Image is from this SCMP article.
Much of the analysis below is sourced from Michael Roberts' great website.
Japan's ruling parliamentary coalition, consisting of the LDP (purple) and it's junior coalition partner Komeito (in light pink) have lost their ruling majority. They have ruled post-war Japan for almost its entire history. The LDP is currently led by Shigeru Ishiba after Kishida stood down due to a corruption scandal, and ties to the Unification Church.
While geopolitical factors (over the cold war between the US and China, etc) may have played a role, by far the biggest reason for this result in the poor economic conditions over the past few years. Inflation has risen and real wages have fallen, with little relief for the working class via things like tax reductions. While inequality in Japan is not as extreme as in America, it is still profound, with the top 10% possessing 60% of the wealth, while the bottom 50% possess just 5%.
Shinzo Abe previously tried to boost economic performance through monetary easing and fiscal deficits, while Kishida ran on a "new capitalism" which rejected Abe's neoliberalism and promised to reduce inequality. Nothing substantial has resulted from all this, however, other than increasing corporate wealth. Innovation continues to fall, and domestic profitability is low, resulting in decreasing investment at home by Japanese corporations. Labour productivity growth has only slightly picked up since the mid-2000s and is falling again. The rate of profit has fallen by half since the 1960s, and Japan has been in a manufacturing recession - or very close to it - since late 2022. In essence: there is no choice but between stagnation or decline.
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Last week's thread is here.
Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
The Mythology Behind the Grameen Bank
We look at the history of Bangladesh's New Leader Mohammed Yunus
Esha Krishnaswamy
The day after the color revolution in Bangladesh, Mohammed Yunus, founder of the Grameen bank, a darling of the west, and a favorite of the Clinton foundation was coronated as “Chief advisor” to the new interim government. To understand the man, and how he will govern in Bangladesh, it is important to understand his history.
Before occupying his newest role as Bangladeshi Juan Guaido, Mohammed Yunus rose to fame in the 1990s, for his Grameen bank, a bank whose purpose was to give micro-loans to poor people. It eventually expanded to create a cottage industry with his Grameen Telecom, Grameen Fisheries, Grameen Danone Food and more!
In his effort to promote the Grameen Bank, Mohammed Yunus has made outrageous claims about his micro-loan program. He once said, “Poverty will be eradicated in a generation. Our children will have to go to a `poverty museum’ to see what all the fuss was about."
Even after 40 years of founding his ‘revolutionary’ institution, Bangladesh remains as poor as ever with 71.4% of the population living on less than $5.50 a day, while 1.3 million children are engaged in child labor. Sadly, people in Bangladesh experience poverty first-hand, and life, itself, is the poverty museum.
However, if we look at articles and literature on the Grameen Bank in the West, it mostly consists of hagiographies and repetition of outlandish claims made by Mohammed Yunus. A cursory examination proves that it is anything but a poverty relief program and the only thing these micro-loans guarantee is that their borrowers will take on more predatory loans.
The theory of micro-lending goes something like this: Give an impoverished, destitute villager 10,000 Takas as a loan. They will use that money to open up a Bhel Puri stand (or something similar), and then, with the income they generate from the Bhel Puri stand, they would not only repay the loan, but they will lift themselves out of poverty using their Bhel Puri straps.
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Bhel Puri is a street side snack made with puffed rice that is available throughout the subcontinent
According to the myth constructed by Mohammed Yunus himself, in 1974, he went to a house of a bamboo stool-maker Sofia Begum, in the village of Jobra. She had apparently borrowed money from the local loan sharks to get bamboos at usurious interest rates. She claimed the money lender charged 10% interest per week. After being moved by his experience, he allegedly gave her and another 42 villagers $27 which freed them from this perpetual state of bonded labor[1](javascript:void(0)).
Seeing the “success” of his loans, he reasoned that the families were poor, not because they didn't have money (which is the obvious definitional cause of poverty), but they were poor because they did not have access to credit.
From this experience, his life mission was born. He was to ensure that every one would be able to get loans, regardless of how poor they were.
According to the Grameen Bank, this is how, a loan is supposed to operate in theory: If someone wants a loan, they have to form a group of five villagers. The loan is given to the group at 20% interest rate and each of the five members are responsible for the loan collectively.[2](javascript:void(0))
For example, if a group of five people borrow 1000 Takas, they will have to repay 20 Takas a week on the principle for fifty weeks. The 200 Takas of interest are due on a lump sum at the end.
The mythology is also combined with an intense propaganda effort. In 2006, in Germany, they staged a play called “Talisma and the Microcredit”:
While in theory, it sounds like a great idea. People who are living on the edges of poverty can get over their problems by simply opening up a Bhel Puri stand in their villages, reality of these loans are a complete different matter.
A Danish documentary filmmaker went back to Jobra after the publication of the book and visit by none other than Hillary Clinton. In that village, 60 families took loans from the Grameen bank to build houses. Only 3 families succeeded and one of the families that did succeed had to sell their house because their daughter became ill and they needed money to pay for her appendix operation. Also, Sofia Begum, the woman whose situation started all this, died in abject poverty in 1998.
Despite, occasional success stories, the structure of the loans make it nearly impossible to do what the Grameen Bank claims it wants to help villagers do: start businesses. One week after they receive the loan, the villagers have to make their first repayment. Most people are not even able to get their businesses up and running within a week, let alone, generate enough cash to make repayments on these loans. When interviewing villagers, many repeated the same story. They had to take up other loans in order to make their weekly repayments.
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A group of women who were borrowers with the Grameen Bank
Mallika, a villager from Jobra explained the problems with the weekly repayments. She said, “I bought land with the money. But, then I found that I couldn’t earn that much money. I had spent the money. So I had to take a new loan to repay the old one.” Another villager Yasmeen said that the weekly payments forced her to take other loan. Eventually, she was indebted to five organizations. Other women who took loans, had to return to their local loan sharks in order to keep up with the weekly payments.
The group payments of these loans puts intense pressure on the borrowers to make their weekly payments because if one member of the group defaults, the other group members, who are in an equally precarious position, have to cover the defaulters loans. Therefore, the social pressure forces borrowers to use any means necessary, even local loan sharks, to find the necessary money to make these repayments, defeating the purpose of the Grameen Bank. Since the Grameen Bank was created to help borrowers not use usurious loan sharks.
This is no wonder, according to research done by QK Ahmed, 1189 of 2501 borrowers surveyed could not repay their loans on time. 72.3% of them had to take out other loans to make their payments. 10% had to sell assets that gave them productivity, like goats, in order to make their repayment. Another study sampled 1489 families from 15 villages. Only, 5-9% of the borrowers said they were better off after using micro-credit.
On top of the failures in helping their borrowers, Grameen Bank has also had serious issues with its corporate governance. Mohammed Yunus, the founder has been at the center of many scandals at the heart of his Grameen institutions, which forced him to resign in 2011. When Grameen Bank lost its tax exempt status, in 1998, he moved $100 million to another shell organization called Grameen Kalyan, and then loaned that money from Grameen Kalyan to Grameen Bank, in order to avoid paying taxes. His Grameen Yogurt business was found using adulterated milk in 2011.
Shortly before occupying his position as chief of Bangladesh, Mohammed Yunus was convicted of violating Bangladeshi labor laws with his other subsidiary Grameen Telecom. Bangladeshi law requires a company to pay five percent of its net profit to a welfare fund that could later be used for pensions. It seems that Grameen Telecom, in its haste to make profits, failed to create such a fund.
Despite, being disgraced and scandal plagued, he continued to be the object of praise and adulation in the West. He has been praised by the likes of Larry Summers and Bill Clinton simply because the Grameen Bank model perfectly fits in with the neoliberal consensus that the West hopes to impose upon the world.
Poverty in the third world is caused by underdevelopment and lack of societal infrastructure. Alleviating this poverty, which has been done successfully in China and Vietnam (to name a few), requires massive government intervention and government programs to change the situation. People in villages in Bangladesh are poor because there are no places for the masses to find decent paying jobs. That requires government investment to set up large scale industries that can employ thousands of semi-skilled workers to give them decent wages. In order to set up these industries, there needs to be large scale infrastructure investments in public roads and trains that will allow these goods to be moved efficiently.
The government also needs to invest in high-quality public schools to create a more skilled labor force for the next generation. On top of it, there needs to be social programs in healthcare and retirement such that one medical emergency doesn't force a villager to sell her house.
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Another Borrower from Grameen Bank in Jobra
But, since the 1970s, the Washington consensus managed by the dual institutions of the IMF and World Bank have been forcing third world countries, including Bangladesh to do the opposite. Since its independence, Bangladesh has been forced to:
However, the philosophy of neoliberalism requires the government to keep a hands-off approach on all the infrastructure projects and social programs required for mass poverty eradication. The Grameen philosophy perfectly dovetails into the dastardly Washington Consensus. If poor people can be given enough loans and high interest rates, they can remove themselves from poverty. Anyone who fails this uphill battle, is at fault for not working hard enough to pull themselves up from their bootstraps.
As the new leader of Bangladesh, given his philosophy and closeness to the neoliberal institutions, it is unlikely that he will involve Bangladesh in large-scale projects with the Belt and Road initiative, which has been instrumental in developing much needed infrastructure in the most underdeveloped areas of the world. Instead, he is likely to follow Bangladesh into bigger and bigger macro-debt traps created by IMF and World Bank.
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Mohammed Yunus at a Global Summit to spread his brand of propaganda
He will sweet talk on the importance of social responsibility while allowing big manufacturers to set up less than safe garment factories in Bangladesh, such as the one that collapsed in 2013. Most importantly, he will allow status quo to continue. This will allow him to be praised in the West as the new face of democracy in Bangladesh, regardless of the situation of the people within.
1
2
Ibid, p 70
Every person who understands how loans work should understand why working-class people should stay the f away from them as much as possible. They are only good for capitalists - the people who can use money to increase their personal incomes.
Microloans are loans designed to target working-class people. Even worse - specifically some of the poorest and most vulnerable working-class people. They are a crime against humanity.
The article says it but people don't have a choice sadly. They have to go into debt to survive and the sales taxes take away even more money away from the poor.
The same taxes promoted by the IMF.