The elite are living life in their ivory towers and would do all they can to convince or coerce the masses that the new status quo is either good, natural or inevitable, and nothing can be done about it.
The first myth they are selling is that the wide income gap is normal and that’s it, live with it, meaning they keep their high income and the masses keep their low income. They are so talented and the average guy is so untalented. They need to pay themselves so high or they will be poached by MNCs that are willing to pay them more. The income of the masses has to be kept low as the whole world is waiting outside our door to take the jobs at lower pay, and they are willing, hungry and more talented.
Another myth is the price of public housing, even when it is a 99 year lease, is affordable and reasonable at the kind of price they are selling and to be repayable over 30 or more years. And they are forcing young people to incur huge debt to service, while those with a little more income are forced to take even bigger debt in private housing. They want it that way, for whose benefits? Definitely not for the young home buyers who would be burdened for almost their entire working lives.
A new myth they have created is that taking public transport is gracious living, reduces jams on the roads. They are also saying the roads are congested and to reduce the jams, high car prices, including $100k COEs are necessary. And who will be enjoying the jam free roads? And they pay themselves crazily to make sure the high prices of car ownership look cheap and affordable. And what is the main cause of more cars on the roads? Is it high population? You dunno meh? And they are going to make the population density go even higher and higher.
Who would have to pay the price for the big squeeze? Not the elite for sure. They even try to con the daft Sinkies that living in dog kennel size flats would not affect the quality of life and to have more children, to have 3 generations living in the little kennel called home.
What else have they fiddled with to their advantage and to the disadvantage of the masses? They told you GST is good and meant to help the poor. How many of you believe in this new moral? They abolished estate duties to encourage the rich to get richer. The rationale is not to discourage the rich from becoming more enterprising, and their talent should not be punished. They deserved to be rich for generations as they are so talented, or talent breeds in the same pool of genes. My eye balls are rolling all over.
What else are the elite telling the masses? Keep more money in your CPF and be happy knowing you have so much money in their safe keeping. Only clever people will put their money in the CPF to grow and the money will not run away. It will be there forever, even after you die. Great moral wisdom isn’t it?
Oh, I nearly forgot, $600,000 is peanuts. Many peasants would never even see $6000 in their bank accounts in their life time. And housing prices drops by 1% they started to kpkb. But when housing prices went up by 200% or 300% they did not bother. They laughed all the way to the banks.
Another interesting new moral is for poor young men and women to defend the riches of the elite, to protect their mansions when the young men and women are paid not even peanuts but more like pittance. And they expect the young men and women to be valiant and to die defending their wealth without thinking or questioning. ‘Si beh kiang or si beh gong’?
Then there is this new wisdom or moral code, that it is the right thing to do to bring in foreigners to replace the citizens in good jobs and allow the citizens to be underemployed or unemployed. It is called meritocrazy! And the citizens are threatened to buck up or their wives and daughters would become maids. Why is there a need for a defence force, and what is there to defend when foreigners are invited to feast themselves at the expense of citizens, to boss over the citizens, to cheat the citizens?
Would the deregulation of the financial industry to allow the banks to do as they pleased, to create money out of nothing, be the new moral code of the elite? You tell me.
This new moral code is not exhaustive. You could have seen and heard even more than are written here. This is the new morality of the elite. And they would tell the daft that these are the hard truths and they have to accept it, like it or not.
Chua Chin Leng AKA RedBean
*The writer blogs at http://mysingaporenews.blogspot.com/