Skip Navigation
Remote View
news @hexbear.net
SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him] @hexbear.net

Bulletins and News Discussion from October 28th to November 3rd, 2024 - LDP Falls Flat / Yet Neoliberalism / Rampages Onward - COTW: Japan

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.

Please check out the HexAtlas!

The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week's thread is here.

1.7K comments

  • There's a lady on tiktok that comes up for me very often and she sets off my psyops alarm bells every time.

    https://www.tiktok.com/@openbookshelf

    She shows up for me often and has nominally soft socialist-adjacent criticisms of power, authority, current government, wealth, landlords, even anti-monarchism and anti-cop, etc etc etc. But when it comes to the biggest issues? The issues of anti-imperialism? She falls on the side of nato EVERY.SINGLE.TIME.

    She's a pretty lady, whose brand is basically a caricature of Britishness, she pulls off the British librarian caricature that I can only describe as like Rachel Weisz in The Mummy. Is almost always seen with a mug of tea in her hand and if it wouldn't make it too obvious I think they'd throw the British Union Jack flag in every video but instead they keep that to only a few.

    It's like she's tailor-made to suck people in to a kind of up your arse intellectualism that then redirects any potential anti-establishment or revolutionary energy into fucking uselessness.

    The biggest giveaway here however is that she worked in China until recently, for the Chinese government she claims, for 3 years. Yet she calls the party by the shibboleth CCP and regularly performs anti-China propaganda unprompted, like it's a job. She does not promote other left accounts. She does not promote events. She exists solely as a sheepdog.

    This strategy is what I think should be called "de-influencer", the goal is to stick people into the left that appear left and have a great media image that's attractive and easily something people can be sucked in by, and to use that to suck air out of the sails of real leftist influence in online platforms.

    I'm telling you, this woman is a cop. GCHQ, Scotland Yard, MI, some branch of Civil Service, maybe military, I don't know. But she's one of them.

    The fact that she stopped working in China at the exact moment in time China cracked down on western agents within their government makes me think she was pulled out because it got dangerous.

  • Ansarallah says do not vote for Trump or Harris:
    https://xcancel.com/Seamus_Malek/status/1851871758200246345

    "Trump's danger is not limited to the outside world, but also to America itself, and he may be the cause of its destruction, but it is not appropriate for the Muslims of America to embrace his election so that they are not the deciding vote for his victory. It is preferable for them to abstain from voting for either candidate because both of them are linked to destructive projects for humanity, whether they are bloody or contrary to nature."

  • Back online after two weeks of taking care of irl stuff. Random disconnected thoughts incoming:

    • Aunt and her kids have successfully left Lebanon into Syria and then into Iraq, very happy with that. Thank God for the Iraqis, we're forever indebted to them for just how extraordinarily generous they've been with the refugees. Fuck the Egyptians for not even doing 0.1% of that for the people of Gaza.
    • Son is already nearly four months old. Very nice kid tbh, not too many sleepless nights so far.
    • Damn the Ukraine war is progressing very fast now, I don't even have time to learn the names of the villages anymore. Cursed town Ugledar might have been the glue that held together Ukraine's defence in the south-east. Nonstop collapse since Ugledar fell and now we are looking at the first big Russian arrow since the first weeks of the war. South Donetsk is done if Russia reach Andriivka, that entire Kurakhove corner will fall in matter of weeks. Very interesting developments on the Oskol sector as well, don't understand why Ukraine is letting their east Kupyansk grouping get pinned towards the river and not withdrawing behind a very defensible river line.
    • I don't believe the reports about any ceasefire whether in Lebanon or Gaza. The Doha talks about Gaza are just a last ditch effort to provide a "peace in the Middle East" boost for Kamala, there's little real substance there. Same with the Lebanon negotiations, there's no incentive for any side here. Israel continue their forever war, Americans sell guns, Iranians have an excuse to lob missiles at Israel whenever they want now and Hezbollah are inflicting record damage on IDF losers.
    • Help me out Hexxies, who will win the election? My instincts say it's big wet Donnie, but idk these days. How are the polls looking? I read reddit and in their world Kamala will win every single state, while right wings dumbasses on Twitter say that NY is a swing state.

  • Bernie Sanders uploaded a video on his YouTube channel about voting for Kamala even if you’re upset by her position on the genocide. He says “Israel has a right to defend itself” in the first ten seconds.

  • There are kids in Gaza who are like 6 years old but they aged 50 years in mere days. The heavy toll on their mental health cannot be measured, it's shattered, they are not only not having a normal infancy, they're living and growing in genocidal conditions... I can't even begin to comprehend what goes through their heads, how are they even able to process and make sense of what they do and what they've seen. I'm afraid the damage and the suffering they go through will give them company for the rest of their lives. May they find hope, love and solidarity within their community.

    death to "israel" and death to everyone who is complicit of this. Anger, hate and violence against zionists and their genocide denial allies is not only morally justified... it is also desirable.

  • Hope this is legit (CW: Pictures of dead Palestinians left by the actionists):
    https://north-shore.info/2024/10/31/sabotage-of-ottawa-factory-producing-parts-for-israels-f-35-warplanes/

    Anonymous Submission to North Shore Counter-Info

    Earlier this week a group of people sabotaged Gastops’ factory in Ottawa, the only place in the world where engine sensors are produced for Lockheed’s F-35 combat jets — including the ones dropping 2,000 pound bombs on Gaza. We cut the wiring inside all of the heat pumps on the Gastops roof, locked them out with official Ministry of Health and Safety lock-out tags, shut off the gas, broke the handles for their systems, and cut the lines to their backup communication system on the way out.

    The following letter and photos were left on site:

    It’s worth noting that we disabled their heat pumps as it begins to get cold here in Ottawa and as displaced people in Gaza and Lebanon plead with us to help them secure shelter, blankets, clothing, as they freeze in displacement camps. Earlier this month an Ottawa neighbour lost her uncle while he returned to his home in Gaza attempting to bring back blankets for the children so they would not freeze to death. He was murdered by air strike while doing so, likely by an F-35 that Gastops supplies parts to.

    People growing tired of politicians continuing to support the slaughter of civilians in Palestine and Lebanon will continue to escalate actions seeking peace and an end to these war crimes.

  • Holy shit, on some CNN discussion news thing some zionist arguing with Mehdi Hasan wished "his beeper doesn't go off" and that absolutely derailed the program to the point where it looks like over the break they continued without that guy.

    this feels like a very skill-less tipping of the hand and seeing how funny it is that liberals are forced by their sham morals to actually intervene, if not just to clear the air of a really distasteful comment. But the comfort you have to feel to foolishly just openly say something like that and misjudge just how behind you everyone is....

    if anyone here had any real morals, they'd choose to be more vocal about the genocide of Palestinians because they just got a full view of who they've been supporting all along

  • when I see Sanders debase himself I want to believe that it's because the three letter agencies have guns trained on Bernie's children and grandchildren, but deep down I know it's because he was a chauvinist and a zionist all along.

  • Kata'ib Hezbollah [Islamic Resistance in Iraq] military official Abu Ali al-Askari on Kamala vs. Trump:

    "For us, there is no difference in the American elections between Trump or Kamala Harris coming to power in the administration of American evil. Harris and her so-called Democratic Party behind her may be worse than Trump and his party. We have had successful experiences with him, having subdued him in more than one confrontation. He lacks patience and cannot endure prolonged material depletion, which saved us much effort and time in revealing the true face of America as evil, exposing its weaknesses live on air."

    Source

  • Libs will come across an influential personality and completely separate them from important context.

    They'll celebrate Yacouba Sawadogo, for instance, for being a pioneer of 20th-century agriculture by reinventing traditional methods for water retention amd soil fertility. And yet, there's something missing...

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yacouba_Sawadogo

    His methods started to find widespread success in the mid-80s, in his country, Burkina Faso. I wonder what was happening around that time? Oh well, that's not important.

    And then 2 decades later the land value of the area he had labored on and improved had shot up and he was struggling to afford the same plot he'd been working for over 20 years. Isn't that just rotten luck? I guess life's just a roller coaster of fortune.

  • Before/after shots of Lebanon villages where Israel has been bombing

    Looks like 80% of all buildings destroyed to me, very similar to descriptions of the US bombing operations in DPRK during the Korean War.

  • Not content with murdering millions upon millions, not content with creating death factories, not content with sending children, women and the elderly to gas chambers, not content with beheading people, not content with throwing people into pits while they were still alive, not content with throwing millions of people into a war as they launched their worldwide campaign for blood and murder, Germany doubles down and stands firm and proud next to their most precious student, "Israel", as they continue to genocide arabs in their quest for blood and conquest.

    History will not be kind to them.

  • I vaguely remember Obama, still as president, making a speech where he says in no uncertain terms that 'the US shouldn't go into Ukraine' because 'it's way more important to the Russians than to America and therefore Russia will put much more into than the US ever will'. Which goes to show that the guy was a pretty good steward of empire whenever he didn't listen to his dumbass secretary of state. If someone knows what I'm talking about, much obliged.

  • The whole “Ana Kasparian is turning right-wing for money” is an annoying narrative. Now I personally don’t care about tyt drama but it points to a larger issue that baby leftists don’t know how to deal with.

    Seeing your comrades get older and a number of them turning right-wing over some stupid culture war shit happens all the time and they don’t need paychecks to make the turn.

    I’ve seen a number of former guerrilla fighters from our civil war turn right wing because they hated how the current left has embraced homosexuals more. None of them are rich either or making the rounds with local right-wing personalities.

    Claiming that anybody making the switch purely for financial reasons or “they were never a leftist to begin with” overlooks the bleak reality that anybody can get stuck in culture war nonsense at some point if they’re unable to adapt with the changing social climates.

1683 comments