REGAIN CONTROL OF OUR LIVES BY VOTING OUT THE MEN IN WHITE

Yesterday was our 50th National Day and I couldn’t find any reason for ordinary Singaporeans to be celebrating. Our country has been going to the dogs since the 80’s when Lee Kuan Yew retired all our old guards except himself. LKY was intent to control Singaporeans for as long as possible.

LKY had already confirmed and admitted that PAP controlled Singaporeans even on very personal matters; it decided who our neighbours were, how we lived, the noise we made, the language we used and how we spat. Singaporeans could and should be programmed according to PAP’s software.

Image source (edited)

LKY was PAP and PAP is still unmistakably LKY. From taking legal action against bloggers and activists to imprisoning a 16-year old for insulting LKY and using taxpayer-funded statutory boards/politicised ministries to fix opposition MPs, PM Lee has no idea of good governance except repeating his father’s mistakes. In terms of government control, Singapore wins every country hands down except North Korea.

It would have been fine if PAP had only wanted to control our behavior. But PAP’s real objective was the control of our assets and property. HDB flats, CPF, privates vehicles, etc are under all the FULL control of PAP and belong to us only in name. Things which belong to you, you must be able to have full control over them and they are very few.

Like our HDB flats, private vehicles are only leased to their ‘owners’ for 10 years after the introduction of the COE scheme. In other countries, a car belongs to the owner forever. With control over our assets, PAP is able to profit hundreds of millions annually without lifting a finger.

(Many Singaporeans have not realised just how expensive a car in Singapore is compared with one across the causeway. It is wrong to assume that a car costing $120,000 is only 4 times more expensive than a Malaysian one with a $30,000 price tag. If the Malaysian car is driven 20 years, the difference could be 6 times, and 8 times if used for 30 years. The additional cost of COE has to be included because well-maintained cars can be driven for up to 30 years or longer. When we take into account maintenance, petrol and other miscellaneous costs, our cars are damn bloody expensive.)

Whatever PAP controls and if it could profit from it, rest assured it would. In January this year, motorcycle COEs cost as low as $4,403. Based on the average price in the 3 months, the same piece of paper now costs $2,000/almost 50% more. PAP does not care if motorcyclists, many from the lower income group, are struggling with high cost of living issues. If motorcyclists do not want to wake up to a $10,000 COE, they’d better start to control PAP’s insatiable greed.

HDB flat buyers have never owned our flats because it has been stated very clearly on every legal document that we are only “lessees”. If we are owners, we could never be subjected to rule changes every year. For example, the PAP cannot suka suka change ownership rules of private property owners but it’s fine when it comes to HDB ‘owners’.

The only thing that we purchased from HDB is a very long-term lease. Although ‘owner’ has been mentioned a million times by PAP and its propaganda mouthpiece, the fact remains – we are not owners.

Legal document stating “the lessees as joint tenants”

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PAP has legalised our HDB ownership status through its total control of Parliament. In fact, it has also legalised other things which it shouldn’t have, such asconverting our CPF into state reserves.

Once this has happened, everything which PAP does is above board – it decides how many peanuts CPF members should be paid, when and how it wants to pay us and how much it wants to profit from our returns. CPF members are now helpless and the situation is hopeless if we do not boot out politicians who intend to continue exploiting us.

But there are quite a number of educated idiots among intelligent Singaporeans who still believe their retirement savings belong to the PAP government. 

It’s like opening a 1-year FD account with Bank A. When the FD is about to mature, the bank tells its customers that the 1-year time frame has been extended to 2 years. Subsequently, Bank A unilaterally extended the FD maturity to 5 years. When the 5th year finally arrived, it promised to pay in installments until the customer dies.

I’m certain these educated idiots will find the above situation unacceptable and it’s unfortunate that many have fallen victim to PAP’s propaganda.

Caution is warranted when the debtor keeps demanding a delay in payment, ie PAP keeps delaying the return of our CPF and is now able to pay out only by installments.

Is the government sufficiently funded to return every cent to CPF members? According to its statement of assets and liabilities, it appears to be able to do so. But why should one be looking at assets instead of CPF investments in GIC?

Statement of assets and liabilities

However, it is possible that unquoted securities have been optimistically overpriced. In the event of another financial crisis, all investments will be decimated with unquoted ones faring worse. CPF Board will have an issue of solvency. Judging by the numerous recent billion-dollar CPF ‘investments’, with more than $40 billion invested during the past 2 years, our next hit will be worse than anything we’ve experienced.

PAP has full control of our CPF and it has been making an increasing number of billion-dollar bets on foreign investments:
May 2015 – GIC invests US$! billion in Brazilian Hospital
May 2015 – GIC invests GBP 1.1 billion in UK telecoms business
Feb 2015 – GIC buys 5% in Nielsen for more than S$1 billion (more than US$800)

More GIC’s multi-million dollar bets on Dealstreetasia.

All the data have not been verified by our representatives in parliament, ie our MPs. And we can’t simply trust a pretend-CPF-is-a-non-issue PAP MP. (PAP had already betrayed HDB residents’ trust by selling public property, ie town councils’ computer software developed at a cost of tens of millions, to a PAP-owned company, AIM, in a ‘lelong’ sale.)

We’ve come to a stage where our government, which has been concealing data for decades, simply cannot be trusted. As a CPF member, the unverified figures in the statement of assets and liabilities mean nothing to me. The government should not distract CPF members from the issue at hand which is one of transparency.

Besides CPF monies, the government also has other liabilities. Is the PAP saying it will prioritise CPF members’ interest over ALL other liabilities in the event of an insolvency issue? Really?

Nothing is cast in stone and a restatement can always be issued if the figures are subsequently found to be incorrect due to honest mistakes over decades. No?

The point is GIC has been speculating with our CPF and we have no control over where our funds are invested. In fact, we are not even supposed to know. Any CPF member would not invest 100% of our RETIREMENT funds in foreign assets so why should we allow GIC to do so? GIC is clearly not mitigating risks and has no intention of paying members back the money because the investment risks are beyond its control. One example:

In May 2010, GIC invested US$100 million in India’s Fortis Healthcare (FH) convertible bonds (at Rs 167) with a yield of less than 6%. FH needed the money to finance its acquisition of Parkway Pantai, a Singapore based company. GIC took the risk to earn less than 6% and thought it could also gain should FH’s price soar.

Instead of soaring, FH price collapsed the following year due to governance issues and when GIC’s bonds were redeemed, FH price was almost unchanged.

GIC got do due diligence or not??

On the surface, GIC appeared to have made about 30% (6% X 5 years) from coupon payments. However, this was negated by exchange rate loss of 46% (chart below). All in, GIC had managed to lose 16% of US$100 over 5 years, excluding opportunity costs.

Singapore dollar appreciated by 47% against the Indian rupee from May 2010 to May 2015

Source

When we begin to scrutinise our CPF investments (yes, our money, not PAP’s), we’ll soon realise GIC has made too many costly bad judgements and it never planned to return our CPF members at 55. It simply can’t because there are too many bad investments with unrealised losses and that’s the reason for PAP to prevent CPF withdrawal at 55.

I am stating this as a fact and if GIC can prove otherwise, I will delete every post on GIC, CPF and Temasek from my blog and issue an apology.

No Singaporean retiree will invest 100% of his retirement funds overseas because ofhuge exchange rate and political risks. Another simplistic investment model by PAP – GIC invests in foreign bonds which pay higher rates due to higher risks, pays CPF members lower rates and keeps the balance. Wow, like that also can meh? What about exchange rate risks? Never mind, PAP is very capable of fighting its own fires.

Is high risks = high returns? The answer is no because PAP creams off our high returns, legislates low returns with the justification that it has provided a guarantee using reserves/tax dollars (also our money). There’s currently no definition for this sort of investment, maybe a legalised scam?

CPF members were never consulted on the use of OUR savings. Every decision is made by a handful of PAP politicians who have total control over almost $300 billion of CPF monies.

PAP is merely trying to prevent the issue of transparency from being addressed by telling CPF members not to worry as all CPF will be guaranteed. Before further damage is done, we need to put the control of OUR CPF back in our hands.

PAP has also implemented an upside-down system where unelected PAP grassroots are appointed to ‘serve’ residents instead of providing taxpayer-funded resources to elected MPs to do the job. It is unethical of PAP to abuse public resources and it has made a mockery of our parliamentary system.

With total control of the mainstream media, PAP has been successful in brainwashing citizens into thinking they are being served when PAP has all the while been self-serving.

PAP’s system sucks because it has legislated control over our assets and property and all it knows is to milk citizens dry . Perhaps when its done with squeezing motorcyclists, it may introduce COEs for small, medium and large bicycles? Nothing wrong with making more money by including strollers and tricycles.

PAP desires total control in order to continue running Singapore on a for-profit basis without any transparency or accountability. We are owners of our HDB, CPF, private vehicles, etc only in name; with a parliamentary majority, PAP is able to tweak legislations to gain even more control. Ordinary citizens must be wary of PAP.

A single-party government wields too much control over our lives and voters must decide if we want our children to suffer the same fate. And you know there’s only one way to regain control of our lives.