Above was what I tot when I read a constructive, nation-building headline that screamed
Singapore watches Hong Kong ‘with concern’; current situation at ‘breaking point’: Chan Chun Sing
Read more at https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/singapore-hong-kong-concern-breaking-point-chan-chun-sing-12104088
As usual he’s clueless. Can he really be an RI boy? But then Tan Kin Lian is also an RI boy. As is Tan Jee Say and Lim Hng Kiang. Thank God, Peter Lim, Edmund Wee (Creative thinking at URA), Rashid Hussain (Remember him?), Dr Paul Thamby (makes sure Mad Dog takes his pills), Ang Yong Guan and Erika Poh are also from RI.
Seriously, Kee Chiu and his fellow millionaire ministers are watching the wrong place. They should be watching the riots in Chile with fear and trepidation because while S’poreans are starting to think like the Chileans who riot, the PAP govt is behaving like the clueless Chilean govt (headed by a billionaire president), prior to the riots. Btw, it Chilean govt is still clueless. But I want to emphasis what it and PAP govt miss about what the voters in both countries really want.
Let me explain.
Further to What riots can achieve, about how the Chilean rioters forced the govt to scrap MRT price rises, increase minimum wages etc, here’s a quote that TOC’s M’sian Indian goons and cybernuts will say applies here too
Most Chileans worry about “low pensions, lack of access to decent housing, health care and medicine, and of again falling into the poverty from which they escaped”, the rector of the Catholic University, whose economists dreamed up the Chilean “model”, wrote this week.
Economist
Here’s where the situation sounds like S’pore, giving the lie to what PAPpies like Kee Chiu and Kate Spade Tin (Remember her?) about poverty being absolute, not relative,
“Chile’s problems are more to do with the expectations that come from success. Standards have become higher and . . . the last administration and this administration do not offer anything fresh, any vision for the long-term economic future of the country.”
(Nicholas Watson, Latin America managing director at the consultancy Teneo talking to the FT.)
And
[P]roblems are more to do with the expectations that come from success. Standards have become higher
FT
Other than rising expectations, the really big problem in Chile that is very relevant in S’pore is
the last administration and this administration do not offer anything fresh, any vision for the long-term economic future of the country
FT
Yes, yes, I know the PAP always has a master plan for the future. And PM and Heng have been talking about the latest. But as I’ve explained before, it’s all copy and paste.
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Another decade, yet another copy and paste restructuring report
“I’m sorry but
“We are feeling the pains of restructuring, but not yet seeing the dividends of our hard work. But we are pursuing all the right strategies, and I am confident that given time these strategies will work for us.”
smacks of “Jam to-morrow and jam yesterday – but never jam to-day”
Pardon my cynicism.
We’ve been here before. How many times has economy been “restructured” since the 80s? And how many times have SMEs been helped to “restructure and tide through challenging times”?”
Economic restructuring: This time, it’s really different
And
Another decade, another restructuring report?
In the 80s, one Lee Hsien Loong as trade and industry minister headed a committee to recommend changes in the economy. In the early noughties when DPM he headed another committee on the same issue.
In 2010, one Tharman and his committee produced the 2010 Economic Strategies Committee (ESC). And now there’s the CFE. It’s a bit early, but then there wasn’t a report in the 90s: so maybe making up for lost time?
If Lee Hsien loong’s 1980s plan was so successful, why keep needing plans every decade? Plan succeeded, but circumstances change said people from constructive, nation-building media like Balji and Bertha then. Really?
Here’s a riposte to recent platitudes by Heng that Mad Dog Chee vetoed the SDP from using: “Pull the other leg Heng, it’s got bells on it”
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What I’m really saying (in the box above) is that the time is coming soon that the copy and pasting will not work even incrementally.
Returning to what’s happening in Chile
This arson was part of a collective nervous breakdown in Chile, ranging from peaceful protests demanding a fairer and less unequal society, to nightly looting of supermarkets and feral criminality, with marauding delinquents robbing homes.
Economist
Turning to my comment that S’poreans are starting to think like the Chileans who riot.
Singapore citizens feel stuck in their social classes, according to a survey of 4,015 people aged 18 and above that was conducted between August 2018 and January this year by a state-backed research organisation.
Asked by the Institute of Policy Studies at the National University of Singapore if they felt their financial status would improve in a decade’s time, more than five in 10 said they would experience negligible financial mobility while fewer than one in 10 felt their fortunes would decline.
This pessimism persisted across education levels. Only 44 per cent of those with a degree were hopeful of upward mobility in 10 years’ time, with the figure falling to 40.6 per cent for Singaporeans with vocational training or a polytechnic diploma. For those with a secondary school education or below, such as food deliveryman Alroy Ho, 32, only 23.8 per cent expected to do better in future, with 10.6 per cent thinking they would be worse off.
No not Terry’s Indian M’sian goons trying to stir the pot for CIA or MI6 $ but the
The findings, released on October 29 in a paper titled Faultlines in Singapore: Public Opinion on their Realities, Management and Consequences, asked respondents for their views on five topics researchers thought could affect social cohesion. These were race, religion, immigration, class, and lesbian, gay, transgender and bisexual issues.
South China Morning Post
Four out of five Singaporeans interviewed by This Week in Asia said their pessimism boiled down to salaries not matching up to costs, and a sense that wages were stagnant.
(Note that the newsroom of the SCMP has lots of people from SPN’s newsrooms including the ex-Malay minister’s sister who was a tua kee in ST. Guess they are like Balji and Bertha Henson, the moment they stop getting their 30 pieces of silver, they turn against the hand that fed them.)
I’ll end with something that should really get Kee Chiu and his millionaire ministers worried:
Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University, has pointed out that income inequality there has actually been narrowing.
Economist
The PAP govt has made narrowing the income inequality gap a priority and they and the constructive, nation-building media are trumpeting the fact that our Gini co-efficient is improving. Read: Why PM needs to get a grip on incompetency and inequality
Great to see minority shareholders do something other than go to and whine to that toothless, flea ridden watchdog that is the Securities Investors Association of S’pore asking for help, or to failed presidential candidate who lost his deposit (and PAP enabler) Tan Kin Lian for help.
Thoughts of a Cynical Investor 