By John Grey Smith
Dr Sulley Gariba, a policy advisor to President John Dramani
Mahama has said that the boycott of the presidential swearing in ceremony by a
section of the opposition is laughable.
He said the unprecedented number of both local and
international dignitaries at the event shows how ridiculous he boycott is.
 |
| Dr Sulley Gariba |
Speaking as part of a panel discussing the event on Ghana
Television, Dr Gariba the said on December 7, Ghanaians went to the polls to
elect a president and parliament.
He said the conduct of business in parliament on January 6,
2013 was indicative that both sides had accepted the results of the election.
According to Dr Gariba, the swearing in is a “peoples even”
held in the open and supported by the vast majority of Ghanaians.
He said many Ghanaian have accepted the election result and
support the president.
He threw a job at the Progressive Peoples Party (PPP) when
he said it got less than half per cent of the votes implying that the party has
no business joining the protest of the New Patriotic Party (NPP).
Dr Gariba said the most important issue now is how to
support the president to enable him deliver on his promises to the people.
In spite of agitation in the ranks of the NPP, former
President John Agyekum Kufour turned up for the ceremony along with former
president Jerry Rawlings and his wife Nana Konadu Ayemang Rawlings.
About 11 heads of state from Africa and representatives of
many governments across the globe were also present.
EDITORIAL
TIME FOR ACTION
A fact finding committee set up by the ministry of Work and
Housing has recommended that Mr. Kweku Botwe, the Acting Managing Diretor of
the Ghana Water Company Limited should be prosecuted for bulk breaking of
contracts.
The view of the committee is that this practice offends the
Procurement Law and should not go unpunished.
We agree.
However it is public knowledge that many ministries and
public organizations have been involved in this practice for a very long time.
Indeed sole sourcing has become the norm rather than the
exception in spite of the provisions of the law.
The Insight insists that if Mr. Kweku Botwe ought to face
the music, then there are many other managers in the civil and public service
who must be dealt with in like manner.
It is important for the new Mahama administration to insist
on doing what is lawful and all who break the law must be dealt with without
fear or favour.
It is time for action and the whip needs to be cracked.
The state, private sector and market failures;
A response to Prof Joseph Stiglitz by Mahmood
Mamdani
'The challenge is not how the state can regulate the market,
but how society can regulate both the state and the market.'
 |
| Dr Kwesi Botchwey, an apostle of deregulation |
Deregulation
of the financial system in the US began with the Clinton administration's repeal of key sections of the Glass-
Steagall Act of 1933. That Act had separated commercial and investment banking
since the Great Depression era. The repeal of that Act was key to the
deregulation of derivatives.
In
2008, Clinton denied responsibility for refusing to regulate derivatives. He
changed his mind in 2010, the blaming his advisors, among whom were Treasury
Secretaries Robert Rubin and Larry Summers and the Chair of his Council of Economic
Advisors, Joe Stiglitz.
Larry
Summers went on to become President of Harvard University. Joseph Stiglitz went
on to be Chief economist of the World Bank and then professor at Columbia
University. Summers showed little remorse for his role in the deregulation era.
Joe Stiglitz, in contrast, became the best known critic of deregulation.
Academic
reviewers of Stiglitz have often wondered when he saw the light: did Professor
Stiglitz oppose deregulation at the time or change his mind when its
consequences became clear? Should we understand his critique of deregulation as
foresight or hindsight, foresight in 1996 or hindsight after his time as
Clinton's senior policy advisor? Professor Stiglitz addressed this issue in a
book he wrote on the Clinton era, a book titled 'The Roaring Nineties:_A New
History of the World's Most Prosperous Decade'. The question I am interested in
was posed by an academic reviewer of the book, Robert Pollin of Department of
Economics at University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Let me quote Professor
Polin:
 |
| Prof Joseph Stiglitz |
“... at what point did Stiglitz, in his role as a senior Clinton
policy advisor, become convinced of the severe damage that would result from
deregulation? ... As one important example, the general tenor of the 1996 Economic
Report of the President, written under Stiglit's supervision as Chair of the Council
of Economic Advisors, is unmistakablyin support of lowering regulatory
standards, including in telecommunications and electricity. This Report even
singles out for favourable mention the deregulation of the electric power
industry in California - that is, the measure that, by the summer of 2002,
brought California to the brink of economic disaster, in the wake of still more
Enron-guided machinations.”
Why market failure?
Professor Stiglitz's theoretical work is on the economics of
information. Traditional economics, both classical and neoclassical, has been
dominated by two related assumptions. The first is what Adam Smith called _ the
invisible hand, the assumption that free competition leads to an efficient
allocation of resources. The second is a related assumption in welfare
economics, that issues of distribution should be viewed as completely separate
from issues of efficiency.
It is this methodological "separation" between growth
and distribution which allows economists to push for reforms which increase
efficiency, regardless of their impact on income distribution. It is the
methodological basis of what we know as the “trickle down” school in economics.
Professor Stiglitz's great contribution has been to challenge both these assumptions.
As he has shown, asymmetric information is a pervasive feature of
how real-world markets operate. The free market is an ideological myth. In the
real world, imperfect information makes for imperfect markets. For Stiglitz,
this means that governments need to strongly and effectively regulate what goes
on in markets.
The point is to level the information field as much as possible so
that markets may function with a modicum of efficiency and fairness. I have simplified
the matter but I think it gives you an idea of the contribution for which he justly
received the Nobel Prize.
In the three decades that preceded Stiglitz, economists had
identified important market failures, but in limited areas, such as
externalities like pollution, which require government intervention. But the
case they had made was for limited government intervention in limited areas.
Professor Stiglitz made a more general case. He showed that markets are always
imperfect since they are always characterized by imperfect information, why
government intervention has to be a constant presence in the market.
Here then is my second question: Why call this “market failure”?
The term “market failure” suggests that markets normally function properly and
that “market failure” is an exceptional occurrence.
It is an appropriate term
to describe the thought of pre- Stiglitz economists who focused on
externalities like pollution to call for government intervention in select
fields. But it hides the real significance of Professor Stiglitz's
contribution, which is to redirect our thinking away from failure as an
exceptional occurrence to imperfection as the normal state of markets.
Like its twin term “state failure,” the term “market failure” focuses
our attention on the exception rather than the norm. But we are not talking of
an occasional lapse in how markets function; rather, we are talking of the
regular state of markets, of how imperfect markets are when they function the
way they are supposed to function.
Information is always imperfect and so are markets. What is
involved here is a methodological shift from the exception to the norm. This is
a shift of paradigmatic significance.
“Market failure” is an unfortunate term because it hides the fundamental
character of this shift.
Not just economic
Before discussing its limits, I will summarize Professor
Stiglitz's response to the
problem he calls “market failure.” Professor Stiglitz attributes
“market failure” to “lack
of transparency.” He has several recommendations on how to check
market failure.
The first is that government needs to bridge the gap between
social returns and private
returns, both to encourage socially necessary investment as in
agriculture and to discourage socially undesirable investment as in real estate
speculation.
Second, the government may set up specialized development banks.
In support, he cites the negative example of America's private banks and their
“dismal performance” alongside the positive example of Brazil's development bank,
a bank twice the size of the World Bank, and its “extraordinary success” in leading
that country's economic transformation.
Finally, Professor Stiglitz cautions against liberalizing
financial and capital markets as advised by the Washington Consensus. He
reminds us that African countries that followed the Washington Consensus like
so many faithful converts paid the price for not thinking on their own feet.
To quote Professor Stiglitz: “Credit to small and medium sized
enterprises went down. More broadly, credit to productive investments went
down. ... Not surprising, the result was that growth was lower in countries
that liberalized.” The countries that succeeded were those in East Asia; unlike
African countries, they regulated financial markets in the interest of their development.
Professor Stiglitz says that the Washington Consensus is an ideology. He has a
term for it: he calls it “free market fundamentalism.” It was “ignored in Asia”
but “has inflicted a high cost on developing countries, especially in Africa.”
He says the crisis of 2008 provides a moment for reflection,
on the key importance of the financial sector, and of how ideology -
flawed ideas about markets - led to a global disaster.”
The lessons are two-fold: first, “more than better regulation is
required”; second, “the government must take an active role in providing development
finance.” I salute the work Professor Stiglitz has done to show the havoc
caused by what he calls “free market fundamentalists.” But I have a critique. I
have already argued that his definition of the problem as that of “market
failure” is inadequate. I will now argue that, in light of the challenge we
face today, his response to the problem is also too limited.
To illustrate how deep and pervasive this crisis is, I would like
to sketch some key developments starting with the Clinton years. Let us begin
with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In the 1990s, the Clinton administration urged on Russia what it called
a “shock therapy,” a cocktail of recipes first perfected in African countries in
the 1980s, and baptized as Structural Adjustment by the Washington Consensus. That
policy practically destroyed essential consumer industries, from
pharmaceuticals to poultry, and led to mass poverty in Russia.
Fully backed by the Clinton administration, Yeltsin and his fellow
conspirators were happy to implement this “shock therapy” as a way to acquire
property at the
expense of democracy. In the words of a moderate Russian paper,
Literary Gazette, the “shock therapy” turned Russia into “a zone of
catastrophe.”
My second example is more current. The Eurozone was created as a
single currency for Europe but without constituting Europe as a democratic
polity. The result was that monetary policy was formulated outside the
framework of democracy. The states in Europe have done to their own people what
the Washington Consensus did to African peoples in the 1980s.
Unelected governments rule Europe; the EU ruling phalanx is not
accountable to anyone. By all technical standards, what is taking shape in Europe
is dictatorship. Not only are essential mechanisms of democratic systems being
eroded or discarded, democracy is rapidly losing credibility.
For the third time in a century, Germany is looking to turn Europe
into its backyard. Germany is now achieving with banks what it failed to achieve
with tanks in World War I and World War II. It is even more interesting that it
is Germany that should now propose a democratic solution to the crisis of the Eurozone,
calling for a political unification of Europe.
Historically, capitalism - and the market- have been kept in check
by democracy. Both the Russian and the European cases show us what happens when
you do away with the democratic process in the interest of economic efficiency.
In both the Russian and the European cases - and one could multiply examples -the
problem has not been the absence of state activism. If anything, states have
reinforced the havoc wreaked by market forces on society.
Society is the missing term in the state-market equation that has
defined the debate on “market failure” among economists. The tendency of the
market, like that of the state, is to devour society. The challenge is to
defend society against these twin forces. Here is my point: The antidote to the
market was never the state but democracy. Not the state but a democratic political
order has contained the worst fallout from capitalism over the last few
centuries.
The real custodian of a democratic order was never the state but
society. The question we are facing today is not just that of market failure
but of an all-round political failure: the financialization of capitalism is
leading to the collapse of the democratic order.
 |
| Any lessons for President John Mahama? |
The problem was best defined by the Occupy Wall Street movement in
the US: it is the
99% against the 1%. Market women Thus my third question: does
not this empirical acknowledgement need to be translated into a theoretical
insight? Does it not call for a revised theoretical apparatus: one beyond a
focus on “market failure”; one that does not limit the frame to the market and
the state; one that is more interdisciplinary and more focused on the
intersection of the economic, the political, and the social, both to illuminate
the depth of the crisis we are faced with today and to shift focus from the state
and the market to society?
Lessons
What are the lessons for Uganda, East Africa and Africa? My first
observation is that the Ugandan crisis is not really exceptional if you look at
the rest of the world.
In his more public and less academic observations, Professor
Stiglitz has remarked on the depths of the problem in “much of the world”. Take
an example from 2007 when Professor Stiglitz wrote of globalization on Beppe
Grillo's Blog in2007: "For much of the world, globalization as it has been
managed seems like a pact with the devil. A few people in the country become
wealthier; GDP statistics, for what they are worth, look better, but ways of
life and basic values are threatened. ... This is not how it has to be."
It would be a shame if this audience is to walk away from
Professor Stiglitz's lecture
with a message that the problem is just one of “market failure”
and the solution is a robust state that regulates markets and provides development
finance.
Is the lesson of the Structural Adjustment era simply that we need
strong states to defend ourselves from the Washington Consensus? Or does the
experience of the SAP era also raise a second question: What happens if
developing countries are forced to push open their markets before they have
stable, democratic institutions to protect their citizens?
Should we be surprised that the result is something worse than
crony capitalism, worse than private corruption, whereby those in the state use
their positions to privatize social resources and stifle societal opposition? Social
activists in Uganda increasingly argue that the state and the market are not opposites;
they have come together in a diabolical
pact.
Like in the US where the state feeds the greed of the banks, the
state in Uganda has become the springboard of systemic corruption. The use of
eminent domain clause to appropriate land – from tropical rain forests to
primary and secondary schools - is done in the name of development.
Even parliamentarians who discuss the oil issue complain, almost
on a daily basis, that instead of leveling the information, the state uses all
its resources to keep information secret and muzzle public discussion on how
public resources are used. The question is simple: what happens if it is the
state, and not just market forces, that hoards information?
I want to broaden our focus to the East African community. The
political class in Africa is weak. Often, its vision is clouded by a
single-minded preoccupation with the question of it own political survival. The
result is a singular lack of imagination, marked by a tendency to borrow
solutions from the West.
The AU named itself after the EU. The East African Community adopted
the European process hook, line and sinker: first a common market, then a common
currency, before any political arrangement. Here is my question: Will the pursuit
of this European recipe – introducing a common East African currency without first
creating a common political framework for East Africa, without first solving the
question of sovereignty, whether through a federation or a confederation - not
invite a Europe-type crisis?
Let me conclude with two observations, one theoretical, the second
political. When I was a graduate student, my economics professor asked me to
read a great postwar classic, Karl Polanyi's 'The Great Transformation'. Polanyi
was the first to point out that self-regulating markets are bound to lead to a
social catastrophe. Polanyi began with the observation that the market is much
older than capitalism. It has been around for thousands of years.
Markets have coexisted with different kinds of economies and
societies: capitalist, feudal, slave-owning, communal, all of them. The
distinguishing feature of all previous eras has been that societies have always
regulated markets, set limit on their operation, and thus set limits on both
private accumulation and widespread impoverishment. Only with capitalism has
the market wrenched itself free of society. A consequence of this development
has been gross enrichment of a few alongside mass poverty.
A corollary of this process, we may say, is that regulation is now
seen as the task of the state, and not of society. That solution is rapidly
turning into a problem. Not only has the market wrenched itself free from
society, the state is trying to do the same.
Not only do market forces threaten to colonize society, the state
too threatens to devour society. Free markets are not a solution for poverty;
they are one cause of modern poverty.
State sovereignty is not a guarantor of freedom; it threatens to undermine
social freedom. The challenge is not how the state can regulate the market, but
how society can regulate both the state and the market.
* Mahmood Mamdani is Professor and
Director of Makerere Institute of Social
Research in Kampala and Herbert Lehman
Professor of Government at Columbia
University, New York City. This article is
reproduced
from Pambazuka.
GNPC ON
SUPPORT FOR BLACK STARS
A Statement By Nana Boakye Asafu-Adjaye, CEO of GNPC
The President of the GFA
Representative from the Ministry of
Energy
Media Men and Women Present
Staff of GNPC present
On behalf of the Board of Directors,
Management and Staff of the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation [GNPC], I
would like to formally welcome you all to the Petroleum House to witness this
most important event. It does indeed set the tone for what we believe will be a
very eventful 2013 for us at GNPC in pushing further the frontiers of oil and
gas exploration and production as it does for the Black Stars in regaining its
leadership in soccer on our rich continent.
Ladies and Gentlemen I am glad to announce
to you that after several months of consultations, GNPC is concretising its
decision to be the Headline Sponsor of the Black Stars to the tune of USD
3million each year.
Ladies and Gentlemen: The business case
for supporting the Black Stars brand was not a difficult one. The Black Stars are
a potential vehicle for projecting GNPC’s brand as a dependable partner in oil
and gas exploration globally. The Black
Stars are a perfect fit for GNPC. We both aspire to compete successfully on the
global stage in a manner that impacts Ghanaians positively and profoundly.
GNPC’s aspires to be a world-class oil and
gas company. The Stars aspire to be world champions. Both have been on
difficult journeys for a long time. Both
of us know how much effort and tenacity is required to achieve success. Both of
us have survived only because of the unflinching support and understanding of
the Ghanaian public. Both of us believe
that our collaboration contributes positively to the environment within which
we must realise our respective corporate ambitions.
Ladies and Gentlemen: It is also
important that GNPC and the GFA seek to succeed through our own national
efforts. Our collaboration affirms
Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah’s and conviction that the Ghanaians must work together
to manage our own affairs in our own interest.
Ladies
and Gentlemen: Supporting the Black Stars is also a way of contributing to national
unity and harmony. Football’s inspirational and unifying power across ethnic,
religious, political, educational divides is simply incredible.
The whole
country comes to a standstill as one any time the Black Stars are on the
pitch. We want young boys and girls who
follow the game and who are looking for role models to see the competitive
unity of our National Team and draw lessons about good sportsmanship, tenacity
and teamwork from it.
We want our youth
to learn to apply that collective competitive unity to other endeavors such as
the development of our natural resources and creation of world-class indigenous
businesses. We want our youth to draw inspiration from the fact that today
their Black Stars are managed by a fully Ghanaian team led by a Ghanaian coach,
himself a former Star, and sponsored by a Ghanaian national corporation.
Ladies
and Gentlemen, His Excellency the President’s confidence in the Team resonates
with us and we expect that with this Headline Sponsorship the Black Stars will
“Go for the Gold" at this African Nations Cup, go beyond the semi-finals
in the 2014 World Cup and win the 2015 Cup of African Nations.
Thank
you
Mossad death squads slaughtered American children
By Dr. James H. Fetzer
While liberals and some conservatives
believe the time has come to ban assault weapons, the graver threat to our
nation’s security has been swept under the rug.
The Sandy Hook massacre appears to have been a psy op intended to strike fear in the hearts of Americans by the sheer brutality of the massacre, where the killing of children is a signature of terror ops conducted by agents of Israel.
This is being used as powerful incentive for banning assault rifles, where most of the public is unaware of the fact that the Department of Homeland Security has acquired 1.5 billion rounds of .40 caliber, hollow-point ammunition, which is not ever permissible in warfare under the Geneva Conventions.
A Senate Subcommittee has issued a report (3 October 2012) based upon its review of 680 “fusion center” reports (from 2009-2001) and found not a single indication of any domestic terrorist threat-not one! None! Since the only domestic “terrorist threats” are ones contrived by the government, especially the FBI, the public needs to know.
This information-as well as the existence of more than 300 FEMA camps and special boxcars to carry dissidents to them-has been deliberately withheld from the American people, because if they were aware of the facts of the matter, it would become obvious that those camps and ammunition are intended to be used against them.
When DHS is gearing up to conduct a massive civil war against the American people, what better excuse could there be for banning assault weapons than the massacre of 20 innocent children at Sandy Hook Elementary School?
The choice appears to be covertly revealing, where “Sandy” means guardian of men (as an allusion to guns) and “Hook” as a euphemism for hooking, gathering or confiscating the only weapons that DHS fears. And who better to slaughter American children than Israelis, who deliberately murder Palestinian children?
Mike Harris of Veterans Today has exposed the pattern relating what happened there to earlier assaults: “This is exactly what Israel did in Norway; the political party that voted sanctions against Israel was retaliated against by a ‘lone gunman’ who killed 77 children. This is what Israel always does, they go after the children.
 |
| US Congress |
“It is what
they do in Gaza every day. It is what was done in Norway. It is what happened
at Sandy Hook. Nobody buys the ‘one gunman’ story anymore, not with the Gabby
Giffords’ shooting, not with the Aurora “Batman” shooting, certainly not with
Breveik, and certainly not in Connecticut.”
The most likely scenario, given what we know now, is that Adam Lanza and his
mother killed the day before. Adam's body picked up by local police. He was
attired in a SWAT outfit, including body armor, and stored in the school.
A three-man team entered the school, one was arrested in the school--cuffed and put on the lawn--two went out the back door, one was arrested, the third appears to have escaped. You can find this on helicopter videos.
Those arrested are currently not in police custody; their names were never released. That is a telling sign that we are being sold a story that is based on fiction, not on fact. What else are the local police concealing?
A parallel situation in Aurora, where there appear to have been multiple participants, but the police concealed information about them. The DC Sniper, John Allen Muhammad, was even a active member of Delta Force, but the public was not informed.
His assistant in this killing spree, Lee Boyd Malvo, had been detained in Seattle but was released, even though he was an illegal alien, where INS has refused to explain how that happened. Did “higher authority” intervene?
Nidal Malik Hasan, the US Army Major who killed 13 and wounded 29 during a rampage at Ft. Hood, Texas, even sat next to the Director of Homeland Security during an event at George Washington University. Can that be coincidental?
When the "long gunman" cover story falls apart, then the national press, which William Colby told us was infiltrated by agents of the CIA-“The agency owns everyone of significance in the major media”-resorts to stories of Mind Control and use of drugs.
We have to see through the smoke and mirrors. These attacks typically involve three-man shooting teams, where, once the story is tainted with bogus MK/Ultra conspiracy disinformation, crucial data, like the assault rifle the Sandy Hook having been left in his car, swiftly disappears.
Lenin and Trotsky were terrorists. Lenin was an outspoken proponent of terrorism. The founder of the Lukid Party and sixth Prime Minister of Israel was an Irgun terrorist. Study its history. No nation in the world cares more about its own interests and less about those of the United State than Israel.
A three-man team entered the school, one was arrested in the school--cuffed and put on the lawn--two went out the back door, one was arrested, the third appears to have escaped. You can find this on helicopter videos.
Those arrested are currently not in police custody; their names were never released. That is a telling sign that we are being sold a story that is based on fiction, not on fact. What else are the local police concealing?
A parallel situation in Aurora, where there appear to have been multiple participants, but the police concealed information about them. The DC Sniper, John Allen Muhammad, was even a active member of Delta Force, but the public was not informed.
His assistant in this killing spree, Lee Boyd Malvo, had been detained in Seattle but was released, even though he was an illegal alien, where INS has refused to explain how that happened. Did “higher authority” intervene?
Nidal Malik Hasan, the US Army Major who killed 13 and wounded 29 during a rampage at Ft. Hood, Texas, even sat next to the Director of Homeland Security during an event at George Washington University. Can that be coincidental?
When the "long gunman" cover story falls apart, then the national press, which William Colby told us was infiltrated by agents of the CIA-“The agency owns everyone of significance in the major media”-resorts to stories of Mind Control and use of drugs.
We have to see through the smoke and mirrors. These attacks typically involve three-man shooting teams, where, once the story is tainted with bogus MK/Ultra conspiracy disinformation, crucial data, like the assault rifle the Sandy Hook having been left in his car, swiftly disappears.
Lenin and Trotsky were terrorists. Lenin was an outspoken proponent of terrorism. The founder of the Lukid Party and sixth Prime Minister of Israel was an Irgun terrorist. Study its history. No nation in the world cares more about its own interests and less about those of the United State than Israel.
The bombing
of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on 22 July 1946, was a stunning example.
The attack on the USS Liberty and Israel’s bombing of its own Embassy and
Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires in 1992 and 1994 are other
illustration.
Those who study 9/11 are all too aware of the role of the Neo-Cons and the Mossad. But the American press covers it up-and Congress is controlled by AIPAC. As Bill Casey, former CIA Director, observed, “Our disinformation program will be complete when everything the American public believes is false.” Sandy Hook is the latest example.
How gangsters run Japanese politics.
By Jake Adelstein
Japan's leaders are going on trial
this month -- in the court of public opinion, though some of them may be
concerned about facing the more traditional kind.
Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda of the
Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), who has been in power for a bit over a year,
dissolved Japan's parliament, the Diet on Nov. 16 after a series of scandals
drove his poll numbers to an all-time low. The final straw was his appointment
of mob-linked Justice Minister Keishu Tanaka, who resigned on Oct. 23 -- ostensibly
for health reasons.
A weekly magazine had reported on Oct. 11 that Tanaka had
strong ties to the yakuza, Japan's organized crime groups -- which
presumably isn't great for one's health.
The irony of the man in charge of
the country's criminal justice system being friendly with organized crime was
not lost on the Japanese public, especially at a time when there is a movement to crack down even harder on the yakuza.
It was also an
embarrassment to a political coalition that came to power in 2009 promising
that it would bring "clean government." The rival Liberal Democratic
Party (LDP), which had ruled Japan nearly uninterrupted for decades, had long
been tied to Japan's underworld and ridden by scandals.
Since the DPJ came to power,
organized crime ties have embarrassed several members of the party, including
Tanaka. So how did the supposedly squeaky-clean reformers wind up in bed with
Japan's answer to the Mafia? To understand this, it helps to look at the unique
role the yakuza plays in Japanese politics.
The yakuza has its origins in
federations of gamblers and street merchants of the Edo period (from the 17th
to the 19th centuries), which evolved over time into the sprawling crime
syndicates they are today.
Currently, the yakuza comprises roughly 79,000 people,
divided among 22 groups. Although referred to by authorities as
"anti-social forces," it's actually a semilegal entity with offices,
business cards, and fan magazines.
The yakuza groups make their money through a
combination of legal businesses -- like dispatching day laborers -- and illegal
activities such as extortion, racketeering, and financial fraud. The largest
yakuza group, the Kobe-based Yamaguchi-gumi, has 39,000 members.
The
Inagawa-kai, the group most closely tied to former Justice Minister Tanaka, has
10,000 members and is based in Tokyo. Its offices are across from the
Ritz-Carlton.
The Inagawa-kai was established in
1948. The organization's de facto leader, Kazuo Uchibori, was arrested on
charges of money laundering in October but was released without being charged.
Uchibori is a blood brother to a powerful leader in the Yamaguchi-gumi, Teruaki
Takeuchi, essentially putting the Inagawa-kai under the Yamaguchi-gumi
umbrella. The yakuza world is constructed like a virtual family, in which ties
of brotherhood, often solidified in sake-drinking rituals, are the grounds for
allegiances within yakuza groups and sometimes with rival groups as well.
In 2007, two years before it came to power, the DPJ received the coveted endorsement of the Yamaguchi-gumi and the Inagawa-kai. It was a relationship that worked out well, until recently. However bizarre it may sound, there's nothing particularly remarkable about an organized crime group supporting a political party in Japan.
 |
| Yoshio Kodama |
He claimed he received the money on behalf of his constituents who had lost money investing with a real estate agency that turned out to be a yakuza front company. He stated that he returned the money to his constituents. Crime or not, that should be grounds for political dismissal. Not in Japan.
In 2009, the DPJ coalition appointed Kamei as minister of financial services, tasked with overseeing the Securities and Exchange Surveillance Commission and ensuring that Japan's financial markets stay clean.
But times have changed. The Japanese public is no longer so tolerant of politicians or companies with yakuza ties. In a 2007 white paper on crime, Japan's National Police Agency issued a warning that "the yakuza have made such incursions into the financial markets that they threaten the very basis of the Japanese economy." In that same year, a yakuza boss assassinated Nagasaki Mayor Iccho Ito after he attempted to cut the gangs out of public works projects.
Japanese voters might have looked the other way at graft or low-level corruption, but political terrorism is another story. The yakuza had become an international embarrassment, as well. In 2011, U.S. President Barack Obama recognized them as a threat to the United States, issuing an executive order that led to the U.S. Treasury Department's passing economic sanctions against the Yamaguchi-gumi and two of its leaders this year. They have simply become too big a liability and embarrassment for the world's third-largest economy to ignore.
If you're a criminal, it always helps to have an ally in the Justice Ministry, and for some yakuza, Tanaka's appointment was seen as a match made in heaven -- especially for the head of the Inagawa-kai, Uchibori, who had been evading arrest on money-laundering charges since Aug. 22. Tanaka didn't have the power to stop the investigation of Uchibori, but his position could have enabled him to exert favorable influence. The Tokyo prosecutor's office is under the supervision of the Justice Ministry.
Theoretically, Tanaka could have possibly recommended Japan's chief prosecutor to drop the Uchibori case; Uchibori was arrested on Oct. 9 but had not been formally charged for money laundering or other offenses while Tanaka was in power. Tanaka, for his part, initially claimed that he had only served as the "the matchmaker" at the wedding of an Inagawa-kai yakuza underboss and attended a yakuza party. A decade ago, that might have sufficed, but in today's political climate, he was forced to resign.
But the DPJ's problems didn't end with Tanaka. The weekly magazine Shukan Bunshun reported on Oct. 18 that Koriki Jojima, the newly appointed finance minister, was backed in his reelection bid by an Inagawa-kai front company. Jojima claims he didn't know whom he was dealing with.
According to LDP Sen. Shoji Nishida, who has written in depth about DPJ ties to organized crime, "Tanaka is the fourth DPJ cabinet member to have been shown to have yakuza ties. Japan has always had a vibrant underworld, and it's always had a normal society. The current ruling government is the underworld and overworld put together. I believe that they've been a conduit for the underworld in the political sphere. The problem has been very underreported here."
For those outside law enforcement or the mob, it's a bit surprising that the scandal is only breaking through now. The police first confirmed that the Yamaguchi-gumi and the Inagawa-kai had ordered their members to support the DPJ in the summer of 2007. According to reports in the daily newspaper Yukan Fuji, over 90 top bosses of the Yamaguchi-gumi were given orders to support the DPJ in upcoming elections. Many had been summoned to the organization's Kobe headquarters and been verbally instructed.
Top police officials said on background that they believe a senior DPJ official promised to keep criminal conspiracy laws off the books in exchange for votes and financial support from the crime group.
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| New Japanese Foreign Minister Nakasone |
That's largely because the so-called "clean DPJ" has staunchly opposed legislation for a criminal conspiracy act, which would make it easier to prosecute yakuza bosses in criminal courts for the actions of their soldiers and seize their assets. According to the Sankei Shimbun newspaper, the DPJ refused to even discuss the legislation when it was a minority party in 2006.
In the meantime, Japan's law enforcement community has been taking matters into its own hands. In an almost covert rebellion, the National Police Agency (NPA) has quietly worked to circumvent the national government by getting local ordinances in place around the country criminalizing paying off the yakuza or doing business with them.
One can see why the yakuza would back the DPJ, but what were the politicians getting out of it? Well, the yakuza are quite well funded, for one thing. Robert Feldman, an economist for Morgan Stanley Japan, once called the Yamaguchi-gumi Japan's "largest private-equity group." Jeff Kingston at Temple University has speculated in his book Contemporary Japan that if the crime group were listed on the stock exchange, it would rival Toyota.
The yakuza, which specialize in extortion and blackmail in their own business dealings, are also useful in finding dirt on political opponents and squelching criticism of their benefactors. And as one-third of the yakuza are Korean-Japanese, they are also useful in securing the support of ethnic Korean groups in Japan and getting political funding from the lucrative Korean-dominated pachinko (arcade-style gambling games) industry. They are also able to mobilize local community leaders and associates to "get out the vote."
However, following the Nagasaki mayor's assassination, the growing influence of the "yakuza money" became a public concern. On Sept. 29, 2009, Takaharu Ando, the head of the NPA, ordered all police in Japan to focus on dismantling the ruling faction of the Yamaguchi-gumi, the Kodo-kai, stating, "The Yamaguchi-gumi Kodo-kai are threatening police officers, are increasingly uncooperative, and expanding their economic activities into all realms of society."
It was the first time the NPA had specifically targeted a single faction of the Yamaguchi-gumi since the so-called "war on the yakuza" was officially launched back in 1965. The police have begun to crack down intensely, after September 2009, on yakuza ties in all aspects of Japanese society, even in the almost-sacred world of sumo. They are also making renewed efforts to turn popular opinion against the yakuza -- who are still viewed as Robin Hood-like folk heroes by much of the population.
The first DPJ politician to really get in trouble for his mob connections was Seiji Maehara, head of the DPJ from 2005 to 2006. In March 2011, he was compelled to step down as foreign minister after it was revealed that he had received donations from Media 21, a production and real estate company that served as a front for the Yamaguchi-gumi and had made donations to several other DPJ members. According to Justice Ministry sources, the Tokyo prosecutor's office is investigating Maehara for falsifying his political donations records to hide his financial connections to Media 21.
Asked for comment for this article, Maehara told me, "First of all, in regard to what the Tokyo prosecutor's office is doing, whether they are investigating -- that is something that I really know nothing about. And also in regard to the alleged relation this company [Media 21] had with organized crime, I don't know anything about that. But I was aware that there were media reports saying such things, and as a result I decided that I would return all the money that was given to me [by Media 21]."
The Tokyo prosecutor's office refused to comment on whether it was still investigating Maehara.
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| Prime Minister Noda |
The yakuza themselves may get out of this relatively unscathed. Even after his friend Tanaka's downfall, police sources say that Inagawa-kai crime boss Uchibori was not expecting to be arrested at all in October on the money-laundering charges that had been filed against him. Top members of the Inagawa-kai met covertly with weekly magazine reporters after Oct. 10, allegedly on Uchibori's orders, outing some other politicians connected to them. Police sources think the message was a warning to every politician with yakuza ties: If you fail to live up to your part of the bargain, the relationship is over and we'll make it a very messy breakup.
It was a successful threat -- Uchibori was not prosecuted for money laundering, and the charges were ostensibly dropped; no hard feelings. If one judges from the latest polls, the yakuza's friends in the DPJ probably won't be so lucky.
US-Israel ties, on-going tragedy
By Jim Dean
The history of America's involvement with Israel has been an
ongoing tragedy. The Palestinians have of course suffered the most, having been
invaded by legions of atheist and communist Jews, primarily from Eastern
Europe. And yes, they claim 'God gave us the land'.
They teamed up with the 5th column Zionists already there who had been carefully and methodically laying plans for taking over the land and doing to the Palestinians what they claimed the Nazis had done to them--killing and kicking the Palestinians out to make more lebensraum (growing space) for more Jews.
Generations of Israeli Lobby fellow travelers have worn the
sordid mantle of 'Palestinian holocaust Deniers', to coin a phrase, with no
shame whatsoever. Golda Meir was their Hebrew Klan Grand Dragon. She produced a
low cost and instant holocaust hat trick. “There are no Palestinian people,”
she said.
One of the main tasks of Israeli espionage has always been to protect Israel from judgment day for their crimes against humanity against the Palestinian people. To them this is a war, and they take no prisoners. When are we going to figure this out, when it comes to dealing with them?
Today I begin a series of articles to pin the holocaust
tails on their correct donkey. I am going to use sources with which the general
public is unfamiliar, the declassified American Intel files on Israel. And yes,
these have been open since the early 1980's, but might as well have been in a
library on the moon.
Israeli penetration into not only our media and publishing, but also our
political arena has virtually banished these documents from the historical
narrative. The fear is that they could be used to deprogram pro-Israeli zombies
and expose all the treasonous Americans who have aided and abetted the Israelis
in hiding their crimes.
Let us start at the beginning. A crime against an entire people, to holocaust them from their own land, has to have a plan. Here it is.
In March, 1948, a Joints Chiefs of Staff paper on Force Requirements for Palestine,
anticipating the termination of the British Mandate, predicted that the Zionist strategy will seek to involve [the United States] in continuously widening and deepening series of operations intended to secure maximum Jewish objectives...
a)Initial sovereignty over a portion of Palestine,
b) Acceptance by the great powers of the right to unlimited immigration
c) The extension of Jewish sovereignty over all of Palestine
d) The expansion of Eretz Israel into Transjordan and into portions of Lebanon and Syria, and
e) The establishment of Jewish military and economic hegemony over the entire Middle East.
The JCS paper added ominously: All stages of this program are equally sacred to the fanatical concepts of Jewish leaders. The program is opening admitted by same leaders, and has been privately admitted to United States officials by responsible leaders of the presently dominant
Jewish group...the Jewish Agency....(Taking Sides, 1983...Stephen Green)
This Intel report is the Rosetta Stone for everything that Israel has done since before its so called birth, but which was more like letting a Frankenstein monster loose on the land. We had loyal Americans who saw the trap back then, yet we walked right into it. Why have we done it, and for whom?
In ten years of sharing this declassified Intel with Americans, including active duty officers and veterans, I have never met a one who was aware of it. Welcome to the free country of the United States, where people are not very free to know a lot of things the Israeli Lobby people don't want them to know.
We also have early reports of the Zionist pre 1948 war 5th columns in Europe shopping all over the continent for chemical and poison gas munitions they could use for their Neo-Exodus. This was the one to drive out the Palestinians, and not the Hollywood Soviet style propaganda film version where 5,000 Zionists held off the Arab hoards.
These American Intel declassified files are filled with report after report of Zionist treachery on a scale that gives truth to a long list of negative stereotypes. Hence, corporate media will not touch this material with a ten foot pole. Now you know why. Much of that has been to steer attention away from their own record of horrors so they could continue to play the perennial victim.
In late 1949, when I was born, US Army Attaché in Tel Aviv Colonel Andrus filed a report citing 'wanton killing of Arabs....denying access to their own land'. The same thing continues today through American support of our almost blank-check support of arms and ammo to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).
This makes both the Palestinians and American children and grandchildren co-victims of Israeli aggression, at the hands of our own government. The last Gaza attack was a perfect example, with the Pentagon now pushing through an almost USD 700 million restocking of munitions for the next Palestinian November turkey shoot.
Earlier in 1948 the Zios began making their mark on terrorism history by blowing up the Semiramis Hotel on January 5th. A bomb, 175 pounds of dynamite, caused it to disappear with 23 civilians killed, including the Spanish consul. This act is still celebrated in Israel. Can you feel the love?
Let us start at the beginning. A crime against an entire people, to holocaust them from their own land, has to have a plan. Here it is.
In March, 1948, a Joints Chiefs of Staff paper on Force Requirements for Palestine,
anticipating the termination of the British Mandate, predicted that the Zionist strategy will seek to involve [the United States] in continuously widening and deepening series of operations intended to secure maximum Jewish objectives...
a)Initial sovereignty over a portion of Palestine,
b) Acceptance by the great powers of the right to unlimited immigration
c) The extension of Jewish sovereignty over all of Palestine
d) The expansion of Eretz Israel into Transjordan and into portions of Lebanon and Syria, and
e) The establishment of Jewish military and economic hegemony over the entire Middle East.
The JCS paper added ominously: All stages of this program are equally sacred to the fanatical concepts of Jewish leaders. The program is opening admitted by same leaders, and has been privately admitted to United States officials by responsible leaders of the presently dominant
Jewish group...the Jewish Agency....(Taking Sides, 1983...Stephen Green)
This Intel report is the Rosetta Stone for everything that Israel has done since before its so called birth, but which was more like letting a Frankenstein monster loose on the land. We had loyal Americans who saw the trap back then, yet we walked right into it. Why have we done it, and for whom?
In ten years of sharing this declassified Intel with Americans, including active duty officers and veterans, I have never met a one who was aware of it. Welcome to the free country of the United States, where people are not very free to know a lot of things the Israeli Lobby people don't want them to know.
We also have early reports of the Zionist pre 1948 war 5th columns in Europe shopping all over the continent for chemical and poison gas munitions they could use for their Neo-Exodus. This was the one to drive out the Palestinians, and not the Hollywood Soviet style propaganda film version where 5,000 Zionists held off the Arab hoards.
These American Intel declassified files are filled with report after report of Zionist treachery on a scale that gives truth to a long list of negative stereotypes. Hence, corporate media will not touch this material with a ten foot pole. Now you know why. Much of that has been to steer attention away from their own record of horrors so they could continue to play the perennial victim.
In late 1949, when I was born, US Army Attaché in Tel Aviv Colonel Andrus filed a report citing 'wanton killing of Arabs....denying access to their own land'. The same thing continues today through American support of our almost blank-check support of arms and ammo to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).
This makes both the Palestinians and American children and grandchildren co-victims of Israeli aggression, at the hands of our own government. The last Gaza attack was a perfect example, with the Pentagon now pushing through an almost USD 700 million restocking of munitions for the next Palestinian November turkey shoot.
Earlier in 1948 the Zios began making their mark on terrorism history by blowing up the Semiramis Hotel on January 5th. A bomb, 175 pounds of dynamite, caused it to disappear with 23 civilians killed, including the Spanish consul. This act is still celebrated in Israel. Can you feel the love?
US consul General Robert Macatee sent a delegation to the
Jewish Agency official Golda Meir, asking her to take special care to protect
our own consular people. He did not know then that the Haganah terrorist group
had blown up the hotel, and that Golda was a member. Israel has a long history
of elevating their terrorists to top political positions.
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| Israeli Premiere Benjamin Nyetanahu and Barack Obama |
Later, the new American consul Thomas Wasson began reporting things like the Zionists using Red Cross convoys as screens for moving weapons and ammunition around and that Israeli soldiers were firing on Arab positions from the Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem. Nasty, nasty.
American media like the New York Times censored out the weapons and ammunition part of the story, spinning it like a wanton murder of doctors and nurses. This particular attack had actually been in retribution for the Irgun's Deir Yassin massacre in which 20 of Golda Meir's Haganah people participated.
The Jewish Agency had refused the pleas of the Red Cross to remove their troops from the Hadassah Hospital, despite the Arab League's agreeing to allow unarmed soldiers to remain. The unfortunate Consul Wasson was assassinated by a sniper soon after, the first of many Israeli killings of American personnel while enjoying American aide.
Any Jewish Agency friendship toward America at the time was just a pretext to get desperately needed financial and military aid if they could. The Zios played the Americans off against the Soviets, a game they became even more adept at as the decades went by with the Jonathan Pollard spy case being their peak until they had our Congress performing like trained seals.
The American public never knew that the Zionist main military logistics bases for training and resupply for the 1948 war were in Czechoslovakia with the Soviets supporting them. This included weapons and motor pool maintenance, medical staff, and refurbishing their fast growing air force with all foreign pilots.
At one point American pilots and mechanics were flying all the Czech-made arms shipments down to Lebanon for the Israelis. Many of these were personally observed by our Military Attaché there.
Besides paying in gold and hard currencies which the post WWII Czechs needed, the Zionists also traded espionage goods through them back to the Soviets. Their biggest coup at the time against America was delivering by a new US Army jeep mounted radar system which the Soviets were just thrilled to get. Disloyal American Jews handled the stateside theft.
As for violations of illegal arms imports, these were huge and all tracked by American intelligence. In June of 1948, the US Military Attaché reported a Belgian firm's preparing to export 10 tanks, 26 US armored cars,and 64 halftracks.
The FBI collected tens of thousands of pages of field
reports on these shipments. Some of them were organized by American state
governors aiding the Zios for their own personal financial and political
benefit, despite their being in violation of American law. This corruption
continues today with our own Congress effectively being an occupied territorial
cow for the Israeli Lobby to milk at will, and they do, they do.
As the Cold War was heating up, the Zionists got very good political advice on how they could scare the Americans into thinking the Soviets might take over Palestine using the Zios if the US did not get their own aid program in action.
We have seen the same treachery play out over and over, in Iraq with the bogus WMD tales, an invention of Israeli Intel and their Neocon partners. We now have the bogus threat of Iranian nuclear weapons programs, which has kept oil prices way above recession level rates, making us all
'Petro-Palestinians'. Think about that for a moment. Who would do such a horrible thing?
All this continues on with Israel sitting smugly back enjoying US military funding of nuclear bomb proof facilities for their nukes and air force command staff. You can add to that our Patriot missile batteries, each shot costing the American taxpayers USD 3 million while their kids are on food stamps.
This is a national disgrace, with treason being committed against the country right out in the open, behind the scenes in the halls of Congress and sometimes even in the White House.
Veterans Today has verified through multiple sources that Israel had at least one top spy on the Bush National Security Council. That particular investigation was stopped, which would indicate that Bush had approved the Israelis being given top secret information, but why?
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