Korea’s top 10 conglomerates employ about 2 million people in all. You may double or triple this number to estimate the total size of people directly dependent on the large businesses called “chaebol.” If you regard all adults in this category as the sympathetic force toward chaebol, they would still remain a tiny minority in Korea’s political arithmetic. So, parties don’t have to be too cautious in joining the bandwagon of chaebol bashing, which seems likely to gain more votes to than it loses.

Election management officials report that some 90,000 Korean residents overseas have registered with Korean missions abroad during the past three months to participate in the April 11 National Assembly election as absentee voters. They account for about 4 percent of the total 2,233,000 Koreans living outside the country who still have their Korean citizenship. The registration rate is lowest in the Americas where the overwhelming majority are permanent emigrants. In the Middle East, where most K

The current extraordinary session is virtually the final time the 18th National Assembly will sit. When its plenary session is over next Thursday, all members, except for those planning to leave the parliament, will start to prepare themselves in earnest for the April 11 general elections.The immediate concern of incumbent lawmakers is whether or not they will be nominated again. It may be too much to demand they focus on lawmaking at a time when the nomination processes are under way in their p

Not a day goes by without Pyongyang vilifying South Korea’s unification minister, Yu Woo-ik, one of the few doves in President Lee Myung-bak’s administration. It continues to excoriate Yu, calling him a jackass, a traitor and a confrontational fanatic ― a development that has broad implications for inter-Korean relations.Pyongyang began to hurl epithets against Yu on Jan. 11, almost four months after South Korea’s former ambassador to Beijing was appointed as unification minister. On that day, P

After two months, it may still be too early to make a correct assessment, but again we are obliged to ask if it was the right decision for the government to license four new “general programming” cable channels and a news-only network at the same time last December. As of last week, all the four new cable broadcasters providing news and entertainment programs were struggling with average viewer shares below 0.4 percent.According to the AGB Nielson Media Research report, MBN came top with 0.385 p

Monday was a bad day for Park Geun-hye, head of the Saenuri Party’s emergency governing body and the front-runner in its presidential race. In a survey result released on Monday, Park allowed Moon Jae-in of the main opposition Democratic United Party to overtake her for the first time. On top of that, the main edition of the Chosun Ilbo carried perhaps the most scathing criticism of Park’s personality in an interview story with a former close aide.Up until the middle of last year, Park had enjoy

The great absurdity of the U.N., the veto power given to the five permanent members of the Security Council, was again exposed when China and Russia used it against a resolution to stop a bloodbath in Syria. The joint action by the two early Cold War allies turned the clock of history back several decades.The draft resolution proposed by the Arab League had been considerably toned down to elicit support from the two countries. It called for the formation of a coalition government in Damascus, a

There is no substitute for victory in elections. Party strategists and anyone who wants to have their name published in the media make sweet promises that they think will help attract votes. The series of election pledges churned out by parties these days have one thing in common ― be they a fivefold increase of soldiers’ salaries and the release of allowances to unemployed college graduates. It is a lack of convincing explanation on how to fund them.Parties put up no collateral to vouch for the

The presidential panel on shared growth between large and small businesses has taken another step toward developing and implementing a win-win model by hammering out an agreement on sharing profits between large companies and their small suppliers. Under a deal reached on Thursday, large corporations agreed to undertake certain projects, such as R&D and overseas market development, jointly with their parts suppliers and share the profits thereof with them as per prearranged contracts. This schem

Hospital addicts are on the rise, putting a growing burden on the finances of the national health insurance system. According to a report released by the National Health Insurance Corp., some 520,000 people visited hospitals more than 100 times in 2010, up from 440,000 in 2008 and 490,000 in 2009. The corporation says if this figure is cut in half, it would be able to reap 800 billion won in savings. In 2010, the national health insurance fund posted a deficit of 1.3 trillion won. The corporatio

It is necessary to draw up lists of eligible voters in all parliamentary electoral districts by next Saturday, two months before the upcoming elections of April 11. The reason is that eligible voters will be qualified to apply for absentee ballots from abroad if they are listed as residing in foreign countries as of Feb. 11.But the rezoning of more than 10 electoral districts has yet to be completed. No wonder, the National Election Commission is fretting about the delay. In an official letter a

It is illegal for a person to put his money in an account opened in the name of another person. But an older brother of President Lee Myung-bak’s did so in violation of the law on the use of real names in financial transactions.Over the past two years, Rep. Lee Sang-deuk of the ruling Grand National Party deposited as much as 800 million won in an account held by a female secretary of his. The money was found when prosecutors were looking into an allegation that one of his aides took as much as

A decade ago, domestic credit companies created a huge financial bubble by recklessly pursuing expansionism amid a loose regulatory environment.When the bubble burst, card companies were all irreparably hurt. The government had to intervene to clean up the mess. Some were sold to new owners while others were bailed out by their parent companies. The turmoil rocked the nation’s entire economy. Now, concern about another credit card bubble is growing as credit card firms are stepping up efforts to