| UMNO Youth: The Crisis, Controversies and Khairy |  |
| Monday, 29 March 2010 08:52 | |
So was there really calamity within Umno’s youth wing or was the whole thing just an overly sensationalized news reports that got out of hand? It was at the last Exco meeting in January 28 that a heated exchange of words transpired where an exco member reportedly asked his new chief Khairy Jamaluddin to quit for being ineffective. Khairy and many other Pemudas were not too happy with widespread news implying crisis in the leadership of the 100,000-member strong wing. The 34-year old son-in-law of former prime minister Tun Abdullah Badawi has refuted claims of being asked to step down while other Excos have been singing the same tune. Apparently, according to some Excos and other sources within the wing, contrary to news reports, the outburst by Hishammuddin Yeop was not specifically directed at the Pemuda chief but it was more of a general remark to call for any members to resign if they could not perform. |
BETWEEN TWIN BROTHERS the Republican's Big Lie AND UMNO'S biggest lie
In 1968, 1,300 sanitation workers in Memphis went on strike. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. came to support them. That was where he lost his life. Eventually Memphis heard the grievances of its sanitation workers. And in subsequent years millions of public employees across the nation have benefited from the job protections they've earned.
But now the right is going after public employees.
Public servants are convenient scapegoats. Republicans would rather deflect attention from corporate executive pay that continues to rise as corporate profits soar, even as corporations refuse to hire more workers. They don't want stories about Wall Street bonuses, now higher than before taxpayers bailed out the Street. And they'd like to avoid a spotlight on the billions raked in by hedge-fund and private-equity managers whose income is treated as capital gains and subject to only a 15 percent tax, due to a loophole in the tax laws designed specifically for them.
It's far more convenient to go after people who are doing the public's work -- sanitation workers, police officers, fire fighters, teachers, social workers, federal employees -- to call them "faceless bureaucrats" and portray them as hooligans who are making off with your money and crippling federal and state budgets. The story fits better with the Republican's Big Lie that our problems are due to a government that's too big.
Above all, Republicans don't want to have to justify continued tax cuts for the rich. As quietly as possible, they want to make them permanent.
But the right's argument is shot-through with bad data, twisted evidence, and unsupported assertions.
They say public employees earn far more than private-sector workers. That's untrue when you take account of level of education. Matched by education, public sector workers actually earn less than their private-sector counterparts.
The Republican trick is to compare apples with oranges -- the average wage of public employees with the average wage of all private-sector employees. But only 23 percent of private-sector employees have college degrees; 48 percent of government workers do. Teachers, social workers, public lawyers who bring companies to justice, government accountants who try to make sure money is spent as it should be -- all need at least four years of college.
Compare apples to apples and and you'd see that over the last fifteen years the pay of public sector workers has dropped relative to private-sector employees with the same level of education. Public sector workers now earn 11 percent less than comparable workers in the private sector, and local workers 12 percent less. (Even if you include health and retirement benefits, government employees still earn less than their private-sector counterparts with similar educations.)
Here's another whopper. Republicans say public-sector pensions are crippling the nation. They say politicians have given in to the demands of public unions who want only to fatten their members' retirement benefits without the public noticing. They charge that public-employee pensions obligations are out of control.
Some reforms do need to be made. Loopholes that allow public sector workers to "spike" their final salaries in order to get higher annuities must be closed. And no retired public employee should be allowed to "double dip," collecting more than one public pension.
But these are the exceptions. Most public employees don't have generous pensions. After a career with annual pay averaging less than $45,000, the typical newly-retired public employee receives a pension of $19,000 a year. Few would call that overly generous.
And most of that $19,000 isn't even on taxpayers' shoulders. While they're working, most public employees contribute a portion of their salaries into their pension plans. Taxpayers are directly responsible for only about 14 percent of public retirement benefits. Remember also that many public workers aren't covered by Social Security, so the government isn't contributing 6.25 of their pay into the Social Security fund as private employers would.
Yes, there's cause for concern about unfunded pension liabilities in future years. They're way too big. But it's much the same in the private sector. The main reason for underfunded pensions in both public and private sectors is investment losses that occurred during the Great Recession. Before then, public pension funds had an average of 86 percent of all the assets they needed to pay future benefits -- better than many private pension plans.
The solution is no less to slash public pensions than it is to slash private ones. It's for all employers to fully fund their pension plans.
The final Republican canard is that bargaining rights for public employees have caused state deficits to explode. In fact there's no relationship between states whose employees have bargaining rights and states with big deficits. Some states that deny their employees bargaining rights -- Nevada, North Carolina, and Arizona, for example, are running giant deficits of over 30 percent of spending. Many that give employees bargaining rights -- Massachusetts, New Mexico, and Montana -- have small deficits of less than 10 percent.
Public employees should have the right to bargain for better wages and working conditions, just like all employees do. They shouldn't have the right to strike if striking would imperil the public, but they should at least have a voice. They often know more about whether public programs are working, or how to make them work better, than political appointees who hold their offices for only a few years.
Don't get me wrong. When times are tough, public employees should have to make the same sacrifices as everyone else. And they are right now. Pay has been frozen for federal workers, and for many state workers across the country as well.
But isn't it curious that when it comes to sacrifice, Republicans don't include the richest people in America? To the contrary, they insist the rich should sacrifice even less, enjoying even larger tax cuts that expand public-sector deficits. That means fewer public services, and even more pressure on the wages and benefits of public employees.
It's only average workers -- both in the public and the private sectors -- who are being called upon to sacrifice.
This is what the current Republican attack on public-sector workers is really all about. Their version of class warfare is to pit private-sector workers against public servants. They'd rather set average working people against one another -- comparing one group's modest incomes and benefits with another group's modest incomes and benefits -- than have Americans see that the top 1 percent is now raking in a bigger share of national income than at any time since 1928, and paying at a lower tax rate. And Republicans would rather you didn't know they want to cut taxes on the rich even more.
Robert Reich is the author of Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future, now in bookstores. This post originally appeared at RobertReich.org.
Khairy Jamaluddin's Leadership with no Inspiration Mahatir's UMNO finally shut door at his face
Umno Youth chief Khairy Jamaluddin originally mentioned not defending his seat in an interview with a newsportal last July.
When pressed for details, he clarified that he had only been “mulling the possibility and that he had yet to make a firm decision on the matter”.
At the beginning of 2011 Khairy again raised speculation about leaving politics. However, this time, he confirmed that he was not going to defend his Rembau seat in the next general election and was considering a break from politics.
“Hope to help win more youth support for BN (Barisan Nasional) in 2011 & work hard preparing for elections. Then I’m taking a break from politics. Can’t wait,” Khairy wrote on Twitter.
When asked what he meant by a “break”, he said, “I would like to ‘stand down’ as they say in the UK. A couple of things I’d like to do before it gets too late.”
He replied that he was not sure how long he planned to be away from politics: “Indefinite. Not sure what I will be doing. A few things I want to do like go back to school.”
This time around, we are made to believe that he is leaving the political arena for real. He says he will be on study leave.
Is he really as unpopular as is made out? There were reports that at the end of January 2010, there was a heated Umno Youth exco meeting during which an exco member asked Khairy to quit for being ineffective.
Or is he going because of his various run-ins with Najib? Khairy’s friendship with Kalimullah Hassan who in turn was friendly with the Singapore government, in particular with Home Minister Wong Kan Seng, who is in charge of intelligence operations, was not welcome. Khairy is one Umno Youth chief who has not been ‘rewarded’ with a ministerial post.
Perhaps his exit from politics is a ruse to lull the opposition into a sense of security. Pakatan might think he is out of politics and be off their guard.
Or it could be a bizarre case of Khairy knowing that BN is not going to do well at the elections and so in order to be more welcoming to the next Pakatan government, has decided to leave politics now so he might get an invitation to join the new government later?
Khairy may tell people he is studying when in fact he is helping Najib’s election campaign by gathering information about various people. The cover that he is no longer active in politics is the perfect opportunity to wreak maximum damge.
He can’t be that sensitive about the revelations in Wikileaks about him. A Singaporean official told another US official: “The political knives will be out for Abdullah (Ahmad Badawi’s) son-in-law, Khairy Jamaluddin, whom nobody likes because he got where he is through family ties...”
Or has Khairy got wind of a certain scandal that is about to be exposed? Documents made public by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the US Department of Justice on Monday allege that French equipment supplier Alcatel paid bribes to employees of Telekom Malaysia Bhd (TM) in exchange for non-public information.
The SEC allege that Alcatel Malaysia’s management consented to these payments and those who got the kickbacks were two consultants who received payments of US$200,000 and US$500,000 through US bank accounts purportedly for market research.
Because of the bribes, it claimed, Alcatel won a US$85mil contract. The contract is said to be for the deployment of equipment for Celcom’s 3G rollout under phase 2 in 2006.
One of the consultants is allegedly Khairy.
So has Najib told Khairy to leave as he will attract adverse publicity for BN in the upcoming election? Najib wants a team free of graft. Is he afraid of more people being charged under his government?
Or did Khairy voluntarily leave and go abroad, so that ‘papers’ cannot be served on him when the law courts come to get him? Is he is trying to save many embarassed faces?
So which is it, did Khairy jump or was he pushed?
Take any leader and you will see that this is so. If these things are not happening, then I would doubt very much if the said person is a leader.
A leader takes responsibility for the actions of the persons he supposedly leads. A leader does not say, "I don't know". The leader knows that the buck stops at him and takes full accountability for the same. Two examples from Indian history stand out in my mind.
Mahatma Gandhi (the original Gandhi) undertook a fast unto death after the Chauri Chaura incident. Why did he do that? It was because he felt (and this is important) he was culpable for his followers actions with resulted in the burning down of a police chowky and many deaths.
Lal Bahadur Shastri in 1956, offered his resignation after a railway accident at Mahbubnagar that led to 112 deaths. However, Nehru did not accept his resignation. Three months later, he resigned accepting moral and constitutional responsibility for a railway accident at Ariyalur in Tamil Nadu that resulted in 144 deaths. While speaking in the Parliament on the incident, the then Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, stated that he was accepting the resignation because it would set an example in constitutional propriety and not because Shastri was in any way responsible for the accident. Shastri's unprecedented gesture was greatly appreciated by the citizens.[Wiki entry, here]
Look at history and you will see that leaders rarely share credit for victories but share all the blame when anything goes wrong. And incidentally both these leaders are with the party that today heads the government.
Today the two people from this very same party who head the government - one official, one unofficial - are leaders of a different nature. One has no idea what is happening under his watch or atleast claims to have no knowledge of what is happening under his watch. He has the certificate of integrity provided by all concerned. And the person he reports to, unconstitutionally, has nothing to say, except take potshots
at the opposition. What about the lakhs and crores looted? Why was your government sitting on all these scams? And these reports were out by atleast one newspaper in 2008 itself.
It beats me - a government that is reportedly the "most corrupt government ever to have ruled India" - its leaders should be accountable for it at the very least? Time after time the party has rewarded those who have indulged in corruption. Today it is Ashok Chavan who after being ousted from Chief Ministership is now eyeing the Rajya Sabha despite being in the limelight of the Adarsh scam. AndSuresh Kalmadi was busy enjoying yet another junketat tax payers expense - the very same taxpayers whose money he helped spend gainfully as part of our hosting the CWG games. And people by their very nature respond to incentives. And in this government, there is no incentive to stay away from corruption - indeed it is rewarded. And loyalty, surely, seems to matter more than corruption. Indeed, it is prized over ineffectiveness as well - see the curious case of Shivraj Patil. In my books, ifcorruption is overlooked it is because the money benefited in some way. After all there is no such thing as a free lunch is there?
Take any organization - if someone reports to a superior, the superior is accountable for all actions that is undertaken by the junior. Every single one. The superior cannot hide under, "I did not know" or "I was
not aware" or "I am honest, those who report to me are not." As a supervisor, you are entirely accountable to what your minions do. If this is true in any random private company it is sure for those who claim to be heading nations and governments? And when your reportee has cheated the exchequer of an enormous sum of money, you are accountablefor it. And you better stand up and say that - as party head and government head. Instead what we see is theatrics, conspiracy theories, lengthy articles on the integrity of the Prime Minister, a quasi leadership that is forever missing in action or a leadership which will run away the first time a difficult question is asked.
I don't get it - how can the leaders (designated and quasi) of the government with the despicable "most corrupt government ever" tag be honest? It beats me. Can someone enlighten?
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