Asian values or apeing the West? Part 1

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Thursday, 24 November 2011

Singapore Democrats

Mr Lee Kuan Yew once famously said: "It is not my business to tell people what's wrong with their system. It is my business to tell people not to foist their system indiscriminately on societies in which it will not work."

Mr Lee was talking about the West imposing its system on Asian societies, in particular Singapore. We are Asians, he says, and subscribe to a different set of values from Westerners. As a consequence, Mr Lee steered Singapore away from the Western model.

Or did he?

It is a veritable myth that Mr Lee eschews the Western style of government. In truth, the former prime minister embraces its system - most whole-heartedly. He has built our country around it and staked our future on it. It is the system of greed and immorality epitomised by corporate America and Wall Street. It is the economic-financial system devised by the neoliberals of the West.

Unfortunately, it is also a system of which he and his party has little understanding and one that has grown to become a danger to the world. We have aped the financial system devised by Wall Street without really understanding how it affects us in Singapore.

To illustrate this point, let us go back a few years to the financial crisis in 2008. Prior to the meltdown, American banks were doing brisk business giving out housing loans to people who had poor credit background and couldn't afford to keep up with their mortgages. Such a practice is heresy in the banking world, something that lenders avoid like the plague. But the bankers, unbeknownst to many, were not concerned because they simply passed on the risks to investors in the form of credit default swaps (CDS).

Briefly, this is how CDS worked: An investor would purchase the CDS products and in the process bet against the housing market. If the market went down, these investors stood to make a profit. Bankers on Wall Street packaged the pieces of paper, called them fancy names and sold them to unsuspecting customers.

In 2008, the US economy started to wobble and many of the people who took the housing loans (which came to be known as subprime loans) were laid off. As a result they couldn't pay their mortgages and many of the homes were foreclosed, the occupants evicted.

This did little to help the banks which were facing enormous losses from the unpaid loans. They now faced a double whammy of having to pay out on the CDS that were sold to investors. Many couldn't. In March 2008 Bear Stearns, the fifth largest investment bank in the US, went bankrupt. This was followed by Lehman Brothers, then Merrill Lynch with the crisis threatening to go up the chain and eat up Bank of America, J P Morgan and the top dog of investment banks, Goldman Sachs.

The meltdown threatened to engulf the entire financial system across the world.

Because we were so enamoured by the big bucks flowing seemingly without end from Wall Street, we copied what they did without understanding what the products were made of and what financial implications they carried. We came up with our own hifalutin names for the paper - Pinnacle Notes, High Notes, and Minibonds - and sold them to Singaporeans just like Lehman sold them to Americans.

We were apeing the West.

Never mind that we didn't have a clue of what was going on within the banking system in the West, we poured tens of billions of dollars into it - all because our leaders were mesmersied by the shiny facade of Wall Street's big names.

But why did we so blindly copy such a system? The short answer is that because it benefits the PAP. The American financial system has been designed to favour those at the very top of the economic food chain. The top one percent of the country owns more than 40 percent of the wealth in the country. The rich own unimaginable wealth while many find themselves out of work and out of a roof over their heads.

The system in Singapore mirrors this horrendous situation in America: The PAP controls almost all the national wealth through two companies, the GIC and Temasek Holdings. While the folks who control the system lavish themselves with huge salaries, ordinary Singaporeans continue to fall further and further behind.

Our income inequality surpasses that of even the US. Per capita, we have the most number of millionaires in the world. Yet the number of homeless and poor continue to grow in this country.

But while ordinary Americans are fighting back through the Occupy movement that is sprouting up all over the country, we remain helpless because we have no political rights. We are at the mercy of the PAP.

Such has been our folly. We have let the PAP bamboozle us into thinking that democracy is a Western concept (which it is most certainly not) and not suited for Asians, us Singaporeans included. In the meantime our rulers have adopted the Western, casino-type model of high finance for our economy.

We must wise up and see that the PAP has in fact foisted the Western system indiscriminately upon our society, a system that has reaped untold riches for the ruling class in Singapore but has left the rest of us impoverished, not just economically but poltically and morally as well.

Part 2 of this article examines how the PAP works to advance Western corporate interests against the interests of ordinary Singaporeans.

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Comments (3)

Fri 25 Nov 2011 12:39 AM | Clear eyed - Insatiable greed

So insatiable is their greed for power and money, the PAP will make use of any concept, eastern or western, Confucianism or capitalism, to hang on to power and continue shovelling the $$$$ into their pockets.

Fri 25 Nov 2011 12:38 PM | Buwakasha

Clear eyed, its not capitalism, it is cronyism. Its not shoveling $$$, it is making you do the shoveling. Its not just the PAP, every major political party does it, especially if they get into power.

Thu 08 Dec 2011 5:15 PM | g_e - Let them rot.

Anyone with two brain cells to rub together needs to watch 'Inside Job', Charles Ferguson's Academy Award-winning forensic analysis of the 2008 global financial crisis. The film traces the emergence of a rogue culture within the finance industry which has corrupted politics, regulation, and academia. At a cost over US$20 trillion, the crisis caused millions of people to lose their jobs and homes in the worst recession since the Great Depression, and nearly caused global financial collapse.

There, laid bare in grim detail we see the reason why we have the Occupy Wall St protest today. Absolutely nothing has changed, nothing. Despite Obama's sanctimonious promises, the robber barons are still in charge and making the rules in the US government even though they caused the wheels to come off the wagon in the first place. Not a single scoundrel has been made to pay the penalty for gross failure to carry out their fiduciary duty and outright fraud. From grotesque gargoyle Greenspan and primary retard George W. Bush who lifted the careful curbs placed upon banks after the horrors of the Great Depression, to the morally challenged millionaire business school professors of the Ivy League universities, the guilty continue to rule in the USA just as they do in Singapore.

PAP aped the US model with gusto because it fitted in perfectly with their devil-take-the-hindmost dogma and Singaporeans paid the price to the tune of over one-third of the nation's reserves - $100 billion dollars. Unbelievably, sixty percent of our citizens loved being sodomised to such a degree that they put the party responsible back in power. Do they deserve any sympathy now that they're drowning in their own tears? I think not.