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Saying ‘yes’ to disclosure
Deal with the big fish |
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Death of a Kennedy
Swiss bank accounts
Back to the hostel
Samajwadis without direction
Health
Rare campaign battle hits Japan
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Saying ‘yes’ to disclosure
It
augurs well for the judiciary that the Supreme Court judges have now agreed to disclose their assets. Undoubtedly, it will boost transparency and accountability in the judiciary and enhance the people’s respect for it. The fact that all 23 serving judges led by Chief Justice K.G. Balakrishnan agreed at Wednesday’s meeting to make their assets public shows that public respect for the judiciary was important in a healthy democracy. The decision comes after months of public debate over the issue. The chorus for transparency in the judiciary became shrill with the media, the public, parliamentarians, former CJIs and three sitting high court judges themselves favouring asset disclosure. The Tribune has been consistently maintaining in these columns that leaving a few, most judges are known for their integrity and character. It was thus unclear why some of them were feeling shy of being transparent. The demand for asset disclosure should be seen in the light of reports of misconduct and corruption among some judges in high courts and lower judiciary. These seem to have eroded the judiciary’s fair image and reputation. As most judges are believed to be honest, their reluctance to disclose assets had created an erroneous impression among the public that they had something to hide. Worse, the recently aborted Judges’ (Declaration of Assets and Liabilities) Bill, 2009, was an anomaly in an age of transparency and the Right to Information. Clause 6 of the Bill sought to keep such information out of the public domain. No wonder, MPs opposed the Bill tooth and nail and the Centre promised to bring forward a new legislation in deference to their wishes. Today, judges exercise more power than any other organ of the state and, therefore, they need to respect the principle that they are accountable to, besides their conscience, the Constitution and the people. It is this logic that guided the apex court to order candidates contesting Parliament and Assembly elections to declare their assets while filing their nomination papers. In a democracy, the people have the right to know whether ministers, civil servants and judges have acquired assets disproportionate to their income. None can seek immunity from this. The judges’ decision to disclose their assets is welcome. They ought to follow it up by accepting the Right to Information Act — at least on the administrative side of the judiciary. Enough safeguards can be provided in the RTI law to ensure that its independence does not get compromised in any way.
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Deal with the big fish
When
Dr Manmohan Singh advised the CBI and Anti-Corruption Bureaux officials on Wednesday to “go for the big fish”, implicit in the advice was the lament that right now, it is only the small fry which get caught. The sharks are so ruthless and mighty that they tear the net into pieces. This malaise has become so serious that the Prime Minister’s words must be put into action right away. The wholesale purveyors of corrupt practices have not only made India an unattractive destination for investment, they have also hampered its economic growth. Every year, India figures embarrassingly high on the list of corrupt countries where it is difficult to do business. Corruption also creates an iniquitous environment where the honest and the week stand to suffer. The Prime Minister has a clean reputation and has the immaculate moral authority to launch a cleansing operation. That will be his abiding contribution to the betterment of the country. Naturally, the clean-up has to start from the top echelons of the system. If the rich and powerful get away with it, those on the lower levels of the pyramid are also emboldened to pull the strings and bend the law. Many politicians are notorious for not only being unscrupulous themselves but also patronising others of their ilk. Many bureaucrats, even at senior levels, tend to collaborate with them. The ripple effect spreads corruption all around in the country. The stink of corruption is pervasive. The big fish can be netted only by the agencies which are scrupulously honest and conscientious themselves. Unfortunately, there are very few which enjoy that kind of clean reputation. The CBI itself, which is the country’s premier investigation agency and has the capability to deliver, is at times spoken in derisive terms when it has to deal with the big fish. The Prime Minister’s advice that its men must do their job without fear and favour should be taken by them seriously. By doing so they will earn the people’s respect and gratitude.
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Death of a Kennedy
With
the death of Edward Moore Kennedy late on Tuesday at 77, the last of the charismatic Kennedy clan passed into history. Senator Tedd Kennedy, as he was popularly known, will be remembered for his impressive achievements in health care, civil rights, education, immigration and many other areas. In the words of President Barack Obama, he was one of the most “accomplished Americans”, whose efforts led to the availability of new opportunities to millions of people. One of most distinguished beneficiaries of his work during his nearly 50-year-long career as a Senator is President Obama as he has himself admitted. The fabled Irish-American family has often been visited by tragedies. The most grievous setback that it suffered was the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. Another brother, Robert, fell to the assassin’s bullets in 1968 in the midst of his Presidential campaign. The eldest of the four brothers, Joseph Jr, lost his life during World War II. The shocks that Ted suffered only strengthened his resolve to do as much for the people as he could. He believed that the life ahead was more beautiful than already spent. Tedd Kennedy tried to enter the White House in 1980, but lost the race for Democratic nomination to President Jimmy Carter. In fact, his Presidential hopes were belied in 1969 when a car he was driving skidded off a bridge, killing a young woman — the Chappaquiddick scandal. He was first elected to the US Senate when he was just 30. He occupied the Senate seat vacated by his brother John F. Kennedy before becoming President and went on to serve in this capacity for the longest time in US history excepting two Senators. Tedd, a pragmatic thinker, was gifted with extraordinary negotiating qualities. His speeches were always full of stirring imagery. This was the reason why he came to be called the white-haired Lion of the Senate. His illustrious career came to an end with brain cancer taking its toll.
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If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars. — Arthur Hugh Clough
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Corrections and clarifications
Despite our earnest endeavour to keep The Tribune error-free, some errors do creep in at times. We are always eager to correct them. This column appears thrice a week — every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. We request our readers to write or e-mail to us whenever they find any error. Readers in such cases can write to Mr Kamlendra Kanwar, Senior Associate Editor, The Tribune, Chandigarh, with the word “Corrections”
on the envelope. His e-mail ID is kanwar@tribunemail.com. H.K. Dua,
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Swiss bank accounts Switzerland has reportedly told the Indian authorities that it would not give them names of the Indians holding secret bank accounts in its banks while its largest bank, UBS, has agreed to give the US government names of about 4,500 US citizens who have accounts there. This is in addition to the 250 names it agreed to give in February 2009. Switzerland is one of the possibly 77 tax havens in the world where rich individuals (from all over the world) keep their money from the prying eyes of their governments. The money kept can be from illegal activities (like drug trafficking and corruption) or from legal activities to evade taxes. Though tax evasion itself is an illegality but this is not considered a criminality. Switzerland considers tax evasion to be a minor matter and can prosecute employees of any bank giving information about individuals indulging in tax evasion. Money from criminal activities may be routed to these accounts via shell companies or dummy companies — money laundering. Money is transferred from one account to the other and the previous account is closed and so on so that it becomes difficult to trace where the money originated from. Such activity is facilitated by bankers themselves, by legal firms and chartered accountants operating in tax havens. To make the task of tracing the origin of the money more difficult, money is sent from one shell company in one tax haven to another in a different country (as in the case of Bofors). Major banks facilitate such activities apparently by maintaining hundreds of companies in tax havens. Given this complexity and difficulty in tracing individuals who are evading taxes, how did the US succeed in extracting a concession from the UBS bank of Switzerland? The short answer is hard work by the IRS (the US government tax department) and the clout enjoyed by the US in world affairs. The story begins in mid-2008 with the indictment of Mr. Bradely Birkenfeld. He was a private banker acting on behalf of Swiss banks. He accepted that he was servicing clients of these banks in the US. This was illegal for a variety of reasons, including encouraging the clients to violate US tax laws. In the year 2000, the IRS established the Qualified Intermediary (Q.I.) programme, which required foreign banks to get US entities who were their clients to file various forms to show their incomes. To overcome the consequent difficulty, the Swiss banks found ways of hiding the identity of the true owners of accounts with them through shell companies in other tax havens. Mr. Birkenfeld, according to the court papers, helped in facilitating all this, moving assets (like bringing diamonds in a toothpaste tube), issue of credit cards for facilitating the use of funds, showing money transferred to clients as loans by Swiss banks and so on. He accepted helping a real estate developer evade $7.2 million in tax and hiding assets worth $200 million. Mr Birkenfeld was apparently one of the many private bankers used by the Swiss and others to get business from wealthy US clients. Since the UBS name cropped up, the US government next charged a top UBS executive with helping 20,000 US individuals hide $20 billion from the US government. As the case progressed, the entire UBS bank was threatened with indictment. To stave off prosecution, UBS in February 2009 agreed to pay the US government $780 million and reveal the names of 200 to 300 US citizens holding secret accounts. The US government next filed a case to get the names of an estimated 52,000 wealthy individuals who have accounts in UBS. The Swiss tried every trick in the trade to stall, like, saying this would lead to a diplomatic row or it would threaten the stability of the financial system in the world and so on. The US judge went to the extent of asking the US government whether it was willing to seize the assets of UBS and put them under another management. The bank argued that revealing the names would be violative of Swiss criminal law. The US government announced a voluntary disclosure scheme, which allowed people with illegal accounts abroad to come clean by paying their taxes due and accepting light penalty. However, the judge did not consider this adequate and maintained pressure on UBS. Given UBS’s large operations in the US and the revelations being made by those using voluntary disclosure, it had to give in. An agreement was signed last week to give the US government between 4 and 5,000 names. The details are not fully available but perhaps the biggest tax evaders who most likely have operations in many tax havens have already shifted funds out of not just UBS but also out of Switzerland (there have been reports to this affect). Liechtenstein, another tax haven, has come to an agreement to clean up its act. In 2007 a disgruntled banker revealed the names of those having accounts there. Governments have started prosecutions based on the data made available. The Indian government, which was initially reluctant to take the data being made available to it by the German government, finally accepted it in March 2009 (under public pressure) and apparently preliminary investigations have started. In the US, as more and more data is coming to light, prosecution is accelerating. On the basis of revelations, Mr Schumacher and Mr Rickenbach were indicted on August 20, 2009, in Florida on grounds of helping US entities to hide assets and evade taxes. Jeffrey Chernick, John McCarthy and individuals referred to as J.E. and E.D. are mentioned in the indictment as those receiving “help” from these gentlemen. The pace of prosecution is likely to increase as more data becomes available through voluntary disclosure and revelation of names by Swiss banks. In India’s case, when some information is received, it is suppressed or the investigating agencies spoil the case so that prosecution is rare. From time to time, information does become available, like in the case of Jain havala or Bofors but this has never been systematically pursued or the case has been weakened. In India, the rich and the powerful have the clout to prevent justice from being done. In advanced countries this seems to be far less. A perusal of the revelations in the US show that banks with operations in tax havens or originating in tax havens are indulging in all kinds of fraud in other countries. In India (given our laxity) they would be doing at least as much as has been revealed in the US. Given this, the least the Indian government should do is to tighten control over such banks operating here. Further, all foreign banks should be made to give undertakings along the lines of Q.I programme. They must also be asked to give information about their subsidiaries and operations in tax havens so that their operations become transparent. While the black economy in the US may be larger in absolute terms, as a percentage of its GDP, it is small (5 per cent) compared to that in India (about 50 per cent). Thus, India is losing far more due to the adverse impact of the black economy. Further, the US receives funds from all over the world, given its lucrativeness, but India loses capital. So, a country that is short of capital has been exporting capital to the tax havens and rich countries. Every time there is demand to unearth the funds lying abroad there is a chorus, obviously orchestrated by the wealthy, that this would be futile. So, while we need to do more to tackle the menace, we do far less than we can or what the other countries are
doing.
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Back to the hostel It was my first visit to Boys’ Hostel Number 5 recently at Panjab University, after I left it in 1968 to join the media. At that time I was a student of PG Diploma in Journalism (JD). I thought things must have changed during the last four decades. It was not so. The hostel, known as Lala Lajpat Rai Hostel, still had the same old look except that a small office building had come up in the once-spacious parking area. We used to park our bicycles there. The old bicycle has made way for luxury cars and motor cycles on the campus now. In 1968 very few hostellers had a scooter, motorbike or a car. As such, hostellers having a bicycle like me were much in demand. I still remember that one of my classmates who retired as Urdu Editor of a news agency, always looked for me when he intended to go for a movie at Kiran or Jagat theatre or have a stroll at the Sukhna Lake. I did not choose a specific day for my visit. I had to attend a media seminar at a nearby hall on that day. After lunch I took a chance to visit my hostel. I found very few students there as many of them were away for their summer vacations. Fresh crowd was expected during the new session. It was lucky enough to have an old “khandani” Hercules bicycle gifted to me by my father. The bicycle was strong enough to bear with our adventures. It could be a part of any vintage cycle rally now. As I entered the hostel I did not find any security guard there to check me except a temporary barrier. The scorching heat had made the security guard to take shelter under a nearby green tree. Without waiting for him I entered the hostel. It took me another two minutes to reach my old dormitory (No. 31) at the first floor of Block-II. I wished to meet the present occupants of the room and give them a surprise. But I found the room locked. Names of the present occupants along with their mobile numbers were engraved on the door. The door looked old and worn out as if it was not painted for years. During our days we had a solitary cracky telephone at the hostel warden’s office which rarely worked. I could remember the wonderful days spent there. I had my room-mate from Haryana who was a student of MA (Economics). We have never met again. Those were the days when the Hostel No. 5 mess was known for its “rajmah-chawal” speciality and weekly treat of “kheer”. I was told that the same menu is followed even today. While coming back I glanced at the rear balcony of the room. A few broken chairs were stacked there and some posters pasted on the window. We used to enjoy our evenings while sitting in the same balcony and discuss scenic beauty of the campus. As I was moving out, I met two young PG students from Himachal. They appreciated me for my adventure and offered me some fresh roses plucked from a flowerbed as a token of love and regard. I wished them “good luck” and “goodbye”. While driving back to my home the popular Urdu couplet “Abke hum bichre to shayad kabhi khawabon mein milen, jis tarah sookhe hue phool kitabon mein milen” echoed in my ears. The roses from my hostel were still fresh with me like the sweet memories of the gone-by
days.
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Samajwadis without direction The Samajwadi Party’s three-day national convention at Agra has thrown up more uneasy questions than it has answered. The party’s ideological contradictions and the catch-22 situation it faces with regard to the Congress have pushed it into a blind alley both nationally and at the state level. Technically the state’s main opposition, the Samajwadi Party, at the moment does not know where it is going. It did not win any of the four bypolls. Still at its Agra National Convention it could decide nothing but deferring the “jail bharo” against the BSP government’s misdeeds to January 2010 and the decision to withdraw support from an “ungrateful” UPA to some opportune time in future. Emerging as the party winning the maximum (23) seats in the Lok Sabha from UP, the SP finds itself far from a bargaining position in New Delhi, thanks to its refusal to do business with the Congress before the elections and its short-sighted Fourth Front misadventure in the run-up to the elections. Its political wilderness at the national level can be gauged from the fact that it can only sulk at being cold-shouldered by the Congress, dub its attitude as ‘opportunistic’, criticise Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his government’s policy and just about threaten to withdraw support. Mulayam Singh Yadav knows that his party and not the UPA government would be the ultimate loser if the SP chooses to withdraw support at the moment. Hence the decision to defer the announcement to an “opportune time” in future. The party’s political isolation at the national level started more than a year ago when it uncharacteristically decided to bail out a tottering UPA government on the nuclear deal issue, undoing years of labour of cobbling together a non-Congress, non-BJP Third Front. The Left Front, stunned by this sudden U-turn, decided to rub salt into Mulayam’s wounds by announcing his archrival Mayawati as a likely candidate to head a potential Third Front government. However, the SP’s honeymoon with the Congress proved to be short-lived reportedly due to Amar Singh’s pushy corporate agenda that Dr Singh was in no mood to carry out as the deal was already safely in place and his government secure. To the Samajwadi Party’s huge disappointment the nuclear deal did not figure as a poll issue and its great contribution to save the UPA government remained an unsung saga, giving it no political mileage during the polls. The bitter feud over the sharing of seats in Uttar Pradesh also misfired. The breakdown of talks helped the Congress that won 21 seats on its own. The SP was patronisingly giving them only 17. The other political blunder was the formation of the so-called Fourth Front along with Lalu Prasad Yadav and Ram Vilas Paswan. Obviously meant to needle the Congress for more seats and fight an imagined anti-incumbency by appearing to be at a political distance before the electorate cost all three most dearly. Ram Vilas Paswan could not even retain his own seat. Lalu Yadav was cut to size and lost the chance to be accommodated in the Union Cabinet. Mulayam’s SP, despite winning 23 seats, was nowhere in the reckoning at the national level. Having their back to the wall would have normally strengthened the SP and made it more determined to strike back. However, another critical decision taken by the top brass just before the general election ensured a more complete undermining of its ideological credibility. The decision was to rehabilitate former BJP leader and the chief architect of the Babri demolition, Kalyan Singh, who had been thrown out of the BJP for the second time for his anti-party activities. The Samajwadi Party, which till then had worked on the magical combination of a Yadav-Muslim vote bank, had already become dubious in the eyes of its Muslim voters. Even before the Muslim voter could recover and re-evaluate the party came the shock of Mulayam Singh Yadav shaking hands with Kalyan Singh, describing him as a “friend”. While Kalyan did not officially join the SP, his son Rajvir Singh was even made the party national general secretary and campaigned extensively during the general election. Clearly, Yadav’s argument that an enemy’s enemy was one’s friend and thus Kalyan Singh, determined to bury the BJP, was a natural ally did not cut much ice with his Muslim voters. What had, in fact, forced the SP supremo to join hands with Kalyan was a realisation that his Muslim vote bank was shifting. He had realised that even seats in his home turf of central UP, popularly called the “potato belt”, were shaky without a realignment of Yadav and backward caste votes (specially Lodhs) over which Kalyan Singh has a considerable hold between the stretch from Kanpur to Bulandshahr. The gamble paid off in a limited sense. Kalyan entered the Lok Sabha supported by the SP as an independent and Mulayam managed to win along with his son Akhilesh Yadav at two places. The heavy cost that the party paid elsewhere for this “friendship” was there for all to see. All senior Muslims, including one of its founders Mohammad Azam Khan, opposed the move and left after an ugly public confrontation. None of the 10 Muslims fielded by the SP during the Lok Sabha election could win. The Muslim-Yadav alliance in UP is clearly over. No Muslim leader of any consequence has any say in the SP any longer. Abu Azmi and Ahmad Hasan, now being projected as the new Muslim faces, have never won an election. Post-general election, it became pretty clear that the SP has to reinvent itself to survive and face the twin onslaught of the BSP and the Congress. This was possible only by adding backward castes votes to the Yadav base vote. The Muslims clearly could no longer be counted upon as they had substantially shifted to the Congress resulting in their record victory during the general election. The BSP is continuously nibbling at the SP’s support by filing politically motivated cases and by poaching their sitting MLAs reducing the SP’s strength in the Vidhan Sabha from 96 in 2007 to 88 at present. The only way for Mulayam and his party is to move ahead. For him there is nothing to gain by flogging a dead horse of a Yadav-Muslim alliance that has outlived its utility. The family has also taken over the party like never before. Despite more deserving candidates in some cases Mulayam is the leader of the party in the Lok Sabha, his cousin Ramgopal holds the post in the Rajya Sabha, brother Shivapal Yadav is now the Leader of the Opposition in the UP Vidhan Sabha and son Akhilesh heads the party in the state. The party’s new contours have clearly emerged at Agra. Kalyan Singh, the Lodh leader openly shared the dais with Mulayam — both smiling in the camera adorning the typical red Samajwadi Party cap. Kalyan’s joining the party now remains a mere formality. Just as the sobriquet Maulana Mulayam is a thing of the
past.
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Health People
may be receiving too much radiation from medical tests whose value has not been proven, researchers reported on Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine. The two biggest contributors to the radiation exposure are CT scans, which use a series of X-rays to produce a three-dimensional image of the body, and heart perfusion scanning to measure blood flow through the arteries leading to the heart. In that test, radioactive technetium-99m is injected into blood vessels and its progress through the heart is monitored with external radiation detectors. Radiation is known to cause cancer, typically years after exposure. By some estimates, medical testing radiation contributes 2 percent of all cancer cases, but experts fear that it may be higher in the future as more and more patients are exposed to these relatively new procedures. They are also concerned because increasing numbers of tests are being performed on younger people, which allows more time for tumors to develop, and on women, who normally live longer than men. Some studies have suggested that the growing number of CT scans being performed results in part from ownership of the machines by physicians, who may view them as a new profit source and prescribe unnecessary tests. There is also a growing incidence of whole-body CT scans in which physicians check for any signs of potential disease in healthy individuals. Such scans were not included in the report because they are not covered by health insurance. More than two-thirds of Americans underwent at least one such imaging procedure in the three years covered by the study, reported Dr. Reza Fazel and colleagues at Emory University School of Medicine. The researchers studied medical records of 952,420 adults between the ages of 18 and 64 who were insured by United Healthcare plans in Arizona, Texas, Florida and Wisconsin. Between 2005 and 2007, 655,613 of the adults underwent at least one procedure that exposed them to radiation. The mean dose of radiation was 2.6 milliSieverts (mSv), a relatively low dose. A dose of 3 to 20 mSv is considered moderate, from 21 to 50 mSv is considered high and a dose over 50mSv is considered very high. Federal regulations put the maximum annual safe dose at 50 mSv. Cardiac stress testing was the procedure that exposed patients to the highest radiation levels, an average of 15.6 mSv, and accounted for 22 percent of all radiation exposure. CT scans of the abdomen, which typically produce about 8 mSv, accounted for more than 18 percent of exposure. A mammogram — a single X-ray — produces about 0.4 mSv. If the findings are extrapolated to the entire population, more than 4 million Americans are receiving a dose greater than 20 mSv each year, the authors said. “It is important to note that we are talking about radiation doses that are incurred in one year,” said Dr. Brahmajee Naliamothu of the University of Michigan, senior author of the study. “Cumulative doses over a lifetime may be much higher.” About 79 percent of women in the study had at least one exposure to radiation, compared with 58 percent of men. Mammograms accounted for only a small part of the difference, Fazel said. Dr. Michael Lauer, director of the division of prevention and population sciences at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, said in an editorial in the same journal that clinical trials of the efficacy of such testing should be conducted before their use is expanded. Despite the wide use of nuclear perfusion for cardiac imaging, he noted, there is no evidence that it increases survival.n —
By arrangement with LA Times-Washington Post
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Rare campaign battle hits Japan Veteran
voters in Takasaki have rarely witnessed a gloves-off election battle — or political campaigning of any kind, for that matter. In this regional transportation hub of 350,000 residents, confident incumbents from the nation’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party had only to list their names on the ballot virtually to guarantee a landslide victory. But all that has changed in this city 90 minutes north of Tokyo, the home district of four previous prime ministers. This year, former Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda faces the political battle of his life to win re-election to the lower house of the Diet, Japan’s parliament. His biggest hurdle does not appear to be his opponent — a former television reporter and political novice — but voter discontent. “The political winds are blowing against us,” acknowledged Tatsuo Fukuda, the candidate’s son. “This is my father’s most difficult election in the last 20 years.” In the run-up to Sunday’s balloting, support for the Liberal Democrats has plunged at an unparalleled rate nationwide, prompting what many predict will be a historic shift of power. After 54 years of nearly uninterrupted rule, the party faces widespread unrest — if not a downright revolt — among voters who say they want change at any price. Prime Minister Taro Aso, known more for his bumbling use of language than for his leadership, has seen his approval rating dip below 20 percent. Many voters view the Liberal Democrats as bureaucrats who remain out of touch with a changing Japan. Riddled with scandal and mismanagement, voters say, the party has provided few answers to Japan’s sagging economy. Japan’s public debt is double its gross domestic product, one of the highest such percentages among developed nations, economists say. “The Japanese are ready to give the LDP a well-deserved sayonara,” said Jeff Kingston, Director of Asian Studies at Temple University Japan. “Everyone thinks they are dead-enders with no fresh ideas and no creative policies. “The misery index is soaring, unemployment and suicides are up, wages and bonuses are down, and everyone is feeling insecure about their jobs and futures.” The situation has provided a rare opportunity for the Liberal Democrats’ main opponents, the Democratic Party of Japan, led by President Yukio Hatoyama — the Stanford-educated millionaire grandson of a former Liberal Democrat prime minister. Hatoyama has promised to cut wasteful spending and improve the daily lives of residents in the world’s second-largest economy. His party is gaining ground not only in large cities such as Tokyo and Osaka, but also in rural areas, the Liberal Democrats’ traditional power base. Some experts predict that the Democratic Party might win more than 300 seats in the Diet’s 480-member lower house. Experts agree that if the Democratic Party is elected, the first few months will be critical. “First impressions matter a great deal in politics,” said Kingston of Temple University Japan. Naoto Nonaka, a political scientist at Gakushuin University in Tokyo, said he believes the Democratic Party is ready to lead and downplayed speculation that party officials might seek a more independent foreign policy from Washington’s. “The alliance between the U.S. and Japan is too critical for the security arrangement of both nations,” he said. “It will not change.” The Fukuda family is one of Japan’s political dynasties: Both Yasuo Fukuda and his father, Takeo, served as prime minister. Yasuo was voted into the job two years ago by the lower house of the Diet. A year ago, however, he unexpectedly quit, blaming his departure on an obstructionist Democratic Party. And now, if there is any time that a political nobody could defeat a former prime minister for his Diet seat, this is
it. — By arrangement with LA Times-Washington Post
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