…please tag your tweets as “#1BM” or “#1BlackMalaysia”. Remove the quotation marks.
We need more sources on the ground. By the way, those already on the ground are doing a great job.
p/s — follow the whole wave at http://twitter.com/#search?q=1BlackMalaysia
Probably, nobody knew if Wong Chin Huat was actually locked up in Brickfields police district headquarters but that did not turn people off. Why Brickfields was a mystery of the day. I joked to a friend that it could have been that somebody threw a dice and decided which poor officers would have to suffer a candlelight vigil. Another question is, who was the dice thrower?
One thing was certain. For some people, it did not matter. What mattered was that Wong Chin Huat should be freed.
Over 50 people (I would not be surprised if the number reached 100) including journalists showed up eventually although at first, there were few people.
What do you expect anyway? It was supposed to start at 21:00 Malaysian time. No. That does not refer to UTC+8 mind you.
Those that showed up early got the honor of being arrested. Altogether nine of them all in the first round of arrest. Merely showing up probably did not cause their arrest; lighting a candle did that. Candles were also the reason why a second group endured arrest. Included in the second group was MP for Serdang. In total, 14 individuals were, well, placed under the care of the Malaysian Royal Police.
The way the arrest was conducted was funny in a sense. An officer, probably a high ranking officer because he brought with him a stick with white tip, did shout a warning. He said if people do not disperse by the count of 3, the police will arrest everybody.
He did count, only too fast. 1… 3. Barely a second passed before somebody could register, “oh, maybe it is time to leave”. Neurons do not quite work at light speed, I suppose.
A lawyer did come later and went in to discuss with the police about the first arrest. Once done, the lawyer answered questions from reporters. According to him, the police justified the arrest as a mean to discourage an even larger crowd from gathering in front of the police station.
Also interesting was that the police did not allow the lawyer to meet the detainees. They reasoned that the detainees did not specifically request for a lawyer. This is probably an important point: if you ever get arrested by the police, make it clear to them that you want to speak to a legal counsel.
It was newsworthy enough that Malaysiakini published the whole thing on their website.[1] It was newsworthy because it could be a precursor to what will happen tomorrow.
That scare tactics could have worked, if the arrest did not happen too early. Not too many people were there in the first place and many came late.
The same tactic was successful the second time. The police threatened to arrest anybody that was still standing in front of the station, unless the crowd dispersed by the count of 10. Being the chickenshits that these peaceful protesters are (me included), we dispersed. But like in any small peaceful protest or vigil or call it whatever you want that I have been to, crowd re-gathered nearby.
There was a game of cat-and-mouse for a time but nothing untoward really happened after that. No more arrest. And after all that, all were released before midnight.
If anything, this little protest will prove tame. Tomorrow in Ipoh will be another story.
In any case, it will be unfair to equate the cause of Brickfields’ little party with the cause of Ipoh’s party, which is expected to be massive . I do still take defecting as a right. It is not immoral.
Nevertheless, after all been said and done, politically, I would like to see an election in Perak. That would tie up a lot of loose end and allow us to move forward.
[1] — The police tonight arrested 14 people who had gathered at the Brickfields police station in support of activist Wong Chin Huat, but they were all released hours later. [Vigil: Police detain 14, all freed hours later. Wong Teck Chi . Malaysiakini. May 7 2009]
With the arrest of Wong Chin Huat, the Najib administration has proven the skeptics are right.
No more assumption of good faith. The goodwill has gone down the drain.
The Obama administration plans to tax US-based corporations for revenue not originated from the US as part of effort to create more jobs in the US.[1] This will help neither the US economy nor the world economy to recover.
There are of course legitimate concerns with respect to tax havens as money laundering tend to happen there more often than not compared to elsewhere. But Obama administration’s proposed action will punish corporations for operating in countries with low taxes as well. The administration thinks that by doing this, those corporations will relocate its foreign operations to the United States if they are faced with the possibility of being taxed for operating abroad.
Indeed, if passed by the US Congress, the proposal may force corporations to reduce or abandon its operations outside of the US, unless they are willing to pay those taxes. Under a scenario where these corporations do relocated into the US, the corporations will suffer higher operations cost due to prevailing environment in the US, compared to places like China or India. It is worth noting that these corporations operate parts of their business out of the US to take advantage of low cost environment, especially if industries which those corporations are in are labor-intensive.
With higher production cost, higher prices will have to be charged and consequently, less will be sold.
If the proposal goes through, it will not only punish those corporations. It will also punish low-tax countries. Worse, such tax is likely to hurt trade volume in times when many countries including Malaysia are heavily reliant on trade to recover.
This of course will only happen if the tax actually convince these US corporations — in reality, multinational corporations — to relocate into the US. Given lower operations cost abroad, the other possibility is that these corporations may actually relocate more of its businesses abroad, avoiding being labeled as US corporations to avoid the tax altogether. This will be bad for the US economy.
So, the possibilities here are: one, the US bringing the world down together with it; two, the US bringing itself down. Either way, the US will lose out. The third and better possibility, of course, is for the US to not impose that tax.
The proposed move should not be too surprising to too many people. The Democrats since at least 2004 — the days of John Kerry and John Edwards — have wanted to somehow punish firms that they accuse as shipping American jobs abroad, either through outsourcing or offshoring. That thinking is protectionist and the Obama administration’s proposal should be seen as a follow-up to that protectionist tendency that Democrats are known for.
[1] — May 4 (Bloomberg) — President Barack Obama proposed raising about $190 billion over the next decade by outlawing three offshore tax-avoidance techniques used by U.S. companies such as Caterpillar Inc. and Procter & Gamble Co.
Obama’s plan also would make it riskier for Americans to stash money in tax-havens. [Obama Seeks End of Corporate Tax Break to Raise $190 Billion. Ryan J. Donmoyer. Bloomberg. May 4 2009]