Currently, there is a growing movement of far right Japanese xenophobes in the Land of the Rising Sun.  And the leaders of these vocal racists openly model their crusade on America’s Tea Party.  They largely consist of young Japanese men struggling to find security in the current economic crisis.  Seeing their standard of living collapsing, these disaffected men are resorting to that tried-and-true tactic of right-wing populism: scapegoating.

According to The New York Times, the more than 500,000 ethnic Koreans living in Japan are a major focus of hate for these Japanese Tea Partiers, dubbed the “Net far right” by the Japanese press.

The demonstrators appeared one day in December, just as children at an elementary school for ethnic Koreans were cleaning up for lunch. The group of about a dozen Japanese men gathered in front of the school gate, using bullhorns to call the students cockroaches and Korean spies.

Inside, the panicked students and teachers huddled in their classrooms, singing loudly to drown out the insults, as parents and eventually police officers blocked the protesters’ entry.

While the US Tea Party has yet to stoop to such outrageous lows, the leader of the organization associated with this action, 38 year-old Makoto Sakurai, admits his affinity with his American counterparts:

Mr. Sakurai says the group [Zaitokukai, which means Citizens Group That Will Not Forgive Special Privileges for Koreans in Japan] is not racist, and rejected the comparison with neo-Nazis. Instead, he said he had modeled his group after another overseas political movement, the Tea Party in the United States. He said he had studied videos of Tea Party protests, and shared with the Tea Party an angry sense that his nation had gone in the wrong direction because it had fallen into the hands of leftist politicians, liberal media as well as foreigners.

Of course, there is nothing new in using the tactics of fear and irrationality in place of engaged, informed political activism — especially in times of true crisis.  I’m not saying the rest of the world never imagined such things before the Tea Party came along either.  But we do see a direct connection, and admittedly so.  The Japanese version differs mainly in tone.  In America, there are no references to the targets of the growing anger and discontent as being “cockroaches” or “barbarians.”  Yet so much of the Tea Party outrage is directed toward some sort of “otherness”: Mexican migrants, Muslims/terrorists, a President with a foreign-sounding name, Liberals/Socialists/Communists.

The Japanese Net far right are admittedly a tiny fraction of the entire population in that country, and the public there strongly rejects such groups.  But in America, a “kinder, gentler” version welds far more power and media influence — thanks in large measure to powerful financial backing that has an agenda all its own.  And this is my point here.

It goes without saying the economic crisis is real.  The discontent and anger are real.  The question becomes, what is the best way forward?  Do we take the easy way and harness these emotions into irrational scapegoating, leading to who knows where?  I hope not.

Technorati Tags: Japan, Korea, racism, Tea Party, Zaitokukai

The insurance giant A.I.G., which is at the center of the current economic meltdown, is going to pay $165 million in bonuses according to the NY Times.  The company, one of the main purveyors of credit-default swaps, has already received $170 billion in taxpayer money.  So their bailout amounts to nothing more than socialism for the rich, an upward distribution of income from regular Americans to the already wealthy. It’s an old story: those most responsible for economic disaster are rewarded while everyone else suffers.

A.I.G. claims it is legally obligated to make the bonus payments as a result of contract agreements made prior to the company’s demise.  But looking deeper into the Times article you see the bonus plan for the financial products unit (the section of A.I.G. that “sold hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of derivatives, the notorious credit-default swaps that nearly toppled the entire company last fall) was locked into place in early 2008 just as the mortgage crisis was becoming most apparent.  So rather than merely trying “to encourage people to stay” as the article alludes, at least some of the bonuses are because these corporate crooks simply saw the writing on the wall and wanted to get their legally guaranteed loot – probably knowing the American taxpayer would come to their rescue if the worst ultimately happened.

Unsurprisingly, a senior government official claimed under the cloak of anonymity the Obama administration is outraged by the bonuses but, despite American taxpayers owning 80% of A.I.G., they are powerless to stop the theft:

The administration official said the Treasury Department did its own legal analysis and concluded that those contracts could not be broken. The official noted that even a provision recently pushed through Congress by Senator Christopher J. Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, had an exemption for such bonus agreements already in place.

But the official said the administration will force A.I.G. to eventually repay the cost of the bonuses to the taxpayers as part of the agreement with the firm, which is being restructured.

If the now government-controlled insurer will have to pay back the bonuses, why even let them make them in the first place?  I say let these A.I.G. executives sue for their fraudulent bonuses; even if they win at least the administration will take a strong stand.  And if the government is upset and it is actually policy that A.I.G. will have to repay taxpayers then why does the official have to speak off-the-record?  The cleptocracy spreads far and wide.

Technorati Tags: A.I.G., Capitalism, economy, Wall Street bailout

Here’s a great video of a brief exchange between Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner discussing the details of the bailout.  While there are some important and valid criticisms of Sen. Sanders regarding his support for nativist, reactionary policies against immigrants recently, in this video he does rightly challenge Geithner and the new Obama administration over whether they will hold the very Wall Street executives responsible for the current crisis accountable to the American taxpayer.

The Treasury Secretary does his best avoiding Sanders’ questions about whether we should change the leadership on Wall Street at this time due to their failures and the vital issue of transparency concerning where taxpayer’s money is spent.

Technorati Tags: Bernie Sanders, Capitalism, economy, Timothy Geithner, Wall Street, Wall Street bailout

Here’s economist Joseph Stiglitz interviewed on the Colbert Report.

Technorati Tags: Capitalism, economy