TR EMERITUS

PAP strongman Lee Kuan Yew has commenced on another European "tour" courtesy of Singapore taxpayers. The octagenarian Lee, who must be the world's oldest living MP and minister, will visit Moscow, Kiev and Paris from Thursday to Sept 25. During his trip to Kiev, he will meet its President and Prime Minister and also attend the launch of the Ukrainian version of his memoirs 'The Singapore Story', the Straits Times reports. At 87 years of age, Lee shows no signs of slowing down and continues to hog the limelight on an almost daily basis. Despite some disquiet among Singaporeans at his continued presence in the Singapore government, Lee has indicated subtly in recent media interviews that he is not quite ready to retire from politics for good. A month ago, Lee dropped a bombshell when he floated the idea of scrapping the retirement age altogether, sparking a massive outcry from Singaporeans. Using himself as an example, he said: “You work as long as you can work and you will be healthier and happier for it. If you ask me to stop working all of a sudden, I think I’ll just shrivel up, face the wall and just that.” In his latest interview with New York Times, he declared: “I know if I rest, I’ll slide downhill fast.” Who will want to retire if they can enjoy a multi-million dollar annual salary for doing "forecasting" and still get to travel around the world free? The total cost of Lee's latest overseas trip remains unknown and nobody should ask the sensitive question as the entire PAP system of governance is based on nothing but "trust"   Related articles: >> Lee KuanYew: Employment after retirement age must be for lower pay >> Singaporeans lampooned Lee Kuan Yew for his suggestion to scrap retirement age >> Lee Kuan Yew: No retirement age for Singaporeans   Please join our Facebook page here and invite your friends to do so to create awareness of the current affairs affecting Singaporeans. Please use our online web form to contact us.  Read More →

Friends, For a while now I have been perusing the alternative media in Singapore, and read with great interest the comments posted by readers on sites like The Temasek Review. I have also done my share of posting comments, sometimes agreeing, often disagreeing with many of the views on these websites. I thank the moderators of TR for allowing my comments to stand with minimal censorship. Freedom of expression is something that one should never take for granted. I love my country and I have always stood by the belief that governments will do anything the people let them get away with. At times my comments were harsh, but it was always made with that belief in mind. It got me thinking about one issue, ‘Can things in Singapore change?’ or is all this activity online simply a way to let off steam? I think things can definitely change, but some crucial things need to happen first. 1. Democracy is not a spectator sport It is the duty of every citizen to participate in the democratic process, and it doesn't start and end at the polling booth. It happens all the time. We should first take personal responsibility for the state of our government, that in many ways this is our creation. We, out of whatever motives, good or bad, voted and kept these people in power. From HDB upgrading to CPF topups, it came to a point where a mere 200 - 400 dollars was enough to make people vote the PAP in. They did not have to bribe us. We let trivial and insignificant matters determine who we vote for.  We sold our principles willingly and we should take responsibility for that. We stopped caring for each other in our drive to better ourselves. We let the disadvantaged suffer because they told us we were the elite and in a meritocratic society, hard work will bring success. We never questioned them. When prices went up, we accepted it as inevitable. When jobs were lost, we accepted it as part of globalisation. It resulted in us being reduced to the status of spectators, so much so that they openly told us that if we want to participate in politics we're either with them or against them. We chose to not participate. This needs to change. We need to take back the democratic process. They are not our masters, but our servants. We pay their salaries. We chose them to represent us, not to rule us. We are not a fiefdom but a democratic society founded on the noble principles of justice and equality. No one is superior to the 'lowest' amongst us, no one is inferior to the 'highest' amongst us. We need to remember that. Democracy works only when the people, from the garang guni man to the President participates in it.  Change only comes when we take personal responsibility for our problems. 2. We need to stop being afraid We did not challenge them because of many reasons, fear, apathy, selfishness, greed, whatever. We let the PAP become powerful. Evil acts do not always require evil people. Sometimes it just requires the good people to remain silent. When they came for Francis Seow, Chia Thye Pow, JBJ and CSJ, we remained on the sidelines. Where were the protests? Where was the strong public condemnation? We let them trump up ridiculous charges against some of our most able men and women, thus ruining them or losing them to other countries and we remained silent. For example, it took a 75 year old British man to highlight the draconian unfairness of the mandatory death penalty. Even today, when he is being persecuted we continue to remain silent, save a few brave souls. In a democracy, everything in the public sphere is our business. We made them powerful by our fear and apathy. We have reached a point where a simple number on a voting sheet is enough to scare us. What use is all the wealth in the world we don't even have the freedom from our own petty fears? 3. No one owes us a living Governments are not genies. The Singapore we want is not going to be built by the government but by us. We keep talking about how our forefathers sacrificed so much to build Singapore, now it's our turn but we are too comfortable to make sacrifices. Our forefathers were ordinary people too, and if they could do it what is stopping us? We expect our governments to solve problems and that is a fair expectation but when the government fails who is affected? It is us. We have to pick up the slack and find solutions ourselves instead of waiting for them. They will never see things our way because they are very comfortable in their multimillion dollar homes and pensions for life. They have and will always be like that. It's always socialism for them, capitalism for us. The question is what are we going to do about our condition? Why depend on them when you know they will come up short? These are people who can't even prevent our premium shopping region from drowning, in a country where it rains 300 days a year anyway! We need to find our own solution to our own problems because waiting is of no use. 4. We're Singaporeans, not "Chinese, Malays, Indians and others" Regardless of whether we became Singaporeans yesterday or were born here, we are Singaporeans and should identify ourselves as that first. We owe it to ourselves and to each other to always remember that. I am not saying we should forget our racial identity, nor am I saying we should pooh pooh other peoples' racial sensitivities, but we should think of ourselves as Singaporeans first, and look out for other Singaporeans, regardless of their race, language, or country of origin. Every country has good and bad people, and we should not let our own views come in the way of being decent to our own countrymen. They will always try to find ways to divide us, by race, language, new- and old-citizens. We should not fall into their trap. 5. Always remember they do not always know better than us It is normal to expect our elected representatives to be smart, but they are human beings too. They are not divine and very often know far less than they pretend to. These past three weeks we have all witnessed the government at its prevaricating best, trying to appease everyone with half-baked measures and knee-jerk responses. They have shown us clearly that far from being a 'perfect' government, they are barely competent. More and more of them are running out of excuses and simply exhorting us to stop expecting perfection. That in itself is a sign of incompetence. They have got away with too much for too long, and it's time for us, as citizens to hold our representatives accountable. They are not our masters, they are our servants. Always remember that. Our country needs us today to hold our elected representatives accountable. We need to stop looking at our governments as something external to us, something to be feared and obeyed without question, but as something we created to ensure our success as Singaporeans. The government of Singapore is the creation of its people and it’s time we remembered that and took it back from the clutches of any political party or ideology. It is a representation of our hopes and desires for us and our children. While we are mindful of and appreciate the contribution of our forefathers and leaders (including those in the PAP) we need to move on. Parties will come and go, but the government of Singapore must always belong to the people of Singapore, not the other way round.   - A Singaporean, father, husband, son and human being  Read More →

Even as most of Asia cheer the return this year of robust growth, the region and the rest of the world, continue to keep their eyes peeled on America - where the economic indicators streaming out each week have been less than sparkling. The US, meanwhile, is looking beyond GDP (gross domestic product) as the defining yardstick of how well the country and its people are doing. It's not that the world's biggest economy is abandoning the universal indicator of economic prowess anytime soon. Mr Lazear: 'Anything we can do to get better measures is fine,' But efforts are underway by a non-profit, non-partisan organisation called The State of the USA (SUSA), under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences, to launch a 'key national indicator system' that would 'help Americans assess the progress of the United States for themselves'. The idea is to develop scores of alternative measures - around 300 - on factors such as crime, energy, education, health, housing, infrastructure, the environment, and the economy, that collectively would be a comprehensive report card on how the country has fared over time. Globally, SUSA is hardly a new initiative, of course. It's but the latest in a wave of ventures over the last couple of decades to go beyond the GDP statistic as the measure of a country's well-being. Implicit in these initiatives - ranging from the genuine progress indicator (GPI) to, at the national level, Bhutan's gross national happiness index and France's Sarkozy Commission - is a sideswipe at the GDP metric. Even as national policies just about everywhere live or die by the GDP statistic, it has also long been known that many of the activities that boost GDP - thus adding 'positively' to a country's performance - actually do nothing for the people's welfare. Pouring resources into flood allevation or fighting a war; cleaning up after a typhoon or tsunami; building more highways and adding to urban congestion and pollution, for instance. In 2007, the European Commission and European Parliament, along with the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the World Wildlife Fund and the Club of Rome, started a 'Beyond GDP' campaign to look into new ways to calculate economic output and track progress. Their September 2009 report suggested, among other things, the creation of quality-of-life and well-being indices, as well as indicators on environmental sustainability to measure the full effects of pollution, and an inequality metric that takes into account various social disparities in everyday living. All in the name of an 'international initiative' to measure the 'true wealth and well-being' of nations. French president Nicolas Sarkozy, on his part, seemed to be on a one-man mission to get the world to shift focus on measuring economic production to measuring people's quality of life. Critics said that it was because GDP figures made France look bad. The bluechip task force of big-name economists that Mr Sarkozy assembled - his Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress - produced, after 18 months, a veritable treatise on the subject. But they thought that the problem lies not so much with the GDP indicator itself as with the way it is used. Still, the bottom line is - value 'quality of life' rather than mere production, by taking into account income, consumption and the intangibles generally termed social capital. America is now also on the bandwagon to try to track, via indicators that 'truly capture our essence as a nation', what 'really matters'. And one consensus is - what really matters is not GDP, even if it's the universal measure of economic performance and hence, as it were, national success. As the late US senator Robert F Kennedy said, most lyrically in a speech shortly after announcing his presidential candidacy in 1968: 'The gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America, except why we are proud that we are Americans.' Moved or not, economists (perhaps apart from those on the Sarkozy Commission, notably Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen) aren't about to ditch or dismantle the GDP measure. Asked for his views, labour economist Edward Lazear said he wasn't 'optimistic' that a better measure of economic output will emerge anytime soon. 'Anything we can do to get better measures is fine,' he told BT during a visit to Singapore in August. 'There are always refinements that we'll have to make. 'One of the big problems that we've had with GDP is that if you move from a manufacturing economy to a services economy, issues of measuring quality, issues of measuring how much of a particular service is being provided, are much more difficult than when you're talking about goods. So those are the kinds of technical issues that I think we need to focus on.' But 'thinking about some sort of lofty theory or notion of what should enter GDP' - economists do and have been thinking about such things, he said. 'We know how to deal with those things, we know how to value them. Usually, we convert them into a monetary equivalent. And my mentor, Sherwin Rosen, who unfortunately passed away a few years ago, he's the guru on how to take non-monetary aspects of production and translating them into money. So anything that we can do to move in that direction, I think would be helpful. I doubt that President Sarkozy is the person to do it. But I'm happy to see anybody who can make progress on that.'   Anna Teo    Read More →