Japan Press Weekly

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2007 June 27 - July 3 [POLITICS]

JCP chair denounces Abe Cabinet for its ‘four wrongdoings’

The Japanese Communist Party on June 29 held its Dietmembers’ meeting immediately after a no-confidence motion against the Abe Cabinet was submitted to the House of Representatives.

JCP Chair Shii Kazuo denounced the Abe Cabinet for committing “four wrongdoings” that go against the public interest and expressed his support for the motion.

One of the Abe Cabinet’s wrongdoings is its responsibility in increasing poverty and social disparities. The cabinet arbitrarily abolished the fixed-rate income and residential tax cuts in disregard of the JCP’s criticism and is now trying to escape from the mounting public criticism against the drastic increase in residential taxes by pushing false propaganda to describe it as if the total amount of income and residential taxes imposed on each taxpayer has not changed. “The cabinet policy of tax cuts for large corporations and tax hikes for the public is completely wrong,” Shii said.

Secondly, the cabinet began rushing to implement the adverse revision of the Constitution by forcibly enacting bills to adversely revise the Fundamental Law of Education, to upgrade the Defense Agency to Defense Ministry, and to establish the procedure for constitutional revision. Shii criticized the Abe Cabinet for embracing the real nature of pro-Yasukuni forces that has never reflected on Japan’s past war of aggression and began carrying out their scheme to enable Japan to fight wars abroad by revising the Constitution.

The Abe Cabinet is also pushing through a bill to dissolve and privatize the Social Insurance Agency only to make it impossible to solve the pension problem on the government’s own responsibility. Pointing out that the government and the ruling parties have just come to acknowledge the validity of the JCP proposal to send 100 million pension account holders their pension premium payment records, Shii said that the dissolution of the Social Insurance Agency will close the door to the solution of the pension issue.

The JCP chair pointed out that the cabinet’s fourth crime is that it has destroyed parliamentary democracy by forcibly enacting those adverse bills. He criticized Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, the head of the administrative branch of the government, for exercising the worst type of “leadership” by instructing the legislative branch to make such outrageous moves.

Shii closed his speech by saying, “Let us make every effort to give a severe verdict on the Abe Cabinet with the JCP’s advance in the upcoming House of Councilors election.” - Akahata, June 30, 2007