Protests at the APEC Summit this weekend in Honolulu included a sign that said, “APEC(equals)Capitalism on Steroids.”
Our movement for the return of our abducted children is linked, intimately, with the objectives of the American and Japanese governments at this meeting and in the relationship between the two states in general. Don’t miss the connection.
The protesters are right in asserting that the APEC meeting is a negotiation among elites for global financial positioning. Yet, while granting economic arrangements to those elites, scant to zero attention is paid in the continuance of these relationships between states to the direct violation of human rights in Japan. There is a dearth of awareness or comment regarding millions of violations of the human rights of children and parents by the Japanese State, where the judicially sanctioned abduction of kids from their parents occurs brutally, systematically, and with startlingly alarming frequency.
APEC is about international agreements and global governance of the financial realities of a system that is now very much in crisis. Yet, embarking on a strategy of denial that makes a mockery of the instruments of international civil relations, Japan says it will sign the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction by spring of 2012 with reservations that are specifically designed to undermine the treaty and prevent a bizarre Japanese abnormality from emerging into the light. 2.2 million Japanese judicial child abductions stand unresolved today; and by extension, Americans are kept entirely unaware that 4000 American children are victims of Japanese International Parental Abduction. And currently, the situation of these children’s protections is rapidly worsening as all indications are that the Japanese have no intention of altering the status quo. Parental kidnapping is legal, sanctioned by the Japanese state and judiciary, and will continue to be so regardless of whether or not the Hague Convention receives a signature in Japanese.
This is the circumstance that the U.S. Department of State, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the banking and financial elites of both countries do NOT want brought into public view, for fear that such knowledge could disturb latest strategies of accumulation of power and wealth that each hope to enact throughout the region in the years immediately ahead. In an era of crisis in the regime of accumulation, in which both states have stumbled gracelessly into a legitimation crisis as well (the U.S. for 35 years of income redistribution to the wealthiest that has finally plunged the country into economic depression and large scale, long term joblessness; Japan for the collusion and corruption revealed in the aftermath of the tsunami and nuclear radiation crisis and inability to reform even to aid in the long-term survival of its citizens), that is a serious matter indeed to the elites of Japan and the United States.
The interests of the wealthiest are all that was on the agenda at the APEC Summit in November 2011. Our President and economic elites in both countries want only for such interruptive concerns as human rights abuses and mass child abduction to quietly go away. Will Americans not ask that these economic agreements be contingent on the return of our children, and respect for fundamental human rights in Japan? Will Americans not object to Japanese violation of our sovereign rights as well, the right to protect and raise our sons and daughters?
See the story here, and please post comments if you can; tell the world about the abduction of our kids! All eyes are on them NOW!
For Rui Boy 