Lies, Damned Lies, and Political Campaign

I would say, there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and political campaign promises.
Approaching 2009, the season of bubble and promises is already on the air again. This is the season when any aspiring Presidential candidate declares an uphill battle against the mother of all evils and the worst of crimes: poverty. Look around, you are already in the middle of a familiar symbolic environment, full of competing bubbles, lies, or half true messages about eradicating poverty.

The season of bubble and lies is on the air
But watch, anyone who win the competition, would in no time develop a tendency to make peace with those market fundamentalists. The moment the winner disappears into the palace, that exactly the time for us to prepare for the post-honeymoon nonstop watch.
Here is (part of) a watchlist, just in case you have the business to know who the new President of our country really is:
1. How His/Her Excellency Mr(s) President reacts to critical issues such as economic liberalization, deregulation, privatization, and globalization?. How far does he or she tend to leave things up to the market? or does he have sufficient political will (or guts) to find alternatives to neoliberal prescriptions?
2. How the new President manage health care and public education? A neoliberal would limit or rule out investment on health care, public education since that would directly interfere with the operation of markets. In the eye of market fundamentalists, the same is also applies for issues involving public broadcast, state enterprises, or social investments.
3. Are there any workable plan and act to protect the viability of small-scale farming?. A market fundamentalist would ignore such a plan because it would require subsidies to the farmers, and restriction on imports of farm products -- both are againsts neoliberalism principle of capital and commodities freedom to move. Likewise, restrictions on multinational companies, such as Care Fuor, which is aimed at protecting traditional markets, would run contrary to market fundamentalism’s prescription of minimal role for government in economic affairs.
4. Is there any efforts to extend the rights of labor? Or he or she prefers to create a more condusive investment climate through respressive policies on industrial relations?
5. Is there any policy priority directed at reducing the unequal distribution of income through, e.g. public works programs, greater budget allocation for public education and small scale business?. As Schumpeter (1954) sum s up a central argument of classical (neoliberal) economists:
· A higher rate of savings allows a higher rate of investment;
· a higher rate of investment allows a higher productive capital;
· a higher level of productive capital allows more output;
and so a higher rate of saving allows a higher rate of economic growth. Because, it is the rich who save . . . the poor spend their income. It follows that, a more unequal distribution of income, leads to a higher rate of growth . . . by raising the share of income going to the wealthy, the inequality raises the saving rate”.
Accordingly, neoliberals intrinsically poses a tendency to limit and rule out programs directed at improving income distribution.

The Don's Legacy

Don Soeharto's worst legacy :
Indonesia's Killing Fields "
Suharto ran Indonesia like a mafia don," said Jeffrey Winters, professor of political economy at Northwestern University, Chicago. "Everything turned on the don, all business went through the don, the don was the source of security, and he destroyed everything, parliament, the rule of law, the intellectual community, and turned the police and military into his personal instruments." Evenr, it's virtually impossibel to write the history of post-Sukarno politics without mentioning Suharto. In seceral crucial issues and events , it would be wrong to analize the country without relating it to Suharto's psychological traits. Nonetheless, despite his undisputed power to write the history of our country during a particular historical juncture, he is now no longer posses the power to write his own history. He is now at the mercy of our media, of younger generations og those who were the vistims of his power.
Suharto's iron-fisted rule bought economic growth but also ushered in nepotism and corruption. And Suharto's legacy of corruption and shady business dealings go back a long way.( to be continued )

Let today embrace the past with remembrance
For the struggle of society against the evil of power
is a struggle of memory against forgetting



( to be continued )

Neoliberalism and Apartheid Economy

They are the negros of our "world class economy" . . . the pariahs in our market fundamentalism dreams
While we are chasing our own version of American Dream, joining the bandwagon of globalization, and pursuing our place in a world-class community, here are pictures of the other side of us all, to whom we -- the market winners and worshipers -- always makes claims that we are hearing them (but never listening), looking at them (without ever seeing), talking to them (yet, without speaking) . . . Because we are too far high, in our five-star neoliberalism dreamland.

The fact is . . . we are moving toward (what Richard Freeman puts it) an "apartheid economy" . More and more portion of Indonesian population has been progressively excluded from the economy, by the instrumental rationality of neoliberalism and market forces, marginalized from the never-ending circuit of money-commodity-more money, doomed to become the pariah or decaying sub-population of our fast modernizing Indonesian economy. They've been treated as subhuman, the "negros" in our "world-class economy". Their kids have been separated from the kids of our "world-class schools and universities", they've been denied from the rights for descent and civilized public health services.
The invicible hand of the sacred market made the "unmarketable poor" invicible . . .
They've been evicted from their houses and sidewalks miniscale mall, for the rich need more space for luxurious housing, convenience traffic, and picturesque American-style urban sceneries -- they are forbiden from wandering into our "world-class" malls or shopping arcades that once were public spaces. Their demands, for better wages and treatments, tend to be supressed, and silenced by labeling them as the ghost of long-gone communists movement -- all for the sake of creating a better investment climate.

Indeed, the invicible hand of our market treats them without human face. On the contrary, the invisible hand made the "unmarketable have-nots" invicible. They are the negros of the Indonesian neoliberal seconomy, and are the pariahs in our market fundamentalism grandnarrative.
p.s.
The chance is getting slimmer each day that they can be reinserted into our world again . . . and the clock of a time bomb is tickling

Approaching the end of our future

Happy New Year,
But what does a new year means?
we are simply a bunch of strangers, in a world we never made . . .
and each of us is "no more free than a slave crawling North on the deck of a ship sailing South" (thanks to Sartre).
. . . for the next stop is clear and near:
the shores of ourselves
where we have to wander overland
into a borderless non- existence . . .
(a thought from the last day of 2007)

http://picasaweb.google.com/dedynhidayat

Merry Christmas for a friend

Merry Christmas!Nollaig Shona Dhuit!Kellemes Karácsonyi Ünnepeket!Joyeux Noël!Feliz Navidad!Buone Feste Natalizie!Fröhliche Weihnachten!Ajmel altehani bemonasebt almīlad wa helol alseneh aljedīdah!I’d Miilad Said Oua Sana Saida!Krismas ki subhkamna!

Though we do not travel the same path
May those warm and bright lights
Guide us all along our journey home
To the same old house of our greater soul
(X-mas day, 2007)

On the ideology of neoliberalism

Like communism, neoliberalism too, promotes its own utopia, an idealized classless society where every human being has equivalent capacity to become enterpreneur , and where there is a level playing field on which individuals compete in line with the logic of market rationality. Neoliberalism -- which market fundamentalists such as Margaret Thacher, and the late Daniel Singer, among others, memorialized as TINA, There Is No Alternative (to "market dictatorship") -- conceals a moral standard which is inherently tainted by victim-blaming ideology; its social compassion (if any) for the poverty-related human suffering is never free from smug questions such as: Why don't they try hard enough to participate in the market? Why wouldn't they learn the logic of the free market ? Why should we be expected to pay for their failures and suffering? (December, 23, 2007)

Jakarta under neoliberalism

Excerpt from Paul Treanor http://web.inter.nl.net/Paul.Treanor/neoliberalism
. . . as you would expect from a complete philosophy, neoliberalism has answers to stereotypical philosophical questions such as "Why are we here" and "What should I do": We are here for the market, and you should compete. Neo-liberals tend to believe that human exist for the market -- not the other way around: certainly in the sense that it is good to participate in the market, anf that those who do not participate have failed in some ways.

In personal ethics, the general neo-liberal vision is that every human being is an entrepreneur managing their own life, and should act as such

. . . then a world will come into existence in which not just goods and services, but all human and social life, is the product of conformiy to market forces . . .

http://picasaweb.google.com/dedynhidayat

On God and Jokes

God is a comedian artist who sits back after the day of creation. All God does now is "paring his fingernails" (thanks to James Joyce), watch us, and kill us when we stop joking. For that very reason, we must never, ever stop joking, everyday, even on holidays too, till the day we die. Yet, do not ever run nor hide from God, and become atheists -- 'cause atheists have less holidays ... (December 1, 2007)

God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh (Voltaire)

On Presidential Candidate

Today is an era in which every Presidential candidate declares unconditional war against the greatest of evils and the the worst of crimes: poverty.

Yet, make peace with neoliberalism seems to be high on the agenda of every newly elected President during the first days in the office.

http://picasaweb.google.com/dedynhidayat/TheFutureInBlackWhite

On Political Jokes

Breaking News:

SBY Postpones Thinking about Economic Development until 2009.

Unofficial Borrowitz Report, Nov. 27, 2007: Saying that it was too early to assess whether the nation's economic condition is improving, President SBY said today he and all of his economic team would postpone thinking about economic development until 2009 after his reelection.

Political jokes is society protecting itself against the insanity of politics and politicians

On Trusting

Never trust
any philosophy which is too grave to laugh,
any ideology which is too proud to weep,
any religious faith which does not bow before humanity
( . . . with an apology to James Joyce)