Paradise island: Infantile abuse as substitute for rational debate
- By R.A.J. (guest)
- Published 27th February, 2008
The
brouhaha caused by Nita Deerpalsing's erudite treatise on government subsidies
deserved much better than the predictable and baseless accusations of racism
levelled at her. How on earth can we possibly move forward as a nation if every
discussion on matters related to the national interest is hijacked by
nincompoops with brains so undeveloped that they always see the evil of racism
lurking behind any intellectual discussion on the economic future of this
country? Add religion to this explosive topic and we have the natural
ingredients that have conspired to entrench the divisions that are so endemic in
our society and which no politician wants to combat, as all our main political
parties appear to have subscribed to the reprobate and morally reprehensible
theory that Divide and Rule is the pathway to political success despite the
enormous damage it causes to our society.
What exactly did Deerpalsing say that has released such an unwarranted amount of vitriol against her? I have read her paper again and I cannot for the life of me begin to even understand the reasons for some people to utter such distasteful calumnies that are plainly untrue. All she did was to give a passionate account of the reasons that lead her to believe that it is more effective and cheaper in the long run to provide universal subsidies than to adopt a policy of targetting which, given Mauritian conditions, is likely to be corrupted by politicians keen to stuff the mouths of their supporters with public money. She explained her position by taking a careful look at the three areas that would necessarily underpin any cogent policy on government subsidies: 1/ evidence-based policy making 2/ poverty eradication 3/ intangible collateral costs of targetting. All the nonsense about racism that is being spouted by a few individuals stem from the third plank of her discourse, and the hypocrisy is simply breathtaking. Is there a sentient human being in Paradise Island who has never heard the crude racism directed at the community that has remained disgracefully stuck within the poorest economic classes for far too long? Deerpalsing has simply voiced the fear that that latent racism is more likely to raise its ugly head if subsidy targetting results in that community being seen to benefit much more than the other components of the population.
The epithetical reference to Rosa Luxemburg by a lapsed Marxist who forgot his revolutionary credentials of the seventies on the very day he sniffed the first whiff of electoral power is undignified and dangerous: dangerous because the man happens to have a significant input in the media of this country, and an impersonation ofSilvio Berlusconi and his emasculation of the Italian media is the last thing that we want in an island that still demands blind loyalty and subservience to those invited by us to serve the country, however stupid, big headed, arrogant, and incompetent they might be. The fact that Jean Claude de l'Estrac then conveniently forgot to mention the huge subsidy that we give him every month on the stupendous pension that he receives for servi nou pei during the times when he was unsure whether he was a Marxist or a capitalist is neither here nor there; but a degree of intellectual honesty would really not go amiss in the discussion of a topic that has such potential for social discord. Perhaps it is appropriate here to remind the media guru of Rosa Luxemburg's most famous quotation which he could, perhaps as a gesture to his grandiloquent views on freedom of expression, use as the motto for his media empire: Freiheit ist immer Freiheit der Andersdenkenden, or as I am sure he knows already, "Freedom is always the freedom of dissenters... Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element". Nita Deerpalsing has every right to dissent from the views expressed by his co listier, Rama Sithanen.
As it happens, I disagree with Deerpalsing's views on targetting although I admire the intellectual elegance and rigour of her paper. But does that make her a racist, or someone whose moderately leftist views will ring alarm bells in the White House? Only a fool will subscribe to such putrid nonsense, or more likely, someone who obediently adopts any position according to the whim of his political or financial master. I have read Rama Sithanen's response and it really warms the heart to at last see real democracy in action, where two senior members of the same party can have an intellectual discussion in public about their respective positions instead of always showing brainless loyalty to party policy or indulging in the fawning obsequiousness of genuflecting to the permanent leaders of our political parties.
I understand and accept Deerpalsing's strong reservations about targetting and the imponderable problem of knowing where to pitch the appropriate scale of income before subsidies become available. However, any objective reading of the situation cannot escape the conclusion that the last MMM/MSM government was absolutely right in targetting the old
age
state pension and that the Alliance Sociale was hopelessly wrong in campaigning
in such a demagogical and virulent manner against it. Pravin Jugnauth, Sam
Lauthan, and Paul Berenger may have done a lot of silly things, but they were
undeniably brave and right to tackle that sacred cow. The Alliance Sociale then
compounded the problem by giving free public transport to every student and old
age pensioner irrespective of their financial circumstances. Vast amounts of
public money are being spent on people who can easily afford to do without them,
which means that there is less in the pot to help those in genuine
need.
Sithanen is right to argue that subsidies should go to the poorest in order to lift them out of the cycle of poverty that has trapped them and their families for generations. But some of his own policies have come back to haunt him and any attempt at removing subsidies from many of the 80% of families earning less than Rs 15,000 a month will inevitably crash against the grotesque monument to iniquity that he himself has created by giving inordinately large fiscal allowances to the rich. There can be no justification on moral, financial, or environmental grounds for the drastic cut in import duties on luxury items for the very rich; allowing multimillionaires the dubious privilege of polluting our air with a sharp cut in the price for limousines is a form of upside down targetting that questions the propriety of removing subsidies from the vast majority of our population barely scraping a living. Reducing Capital Gains Tax was, on balance, the right way to encourage investment despite the evidence showing that very little of the Rs3 billions 'subsidy' given to the very rich has been reinvested or voluntarily used to alleviate poverty, something that rich Americans do as a matter of course ; perhaps a windfall tax in the next Budget may encourage the rich to show some gratitude the next time a government shows a degree of fiscal generosity towards them that some people believe borders on the reckless.
What other subsidies should Sithanen remove before implementing policies that stand a real chance of creating a climate that Deerpalsing has rightly and courageously described as the "incurable spread of welfare racism that breeds on false perceptions"? For a start, he could recall Indira Sidaya from the grotesque, non job at UNESCO that makes even the most fanatical supporters of unrestrained political patronage blanch with embarrassment; that is at least Rs 9 millions extra in the pot. He could save a couple of hundred million rupees by getting rid of these so called First, Second, Third Secretaries, Trade commissioners, and other useless hangers on who pollute our embassies around the world; if he has any doubts about this measure, he only has to ask for the views of any expatriate who has to deal with our embassies abroad. Nobody has even attempted to explain why God needs Rs 70 millions of taxpayers' money every year to help us to worship Him better, and the suspicion that the money is destined for temporal rather than spiritual causes is getting harder to dispute. We all have to pay up to 22% in taxes (registration fees, VAT, etc) when we purchase a plot of land and build a house on it; it really is therefore inconceivable that the government can accept a measly 25% of the pre realised value( i.e. ignoring the huge windfall aspect of the exercise) of IRS palaces and then claim that a flat rate tax of under Rs 200,000 is a fair amount to take from rich strangers paying anything up to Rs 75 millions in order to buy our best land and a permanent residency status to boot.
There are many other subsidies that need to be stopped completely before any approach at targetting becomes acceptable to the population. For example, I have yet to hear any Chairman/Director complain about the immoral contracts that they benefit from following their appointment, or to justify the hundreds of thousands of rupees that they take from the taxpayer every month. Shouldn't a policy of ser sintir start from a drastic cut in the salary and expenses package of these parasites? Shouldn't a responsible government at the very least contemplate the end of the grossly immoral policy that allows so many idiots the use of a chauffeur driven limousine at the taxpayers' expense? How many hundreds of millions of rupees can be saved from simply doing the decent, morally right thing here?
This brings me to the most sacred of cows, the one that no politician including Deerpalsing can ever locate on their moral compass. How much longer can Paradise Island sustain the iniquitous, peccant, anachronistic, environmental hooliganism known as duty free cars for those who are wealthy enough to pay the full duties on the toys they are desperate to purchase? What moral imperative allows all our governments to consider it ok that the poor individual's VAT should be used to subsidise the richer person's sense of outrageous vanity?
Deerpalsing has every right to put forward legitimate views that are based on solid research; Sithanen is equally right to posit the opinions that he believes are sounder. To hurl the trite accusation of racism or being a zom FMI/bank mondial is a gross insult to the democratic process and a denial of the right to freedom of expression.
The dissenter has as much right to exercise that basic democratic freedom as those who are powerful enough to make decisions that will affect each and every one of us.
R.A.J.
Email: servipei@yahoo.com
What exactly did Deerpalsing say that has released such an unwarranted amount of vitriol against her? I have read her paper again and I cannot for the life of me begin to even understand the reasons for some people to utter such distasteful calumnies that are plainly untrue. All she did was to give a passionate account of the reasons that lead her to believe that it is more effective and cheaper in the long run to provide universal subsidies than to adopt a policy of targetting which, given Mauritian conditions, is likely to be corrupted by politicians keen to stuff the mouths of their supporters with public money. She explained her position by taking a careful look at the three areas that would necessarily underpin any cogent policy on government subsidies: 1/ evidence-based policy making 2/ poverty eradication 3/ intangible collateral costs of targetting. All the nonsense about racism that is being spouted by a few individuals stem from the third plank of her discourse, and the hypocrisy is simply breathtaking. Is there a sentient human being in Paradise Island who has never heard the crude racism directed at the community that has remained disgracefully stuck within the poorest economic classes for far too long? Deerpalsing has simply voiced the fear that that latent racism is more likely to raise its ugly head if subsidy targetting results in that community being seen to benefit much more than the other components of the population.
The epithetical reference to Rosa Luxemburg by a lapsed Marxist who forgot his revolutionary credentials of the seventies on the very day he sniffed the first whiff of electoral power is undignified and dangerous: dangerous because the man happens to have a significant input in the media of this country, and an impersonation ofSilvio Berlusconi and his emasculation of the Italian media is the last thing that we want in an island that still demands blind loyalty and subservience to those invited by us to serve the country, however stupid, big headed, arrogant, and incompetent they might be. The fact that Jean Claude de l'Estrac then conveniently forgot to mention the huge subsidy that we give him every month on the stupendous pension that he receives for servi nou pei during the times when he was unsure whether he was a Marxist or a capitalist is neither here nor there; but a degree of intellectual honesty would really not go amiss in the discussion of a topic that has such potential for social discord. Perhaps it is appropriate here to remind the media guru of Rosa Luxemburg's most famous quotation which he could, perhaps as a gesture to his grandiloquent views on freedom of expression, use as the motto for his media empire: Freiheit ist immer Freiheit der Andersdenkenden, or as I am sure he knows already, "Freedom is always the freedom of dissenters... Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element". Nita Deerpalsing has every right to dissent from the views expressed by his co listier, Rama Sithanen.
As it happens, I disagree with Deerpalsing's views on targetting although I admire the intellectual elegance and rigour of her paper. But does that make her a racist, or someone whose moderately leftist views will ring alarm bells in the White House? Only a fool will subscribe to such putrid nonsense, or more likely, someone who obediently adopts any position according to the whim of his political or financial master. I have read Rama Sithanen's response and it really warms the heart to at last see real democracy in action, where two senior members of the same party can have an intellectual discussion in public about their respective positions instead of always showing brainless loyalty to party policy or indulging in the fawning obsequiousness of genuflecting to the permanent leaders of our political parties.
I understand and accept Deerpalsing's strong reservations about targetting and the imponderable problem of knowing where to pitch the appropriate scale of income before subsidies become available. However, any objective reading of the situation cannot escape the conclusion that the last MMM/MSM government was absolutely right in targetting the old
Sithanen is right to argue that subsidies should go to the poorest in order to lift them out of the cycle of poverty that has trapped them and their families for generations. But some of his own policies have come back to haunt him and any attempt at removing subsidies from many of the 80% of families earning less than Rs 15,000 a month will inevitably crash against the grotesque monument to iniquity that he himself has created by giving inordinately large fiscal allowances to the rich. There can be no justification on moral, financial, or environmental grounds for the drastic cut in import duties on luxury items for the very rich; allowing multimillionaires the dubious privilege of polluting our air with a sharp cut in the price for limousines is a form of upside down targetting that questions the propriety of removing subsidies from the vast majority of our population barely scraping a living. Reducing Capital Gains Tax was, on balance, the right way to encourage investment despite the evidence showing that very little of the Rs3 billions 'subsidy' given to the very rich has been reinvested or voluntarily used to alleviate poverty, something that rich Americans do as a matter of course ; perhaps a windfall tax in the next Budget may encourage the rich to show some gratitude the next time a government shows a degree of fiscal generosity towards them that some people believe borders on the reckless.
What other subsidies should Sithanen remove before implementing policies that stand a real chance of creating a climate that Deerpalsing has rightly and courageously described as the "incurable spread of welfare racism that breeds on false perceptions"? For a start, he could recall Indira Sidaya from the grotesque, non job at UNESCO that makes even the most fanatical supporters of unrestrained political patronage blanch with embarrassment; that is at least Rs 9 millions extra in the pot. He could save a couple of hundred million rupees by getting rid of these so called First, Second, Third Secretaries, Trade commissioners, and other useless hangers on who pollute our embassies around the world; if he has any doubts about this measure, he only has to ask for the views of any expatriate who has to deal with our embassies abroad. Nobody has even attempted to explain why God needs Rs 70 millions of taxpayers' money every year to help us to worship Him better, and the suspicion that the money is destined for temporal rather than spiritual causes is getting harder to dispute. We all have to pay up to 22% in taxes (registration fees, VAT, etc) when we purchase a plot of land and build a house on it; it really is therefore inconceivable that the government can accept a measly 25% of the pre realised value( i.e. ignoring the huge windfall aspect of the exercise) of IRS palaces and then claim that a flat rate tax of under Rs 200,000 is a fair amount to take from rich strangers paying anything up to Rs 75 millions in order to buy our best land and a permanent residency status to boot.
There are many other subsidies that need to be stopped completely before any approach at targetting becomes acceptable to the population. For example, I have yet to hear any Chairman/Director complain about the immoral contracts that they benefit from following their appointment, or to justify the hundreds of thousands of rupees that they take from the taxpayer every month. Shouldn't a policy of ser sintir start from a drastic cut in the salary and expenses package of these parasites? Shouldn't a responsible government at the very least contemplate the end of the grossly immoral policy that allows so many idiots the use of a chauffeur driven limousine at the taxpayers' expense? How many hundreds of millions of rupees can be saved from simply doing the decent, morally right thing here?
This brings me to the most sacred of cows, the one that no politician including Deerpalsing can ever locate on their moral compass. How much longer can Paradise Island sustain the iniquitous, peccant, anachronistic, environmental hooliganism known as duty free cars for those who are wealthy enough to pay the full duties on the toys they are desperate to purchase? What moral imperative allows all our governments to consider it ok that the poor individual's VAT should be used to subsidise the richer person's sense of outrageous vanity?
Deerpalsing has every right to put forward legitimate views that are based on solid research; Sithanen is equally right to posit the opinions that he believes are sounder. To hurl the trite accusation of racism or being a zom FMI/bank mondial is a gross insult to the democratic process and a denial of the right to freedom of expression.
The dissenter has as much right to exercise that basic democratic freedom as those who are powerful enough to make decisions that will affect each and every one of us.
R.A.J.
Email: servipei@yahoo.com
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3 Responses to "Paradise island: Infantile abuse as substitute for rational debate" 
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Aston Martin
said this on 06 Mar 2008 1:03:46 AM MUT
L'express 5 mars:
Autre ambiguïté : il n’est pas clair si c’est une pique à la députée Nita Deerpalsing (qui n’était par ailleurs pas présente) mais le Premier ministre a aussi dit par rapport à la pauvreté que «ceux qui parlent de communautés ou de castes, c’est qu’ils n’ont rien compris». |
Author/Admin)|
Kevin Ng
said this on 28 Feb 2008 9:25:19 AM MUT
Le proces d'intention fait a Nita est pathetique. Il est vehicule par la meme bande qui voit du racisme partout mais qui au fond preche pour le statut quo et les interets du gros capital. Ce pays est gravement malade. On veut un debat mais des que quelqu'un ose s'exprimer la machine de chararacter assassination demarre.
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Insaf
said this on 28 Feb 2008 4:44:08 AM MUT
Nita is not guilty of racism, but of ethnocentrism. By saying that targetting subsidies for the sole benefit of poor people might cause communal riots, she implied that targetting in favour of the poorest people (most likely the creoles) would be against the interests of the majority. Of course, when there is positive discrimination in favour of one group, other groups in society will be excluded. When Blacks in America receive special support from the State under the affirmative program, we do not see whites threatening the government with racial riots, except maybe the KKK. Obviously, Nita wants to cater to the needs of her political constituencies. Her ethnocentric views are shrouded in an analysis that purports to be intellectual and rational. But the violence of her words on the radio showed her real motives.
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