Japan and America Guilty as Charged

["John Gelles" <indexed-savings@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On www.cspan.org you can listen to the Woodrow Wilson
Center's  discussion yesterday of Japan and the USA. It was
brought out in the discussion that 33,000 Japanese workers
who lose their jobs, mostly in middle age, kill themselves
each year.

The fact presented is astounding. For lack of a sensible
approach to money, spending, saving, employment,
retirement, production, and consumption, -- with interest
and taxes judicially applied to avoid hyperinflation, --
(as advised by Keynes and Lerner), and known (if not
understood) by their leaders and scholars, the second most
successful economy on earth has become the mass murderer
of people who brought it to industrial greatness after the
most devastating war in its history.

Why would Japan, of all countries, where nothing of an
intellectual nature is beyond their competence, and where
so many people are so alike each other, be so dense as to
allow this tragedy to go on?

If the government of Japan had ensured that all Japanese
workers, released from work to protect their employer
from insolvency, had been re-employed at substantially
the same earnings -- in government sponsored jobs with
firms old and new, large and small -- under temporary
government contract to bridge the time gap between an
export-driven path to growth and a path that includes
greater domestic and regional consumption, the murders
would not have happened.

America has a major responsibility here too. It helped
write the Japanese constitution (at Harvard, I believe.)
It waged World War II to bring Japan and everywhere
else freedom from want and fear. Then it left these free-
doms out of the draft of that constitution and out of its
own plans for the future at home and abroad.

What the hell is the matter with Numbers 1 and number 2.
They are the greatest producing nations in history. And
they can't produce the easiest solution imaginable.
        These two-- now anxious to build a better Boeing
        to fly tourists to visit Rome-- while so many who
        have never been there are left at home to die before
        their time.

John Gelles    www.tiea.us
Public Interest Money (PIM)   www.tiea.us/pim1