Prime Minister Taro Aso is rich – should anyone care?
Fifty people gathered at Hachiko yesterday to hold a protest march directed at Prime Minister Taro Aso’s very expensive home in Shibuya-ku. The protesters, who organized the event on the internet, had not applied for a permit, so police blocked them when they attempted to start their march. Three people were arrested – one organizer and two protesters who had assaulted police officers.
The protest has come at a time when the Japanese press is giving a lot of attention to the wealth of politicians. A few days ago, it was the Asahi attacking the Prime Minister Taro Aso’s habit of dining at expensive hotel bars and restaurants (paying the bill with his own money, not official government funds). Now Mainichi is printing articles about the wealth of Aso and his cabinet:
Members of the Cabinet, including Prime Minister Taro Aso, own an average of 141.28 million yen in family assets, the government has announced.
The figure is 24.33 million yen more than the average of the Cabinet of his predecessor Yasuo Fukuda.
The average amount of personal wealth that the prime minister and his 17 Cabinet members have in their own names came to 118.29 million yen.
Of the 18, Aso is the second wealthiest with 455.48 million yen in assets he owns in his own name and the names of his family members he lives with, following Internal Affairs and Communications Minister Kunio Hatoyama, who is worth 764.6 million yen.
Mainichi states that Aso might be the second wealthiest Prime Minister in Japanese history. That sounds like he is ultra rich, but his 455 million yen ($4.8 million) fortune isn’t quite as big as the wealth of other first world leaders such as George W. Bush ($15 million), Helen Clark ($8 million), Kevin Rudd ($37 million), and Silvio Berlusconi ($9.4 billion).
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If it is his money that he would spend on expensive hotels and so on,I think it’s ok.It’s his policy that matters,not his wealth,right?
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The policies of a corrupt leader who was born into wealth or stole it are very different from the policies of an honest leader who worked their way to where they are and understand the challenges most people face everyday.
How much money a county’s leader has is not the issue. It’s how they got that money. That has everything to do with they way they run their country. George Bush is a fine example of that.
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Depends on how much of the money was legitimately earned.
“The protesters, who organized the event on the internet, had not applied for a permit, so police blocked them when they attempted to start their march.”
Requiring a permit to protest is such an odd policy to have operating in a democratic system. It’s basically, “Let’s fight the system as soon as the system tells us it’s OK to do so.”
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I bet the guys in the black trucks don’t go and get permits.
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actually, they do. and its all pre-rehearsed.
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The fact that Aso and many other politicians are children and grand-children of other politicians is much more disturbing than their financial status.
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yeah, uyoku can drive about carte blanche and have their way without any hint of permits…. as soon as you start calling out the rich people for their opulent lifestyles on the back of the working class, then you feel the rich peoples army (police) cracking down….
same BS of the rich ruling and the workers slaving.
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Oh really!!!!!!!!!!Who cares about that. Do you know some poor politicians around the world?
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I don’t. So that’s why I generally don’t trust any politicians.
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Brasil’s President Lula and Sweden’s ex-PM Göran Persson come to mind.
The fact that Aso is rich is not a problem in itself, but the fact that in many countries many politicians are born into fabulous wealth reflects a problem with those societies.
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ダビ,
Lula is not poor. His net worth is around 1 million (in brazilian reais).
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Again with the black-and-white polls!
As a number of other users have already pointed out, it really depends on how the money was earned as well as other contexts. If the wealth or the manner in which it was gained goes against the stances and proposals of said politician, I would say it matters. If a politician claims to be against, say, the tobacco industry but in fact earned millions of dollars working for a tobacco company prior to their term in office, red flags should be going up like crazy.
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How surprising, so few here has commonsense.
Personal wealth of a politician is a very important factor in voting.
Do you believe a politician who says, “I will work for the best interest of the middle class”, while he himself, his family and relatives and all of his friends are super rich?
By the way, you do not need a “permission” of police to walk to see the house of the prime minister from the public road. The arrest is pretty much politically motivated.
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It seems they were actually holding a demonstration without a permission, and that’s what has led to the arrest.
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Read the article.
“The protesters, who organized the event on the internet, had not applied for a permit, so police blocked them when they attempted to start their march. Three people were arrested – one organizer and two protesters who had assaulted police officers.”
No one was arrested because of demonstration without a permit. They are arrested because of “assaulting police”.
They did not need a permit to begin with. Police harassed the people, and then arrested them citing “assaulting police”. This is a good old folly routine of Japanese public security police.
The final touch is to release the statement like this to make people believe, “Oh, they are arrested due to demonstration without a permit”.
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Well, what the people should be wondering is why they need a permit to demonstrate in the first place. Japan does not have an article proclaiming free speech?
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I guess stereo has a better answer but anyway・・・
Japanese constitution guarantees the freedom of speech in the article 21, but when you organize march and rally in a certain place , you need to inform it to the police so that the police can control the traffic. And it is a report rather than a permit.
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Article 77 of Doro-koutsu-hou(Road Traffic Law) says that you need a permit of police when you have a festival, shoot a movie, or do some activities that extremely affect the traffic and that are specified by the local government regulation on the public roads.
Article 18 of Tokyo-to-douro-kisoku-kisoku (Road Traffic Regulation of Tokyo) specifies 9 such regulated activities on public road.
1. Festival and Parade
2. Advertising in eye-catching costume
3. Advertising by running an eye-catching car
4. Movie shooting
5. Broadcasting
6. Street performance
7. Fire exercise
8. Soliciting
9. Robot experiment
The police may argue that the people’s act was a parade. I disagree. It was the police that blocked the traffic, not the people.
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How the hell does the PM of NZ get $8 million? Isn’t that almost the entire GDP?
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