For many, many years, at least two decades, I have written extensively about the deflationary trap Japan fell into and cannot escape. Japan is literally dying. It is literally being ground apart by both Mother Nature and the Japanese Industrial complex disasters. And it is being propped up by the US as a means of defying dynamic, growing, active China. This is a total failure and easy to see why. A dying, disintegrating culture can’t project power or run things, it is in barely-survival mode and rapidly literally dying.
Now, our main media has finally noticed the obvious. Here is today’s main article from NYC about this huge ongoing collapse of the world’s once #2 economy: One Obstacle Won’t Budge in Japan’s Fight With Deflation – NYTimes.com
Since taking office in December, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has made fighting deflation a priority, pumping the Japanese economy with cheap money and bolstering public spending in a bid to kick-start growth.
Such moves have helped stoke the prices of luxury goods like Ferraris, golf club memberships, prime real estate and vintage wines. But so far, the government’s efforts have not had much effect on everyday items, like a can of soda…
So far, the rally in Japan’s stock market has not significantly rubbed off on wages or wealth in a country where just 15 percent of households hold shares, according to a recent Bank of Japan survey. And despite the rising economic sentiment, consumers remain thrifty; the government reported on Friday that consumer spending had cooled.
This really, really, REALLY irritates me! Inflation is theft and only if workers are union organized and very powerful, can ‘inflation’ mean more economic activity. That is, workers demand pay raises and then spend it, fast. But when workers are being crushed, wages are falling and 50% of the under-30 population is part time labor and the retired workers are not replaced but instead, robots or moving jobs overseas means less and less profits go to the workers…who then have no money to spend.
So…when the nasty, evil elites at the top deliberately devalue the currency so they can make bigger profits importing and exporting goods, this hammers the workers who can’t cope and who then cut back more and more mainly, by not having any children. And so the nation literally dies.
Like the US, Japan has had raging inflation in key areas namely, rents and fees as well as taxes such as doubling the sales tax. The average Japanese no longer can afford Toyotas and more and more are riding bikes and if you explore Japan via Google maps, you can see the many bikes being used in Tokyo and cars are increasingly scarce.
It looks more and more like Maoist China! The NY Times has been pushing for inflation and I find this hilarious since inflation has HAMMERED me on my fixed income, big time. With virtually no rises in SS or pensions thanks to rigging the inflation stats so it doesn’t reflect reality, life is very hard now. I used to heat with gas, now I go forth every summer to produce a mountain of firewood because I can’t afford heat anymore, for example.
I am not alone. Everyone I know has the same problem and is trying desperately to fix things via burning firewood as if this is 1813 and not 2013. Of course, the staff at the NY Times doesn’t live in my universe even though my neighbors and I live fairly close to Manhattan.
Seems that some economic forecasters have figured out what ails Japan…sort of…too bad most are anti-union so they don’t make the ‘work/pay’ connections: Central Bankers Gone Wild | Thoughts from the Frontline Investment Newsletter | Mauldin Economics
Geeze! As with the US, tax revenues have fallen while spending which mainly benefits the elites and their business with the government, shoots upwards! And then the workers are blamed for all of this, as we are in the US. The Japanese elites grew very rich playing this game just as our elites have hogged much of the economic pie. The solution is obvious: tax the rich heavily!
Instead, the Japanese and US elites have decided another course: cause global warfare, agitate for imperialist games, threaten other Great Powers and act the bully. Ooops. The Japanese elites didn’t expect the obvious to happen!
When they agitated the Chinese leaders, they agitated the entire Chinese as well as both Koreas’ people! Who are now running a de-facto boycott of all Japanese goods. China, not the US, was Japan’s #1 customers last year and this is rapidly collapsing to the despair of the elites who backed aggression against China.
Now, they are backpedaling after insulting not only China and both Koreas, but the US and our military, accusing us of using sex slaves, for example. Now, Abe’s staff are grinding their teeth while blubbering about how a Strong Japan will be no threat to Asia, says defense minister ‹ Japan Today: Japan News and Discussion
“Some say Japan is tilting toward the right because of these initiatives. Moreover, we sometimes hear criticism that Japan is abandoning its identity as a pacifist nation and is attempting to challenge the existing international order,” Onodera said.
“These views are total misperceptions,” he said. “These efforts are crucial in the pursuit of our national interest, which is to maintain and strengthen international order based on fundamental values of freedom, democracy and the rule of law.”
You don’t strengthen international order by making unilateral territorial demands backed by military force! I think Japan will never learn this. But they have powerful teachers next door who will drive home this lesson.
Now to another topic concerning Japan and China and our military/industrial rich bastards at home. Boeing. One of my first stories was boing boing boeing – Culture of Life Financial News which I wrote years ago. This is all about how our US trade reps are actually Boeing salesmen and this business of selling jets is crashing, big time, with Japan and Israel forcing us to open factories in their countries and then China demanding the same things. So…in the news today is this: Boeing shifting engineering work to California, S. Carolina | Business & Technology | The Seattle Times
Boeing said it will transfer a chunk of engineering work employing some 300 people from Tukwila to Long Beach, Calif., and will create engineering centers for future work in South Carolina and possibly in Kiev, Ukraine.
HAHAHA. The usual game: move things to the former slave states, exploit the workers, get huge tax breaks from the GOP rulers down there and then…hike off to Russia, China, wherever. They don’t even bother hiding this! Note they do say, ‘POSSIBLY’ Kiev.
Right. HAHAHA. The workers for Boeing are very unhappy, they know this game very well and are, thanks to Reagan, helpless to stop this as was Detroit and much of the Midwest and all steel workers, etc, etc.
Now on to India, supposedly was going to best China and be smarter and richer…HAHAHA, yeah, right: India records worst GDP growth in a decade which doesn’t surprise me at all. Have a huge population boom and huge racist society with the underclass totally cut off from economic participation…sounds like what the US is becoming.
And is China falling apart? Nope. China Manufacturing Tops Estimates in Sign Growth Is Stabilizing – Bloomberg. Again, no surprise to me.
Last of all, Africa has lost $1.2 trillion in dirty money, Nigeria tops list as ‘aid’ pours in, the money pours out into foreign bank accounts exactly like our own elites are doing to North America. We are all in the same boat and the captain is a pirate.
Email:
emeinel@fairpoint.net
MAILING ADDRESS:
EMS NEWS
P.O. BOX 483
BERLIN, NY 12022
Make checks out to ‘Elaine Supkis’
Click on the Pegasus icon on the right sidebar to donate via Paypal.
Culture of Life News 
India a world power…what a riot. Only countries that take care of their own reach those heights. Empire is a collaborative mission. Oligarchies don’t get to be world powers. They destroy them.
Some delusional on Huffpost was trying to convince me that Spanish should be among the languages to learn for the future besides Mandarin, Russian and German. Mexico and the rest of South America was industrializing. Yeah, on slave labor with all the money going to Oligarchies. Again, most of their underclass are illegal aliens in the US. That isn’t a sign to becoming a world power. I swear, people intentionally close their eyes.
What started out as life on our planet was the sustainability of life on “free” produce provided by the land, lake, or river. The amount of labor that life put into sustaining itself was the price of subsistance. In fact, this has not much changed, except the “free” produce is now torn from the land with heavy machinery, and what was once a necessity, has been turned into an utterly useless and wasteful consumer product. The latter method of taking what is still freely given is what has brought us to exhaustion. And I welcome this turn of events, though am unlikely to survive it.
Just yesterday, I visited a woman who lives alone in a shack that is gradually falling apart,. But she has a stove and a few pots, and a garden. During the summer and fall seasons, she cans the vegetables she grows, and when the potatoes and carrots come in, she puts them in a pile and covers it with a thick layer of dirt, so they do not freeze come winter.
I live among such ‘primitive’ folk, have noted their troubles now for over a decade as the government tries to drive them out of existence, forces their sons and daughters to emigrate to “rich” England or whereever. I continue to help them on whatever is in excess of my fixed SS pension, and try my best to talk some out of excessive drinking and using alcohol as a tool of self-sacrificial protest against an urban oriented ‘civilization’s’ ways of devaluing their lives and turning our organically oriented planet into a virtual desert.
My best friend here is a veteran of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, where he survived a severe concussion, is a man in his early fifties, whose grandfather used to be a substantial raiser of horses before WW2, was condemned to 15 years in Siberia for that reason, and when he returned, he and his son drunk themselves into the grave. My friend, the man’s grandson, appears to want to do the same. The governmebt here calls him and his like ‘alcoholics’ and ‘lazy good for nothings’. Another man his age, who I knew well enough, recently died of overconsumption of alcohol. All his five children came to his funeral from other European countries. The sixth sibling, a daughter who married a Pakistani, could not make it. Still, the television adds continue to advertise the “good” life of consumerism, and the government claims now to be one of the fastest growing economies in Europe. Notable banking officials of European countries visit our capital, praise or ability to tighten our belts, and the governmet makes sure everyone hears such praise that means nothing to most people.
I welcome the coming collapse of Japan, England, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, China, Sweden, Russia, America, and the government that the post-Soviet novus ordo has shoved me under. I do not believe that either China or India or happy Australia or Luxemburg show the way to the future. You can buy all the gold you want in the belief that it is better than fiat currency, but in the end a gold brick may not buy even a winter’s worth of subsistence.
ΩΩΩ
ELAINE: Esso, you are so very right!
We lived for ten years, yes, ten years, in a TENT complex I built mainly out of discarded materials while we fought in court for money from my husband’s work injury. We won and I then built us a house, my son, myself and some friends but mainly myself. It was hard but it is our own home, we own it not some bank!
And yes, despair drives drinking and your country is an IMF example of how to ‘fix’ things…for the elites, not the rest of us.
Wouldn’t the “Captain” say he’s a “Viking,” not a “Pirate”?
ΩΩΩ
ELAINE: Heh! But the Vikings fought hand to hand! Well, I am descended from these guys…
One of my relations in the past was Captain Pettit, a Huguenot capitalist who, when the Paris Massacred happened and his family was killed, turned into a pirate. Then, when this was too dangerous, moved to the US/Canada NE sector and did business with the Indians instead.
I’m retired and live in economically vibrant and fairly well off Bellingham, Whatcom, County, north of Seattle and just south of the Canadian border; it’s a university, fishing port, and small manufacturing town, where there is hot money flowing in from Canadians who come to buy clothing and shoes at Bellis Fair Mall, gasoline at Costco, and groceries at Fred Meyers, that is Kroger, and to gamble at a just refurbished and greatly expanded Indian Casino.
Too bad for those being transferred, or most likely laid off, and replaced by immigrant engineers. Tukwila will become more poor.
Lornet Turnbull of The Seattle Times reports Poverty hits home in local suburbs like South King County. For the first time, there are more poor people living in American suburbs than in the nation’s big cities, according to new findings by the Brookings Institution. South King County is particularly “eye-opening,” the researchers say. Nowhere is suburbanization of poverty more evident than in South King County, where affordable housing has drawn immigrants and refugees coming here from across the globe as well as low-income families forced from Seattle by skyrocketing housing costs.
The findings are contained in a new book: “Confronting Suburban Poverty in America,” which examines this trend in the 100 largest metropolitan areas across the country, including the Seattle metro area, where 3.5 million people are spread across King, Snohomish and Pierce counties.
Incredible diversity. Classrooms in schools across South King County teem with a mix of cultures and in many of the area’s school districts, more than 100 languages are spoken. Cities face increased need for interpreter services, and schools for specialized language classes. Some city leaders bemoan the high costs of diversity and grapple with how to engage this new population. “You have this incredible refugee population coming from all corners of the earth and landing in Tukwila and communities next door, joining longtime middle-class families that have been there for decades …” Berube said. “There’s incredible diversity that comes with that and challenges for a small community to assist with integration.” Some community leaders are trying to understand and address the challenge, Berube said.
But “there are others who might have thought: ‘all these immigrants come into our communities, stressing our schools
Exercises you can do on your own.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-06-02/try-google-search .
Essentially it is searching for “All time high” or “all time low”
Only fools welcome the travesty of ‘die-versity’:
‘incredible diversity. Classrooms in schools across South King County teem with a mix of cultures and in many of the area’s school districts, more than 100 languages are spoken’
Yen Guy, poverty in the burbs is due to peoples taking multiple mortgages,
immigration, and especially SECTION 8.
Under Barry there are the ’99ers’, 1 in 6? on food stamps, 10 million on disability, etc.
Yes, yes they do. And the oligarchs of all times have relied on this unfortunate human tendency to easily maintain their power and priviledge.
120 years ago, my ancestors grumbled about all the ‘aliens’ flooding into the US but the industrialists kept the front door wide open so they could exploit cheap labor.
But then, my ancestors were invaders, themselves.
The main reason public schools were started was to turn the children of the immigrants into American Citizens, by the way.
Well, Elaine…it is has come full circle.
Now the oligarchs are using illegal aliens/legal immigrants to destroy the public school system. How can American citizens learn anything if their classmates do not understand English? School budgets are being starved of revenue so that ESL courses are either faltering or pilfering money from other areas benefiting natural born citizens.
I fully expect to see the public school system collapse in my lifetime leading to permanent underclasses. What a disgrace.
MEL..I know a Chinese immigrant Gal with a [worthless] MBA from a private college. She said at ‘language classes’ the people talk in other languages.
I am a total believer in the ‘immersion’ system for learning languages. When I went to school in Germany, the only way I could learn to talk like a native was to forbid anyone speaking English to me. IT WORKED. In six months, I mastered the language.
Now, they don’t do this anymore and so students go onwards in school usually being illiterate in both English and their home language. This is infuriating and stupid but unstoppable.
‘ This is infuriating and stupid ‘ but makes teachers $….
infuriating and stupid , as is allowing immigration into a built nation.
Immigration brings many good things and some troubles. The main trouble here is uncontrolled populations due to poverty, religious fundamentalists in the ‘Desert God of the Middle East’ forcing women to have children no matter how hideous this may be for her, society and the entire planet.
Elaine, please look in to and discuss the carry trades and the yen. They must be hugh and my understanding involve billions in money and all countries and sure not talked about!!