Japan, Refutation of Neoliberalism – Robert Locke

No-one wants to talk about Japan these days.  The conventional wisdom is that the bloom went off Japan’s economic rose around 1990 and that the utter superiority of neoliberal capitalism was vindicated by the strong performance of the American economy during the 1990s.  Furthermore, everyone is now convinced that China – whose economy is 1/8 the size of Japan’s – is the rising economic power and therefore the appropriate object of attention.
But Japan is, despite everything, still one of the master keys to understanding the future of the world economy, because Japan is the clearest case study of why neoliberalism is false.  Simply put, Japan has done almost everything wrong by neoliberal standards and yet is indisputably the second-richest nation in the world.

Could the great recession lead to a great revolution?

(Yahoo) – For the first time in generations, people are challenging the view that a free-market order – the system that dominates the globe today – is the destiny of all nations. The free market’s uncanny ability to enrich the elite, coupled with its inability to soften the sharp experiences of staggering poverty, has pushed inequality to the breaking point.

Honduras Coup: the US Connection

Discussions in George Bush’s team revolved around the timing of the coup. One option under consideration was to synchronize it with Georgia’s aggression against South Ossetia in order to demonstrate US assertiveness over all azimuths, but the idea was found too extreme even by the staunchest hawks given the upcoming elections in the US.

The Smooth Criminal Transition from Bush/Cheney to Obama

Corrupt new administration deepens and expands systemic criminalization and war agenda

The G-20 Summit: Neoliberal Agenda Untouched. Next Phase of the Crisis is Looming

The G20 summit meeting in London from April 1st onward was loudly announced and publicized. Those 20 industrialized and emergent countries (G20) are meeting to find solutions to the crisis. But long before the end of the summit, it is clear that they will not rise to the challenge.

2.5 Million Protest Government Response To Global Economic Crisis In France On ‘Black Thursday’

Americanization as a controversial subject in the francophone world, granted, is not new. Jean-Luc Godard was obsessed with the subject treating it heavily in his films in the 1960s. The film ‘Two or Three Things I Know About Her,’ for example, revolves around criticism of the American capitalist invasion and its effect on the speed and color of life. More directly, ‘Made in the U.S.A.,’ an early imitation of the American conspiritorial thriller that took off most notably after Watergate, creatively blurs the boundaries between the two societies showing an Americanized world in France where car horns, planes and gun shots interrupt actors; money, blood and politics are equated; American corporate labels and consumerist images are rife, relative to the period; and the death of liberty and the left are represented side by side with the hunting and killing of communists. For Godard this was a combat against an imperialism waged by foreign corporations intending to spread their advertisements everywhere in the public space, denegrate ideas and access to them, box people up in cars on big highways, and separate the political from the everyday.