Saturday, September 6, 2008

Seoul Shelves KORUS FTA By Oh Young-jin at Korea Times

Lee Hye-min, deputy trade minister and chief FTA negotiator

Korea has given up hope of having its free trade agreement (FTA) with the United States ratified before the Nov. 4 U.S. presidential election, a senior trade official said Monday.

During an interview with The Korea Times, Lee Hye-min, Korea’s deputy minister for trade and chief FTA negotiator, said, ``It is certain that the U.S. will not be able to ratify the agreement until the presidential election.

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Thursday, September 4, 2008

NY TIMES ‘In the Produce Aisle, Solidarity for Korean Grocers’ By SEWELL CHAN

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/02/in-the-produce-aisle-solidarity-for-korean-grocers/index.html?hp

*In 2001, union organizers from Local 169 of Unite Here, representing Hispanic grocery workers, reached a labor agreement with Korean business owners. (Photo: Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times)

Few immigrant groups are as closely identified with an occupational niche as Koreans with grocery stores. While mom-and-pop produce stores have become an engine of economic mobility and opportunity for some Korean families, Korean produce merchants in New York City have often found themselves in conflict with white wholesale distributors, black customers and labor unions representing Hispanic employees, according to a new book by a Queens College sociologist.

The sociologist, Pyong Gap Min, who also teaches at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, offers a look at the complex role that ethnicity plays in immigrant businesses in New York in the book, “Ethnic Solidarity for Economic Survival: Korean Greengrocers in New York City,” published recently by the Russell Sage Foundation, which finances research in the social sciences.

Among the most interesting insights in the book are Dr. Min’s explanation for why “Korean-black conflicts, which peaked in the later 1980s and early 1990s, have almost disappeared since the mid-1990s,” and his descriptions of how Korean grocers organized themselves to gain more leverage in their dealings with white wholesalers at the Hunts Point Market in the Bronx.

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Tuesday, August 26, 2008

“Korean Mexicans learn more of their Asian roots on visit to Southern California” by Hector Becerra

The visitors are descendants of Koreans lured to the Yucatan Peninsula a century ago by false promises. In ensuing decades, they spread to other parts of Mexico and abandoned the Korean language.

By Hector Becerra
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

August 16 2008

The teenagers and young adults struggled as they rehearsed an ancient Korean song, a kind of lamentation to leaving home.

“Uno, dos, tres,” began Fermin Kim, 48, a chaperon for the group.

Arirang, Arirang, Arariyo. . . .

The words burbled out in a discordant drone, tentatively and unsteadily—sounding very much like, well, Mexicans suddenly asked to sing in Korean.

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Tuesday, August 5, 2008

NODUTDOL’S SOLIDARITY SPEECH @ ‘NO WAR ON IRAN’ AUG 2nd PROTEST

The similarities and differences between the lead up to the 2003 Iraq war and today’s increasingly loud drumbeat for an attack on Iran are striking. These key differences have not altered the rhetoric for war and the ominous similarities have not given pause to those in charge of US policy.  In 2003, we went to war under the supposition that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction. Today, 16 US intelligence agencies have reported that Iran has neither nuclear weapons nor a nuclear weapons program. In 2003, the government manufactured a link between 9/11 and Iraq. Today, they link Iran to the resistance in Iraq that they call ‘terrorism’. In 2003, Bush stated that our involvement in Iraq would be clean, short, and beneficial to the people of Iraq. Today, the government argues that the world will be made safer if we attack Iran.

We know, however, that this was not true in 2003 and that it will not be true for 2008. Every war has involved the massacre and mistreatment of innocent civilians, yet each time such massacres are presented as aberrations. The people of the United States need to know and remember that the wholesale slaughter of refugees in Nogeunri in south Korea, My Lai in Vietnam, of Palestinian refugees at Sabra and Shatilla in Lebanon, and the daily murders of innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan are not aberrations—they are facts of war. And so when you authorize a government to go to war on your behalf because you have been placed in a mentality of fear and of what-ifs, you are consenting to the sacrifice of the other, often non-white people in that land, to stave off a manufactured threat based on fundamentally flawed presumptions.

We stood against the war in 2003, as generations before us stood against the Korean war 60 years ago. We stand against possible war today and we will continue to stand with all of you every time there is a threat of invasion and war. Peace treaty in Korea! US out the Middle East! 투쟁!

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Monday, July 28, 2008

“The South Korean Massacre at Taejon: New Evidence on U.S. Responsibility and Coverup” by Cummings

http://japanfocus.org/_Bruce_Cumings-The_South_Korean_Massacre_at_Ta

Most of the time, however, no one pays attention, and in the worst instance, when awful crimes occur for which the U.S. bears a deep responsibility, they are covered up and buried, and one wonders if anyone cares—even when the truth finally comes to light. Neither of Mr. Hanley’s articles was picked up or covered by our paper of record, the New York Times (even though the Times had run a short version of the original Associated Press story on this massacre). Yet the Los Angeles nurse’s father was thrown into prison under the U.S. Military Government (1945-48), as were perhaps the majority of the prisoners in Taejon; this is a direct link between the Americans who held ultimate authority in southern Korea, and the awful events of July 1950. Yet most Americans, including some journalists for the New York Times in my experience, are unaware that there even was an American occupation of Korea after World War II.

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Thursday, July 24, 2008

Rice Meets Top N. Korean Diplomat by Jae-Soon Chang and Christopher Bodeen

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-US-Koreas-Nuclear.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=ministerial+meeting+singapore+July+23%2C+2008&st=nyt&oref=slogin

Wednesday’s meeting marked the first time since 2004 that top diplomats from the United States and North Korea have met face-to-face.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is pushing North Korea hard to accept terms to verify the dismantling of its nuclear weapons program after breaking a four-year hiatus in Cabinet-level talks with the communist state.

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