I was recently visited by three Japanese journalists from the Japanese Bradcasting Corporation. They seemed surprised that I even knew the name of their Prime Minister (Junichiro Koizumi, btw) or the dominant political party in Japan (the Liberal Democrats). Their experience of Americans is that we don’t know, and don’t give a shit. I was anxious, however, because I really knew little else except the fact that Japan has the world’s biggest dollar holdings outside the US and it is re-militarizing. With the recognition, recently, of how little I understood India, the second biggest nation in the world, I set ab out doing a comprehensive, rtesearch-based articleon it as a form of self-rectification. Now seems as good a time as any to do the same with Japan, since its position is critical in the systme of dollar hegemony and the US is using Japan in its nascent conflict with China. Japan, like UK in the West, serves the US as a stalking horse in the region, yet we know very little about Japan’s history or politics. So I am excerpting and linking R. Taggart Murphy’s recent analysis for the New Left Review in case anyone wants to rectify along with me. This site has long recognized the military-monetary nexus that forms the basis of American imperial power, and we have paid more attention than most to the critically important arcana of currency speculation as a very big devil hiding in the details. We have also expressed skepticism about the so-called Euro-challenge to the dollar, basing our questions on the issues raised by people like Michael Hudson and Henry C. K. Liu about the capacity of challenger currencies to absorb the kind of investment required to really confront the dollar. This piece by Murphy is a very accessible continuation of this discussion. Enjoy.

I am posting an excerpt and link for Todd Chretien’s excellent analysis (disappointingly, but predictably, gender was largely left out… again) of the breakdown occurring in both political parties, and the problem that confronts the left in this period. Chretien is a Green Party Senate candidate in CA. He correctly points out that Iraq, Palestine, and immigration are minefields for the Democratic Party. I wish we could add (perhaps we can here) an analysis of the conundrum for Dems of gender and prisons. And hereabouts, we might as well start interjecting about food. Chretien suggests we have to resuscitate the Left… from scratch… with no apparent perception of the oxymoronic character of that metaphor. In fact, he says “re-build”, which is an analog that needs to be studied itself. Where do we go on this from the standpoint(s) of feminism and food-production/food-security? Seems a worthwhile POV to add to this mix.

I’m posting this at Huffingtonpost, folks; so head over that way first to post comments. That’s a bigger lake than this pond, and your insights are needed to rebut the lbrul crap that will inevitably ensue.

“At least 10 Florida-based journalists were paid by the US government to contribute to anti-Cuba propaganda broadcasts, the Miami Herald says.

“Three writers have been sacked by the Miami Herald newspaper group for an alleged conflict of interest.”

-BBC, September 8, 2006

Communist Island

by Michael Watts

In his 2006 State of the Union address, George Bush finally put into words what all previous presidents could not bring themselves to utter in public: addiction. The United States, he conceded, is “addicted” to oil—which is to say addicted to the car—and as a consequence unhealthily dependent upon Middle Eastern suppliers. What he neglected to mention was that the post–Second World War U.S. global oil acquisition strategy—a central plank of U.S. foreign policy since President Roosevelt met King Saud of Saudi Arabia and cobbled together their “special relationship” aboard the USS Quincy in February 1945—is in a total shambles. The pillars of that policy—Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf oil states, and Venezuela—are hardly supplicant sheep within the U.S. imperial fold.

I have been reading Mr Ahmed for some time. He is a British Muslim with socialist tendencies (imo), and he works with IPPR (a UK-based think tank, with a good take on capitalism & environment). The title is a little over the top, since whomever wrote it said “the Army”, when in fact it was remarks from one Major (a low ranking public figure as Army public figures go… though a commissioned officer). It is a remarkably honest account, however, from an insider, on what I’ve been referring to as “exterminism.” This is a good inside peek at neo-con thinking, but it is also a peek inside the thinking of the entire US ruling political stratum. Whether they have family arguments about the facilitative techniques or the pace of their drive toward their goals, they tell us the earth is a cornucopia, all the while knowing that — at some level — it is a zero-sum game.

The criminal fraud perpetrated in the July 2 presidential election against leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) by the right-wing PAN party, President Vicente Fox, the Federal Electoral Institute and the Supreme Electoral Tribunal once again rips the mask off racism in Mexico.