Losing Our Country -- the Beginning? Part 1

A friend forwarded me a thought-provoking article by PAUL KRUGMAN titled Losing Our Country he put out as a columnist in The New York Times of June 10, 2005.

I record my gratitude to the writer and take the liberty extracting some key points for discussion here, and thus pose the question: Are we losing our country too?

* In the 1960's America was a place in which very few people were extremely wealthy, many blue-collar workers earned wages that placed them comfortably in the middle class, and working families could expect steadily rising living standards and a reasonable degree of economic security.

** Working families have seen little if any progress over the past 30 years. Adjusted for inflation, the income of the median family doubled between 1947 and 1973. But it rose only 22 percent from 1973 to 2003, and much of that gain was the result of wives' entering the paid labor force or working longer hours, not rising wages.

*** But the wealthy have done very well indeed. Since 1973 the average income of the top 1 percent of Americans has doubled, and the income of the top 0.1 percent has tripled.


Here I pen my thoughts for sharing, perhaps my readers can tell me their reactions and open up an important question for debate: Malaysia is not yet caught at that state as the US is at the moment as Krugman sees it in his article: that the Ameircans are "losing their country". But my feeling is that a similar scenario in dear young Malaysia is beginning to unfold.

Malaysians have seen policies which were formulated in the 1960s and 1970s and targeted with honourable objectives such as bridging the gap between the have's and havenot's and also to disengage the identification of specific jobs and professions and functional occupations for daily livehood with certain ethnic groups.

These policies which were initially planned to last 20 years --assuming the objectives would have been largely achieved within that time span -- were extended for a decade or two, and are now in danger of being enshrined forever to the majority of Malaysians's dismay and foreboding. We as a nation are no more ennobled by their objectives; the leaders have deviated and have embarked on a journy on waste and greed -- leading, not guiding, this nation on the road to suicide, riding on political greed and expediency.

I find that the government's continued walk down this path with many policies based on ethnicity, not for the comon good, tending to divide rather than heading towards the social objective of equalising society based on needs -- this is the beginning of a journey that will lose us our country. Everywhere we turn, we witness this greed, immense greed, that's frightening, that drives our politics, our daily lives, both so pervasive in government service, and the corporate wrold.

Let's examine a few examples:

+ When the BBMB-BMF (that is Bumiputra Malaysia Finance) scandal broke in the 1980s, the sum involved was RM2.4 billion. It involved a George Tan-Carrian misadventure of then gigantic proportions by my country's standards, and luckily, only one such magnitude scandal remained on our national landscape for a decade. The PS to this one was a nationalist, nothing less than a BBMB-headquartered General Manager sent to Hong Kong to investigate the BMF case was found killed. Was there a conclusive end to this murder? I don't remember seeing any.Who weeps for the Malaysian ideed?

The 1990s and 2000s brought forth a slew of billion-dollar scandals -- do I need to mention them here? Okay, just for the record -- Perwaja Steel, Malaysia Airlines, Bakun Hydro-Electric Dam, KLSE shutdown for three days (stand corrected on the number here, which affected the Singapore Stock Exchange similarly too, due mainly to Pan-El Industries scandal)Bank Negara forex misadventure...you add on the list!

In the initial happenings, there was national outbursts of outrage. Rightfully so -- for in most cases, our national coffers were drained -- in suffering direct losses, in bailing out the lsied companies (I won't use the word "crony" to link to these companies, it's a 5-letter word, but still dirty ...)However, this frequency for high-magnitude scandals has caused in many Malaysians, including this writer, to suffer an "immunity" to be surprised anymore when the next scandal broke.

++ The disbursement of scholarships has seen three to four decades of abuse in inequities and injustices committed against the common citizenry, who it must be stressed, are all "equal" taxpayers before the law, and therefore have a right to expectations that the government which collects their taxes to use the monies fairly and equitably. But we all know that performers were victims to the system, which is vulnerable to seeing studnets with inferior results but with the "right" political and corporate connections get the major portion of the scholarships allocations.Yes, even ministers' children feel their children have priority to such scholarships, when their "needs" rank very low compared with the performing kampung or village lad/lass, don't you think so? If a "needs" basd system has been put in place from the very beginning, Malaysia would have begun its nation-building process much, much earlier.

+++ In a corollary development, the above Scholarships issue is tied to the common issue of brain drain and migration to foreign countries. In recent years, the ministries of sciences and health have embarked on overseas missions trying to perusuade Malaysian scientists and doctors who have built up a reputation in their adopted countries to "come back" to Malaysia to serve the Motherland. In the first place, many such Malaysians would have gladly remained to serve the Motherland, if they had only been treated with some decency and respect. Persuading them to return --- yes some did, and after some years, maybe months even, they up and go again, because they feel "it's a lost cause". Do we blame them? Do we gain by calling them names like "unpatriotic"?

Dear leaders, it's a classic case of "Bolting the stable gate after the horse has bolted"!

Yes, the country has succeeded in building up a sizeable middle class that crosses ethnic lines, which is to be deemed as good and desirable. In Krugman's vocabulary, which I totally agree, as he stated:"The fact is that working families aren't sharing in the economy's growth, and face growing economic insecurity. And there's good reason to believe that a society in which most people can reasonably be considered middle class is a better society - and more likely to be a functioning democracy - than one in which there are great extremes of wealth and poverty."

I will examine further the issues of concern to Malaysians -- foreign workers and the climate of insecurity in the neighbourhood; the corporate world and globalisation; declining morale amidst declining living standards over the past few years; education and employment; and racial profiling in housing in Malaysia -- the last two are highly racialised issues that continue to sag our spirits and fan the fires of ethnic divide that's threatening to spin out of control, and eating into the Malaysian fabric of life like Cancer.

Desiderata:Come back for more in Part 2 tomorrow, God-willing.