Originally posted by Kuali Baba:
Here goes (from CNA):
SINGAPORE : Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew said Singapore has to continue to distinguish itself from its neighbours by having better standards of governance.
And key to achieving this is a corruption-free government. Otherwise, he said, Singapore will degrade and decline.
Speaking at a forum on "Singapore in the 21st century", attended by 1,800 Nanyang Technological University (NTU) students on Thursday, Mr Lee added that the situation in Myanmar looked "troublesome".
At the start of the forum, Mr Lee warned of the main setback for Singapore - unexpected turn of events.
He said because the prospects for the next 5-10 years are favourable to the country, Singaporeans tend to be complacent and ignore warning signs that things could go wrong suddenly.
"A first warning was the sudden drop in the Dow Jones Index of the New York stock market in August. The losses spread right across the world's stock markets. They recovered only when the US Federal Reserve Board reduced its discount rate by 50 basis points to boost confidence in the market and increase liquidity," said MM Lee.
"But the underlying problem has not gone away. The sub-prime mortgages problem is still not cleaned up. These were high risk loans to people who did not have the means to repay. Now there are nagging worries: commodity prices are rising - oil, gold, corn, wheat, iron, coal... Inflation is up.
"If the US consumer, suffering from reduced house values, loses his appetite for consumption, there will be a downturn in the US economy. That will affect the export-driven economies of China and the rest of East Asia."
While Asia looks promising, there are problems in the immediate region. Myanmar, he said, can be a destabilising factor.
Said Mr Lee: "ASEAN leaders realise that if we have volatile and unstable neighbours, they will destabilise the whole region. Hence the common reactions from ASEAN leaders, foreign ministers, presidents and prime ministers are that of sorrow and revulsion, that Myanmar's generals have again used armed forces against monks and civilians who are demonstrating peacefully because they are suffering from deprivation due to their poor economic conditions.
"ASEAN leaders know that if the situation in Myanmar continues to deteriorate, there must come a breaking point when much more brutal force will again be necessary to put their people down.
"We must try our best to help stabilise Myanmar. Singapore is at the very heart of Asean. An unstable Myanmar is a time bomb in the whole region."
Turning to the challenges that Singapore faces, Mr Lee said that when he and his colleagues started out, they did not know what branding meant.
All they knew was that Singapore had to be different from the way the neighbouring countries were being run, and that the country had to make up for the lack of resources to survive.
So Mr Lee said he and his team set out to build up a clean, corruption-free, secure and safe system, and a government which was effective and efficient, and one which welcomed investors and business.
"We had to get the big pieces right - national solidarity, not racial, religion or language strife. Hence the emphasis on racial and religious harmony, the mixing of all the races as we rebuild the city, with everybody sharing the same HDB blocks," said Mr Lee.
"We avoided clashes over languages. We would have brought troubles if we had chosen Chinese as our working language and thus disadvantaged the other races. We chose English - a neutral language with no special advantage to any race - as the working language, but we keep our mother tongues," he added.
As for the future, Mr Lee stressed that it depends on every Singaporean to realise that the country always has to be different.
Singapore has to have better governance compared to its neighbours. This will ensure that Singapore survives the competition against neighbours who have a wealth of natural resources, larger territories and bigger populations. - CNA /ls
The long and short of his vision as always consists of painting a bad picture of the world as being full of problems e.g. communist threats, racism, corruptions and lawlessness etc in order to create fears and give him the free hands to do as he pleases.
His horror stories are often anecdotal and unconnected to the primary issues at stake but nevertheless when repeated in speeches after speeches it gives him justification to exert his many draconian authoritarian measures on the citizens and political opponents alike serving to perpetuate his narrow-minded political agendas.
It is a vision largely borne out of paranoid besiege mentality premised on presumptuous fear and assumptions.
Based on the threats in Myanmar as painted in his speech he would again be justified to impose his autocratic self-centred control over the judiciary and his peers of elected representatives of the people riding roughshod over all of them without regard to the long term political evolution of the people.
It would be for sure despite Myanmar and Singapore being totally unconnected in terms of political and social development he would go on imposing ad nausem harsh restrictions on freedoms and rights of the ordinary citizens from freedoms of speech to participating in the governing process and putting down any one who dare to question his wrongful policies in public forums or the news media like Mr. Brown.
This sort of kiasu and paranoid mentality has largely resulted in his raising all kinds of taxes, prices with all kinds of profiteering schemes to charge citizens ever higher fees even double charging on lands and assets already paid by citizens for services which should have been funded from the over-large taxes in the first place.
Unfortunately many people have been brainwashed into believing his inevitable contagion theory borne out of his own inadequate besieged mentality.
Hence Singaporeans are being subjected to all the direct and indirect taxing and profiteering schemes of all sorts being one of the heaviest taxed people in the world in order to allow him to build up an impregnable surplus to cope with his own sense of inadequacy or paranoid fear.
It is sad that many have been brainwashed into believing his inevitable draconian measures despite their many years of sacrifices to build up the national surpluses to US150 billions.
To top all the direct and indirect tax burdens he has even proposed to commandeer people's own retirement savings at age 55 only to be released back to them in small worthless and meaningless annuities upon their reaching 85.
How many people on earth will live until 85 to receive his retirement CPF saving?
Just ask this question: Is his vision on fears not paranoid ? Is not this kind of draconian retirement measures borne out of paranoid fear that the citizens could not look after themselves and will become destitute posing a burden on the state. Is he not over-reacting to all happenings and events in order to create fears that allow him to get his way at the expense of the ordinary citizens who are struggling for a living and being forced to suffer setbacks despite working so hard all their lives in good time and bad.
Despite all his claims of success and growing GDP etc ordinary citizens are being deprived of retirements and all their dues and entitlements. Many are losing their jobs to all the cheap labors being imported in large number to replace many hard pressed citizens who have migrated due to loss of jobs caused by economic stagnations due to his paranoid draconian governing system.
If his vision has worked there is no reason why people are still after so many claims of success struggling to pay the ever rising costs of living and the heavy mortgage debts imposed by years of profiteering on lands and assets by the SLA, URA and HDB. (Note SLA just announced another $6 billion profits for 2006-7 from acquired state lands paid from the tax payers' monies from sale of lands for public housing and private residential housing and commercial projects)
What a visionary demagogue.
I'm not going to stay put if the Big White Nanny's vision doesn't agree with what I'm looking for in life.