Left Flank

I'm overwhelmed by the sheer amount of bullshit press reports on the April 1 ROK-US FTA deal on South Korean TV and radio. If it's not shrieking trade unionists, then its blubbering farmers. ESL students even asked me about it today. All three of them (of those who stayed past the end of the class) favored it, but still were uncertain about what FTA was. Generally, these students want an opportunity for a job sometime in their future, and they hope FTA helps. I was asked how I felt about the deal.

Firstly, I told them, like Dram Man, I was skeptical before I knew the details. I eschewed the opportunity to lecture on comparative advantage. Instead, I told them when they watched trade unionists and farmers railing against freer trade, just to imagine someone screaming, «Me! Me! Me!» I asked the students to consider whether these persons had the right to ask an entire nation to pay higher prices to fund their corrupt exploitation of the political process. I also argued that for free trade to work, all states had to sign the same deal, not just two. One student pointed out the political nature of this FTA, when he said that the deal would give Korea an advantage over Japan. I cautioned them that the deal was far from sealed, and most likely would not be ratified in either the US or Korea (Kotaji disagrees, probably more from a sense of foreboding than facts). The US Congress needs to work fast (never one of its hallmarks) before the end of June to ratify this deal. With other more pressing legislation pending, unfortunately I do not believe South Korea rates highly on the agenda. Finally, I argued that the government, in both the US and South Korea, had to help the losers from free trade to find new jobs or provide a modicum of a safety net. If it can't do that, and if a multilateral FTA is not in the works, I'm almost resigned to letting this political pact lapse. I gave them several examples of how basic goods were too expensive in Korea, and exposed the self-interested mendacity of many of those protesters.

Still, those students gave me hope that South Korea can tackle its problems and offer average people something more than soju and gold medals.