Socialism & Ecology in Japan-Look back to '47

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>Deja vu for Japan. Starting in 1947, the US occupation forces in 
>Japan, allied with conservative business groups, powerful US 
>companies and suddenly rehabilitated Japanese war criminals, turned 
>its immense power on the Japanese trade union movement and its 
>communist leadership. First a general strike scheduled for Sept. 1 
>1947 was banned on MacArthur's orders. In the coming years, strong 
>unions were busted in the railroads, Nissan, the steel industry and 
>coal mines; then, with the Korean War 'boom,' those industries took 
>off and didn't come down until the 1990s. In 1948 a Detroit banker 
>named Joseph Dodge was brought in to force an austerity budget on 
>Japan that sharply reduced state spending and was almost a carbon 
>copy of what the IMF would later do in Asia, South America and 
>Africa. The CIA poured millions of dollars to create and sustain the 
>LDP, which remains the most slavishly pro-American ruling party in 
>the world. I'd say Japan already had its US-sponsored 
>counter-revolution.
>
>TShorrock

*****   The New York Times
July 1, 2000, Saturday, Late Edition - Final
NAME: Alfred C. Ulmer Jr.
SECTION: Section A; Page 11; Column 5; Foreign Desk
LENGTH: 385 words
HEADLINE: Alfred C. Ulmer Jr., 83, Officer In U.S. Intelligence Agencies
BYLINE:  By ERIC PACE

Alfred C. Ulmer Jr., a former official of the Office of Strategic 
Services and the Central Intelligence Agency, died on June 22 in 
Virginia Beach. He was 83.

Mr. Ulmer did intelligence work in the Navy in World War II and then 
joined the O.S.S. He served in Turkey, Egypt, Italy and Austria, 
overseeing intelligence operatives gathering information about the 
German military in North Africa and the Balkans, his family said.

The service was disbanded by President Truman late in 1945, and Mr. 
Ulmer joined the C.I.A. not long after it was founded in 1947. He 
retired in 1962 and received the agency's Intelligence Medal of Merit.

In his C.I.A. years, he was stationed in Madrid, Athens, Paris and 
Washington. He ran the agency's Far East operations from 1955 to 1958.

"God, we had fun," he said in a 1994 interview. "We went all over the 
world and we did what we wanted."

Thomas Powers wrote in his book "The Man Who Kept the Secrets: 
Richard Helms and the C.I.A." (1979) that in 1956 Frank Wisner, a 
senior C.I.A. executive, told Mr. Ulmer, "It's time we held Sukarno's 
feet to the fire."

At the time, Sukarno was Indonesia's leader. Mr. Powers wrote that 
the director of central intelligence, Allen Dulles, and his brother, 
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, "did not want to overthrow 
Sukarno exactly, just force him to suppress the P.K.I." -- 
Indonesia's large Communist Party -- "send the Russians packing and 
get on the American team."...

In a major covert operation in Japan, the agency spent millions of 
dollars in the 1950's and 60's to support the conservative party that 
dominated the country's politics for a generation, the Liberal 
Democratic Party.

Mr. Ulmer was born in Jacksonville, Fla., and graduated from 
Princeton in 1939. After the C.I.A., he worked in the financial
world.

His marriage to Doris Gibson Bridges ended in divorce. He is survived 
by a son, Nicholas, of Geneva; a daughter, Marguerite Ulmer Power, of 
Virginia Beach; five grandchildren; a brother; and two sisters. 
*****

Yoshie