Elaine Meinel Supkis
Japan sits dead center in the world's economic maelstrom. The country is increasingly politically destabilized as the ruling party clings to power and desperately clings to the New Japanese World Order they created in the wake of the Plaza Accords and US push to open Fortress Japan. I found an interesting speech by our Security and Exchange commissioner given in Japan back in 1990 at a point when the LDP was still trying to cooperate with US world trade ideals. Needless to say, this cooperation was thrown out the window in 1995 and a totally new system, a very secret system, was introduced. Time to look into the recent past to see what everyone has done since.
Japan's economy remained on a recovery track in September but may be hit by the vagaries of the U.S. economy, which is wrestling with the subprime mortgage crisis, the government said in its monthly report released Friday.
*snip*
The September assessment confirmed that Japan's economy has continued to grow for 68 months — the longest uninterrupted expansion in the postwar period.However, the government downgraded its view on capital spending and bankruptcy.
So, the Japanese economy has grown an uprecedented 68 months which is over 5 1/2 years? And they are in a depression, remember? Never forget this is the story we are hammered with by both the Japanese and US financial controllers!
The ruling Liberal Democratic Party scrambled to find a successor to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Thursday as former Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuo Fukuda and Finance Minister Fukushiro Nukaga expressed their intention to vie for the LDP presidency and thus the prime ministership.Possible candidates for the LDP presidential race kicking off Friday include four party veterans: (from left) former Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuo Fukuda, Finance Minister Fukushiro Nukaga, LDP Secretary General Taro Aso and former Finance Minister Sadakazu Tanigaki. AP PHOTOS
LDP Secretary General Taro Aso, who leads a small faction and was reportedly considered a front-runner, had yet to declare his candidacy as of Thursday night and was apparently trying to gain more support from other factions.
But Fukuda has reportedly gained the backing of some LDP executives, notably those led by Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura, who chairs the LDP's largest faction, making him a powerful rival to Aso.
The news in much of the world, when discussing the upheavals in Japan, leave out tons of information. Since I sort of remembered some bad stuff about Fukada, I went off, looking for more data. It didn't surprise me to find the best information at a socialist site. For some stupid reason, the American right wing can't understand, the Japanese right wing are NOT their buddies but their dire enemies. So they forgive or overlook Japanese imperialists! Reminds me of before WWII and the right refusing to understand German right wing intentions. The 'nationalist' part eluded them.
From the World Socialist Web Site, By Joe Lopez, back in 31 May 2004:
Over the past month, a scandal over the non-payment of mandatory pension scheme contributions has forced the resignations of senior government and political figures. The speed and scope of the crisis has revealed once again a deep divide between the country’s political establishment and a majority of the population, particularly younger layers.The first major figure to go was Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuo Fukuda, a key political strongman in the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) government of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. Fukuda quit on May 7 to head off demands for the resignation of six other government ministers who had also been exposed for their non-payment into the pension scheme.
Fukuda is the son of a former prime minister and one of the main right-wing ideologues behind Koizumi. He is widely regarded as the architect of the government’s close relations with the Bush administration, the highly unpopular dispatch of Japanese troops to Iraq and its drive to amend the country’s constitution and remilitarise Japan.
Osawa wants to question Fukada. He is also demanding the house be dissolved and a new election called which he is confident he will win. The people pretending that Koizumi was 'reforming' anything is totally false. He was a front man who became increasingly unpopular and left before it fell through the floor. Now, it is falling, fast.
Fukata is also a powerful person within this rather difficult to research (HAHAHA) institute, the Kinzai Institute For Financial Affairs. This mysterious organization is very much the baby of the LDP. It is where the Japanese train their future cogs in the machine that is Japan, Inc. The footsoldiers as well as the generals of Fortress Japan all train there. They have a peculiar system of training which I think, I suspect, involves lying non-stop to gullible Americans who think people tell the truth to their faces even as these same trusting Americans blandly lie, themselves, about nearly everything. Even honest talk is filled with lies since there is no attempt at talking about the process that forces everyone to end up lying in the first place. I hope no one gets a headache, reading this. Fukada is deeply involved in the Kinzai Institute and I suspect he and his buddies gather information there from the US not to learn but to probe for weaknesses and to practice their skills at foot-dragging, unbending refusal to move and smiling while saying 'no'.
We must enter the world that is upside down, backwards and totally magical. Filled with magicians whose wands work only when they are emotionally aroused and I do mean for everyone to picture the sexual organs when talking about money magical wands! Wealth=sex. This is why it is part of the dark, damp cave complex where death and lust reign. True to the secretive nature of the Japanese political classes, finding information about the Kinzai Institute was nearly impossible. But it did lead me down an interesting side trail, one left by our government. Unlike the goofballs running our Federal Reserve, the SEC is charmingly open and even honest to an astonishing degree.
For the last 40 years, a long line of government officials and politicians have trooped off to Asia to lecture the Asians about cooperation, open markets and free trade. We demonstrate our good intentions by opening up everything here while begging them to do likewise. Of course, they never do. Which is why free trade should have been abandoned about 40 years ago. The Asians also have no qualms about bribing American politicians so they don't worry about the US doing something since they have our government in their back pockets. Many foriegn entities bribe our politicians. Our money-raising systems for elections are merely machines for gross bribery.
Asia doesn't have expensive elections like we have. Japan, for example, has very strict limits on spending and the LDP uses this as a tool to stay in power. They are like a shadow in the body politic. The involvement of the people in their own government has fallen due to this. Anyway, this speech is interesting to me partly because of the obvious lies told by the American and the reaction of the Japanese who obviously, after the Americans leave the room, begin plotting to circumvent American desires.
Mr. Breeden is refering to the Plaza Accords. Like with the Bretton Woods II mess, the US decided the only way to fix our trade and currency problems would be to get all the othe major traders with the US together in one room and beg them to make the dollar cheaper and let us into their markets. All countries, eager to keep their main customer happy, would agree every time to our great satisfaction.
Then they get hammered by us in international trade! So they work hard to undo these accords and gradually, the dollar gets stronger and they resume penetrating our domestic markets. These multi-lateral agreements were hailed as a great way to run the world in lieu of a strong imperial currency backed by gold. The new world order's fiat currency would be open and free of government manipulations! But this dream died the minute it drew breath. Everyone hated this idea including millions and millions of people in many countries.
So the game had to be dual: to talk free trade while never, ever practicing it. To do this, all the top traders had to come up with schemes and games that would make it look as if they were free and open while slamming the doors shut through various means. Any country or group playing this game as the US urged, has been burned, badly.
The US has made the mistake of thinking the rulers in Asia are as eager as the ones in the US to play the 'consumer' game. Namely, the important thing is to make consumption rise no matter what. One tallies national well being via consumer appetite. This is why our Wall Street and our politicians all go nuts over the consumer indexes. I suspect 100 years of the US manufacturing most of what we consumed has created this bias. Whatever the reason, the fact is, this bias is dooming us to bankruptcy since we are bent on increasing consumer spending no matter how inappropriate or dangerous. Our entire system is set to rotate around several things: Christmas, the big consumer event, grows ever more monstrous and stupid.
There is also vacation spending and back to school spending. These annual events are dominant and the statistics from these things are carefully scrutinized. Despite the obvious fact that much of the goods made for these annual events are no longer made in America, the presumption is, if Americans are spending on these events, all is well!
I bet when our SEC chief talked about how Japan must let us compete in Japan and overcome uncompetative Japanese industries, the smiles in the room must have blinded him. I bet he thought they were agreeing with him. Smiles in Asia often are closer to the smiles wolves make: baring the teeth. I suppose this seems normal to me, I smile harder and harder as I get more aggressive and angry. So perhaps I understand this Asian tendency.
This poor SEC guy then goes on to talk about how the US has opened up and a flood of foreigners, many speaking Japanese, came pouring in to take over! And instead of showing anger about this, he laughs and said the primary beneficiary was the American Consumer, the Golden Calf of our economic system.
I imagine the men in his audience all shifted their eyes sideways on that remark. They noted correctly, the chink in America's armor. They provide cheap prices or good deals for the almighty consumer and all would be well. Then the US official said Japanse financial houses and businesses no longer need the protection of the Nanny State for Hell, the LDP! I wonder if Mr. Breeden heard the hiss of an entire audience breathing inwards at once. The icy glare should have clued him that his whole lecture was now finished as far as they were concerned.
This part is interesting to me because 99% of the present hedge fund and queen of England pirate cove business didn't get launched until the government began to 'fix' Glass-Steagall and eliminate all those pesky controls set up during the Great Depression! He talks about the Savings and Loan collapse under Bush Sr but started by Ronnie Reagan and his funny money/pay no taxes maniacs. He and his stupid fellow Republicans wanted to protect banks from their bad loan policies and their bad choices, backing dead beats, etc. If only there was some system whereby the financial houses could generate wealth with NO BACKLASH!
And the present system was born and refined. Up until just two months ago, we were all assured, the world's biggest banks and financial houses would never go under or be harmed by the failure of their loans and business deals! But Bear Stearns showed this was utterly ridiculous. They kept their hedge funds seperate and when they began to die, shipped them off to a Queenly hideout, in this case, her Cayman Island possessions (yes, they are possessions of a certain woman, not free islands!). The departure of all this loot to the Cayman Islands alarmed investors across the planet who suddenly understood, the banking system and financial houses were planning to insulate themselves from failure and loss by loading the entire loss onto the investors!
This, dear readers, lead to the banking crisis that still roils like crazy no matter how much the governments and central banks try to quell it. Far from being over, this crisis has barely begun. Who will be stuck with the losses?
The SEC was worried about angry voters. Unlike in Japan, angry voters can turn on a government swiftly. Japan has basically had one rule since WWII: the LDP. This is finally going to fall and its fall has huge implications. Americans should greet this potential change with open arms. We must change our relations with Japan, time is running out.
The Federal Reserve is set next week to take out an ounce of prevention, in the form of a cut in its target federal funds rate, to try to avoid having to rush in with a pound of cure.The latter would be required if the drag on U.S. economic growth from the weak housing market, the mortgage market's credit crunch and the recent turmoil in the financial markets turn out to be severe.
Market economists believe the central bank will cut the fed funds rate cautiously, by a quarter of a percentage point, to 5% next Tuesday. This would be the first rate cut since June 2003.Among Fed watchers, prospects for a rate cut are seen as a virtual certainty.
'The credit-market storm is a far more dangerous thing that anything we've seen in memory.'
— Jim Glassman, J.P. Morgan"The only argument left for not easing is the moral hazard argument, but that ship has sailed," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com.
The moral hazard ship sank. All hands on board. They are dead as dodos. The moral hazard concept was always hogwash. Note the SEC speech above! The guys who lost all that money back then, were saved by the American taxpayer! And where did the government go for money? Japan! Soon after that speech, Japan's bubble burst...geeze...and they went into a happy depression which, unlike the bubble, the industrialists started making huge profits.
Fukuda, Aso Vow To Consider Sales Tax Hike, Aid For Those Hurt By ReformTOKYO (Nikkei)--Both candidates in the race to succeed outgoing Prime Minister Shinzo Abe pledged Saturday to continue the government's structural reform efforts if elected president of the Liberal Democratic Party, but also promised to ameliorate the negative effects of reform such as the economic gap between urban and rural areas.
**************************************************Fukuda Mulls Freezing Health Cost Hike For Elderly
TOKYO (Nikkei)--Former Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuo Fukuda will consider suspending a planned increase in out-of-pocket payments for medical care by the elderly if he wins the upcoming Liberal Democratic Party presidential election and thereby becomes Japan's next prime minister, according to his campaign manifesto, a copy of which was obtained Saturday by the Nikkei.
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Japan's rulers continue the attack on the consumers in Japan! The LDP base of the elderly and country folk has to be fed while the consumers are the enemy. The elderly need no inflation. I am on a fixed income which means I would love a depression that would stretch my dollars only I am not crazy: a depression means our social system will collapse. We need workers paying into Social Security! This is why I support employment actions. But inflation doesn't fix employment at home. Price hikes from tariffs and barriers will cause a one-shot inflationary surge but then, things will begin to right themselves, one hopes.
The US and the world should be very angry with the LDP plans to raise sales taxes. The LDP could raise income taxes but they won't. Better still, they could use their gigantic FOREX reserves to take care of the elderly and the farmers! But they won't do that! Heaven forbid! That is there for one purpose: to keep the yen weak for market penetration overseas!
Today, in Japan, they are already talking about keeping interest rates at near zero for another year. Japan's economy grew for 5 1/2 years and during that entire span, interest rates were nearly zero! There is a connection which the US cannot ignore nor encourage. I see the LDP pushing hard to keep this crummy status quo of theirs going no matter what. And there is no one in Europe or America pushing to stop them!
Here is another statement from Greenspan I find interesting coming, as it does, from the creator of this global bubble that is destroying the US economic base... From Bloomberg:
To keep inflation under 2 percent, ``the Fed, given my scenario, would have to constrain monetary expansion so drastically that it could temporarily drive up interest rates into the double-digit range not seen since the days of Paul Volcker,'' Greenspan wrote.
High interest rates kill inflation? But then, why is Japan not having the biggest consumer bubble on earth? Ask the LDP! The key is simple: just don't let consumers access loans at low rates! Restricting money to only one class of people is nifty, isn't it? And if consumers get around this by making money overseas and then spending it in Japan, raise the sales tax.
LABOUR-Bosses are raising wages faster than at any time since 2000, but the good times for workers could dent Singapore's competitiveness. Workers' earnings have recorded a year-on-year increase of 8.5 per cent, the largest rise since the economic boom seven years ago.
*******************************************HK hit by slew of strikes amid economic boom
UNHAPPY over their wages, construction workers, nurses, teachers and social workers in Hong Kong have launched strikes to demand better terms amid a booming economy.
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China's central bank lifts interests rates by 27 basic pointsThe People's Bank of China, the country's central bank, announced today another interest rate hike of 27 basic points, effective Sept. 15, marking the country's fifth interest rate rise since the start of the year, accor.....
Asia is having inflation. Except for Japan. All of Japan's trade partners are raising interest rates. Except for Japan. The US is being forced into dropping rates in order to keep this Japanese fake depression running on US consumer buying. But this is worsening our own inflation. Instead of exporting it, we are generating it. Chinese sectors of Asia are running white hot right now and the resulting inflation is causing labor unrest. But they are part of our natural banking/trading system unlike Japan.
And this is critical. The Chinese penetrate our markets because we want to export our labor to cheaper venues so prices can go down no matter how much inflation there is in raw materials and other sources. But Japan isn't a cheap labor venue. The riddle of all this has consumed many articles here because I am bemused by all this. In my heart, I feel that the retrograde, upsidedown nature of Japan's finances and trade is deforming he natural flow of global trade and finances and it is driving the whole world in a most dangerous direction, one that will impose on everyone, a horrible depression worse than the one the LDP cooked up for the Japanese workers.
My alarm about this is growing greater by the day. The headlines from Asia are intensely distressing. Never, never, NEVER has any nation set its interest rates so low. If they do it for a year, it would be amazing. Doing it for ten years: this is new. Like all new developments in history, this one has no precedent and we can't tell how this will turn out but I am guessing, it will be very bad. Very bad. Coupling this with the US/UK empires overspending and over consuming and we see the stage set for an economic meltdown.
Manipulating interest rates in China, the US and Europe won't fix what is wrong. Indeed, the more we do this, the worse it all gets. When China asked the IMF to discipline Japan, the US sprang into action and demanded China be punished for not raising rates faster! Now, China is nursing its fury and planning to punish us for this. They tried raising the value of the yen but the US and Europe, addicted to the carry trade system at this point, fought back and protected Japan while they increased their FOREX reserves even more.
This is why I am furious and frightened. So many lies have been told for so many years while everyone stuck their paws in the cookie jar, it is virtually impossible to understand the problems we face and who to change. I do know, if the Democratic party of Japan takes over, we will witness many trials as they finally dig out of the corrupt swamp, all the LDP messes and criminal actions. And this will change the entire world.
And it is about time!
Hello Elaine,
It seems to me that the Japanese are the only nation on earth that could discipline their people for such a grand, covert effort to conquer the world through economic warfare.
But, remember the East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere of the 1930's and 40's? Roosevelt saw that coming thanks to his banking/trading cousins and kitchen cabinet and may have predicated some of the early economic/political moves of his administration on those Asian events, especially in conjunction with the fascists’ victories in Germany and Italy.
However, I flatly disagree with your perspective that the government [LDP] of the Japanese warlords is collapsing.
The members of the crew with weak stomachs or too much personal baggage are just being shunted aside.
I suspect a more 'able' wartime cabinet will come aboard in the next fortnight and the real fireworks will begin.
Kindest regards,
PFO
Posted by: PFO | September 15, 2007 at 05:08 PM
PFO: you may be right. I often think of Chile, for example. The US has this fondness for warlords and dictators. But will the Japanese people put up with this?
A very big question.
Posted by: Elaine Meinel Supkis | September 15, 2007 at 08:34 PM
Hello Elaine,
Your mention of Chile is well taken. But all of South America was under the boot of dictators to one extent or another in the 1970's, perhaps in imitation of Franco's Spain.
However, I would not hesitate to note that unlike the rest of us, Japan is an isolated and homogenous country composed of 99.XX% Japanese. Therefore, Japan is THE singularly most individual country of the Earth! And when one segment of such a society gains ascendancy the sheeple follow.
With minor exceptions since Admiral Perry kicked-in the front door a scant 160 years [5 generations] ago; Japan has remained a Shintoist, Samurai society that selects those aspects [read 'weapons'] of gaijun cultures that best suit their long range goal of Banzai Nihon! In the 20th century, the military theater of international actions failed them from lack of raw materials, which were carteled by Europeans and Americans.
Thus the focus of every aspect of Japanese society on all things American after the war! They even named the highest business award after an American Edwards Deming.
In his 1984 classic ‘The Reckoning’ David Halberstam chronicled this amazing morphing of Japanese society into West California. But, he did not miss the same steely smiles you have noted in your columns. After all Japan has been itself for over 3,000 years, so what are a few generations of gaijun influence in such an epoch?
China is plagued by too many warlords vying to run the place, so they can't summon the power of a national mind that the Japanese can bring to bear; and won’t have the decisive role in how all this economic theater of the absurd plays out. However, in the end, neither will the single-minded Japanese.
The solution to all of this trans-nationalists manipulation of our world is to be found in Europe; the cradle of Judeo-Christian civilization and a continent living in the twilight of Fatima and the shadow of the Great Monarch.
Kindest regards,
PFO
Posted by: PFO | September 15, 2007 at 10:28 PM
Bear in mind a secondary social dynamic. My understanding is that Japanese workers are still paid yearly. I can’t offer direct observation but I can imagine that this would play towards employers resulting in a restricted movement of workers between opportunities. Particularly if savings opportunities are limited for to the benefit of workers. This also offeres the continuation of homage mindset in the emperor vein. The term “ingenious” comes to mind
Posted by: Canuck | September 15, 2007 at 11:54 PM
Yearly pay is very medieval. I will look into that, Canuck. Thanks for the reminder.
Posted by: Elaine Meinel Supkis | September 16, 2007 at 01:34 PM
"We must enter the world that is upside down, backwards and totally magical."
Speaking of which... isn't today one of those big-deal magical-numbery days?
Posted by: JSmith | September 17, 2007 at 08:30 AM