david, thanks for making my wish your command. and just in case you think i was kidding about the bon jovi/anti-koizumi connection, check this out...

http://www.zakzak.co.jp/gei/2005_08/g2005081801.html

after jon gets thru w/him, i'm sure the japanese PM will really be livin' on a prayer!

I don't know. I heard that Jon is wanted dead or alive.

We're on different sides in this issue, since I'm more 'neo-marxist' than you! I want the Post Office to remain in government control, and all those little island post offices (like the ones my ancestors worked on in the Hebrides) to remain open as a public service, rather than get scrapped in the name of "reform" and "profitability".

I also think this word "reform" hides a multitude of sins, whether it's used of Japan or Iran. Things can "reform" in more than just the liberal-capital direction. How about some "reforms" which help ordinary people rather than shareholders?

From a service perspective, Japan Post is terrible compared to the other banks. Centralization does not necessarily imply socialism, although that's your kneejerk reaction. You should be for greater decentralization which will give more local communities more direct political control.

so, all this politic's is great. but can we get to what is important? now that p. diddy, is just diddy.. and only diddy. [thats what TV told me].. can puffy go back to just being puffy? [in the states] didn't they change there name just out of good faith? can someone really, actually confuse the diddy, with puffy? they would have to be blind, and deaf. and then, would it really make a difference for that person to care?

This whole postal privatization thing is the most exciting thing in Japanese politics in like 12 years. Even if you think Koizumi has been ineffectual since he's been elected, his greatest accomplishment so far has to put the word reform on the map. Now, even if you're staunch right-wing LDP, you at least have to pay lip service to reform, even if you don't believe in it. (Unless you're Kamei, who I've seen on TV say basically "My job is to make sure I funnel as much money as possible to my constituents in the form of engineering and contruction projects." Got to hand it to the guy, he's got balls...)

Getting Horie to run is like some sort of coup de grace. I mean, really, even if he loses in Hiroshima, everyone else all over Japan who likes him is going to think "Oh yeah, this guy is affiliated with the whole thing Koizumi is trying to do, so I'm voting for the LDP."

And certainly if he pulls it off, this is the end of the LDP as you know it. The old-school hardliners have gone off to form the Kokumin Shinto (how fucking cynical can you get!) so once (hopefully) they get trounced in the upcoming elections, maybe things might start to change around here.

Kamei is a skunk and I hope that by forming his 国民新党he ends up cutting his own throat politically. Koizumi has walked his tightrope very well and has chosen an opportune moment to make his stand. If it dont happen now then he gets one more shot, if he did this earlier he'd have sunk himself prematurely. The DPJ are wandering agendaless fools, its too bad they are the only "real" opposition party.

momus: it really aint about the little post offices and it aint about not considering the common man or giving more consideration to shareholders. In any case the term shareholder here dont quite mean what it does elsewhere since less than 25% of all issued stock is ever liquid. This one really is about cutting off the MOF/LDP access to a massive slush fund which acts as a second budget. The availability of this ends up creating a distorted bond market, creates conditions where national debt vastly outweighs GDP and thus gives Japan a soverign credit rating of a third world nation. Additionally it puts the government in rigged competition with private finance which subdues normal banking business. The kind of business which employs the "common man" and is pretty clearly suffering. If Koizumi pulls this one off then there are only 28 more government banking agencies to go before private financing can compete on fair footing.

A few links
http://economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=3157589
http://economist.com/agenda/displaystory.cfm?story_id=4146786
http://economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=4234865

You know, the man lost the vote for Post Office privatization. That's what democracy is about, you put it to the vote and if you lose, you lose.

No, he won the lower house vote and then was blocked by hardliners in his own party in the (meaningless) upper house. If he loses this time, he's gone. That's democracy. (His cabinet's approval ratings are up, apparently.)

The only downside I see to privatization is the impact on the inaka economy, but the LDP is to blame for the fact that these small towns have nothing but concrete/construction sectors in the first place. If they had actually developed industries or deregulated bureaucratic procedure to make domestic travel cheaper, then these villages would not be in such dire straights.

Protectionism and centralized power-grabbing are not necessarily socialist policies that help redistribute income. All they do is keep the lower classes more dependent upon government aid and less willing to push for innovation that would actually make them competitive in the real world. The Japanese government for years had massively-organized "moral" campaigns to promote postal savings, and everyone, trusting their benevolent government, put money in no-interest accounts. Now they are stuck dependent on a system that never benefited them in the first place.

Also, I don't see why the bureaucrats are opposing so much. Koizumi is promising them 4 new jobs to amakudari themselves into!

True, but it's not like those new jobs are going to be available immediately. I mean, Kamei might be able to wait for 12 years, but Watanuki's days are numbered, I would imagine. He looks old as hell.

I agree with Chris_B, if the result of this is that all of those idiots joining Kokumin Shinto end up ruining their careers, then this whole exercise will be well worth it. Might as well throw in Suzuki Muneo's Shinto Daichi as well. That someone appealing a bribery conviction can even be considered a legitimate candidate is insane.

Brad: Muneo is a rank amateur compared to all the guys who basically got off scott free over the Lockheed scandal. In terms of pure corruption todays crew is but a shadow of its former self.

Marxy: its not a question of interest since thats not normal in any bank. Retail banking here evolved around and fills completely different roles than banking in the west. Remember that not too long ago retail banks were part of the zaibatsu. Employees were paid into captive accounts and the money was kept available for group company use. Also IIRC there was somewhat of a taboo around the very concept of interest since it was connected to usury.

My opinion of Horie improved thanks to his appearance on this NHK program about growing economic disparity in Japan:

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/print/features/media2005/fd20050410pb.htm

All the talk of pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps was pretty hard to stomach (couched in an excess of katakana words like "challenge," always a sure sign of a snow job), but Horie-mon got points from me for strongly opposing unequal rewards for regular workers and temporary workers doing the same work. The emerging two-tier system rewards nothing but connections and dumb luck.

I hope that they take these ideas further, and don't just apply Anglo models in a knee-jerk fashion. Might Japan find success by improving its social services and making its workforce more adaptable in emulation of the Danish "flexicurity" model?

Chris, thanks for the finance insights! Interesting to learn that Japanese banks started as places to keep your scrip. Even today it seems to be common practice for employers to tell foreign employees which bank they should use, I wonder if the same is true for Japanese staff?

They had a thing in the Japan Times where they said, "Postal Reform, what do you think?" and everyone was like, "oh those poor inaka post offices." But really that's totally unrelated. The real question is government control of the largest bank in Japan. To be honest, it might be just as well to keep control of the actual mail delivery services in the government's hands. But the idea of the government controlling this huge as bank, and then tying it into the post office for no reason, is just absurd. It needs to be cut loose. Here's hoping Koizumi can do it.

Of course, before that the Japan Times had a What Do You Think about global warming. All the respondents said, we gotta do something about the hole in the ozone layer.

They are masters of kankei nai.

This morning on "Tokudane" they had Kamei and Horie live via satellite from Hiroshima and it was hilarious to see just how slanted FujiTV is. In this case, it was a double bias against the reformist Koizumi and against Horie. They were pitching softballs at Kamei and letting him get away with statements like "this election is not about postal privatization, it's about what he (Horie) can do for the people of Hiroshima". Then they'd ask Horie things like "So, is this your first time in that part of Hiroshima?" trying to paint him as some sort of know-nothing out-of-towner.

Great stuff. I wonder if Rupert Murdoch is taking notes...

Not unlike US politics, the heartstrings politics of the poor heartland japanese folks are dominating the news here... and like the US, that's not the biggest issue at hand.

But there's still good reason not to privatize. Those who have put their money into postal accounts have for some reason or another chosen to do so, and to avoid the private banking system. Whether it's the confidence, and convenience of knowing that the post office will always be there, and not far, or just an accumulation over time of uninformed saving, people put it there on purpose, and have always been free to move it.

If the government needs reform, it needs reform, but taking the worlds largest bank and putting it in the stewardship of the highest bidder, or tightest crony is not how to fix things. To stop the government from pulling from the postal service write a law that forbids that, not a law that takes a public institution private to the likely detriment of the public.

You should be for greater decentralization which will give more local communities more direct political control.

Is that really your considered analysis of what privatization means?

"There can be no doubt that the Soviet collapse represented an advance for human freedom. Yet since then Russia has suffered rising levels of absolute poverty and large increases in inequality of wealth, and it seems clear that the economic "shock therapy" administered on Western advice just after the Communist collapse contributed to these developments. Price decontrol wiped out small family savings, and by limiting the benefits of privatizing government industries to a small number of insiders produced a marked concentration of wealth. As a result, large parts of the Russian population have been excluded from the benefits of the global market. Other policies could likely have avoided or mitigated this outcome."

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18154

From that same article, an important point, I think:

"Neoliberals interpret globalization as being driven by a search for greater productivity, and view nationalism as a kind of cultural backwardness that acts mainly to slow this process. Yet the economic takeoff in both England and the US occurred against the background of a strong sense of nationality, and nationalist resistance to Western power was a powerful stimulus of economic development in Meiji Japan.

"Nationalism fueled the rapid growth of capitalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and is doing the same in China and India at the present time. In both countries globalization is being embraced not only because of the prosperity it makes possible, but also for the opportunity it creates to challenge Western hegemony. As China and India become great powers they will demand recognition of their distinctive cultures and values, and international institutions will have to be reshaped to reflect the legitimacy of a variety of economic and political models. At that point the universal claims of the United States and other Western nations will be fundamentally challenged, and the global balance of power will shift."

momus: glad to see you have retaken the Red Herring Trophy back from alin. What point exactly were you attempting to support with those two quotes?

nate: actually the govt is proposing to keep a large part of the two entities actually related to things postal, the mail delivery and the physical assests (post offices, trucks, bikes, etc). Also what I did not address is that one reason postal savings have been attractive is they have offered accounts which bear some interest over long terms. IIRC they have/had some very popular 10 year bearer accounts which paid something back at the end, a product not offered by any of the retail banks.

If any of yall followed those Economist links you might have also noticed that Postal savings are not regulated like traditional banks, they are under a completely different system. I'm still not clear if the privatization proposal will address that deficiency or not. That would make a big difference as to the long term impact of any privatization plan.

Also its interesting to see how the DPJ might go about this, they propose to cut the guarantee level of postal savings accounts by 50% hoping that will be a means to the same end. Unfortunately that will probably end up creating more fraud (its common here for people with lots of cash to open multiple accounts using false names to try and cheat the taxman) as well as forcing mid range savers to put more money into retail banks where they get less benefit for long term deposits (see above). This might even cause mid range savers to either put any savings above the guaranteed levels into either false accounts or just "hide it under the futon" thus reducing overall liquidity.

I don't get what point Momus is trying to make - other than some vague "Capitalism is bad" statement. The one quote above was about developing economies and Nationalism, which has nothing to do with contemporary Japan.

We should remember that both socialism and capitalism strive for the same goal of optimal allocative efficiency - just with different ideas on how to reach that end. Japan's development state model of intentionally sustaining inefficiencies raises salaries through raising prices, which just decreases purchase power for everyone now that the high-growth era is over.

The truth of the matter is that I'm not sure that any system at this point can keep income inequality low in the First World. High-paying, low-skill jobs are gone across the board. Increasing job training programs, redistributive tax structures, and better funding for the education system would have an effect. I'm not sure that giving bureaucrats control of a huge pile of money in the form of postal savings automatically leads to socialist-level income equality.

seems to me that giving beuraucrats control of a huge pile of money leads to bridges to nowhere and paving the rivers and hills which leads to kickbacks, gangster enrichment and the stifling of non construction related industries.

vote mr. HORIE for prime minister and give HIM the big pile of money. i'll bet it all on one pony...one that will probably come in. bonanza time, full bubble recovery, LV bags for everybody!
best,
r.