Japan's concrete-industrial complex
Tetrapods™ are concrete monstrosities ostensibly built to protect Japan's coastlines from erosion and tsunami waves. On March 11, 2011 when tsunami waves rolled ashore plowing through everything in their path, how effective were all those concrete constructed tetrapods lining Japan's coastline at slowing down or dissipating the tsunami waves? From the many video clips that were observed of the tsunami waves, it looked as though the tetrapods made very little difference in deflecting or even slowing down the tsunami waves. Yet, this was one of the major reasons for constructing tetrapods.
After the tsunami waves that came ashore on March 11, 2011 Japan's LDP party through Taro Aso and Aso-Lafarge, became the power behind Japan's concrete political economics. In 2014, Aso Cement had US$310 million in sales. The LDP party should be renamed to the Liberal Concrete Party, or maybe the Liberal Tetrapod Party, thanks to Taro Aso ("Francisco"), the partial owner of the biggest concrete conglomerate in the world, Aso-Lafarge. Taro Aso is Japan's deputy prime minister and the finance minister, which places him on top of all of Japan's public works projects.
It goes without saying: Japan's record public debt is now almost entirely funneled into the concrete industry. "Abenomics" (Tetrapodnomics?) while suppressing the news media about the possibility of corruption in the execution of large reconstruction projects, is all about concrete. No wonder the LDP passed a secrecy law last year. Japan's government and the LDP don't want savvy investigative journalists - not that there are any in Japan - to be covering this and other stories related to this relationship between the LDP and the concrete industry.
Humongous Tsunami Devours Building instantly - Never before seen footage
Hillary Clinton paid US$31,000 a year to sit on Lafarge's board
What readers may not know is that Hillary Clinton was on the board of directors of the mob outfit Lafarge cement when they shifted from burning natural gas to burning toxic wastes to heat their cement kilns. Toxic waste incineration synthesizes thousands of new chemicals that do not occur in nature. Many of them, especially those based on chlorine, are known as "bioaccumulators" and are disruptive to mammalian life forms. Burning hazardous wastes with petrochemicals and chlorine creates new "products of incomplete combustion" that are among the most toxic substances invented during the 20th century, including dioxins and furans, which are carcinogenic, mutagenic and teratogenic. Taro Aso must feel rather comfortable joining up with another mob outfit. For Hillary Clinton it was a work-free job for which she was paid US$31,000 a year to do basically nothing.
When Hurricane Katrina swept through New Orleans in 2005, Lafarge North America had leased the barge ING 4727 owned by Ingram Barge Company. A witness to the levee being breached said that he "saw the Lafarge-leased barge hit the levee and caused the breach" after it delivered a load of cement. Ever since the devastation from Hurricane Katrina – alleged to have been intensified and steered using weaponized weather technology – there has been plausible speculation that the levee was sabotaged.
What the Japanese are essentially doing is building a "castle" out of concrete tetrapods™ around Japan with some estimates suggesting more than 50 percent of Japan's coastline is now covered in concrete barriers including tetrapods. The construction state returns with a vengeance through the Liberal Concrete Party (formerly the Liberal Democratic Party) with the planned construction of a 400 kilometer (250 miles) long concrete wall on the Pacific side of Japan with some sections planned as high as 4 and 5 stories. Japan's version of the "Great Wall."
What has people scratching their heads wondering, is why the backlash on building a new stadium for the 2020 Olympic Games with no equal backlash on this huge 400 kilometer long wall planned on being built? Is this because the Liberal Concrete Party wanted to take attention away from this huge public expenditure and instead get everyone riled up over a new stadium which came in at ¥155 billion? This planned concrete wall has an estimated total cost of ¥820 billion yen, or US6.8 billion. And as it turns out, many of the Japanese killed on March 11, 2011 ignored warnings to evacuate the coastline. Will they be any less inclined to evacuate if this wall is built? In Taro Aso's policy speech given in 2008, guess he calls this "coexisting with nature" by burying it in concrete.
Japan's Tetrapod™ fetish
Observing Japanese insular psychology at work combined with its "concrete fetish" surrounding Japan in concrete destroying 100s of kilometers of beautiful ocean shoreline is bewildering. The fear psychosis becomes apparent observing signs on concrete manufacturing plants that read: "Concrete is here to protect the people." It's what shoguns would tell Japanese peasants: "I'm here to protect you with this new castle."
Taro Aso insulted millions of Japanese when he suggested that "the elderly are an unnecessary drain on the country's finances." In a corporate quietly run fascist mercantile state like Japan, that comment makes perfect sense, especially since millions of Japanese workers (producers) didn't create these giant mercantile corporations running Japan. "Francisco" also referred to elderly people no longer able to feed themselves as "tube people." According to assho, sorry, Aso, if you're a "tube person", by having a My Number the Japanese government can better determine your condition to potentially have your feeding tube (social welfare) disconnected because the government is paying your pension and benefits.
When the economic efficiency of the "tube person" outlives its economic value being bed ridden feeding off a tube for months, by having that My Number the Japanese government can more efficiently monitor your status. Taro Aso being the minister of finance and a powerful leader of the LDP (Liberal Democratic Party), wields a tremendous amount of influence in the Japanese government. Whenever Taro Aso is seen returning from abroad in one of his expensive suits with his hat and scarf on, people can't help but have the impression he is more of a gangster than anything else.
Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe recently "reshuffled" his cabinet probably largely due to criticism, but Taro Aso remained as Japan's minister of finance. What would be worth noting is to learn where Taro Aso and his LDP insider cronies decided to further advance the My Number system from as a continued economic and financial policy change? Taro Abe while attending the G20 Summit in Germany in June 2015, discussed with other central bank representatives, Japan's financial condition and Japan's enormous debt obligations on social welfare. Explains why Taro Aso made the comments he did about Japan's elderly and what he referred to as "tube people." Hurry up and die so that pensions and social welfare payments don't have to be paid. What precisely is Taro Aso advocating when this statement was made about him: "In 2001, he [Aso] said he wanted Japan to become the kind of successful country in which 'the richest Jews would want to live.'" What is that supposed to mean? One has to wonder too who Japan's dynastic elite really work for when it is considered Taro Aso was trained at the London School of Economics (LSE), and Japan's current governor of the Bank of Japan, Haruhiko Kuroda, was educated at Oxford.
Then he goes on to make other comments suggesting that "Japan should imitate Nazi Germany tactics?" You can't have it both ways, Mr. Aso. Using "Nazi Germany tactics" while at the same time making Japan a place where "rich Jews would like to live?" What, are you nuts? Especially since Japan has some of the strictest immigration laws of almost any other country? The real reason why Aso made this comment about making Japan a place where "rich Jews would want to live," is because he is known for admiring Nazi political strategy and wanted to mask this fact. Taro Aso's family has been extremely well connected throughout the past 100 years or so, having connections to Japan's royal family. That leads some to think Taro Aso has access to information on how the LDP party has been maintained in power as a consequence of everything that has transpired over all these intervening years since 1945 related to Japan's Operation Golden Lily?
Taro Aso's family has an interesting history. Papers that were compiled in 1946 by Aso Mining, documented that "101 British prisoners, 197 Australians and two Dutch were put to work digging coal for Japan's war effort in 1945." And that "an estimated 10,000 Korean slave laborers were also put to work in the company's mines during the war." Aso Mining has since become Aso Cement, and was headed by Taro Aso himself during the 1970s. Taro Aso's father, Takakichi Aso, was the chairman of the Aso Cement Company and a close associate of Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka. Taro Aso's grandfather, Takichi Aso, founded Aso Concrete in about 1933. The Aso wealth has derived entirely from concrete. A dynastic Japanese family formed in concrete. Taro Aso's younger brother, Yutaka Aso, is now chairman of Aso Concrete and Iwao Aso is the vice president. No compulsions here about him not speaking out against slave labor is there? Which he never did after much was published on this history.
More efficiency so let's get that My Number online as soon as possible despite a television news broadcast the other morning heavily criticizing the My Number system. To not think for a moment that Taro Aso isn't an "elitist Nazi-admiring bureaucrat" learning his economic policies from elitist power structures in other countries is to miss what is going on here. Of all things too, Taro Aso claims to be a devout Catholic (confirmed as Francisco). That sends all kinds of red flags up for people considering the Nazi "rat lines" out of Germany run by the Catholic Church and its historical connections to fascism. The Aso family motto: "Moderation is a virtue, idleness is a sin." Sin? What's wrong with a little idleness? The Japanese people have been tied to work and their corporations in a dysfunctional social-cultural pattern. So, if one in five Japanese aren't involved in the concrete and construction business that's a sin?
Here is a clip of Taro Aso meeting with Chuck in Britain. Chuck's family are Prussian, not "British" in case folks do not realize this fact by now. And if anyone thinks Chuck isn't a depopulation-promoting elitist oligarch think again.
Prince Charles meets Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso ("Francisco")
During the previous debates about whether or not Japan should reform its pacifist constitution to allow for Japan's re-militarization, and to allow Japan's military to deploy outside of Japan, Taro Aso stated that: "Japan could learn the technique Nazi Germany used to change the Weimar constitution." Taro Aso stated clearly: "Why don't we learn from their [Nazi Germany] tactics." What other "tactics" do you have in mind Mr. Aso? That's interesting since it was the Nazi technique to have numbers tattooed on concentration camp slave laborer's forearms. The next thing we will see are signs hanging from train station entrances in Japan only in Japanese "Arbeit macht frei." Back then IBM developed the punch card to keep tabs on people. Today its much more accurate and efficient with computer software capability.
Welcome to Japan: Arbeit macht frei (働けば自由になります)
The underworld of the yakuza are inextricably linked to the LDP party. And what's with this "party" thing? Are we invited to some kind of a concrete pouring party sponsoered by Taro Aso's concrete mixers? These aren't isolated incidents either of the LDP being connected to Japan's underworld. As the former prime minister, Taro Aso peppered his speeches with yakuza terminology. He referred to the act of "earning money" as shinogi — a term almost exclusively used by yakuza to describe their (illegal) methods of money making. Not only the actual connections between yakuza and politicians, "but the way they speak and think also make it seem like they are two sides to the same coin."
Japan is building a massive structure of concrete practically around the entire country with which means this is all going to be paid for out of tax revenue. The corruption involved here where politicians meet with construction company owners behind closed doors is just as ugly as these concrete tetrapods, burying beaches in concrete at remote locations where most Japanese never see. And the locals who live in these remote locations where jobs are scarce, are too afraid to speak out against this concrete assault on their beaches. It just seems that the "fetish for concrete" has gone to extreme levels in Japan.
Taro Aso ("Francisco"): Mafia Don or Finance Minster?
Taro Aso who is the finance minister and through the LDP, are justifying a record expenditure in public works projects by using the fear of tsunami waves and government responsibility to protect people. The money that will be spent will be used to build in some locations up to 20 meter high concrete walls along many parts of Japan's coastline, and dumping more tetrapods everywhere, including on virgin beaches that no one knows about. After searching for information on the "concrete-industrial complex" as one blogger described these circumstances in Japan, a man who had experience running a public works construction company described his experience:
"I ran a public works construction company in Tohoku for thirteen years and can say virtually without exception, large public works contracts (say, over $10 million US) are accompanied by an obligatory 3% kickback to the politician who uttered the Voice of Heaven, blessing the company chosen to get the work. My guess is that the seawall project has long been chopped up into dozens of segments, with a Voice of Heaven chorus of politicians waiting in the wings for their chance to sing. Since they are counting on their kickback to fund the next election, any bureaucrat who endangers their segment had better watch his back."Just as Japanese have this seemingly odd fixation with robots and technology, this same "odd fixation" can also be seen in the construction industry which has built hundreds of thousands of four-legged tetrapods. One Japanese art student best explains this "odd fixation": "I think the attraction of tetrapods lies in their contrast with nature. The material of a tetrapod is concrete and its shape is formal, which can’t be found in nature. Also, it is manufactured by pouring concrete into molds. The tetrapod is a symbol of artificiality. Setting hundreds of tetrapods on a big scale that matches that of nature is simply art." Hundreds of thousands of ugly concrete tetrapods™ burying kilometer after kilometer of beaches and shoreline disfiguring nature is "art?" For a people who have been known to historically admire nature and go out of their way to climb mountains to be in natural surroundings, this sure is an odd circumspection. The average Japanese could probably care less providing their only rebuttal to this concrete castle being built around Japan with "shoganai" (it can't be helped)."
"Castle walls" built of Tetrapods ringing Japan's coastlines
This is the inexplicable behavior of Japanese where more than 50 percent of Japan's shoreline are stacked up with concrete tetrapods. The astonishing thing about all this is that the Liberal Concrete Party have not used any long term environmental impact studies to determine what the long term consequences will be to the environment and the continued loss of sand on beaches. It is now known that sand beaches are disappearing because of tetrapods™. Coastal sand is disappearing because almost all rivers and estuaries in Japan have been "sealed" in with concrete walls and tetrapods preventing sedimentary flow to the ocean.
What is Japan's answer to stop this continued erosion? More concrete walls and tetrapods. And there is speculation that impact studies or studies on erosion that have been done, are probably by professors in Japan's universities connected to the LDP. So any of their studies that are released, or even read by the public for that matter, will recommend more concrete barriers to stop the erosion. Furthermore, as another researcher noted:
"To call erosion a 'problem' is to take a human-centered view of natural coastal changes. Beaches exist in a 'dynamic equilibrium involving four factors: the supply of sand to a beach; the wave energy (related to wave height); sea-level change; and the location of the shoreline,' state Pilkey and Hume."Most of the sand comes from the rivers as sediment, but if nearly all of Japan's rivers and estuaries have been lined with concrete walls, large artificial rock beds and tetrapods, this reduces sedimentary flow into estuaries where waves push the sand up onto shorelines creating beaches. The continued concrete buildup in Japan is circumventing thousands and thousands of years of natural flows and patterns of rivers.
Jeff Kingston, in his 2010 book Contemporary Japan, wrote: "The nexus of massive construction projects, bureaucrats, politicians, businessmen and yakuza are as revealing about Japan as they are about Italy and Russia." Kinston once told Bloomberg News that "nothing enriches yakuza bosses like construction, given that during the 1990s, the public-works budget was on par with the US Pentagon's budget and remains quite high despite huge cutbacks." Another writer, Alex Karr, wrote Dogs and Demons: Tales from the Dark Side of Japan, which will always be one of the more sobering looks on a deeper level into Japan's dark side, described the construction industry and concrete manufacturing with this eye opening analysis:
"In the early 1990s, construction investment overall in Japan consumed 18.2 percent of the gross national product, versus 12.4 percent in the United Kingdom and only 8.5 percent in the United States. Japan spent about 8 percent of its GDP on public works (versus 2 percent in the United States — proportionally four times more). By 2000, it was estimated that Japan was spending about 9 percent of its GDP on public works (versus only 1 percent in the United States): in a decade, the share of GDP devoted to public works has risen to nearly ten times that of the United States. — The colossal subsidies flowing to construction mean that the combined national budget devotes an astounding 40 percent of expenditures to public works (versus 8 to 10 percent in the United States and 4 to 6 percent in Britain and France). — by 1998 it (the construction industry) employed 6.9 million people, more than 10 percent of Japan's workforce–more than double the relative numbers in the United States and Europe. Experts estimate that as many as one in five jobs in Japan depends on construction, if one includes work that derives indirectly from public-works contracts. — In 1994, concrete production in Japan totaled 91.6 million tons, compared with 77.9 millions tons in the United States. This means that Japan lays about thirty times as much per square foot as the United States. — By the end of the century…shoreline that had been encased in concrete has risen to 60 percent or more."The tetrapod concrete construction business has been so profitable to the Liberal Concrete Party insiders that special construction equipment has been engineered and manufactured to more efficiently move thousands of tetrapods onto the beaches and estuaries of Japan. And don't expect the LDP to allow journalists to report on this "concrete-industrial complex" with any aggressiveness worthy of good investigative journalism either; because the secrecy law was passed preventing journalists from speaking out. "Abenomics" is about everything looking rosey and tetrapod – stacked future – and spending a lot of money.
Japan Tetrapods
The tetrapod laying using hydraulic grab "F3C" (product by TAIYU)
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