Mr. Lee's broken promises???

maurizio13 SG

"Without trust in a leader, in a person's judgment, you cannot be the leader. But the key to my continued winning of elections, was that they realised I was not, what they call today, spinning the story. What I said, I meant, and what I promised, I would do my best to deliver," said Mr Lee.

I wonder whatever happened to our Swiss standard of living which he promised?

Maybe his best wasn't good enough to deliver those Swiss standards of living?

HyperFocal SG

During the latest Election:
LHL; "..I will reduce the cost of living..."

Rolling Eyes

mochou SG

Men always tell broken promises to women.
And politician do it in a much much bigger scale, they tell broken promises to millions of ppl.

HyperFocal SG

you mean to millions of women only?

Lin Yu SG

promises are meant to be broken and scrects are meant to be told
Laughing

LazerLordz SG

You guys really trust politicians that much? They’re like salesmen too.

Mid9Sun SG

Actually they are worse then salesmen......they are fiends

sgdiehard SG

They have to say they trusted politicians so they can blame them when things go wrong. Those who truely trusted politicians were cheated by the politicians, those who blame the politicians for mistakes are cheating themselves.

Salesmen sell products that are visible, they highlight good features, down play bad side effects. No product is effect, you choose what you want. They are just making a living, can't say they are playing politics. shouldn't doubt their integrity until proven otherwise.

Politicians sell themselves, with promises for the future. Unfortunately many people buy the product for the little free gift, just like kids buying Big Mac just to get the little toy, the father ended up having to eat the Big Mac.

storywolf SG

Originally posted by maurizio13:
"Without trust in a leader, in a person's judgment, you cannot be the leader. But the key to my continued winning of elections, was that they realised I was not, what they call today, spinning the story. What I said, I meant, [b]and what I promised, I would do my best to deliver," said Mr Lee.

I wonder whatever happened to our Swiss standard of living which he promised?

Maybe his best wasn't good enough to deliver those Swiss standards of living?
[/b]

Hello - he say it correctly "he say i will deliver swiss standard of living"!!! but he did not say to who !!!

He did add 30% to his and top team payroll = and that is swiss enough !!! he did not say swiss standard to everyone !!!

mochou SG

haha no la, men, women, trans too.

I-like-flings(m) SG

he never broke his promise lah...... the fine print that u guys all missed it... "for who" Laughing

qlqq9 SG

Ha ha! How to trust him in big things? ha ha ha, laughable! WE should know better than to trust him! I am making myself clear that I am not doing any character assassination - whether to trust a person on his promises or not will depend on the character of the person.

I have never put my trust in LHL, for I know long long time ago this fellow can't be trusted. Sometimes, he may just Xing kou kai he! To me he is just an empty vessel who makes the most noise!

Swiss standard of living is promised by SM Goh when he was the PM.

Mr. Green

qlqq9 SG

but Big Mac is nice to eat! Laughing

Atobe SG

Lee Kuan Yew, Legislative Assembly Debates April 27, 1955

"But we either believe in democracy or we not. If we do, then, we must say categorically, without qualification, that no restraint from the any democratic processes, other than by the ordinary law of the land, should be allowed... If you believe in democracy, you must believe in it unconditionally. If you believe that men should be free, then, they should have the right of free association, of free speech, of free publication. Then, no law should permit those democratic processes to be set at nought, and no excuse, whether of security, should allow a government to be deterred from doing what it knows to right, and what it must know to be right... "

Lee Kuan Yew Legislative Assembly Debates Sept 21, 1955

"If we are to survive as a free democracy, then we must be prepared, in principle, to concede to our enemies - even those who do not subscribe to our views - as much(sic)constitutional rights as you concede yourself."

Opposition leader Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore Legislative Assembly, Oct 4, 1956

" Repression, Sir is a habit that grows. I am told it is like making love-it is always easier the second time! The first time there may be pangs of conscience, a sense of guilt. But once embarked on this course with constant repetition you get more and more brazen in the attack. All you have to do is to dissolve organizations and societies and banish and detain the key political workers in these societies. Then miraculously everything is tranquil on the surface. Then an intimidated press and the government-controlled radio together can regularly sing your praises, and slowly and steadily the people are made to forget the evil things that have already been done, or if these things are referred to again they're conveniently distorted and distorted with impunity, because there will be no opposition to contradict."

Opposition leader Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore Legislative Assembly, Oct 4, 1956

"If we say that we believe in democracy, if we say that the fabric of a democratic society is one which allows for the free play of idea...then, in the name of all the gods, give that free play a chance to work within the constitutional framework."

Opposition leader Lee Kuan Yew, Straits Times, May 5, 1959

"Repression can only go up to a point. When it becomes too acute, the instruments of repression, namely the army and the police, have been proved time and time again in history to have turned their guns on their masters."

Complaining about the Straits Times in 1959

"I pointed to an article with bold headlines reporting that the police had refused to allow the PAP to hold a rally at Empress Place, and then to the last paragraph where in small type it added the meeting would take place where we were now. I compared this with a prominent report about an SPA rally. This was flagrant bias."

Lee Kuan Yew Dec 18, 1964 Malaysian Parliamentary Debates

"Let us get down to fundamentals. Is this an open, or is this a closed society? Is it a society where men can preach ideas - novel, unorthodox, heresies, to established churches and established governments - where there is a constant contest for men's hearts and minds on the basis of what is right, of what is just, of what is in the national interests, or is it a closed society where the mass media - the newspapaers, the journals, publications, TV, radio - either bound by sound or by sight, or both sound and sight, men's minds are fed with a constant drone of sycophantic support for a particular orthodox political philosophy?

That is the first question we asked ourselves. I would like to see minds stimulated and debate provoked, and truth refined and crystallized out of the conflict of different evidence and views.

I, therefore, welcome every and any opportunity of a chance to agree, or to dissent, in order that out of thesis comes synthesis - thesis, anti-major premise, anti-premise, synthesis, so we progress... I welcome every opportunity to meet members of the opposition, and so do members of my party, over the radio, over the television, university forums, public rallies. We never run away from the open encounter.

If your ideas, your views cannot stand the challenge of criticism then they are too fragile and not sturdy enough to last. I am talking of the principle of the open society, the open debate, ideas, not intimidation, persuasion not coercion...

Sir, the basic fundamentals we asked ourselves...is whether the duties of the Minister of Information and Broadcasting are to produce closed minds or open minds, because these instruments - the mass media, the TV, the radio - can produce either the open minds receptive to ideas and ideals, a democratic system of life, or closed and limited. But I know that the open debate is a painful process for closed minds...

But let me make this point: that 5 million adult minds in Malaysia cannot be closed - definitely not in the lifetime of the people in authority. It is not possible because whatever the faults of the colonial system, and there are many...they generated the open mind, the inquiring mind."

Atobe SG

Mr Lee Kuan Yew, 1962

"If I were in authority in Singapore indefinitely without having to ask those who are governed whether they like what is being done, then I would not have the slightest doubt that I could govern much more effectively in their interests."

Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, 1986

"We have to lock up people, without trial, whether they are communists, whether they are language chauvinists, whether they are religious extremists. If you don't do that, the country would be in ruins."

Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, Straits Times, 20 April 1987

"I am often accused of interfering in the private lives of citizens. Yes, if I did not, had I not done that, we wouldn't be here today. And I say without the slightest remorse, that we wouldn't be here, we would not have made economic progress, if we had not intervened on very personal matters - who your neighbour is, how you live, the noise you make, how you spit, or what language you use. We decide what is right. Never mind what the people think."

Lee Kuan Yew, 24 December 1984, election aftermath

"At this rate, the one-man, one-vote system could lead to decline and disintegration" - after the Opposition won 2 seats
"Every election campaign starts off on a reasonable note, then in order to get the crowds excited, they make more and more brazen, scurrilous, wild accusations." - Accusing the Opposition of "gutter politics"
"The party would withdraw services to the two opposition-held seats of Anson and Potong Pasir" - On Potong Pasir and Anson electing non-PAP MPs"

Lee Kuan Yew interviewed by Sunday Mail Magazine 1990 on being a "state out of 1984

I'm prepared to banter with you. I'm prepared to humour you. But if this were an Orwellian society with an Orwellian leader, would we be having this conversation?

Lee Kuan Yew, 1988 National Day Rally, when he discussed the leadership transition to Goh Chok Tong in 1990

Even from my sick bed, even if you are going to lower me into the grave and I feel something is going wrong, I will get up.

Lee Kuan Yew, 6 October 1997

"Between being loved and being feared, I have always believed Machiavelli was right. If nobody is afraid of me, Im meaningless."

Lee Kuan Yew on Singapore society, The Man & His Ideas, 1997

"Mine is a very matter-of-fact approach to the problem. If you can select a population and they're educated and they're properly brought up, then you don't have to use too much of the stick because they would already have been trained. It's like with dogs. You train it in a proper way from small. It will know that it's got to leave, go outside to pee and to defecate. No, we are not that kind of society. We had to train adult dogs who even today deliberately urinate in the lifts."

SM Lee Kuan Yew, The Man and His Ideas, 1997

"Supposing Catherine Lim was writing about me and not the prime minister...She would not dare, right? Because my posture, my response has been such that nobody doubts that if you take me on, I will put on knuckle-dusters and catch you in a cul de sac...Anybody who decides to take me on needs to put on knuckle dusters. If you think you can hurt me more than I can hurt you, try. There is no other way you can govern a Chinese society."

Lee Kuan Yew, The Man & His Ideas, 1997

"What people mean by consultation is an imitation of what they see in America; pressure groups and lobby groups..It's an unthinking adoption of Western practices of development without any pruning and modification to suit our circumstances."

SM Lee Kuan Yew, The Man & His Ideas, 1997

"Put it this way. As long as Jeyaretnam [Workers' Party leader] stands for what he stands for -- a thoroughly destructive force -- we will knock him. There are two ways of playing this. One, you attack the policies; two, you attack the system. Jeyaretnam was attacking the system, he brought the Chief Justice into it. If I want to fix you, do I need the Chief Justice to fix you? Everybody knows that in my bag I have a hatchet, and a very sharp one. You take me on, I take my hatchet, we meet in the cul-de-sac. That's the way I had to survive in the past. That's the way the communists tackled me. He brought the Chief Justice into the political arena.

"... If you can't think because you can't chew, try a banana"2000. Lee was responding to a BBC reporter who suggested that Singapore's draconian laws (including the ban on chewing gum) could stifle the people's creativity.[5]

Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, Straits Times, Aug 17, 2004

"Political reform need not go hand in hand with economic liberalisation. I do not believe that if you are libertarian, full of diverse opinions, full of competing ideas in the market place, full of sound and fury, therefore you will succeed."

"If I have to shoot 200,000 students to save China from another 100 years of disorder, so be it." - Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew evoking the ghost of Deng Xiaoping whilst endorsing the Tiananmen Square massacre, Straits Times, Aug 17, 2004

MM Lee Kuan Yew on James Gomez, Channelnewsasia, May 2006

"When I call a man openly, you're a liar, you're dishonest, and you do not dare to sue me, there's something basically wrong. And I will repeat it anywhere and you can't go and say, oh, I have apologised; let's move on. Can you commit a dishonourable -- maybe even one which is against the law -- an illegal act and say, let's move on because I've apologised? You may move on but you're going to move on out of politics in time."

MM Lee Kuan Yew on the results of the 2006 election

"Please do not assume that you can change governments. Young people don't understand this"

"Without the elected president and if there is a freak result, within two or three years, the army would have to come in and stop it" -- MM Lee Kuan Yew on what would happen if a profligate opposition government touched Singapore's vast monetary reserves

MM Lee Kuan Yew, 2007, on Minister's Pay

"Low salaries will draw in the hypocrites who sweet talk their way into power in the name of public service, but once in charge will show their true colour, and ruin the country."

Atobe SG

Lee Kuan Yew in 1967

"We must encourage those who earn less than $200 per month and cannot afford to nurture and educate many children never to have more than two... We will regret the time lost if we do not now take the first tentative steps towards correcting a trend which can leave our society with a large number of the physically, intellecually and culturally anaemic."

Lee Kuan Yew, 27 December 1967

"Three women were brought to the Singapore General Hospital, each in the same condition and needing a blood transfusion. The first, a Southeast Asian was given the transfusion but died a few hours later. The second, a South Asian was also given a transfusion but died a few days later. The third, an East Asian, was given a transfusion and survived. That is the X factor in development."

Lee Kuan Yew in 1982

"Let us not deceive ourselves: our talent profile is nowhere near that of, say, the Jews or the Japanese in America. The exceptional number of Nobel Prize winners who are Jews is no accident. It is also no accident that a high percentage, sometimes 50%, of faculty members in the top American universities on both the east and west coasts are Jews. And the number of high calibre Japanese academics, professionals, and business executives is out of all proportion to the percentage of Japanese in the total American population."

Lee Kuan Yew in 1983 National Day Rally

"If you don't include your women graduates in your breeding pool and leave them on the shelf, you would end up a more stupid society...So what happens? There will be less bright people to support dumb people in the next generation. That's a problem.''

Lee Kuan Yew, The Man & His Ideas, 1997

"The Bell curve is a fact of life. The blacks on average score 85 per cent on IQ and it is accurate, nothing to do with culture. The whites score on average 100. Asians score more ... the Bell curve authors put it at least 10 points higher. These are realities that, if you do not accept, will lead to frustration because you will be spending money on wrong assumptions and the results cannot follow."

"I started off believing all men were equal. I now know that's the most unlikely thing ever to have been, because millions of years have passed over evolution, people have scattered across the face of this earth, been isolated from each other, developed independently, had different intermixtures between races, peoples, climates, soils... I didn't start off with that knowledge. But by observation, reading, watching, arguing, asking, that is the conclusion I've come to."

SM Lee Kuan Yew, Straits Times, September 19, 1999 on Malays in the Singapore Armed Forces

"If, for instance, you put in a Malay officer who's very religious and who has family ties in Malaysia in charge of a machine gun unit, that's a very tricky business. We've got to know his background... I'm saying these things because they are real, and if I don't think that, and I think even if today the Prime Minister doesn't think carefully about this, we could have a tragedy."

Mat Toro SG

He promised to try his his best, did he actually promised Swiss standard? Where?

Ponders SG

DO you seriously want Swiss Standard of living???

You must buy stickers to paste on your rubbish bag to pay for that rubbish in the bag you want to dispose.

A MacDonald's Everyday value meal is SFR 12 (about S$ 20)

You have to vote for every decision you want the government make.

30 mins of internet.. SFR 6 (s$9)

Bankrupt airlines (something sg govt won't want to happen to SIA)

maurizio13 SG

Yes Yes Yes!!!

Do you have any idea how much does the average worker in Switzerland gets a month?

Around 4,000 Swiss Francs (SFr 1.00 = SGD 1.26), which is around SGD 5,000 a month for simple and repetitive task (consider road sweeper, garbage disposal and Macdonald's frontline staff)

Source: http://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/portal/en/index/news/publikationen.html?publicationID=2297

Have you over priced the MacDonald's everyday value meal and the Swiss Francs as compared to the Singapore Dollar?

The price of a Big Mac in Switzerland is SFr 6.30 and the current exchange rate is around SFr. 1.00 = SGD 1.26 NOT SFr 1.00 = SGD 1.67 as implied by your calculation of Macdonald's everyday value meal.

Source: Big Mac Index

Source: Exchange Rates

I do not read German, but an internet service provider in Switzerland quoted on it's webpage the price of ADSL per month. It was around SFr. 69 per month for a 3500 / 300 Kbits/s ADSL line.

Source: ADSL in Switzerland

How do you attribute the success and failure of airlines to the government? Isn't it the management staff of the airline that manages the state of affairs in a company?

Another point, standard of living does not necessary equate to cost of living.

Ponders SG

My bad about the exchange rates, i must have been thinking x1.5.

While i know people do get paid higher there, at the same time they are not left with much after all monthly deduction..

Can't blame me about overpricing, I was there as a tourist, so naturally i had to use "pay as you go" internet.

About airlines, it was meant to be a joke as what people would have said during when ex-PM Goh said swiss standard of living and only months later Swiss Air collapse.

Anyway, as for Swiss standard of living, i do agree everything seems arranged there, everything has its place. Which is good, but at the same time bad as it leads to lack of variation.

I don't mind swiss standard of living, only if it doesn't come with is cost.

Many developed nations face a pattern where standard of living remains high but at the same time comes with great cost to its Citizens.