Cha Yoon-min, 13, marched on City Hall on Saturday night with his mother, a lawyer in Seoul. “I am afraid of American beef,” he said. “I could study hard in school. I could get a good job and then I could eat beef and just die.” [Washington Post]

Also is this was only about 2MB then why demand renegotiation of the US beef imports when Americans are eating beef over 30 months old and exporting and importing beef to and from other countries over 30 months old?

http://tinyurl.com/2jonk6

http://tinyurl.com/ccjlj

If people were simply demanding that 2MB fire cabinet members then I think the claim this is all about 2MB would be valid but this is not what the mob is demanding.

Also bringing up domestic Korean beef standards is valid because the mob wants the US to meet safety standards that they are not willing to impose on their own domestic meat industry.

well said and i agree at the mass-media-portrayed level this protest is being dumbed down and some political party members are using the situation for personal and party gains rather than for legitimate concerns for korean voters.

but as an american i am not sure i feel this to be a specifically anti-american issue. no doubt there are anti-american factions participating in these protests (as with any nationwide protest in korea).

maybe it’s because of my personal political leanings and view of justice, as well as conception of democracy, but to me these protest and the ability of koreans to make such a fuss that their government has to deal with is a great thing. it’s an amazing thing and regardless of how tainted they may be with shaky facts and less than firm convictions, i wish folks back home had done something similar 5 years back and mainatined the standards set down by the forefathers.

well said and i agree at the mass-media-portrayed level this protest is being dumbed down and some political party members are using the situation for personal and party gains rather than for legitimate concerns for korean voters.

but as an american i am not sure i feel this to be a specifically anti-american issue. no doubt there are anti-american factions participating in these protests (as with any nationwide protest in korea).

maybe it’s because of my personal political leanings and view of justice, as well as conception of democracy, but to me these protest and the ability of koreans to make such a fuss that their government has to deal with is a great thing. it’s an amazing thing and regardless of how tainted it may be with some shaky facts less than firm convictions

its a good point you make, however i think most of the controversy you have been reading about on this blog isn’t that the Koreans are protesting the importing of beef. It’s that its a direct xenophobic attack on Americans and American Soldiers in Korea.

I doubt Koreans really care about the age of the beef, who’s to say they have to accept Beef that is over 30 months of age? I think that would be the importer’s responsibility rather then the government (they have pets and livestock to feed in korea too right?) However when you get protesters in France (who gets UK beef, you know the one that has actually had mad cow outbreaks) saying that they don’t want tainted beef coming to the homeland…How ludicrous is that? As I said before, this to me seems like some serious politics and fears of country-wide job-loss, however when you dumb down the protest to something as simple and dumb as “Not one Korean death from the US Beef”, if you are an American you have the right to be a little offended by such a statement. American Corporations are no more or less evil then the ones you see in the rest of the world including Korea, and our (American’s) goal is not to send poisoned beef to the country (ask any drug dealer, you don’t make money by killing your clientèle).

If the underlying truth to the protests is what i think it is, then the Korean people could go about a much more constructive way of stating there views, and the ROK’s government could do a much better job of explaining the pros and cons of their proposition.

but this is all moot when we consider the old axiom, that “the customer is always right.” these protests contrary to what some may believe is not to ban US beef but to renegotiate BACK to the standards that korea had maintained and which most other importing nations maintain. when the new president unilaterally dismissed all these standards and basically threw out all the regulations, understandably the koreans felt a bit p’d off. furthermore, to point to korean domestic beef industry and its supposed lack of standards as an argument misses the point of these protests. at the core, the protests are not only about the supposed rise in health risks, it’s about a government that lowered the standards to levels unmatched internationally due to its lack there of.

regardless of it all the US exporters can still make a nice profit importing beef under the old regulations but somehow they want the whole cake and the pie too because if the prize that lee gave goes through, the exporters can now export beef that would otherwise have not been sold for human consumption. e.g. milk giving cows over 30 months which would otherwise have become feeders for other livestocks and pets. if koreans, as customers (importers) are now demanding to only consume beef at the standards other nations are following than does that somehow logically lead us to make negative estimations of their intelligence?
we can accuse the korean government for going back on a trade deal but it seems unfair to grossly judge the korean consumer based on a consumption choice that they are making, which is what this is all about….a choice.

…and they thought the Japanese occupation was brutal, imagine what KimJung Il would do.

I would also respectfully ask for my Uncles leg back, he lost it over here in the early 50’s defending idiots, like “US must leave!”.