JAPANESE FINANCE MINISTER MURDERED BY SUICIDE?

The day before the 11h anniversary of the September 11 attacks, 73-year old Japanese Finance Minister Tadahiro Matsushita was found hanging in his home:

Japan Banking Minister Matsushita Found Dead at His Home

Now, if you're like me, your antennae are immediately pulsing with suspicion over this one. My intuition is telling me this is another case of "murder by suicide," because Matsushita was part of the new Japanese government's attempts to get to the bottom of the plundering and corruption of that country by the decades' long oligarchical rule of the Liberal Democrats. As I have blogged elsewhere on this site, the circumstances of the political changes sweeping Japan have jeopardized the decades' long relationship between the Liberal Democrat oligarchy of that country and its American counterparts. Shortly after that party lost power, the new Japanese government made moves on the international political stage that indicated Japan was attempting to patch up the rift with China caused by the war, and, you'll recall, there was even talk of a visit by Emperor Akahito to Beijing, an unprecedented step. The Japanese Government also around the same time quietly began suggesting that it was time for the US to remove its base from Okinawa, a request, you'll recall, that received nothing less than a veiled threat from US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. A little later we had Fukushima.

The corruption of the Liberal Democrat Party of Japan could only conceivably be matched by the Dummycrooks and Republithugs in this country. It was, for example, an LDP Prime Minister, Tanaka, who came up with the now infamous case of the notorious "57 bonds", bonds that - to put the story very succinctly without getting into the details (the details would take all month to blog on a daily basis!) - were deliberately issued and designed to be peculiar,different than normal Japanese Government securities, and this design included "errors" of grammar, and so on.

The reason for this strange circumstance? Very simple: so Tanaka and his cronies could later claim the bonds were fake or counterfeit if their holders should prove to be "uncooperative", or, alternatively, redeemed only at a sharp discount. Now, if this is sounding vaguely familiar, that's because it is, for the same pattern, you'll recall, was suggested in all those Bearer Bonds Scandals that I've been blogging about here for over a year. Dig a little further into Tanaka and you'll discover that he and his LDP cronies created these "57 bonds'(so-called because they were issued in the then-Emperor Hirohito's 57th year of his reign) as a means to swindle bond holders twice, when a previous scheme of bonds that had come due, and which Tanaka's ministry of finance could not pay. The bond-holders were persuaded to swap their legitimate government bonds for the "57s", which could, because of their design peculiarities, be subsequently denounced as fake.

Dig even further into Tanaka, and you'll discover some interesting connections to Richard Nixon, and a hidden system of finance... but that, of course is another story.

For now, the official story is Minister Matsushita committed suicide. You can bet he didn't, and that this story bears watching...

See you on the flip side...