The PAP appears to have shifted to a new strategy of “selling” its unpopular and erroneous policies nowadays.
This strategy has three components:
1. Using pseudo-professional agencies such as the National Population & Talent Division (NPTD) to give its policy intention some “objective” grounding.
2. Using its lapdogs in SPH, particularly the Straits Times, to drum up fears and publicize the data from these agencies.
3. Using certain members of the public to write in to the Straits Times Forum Page to “express support” for these policies and create fear to show that members of the public share the same views.
Some of these components have always been in place but we are beginning to see an emergent and consistent pattern of all three being used concurrently.
This letter by Kee Soon Leong (‘ST Forum Letter: Slower growth will cause SG’s downfall‘), a civil servant who professes the PAP as his party of choice and counts LKY’s “Hard Truths” as one of his favourite books in his Facebook is a good example.
In typical PAP style combining fear mongering with a shallow analysis, this economist-wannabe warned that tightening of foreign manpower supply will cause investors to leave Singapore and result in less revenue and lower subsidies for the poor.
According to him:
“Our future generations may, instead of being grateful to us for helping them to achieve a slower pace of life, accuse us of causing them to face unemployment and lower standards of living.”
Kee Soon Leong’s arguments are simplistic to say the least and ignores the elephant in the room.
The scenario of “slower growth” was conjured by the PAP, in particular by middling ministers like Lim Swee Say, based on a false premise to begin with: that of a wholesale restriction of supply of foreign manpower into Singapore.
You stop the foreign labour supply across the board, you get a slowdown in industry output because there is insufficient manpower to man the production. The end result is a reduction of GDP output. Of course that’s a given!
But wait, did anyone ask the PAP for a wholesale restriction of foreign manpower supply?
In its manifesto, the Workers Party called for a calibration of the foreign labour policy, looking at the specific needs of each industry, with the objective of enhancing the lives of Singaporeans.
The PAP on the other hand adopted a lazy sledgehammer approach and imposed a wholesale restriction.
If Mr Kee had bothered to analyze further, he would also have found that the impasse that we find ourselves in today is all the PAP’s doing.
The current problems of stagnating wages, overcrowding, social divisiveness, infrastructure breakdown, and high inflation rate fueled primarily by escalating property and car prices (not to mention miscellaneous problems like rise in littering) are the result of policy failure both at the formulation and implementation stages.
All this becomes all the more appalling when one considers that in the past decade the PAP ministers had been paying themselves astronomical salaries claiming that they are the creme de la creme.
So now cronies of the PAP want to turn around and accuse its critics of trying to sabotage the country’s future?
Have people like Kee Soon Leong looked into the mirror and questioned if it is not their blind unquestioning allegiance to the PAP that has contributed to the problems we are facing today?
To conclude, in trying to get out of a problem that it has created, the PAP has dug for itself an even deeper hole. The band of sycophants now peddling the toxic medicine of fear are like a pack wolves baying for blood from that hole, not realizing that it is their political masters who had pushed them in.
[Source]: http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Alternative-View/358759327518739
This strategy has three components:
1. Using pseudo-professional agencies such as the National Population & Talent Division (NPTD) to give its policy intention some “objective” grounding.
2. Using its lapdogs in SPH, particularly the Straits Times, to drum up fears and publicize the data from these agencies.
3. Using certain members of the public to write in to the Straits Times Forum Page to “express support” for these policies and create fear to show that members of the public share the same views.
Some of these components have always been in place but we are beginning to see an emergent and consistent pattern of all three being used concurrently.
This letter by Kee Soon Leong (‘ST Forum Letter: Slower growth will cause SG’s downfall‘), a civil servant who professes the PAP as his party of choice and counts LKY’s “Hard Truths” as one of his favourite books in his Facebook is a good example.
In typical PAP style combining fear mongering with a shallow analysis, this economist-wannabe warned that tightening of foreign manpower supply will cause investors to leave Singapore and result in less revenue and lower subsidies for the poor.
According to him:
“Our future generations may, instead of being grateful to us for helping them to achieve a slower pace of life, accuse us of causing them to face unemployment and lower standards of living.”
Kee Soon Leong’s arguments are simplistic to say the least and ignores the elephant in the room.
The scenario of “slower growth” was conjured by the PAP, in particular by middling ministers like Lim Swee Say, based on a false premise to begin with: that of a wholesale restriction of supply of foreign manpower into Singapore.
You stop the foreign labour supply across the board, you get a slowdown in industry output because there is insufficient manpower to man the production. The end result is a reduction of GDP output. Of course that’s a given!
But wait, did anyone ask the PAP for a wholesale restriction of foreign manpower supply?
In its manifesto, the Workers Party called for a calibration of the foreign labour policy, looking at the specific needs of each industry, with the objective of enhancing the lives of Singaporeans.
The PAP on the other hand adopted a lazy sledgehammer approach and imposed a wholesale restriction.
If Mr Kee had bothered to analyze further, he would also have found that the impasse that we find ourselves in today is all the PAP’s doing.
The current problems of stagnating wages, overcrowding, social divisiveness, infrastructure breakdown, and high inflation rate fueled primarily by escalating property and car prices (not to mention miscellaneous problems like rise in littering) are the result of policy failure both at the formulation and implementation stages.
All this becomes all the more appalling when one considers that in the past decade the PAP ministers had been paying themselves astronomical salaries claiming that they are the creme de la creme.
So now cronies of the PAP want to turn around and accuse its critics of trying to sabotage the country’s future?
Have people like Kee Soon Leong looked into the mirror and questioned if it is not their blind unquestioning allegiance to the PAP that has contributed to the problems we are facing today?
To conclude, in trying to get out of a problem that it has created, the PAP has dug for itself an even deeper hole. The band of sycophants now peddling the toxic medicine of fear are like a pack wolves baying for blood from that hole, not realizing that it is their political masters who had pushed them in.
[Source]: http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Alternative-View/358759327518739
