In 1997 the tides of 'financial and foreign currency crisis' have swept the Eastern Asia that has been praised as the model for third world economical development. And the IMF has stood upon the people of East Asia as it has done in South America and Africa. The IMF prescribed and applied its medicine in order to overcome the crisis to the East Asian countries but with three years having passed already, the results are devastating. The structural reform policy that the IMF and the East Asia governments have tried to propel have magnified and reproduced, instead of overcoming, the financial crisis. The stock market and financial market has long since been the speculating field of trans-national capital and local institutional investors, and the phenomenon where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer has become intensified.
Matters are the same here in Korea.
The neo-liberal structural reform of the IMF and the Kim Dae Jung administration has now put Korean economy into a state of no return. Public corporations that have been providing service to the people have been accused of being 'tax thieves' and are being sold to monopolist capital in and out of the country. The increased number of the unemployed are on the verge of starvation and labors are screaming in agony of increased work load. Korean-Japanese bilateral investment treaties that will threaten the lives of the laborers and the ordinary people. The Korean people affirm that these treaties and agreements will strengthen the political and economical power of the trans-national capital and trample on the lives of the people.