TR EMERITUS

Back when Singapore was still a developing nation, life on a general basis was affordable and national identity was strongly fostered among the people. In the population of 2.5 million before 1990, and everyone can afford a decent and pleasant standard of living, trust was deeply rooted into the PAP government because they indeed knew what was best back then. Today in 2010, can we still say PAP still knows best? Let's take CPF for example. Gone were the days of high CPF interest rates during Lee Kuan Yew's times where interest rate peaked at 6.5% even when Singapore was still a developing country. But today in a fully developed nation context, our CPF's interest rates has been stuck at a pitiful 2.5% ever since the beginning of Lee Hsien Loong's leedership. The resulting effect of a low CPF interest rate translates into low HDB housing loan rate(presently at 2.6%) which in turn contributed to overpriced HDB Public Housings where our young couples have been put into hefty 40 years mortgage debts with. The PAP has flopped big time when it comes to tackling low birth rate and their constant denial of recognizing overpriced housings have deterred and delayed marriages certainly does not reflect wisdom and responsibility in the decision-making process of public policies. In simple terms, the PAP is the last party anyone who have family plans in their mind. Another area where the PAP government has crashed miserably is the influx of Foreigners. Aside from pricing out Singaporeans in housing, the Foreigners here have also contributed to a depression of wages. Real earnings among Singaporeans have taken a hit ever since the PAP government relaxed Singapore's Immigration and Manpower Policies since 2000. Singapore used to only have a 3million population in the 1990s, but today, it has exploded to 5million in less than 20 years in today, 2010. PAP Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong even targeted Singapore's Population to a ridiculous 6.5million by 2030. Public Transport are overcrowded, public infrastructures are overstressed and education institutes like government subsidized universities, NUS and NTU, are already keeping Singaporean students out to fulfill their minimum 20% Foreign Students quota. Singaporeans are increasingly sidelined by the PAP and condemned as 2nd class citizens especially for NS men who have to go through National Slavery. For example, the recent winning of Table Tennis Championship seems only to be celebrated by PAP and the foreigners. No true blue Singaporeans will ever do the traitorous move to call these players Singaporeans, because we all know they are no Singaporeans; they are mercenaries at best just like the Gurkhas. Our National Identity has been diluted no thanks to the present PAP administrations. $10 million Integration Fund has been set aside for the foreigners while our elderly and poor take to streets, peddling tissue papers or collecting aluminium cans from rubbish bin to rubbish bin. Despite such pressing issues and urgency, Singapore's Opposition Parties are still currently incapable of forming the next Government. They can't promise us GST cuts, reduction of Foreigners, reduction of Public Transport fares, increase in welfare, increase in affordability or whatsoever. But rest assured, so long we Singaporeans vote the Opposition Candidates in, we have One More Voice for the People, instead of yet another sleeping yes-man. Vote for Change, vote the PAP out   Alex Tan  Read More →

In an extensive interview with Straits Times Insight last Saturday, Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam said that Singapore is a "country" and not just a global city. His remarks appeared to contradict that made earlier by his cabinet colleage Law Minister Shanmugam who told a visiting delegation of American lawyers that Singapore is NOT a country in his desperate attempts to defend Singapore's atrocious human rights records. Drawing on arguments by American economist Bryan Caplan in a recent article, he said Singapore was viewed as a deviation from the democratic norm because it was seen primarily as a country. ‘This is where most people make a mistake…I have tried to explain that we are different. We are a city. We are not a country," he said. His comments sparked an outcry in cyberspace with many netizens questioning the real meaning behind Mr Shanmugam's words. Mr Tharman's reply seemed to be carefully crafted to undo the PR "damage" done by Mr Shanmugam's earlier "Freudian slip." He was asked by ST journalist Rachel Chang on his one-third limit on foreigners. "One-third is somewhat lower than what some other global cities have been able to accommodate. If you look at London, New York, it's probably over 40 per cent..... I don't think we can afford to be like them, to have over 40 per cent of our workforce foreign without losing something that defines you as a nation, a basic tenor of society that's still Singaporean.....We felt we are more comfortable with that than thinking we are nothing but a global city. We are also a country," he was quoted as saying in the Straits Times. Mr Tharman obviously hasn't been reading reports from the National Population Secretariat. Singapore's population crossed the 5 million mark last year June, out of which 36 percent are foreigners. Of the remaining 64 percent who are citizens, an increasing number are born overseas. More than one-third of Singapore's population are foreigners. In fact, at the rate the PAP is mass-importing foreigners, native Singaporeans will soon become a minority in their own country.   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 →

By Shi Jiangtao from South China Morning Post Wang Xisheng's home is just a few kilometres off the coast of Lake Tai, China's third-largest freshwater lake, famed for scenic beauty and abundant delicacies. But for him, it is no longer a blessing to live in the suburbs of Wuxi, one of the most affluent cities in Jiangsu. He was diagnosed with lung cancer three years ago. And the cause, he and his fellow residents in Xiangyang village believe, is pollution released by the city's largest petrochemical plant, whose chimney is only about 20 metres away from their houses and used to churn out dark clouds of filthy smoke day and night. "I was born in the village and have spent all my life here. We have never seen so much pollution before," said Wang, 64, a retired worker. The factory was built in 1958 during the Great Leap Forward, but it did not turn into a nightmare for thousands of local people until the turn of this century. "My 15-year-old grandson used to swim and catch shrimp in the river when he was five. But the river has turned black in the past decade, giving off a choking, foul odour," he said. Large amounts of untreated waste water were discharged into the river, and some villagers even made money from collecting oil floating on the river that leaked from the factory. "We knew things had gone seriously wrong, but we did not know they could have disastrous consequences for us until we began to see an outbreak of cancer in the villages near the factory, including my own," said Wang. "We've never seen so many cancer patients in the past, and the number of cancer cases is particularly high in villages surrounding the factory." Wang was especially bitter that the factory had moved the smokestack closer to his village after residents of neighbouring Guangfeng village managed to have their grievances printed by state media in late 2003, which caused quite a stir. Thanks to the report by China Consumer News in December that year, Guangfeng gained national fame as another "cancer village" in the country. More than 30 people in Guangfeng died of various forms of cancer between 2000 and 2003, and another 30 villagers were diagnosed with cancer, mostly of the liver, stomach and lungs, the report said. But the media coverage of the Guangfeng villagers' misery failed to prompt the closure of the factory, a request that local residents have made repeatedly but which has been ignored by the government over the years. "That report helped to improve our situation only a little. We had thought the government would have to relocate the factory because of media pressure, but the factory got away with it eventually, and it only agreed to move the chimney a few hundreds metres away from us," Li Qiaodi, a retired primary school teacher in Guangfeng, recalled. "And as national attention ebbed, our plight has simply been forgotten yet again." Guangfeng residents were also keen to talk about their suffering, in strikingly similar terms to the stories told in Xiangyang. Both villages are under the jurisdiction of Guangyi town, a hotbed of small and medium-sized enterprises in Wuxi which have become the driving force of the regional economic takeoff. The villages are also surrounded by dozens of smelting plants and other factories producing chemical fertiliser, paint and sulphuric acid, to name but a few. Read rest of article here.  Read More →