Thread by @bidetmarxman

Plaza Accord - Part 2

After much of Japan’s political left was eliminated after WW2 in the US-backed Red Purge, the remaining politicians and party members on the political right coalesced into the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), with some notable “help” from the CIA. 🧵

Since then, Japan has been ruled by this one party for all but 9 yrs. Far from being an odd quirk of Japanese conservatism, this political consistency has been unwaveringly in service of US interests.

And there’s no better recent demonstration of that subservience than Okinawa.

As one of her first acts as Obama’s Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton flew to Japan to sign the “Guam Treaty” in Feb 2009. The treaty obliged Japan to construct and pay for a new US base on Okinawa and to contribute a massive sum towards constructing another on Guam.

Popular resistance to the new US base in Okinawa grew. During Japan’s 2009 elections, the center left candidate Yukio Hatoyama campaigned on eliminating the US base in Okinawa. He rode this wave to win in a landslide victory, ending 54 years of LDP rule.

Hotoyama quickly got to work normalizing relations with South Korea and China, and pulled support for the US war in Afghanistan. He began taking a “partnership of equals” approach to relations with the US, pivoting away from the US and toward building an East Asian economic zone.

But less than a year into his term, Hotoyama inexplicably U-turned on the Okinawa promise, cryptically stating that removing the US base would be “impossible”. Shortly after, his coalition began to falter, and following the threat of a no-confidence vote, he resigned.

After two short stints by PMs from the DPJ, the LDP regained their hold on political power 2 years later when Shinzo Abe was re-elected, ushering in an era of redoubled neoliberalism and tight realignment with US foreign policy goals.

So what really happened? Did the US covertly overthrow the Japanese govt in 2010?

While this may sound far-fetched even to those familiar with US history of meddling in foreign govts, it wouldn’t even have been the only western govt coup’d that year!
wsws.org/en/articles/20…

But even if we approach this from outside the controlled political arena, after decades of stagnant wages and an oppressive work culture, why hasn’t Japanese labor organized to demand better working conditions?

They have. But members of labor organizations, particularly those expressing anti-americanism, have been brutally suppressed through an alliance between the CIA, the LDP, and organized crime syndicates like the Yakuza through intimidation, attack, and murder.

And so while Japan’s initial compliance with US demands guaranteed they wouldn’t have to pay WW2 reparations and their ruling class avoided any socialist reform or standing trial at the Hague, their ongoing subservience can be harder to understand.

However no arrangement like this would be stable for so long without an exchange of consideration. Which is why, for their continued compliance, Japan has been allowed to play junior partner to US imperialism.

thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2019/11/14/hm2…

Now, almost four decades after the Plaza accords, a superficially similar scenario is emerging as China economically eclipses the US, with one important difference: the US doesn’t have the direct ability to hamstring China’s economy like it did with Japan.

But not for lack of trying!

The efforts to similarly infiltrate the Chinese political system have been severely hampered in recent years, first by the anti-corruption drive that began under Xi and then by massive purges of CIA spies.

In contrast to Japan’s subservience, the US deems China’s refusal to bend the knee as a major threat. Repeated US tantrums branding China as a “currency manipulator”, expose this frustration.

One of the most basic pillars of sovereignty is being able to adjust one’s own economic and monetary policies to best serve one’s own people. When the US imposed the disastrous Plaza accords on Japan, it demonstrated the degree to which Japan remains an occupied country.

Marx's foundational theory shows that while capitalism first develops the productive forces, it inevitably becomes a brick wall in the way of further development, holding it back and even destroying those very forces it brought into being.

In this way, a major tension is again building as US global monetary strategy comes to a head, with the US wanting a strong dollar to combat inflation, while simultaneously needing a weak dollar to maintain foreign investment and dollar recycling.

In the past, this tension could be resolved by bringing peer economies to heel, as was done to Japan in the 80s and Russia in the 90s. But now, the newest economic superpower is not only proving impervious to US efforts to subordinate it, it is forging an alternative pathway.

In 1971, John Connally, Richard Nixon's treasury secretary, famously told a delegation of Europeans worried about exchange rate fluctuations that the American dollar “is our currency, but your problem.”

But now, in 2022, the ‘dollar problem’ is coming home.

Link to Part 1