Learning from the great enlightening American experience

Goldman Sachs is being sued by the SEC for fraud, looting the innocent investors by manufacturing fraudulent scripts of papers and selling them as products. So it is now going to face the music. Wait a minute, who is Goldman Sachs? Oh it is an organisation, not an individual. So no one will be found guilty of any misdeeds. The organisation, an inanimate thing, will be found guilty and be made to pay for the losses or fine. This reminds me of the Lehman toxic notes fiasco. As usual, the inanimate thing will be found guilty. No one else is guilty. No one has done anything wrong, no decision made by anyone, it just happened. Oh, a few small guys or gals were made guilty, I think, in Hongkong. My goodness, the billions of dollars or trillions of dollars lost because of a systemic fraud created by a bunch of crooks and helped by an army of greedy accomplices across the world, and no one is at fault. This is something that we must learn from the Americans. Save and protect the individuals. Just put the blame on the organisation. And more frauds and lootings can be repeated in different forms and disguises. Kevin Scully, executive Chairman of NRA Capital said Obama's bank reform will put many banks under heavy scrutiny and regulation by the SEC and that the culprits of the fallout must be identified. But Kevin forgot that it was the SEC that needs to be placed under heavy scrutiny for allowing the looting to go on in the first place. They have been sleeping, yes sleeping with the crooks and looters all this while. And they pretend and act as if they have done no wrong and now waking up, standing up, to do the policing. What a bunch of crooks and their crooked deals.

Bullying the young upstart

We are still waiting for the green light to watch the World Cup. Why is Fifa making it so difficult and expensive for us to watch the World Cup? Should there be an equitable formula like on a per head basis? Or are they saying since we have so much money to throw around, they want a bigger share of our money? Did we bring this to ourselves? To Fifa we are just too small a market that they can afford to lose. They probably says take it or leave it. The coverage of the World Cup will still be available live to Singaporeans through other channels, at different cost of course. Now it has become a poker game and see who blinks and who is the big winner. The people who suffer are the innocent consumers. Actually we shall just go and tell Fifa, 'How much?' and dump the cash on their table to show that we have the money. And when they name another ridiculous price, just take the money from their faces. There is no need to waste so much money under a situation not much different from being robbed at knife point. But we must also learn our lesson. Don't go around throwing our money at everyone.

Honouring the gangsters

There is this big exhibition going on at the National Library about a William Farquhar who was the first Resident of a pre colonised island which is now Singapore. He took over control of the island as a stand in for Stamford Raffles who claimed to have founded this island for the British Empire. Uh no, for the East India Company. Yesterday a Teresa Lim wrote passionately about rediscovering and remembering this great Resident and even naming a few places in his honour. Now what is a resident and what was East India Company? We have more than a million permanent residents here today. There were several hundred residents here before the arrival of Raffles and the appointment of the first Resident. Funny usage of the word. I think first Resident meant that he was the top dog in the island then. And what was the East India Company? Was it a state company, an extended arm of the crown, or was it a privatised company of the state just to make profits for the state? How could a private company went around and claiming pieces of land as theirs? It seemed that the British separated the state from the running of profit making organisations then. The choice would allow the state to be free from the ugly dealings of the company. The company could schemed, connived, stole, robbed under whatever pretext, even grabbing lands and countries from the natives and their rulers, often at gun point. The state stood at a distance and was not tarnished by the unscrupulous doings, above the dirty deals. The state only came in like the Opium War in China to help the merchants on some fabricated excuses like protecting the interests of its gangsters, drug lords or subjects. The East Asia Company was nothing different from organised crime dressed up as legitimate businesses. They wielded tremendous powers and every warlord was literary a mafia boss. Raffles or Farquhar was no different. They were gangsters of the old days, protected and given legitimacy by the crown of England. Some of the knights of the British Empires were actually pirates, not much different from the Somalian pirates today. Whatever they did, it was for their own interests and the interests of the British crown and the British Empire. What happened after the years of occupation when we were given independence to run the island was a necessary convenience of the day. What and how we came about was not of design by these gangsters. We made it what it is today. Reading the history of yesterday and understanding how things were in the correct perspective would help to increase our knowledge of past events. Maybe there were no victims and no sufferings under the control of the gangsters, maybe it was ignorance, we seem to have a romantic view of our colonial history and their exploits, and remember them fondly. I think they make a good collection as the myths of Singapore.

What is realistic pay?

Our model of high pay for ministers was given an airing in an American TV channel, the Chicago Tonight, hosted by Phil Ponce and guest Lee Hsien Loong. The merits of our case against the demerits of the American case were discussed and defended. One example quoted was the American judges presiding in their courts and listening to young lawyers who were paid many times more than the honourable and distinguished gentlemen sitting at the top bench. Kind of funny really. How could the judges sit there listening to young boys telling them about the case and knowing that these young boys are being paid so much more than them, and could buy them dinner on every outing? What would be going on in the minds of the judges other than the cases being read? The conventional wisdom here will say that the judges were grossly underpaid and needed to be realistically rewarded for the responsibility they were holding. Or are the young lawyers being grossly overpaid while the judges are being paid reasonably? Which is which will depend on who and how people look at the issue. Look at the numbers again. A CEO being paid $10m pa versus workers being paid $20k pa is equivalent to one man doing 500 men's job. That is how productive or valuable the CEO is to the organisation. He carries the weight of 500 men's wage bill. Does he really do the job of 500 men? Oh, big responsibility. His decision, just saying yes or no, could mean millions and billions being made or lost, and hundreds of thousands of people's lives being affected. This is what they are being paid for. Responsibility. Could the little worker's responsibility be in that scale? A terrorist, with little skill or professional qualification and training, could unleash a vial of deadly chemical or biological material that could do untold damages to untold number of people. The impact of his action surely must be greater than a $10m CEO and should rightly command such a pay. And the little soldier or custom officer manning the checking counter must be shouldering the same kind of responsibility and deserve more than what he is being paid currently. So is the security guard to a high value vault or premise. It reminds me of one very highly paid security guard. The cook in a top notch restaurant where all the big shots eat better be paid more than the big shots as their lives depended on him not poisoning them. His responsibility is enormous. So are bodyguards to Presidents and Prime Ministers. So are all the arseholes. So what is realistic pay? According to what and who?

Is it so difficult?

Is it so difficult to forecast the number of doctors needed here? Hospitals are not built overnight. I think it takes much longer time to built hospitals than HDb flats. Why is there a sudden shortage of doctors when the numbers can easily be calculated with a pocket calculator? We don't produce enough doctors from our universities, not enough capacities. And many of our brightest have to get their medical education overseas. The sad part is that these students who went overseas were not part of the planning process to meet the demands of our hospitals. They went completely on their own motivation and may not even want to return if they can find jobs elsewhere. In the meantime we went on a recruitment blitz, grabbing anything that comes by while many of our best were scattering away from our shores. Is this another jamban case?