A million people can’t be wrong…or can they?

South Korea hosted the largest demonstration in twenty years on June 10th.  Protestors estimate that over a million people gathered across the country with half of those in Seoul.  Of course, police drop the number to less than half of that.  The main topic for the protest was beef.

Of course there are always other issues that are bound up here, and I'll readily discuss how irrelevant they are with anyone who asks.

Leading up to the protests, police barricaded the paths to the presidential palace with shipping containers.  They welded shipping containers together, two-high, filled them with sand and greased them up so protestors couldn’t climb them.

Below is a picture a barricade from the Korean blog Modern Day via The Marmot’s Hole (the comments here are also interesting).

Here is a picture of the protest in progress from Chosun.com via Korea Beat.

Here’s a roundup of links for those wanting to read more about the protests and the controversy:

• My own look at the controversy last week. [An American in Geoje]
• The reneging of the beef deal will cause trouble with the Korea-US Free Trade Agreement. [World Politics Review]
• How the Lee Myung-Bak’s government and US trade officials are scrambling to save the agreement [BBC]
• News that Korean auto workers were considering a strike so they could join anti-US beef protests. [Trading Markets]

And in regard to the auto-workers potention strike, I have an idea: you can continue to implement a protectionist trade policy and keep US beef out under the guise of a public health issue.  Then, we could ban Korean-made cars since they could potentially be deadly.

Or, we could prevent the sale of Samsung or LG cell phones since they may cause brain cancer.  This is also pretty damning since Korea is a de facto closed market when it comes to cell phones.  Hey, if the signal from a cell phone can pop a popcorn kernel, they what is it doing to our brains?  We must stop this threat.