Merdeka! Stand up and be counted, Malaysia; Stop feeding rats and racists, What the NEP meant and means? Rethink the spirit of Merdeka

Stand up and be counted, Malaysia

BRAVE NEW WORLD
By AZMI SHAROM

It is strange that in the 21st century, we are still having to face the problem of institutionalised racism.

"Article 153 of the Federal Constitution is seen as the holy grail for those who hold this view"

OVER the past week or so, there have been some developments in our country which are more disturbing than usual.

In particular, the two cases of alleged racist remarks by school heads; the accusations that Penang mosques have replaced the Yang di-Pertuan Agong with the Chief Minister’s name in their prayers; and the continued insistence that Article 153 of the Constitution is equal to an inalienable right that could not be questioned.

These events are interrelated and it seems to me that they indicate that there is a battle of ideology going on in the country now.

On one side is the idea that a person’s ethnicity and religion entitles him to be treated better than anyone else who is different. On the other side is the idea that equality is an aspiration that is both noble and necessary for nation building.

It is strange that in the 21st century we are still having to face the problem of institutionalised racism.

Looking at our history, one can see why this has occurred. The combination of race-based politics and poorly interpreted constitutional provisions have meant that the idea of racial and religious superiority has been allowed to grow and become the norm rather than something undesirable and out of the ordinary.

How else can one explain the possibility that teachers, the very people to whom we entrust the education of our children, can have such warped values and also have the gall to express those views publicly?

How else can we explain the near rabid attack on the Penang Chief Minister for something which he and the state religious department have vehemently denied and in fact would have been insane to attempt?

Let’s analyse this one step at a time. When the dominant political parties in this country do not have any political ideology to speak of and are instead, based on the principle that each race-based component has a duty to safeguard the interest of its community, what one has is a recipe for the kind of policy and rhetoric that divides rather than unites.

Historically, one can see the reasons why the politics of the nation was forged in this way. It was a necessary evil in the face of the divide-and-rule policy by the British to show that even when separate, the three major communities of the nation can still work together politically.

However, it is an unsustainable model and what started life as a fairly rosy example of racial cooperation too easily descended into crude racialist type politics.

Which is why the early aspirations that our founding fathers had for a society treated with equality has now been all but buried by the idea that one race is superior to others and in fact is the only race with any right to be here in Malaysia.

This is because in the battlefields of politics, it is easiest to appeal to base racialist emotions, especially when without those types of ideas, a party based on race will have no collateral to work with.

In this kind of political atmosphere, it is of no surprise that what has been forgotten is that the basis of this nation was one of justice and equality. And the document that is meant to protect that, the Federal Constitution, has been misinterpreted to the extent that there is no longer any trace of this aspiration in the mainstream discourse of the day.

Let us be absolutely clear on this matter, the Constitution does give powers to the government to take affirmative action and it does acknowledge the fact that Islam has a special place in the public life of the nation.

What it does not intend to do however is create a perpetual system of ethnic-based favourable treatment nor does it advocate the idea that all other religious beliefs must be subservient to Islam.

However, instead of this reasonable position, what we have today is the idea that affirmative action for Malays is unquestionable and to be continued in perpetuity becoming the norm.

This cannot be further from the truth as there are no legal justification for it at all.

Article 153 of the Federal Constitution is seen as the holy grail for those who hold this view. However, if we examine the provision closely we will notice two things.

Firstly, affirmative action is not a Malay right. Article 153 does not endow a right. What it does is to merely give government the power to take affirmative action despite the overarching ideal of equality which is enshrined in Article 8 of the Constitution.

To support this contention, we see that Article 8 clearly states that all citizens in this country are equal except for situations specifically provided for in the Constitution. Those “specific provisions” are found in Article 153 and there are not many of them.

They include the power to establish quotas for the civil service, permits and licences, scholarships and education.

Therefore anything other than these areas should not be subjected to affirmative action.

Furthermore, any affirmative action has to be reasonable. The idea of what is reasonable must surely be open to research and debate otherwise there will always be the risk of abuse and wastage of resources.

This being the case, although questioning the existence of such a power to have affirmative action is moot, discussion on the efficacy of affirmative action policies and programmes surely is not.

The way the discourse is today, and not merely by the racialist fringe but by mainstream politicians in power, is that even the implementation of Article 153 is not to be questioned at all.

This is surely wrong based both on the meaning of the Constitution as well as the principle held by the founding fathers that Article 153 was an unfortunate but necessary aberration from the ideals of equality and that it was to be used not in perpetuity.

With these kinds of distortion of law, is it any wonder then that we still get people actually classifying whole swathes of the citizenry as having no right to be here?

Is it any wonder then that a crazy accusation against a Chief Minister whose government has given twice as much money to the Islamic bodies in the state than the previous administration, can give rise to the belief that he is a threat to the faith?

If this country is to have any future as a true nation, the time has come for those who believe in the ideals of equality, ideals which were held by the political founding fathers of the country as well as the traditional Rulers of that time, to stand up and be counted.

To not be cowed by the bigots and to say that this is our country and it stands on noble humanitarian ideals, not opportunistic racialist thinkin

Stop feeding rats and racists

ALONG THE WATCHTOWER
By M. VEERA PANDIYAN

Failure to act promptly and appropriately against racism will only encourage more racists in the country.

"Over the past two decades, our leaders have shown their inability to mend old tears and prevent new frays"

IN five days, we will mark 53 years of Merdeka but frankly, how many Malaysians are in the mood to celebrate? The political milieu is sickening; no thanks to the raving racists and their apologists who help fan the flames of hatred.

It is the season of the Hungry Ghosts when the gates of hell are supposedly cast open for the spirits of the dead to enter the realm of the living, according to believers.

The real scare, however, is not from any such spirits but from rats and the filthy folks among us who help the rodents spread leptospirosis.

The water-borne disease caused by bacteria in rats’ urine has already killed more than 10 people, the latest being a 17 year-old boy from Kedah who swam in a river.

Parks located near rivers and waterfalls have barred to members of the public who have also been warned against wanton dumping of rubbish (which the rats feed on) and wading in flood waters.

But while the threat that the rats pose can ne handled with medication, the other diseases that’s really gnawing at the very fabric of the country – the scourge of racism – is a far more difficult one to handle.

Over the past two decades, our leaders have shown their inability to mend old tears and prevent new frays. The latest flare-up involves two school heads.

The first principal, who is from SMK Tunku Abdul Rahman Putrain Kulai, Johor allegedly called the non-Malays penumpang (passengers) during a school assembly to launch Merdeka celebrations.

The headmaster of SMK Bukit Selambau in Kedah allegedly accused Chinese students of being insensitive to the Muslims for eating in the school compound during the month of Ramadan by telling them “to return to China” if they could not respect the cultures of others.

Politicians from both sides of the fence have called for disciplinary action if they are found to be guilty.

At the directive of Deputy Prime Minister and Education Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin, Education director-general Tan Sri Alimuddin Mohd Dom has set up a panel to probe the matter, although he initially said that it was a “misunderstanding”.

About 20 police reports have been lodged against Siti Inshah, who is currently on leave and the case is being investigated under Section 504 of the Penal Code for provocation, which carries a maximum imprisonment of two years, a fine, or both.

But the Kulai school principal is getting her fair share of support from a group of vocal bloggers who believe that she has done nothing wrong.

She’s also creating a stir on Facebook through a fan page with more than 1,900 people supporting her. A tit-for-tat page against her had more than 400 fans as of early Wednesday.

The strongest response from someone within the government has come from Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department, Datuk Seri Nazri Aziz. Kudos to him for saying that there should be “zero tolerance” for racist educators, irrespective of where they are from.

“If it had been my teacher, I would have smacked his (sic) face. You are a teacher and you are supposed to be teaching us right things but yet, you talk like this,” he was quoted as saying by a portal.

But as Nazri noted, the Government’s failure to respond quickly and appropriately on racism has only encouraged more of such acts.

However, how can it respond when many government servants and agencies are not sensitive to the feelings of the people and have little understanding of 1Malaysia concept.

As in the case of the rats, we need to stop feeding this source of national debility and discord.

A friend of mine who is known to be a dedicated teacher, underwent a course (it is compulsory as a prerequisite for upgrades in salary and promotions) in June and returned utterly devastated.

She said there was no emphasis on national unity throughout the course, only a sense of intimidation and being “put in her place” through the emphasis of “Ketuanan Melayu” and the unwritten social contract between the races.

In her email she wrote: “The epitome was in the last module where a video was screened with a tinge of racial slurs, depicting the fall of the Islamic empire and the building of churches, Hindraf, communist memorials in Chinese cemeteries and finally a Muslim extremist killing a child. There was a weeping voice-over asking:
 “What else do you want?”

What right-thinking Malaysians want is quite simple: mutual respect, a sense of fairness and acceptance that all of us belong to this blessed country.

> Associate Editor M. Veera Pandiyan likes this observation by H. G. Wells: Our true nationality is mankind.

What the NEP meant and means?

Question Time
By P. GUNASEGARAM

We need more debate and less rhetoric in ironing out the real issues of affirmative action.

WITH all the brouhaha over Malay and non-Malay rights and the relentless rhetoric of race-based politics coming to the fore in the economic arena yet again, it is time to revisit the tenets of the original New Economic Policy (NEP) and separate fact from fiction.

Sadly, the major problem with the NEP is that the 30% equity target for Malays and other bumiputras became the very visible and de facto criterion for measurement of the very success of the NEP.

The other contentious part was quotas for all manner of things and preference given to bumiputra companies and individuals when it is related to procurements and contracts from the Government, often as a means to achieve that 30% target.

Both of these were administrative measures and targets and did not even form part of the policy aims of the NEP.

Very few people, if any, are likely to disagree that the broad twin aims of the NEP, formulated in the wake of the racial riots of 1969, were to eradicate poverty irrespective of race and to eliminate the identification of race with economic function.

The first aim, according to government figures, was very much achieved with hardcore poverty being virtually eradicated. And there have been major strides made in terms of Malays and bumiputras, and jobs with them making major inroads into all areas.

These are achievements of the NEP which no one can deny, although there are valid arguments and concerns such as whether the poverty line figure is a realistic one and whether there is too high representation of Malays in Government services even as they made inroads into the private sector.

While no one questions the twin aims of the NEP — everyone, including the Opposition, is in agreement — the problem is with the administrative measures that have been put in place.

These are being challenged by all sides: some sides want more and some less, some want them to be dismantled and others want them to not only be continued but reinforced.

So, let’s agree on the aims – and move on from there.
Thus, it will not be seditious if someone questions the 30% bumiputra equity target or says the measurement criteria are seriously flawed.

If someone said quotas should be reconsidered given the progress that Malays have made in some areas, that should not be interpreted as questioning Malay rights. Under the Constitution, the Government has the right to undertake affirmative action provided it is justified and it has the right not to.

The NEP (technically, the NEP has expired but the present policy still relies on the original NEP) and its future form will benefit substantially from the right kind of debate about it without emotions clouding the issues.
But there are some bodies and people who are bent on bringing in emotions precisely because it will cloud the issues. They must not be allowed to have their way.

Let’s take the 30% equity target for instance. It cannot be taken as the sole or even the most important part of NEP achievement because there are other things which are far more important – poverty eradication and racial balance in employment to name just two.

There is therefore nothing wrong in asking that this target be reviewed so that we can have better measurement of Malay and bumiputra participation in the economy and to avoid all the perils of patronage that come with this.

The same applies to quotas and bumiputra discounts for high-end property.
It is because the NEP has done so much in narrowing the gap between the races that there is a need to review some of its administrative targets to ensure that the wrong people do not benefit from it.

Bumiputras who have already made it don’t need quotas and affirmative action anymore. But others might.
But we must expect that some of those who will lose their so-called privileges will fight a rearguard action to preserve them, for that’s a way to quick riches when abused. These are the people who will benefit most by obscuring the real issues under a cloud of emotional rhetoric.

The time has come for all Malaysians to see beyond these and do what is right for everyone. Help everyone who is needy and if any particular race is more needy than another, it will automatically be helped more too.
Move to a needs-based system and you eliminate racial posturing and fighting just like that.

> Managing editor P Gunasegaram believes too many sins are committed in the name of race.

Rethink the spirit of Merdeka

Putik Lada
By H. R. Dipendra

Merdeka must now include independence of thought, ability and nation building in a globalised environment where each and every one are important stakeholders.

THE Merdeka month, at best, can be described as an opportunity for Malaysians to remember and understand the events leading up to Merdeka Day.

It usually encompasses the role played by various politicians, the forgotten heroes and culminating in a re-enactment of the raising of the right hand by our first Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman Putra Al-Haj.

To further instil a sense of patriotism, Malaysians are exhorted to drape buildings with the Jalur Gemilang, wave mini-flags or fly these atop cars at every conceivable opportunity.

To top it all, Malaysians get to enjoy various heartwarming advertisements extolling what a proud nation we are, and how we can all live harmoniously under one roof. No doubt, the Merdeka message is clear.

Then, it is back to business as usual.
This begs the question: What should celebrating Merdeka be all about? Hasn’t 53 years of independence brought about any other reflection?

Would it be presumptuous to suggest that we are an independent modern developed nation given that we have mostly all the physical attributes normally associated with a modern developed nation?

What if we were to explore deeper into the social and cultural fabric of current Malaysian society, would we then be brave enough to suggest that we are truly independent and modern?

Given that time and again we have this fascination to revert to the history of Merdeka, it would seem, albeit an unfair one, that our major achievement after 53 years of independence is simply managing to emancipate ourselves from the British.

My consternation is really about how we have continuously failed to realise that Merdeka is more than just a mere physical event to be celebrated.

It should be about Malaysia and a celebration of what the nation is about and not what it was. No one really celebrates Malaysia for its thoughts, aspirations and assimilation of a nation.

I realise the value of the historical events leading up to Merdeka day. But I would be failing as a patriot if I do not recognise that we have somehow lost our way in making us a proud nation.

Politics and socio-economic matters have become fraught with divisions. Perhaps the politicians are too embarrassed to admit this, but we should take heart that something is being done about it.

The noble initiatives put forward by Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak in making us a high-income country and his concept of 1Malaysia are indeed positive starts.

But it is disappointing to note that many of his initiatives have been met with derision and been reduced to sloganeering.

This should not be the case at all when we should be doing all that we can to make Malaysia a proud and strong nation.

It is easy to get trapped in a deep racial and social malaise.
A good starting point would be to do away with the prevalent siege mentality, a mentality where we feel it is a case of us vs them.

We cannot be constantly afraid of our own shadows as doing so will only make us a nation of cynics and sceptics.

The time is ripe for all Malaysians, irrespective of race, religion and persuasion to embrace a new thinking about what Merdeka is all about.

We have come a long way from being reliant on mining and agriculture.
The economic growth in the 1990s bore testament to that. Since the Asian Financial Crisis, we have struggled to create a value and niche for ourselves.

The fact that we are abundantly blessed with natural resources should not lull us into a false sense of wealth as ever so often this can be viewed as a curse because it impedes us from actually moving out of our comfort zone and casting a strong future for the coming generations.

My Merdeka Day message is simply that we have to confront our shadows, banish them and forge ahead. This country needs character as it strives to be independent.

As Abraham Lincoln once said: “You cannot build character and courage by taking away a man’s initiative and independence.”

We simply must not be held back by prejudices and the wanton desires of small-minded people that only seek to gain from other’s misfortune.

Merdeka must now include independence of thought, ability and nation building in a globalised environment. It must include how we can all contribute to nation-building, how we treat each other and how kind we are to our animals.

It is a time to recognise that all of us are important stakeholders and not merely squatters or rent-seekers.
Malaysians know deep down that there is no nation like ours. As much as some of us feel that the grass is greener on the other side, nothing beats the lifestyle choices offered in Malaysia.

It is time that Malaysians once and for all decide how we want this country to be shaped in the years ahead.

If the Germans are known for their automotive technology, the French for their food, the Italians for la dolce vita (the sweet life) and the South Koreans for their embracing of the Internet, what should Malaysia be known for?

Is it not time that we define what Malaysia should stand for?

> The writer is a member of the National Young Lawyers Committee of the Bar Council. Putik Lada, or pepper buds in Malay, captures the spirit and intention of this column – a platform for young lawyers to articulate their views and aspirations about the law, justice and a civil society. For more information about the young lawyers, please visit www.malaysianbar.org.my

FDI – more than economics

DIPLOMATICALLY SPEAKING
By DENNIS IGNATIUS

Malaysia needs to go well beyond mere economic and fiscal measures if it is to reverse the decline in foreign direct investment. 

THE recently released UNCTAD World Investment Report 2010 indicating that foreign direct investment (FDI) in Malaysia declined by a massive 81% in 2009 has quite understandably grabbed headlines.

According to the report, FDI declined from US$7.3bil (RM23bil) in 2008 to a mere US$1.4bil (RM4.4bil) last year. In addition, there was a massive US$8.04bil (RM25.3bil) outflow of capital.

The overall result was that our country experienced its worst FDI performance in decades.

As we so often tend to do with bad news, we shift the blame; the drop in FDI was explained away as the result of “external factors.”

The argument was made that the global economy is, after all, still recovering from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Besides, the doubling of foreign ownership of Malaysian Government Securities (compared to the previous year) and the splendid performance of the Ringgit indicate that investor confidence continues to remain high.

The massive outflow of funds from Malaysia, on the other hand, was explained away as Malaysian companies aggressively pursuing investment opportunities abroad, a coming of age of sorts even, by our multinationals.
Nevertheless, for a country that has long depended upon FDI to prosper and grow, such a drastic decline comes as a rude awakening.

For years we always bragged about how special Malaysia was by virtue of our success in attracting FDI at levels which left our neighbours green with envy.

High investment inflows were seen as a reflection of our competitiveness, our highly favourable business environment as well as our political maturity and stability.

Dismissing the significance of the precipitous decline in FDI might be politically convenient but it will not hide the arresting message that it sends: a serious loss of confidence in Malaysia and a sign of our decline.

Anyone closely monitoring developments in Malaysia, including foreign investors, cannot but conclude that our nation is now increasingly shaky in several areas. And they must also wonder, given recent events, if we are even up to the challenges we face.

Right now we are transfixed by the staggering RM12.5bil Port Klang Free Zone scandal.

What is really distressing is that such corruption and scandalous mismanagement of public finances keeps recurring with frightening regularity.

We seem to helplessly careen from one major scandal to another. It is a mess, a sordid mess, that must surely cause many foreign investors to simply shake their heads in disbelief and dismay.

And more than that, it tells the world that we still have not found the political will or the necessary institutional architecture to prevent such massive corruption from recurring.

It would be naïve to think that corruption on this scale will not impact investor confidence.
And, given our dismal record of bringing to justice the real kingfishers of corruption, not many believe that things are about to change.

Cumulative scandals affecting other national institutions, including the police and judiciary, have also steadily undermined the perception of Malaysia as a safe and competitive place for long term investments.

And then there is the increasingly strident and racially charged rhetoric that marks so much of what passes for political discourse in our country these days.

It may be just politics Malaysian style to some or a convenient, if morally bankrupt way, to garner support to others but it makes foreign investors, and many locals too, very jittery.

It is not for no reason that more and more Malaysians of all ethnic backgrounds are packing up and moving abroad.

According to the World Bank, the number of emigrants out of Malaysia rose from 9,576 in 1960 to almost 1.5 million in 2005. Over 300,000 left between March 2008 and August 2009 alone.

In this connection, I wonder how much of that US$8.4bil that left our shores last year was simply Malaysians moving their capital to safer shores.

The assurances by the government that it will take proactive measures to reverse the decline in FDI are of course welcome as are the measures already introduced under the Government Transformation Programme and the New Economic Model.

Our response, however, needs to go well beyond mere economic and fiscal measures if we are to reverse the decline.

What is also urgently needed is real and effective political leadership to tackle head on the corruption issue and the growing racial and religious divide.

The Prime Minister’s 1Malaysia policy, while constructive and desperately needed, unfortunately already suffers from a thousand cuts. Unless he is able to revive confidence in the Government’s ability to bring about its realisation, it will not help turn the tide of slumping investor confidence.

If we ever hope to raise the RM115bil worth of investments to achieve the goals of the 10th Malaysia Plan, we must act now.

And not with half-measures and half-hearted gestures but with credible policies and programmes backed by the necessary political will.

Bearing in mind the turbulent and uncertain global economic environment we are in, our very prosperity, if not survival, depends upon it.

How expert are the experts?

Review by Choo Li-Hsian

Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us – And How to Know When Not to Trust Them
Author: David H. Freedman
Publisher: Little, Brown & Co

EVERY day, we are surrounded by “expert advice” from various media. So, how do we pick the good stuff out of the constant stream of flawed ones?

In a sense, we often trust experts blindly because we are programmed to do so from young – at first with our parents, teachers, and then the authoritative voices in textbooks and the network news.

Studies on brain scans apparently show that we actually surrender our own judgment and forego our own decisions when presented with “expert advice”.

David H. Freedman, author of the book Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us – And How to Know When Not to Trust Them has spent the past three years examining why expert pronouncements so often turn out to be exaggerated and misleading.

He provides several reasons. One of them is that scientists are not as good at making trustworthy measurements as we give them credit for.

Surveys revealed that fraud, careerism, suppression of data and lousy analysis, among other reasons, are fairly rampant even among the most respected researchers and institutions.

As Freedman puts it: “It is not that they are mostly incompetents and cheats. Well, some of them are... (but) a bigger obstacle to reliable research though is that scientists often simply cannot get at the things they need to measure.”

He terms this as the streetlight effect – a reference to a joke scientists love to tell. Late at night, a police officer finds a drunken man crawling around under a streetlight.

The man says he is looking for his wallet; that he is likely to have dropped it across the street. “Then, why are you looking over here?” the police officer asks. Because the light is better here, explains the drunken man.

Freedman notes that “many and possibly most scientists spend their careers looking for answers where the light is better rather than where the truth is more likely to lie... it is often extremely difficult or even impossible to cleanly measure what is really important, so scientists instead cleanly measure what they can, hoping it turns out to be relevant.”

In many cases, scientists are stuck with surrogate measures in place of what they really want to quantify.

For example, economists cannot track the individual behaviour of billions of consumers and investors, so they rely on economic indicators and data extracts to form conclusions. A 1992 study by researchers at Harvard and the National Bureau of Economic Research examined papers from a range of economic journals. They discovered that none of them had conclusively proved anything.

John Ioannidis, a highly regarded “medical mathematician” from Greece’s University of Iaonnina examined the 45 most prominent studies published since 1990 in the top medical journals. He found that about one-third of them were ultimately refuted.

Scientific studies are also not always performed on the right subjects. Patient recruitment is a problem in medical studies. Researchers often end up enlisting those who do not represent the population in terms of health or lifestyle – students, the poor, drug abusers – as their subjects.

Studies on human health are based on animal testing but three-quarters of the drugs that prove safe and effective in animals end up failing in early human trials.

“Publication biasness” is quoted as the biggest culprit, that is, journals’ tendency to eagerly publish the small percentage of studies that produce exciting, surprising breakthrough results.

How can we counter all this? Freedman is not calling us to discard experts and their findings. The key is to distinguish between expertise that is “more likely to be right” and those that is “less likely to be right”.

We need to ask: “What does better advice have in common?” or conversely “What does bad advice have in common?” Bad advice, according to Freedman, tends to be simplistic.

It tends to be definitive, universal and certain; it is advice we love to hear, for example, chocolate is good for you.

The best advice tends to be less certain – those who say: “I think maybe this is true in certain situations for some people.” We should, therefore, avoid findings which shout “it’s exciting, it’s a breakthrough, it’s going to solve your problems.”

Instead, we should consider advice that embraces complexity and uncertainty. While this may go against our intuition, we have to accept that we live in a complex, messy and uncertain world. Experts who are more likely to steer us in the right direction are those who acknowledge this.

But here’s the million dollar question: since Freedman is a kind of expert on experts, why should we trust him? Freedman concedes that you should not.

In fact, he even dedicates a whole chapter to this subject entitled “Is This Book Wrong?” He emphasises that his purpose is not to give people answers but to provoke thinking, raise awareness and point out that there are real questions we should all be asking instead of passively accepting the status quo. In essence, we should all be smarter about how we pick our advice.

Life after retirement

By EUGENE MAHALINGAM
eugenicz@thestar.com.my

RETIREMENT. To many people, it refers to the period in life where one should be kicking back, relaxing and catching up on the things they never could during their long, gruelling working lives.

Realistically, however, not many people get a chance to enjoy their retirement period, usually due to financial constraints that comes once we stop earning a living.

With the rising cost of living, many retirees are finding it difficult to make ends meet with their EPF (Employees Provident Fund) savings or pension scheme alone and are forced to continue working.

For the purpose of this article, we’re going to skip that group of people who, during their working lives, were prudent with their expenses and shrewd with their investments and are now laughing themselves all the way to the bank till the day they die.

For those who still need to earn a living post retirement, embarking on a job can still be fun and need not be a burden. In fact, many of today’s retirees view retirement not as an end, but instead as a new and exciting phase in their lives.

Work from home

For a retiree, working from home has its advantages, says Janice Tam, a retired school teacher.
“You can work at your own pace and avoid the hassle of travelling to and fro to an actual office,” she says.
Tam today provides tuition classes for kids below 12 years of age.

“Providing tuition classes is a very popular side income alternative. Baby sitting is also a good post retirement job choice, especially when the parents drop the child at your place and saves you the hassle of having to go to their home.”

Starting your own business

Many a times, the experiences of a long career can provide retirees with the confidence and knowledge to launch a successful business.

G. Murthy used to serve with the armed forces and now, at 57, is heading his own security firm.

“My experience with the armed forces allowed me to gain invaluable knowledge in self defence and now it not only allows me to help protect people, it also provides me with a decent income.”

Sometimes, the knowledge and experience could be gained from a family business.
Growing up, Rashid Abu Bakar, now 67, used to enjoy the nasi lemak his mum sold to the local village-folk to earn a living.

After serving with the Government, he is now retired and is continuing the family business and claims that it is “good pocket money.”

“It makes for a good side income on top of the pension that I get every month.”
Rashid says he enjoys eating the nasi lemak just as much as he does making them.

“As it’s important to find pleasure in what you do, or else it would just become a burden. I have to wake up very early in the morning to prepare the food but it is something that I enjoy doing.”

He adds that it is important to understand the demands and dynamics of running your own business, its prospects and needs.

Become a consultant

Many people retire from their jobs only to become consultants to their previous employers or advisors to organisations within the industry.

Says Alvin Loh, 63, an advisor to a local property developer: “Consult-ing provides you with a lot of flexibility and due to the person’s invaluable years of experience, demand for such jobs are good and so is the salary.”

Go back to school

It is not uncommon for senior citizens to enrol part time or even full time at a college or university to learn a new skill and take up a new job, says Kajang-based private college tutor Rashid Ali.

“There are many senior citizens where I teach who are taking up something new. Some of them even come back to do another course!”

Rashid admits that taking up a part-time diploma or degree can be a huge sacrifice for someone who is married.

“There are many private institutes that offer night-time or weekend courses to cater to this group of people. There are many genuine courses that one can do online.

“Having an extra qualification on your resume carries a lot of weight and if it means better job and salary prospects, it’s worth it,” says Rashid.

Become a volunteer

There are many organisations out there that are eager to accept volunteers, regardless of a person’s age, says Jacob Wong, a committee chairman for a Kepong-based non-profit organisation.

“Because we have to constantly keep our budgets down, we’re always looking for volunteers. Believe it or not, a lot of times we prefer to work with retirees because they are less demanding and are quite satisfied with the pocket money that we give them.

“Many of today’s youths are just interested in making money and are not interested with volunteering. That’s why we prefer to work with senior citizens,” he says.

Schools, libraries, religious and relief centres and charitable organisations are among some of the places that are always on the look out for volunteers, Wong adds.

Action and reaction

Behind The Headlines
Bunn Nagara

The continued rise of China takes several turns, with each one prompting revealing reactions abroad.

CHINA’S economic ascendancy is already old hat, stunning as the curve still is. But what is particularly compelling is its international fallout.

How do others react to China’s soaring trajectory? A glimpse was available during the week, when GDP figures for the second quarter surpassed Japan’s to make China the second-biggest economy in the world.

China’s number two status had been known for weeks already and previously its GDP had also overtaken Japan’s temporarily. However, as Japan continues to stagnate and China to grow, the gap between them is now expected to stay in China’s favour, making 2010 the year it becomes the world’s second-biggest economy after the United States.

Japan gave up its title as number two after 42 years in resigned acceptance.

 

Economic powerhouse: A child playing at a sculpture of a laptop computer merged with an abacus as its monitor in Shanghai on Friday. China has overtaken Japan to become the second-biggest economy in the world. — AP

 

Academically, this was a foregone conclusion, since both China’s growth and Japan’s stagnation – notwithstanding a brief respite in the first quarter this year – had been evident for years.

Popularly, a sense of lethargy seems pervasive, with little imagination or hope of how to turn things around.
Politically, attention is focused on managing consumption, subsidies and production incentives rather than challenging China.

Japanese businesses could hardly be more bullish on a booming China, particularly when they have been investing so much for so many years there.

Increasingly, Japanese industrialists are acutely aware of the potential of the world’s biggest production house and the most extensive market just next door.

The same sentiments are shared in Taiwan, if anything more so. Official notice of China eclipsing Japan economically came in the same week as approval in Taiwan’s legislature for a landmark Economic Co-operation Framework Agreement (ECFA) slashing tariffs across the Taiwan Straits.

This was a moment, enabled by a Kuomintang majority in the Legislative Yuan, that Taiwanese businesses had been waiting for.

Bilateral trade across the straits, already at US$110bil (RM346bil) annually, is set to multiply much more.
The opposition Democratic Progressive Party tried to block passage of the deal by warning that it would mean excessive dependence on the mainland, to no avail.

Their mistake was in seeing the ECFA as facilitating this dependence, when it is only a symptom of it.
The ECFA includes a host of features for mutual consultation, review and fine-tuning that will enhance and enrich cross-straits relations.

By encouraging Taiwanese businesses to explore and profit from dealings on the mainland, Taiwan’s business community as a whole would soon be convinced of improving bilateral ties all-round.

All of this might seem to prod the United States into self-doubt in the region.
Its decades-old bilateral relations with Japan as “the most important bilateral relationship across the Pacific” had just been eclipsed by its relationship with China.

Now that China’s rising economy has driven the point home by eclipsing Japan’s, what next?

Whither the 1951/60 US-Japan security treaty? And with cross-straits relations swirling into a new configuration, what would happen to the US “security understanding” with Taiwan enshrined in the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act and all its nuances?

A rising China is not doing anything significant to upstage US military dominance of East Asia but some militarists see its hulking economy to be making waves nonetheless.

But in being militarists, they have no proper response to developments in the economic realm.
The day after Taiwan’s legislature passed the ECFA convincingly, Adm Robert Willard, head of the US Pacific Command, said in Manila that the United States opposed the use of force in South China Sea disputes.

This followed comments by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last month that the United States had a “national interest” in seeing the disputes resolved diplomatically, upsetting China.

The problem was not over disputes having to be resolved diplomatically but about the United States seeing itself as having a national interest in the region.

It could mean that US forces would intervene to defend those perceived interests whenever it deemed appropriate.
That came after officials in Beijing reportedly told a visiting US delegation in March that the South China Sea was a “core national interest” of China.

How far would the United States want to pit itself against China in the region and for how long would the United States want any such conflict to last?

Adm Willard’s talking points were neither new nor ever disputed by any country in the region. But why they were made at the time could bear some examination, particularly when he added that countries in South-East Asia were concerned with China’s military assertiveness.

This outlook contradicts many perceptions in the region, as have been communicated to the latest Pentagon survey.

Its current annual report to Congress, Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2010, cites China’s military build-up continuing “unabated” but also acknowledges its ability to sustain military power at a distance “remains limited”.

At the same time, US military exercises in the region amount to overt posturing in playing to a Beijing audience.

The more hawkish media in the United States and East Asia then pick up on these events and spin them through their respective prisms.

More of the same can be expected when China’s PLA Navy begins work on its first aircraft carrier later this year.

Other countries in East Asia are unlike the United States not only in terms of size and strength but also in simply being here – which means they cannot end a regional conflict by simply withdrawing troops.

China’s rising economy need not provoke a military face-off with anyone but could instead foster closer ties as Japan and Taiwan have found.

Economic pre-eminence should not have to trigger a military response, least of all the kind of military intervention proven disastrous elsewhere.

Car loan takers top bankruptcy list

By LEE YUK PENG
yukpeng@thestar.com.my

PETALING JAYA: At least 500 people who take out hire-purchase loans for vehicles are declared bankrupt every month.

The majority, comprising 37% (950) of the 2,565 cases in the first five months of this year, were aged between 35 and 44 years. (See Table)

Insolvency Department director-general Datuk Abdul Karim Abdul Jalil told The Star the incidence of bankruptcy from unserviced car loans was extremely high in the first five months of the year, an average of 513 cases a month.

He said this was in contrast to the average of 330 cases a month last year, 227 in 2008 and 265 in 2007.

He added that becoming bankrupt because of one’s inability to service vehicle loans had also topped the list of bankruptcy cases in Malaysia, accounting for about 24% of the total 80,370 cases between 2005 and May this year.

“Personal loan borrowers and business loan borrowers accounted for 12% and 11% of the total number of bankruptcy cases respectively within the same period.”

Once a person is declared a bankrupt he will be restricted from, among others, travelling overseas, holding the post of company director, and will have to give up his assets, including property and cars.

He must contribute to the bankruptcy estate, and will only be discharged once the sum owed is settled.

Abdul Karim is concerned that the number of bankruptcy cases involving car loans among those aged below 25 had shot up to 156 last year, against 55 cases each in 2008 and 2007.

There were 27 such cases as at May this year.
Under the hire purchase agreement, the bank repossesses the car if the borrower defaults on the monthly instalments for three consecutive months.

It will sell off the car to recover the sum owed and if the amount still owed is more than RM30,000 the bank will file a bankruptcy petition in the High Court.

In cases where the sum owed is below RM30,000, the bank will wait until the amount, with accumulated interest, balloons to RM30,000 before filing the petition.

On the rising incidence of bankruptcy involving those taking car loans, Fomca claims there is a reason why banks prefer to repossess and sell the cars instead of negotiating with the borrowers to come up with a scheduled repayment that they could afford.

According to its secretary-general Mohd Sha’ani Abdullah, some bank officers receive kickbacks from car repossessors and auctioneers for giving them business.

He said Fomca had complained to Bank Negara on the zero downpayment for car loans as advertised by some car salesmen last year: “How can this be allowed when borrowers have to pay at least 10% of the price as downpayment?”

Appeasing the Bond Gods

From Paul Krugman’s latest column:

As I look at what passes for responsible economic policy these days, there’s an analogy that keeps passing through my mind.

I know it’s over the top, but here it is anyway: the policy elite — central bankers, finance ministers, politicians who pose as defenders of fiscal virtue — are acting like the priests of some ancient cult, demanding that we engage in human sacrifices to appease the anger of invisible gods.

Hey, I told you it was over the top. But bear with me for a minute.

Late last year the conventional wisdom on economic policy took a hard right turn. Even though the world’s major economies had barely begun to recover, even though unemployment remained disastrously high across much of America and Europe, creating jobs was no longer on the agenda. Instead, we were told, governments had to turn all their attention to reducing budget deficits.

Skeptics pointed out that slashing spending in a depressed economy does little to improve long-run budget prospects, and may actually make them worse by depressing economic growth. But the apostles of austerity — sometimes referred to as “austerians” — brushed aside all efforts to do the math. Never mind the numbers, they declared: immediate spending cuts were needed to ward off the “bond vigilantes,” investors who would pull the plug on spendthrift governments, driving up their borrowing costs and precipitating a crisis. Look at Greece, they said.

The skeptics countered that Greece is a special case, trapped by its use of the euro, which condemns it to years of deflation and stagnation whatever it does. The interest rates paid by major nations with their own currencies — not just the United States, but also Britain and Japan — showed no sign that the bond vigilantes were about to attack, or even that they existed.

Just you wait, said the austerians: the bond vigilantes may be invisible, but they must be feared all the same.
This was a strange argument even a few months ago, when the U.S. government could borrow for 10 years at less than 4 percent interest. We were being told that it was necessary to give up on job creation, to inflict suffering on millions of workers, in order to satisfy demands that investors were not, in fact, actually making, but which austerians claimed they would make in the future.

But the argument has become even stranger recently, as it has become clear that investors aren’t worried about deficits; they’re worried about stagnation and deflation. And they’ve been signaling that concern by driving interest rates on the debt of major economies lower, not higher. On Thursday, the rate on 10-year U.S. bonds was only 2.58 percent.

So how do austerians deal with the reality of interest rates that are plunging, not soaring? The latest fashion is to declare that there’s a bubble in the bond market: investors aren’t really concerned about economic weakness; they’re just getting carried away. It’s hard to convey the sheer audacity of this argument: first we were told that we must ignore economic fundamentals and instead obey the dictates of financial markets; now we’re being told to ignore what those markets are actually saying because they’re confused.

You see, then, why I find myself thinking in terms of strange and savage cults, demanding human sacrifices to appease unseen forces.

And, yes, we are talking about sacrifices. Anyone who doubts the suffering caused by slashing spending in a weak economy should look at the catastrophic effects of austerity programs in Greece and Ireland.

Maybe those countries had no choice in the matter — although it’s worth noting that all the suffering being imposed on their populations doesn’t seem to have done anything to improve investor confidence in their governments.

But, in America, we do have a choice. The markets aren’t demanding that we give up on job creation. On the contrary, they seem worried about the lack of action — about the fact that, as Bill Gross of the giant bond fund Pimco put it earlier this week, we’re “approaching a cul-de-sac of stimulus,” which he warns “will slow to a snail’s pace, incapable of providing sufficient job growth going forward.”

It seems almost superfluous, given all that, to mention the final insult: many of the most vocal austerians are, of course, hypocrites.

Notice, in particular, how suddenly Republicans lost interest in the budget deficit when they were challenged about the cost of retaining tax cuts for the wealthy. But that won’t stop them from continuing to pose as deficit hawks whenever anyone proposes doing something to help the unemployed.

So here’s the question I find myself asking: What will it take to break the hold of this cruel cult on the minds of the policy elite? When, if ever, will we get back to the job of rebuilding the economy?