The Marmot’s Hole

5 Comments

1. mins0306
   Posted August 24, 2007 at 10:37 am | Permalink

   Considering that S.Korea will have a $22 billion budget deficit this year, Lee Myung Bak, who has touted himself as the “CEO of Korea” should cancel the canal project altogether and focus more on bringing down the deficit.

   It doesn’t make sense for a CEO to invest a huge amount of money into an unnecessary prestige project when your company is in the red.

2. austin
   Posted August 24, 2007 at 10:49 am | Permalink

   Hey if it gets some of the maniac truck drivers here off the roads then I’m all for it!
   Why is there seems to be money for canals, super hi tech highways, hi speed trains, but little money for sidewalks?
   I guess building sidewalks, and reducing pedestrian deaths (especially children) doesn’t add to the Chaebol bottom line!

3. mateomiguel
   Posted August 24, 2007 at 11:23 am | Permalink

   How do you make a cross country network of canals in a highly mountainous region? Are these canals going to snake up and down the slopes?

   And I’ve always wondered why the very large and easily accessible Han river was completely devoid of shipping traffic and effectively cut off from it by low-lying bridges. Why don’t they use it for moving stuff?

   Well, they almost utilize it, they built the olympic and gangbyeon parkways as continuous bridges along its banks. Maybe they should build another bridge along the center of the Han?

4. Ut videam
   Posted August 24, 2007 at 5:25 pm | Permalink

   How do you make a cross country network of canals in a highly mountainous region? Are these canals going to snake up and down the slopes?

   As I understand it, the majority of the canal’s length will be comprised of a dredged-to-navigable-depth Nakdong River—probably the only feasible course for the reason you cited.

5. MigukNamja
   Posted August 24, 2007 at 5:38 pm | Permalink

   It makes perfect sense to me. Lee was the CEO of a construction company and it’s not likely he’s completely severed his ties. So, it’s in his own (financial) best interest of him and his cronies to keep the taxpayer money flowing into his and his cronies’ pockets.

   So, the real question is how many people in his party are not on the take for this personal pork-barrel project.

   I also can’t resist pointing out the similarities in the U.S. with Bush/Oil and Cheney/War. Bush and Cheney at least had to come up with some liespretexts to fatten their (own, family, and crony) pockets with taxpayer money.

   However, corruption in Korea is so rampant that Lee Myung-Bak can pretty do in the open what Bush, Cheney, and cronies had to go through a lot of trouble to do.