cookie-cutter comments

It was a chance meeting on the road. Richard was heading off for lunch and I happened to be driving right behind his car. A few shouted comments past each other’s wound-down windows and I found myself enjoying some really good wan ton mee near Century Gardens.

Much of what we discussed will not find its way here, but the upshot of it revolves around the fact that he’s doing really well, and that I should, to paraphrase, consider moving elsewhere. And I have, for the nth time considered this.

But considering options at this stage would be premature. I know my worth; I was confirmed in it about 2 months back when I had an alternative offer. But plans are plans, and they must be followed through, if only to gain that bit of information I require to make my decision. I will have to see if AK delivers on his promise/word. If he doesn’t, then we must part ways, no matter the relationship we have.

Talking with Richard is always a game. He tells me what he wants me to know, perhaps wishing me to distribute the information, and sometimes he tells me things to convince me of his own position; i.e. he usually has a hidden agenda. This lunch session was no different, but after chatting with him for about 2 hours concerning work and everything in between, I realised why Koh maintains a fascination with him; he makes you feel as if you’re not an employee, not a ma chai or underling, but an equal.

That and the fact that we used to be closed to Richard, made me miss talking to him. I came away with a sense of what was out there in the market, and the sort of opportunities I was letting slip past me. It was a good experience overall.

Speaking of turning corners, the government seems to have decided that importers of foreign cars which compete directly with Proton are to be levied heavy charges for, apparently, under-declaring their values at Customs and selling them at competitive prices to customers in Malaysia. A snippet of this piece of news can be found here at the New Straits Times website.

The affected brands would be Kia, Chevrolet, Hyundai, Chery, Fiat and Mahindra Scorpio. Korean cars, in particular, have been enjoying burgeoning sales in the past few months due to competitive pricing; in the light of alternatives to Proton, many have taken refuge in purchases of these cars, and who can blame them? Their levels of quality, especially so for Hyundai cars, are very high.

The furore over this imposed charge, of 30% against sales price for vehicle capacities 1.6 litres and below, and 38% for vehicles above 1.6 litres is considerable, but the government has waved them off, noting that similar charges were imposed last year.

In response, the Association of Malay Importers and Traders of Motor Vehicles president Datuk Abdul Hamid Ibrahim has come right out and declared that said brands would not survive due to the immense competition in Malaysia, which is probably double-speak for saying “Only Proton will prosper”. This news snippet can be found here.

See, my question is: why isn’t anyone looking into the culpability of the Immigrations Officers who approve the imports of these vehicles? Open market prices for the vehicles of the affected brands are available; if they are available, Customs should have taken the trouble to investigate the prices being declared and if they did, they would have brought up charges against these said importers, wouldn’t they? But why didn’t they? Throughout the AP debacle, the Immigrations Department has been conspicuously silent; it’s time someone high up start asking questions of them.

But apart from that, I can imagine the sheer frustration of people who are looking to buy cars from other makes besides Proton; a Hyundai Getz 1.6 now retails at RM 77,000.00 OTR. This is already exorbitant for a car that is considered elsewhere as a ‘budget car’. An increase of 30% against the sales price would push that figure up to RM 100,100.00, about the price of a Proton Perdana 2.0 V6. What the hell?!

Ack, jeez, I haven’t laughed myself this silly for quite a bit . Yoghurt anyone?

He should be getting it now; he’s caught up between being a friend and being a superior. It isn’t that he doesn’t know what he needs to do, it’s just that he’s too preoccupied covering for that asshole’s, well, ass. The upshot of it is, he gets the flak. Very noble, but unnecessary.

I’ll be obtaining some forms and templates so he can start charting a system to keep track of personnel performance marked against several benchmarks. I’ve told him to institute something like this before, but I felt at the time that I was in no position to explain to him the need.

He is, after all, about 2 years’ my senior.

Note to self: Prepare sanitized versions of my offline case log for posting.

Spent the last few hours updating the links from my previous site to this one, and realized that I’d need to meddle with the stylesheet for this template if I want to re-position some of my links… I think I’ll get to that in another day or so (if at all).

Most of the links I’ve added are the ones I use constantly when the mood takes me. I’ve not added my links to forums that I frequent, though, which would take up another long list of sites. I think I’ll get this done another day. Too bushed to continue, actually.

I can’t seem to make the other categories visible without having content in them, it seems Sounds pretty logical to me, but nevertheless frustrating.

The unfortunate thing about saying anything with a shade or suggestion of alternative politics in Malaysia puts one at risk of being castigated, investigated and eventually jailed under the infamous Seditions Act. Several bloggers have already suffered this, from being investigated to being put in jail without trial for up to two years.

Among those affected currently is Raja Petra Kamarudin, the editor of Malaysia Today, a site run by Malaysians providing alternative views of the political goings-on in Malaysia. Unfortunately for Raja Petra, this will be the second time he’s had to face this; he was imprisoned once already for alleged seditious comments.

Jeff Ooi has also been under Police investigation since October 2004, for allowing an anonymous poster to post a apparently seditious comment insulting Islam or some such. He now screens posters to his site, and actively edits posts that he feels are not factual or established with solid, available evidence.

In effect, Jeff Ooi has been forced to self-censor. A price to pay for maintaining alternative news? Perhaps, but his case, as far as I know, has not been resolved and is still under investigation. If prosecuted, I think he faces several years in jail. More information on Jeff Ooi’s plight and on other bloggers threatened with action can be found here.

Local forums in Malaysia has recently been replete with news coming off of the UMNO general assembly, held between 19 July to 23 July this year. At the heels of the assembly was a dramatic spat between the former Prime Minister, Dr Mahathir and his loyalist, Puan Rafidah Aziz, the current Minister of International Trade and Industry, over the issue of Proton Berhad’s survival as a national car maker. The issue is quite complex and is replete with obscure references, but what has emerged as the smokescreen in this instance is the issue of Approved Permits (or “APs”) issued to Bumiputra Malaysians.

I prefer not to explain what “Bumiputra” means, but for a bit of context, go here for a brief wiki on the main issues. At its basis, APs are sort of like the Singaporean version of the COE, or Certificate of Entitlement, required for the purchase of imported cars. In Singapore, one is forced to purchase a COE when purchasing an automobile, and said COEs are used to maintain a necessary control measure against streets overpopulated with vehicles.

In Malaysia, however, the stated aim of APs is to engender a class of “towering” Bumiputra operators in the automotive industry. It works like this: an AP can only be issued to a Bumiputra, who in turn uses it to import cars into the country. Now, this makes AP certificates really sought-after, and it has been estimated that each AP is worth between RM 20,000.00 to RM 40,000.00. This year alone, about 60,000 APs were issued, for a total estimated worth of about RM 2 billion dollars.

Now, beneficiaries of these APs do not pay a single dime to the government for the privilege; being Bumiputra is reason enough to have these APs. What has ensued, since the inception of the AP program is characteristic of the get-rich-quick mentality of some of its beneficiaries: instead of going through the trouble of importing cars, setting up service centres and sales staff etc., quite a number of beneficiaries sold their APs to existing operators in return for cold hard cash. This practice, prevalent in many sectors of the economy, is the vaunted “rentier mentalities” of these fortunate Bumiputras.

The government, under the New Economic Plan (NEP) of 1971 decreed that all companies must have a compulsory 30% Bumiputra shareholding. These shares, when distributed by the government, we promptly sold for quick cash. The same thing happened.

In any case, it’s come to light now that almost all beneficiaries of APs were either politically well-connected, “in the family” or, as it turned out, former MITI officials. About 40% of all APs issued for this year went into the hands of 4 persons, representing, of course, 2 corporations. The recipients have insisted that they do not benefit directly from any sale of APs, of course, but that’s not saying much since they run the corporations that enjoy the government’s largesse.

It has been a tumultuous and significant week, so far, with tears and lots of drama, all of which has been faithfully reported by Jeff Ooi. Strangely enough, the ensuing furore has been particularly effective in turning attention away from the flailing Proton.

I spent a bit of time last night downloading a short indie film directed and produced by a Singaporean, Martyn See, on the ’struggles’ of Singapore’s Chee Soon Juan. Apparently, there was some effort expended to try and ban the movie, an official/officious reason being that it was too bias towards one party rather than another, effectively being political propaganda rather than the short feature presentation it was meant to be.

Links to the clip are found at Singabloodypore.

I’ll admit: having watched it, it does sound very much like party propaganda, mostly because most of the 26 minutes of the short presentation revolved around an interview conducted for the film (presumably). I won’t be naive enough to suggest that films of this sort are curatives for the “repressive” state of politics in Singapore, because most of what Chee Soon Juan’s been doing (and his various encounters with the law) is public knowledge.

When I say “public knowledge”, I generally refer to people who would take an interest in these sorts of things. Friends I’ve spoken with over the issue are largely ambivalent over CSJ’s actions in the past. The bulk of the pro-PAP supporters I have interacted with constantly refer to his ‘faux’ hunger strike, which consisted of CSJ being on drip for about… 18 days, was it? In any case, the more informed pro-PAP supporters have presented some telling arguments against many of his charges.

Some friends involved in the opposition parties in Singapore have shied away from speaking about CSJ mostly because they feel what he’s done has hurt their credibility rather than aided it. There are many reasons they cite, of course, but the one reason few cite - and which I think is at the heart of things - is that CSJ’s actions have been, by and large, embarassing.

I think a pragmatic Singapore would have little time for the sort of dramatics that CSJ’s now known for; going up against the government would require reflection on the government’s policies and the pitfalls it could have avoided, rather than going on hunger strikes which, not just being dramatically passive-aggressive, would not serve to convince the more educated and more middle-class Singaporeans of anything but CSJ’s apparent conviction of his beliefs.

Unfortunately, I think it just ends there. I wonder to what extent the population at large in Singapore have dismissed meaningful points raised by CSJ by rejecting the man himself.

In any case, the issue I’m far more interested in is the abuse of suits against political opponents pursued by the incumbent government; they are usually nasty, messy affairs which gain a veneer of legitimacy by bringing ‘grievances’ to the court of law. A pretty good reference is a report issued by Lawyers’ Rights Watch Canada on another similar case of abuse via libel against J. B. Jeyaretnam, another prominent opposition politician for the Workers’ Party. A copy of the report can be obtained here.

The findings of that report are, to say the least, very interesting.

I came across a fantastic interview in the Sun, an interview between one of the reporters, Zainon Ahmad and Dr. Farish A. Noor. Much of what he says makes a whole lot of sense (because I agree with him? perhaps so). You can read it here.

What I do disagree with him is his unqualified support for what he refers to as the “subaltern”. I think he’d agree that the governing of a nation is not merely the marshalling of its resources, but the husbandry of the social sphere of Malaysian life. And that husbandry means the managing of expectations of a diverse community of individuals.

Unfortunately, to insist on a variagated community of individuals pressed into the belief of each others’ alterity is an ideal that, currently, will find no purchase amongst the really conservative; and it can be frightening how conservative the majority of Malaysians can be.

I’m quite certain Dr Noor doesn’t exist in a rarified vacuum divorced from the aspirations, wishes and beliefs of Malaysians outside the more cosmopolitan concentrations of people.

Legislation allowing the expression of alternative lifestyles and such would find much opposition not only amongst politicians but also the people; to move this fast in this direction can be politically hazardous.

I sometimes wonder if the State should be a gestalt of the people or if the State must find itself in the position to mould the people after its own image and ideologies. The latter may not be too difficult to do; after all, the repressive regime under which we live is proof enough of that. But how else to balance the aspirations of the people with the State’s vision for the people?

Anyway, it’s fuzzy thinking on my part.

While I think that some of his prescriptions are unrealistic, I do agree with them as ideals in and of themselves. His discussion on the islamization of the political arena in response to the perceived threat of PAS, in parallel with the race-based politics in the current milieu is interesting, and I’ve had discussions on the very subject with friends over the course of some years; on those occasions, I found myself discussing it in the context of Singapore (where I studied) rather than in the context of Malaysia.

Nevertheless, the problem has always been somewhat similar. In the case of Singapore, we have on the one hand Singaporean Malays who as a community have become shut off from the normative discourse of society due in part to a conscious or unconscious decision to remain differentiated from the Chinese population, perceived as the dominant (and most times repressive) other. It could be argued that the professed siege mentality adopted by the ruling elite reinforces this view (that Singapore is an alien nation bounded by hordes of muslim malays); but that’s another discussion altogether.

On the other hand, in Malaysia, we have a similar situation arising. The Malay man on the street will allude to Chinese possessive-ness and greed as explanations for their economic superiority, and will harbour feelings of resentment over being seen to kowtow to the Chinese in any regard; they feel themselves economically threatened. It’s probably this sort of inferiority complex that gave birth to the NEP, no matter what others may say to the contrary.

But the similarity between both communities — the Chinese in Singapore and the Malays in Malaysia — is that both feel under siege for some reason or another. The Chinese in Singapore are made to believe that they are, militarily, constantly under threat of invasion, or just an ambiguous threat per se (which would be more insidious). The Malays in Malaysia feel themselves under economic threat from local Chinese, on the other hand.

(I must admit: this is how I view it)

What’s frustrating, however, is how both communities have couched their socio-political differences in reference to, or in retaliation to, a perception of the other born out of their own fears.

*****

On a decidedly more hilarious note, I spent the day doing next to nothing. I felt a twinge of guilt, but that was quickly subdued by the dastardly broadside launched straight from the boss’ computer terminal.

He sent out a strongly worded mail warning all 6 recipients that it was illegal to solicit business on the side and to look out for spam… attaching a private conversation between an ex-staff and a business concern in the US about opening up a franchise of said business in Malaysia.

I’m sure the email was vaguely informational, but the entertainment value of the foregoing conversation was hilarious not because it was hilarious, you understand. It was dead funny because the boss seemed to be getting back at someone who wasn’t there anymore.

It was only later that I was informed that the email was intended to smoke out informers and such. So very Tintin these spygames. Sheesh, I feel like they’ve put me in diapers!