President Ma Ying-jeou used the second anniversary of the return to power of his rightist Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) to try to persuade the 23 million Taiwan people to believe in a new vision of a "Golden Decade."
Ma clearly realizes that the greatest threat to his chances of winning a second four year term in the next presidential and national legislative polls in early 2012 is the fact that the majority of the Taiwan people have already realized that they were tricked in the March 2008 presidential polls by the KMT leader's "633" mirage.
Ma secured a landslide 58 percent mandate in March 2008 with his promise to lift Taiwan's annual expansion in inflation - adjusted gross domestic product to over six percent, reduce the unemployment rate to three percent by 2012 and boost Taiwan's per capita GDP to US$30,000 by 2016 if elected to two terms.
Instead, Ma has shattered the KMT's own myth of being uniquely competent in economic management by turning an average "annual economic contraction rate" of 0.91 percent and an average unemployment rate of 5.35 percent, compared to an average of 4.4 percent economic growth and 4.28 percent unemployment under the DPP.
Moreover, the performance of the Ma government has shown that the KMT, with its ingrained authoritarian mentality and bureaucratic habits, is unfit to deal with the challenges faced by a democratic Taiwan in the 21st century.
Besides displaying bureaucratic incompetence in dealing with the aftermath of Typhoon Morakot last year, the KMT government has shown its contempt for Taiwan's people and our democratic system by conducting virtually all policy making in a "black box" of secrecy away from democratic accountability.
Public anger exploded over pacts negotiated behind closed doors with the authoritarian People's Republic of China without legislative monitoring or ratification and a secret protocol with Washington to import U.S. beef offals.
The result has been deep public suspicion on the motives for Ma's push for a "Cross-Strait Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement" and other "liberalization" moves with the Chinese Communist Party-ruled PRC.
Not surprisingly, Ma's satisfaction rating has dropped considerably during the past year. Even a poll of 805 Taiwan adults published yesterday by the KMT-friendly United Daily News found that only 39 percent were satisfied with Ma's performance, with 43 percent displeased, compared with a positive appraisal of 52 percent satisfied with 33 percent dissatisfied a year ago.
Evidently hoping to reverse the ebbing lack of voter confidence, Ma held a news conference to mark his second year in office by declaring that the ECFA would lead to a "golden age" of "prosperity" and would lead naturally to an era of "peace" through expanding interaction between our economy and the PRC, despite its deployment of 1,500 missiles opposite our shores.
Parroting Pinnochio
The so-called "64-dollar question" is whether our citizens should believe in Ma's new "golden" promise after the bursting of the "633" bubble.
One indication is the inability of the president cum KMT chairman to tell the truth.
Ma's declaration that last year's ratification of the two international human rights covenants has "raised our human rights standards to world levels" has already been exposed as duplicity by the execution of four death row convicts and the shattering of the five - year moratorium on the implementation of death sentences, its emasculation of the Legal Aid Foundation and the drive to restore party-state control over the news media.
Indeed, the president delivered an outright lie when he stated that the reduction of Taiwan's rating for news freedom last month by Freedom House to 47th compared to 32nd in 2008 and from first to eighth in the Asia-Pacific region, "had nothing to do with the government" and told reporters to "look at the report."
Looking at the Freedom House country report on Taiwan's news freedom cited "government influence over the editorial content of publicly owned outlets" and the revival of "embedded marketing" by the KMT government among the "challenges for media independence" during 2009.
Freedom House also said measures "initiated by the government or the ruling KMT's party caucus in the legislature, as well as personnel changes within publicly owned media, have raised concerns that their aim is to influence the editorial content of the nonpartisan outlets."
Freedom House cited the observation by local media monitoring groups and international observers that "criticism of the government in the Central News Agency's coverage appeared to be markedly toned down since the end of 2008" when former Ma campaign spokesman and now presidential spokesman Lo Chih-chiang was appointed as CNA deputy president.
Furthermore, Freedom House noted that "local press freedom advocates and the Control Yuan criticized subsequent measures by the government to expand the Public Television System board and prematurely end the contracts of the broadcaster's management."
Sadly, Ma showed that he has not realized that he can only regain the people's trust with honesty instead of trying to pass a pile of pyrite lies as the beginning of a "Golden Decade."
Source: Taiwan News Online - Editorial 2010/05/20
Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
