Politik, Legislatif, Dasar dan Tadbir Urus

Malaysia is rated as "high risk" while Singapore is well-positioned to weather the economic slowdown because of its political and social stability, says Hong Kong-based Political & Economic Risk Consultancy. Its analysts ranked Singapore as having the least political and social risks next year among 16 territories in Asia-Pacific, according to a summary of its 87-page report released to the media yesterday. Malaysia,Thailand and India were ranked as the most risky because of internal developments. The unlikelihood of sudden political changes, stable labour relations and sound policies, including measures to help the poor, were among the factors in Singapore's favour, said Perc's managing director, RobertBroadfoot. "Singapore's fiscal situation is strong enough for the fiscal incentives that are going to help the country get over the crisis and spread the pain of recession," he said. Politically, he noted, Singapore has no election coming up and the G...

PACE will be organising a talk on Heritage Conservation - the Georgetown case on 25 October 2008 at the Socio-Economic & Environmental Research Institute (SERI) office, 10 Jalan Brown off Jalan Ayer Rajah, 10350 Penang. The talk will commence from 2.30pm to 4.30 pm and the speaker for this session will be Mrs Loh Lim Lin Leem who is a senior council member of Penang Heritage Trust (PHT) since 1990 and also a member of the Georgetown Dossier Submission Team for Unesco World Heritage Listing.

Tens of thousands of Malaysian workers from the services and manufacturing sectors in Singapore will be retrenched when employers, hit by the recession, start downsizing in the island republic. Though the recession has not translated to retrenchment, Malay-sian workers in Singapore are starting to feel jittery over the prospect of losing their jobs if the country’s economy takes a turn for the worse. At the same time, Johor is taking early steps, including playing job matchmaker, to ensure those retren-ched can quickly be matched with jobs available locally. For many Malaysians working in Singapore, the main concern is how to continue supporting their families if they are retrenched. Some said they were willing to take a pay cut and return to Malaysia. Others were even prepared take up two jobs back home to supplement their income.

In April 2007, a barge crossing from Penang Island to Seberang Perai on the Malaysian peninsular sank into depth of Selat Melaka. Tons upon tons of cargo-garbage from the heavily urbanized island floated to the surface of the sea, seriously polluting the surrounding waters. This incident spot lighted an issue that Penang Island and other densely populated metropolitan areas in Malaysia had dreaded to face but had not being able to wish away: exporting their garbage to somebody’s backyard. Throughout the lifecycle, garbage never stops taking a heavy financial and environmental toll on Malaysia. Garbage disposal drains about RM00 million out of Malaysia’s sheds, continue the onslaught by seeping, especially during the raining seasons, into streams and rivers to foul up drinking water and aquatic ecosystem. At the same time, methane and other greenhouse gases escape into the air adding more atmosphere warming. To counter this glomming picture, many Malaysian citizens from Penang to Kuala...

Central to the meaning of socialism is common ownership. This means the resources of the world being owned in common by the entire global population. But does it really make sense for everybody to own everything in common? Of course, some goods tend to be for personal consumption, rather than to share – clothes, for example. People ‘owning’ certain personal possessions does not contradict the principle of a society based upon common ownership. In practice, common ownership will mean everybody having the right to participate in decisions on how global resources will be used. It means nobody being able to take personal control of resources, beyond their own personal possessions. Democratic control is therefore also essential to the meaning of socialism. Socialism will be a society in which everybody will have the right to participate in the social decisions that affect them. These decisions could be on a wide range of issues – one of the most important kinds of decision, for example, wou...

The word capitalism is now quite commonly used to describe the social system in which we now live. It is also often assumed that it has existed, if not forever, then for most of human history. In fact, capitalism is a relatively new social system. But what exactly does ‘capitalism’ mean? Class division Capitalism is the social system which now exists in all countries of the world. Under this system, the means for producing and distributing goods (the land, factories, technology, transport system etc) are owned by a small minority of people. We refer to this group of people as the capitalist class. The majority of people must sell their ability to work in return for a wage or salary (who we refer to as the working class.) The working class are paid to produce goods and services which are then sold for a profit. The profit is gained by the capitalist class because they can make more money selling what we have produced than we cost to buy on the labour market. In this sense, the working c...

DURING the Soviet economy era, free market capitalists used to joke that Soviet workers pretended to work and the state pretended to pay them. Now we have financial engineers pretending that they are creating value and the state is pretending that the value still exists. We have built a Tower of Babel through financial engineering. Through excessively low interest rates, we created a financial bubble that has to deflate back to reality. Subprime mortgages meant that we pretended that people without the income can afford high price housing. The originators sold that dream and took away their profits. The packagers then pretended that the CDOs (collateralised debt obligation) had AAA ratings and sold that dream to investors who thought the rating agencies knew what they were branding. The CDS bought or sold pretended that the guarantees were valid. Now we are not so sure. Civil engineers build real structures, but financial engineers build dreams. We should have seen through that dream w...

Jalan Alor on Yahoo! returns more than 900,000 results. It is that famous. Yet, Kuala Lumpur City Hall is adamant that changing the name to Jalan Kejora - a move that has sparked a public outcry - is the right thing to do. Datuk Bandar Datuk Ab Hakim Borhan said the move, which was planned three years ago, would give the tourist destination of Bukit Bintang a new image. “Other roads in the area will soon have new names, and they will all be named after the stars to create the new image,” he said yesterday during a visit to a landslide site in Cheras. The name change came to light when city hall replaced the road sign about a week ago. The Jalan Alor name has been in existence for 35 years. City Hall explained that the name was changed at the request of the National Economic Action Council to meet requirements under the road naming guidelines and to go with other roads in the vicinity. The DAP MP for Bukit Bintang, Fong Kui Lun, who has brought the matter up with the Federal Territories...