom activist as “a clear indication that the international community has had enough of Yahya Jammeh’s tyrannical rule.”

gambia — Protest against Jammeh’s dictatorship, December 2014

As with the Kims in North Korea and the Castros in Cuba, Jammeh’s countenance is ubiquitous throughout his realm, with his face being “used to advertise everything from food to phone credit.” One human-rights activist, indeed, has even called Gambia “the North Korea of Africa.” Jammeh is especially preoccupied with homosexuality, having called gays “vermin” and destroyers of culture and threatened to decapitate them. “Some people go to the West,” he announced in a 2014 speech, “and claim they are gays and that their lives are at risk in the Gambia, in order for them to be granted a stay in Europe. If I catch them I will kill them.” Last year, he approved a law punishing homosexuality with life imprisonment. Among many other offenses, he’s been accused by Senegal, the country that surrounds his own (except for a small sliver of Atlantic seacoast), of trying to ship Iranian weapons to separatist rebels in Senegal’s Casamance region.

gambia-2 — A Jammeh billboard in Banjul, the capital of Gambia

This is the man whom Jermaine Jackson calls a friend and a “very, very real person,” whatever that means. During a visit to Gambia in 2010, Jackson hung out with Jammeh and announced that he wanted to play a role in what he described as Gambia’s development. (As one German newspaper noted, nobody, especially human-rights activists, thinks that there is anything deserving of the label “development” going on in Gambia.)

In addition to identifying Jammeh as a key figure in building bridges between Africa and African Americans, Jackson praised him effusively for his belief in Allah, his “respect” for his people, and above all for his “truthful” nature. Jackson said that he’d met many world leaders over the years, but placed Jammeh “above all of them because of his devotion to Allah.” At a concert Jackson held in Gambia during his visit, he addressed Jammeh personally from the stage, saying: “Thank you for being you for the world. Thank you for being you for Africa. Thank you for being you for Gambia. Thank you for loving him, Gambia.”

Think of it this way: if Jammeh is the Kim Jung-un of the D-list, Jermaine Jackson is the D-list Dennis Rodman. No, it’s certainly not as high profile a friendship, but it’s every bit as odious. And, of course, every bit as dumb.

Posted on July 8, 2015July 6, 2015 by usefulstooges 2

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