<pic credit: AFP>
If you look at our laws. They have always veered toward the government and businesses. God forbid, if you let customers have a greater weight in the scale of justice or even a balanced weight, you may get citizens actually clamoring for more rights against the government. After all, customers are also citizens.
You may have Competition Commission Singapore (CCS) to ensure a fair playing field, Calvin Cheng was fined for a scheme of “price-fixing when he was the President of the Association of Modelling Industry Professionals (AMIP).”
But Calvin Cheng is small fry. If you look at how our Telcos and our cable TVs owned by Temasek price their products, you must suspect monopolistic behavior. And even our Petrol companies are not immune to ‘price fixing’. So is it a wonder, that Calvin Cheng felt entitled to do the same, and even ‘glamorized’ his misdemeanor by alluding to the fact that Microsoft also got fined for ‘price-fixing’?
But Calvin Cheng is not part of the inner circle. He is just another wannabe elite to be conveniently ‘displayed’ to show the public what is impartiality. I will believe it when Temasek is taken to task. I will believe it when CCS launches an inquiry as to how govt-union-biz may have depressed wages through so called collective bargaining.
CASE has been a joke since its inception. PAP wants to pretend it is just as civil minded, just as democratic by dressing itself appropriately, like wearing CASE as part of its democratic credentials. But CASE has little enforcement value, there lies the truth. It is merely a mannequin to look pretty.
But as more and more citizens get fed up with the unfair abuses, and start to take matters into their own hands, people will realize there is a systematic rationale as to how laws in Singapore are conceived, which is to advantage the government and businesses.
As the seeds of all these woes planted by an arrogant PAP start to bear fruits, fruits of bitterness and anger, we will come to the conclusion that it is time to replace the guardians of our garden.
BK