Politicians never cease to amaze with their brazenness.
The latest example comes from President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), who, apparently taken aback by the enthusiastic response of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) supporters to the DPP’s “three little pigs” donation campaign, took a swipe at the opposition party on Sunday, saying: “We store our wealth among the people and create opportunities for people to become more affluent, rather than send out piggy banks to raise money from the people.”
If only Ma could see the irony in his statement.
Perhaps Ma has not noticed, but fundraising for electoral campaign purposes is a common practice in democratic countries. As long as all funds are solicited in accordance with the law, there is no wrongdoing.
And if Ma believes a political party should not raise money from the public, why has his own re--election campaign office launched a TV campaign calling on the public to make small donations to the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)?
Surely Ma could not have been serious when he declared: “We store our wealth among the people.” The KMT is one of the richest political parties in the world. Last year alone, it had an income of NT$3.5 billion (US$116.1 million), NT$2.9 billion of which came from stock dividends.
To suggest that the KMT’s wealth is shared with or belongs to Taiwanese is anything but convincing, particularly as the party struggles to defend the legitimacy of its assets, many of which were taken over from the Japanese colonial government when the KMT seized control of Taiwan after World War II.
Ma might say that his administration takes pride in sharing the wealth, but recent incidents have proven otherwise.
Last month, Ma announced the Executive Yuan’s proposal to raise retired farmers’ monthly subsidy from NT$6,000 to NT$ 6,316. Does he really believe that a mere NT$316 per month translates as sharing “wealth” with the people, especially when some KMT legislators have suggested raising the monthly subsidy to NT$10,000?
Let’s not forget how much of the taxpayers’ money the government so “generously” spent on the musical Dreamers (夢想家), which was staged as part of the Ma administration’s Double Ten National Day celebrations last month.
That project cost more than NT$215 million. Meanwhile, a government program that provides nutritional supplements to children from low-income families has an annual budget of about NT$9 million.
Then there was the plan by the Council of Agriculture to end a milk subsidy program for children, which is part of the aforementioned nutritional supplement policy. It is only thanks to the clamoring voices of the opposition last week that the council did a U-turn and agreed not to do away with the milk handouts.
It certainly is a funny way to “store our wealth among the people.”
These examples clearly illustrate how tightfisted the government is when it comes to providing financial help to those in need.
Ma might be able to talk the talk, but when is he going to prove to the public that he can walk the walk?
Because much of what former US president Donald Trump says is unhinged and histrionic, it is tempting to dismiss all of it as bunk. Yet the potential future president has a populist knack for sounding alarums that resonate with the zeitgeist — for example, with growing anxiety about World War III and nuclear Armageddon. “We’re a failing nation,” Trump ranted during his US presidential debate against US Vice President Kamala Harris in one particularly meandering answer (the one that also recycled urban myths about immigrants eating cats). “And what, what’s going on here, you’re going to end up in World War
On Tuesday, President William Lai (賴清德) met with a delegation from the Hoover Institution, a think tank based at Stanford University in California, to discuss strengthening US-Taiwan relations and enhancing peace and stability in the region. The delegation was led by James Ellis Jr, co-chair of the institution’s Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region project and former commander of the US Strategic Command. It also included former Australian minister for foreign affairs Marise Payne, influential US academics and other former policymakers. Think tank diplomacy is an important component of Taiwan’s efforts to maintain high-level dialogue with other nations with which it does
On Sept. 2, Elbridge Colby, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development, wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal called “The US and Taiwan Must Change Course” that defends his position that the US and Taiwan are not doing enough to deter the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from taking Taiwan. Colby is correct, of course: the US and Taiwan need to do a lot more or the PRC will invade Taiwan like Russia did against Ukraine. The US and Taiwan have failed to prepare properly to deter war. The blame must fall on politicians and policymakers
The arrest in France of Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov has brought into sharp focus one of the major conflicts of our age. On one hand, we want privacy in our digital lives, which is why we like the kind of end-to-end encryption Telegram promises. On the other, we want the government to be able to stamp out repugnant online activities — such as child pornography or terrorist plotting. The reality is that we cannot have our cake and eat it, too. Durov last month was charged with complicity in crimes taking place on the app, including distributing child pornography,
RSS