Lee Myung-Bak Holds Press Conference   2008-06-19 17:37

As we reported before, the coalition of NGO's gave the government until June 20 to come up with an answer to current issues. President Lee held a special press conference today, barely thirty-six hours to the deadline. He addressed virtually every issue at hand, from the import of U.S. beef to the Grand Canal to the privatization of public utilities to the Cargo Union's strike. The full text of Lee's statememt in Korean is available here, and a question-and-answer session was also held immediately afterwards. We'll have to wait a couple of days for all the relevant groups to respond and for those keen People on Daum Agora to carry out their discussions, so right now we will only outline our initial impressions.

1. Lee started by saying that he wanted to "explain, seek understanding, and apologize" through today's press conference. He actually used the word "apology" (sagwa) in his statement, which means a lot in politics. But of course, an apology is only genuine when accompanied by a positive change of behavior. So let's move on to the substance of the statement.

2. Lee confessed that he has been rather hurried. In his opinion, he had to make the necessary changes in the first year of his single 5-year term, or else he wouldn't be able to do any substantial work in the remaining years. Okay, we get that. People can get overambitious from time to time, especially when they've just sworn into the President's office.

3. Then comes the tricky part. Around the time he became President, said Lee, world economy was in a terrible shape. Subprime mortgage, oil prices... you name it. Lee thought that the best way to ensure growth was to get the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement ratified as soon as possible. According to Lee, the FTA would create 340,000 jobs and give us 6% growth for the next 10 years. Sounds too good to be true? Then it probably is. But the FTA was mostly prepared by the previous government, so we might not want to place the blame of overoptimism squarely on Lee Myung-Bak. Like it or not, ex-President Roh Moo-Hyun is just as responsible for the FTA as Lee is.

Notice: Completely absent is any response to the opinion, frequently expressed these days, that the FTA will actually harm the economy. According to the critics, the FTA is disproportionately advantageous to the U.S. because it forces Korea to adopt all sorts of regulations modeled after those in the U.S., including but not limited to the notoriously controversial Digital Millenium Copyright Act and a U.S.-style pharmaceutical industry. We saw thousands of pickets saying "Cancel the FTA!" on the streets these past few weeks; but Lee didn't say anything about this in his statement.

4. According to Lee, the issue of beef trade was a major stumbling block to the ratification of the Korea-U.S. FTA. So he had to make a concession here. Lee also said that because of the nuclear threat of North Korea, he wanted to establish and/or maintain a friendly relationship with the U.S., and that he couldn't let the issue of beef trade to get in the way. This, then, is the explanation for the totally unexpected total concession, on April 18, to the U.S. damand with regard to the import of U.S. beef.

5. Lee realized, however, that he should have taken the People's concern for food safety more seriously. So his government is currently trying to make additional negotiations with the U.S., with the goal of getting the U.S. to agree not to export beef and beef products taken from cattle over 30 months old. Until this additional agreement is reached, Lee would not let the original agreement to be reflected in Korean law.

Notice: Lee still rejects the People's damand for a renegotiation, instead resorting to additional negotiations. This means that the original agreement reached in April (which allows the import of all sorts of problematic stuff) is still in effect, and that any additional agreement reached will take the form of voluntary regulation (because you can't have two equally binding agreements which conflict with each other). A lot of People just don't like this. The reason why Koreans protested against the import of U.S. beef in the first place was because we just didn't trust large American agribusinesses. How, then, can we trust a promise of voluntary regulation by that same industry? Basically, Lee's position on the issue of beef trade hasn't changed at all since April. I mean, seriously, not at all.

6. The reason why renegotiation is out of the question, according to Lee, is that this would cause other problems. Renegotiation means scrapping the original agreement and going back to the drawing board. If Korea demands that, many of Lee's supporters have said, Americans and other onlookers will think that Korea is a country that doesn't take trade agreements seriously. This, said Lee, would deal a huge blow to Korea's relationship and trade with other countries.

Notice: Lee used the example of garlic trade with China to illustrate the kind of problems we could get ourselves into by not sticking to trade agreements. In 2000, the import of cheap Chinese garlic caused tremendous hardship among garlic farmers in Korea. (For your information, Koreans comsume many times more garlic per capita than any other nation in the world.) The Korean government yielded to public opinion at the time, and introduced steep tariffs on Chinese garlic. China responded by prohibiting the import of Korean mobile phones and oil products, and this was very dangerous to the Korean economy; so the government ended up removing the tariff. We'll have to wait and see what others have to say about this, but some have already suggested that Lee chose a bad example. Is the United States going to ban the import of Samsung and LG mobile phones and other electronics, or Hyundai and Kia cars, if we don't import U.S. beef? That scenario requires a rather long stretch of imagination, simply because Americans are more reasonable than the Chinese when it comes to international trade.

7. Lee promised an overhaul of personnel, which consists of replacing most of his aides and some of members of the cabinet. Opposition parties are furiously debating the merits (or lack thereof) of this part of the statement, but ordinary citizens can't be less concerned. Does anyone really expect a change of personnel to result in a significant change of policies, unless the President himself changes his mind?

8. Lee said that he wouldn't push his plan for the Grand Canal if the People don't like it. This, of course, leaves open the very real possibility of letting the private sector take care of the construction of the Canal. Many important figures in Lee's government have said, over the last four months, that the Canal was scrapped; but we know that it hasn't been scrapped. We need better assurance in order to take the President's word.

9. Lee said that he wouldn't "privatize" public utilities such as water, electricy, gas, and -- most importantly -- universal health care. But he said immediately afterwards that he would bring about "advancements" to all of those fields, and he didn't exactly preclude privatization as a means to advancement. He also said, in what is clearly meant to be some sort of assurance, that privatization doesn't necessarily cause the cost to go up; and in our opinion this means that he would push for privatization where he thinks that a rate hike is unlikely. (Readers around the world: give us one example of privatization that didn't result in a rate hike!)

10. With regard to the Cargo Union's demand for a fundamental change to the structure of the shipping industry, Lee acknowledged that a large overhaul was necessary but refused to suggest any particular solution. Lee also rejected the Cargo Union's demand for collective bargaining rights, which he said only belong to ordinary labor unions. (See our other posts for more information on this issue.) It is unlikely that the Cargo Union will be satisfied with this answer.

11. With regard to the issue of information control and censorship about which we wrote earlier today, Lee denied any allegation of online censorship in Korea. Lee said during the Q&A session that his statement in this week's OECD Ministerial Meeting (about the dangers of untrustworthiness on the net) was entirely about international relations and not at all about internal affairs. Which leaves us wondering: who on earth is then responsible for those manifest acts of censorship that we've witnessed?

Obviously we have more questions than answers. As we said, we'll have to wait and see how the particular issues unfold. Meanwhile, our initial response -- as you can probably guess -- is that we're far from impressed. Little has changed in Lee's policies; even where he confirms that something won't be done, he leaves open the possibility of getting the same thing done by the private sector. And we all know that Lee and his gang of neo-conservatives are obsessed with making the private sector do all the important stuff. The government even "privatized" the use of violence against protesters, by allowing pro-government groups to beat up innocent citizens! (See the last paragraph of this post.)

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