Dual Faced Citizenship

See, our passport also red one.

It was something denied to Singaporeans despite years of clamour for dual citizenship. Even Americans who have taken up citizenship here have been reminded by the Immigration & Checkpoint Authority (ICA) to surrender their USA passport. Current regulations reflect the longstanding policy of the U.S. Department of State that no person should be in possession of more than one valid, or potentially valid, passport at any one time.

Yet prime minister Lee Hsien Loong as good as collected a Korean passport when Seoul city's mayor Park Won-soon awarded him an honorary citizenship on Thursday morning (Dec 11). And it's not the first time either. Earlier this year, apparently he received another foreign passport in London on the quiet.

When Lee Kuan Yew was presented with the Order of Honour in January by Leonid Moiseev, Russia's Ambassador to Singapore, it wasn't clear if citizenship was part of the package. But there was definitely a red passport in the press photo, next to the bluish medal first conferred on Lee by Russian President Vladimir Putin on September 10 last year in conjunction with the old geezer's 90th birthday.

Only a few days ago, PM Lee said that the next General Election will be a “deadly serious fight”. It's starting to look more serious than we can imagine. Can a Korean citizen be elected prime minister of Singapore?

Mahathir was really miffed when he learnt that Putrajaya had appointed German national Christoph Mueller as CEO-designate of Malaysia Airlines under its restructuring plan.  Dripping with sarcasm, he told Malaysiakini, "I am worried, if we do not believe in ourselves, one day when we need a prime minister, we can get a white man because he is 'smarter' than us."

That's the difference between Malaysia and Singapore.

Love Affair With Communism

Goya's Que viene el coco
"Here Comes the Bogey-Man"

Associate professor K Ramakrishna of the Rajaratnam School of International Studies is embarking on a rewrite of his version of Operation Coldstore and resurrecting the spectre of the communist bogeyman ("If Singapore was ruled by Barisan Socialis", TODAY, Wednesday 10 Dec). He claims that the Communist United Front (CUF) was "flushed into the open" in the institutional form of the Barisan Socialis.
Wonder what he will say about Toh Chin Chye's unabashed answer to one intriguing question about his party's affiliation.

Why did you have the reputation for being Communist?

"Well, we were Left-Wing, and the only type of Left-wing politics anyone had heard of was Communism. They had never heard of Fabian Socialism. That was one reason.
The other reason was the problem of recruiting members. Now, while we were recruiting members for the PAP, we made no headway with the English-educated, middle class types. No headway at all. No way! I tried! I started the University Association in the University of Singapore. It was like the Malayan Forum; I was the Secretary. Doing all the donkey work, just getting things moving. I compiled a register, tried to rope in people.
That had nothing even to do with politics! It was just getting together the graduates of Raffles College. There was an Indian lecturer in the Anatomy Department who tried to get his peers in. I knew Minnie Knight, the mother of Glen Knight, she was a Raffles College graduate. So between her and me, I tried to repeat what I had done in London. We concocted a bulletin called a Chee Chak. You know, the house lizard? It sounded like “Chit Chat.” Nothing serious. I made her the Editor. We never got off the ground. Nobody read it! It died a natural death.
So that was why we drifted towards the Chinese educated. That is why we stumbled into existence as a largely Chinese-based party. That was when dialects became important. Mandarin became important. You understand now the role of Lim Chin Siong, Fong Swee Suan and company? They were Chinese educated. They could make speeches in dialect and Mandarin. They had a big following from the Chinese speaking unions, and the unions were the only organized mass force in Singapore.
So we became a Chinese-based party! We also became a Left Wing party. We were Socialist to begin with, and the unions were very Left Wing if not Communist. We worked out a Manifesto, which was quite revolutionary."

The affair with the Commies continues. Singapore's NTU has ‘groomed’ more than 12,000 high-ranking government officials from almost all provinces in China under its current executive and postgraduate programmes, PLA army officers are feted openly here, and PRC kids are still courted at a tender age to study here on generous scholarships and then guaranteed jobs for 6 years after graduation. Anything goes, so long as they satisfy the party agenda. Education Minister Heng Swee Kiat said "Singaporeans and local academics can also learn a great deal from their interactions with the participants in the Mayors’ Class". From a Chinese general handing out Mercedes cars packed with gold bars maybe?

Going Nuts Over Nuts

Cho Hyun-Ah, the daughter of Korean Air’s CEO, resigned over a flap about macadamia nuts.

The New York-Seoul flight had just left its gate at New York’s JFK airport when Cho, sitting in first class, took exception to being served macadamia nuts she had not asked for, in a packet instead of a bowl. The chief purser was challenged over his crew’s knowledge of in-flight service procedures, after which he was asked to leave the plane, causing an 11-minute delay in arrival of the flight as a result of the unscheduled disembarkation.

Korean Air — South Korea’s flag carrier — initially apologized for causing “inconvenience” for passengers but defended Cho’s action as a “reasonable” move to improve in-flight service. The Korean newspaper Dong-A Ilbo said Cho’s action had exposed the “sense of entitlement and supercilious attitude” prevalent among the rich.

In 2003, the passengers of Singapore Airlines flight SQ321 were inconvenienced when it was commandeered and outfitted  into a private hospital ship, complete with two neurosurgeons, two intensive care nurses, oxygen equipment and a drip, to fly someone's wife back from London. The news team of tabloid ‘TODAY’ was trashed for the report they made of a speech about the event, which was based on factual material quoted from an official press release.  Apparently the offending point had to do with a phone call made by Singapore High Commissioner Michael Teo to No. 10 Downing Street, hoping for some intervention to jump the NHS queue for a brain scan, and inconveniencing the British prime minister.

That's the difference between Korea and Singapore.

The Message Is Clear

Without access to the exif data embedded in the original files, it is impossible to determine which of the two images were captured on camera first. What is absolutely clear is that one picture says "no selfies please", and another clearly shows a bunch of clowns doing exactly that. And the faces of two members of parliament are clearly identifiable.

One message we can come away with is that those characters can't read to save their lives. The other is something more familiar: "Do as we say, not as we do". Either way, it makes one wonder how serious Lee Hsien Loong was when he said the next election would be about choosing a “clear vision” and “capable leadership” for the nation.

Take the Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore announcement on Monday that owners residing in Housing Board flats will enjoy a reduction in their property tax by about 3 percent in 2015. Their official explanation is that the annual values of three-, four-, five-room, and executive flats are lowered to reflect the dip in market rentals. If their vision weren't so blurry, they would have observed that rentals for private housing are also heading south. Myopia can be corrected by prescriptive lenses, but capable leadership require more drastic measures. Especially leadership tainted by pork barrel politics.

New Vision, Same Bull

We should thank Lee Hsien Loong for succinctly summarising all that is wrong with the current regime:
"When we face problems, we acknowledge them publicly, and deal with them. We don't pretend there's no problem, no comments, studying the matter, thinking about it, will clarify one day. We settle now! You lie low hoping the public will forget the issue, and the issue will go away, the public will forget you, and might as well go away."

Lee, who is also the Secretary General of the People's Action Party, was addressing about 2,000 cadres at the party's 60th anniversary rally held at the Singapore Expo on Sunday, 7 December 2014.

Taking potshots at that paragraph alone is like the dilemma of a mosquito at a nudist beach - you just don't know where to start.

By his standards, the obfuscation of the Action Information Management (AIM) debacle was no problem. Wasting huge sums of taxpayers money on a $2 company with no technical staff or competence was no problem. That Chandra Das, a former member of parliament and longstanding steward of the party, was the principal  middleman in the transaction was no problem. None of the salient points was acknowledged as thorny issue by the mainstream media. No wonder Yang Yin was emboldened to embark on his grand scheme of deceit. He punched all the right buttons, right connections and the right politicised machinery to sweep shortcomings under the carpet.

One positive way to look at the mee-siam-mai-hum talk of disconnect is that he was talking to boys and girls sitting at his feet, reminding them to be good or Santa won't be distributing presents. And what presents - $16,000 MP allowances, $1,000,000 ministerial pay, and lots of directorships for consolation prizes. Never mind if the people don't want them - as the "Son of Punggol" doctor's wife told him before the disastrous by-election - the gerrymandering and GRC system are time proven guarantees.

Party chairman Khaw Boon Wan said of their new vision,"As our society becomes more diverse, our economy more mature and our political landscape more contested, it is timely to fundamentally review our overall approach." If only leopards can change their spots.