Why So many Santa Clauses during Chinese New Year?

Yes, they wear red T's (no, not kangaroo T's) like Santa too!

“We should not continue to have politics treated as entertainment or as a miscellaneous offence … We should distinguish between political and non-political activities." So said Ministry of Home Affairs of Singapore in Today's newspaper of 17 Jan 2009.

If not treated as entertainment, most Singaporeans would have suffered high systolic and dystolic blood pressure or even heart attack when they read articles like "PM donates $500,000 to fund" "This latest donation to the fund comes from the salary increase of $1.04 million that Prime Minister Lee received last year as a result of the salary adjustments announced in April 2007. He has donated the rest of last year's increase to a range of community, grassroots, arts and welfare organisations."

If this is not an entertaining joke, please tell me what is. Why rob so many Poor Peters to pay selected Elite Pauls so that Elite Paul can be seen as an altruistic charitable donor to good causes? What the hell went wrong? Why pay themselves so much in the first place? Or have they realised that they can't bring it with them?

It's ironic that they do not realise that Greed for money, power and appearance (appearing to be generous, virtuous, kind and good) is not the way to win the hearts of the people! Not all will barbeque a MP for not receiving an ang pow but most will know with disgust that the CNY Santa Show (wayang of giving ang pows) is a political hype to win more votes. The fact is Robin Hood did not rob from the poor to help the poor! The Sheriff of Nottingham robbed from the poor to enrich his cronies and himself!

It cuts like a knife for a Singaporeans to know that GST was raised from 5% to 7% to increase ministers' and MPs' salary. Can the guilt of adding misery to suffering peasants by sucking them dry (with GST, PUB, SMRT, CPF, ERP, ETC.) be cleansed by another $500,000 donation? Can it buy more votes?

I wrote previously of Chinese New Year Santa Clauses of Singapore distributing ang pows to residents. As much Mr Seng Han Tong does not deserve to be torched, I hope the powerful leaders are mindful of the fact that "grandstanding" as donors or giver of ang pows in photo ops is passe.

The art of altruism is to do good in secret!

Can anyone tell me where the money for the ang pow comes from? Whose money is it? If it's not from the pockets of the distributors, it's rather embarrassing. Is this another case of "gia lang eh kachng peh cho bin peh"? Literal translation from Hokkien, "Use someone else's backside skin as your face skin".

False appearance is detrimental to one's integrity!

Meanwhile, while the Chinese from China building the Great Gambling Dens of Singapore are being cheated by clever agents and employers, without help from MOM as claimed. I'm amazed that construction of the Great Casinos of Singapore can caused as much hardship as the contruction of the Great Wall of China! I sincerely hope that the victims lose only money and not lives like the millions who died during the construction of the Great Wall of China! The stench of of foreign labour exploitation (levy) is getting embarrassing.

Let's hope that blogging will be treated as entertainment and not as an offence. At the rate that the laws are changing and the AGC going about nitpicking kangaroo T-shirts wearers, we can only hope that sensibility prevails and no one will come knocking on blogger's door in the middle of the night.

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