 Javier Millay has taken over as president of Argentina and has begun what he calls shock therapy, what is on his agenda. A fundraising scandal has rocked Japan and a cabinet reshuffle is said to take place. How is the 500 million yen case affecting the government? This is the daily debrief. These are your stories for the day and before we go any further, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Argentina's new president Javier Millay has delivered on his promises a drastic set of measures that will cut spending and is most likely to cause suffering to the poor and working class has been introduced. Now the new president and his ministers say that it is painful but necessary but the real issue is a particular far right wing approach to economic aspects which has failed time and again. We go to Zoe Alexander to understand what these measures are and what impact they'll have on the people. Zoe, thank you so much for joining us. So what's been happening since Millay took over a raft of proposals being announced? Well, finally the perhaps unexpected for many did take place this Sunday on December 10th Javier Millay from the Liberty Advances Party was sworn in as president of Argentina. A move many thought they would not see occur but as we know he did win by a 10 point difference in the second round of the presidential elections back in November. So he had made a lot of what some might call crazy promises when he was campaigning for president. Javier Millay is again a far right libertarian. Some of his key promises in the area for example of the economy which was one of the areas that he was most emphatic about was saying that he would dollarize the economy, close the central bank and enact harsh austerity measures. So in this first three days and this first couple of days of Javier Millay's presidency we saw the economy minister Luis Caputo one of the few remaining ministers under Javier Millay make a televised address and announced a series of measures to deal with the economic crisis facing Argentina and there are about 10 of these and all of them essentially involve hiding public spending and an approach of kind of making it worse before anything will get better. So amongst the measures that were announced by Caputo are that for example work contracts of state employees that have been working for less than a year are not renewed. All public works of the government so bridges public infrastructure projects are not renewed and they're suspended. The number of ministries is reduced from 18 to 9 and the government secretaries from 106 to 54. The amount of money transferred from the central government to the regions the provinces is reduced. There is a reduction of subsidies for energy and transportation and importantly the exchange rate of the peso to the dollar is fixed at 800 pesos to the dollar. So there are a couple other of economic measures that were announced and I think what's important to highlight is that in Javier Millay's campaign the main message was that we're going after the political cast we're going after the corrupt, we're going after the rich we're going to really hit them where it hurts we're going to make Argentina for the people, the hard workers and what's interesting about all of these measures is that it actually does kind of the opposite of that these are all measures that will directly impact working people people who are not long-term involved in the government who are not from this kind of made up idea of this political cast as Javier Millay calls it. These are the people who are already most vulnerable it's going to impact state employees, some of the only people working class people who have stable jobs and salaries and of course the reduction of subsidies for energy and transportation is brutal because this is the daily needs of everyone in Argentina this means that transportation taking the bus, taking the subway can be affordable the price in Argentina is extremely, extremely, extremely affordable and economic because the state subsidizes this transportation taking this away again it's trying to cut state spending trying to reduce the foreign external debt etc. pay off this debt have less state spending but this is absolutely going to hurt working people and it in no way actually comes close to touching those who are established economic power, those who are established political power and could you also elaborate a bit more on how these proposals will affect the common people and what has been the kind of response from working class actions from those who are going to be affected? Well I sort of mentioned it before the impact on working people of these measures it has been received with a lot of trepidation I think a lot of people were waiting to see exactly what Millay would really move forward with again as I mentioned before and we've talked about in other episodes he has such a radical and anti-people proposal he promised during his campaign harsh austerity he promised many many things and I think that what we're seeing is that he is going to follow through on this harsh austerity some people call him a Macri to point out but obviously with a completely different presentation but it's interesting to note that Macri is deeply involved in his government and helped convince major sectors of the right and some people would consider center right to actually get behind Millay he's been helping a lot of the ministers are those who are close to Mauricio Macri and so I think that in that perspective we can see this as a continuation of this very very intense neoliberal policies which again saw devastation for the Argentine working people pushed into poverty the poverty rate today in Argentina is 40% of the population living below the poverty line this jump from what it was before occurred under Mauricio Macri it maintained throughout the government of Alberto Fernandez and I think that it's likely that we'll see this increase during Mauricio Macri during sorry Javier Millay's presidency many of the few middle class working class people who had not fallen below the poverty line are likely to now because for example those who work with different state programs state governments and different sort of public projects are all going to be impacted by these cuts when it when it when they says cutting ministries cutting secretaries that means the salaries and the jobs of all of those you know thousands of people who and hundreds of people who are employed there when there's less money from the federal government going to the provinces that means provinces will also have to reduce their spending which again is largely hiring people for these social programs that many of them have this is really going to push people further towards the edge further into economic precarity and we've seen that all of the major trade unions in Argentina have already announced their opposition to these measures I think we're going to see just as we're seeing maybe what will be in Macri to Pono in terms of the neoliberal policies I think we're also going to see that in terms of resistance the years under Mauricio Macri saw tremendous level of mobilization by the trade unions by mass organizations by workers of the popular economy and I think that is definitely going to reactivate during these times organizations have pledged that they're not going to be afraid they're not going to be scared by such a by policies which hit them directly by this discourse of hatred we know that Javier Millet also has called communists left-wing people people who fight for social justice fighting all sorts of things that they're terrorists or they're criminals that they're all this that the other thing there have been you know not only these economic policies but really direct threats to them however organizations said they will not be intimidated and they will continue fighting and especially this time where it's most important to keep organizing and fighting for the most vulnerable the most economically precarious the workers of this popular economy and so many different other sectors in Argentine society which will be directly impacted again by what could be hyperinflation already this established currency devaluation and so many other measures which really hit the pockets of Argentine people thank you so much Zoe for talking to us we'll come back as Millet will definitely be coming up with more such proposals a fundraising scandal is exposed deep divisions within Japan's ruling conservative liberal Democratic Party or the LDP in a third cabinet reshuffle to be put in place by Prime Minister Fumio Kishida heavyweights of the LDP's most powerful clique are expected to be dropped as ministers nevertheless while the internal blame game over the scandal of missing 500 million yen continues the party is facing the worst in anti-incumbency in more than a decade as their popularity has gone below 20% Anish has more details Anish thank you so much for joining us a 500 million yen scam so what is this fundraising scandal all about Yes Prishan so the fundraising scandal in short is basically how LDP leadership especially those who belong to the former Abe faction which is usually called the Abe faction have used fundraising tickets and you know unaccounted for fundraising money and distributed it among themselves so what happens is in the in the Japanese electoral system you can't really fundraise as individual politicians it has to be through party fundraisers and the party can actually distribute money among their members now what happens here is that like a particular faction especially is being targeted as being you know not targeted but squared off as the ones to be blamed and they have used fundraising tickets and like unaccounted for money to actually secure largest portion of the funds to themselves now in the larger political context if you look at the amount of money 500 million yen is not that much it translates to about 3.7 million dollars it's not that much of a huge money but it clearly shows that there are loopholes and there are possibilities of politicians exploiting the existing system on the other hand if you look at the LDP's inner politics it pretty much opens up the nature of the kind of factionalism that exists within the party LDP has always been a party of factions it was never really that unified as a political faction it just brought in different factions ranging from the far right to you know the conservative liberals and it is pretty much the convergence of these factions that they run the current the most powerful faction obviously is the Seva Kai faction which pretty much was led by Abe before and it was known for the one that actually led LDP to push the boundaries of the pacifist constitution in Japan and also pushed for the most you know most fundamentalist kind of neoliberal market ideology into the state policies and it is this faction that is currently being held accountable for and it is pretty much all the ministers four ministers that are being you know that have been removed from the cabinet reshuffle they are the ones who are you know the heavy weights pretty much the collective leadership of this entire faction and so they are the ones who are right now being held but it actually exposes problems within other factions as well right now So what does this mean for the Kishida government which is also facing anti-incumbency you know how is he sort of dealing with it so the story by the time this episode goes out more ministers might have quit as well sir Yeah so it was already understood that this scandal is going to hit the party at large the manner in which we have already seen opinion polls polling at less than 20% some going as low as 17% which is possibly the lowest in decades but definitely the lowest since the LDP came back to power in 2012 after a small interregnum and in this period this is probably their worst and if there is an election very shortly the LDP will not really survive and that has clearly shows how people have you know grown tired of the current Kishida government it has been quite mainly a whole lot of issues it has not clearly shown that level of leadership but most importantly it has been riddled with one controversy after the other despite the recent victories in different elections it has been pretty much ridden with multiple controversies beginning with the unification church controversy that again the same faction was involved in to the current set of faction and obviously the absolutely terrible mismanagement of the economy of you know the cost of living crisis the growing employment crisis the growing suicide crisis even which is making a comeback in Japan right now and all of these are continue to be by the current government and this is pretty much the final nail in their coffin in many ways and that is how everybody looks at it because there is literally there is going to be they will take a lot more to just you know replacing better ministers in the cabinet for the government to shore up any kind of support at this point because even you know the more conservative core constituencies are actually feeling disillusioned by the current government so this is the most difficult part but what might happen is that this government might double down on their militarism might double down on their you know ultra nationalist policies and that is going to be bad for the geopolitics of the region as well because obviously it's already on the path of militarizing itself over the next five years the current set of crisis are going to make it you know go even harder on the many of these promises and perhaps that is not going to be good for both you know the politics domestically and the politics abroad Anish thank you so much for explaining that to us that's all we have in today's episode we'll be back with a new episode tomorrow in the meanwhile do is it our website peoplesdispatch.org follow us on all the social media platforms and if you're watching this on YouTube please hit that subscribe button