Today's Stories

April 13, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
Iraqi Militia Fear Reprisals After US Exit

Jeremy Scahill
A Test Case for Habeas Corpus: Will Obama Prosecute the Somali Pirate in a US Court?

Karl Grossman
A Radioactive Extension for Aging Nuclear Plants

Nadia Hijab
Still Waiting: Obama and American Muslims

April 10 / 12, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Resurrection and Revenge

Chris Floyd
Hope Abandoned: Obama Protects CIA Torture Memos

Mike Whitney
"Liquidate the Banks; Fire the Executives!" Warren's Devastating Report to Congress

Saul Landau
How the Media Bought the Surge

M. Reza Pirbhai
Obama's Afghanistan Plan and India-Pakistan Relations

Franklin Spinney
The Art of the Scam: Wall Street and the Pentagon

Rannie Amiri
Iran's Elections: Why Arab Leaders Want Ahmadinejad to Win

William Blum
The Ideology of Barack Obama

Matt Vidal
Why Card Check Would Help the Economy

Jeff Howison
Death of the Square Deal

Jeff Leys
Resisting the Af-Pak War: the Creech Air Base Arrests

Dave Lindorff
America's Imperial Wars: Why We Need to See the Horrors

Ramzy Baroud
Israel Investigated: But Will It Repent?

Missy Beattie
The Grateful Dead, Wounded and Displaced

Fred Gardner
Fakes Left, Goes Right: Obama's Crossover Dribble on Marijuana Policy

Harvey Wasserman Another $50 Billion for Rust Bucket Nukes?

Suzan Mazur
A Revolution in Biology: an Interview with Nobel Laureate Paul Nurse

Bernard Umbrecht
German Capitalists Take Fire

David Macaray
A Word Clooney, Hanks and Baldwin Should Learn: Solidarity

Janet Kauffman
How to Starve (or Feed) a River

Ron Jacobs
Daring to Struggle, Failing to Win

Norman Solomon
Getting a Death Grip on Memory

Michael Winship
Let the Railsplitter Awake!

Richard Rhames
Empire, Ennui and Extra Cheese

Wanda Fucha
Brother, Can You Spare a Million Bucks?

David Yearsley
My Journey to the Heart of Rahman

Lorenzo Wolff
Getting Beyond the Black-and-White: Jason Isbell's Challenging New Album

Ben Sonnenberg
Rossellini's Louis XIV: "Neither the Sun Nor Death Can be Gazed Upon Fixedly"

Jeffrey St. Clair
Savage Incongruities: the Photographic Life of Lee Miller

Poets' Basement
Corseri and Corzett

Website of the Weekend
The Palestine Chronicle Needs Your Help!

April 9, 2009

Mike Whitney
The Decade of Darkness

Patrick Cockburn
What It Would Take to Mend Fences with Islam

Stephen Soldz
Caught on Tape: Diagnostic Abuse of Veterans

P. Sainath
The Rise of the Shoe-cide Bomber

Ellen Cantarow
Israel's Master Plan for Transfer

Gareth Porter /
Jim Lobe
Obama and Israel's Threat to Strike Iran

Jeremy Scahill
How Many Democrats Will Stand Up Against Obama's Bloated Military Budget?

Jerry Kroth
Saving GM From Bankruptcy--With the Stroke of a Pen

Binoy Kampmark
Fujimori Convicted: A Measure of Justice in Latin America

Fidel Castro
My Meeting with the Black Caucus

Website of the Day
Bird Song Radio

April 8, 2009

John Prados
The Af-Pak Paradox

Bill Moyers /
Michael Winship
Changing the Rules of the Blame Game

Winslow T. Wheeler
The Tooth Fairy and the Defense Budget

Russell Mokhiber
PBS Lashes Back

Kathy Sanborn
Depression Fury

Rev. William E. Alberts
If the Shoe Fits: Bush and Al-Zaidi

James McEnteer Rashomon and the Binghamton Shooter: the Rush to Interpret Jiverly Wong's "Statement"

Nadia Hijab
Olmert's Nightmare

Adam Turl
Card Check on the Ropes

Kevin Zeese
Escaping the Drug War Quagmire

Website of the Day
Walk Score Your Neighborhood

April 7, 2009

David Price
Counterinsurgency's Free Ride

Uri Avnery
Who's the Boss?

Chris Floyd
Talking Peace in Prague, Dropping Bombs in Pakistan

Winslow T. Wheeler Defense Cuts: Gates and the System

Marjorie Cohn
Prosecuting the Bush Torture Team: Spain Leads the Way

Dean Baker
Hands Off Social Security

Diana Johnstone
NATO, Strasbourg and the Black Block

Dave Lindorff
Politicizing Accounting

Martha Rosenberg
Life on HBO's Factory Hog Farm

Evelyn Pringle
Motherhood and the Psycho-Pharmaceutical Complex

Website of the Day
Gaza: Closed Zone

April 6, 2009

Michael Hudson
The IMF Rules the World

Andy Worthington Bagram: Guantánamo's Dark Mirror

Ray McGovern
Profiles in Cowardice: Eric Holder and Colin Powell

Deepak Tripathi
The Pakistan Enigma

Mike Whitney
Bernanke's Financial Rescue Plan: a Glide-Path to Destitution

Norman Solomon
Meet the New Escalators: the Democrats and the Afghan War

Jonathan Cook
Israel Railways Accused of Racism in Firing of Arab Workers

Judith Bello
Justice for the Developmentally Disabled

Deena Metzger Blackwater in Liberia

Dr. M. Kamiar
"There's No 'Eye' in Iran:" Obama's Pronunciation Problem

Website of the Day
Prison Talk

April 3-5, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
From Twin Towers to Twin Camelots

Kathy Kelly /
Brian Terrall
Getting a Closer Look at the Killer Drones

Sue Sturgis
Fooling with Disaster? Startling Revelations About Three Mile Island Raise New Doubts Over Nuclear Plant Safety

Peter Morici
Girding for a Depression

Kathy Sanborn
Homeless in Tent City, USA

Andy Worthington
Britain's Guantánamo: Fact or Fiction?

Rob Larson
Subprime Supreme Court: The Roberts Court Has Become a Powerful New Tool for Business

Saul Landau
Biden and Nixon: a Tale of Two Latin American Experiences

Steve Early
An Evening with Andy Stern

John Goekler
Was Gaza Israel's Waterloo?

Rannie Amiri
Arab League Reconciliation Summit a Bust

Dave Lindorff
Hooray for Juries! A Courtroom Victory for Ward Churchill and Academic Free Speech

Lee Ballinger
Sound Garden: Tom Morello at the Grammy Museum

Ron Jacobs
Artifacts for Survival

David Macaray
AIG Plays the Sympathy Card

John Wight
G20: Capital's New World Symphony

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Race in the Obama Era

Mychal Bell
Surviving Jena Six

Missy Beattie
Hoop Hopes, War and Peace

Reza Fiyouzat
The Iran/US Rapproachment Dance

Michael Boldin
The War on Drugs is a War on You

Christopher Brauchli
The Pope's Batting 50-50

Charles R. Larson
Too Much Stuff

Susie Day
Bernie Breakout Shocker!!

Stephen Martin
Gordon Brown's Chicken Run at the G20

Kim Nicolini
"Last House on the Left:" Vigilantes of the Bourgeoisie

David Yearsley
Homage to Moog and Mallards

Phyllis Pollack
An Interview with Legendary Rock Producer Chris Kimsey on Working with the Stones, Ronnie Wood, Jimmy Cliff, Peter Tosh and Saint Jude

Poets' Basement
Foley, Valentine and Kozak

Website of the Day
The Corner Store

April 2, 2009

Robert Weissman
What If Obama Had Treated Detroit Like Wall Street?

Eric Toussaint /
Damien Millet
A G20 Meeting for Naught

George Bisharat
Israel's Impunity Must End

Russell Mokhiber
Something is Rotten at PBS

Franklin Lamb
Has Washington Lost Lebanon?

Gareth Porter
Settling Scores in Iraq: Maliki Draws US Troops into Crackdown on Sunni Rivals

David Macaray
Obama and the Ruling Class: "Only the Little People Pay Taxes"

Chris Genovali
B.C.'s Bloody Grizzly Hunt

Sam Smith
The Politics of Adulation

Suzan Mazur
Is Neo-Darwinism Dead?

Website of the Day
Fighting for Change in St. Louis

April 1, 2009

Chris Floyd
Surging Further Into the Afghan Abyss

Stanley Heller
Israeli War Crimes: Thank God, It Was Only Rumors

Mark Brenner, Mischa Gaus and Jane Slaughter Obama's Perilous Plan for Detroit: Restructure the Big 3, But Not With Bankruptcy

Jonathan Cook
The Slow Demise of Ehud Olmert

Eric Walberg
EU in Tatters: Only the Protesters Have Any Vision

Richard Morse
Why Haiti Can't Forget Its Past

Don Fitz
Guess Who Came to Dinner with a Match? Green Mayoral Candidate's Van Firebombed in St. Louis

Laray Polk
Texas and Evolution

Belén Fernández
12 Años de Soledad?

Harvey Wasserman
Cracking the Media Silence on Three Mile Island

Website of the Day
Pentagon Fraud Investigations Fell, While Contracts Soared

March 31, 2009

Uri Avnery
The Deception Tango

Peter Lee
Ghosts in the Machine: the World's Hottest Cyberwar Battlefield

Nicholas Dearden
A New Global Debt Crisis

Dave Lindorff
The Obama Betrayal

Joanne Mariner
"We'll Make You See Death"

Ron Jacobs
Obama's Pakistan Gambit

Wiliam S. Lind
Another Lost War

David Michael Green
Who Says the GOP Doesn't Have a Plan?

Benjamin Dangl
Beyond Elections in the Americas

Johnny Barber
Meditation in Orange

Dedrick Muhammad
Economic Inequality: the Foundation of the Racial Divide

Website of the Day
How the Obama Dems Took Over the Peace Movement

March 30, 2009

Michael Hudson
Financing the Empire: Do US Face G20 Mutiny?

Patrick Cockburn
What Next in Afghanistan?

Henry A. Giroux
Hard Lessons

Mike Whitney
Where's Eliot Spitzer Now That We Need Him?

Ralph Nader
Where's All the Money Coming From?

Paul Craig Roberts
Obama's War on the (Upper) Middle Class

Jeremy Scahill
The Logistical Nightmare in Iraq

Robert Bryce
The Cellulosic Ethanol Delusion

Jonathan Cook
Remembering Land Day in Palestine

Ray McGovern
Obama Bombs

Website of the Day
Hersh: Syria Calling

April 13, 2009

"I Can't Get Rich Even If I Work!"

Makota's "Campaign Against Poverty"

By NAMIHEI ODAIRA

On  June 8, 2008, a sunny Sunday afternoon, a man in his twenties made his way to the crowded streets of Tokyo’s Akihabara district, a popular venue for pop culture in the city. Lots of locals and tourists had come to see people dressed up as manga and anime characters. The peace of the afternoon was shattered when the man pulled out a knife and went on the rampage, killing seven people, seriously injuring 10 more and leaving the country reeling from the shock.

As always, specialists have come forward with an explanation: “Japan is in the process of becoming a criminogenic society. To ensure this doesn’t happen again, security measures need to be tightened up”. However, as Japanese violent crime figures have been falling continuously since the mid-1950s, Japan’s reputation as a fundamentally safe society doesn’t seem under threat.

The young temporary worker responsible for this savage attack had lost his bearings in Japanese society. “I wanted to kill anyone at all,” he said when he was arrested. That was the only justification he was able to give for his actions. In the weeks leading up to the attack, though, he had published posts on his website in which he expressed the fear of losing his job and being abandoned. He was afraid of confronting a reality which many Japanese escape by seeking refuge in virtual worlds. It is a malaise felt by an increasing number of Japanese who face the threat of unemployment and growing social inequality in a country where only 30 years ago more than 90 per cent of the population described themselves as middle class (churyu).

At that time, the whole country had a common objective, to join the club of great economic powers, and the feeling of cohesion this engendered made possible an amazing degree of political and social stability. The state, business, education and the family provided reliable reference points for every individual, and so it was natural that the Japanese should follow the course that was laid out for them.

No one was prepared for the upheavals of the 1990s. Neither the government nor business expected the “Japanese model” to fall apart as dramatically as it did after the financial bubble burst just as the communist world collapsed. In the space of a few months, the economy weakened, bringing repercussions for Japan’s international relations.

A period of chaos coming after such stability provoked a major trauma. One result of the crisis was a weakening of the banking sector, which a few years before had been ranked among the strongest in the world. Businesses were quick to make massive lay-offs among a workforce which had devoted itself wholeheartedly to its employers’ success.
In the geopolitical arena, Japan realized that being the exclusive ally of the US during the cold war no longer protected it from international shocks. Japan had to assert itself on the international stage at the very moment when its sickly economy was making it weaker. And no one seemed capable of setting the right course for the nation.

Ten years on from this first crisis, just as it seemed able to get back on its feet, Japan has taken another tumble. Even if it didn’t get carried away by the financial bubble this time around, it has nonetheless been affected by it: its GDP has fallen by 12.7 per cent. This collapse is due to the drastic drop in its exports, down 45.7 per cent in the 12 months to January 2009. “Japanese export industries have been big beneficiaries of a favourable set of circumstances globally. Now that the crisis has affected the whole planet, they’re suffering the most,” according to Ryutaro Kono, chief economist at BNP Paribas in Tokyo.

Car manufacturers, the symbol of Japan’s export-oriented economy, have been the first victims. In profit a year before, Toyota reported a ¥450bn loss ($4.5bn) for the year to end March 2009. It has announced 4,000 redundancies. In the car industry overall, 28,000 people are expected to have lost their jobs by April 1, 2009. The picture is the same in the electronics sector. Japan’s unemployment rate was 4.1 per cent at the end of January. It could exceed 6 per cent by the end of the year, and though that may seem a low figure compared with other developed nations, Japan is a country used to almost full employment where people find it difficult to accept that society is getting poorer.

The deregulation introduced to deal with the crisis of 1997-8 has undermined the country’s ability to cope with the current crisis. “There’s nothing left in this country. It’s a dead country,” says the high school student in Ryu Murakami’s novel, Kibo no kuni no ekusodasu (Exodus to the Land of Hope) – an illustration of the prevailing state of mind of Japan’s youth. In the book, the writer imagines huge numbers of adolescents going off to live in Hokkaido where they set up a semi-independent state which runs by different rules from the rest of the country.

Everyone profited in the years of the financial bubble. Twenty years on, only a minority are still doing well, while many others have to make do with low-paid work. The terms freeters (a neologism formed form the English word “free” and the German “Arbeiter”, which indicates a person who gets by on menial jobs) and NEET (not in education, employment or training) have appeared in the press and become synonymous with social exclusion. At the end of 2008, Japan had more than 1.8 million freeters and around 640,000 NEETs, members of a lost generation (known as the losu jene in Japanese).

In his film Tokyo Sonata (2008), director Kiyoshi Kurosawa portrays this generation through the character of the elder son in a family that is falling apart. The boy joins the US military (permissible under a fictional change in the law) and goes off to fight far from home according to an absurd logic whereby a Japanese national becomes a US soldier. The young man, however, takes control of his destiny and ends up going over to the enemy in order to “find absolute happiness”. And that’s the lesson the director wanted to get across: the renaissance of Japanese society will inevitably depend on its youth and the reconstruction of its key reference points. Kurosawa emphasises the border as a symbol of the relationship between Japan (represented in his film by the family) and the rest of the world.

This film illustrates the way society has changed as a result of the policies of Junichiro Koizumi’s government (2001-6). Takafumi Horie symbolizes this period in which neo-liberalism came to dominate. This young internet entrepreneur started in 1996 with the idea that everything is for sale if the price is right and went on to create the vast Livedoor empire. “Without doubt it’s you who makes today’s youth dream,” Koizumi assured him shortly before the 33-year-old was arrested in January 2006 for violating stock exchange rules. His indictment provoked a mini-crash, which forced the Tokyo stock exchange to close early for the first time in its history.

‘I can’t get rich even if I work’

If Horie’s value system made some of Japan’s youth dream, it contributed to the marginalization of others who never found a place in a country in which money was all-powerful. Tokyo Sonata opens with the father of the family being sacked when the company he works for moves to China. He feels outraged at the decision, but he accepts it. As long as the system worked and enabled companies to make record profits, few people questioned it. And those who were on the outside kept behaving as though they were still part of it; the father in the film continues to lead the life of a perfect employee: he goes off to work each morning although he has no job and acts like he believes he’ll still be able to find his place in the system again. But he has to put up with the fact that globalization has prevailed over the Japanese model.

Globalization has even contributed to the creation of a category of workers which the Japanese refer to by the English term the “working poor”, as if to emphasize that the very concept is alien to Japanese culture. While the Japanese overwhelmingly identify themselves as churyu (middle class), they prefer a foreign expression to talk about a phenomenon which profoundly disturbs them. A documentary entitled “I can’t get rich even if I work”, which was broadcast in an early evening slot in July 2006, came as a revelation: what had seemed until then a matter of individual behavior now struck them as a collective failure which demanded action.

Yuasa Makoto, a leader of the Network against Poverty, condemns what he calls the “toboggan society” in which workers who don’t have a contract have to fend for themselves. “Once you’ve reached the bottom, you can’t take the toboggan back up again. Starting over is an impossible task for people who are excluded.” As a result he decided to launch a campaign against poverty, which is threatening social cohesion.

Between December 31, 2008 and January 5, 2009 he ran a “Village of Temporary Workers” in Hibiya Park in central Tokyo, not far from the ministerial district. The aim was to publicise the distress of temporary workers as the first victims of the recession. As they have no social protection and are often given accommodation by their employer, they can find themselves turned out on the street from one day to the next. According to official figures, 157,000 of them were expected to be jobless by April 1, 2009.

Makoto Yuasa’s initiative had an effect: nearly 1,700 volunteers turned up at the village to lend a hand and legal advice given to some 500 of the unemployed workers has helped many of them get compensation. Other villages have been set up around the country.

Of course, Yuasa realizes that this won’t in itself be enough to get the country back on its feet. But a new, more stable economic model in which everyone in society has their place remains speculative. However, the time when the government could act without being held accountable is gone. The Japanese Communist Party registered around 14,000 new members in 2008 and subscriptions to its daily paper Akahata (Red Flag) also saw an uplift.

Twenty-six-year-old Haruki Konno runs the Posse association, which aims to establish new relations in Japanese society and help the young find their way in the world of work. He confirms that Japanese people want to get involved. In the first issue of the organization’s magazine one of the themes they tackled was “Identity and young workers in relation to the Akihabara killings”. The magazine’s editors knew that by presenting that tragic event in the context of their society’s malaise, they would make a splash. Their magazine has not just been selling very strongly, it has sparked a heated debate.

Namihei Odaira is a journalist. The article appears in the April edition of the excellent monthly Le Monde Diplomatique, whose English language edition can be found at mondediplo.com. This full text appears by agreement with Le Monde Diplomatique. CounterPunch features two or three articles from LMD every month list.

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