How Central Banks Have Seized Power Over Our Societies (The Story of Japan and What I Think Will Happen in Europe)

This whole documentary is great, but the most ominous words in it for me were at the beginning:

3:16

“Democracy was to be instilled in the Japanese people as though they had never heard of it.

Our problem’s in the brain inside of the Japanese head. These brains like our brains can do good things or bad things all depending on the kind of ideas that are put inside.”

While this documentary is great, of course, it’s missing a lot of facts. For example, Japan was built on war loot from war crimes committed during the Second World War, as mentioned by Aaron Good:

“In Japan, the LDP is essentially the one-party state. They were founded with a slush fund of over a hundred million dollars’ worth of war loot stolen by a Yakuza drug trafficker who was made a rear admiral and was a Class A war criminal. The CIA bailed him out of jail, and that money has fueled a one-party state. Over the years, there have been scandals about how the LDP has so much money, but it all traces back to war crimes. Japan is not what we think…”

I wrote before comparing what happened to Japan to what is now happening in Europe. The capitalists want to Americanize the EU. By that, I mean introduce neoliberalism—removing all social programs, all socialism, and regulations—so they can turn the EU into a nightmare like the US, with private healthcare, private prisons, etc. A nightmare state for citizens and a dream state for capitalists.

Right-wing fascists in Europe, like Marine Le Pen and the AFD, are here to serve this purpose. People are happy about their rise, but they are right-wing, not socialist, and nationalism is what they use to hide their neoliberalism. Marine Le Pen and the AFD are right-wing fascists, and fascism is the final stage of capitalism when the state takes over the government. The fact is, we already have a fascist government in the EU, but Marine Le Pen and the AFD are even more extreme.

If they are right-wing, how destroying workers’ unions help workers? After all, according to the misguided, uninformed right-wing neoliberals, all the problems of the EU are because of regulation and unions. They think that after they get rid of unions and regulations, we will all live in a wonderland of free markets and that after you remove all regulation and unions, you will unshackle the free market, which they believe this will save Europe. This sounds so similar to what they did in Japan.

Japan’s 30 years of stagnation—the “Lost Decades”—are the miracles of free-market capitalism that they want to introduce to the EU. So anyone supporting the right-wing, like Marine Le Pen and the AFD, should watch the main video, as this is exactly what those people will do in Europe. I don’t know much about Marine Le Pen and the AFD, but they are right-wing and fascists, which is why they will do it. They will not do it because they want to destroy the EU, but because they truly believe they will help in this way.

52:17

“The early postwar Japanese leaders knew that they were running a war economy, but they chose not to talk about it for political reasons. The Cold War propaganda message was that postwar Japan had adopted a U.S.-style political and economic system.

Unwilling to tell the truth, the early postwar leaders took their intimate knowledge about the origins of Japan’s miracle economy with them to their graves.

A generation of bureaucrats and politicians reigned in the 1980s and 1990s who did not understand the true character and purpose of their own country’s economy. A whole generation of Japan’s economists had been sent to the United States to receive PhDs and MBAs in U.S.-style economics.

Since neoclassical economics assumes that there is only one type of economic system, namely an unmitigated free market where shareholders and central bankers rule supreme, many Japanese economists quickly came to regurgitate the arguments of U.S. economists.”

Just like Japan’s “generation of bureaucrats and politicians” believed in U.S.-style economics, today people like Marine Le Pen and the AFD are right-wing and also believe in this U.S.-style economics. Capitalists want the far-right to win in the EU, not because they care about the nation, nationalism, Christianity, or culture—they do not care about that as much as they care about economics. And since Marine Le Pen and the AFD are right-wing and believe in U.S.-style economics, capitalists want them to win. So, our lovely far-right in the EU, like Le Pen and the AFD, will introduce us to U.S.-style economics. This transformation is described in the main video.

12:57

“The Bank of Japan gave quarterly instructions to individual banks on the value of loans and which industrial sectors they should be allocated to. All loans were broken down in sectors and sub-sectors, and large-scale borrowers had to be listed by name. The Bank of Japan could decide which projects should be encouraged and which should be discouraged by dictating to whom and for what banks could issue loans.

This was the war economy system, adapted to the production of consumer goods. The 95 million people of Japan now enjoy a national income second only to the United States and the more prosperous nations of Western Europe. It’s not a good system for capitalists, you know, shareholders, but for the population, it created a lot of wealth, very even income and wealth distribution, very high growth, and very rapidly raised quality of life and standards of living. In 1959 alone, the economy expanded by 17%.

But a result of the war economy system was that entire industrial sectors would compete not for profit but for market share. Companies would fight until bankruptcy to gain market share. This phenomenon was soon recognized and called “excess competition.” The solution was the creation of explicit, or implicit, cartels.

In the banking sector, window guidance acted as the cartel control mechanism because the Bank of Japan could dictate the number and value of loans that banks issued. As a result, bank rankings never changed during the postwar era except after mergers. According to one banker, “If it were not for window guidance, we would compete until Harakiri.”

The U.S. current account deficit surged to its highest level in nine years. The size of the increase took many economists by surprise. While cartels controlled competition within Japan, there were no such limits when it came to international markets. Japanese corporations soon became dominant in many markets in the world. In America, formal congressional hearings were held under the title “Japanese Productivity Lessons For America.”

Leading economic theories indicate that only free markets can lead to success, but Japan rose within decades to become the second-largest economy in the world without relying only on the invisible hand of free markets. Japan’s postwar economy was a fully immobilized war economy with production shifted from weapons to consumer goods.

Since the Bank of Japan presented itself as a champion of free markets, window guidance was an embarrassment. Official publications either failed to mention it or downplayed its role by calling the credit controls voluntary. Whenever the Ministry of Finance would inquire about the Bank of Japan’s credit creation and allocation policy, Bank of Japan staff would engage in complex discussions full of technical jargon to make the process appear impenetrable to non-experts.

In November 1965, the first batch of Japanese government bonds came onto the market. From now on, when politicians wanted to spend more, they would no longer put pressure on the Bank of Japan but instead exert it on the Ministry of Finance. So the ministry would ultimately preside over an ever-increasing national debt mountain.

The 1980s was an era of financial deregulation in the industrialized world. Most industrialized countries lifted their restrictions on the movement of capital. In Japan, Tadashi Sasaki, a former governor of the Bank of Japan, called for a five-year plan for the transformation and liberalization of the Japanese economy. Then in 1986, the Advisory Group on Economic Restructuring, headed by the former Bank of Japan governor Haruo Maekawa, proposed a 10-year economic reform plan designed to make the living standards of Japanese more comparable to those enjoyed in the West.

The proposal stated that the report read like a wishlist by U.S. trade negotiators. It started with calls for administrative reform and the abolition of bureaucratic powers. The goal was the transformation of the entire body politic, the abolition of the war economy system, and the introduction of a U.S.-style free-market economy. Those members of the advisory group who uttered dissent were relieved of their duties.

Reports in the press were highly critical. Observers recognized the radical nature of the plan. It seemed far too ambitious. It was calling for a wholesale revolution of all parts of the Japanese economic, political, and social system. Although the report was clear about what was wanted, it was embarrassingly silent about how these goals would be achieved. The only clue hidden in the report was that the Bank of Japan has always been on the record arguing that this typical Japanese system that we’re so familiar with should be scrapped. It just should be entirely scrapped, and U.S.-style capitalism should be introduced.

Now, whether you agree with that or not is an entirely separate question, but the Bank of Japan certainly thinks it should be scrapped. Now the next question is how do you do that? Well, the Ministry of Finance has been legally in control for most of the postwar era. We’ve got entrenched bureaucratic structures, politicians, and all these cartels and so on. That was the old system. Well, history teaches a system changes only fundamentally if there’s a crisis.

The commission proposed that monetary policy should be used to promote a historic crisis sufficiently large to overcome the vested interests of the Ministry of Finance, politicians, and corporate Japan.”

In my opinion, they are now coming for the European countries.

24:24

“Between 1985 and 1989, stocks rose 240% and land prices 245%. By the end of the 80s, the value of the garden surrounding the Imperial Palace in central Tokyo was worth as much as the entire state of California.”

LOL

32:09

“Often jumped to 300% or more. To the public, this was a strange phenomenon. People soon dubbed it “excess money.” Only economists, analysts, and those working in the financial markets or for real estate firms knew better. They dismissed such simplistic analysis. Land prices were going up due to far more complicated reasons than just excess money, they claimed. Ordinary people simply did not understand the intricacies of advanced financial technology.”

LOL

40:53

“Meanwhile, the governor of the Bank of Japan, Yasushi Mieno, said, “Thanks to this recession, everyone is becoming conscious of the need to implement economic transformation.”

Yes, and now we will have a recession in the EU, which will make people “conscious of the need to implement economic transformation.” This is all so people will follow the right-wing to implement neoliberalism in the EU, just like they did in Japan.

50:30

“When I was at the Bank of Japan in ’92 and ’93 as a visiting researcher, I was convinced that this recession was going to get really bad. So, any Bank of Japan official who I could get to talk to me, I would ask, “Why aren’t you printing more money?” I noticed they were not printing enough money.

I met one person who was quite open about it, and he said, “Richard, yeah sure, we could have printed more money. We could have created a recovery, but then nothing would have changed. Japan’s economic structure would not have changed.

At that time, I still wasn’t ready to believe that the Bank of Japan was seriously prolonging the recession on purpose in order to get structural changes—that just seemed a bit too wild.”

So, any right-wingers, neoliberals, or believers in free markets, just look at the story of Japan and what that so-called free market looks like and what it has done in Japan. Before you vote for the right-wing, thinking that free markets and removing regulation will lead to the wonders of the free market, remember that our wonderful capitalists will make more profit. And since you are right-wing, you believe in trickle-down economics, so while the rich get richer, you’ll get a piece of it.

Just look at the U.S. and their standard of living, etc., to see how that trickle-down, neoliberal, free market economy has worked so far.

P.S. Please share my posts so more people will know and understand what is happening.