How much is enough for a country's leader Doug Conway, Senior Correspondent | December 29, 2008 - 1:37PM Everyone knows politicians aren't in it for

How much is enough for a country's leader

Doug Conway, Senior Correspondent | December 29, 2008 - 1:37PM

Everyone knows politicians aren't in it for the money.

But the aspiring, and skint, world leader who is looking for a country to run in these belt-tightening times should head for Asia, particularly Singapore or Hong Kong.

The salaries on offer there far exceed anything even the White House can manage.

Ambitious Australian pollies in straitened circumstances should head not east but west.

Western Australia's leader is the highest paid premier in the nation, and the common, garden variety WA backbencher earns more than his federal counterpart in Canberra.

If that seems nonsensical, Australia also pays its governor-general more than its prime minister.

But in the leadership salary stakes, no one can hold a candle to Singapore, the tiny island nation which believes in rewarding its public servants big time.

Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong earns the equivalent of $A3.8 million a year.

That's six times more than Barack Obama will earn when he takes office in the US next month, nine times more than Britain's Gordon Brown and almost 12 times Australia's Kevin Rudd.

Singapore's PM will actually take a 19 per cent pay cut next year in response to the global financial crisis, but should still be able to scrape by.

Hong Kong chief executive Donald Tsang swings a mean pay satchel, too, pulling down $A775,000 a year.

But one of the world's top pay-per-population earners has to be Ireland's Brian Cowen, who draws some $A624,000 for running a country of four million.

Vladimir Putin's official stipend is tiny - one fifth of the Irish PM's - but the Russian leader's personal fortune is said to be considerable.

The United States evidently sees little need to offer massive financial rewards to its president, who usually has to be a multi-millionaire to run for office in the first place.

The president's $A597,000 pay cheque is skimpy considering he is running the world's biggest economy, and it was half that until as recently as 2001.

Some presidents, including John F Kennedy and the very first, George Washington, have been sufficiently wealthy not to require a cent of it.

But self-denial among leaders doesn't come much greater than Bolivia's Evo Morales, who made good on a campaign pledge to halve his salary when he won office in 2006.

He takes just $A32,000 a year, still fairly handy for a coca farmer and former llama herder.

Kevin Rudd will never be short of a dollar, thanks principally to his wife's considerable wealth, but his $A330,000 pay packet also puts him in a respectable position.

The Kiss of Economic Death

Into the red: 'lipstick effect' reveals the true face of the recession

• Larry Elliott
• The Guardian, Monday 22 December 2008

Some say hemlines and heels rise and fall with the state of the stockmarket. But for those who really want to know how bad things are there is only one item that counts: lipstick.

When times are tough, consumers stop spending on big ticket items. Car sales are down by a third; the drop in demand for mortgages has taken its toll of spending on carpets and furniture.

But, according to one City economist, rather than lose the spending habit consumers simply trade down to cheaper items to cheer themselves up. What's more, this effect has held good in recessions of the past and in countries with different cultural traditions.

Dhaval Joshi, analyst with RAB Capital, said that the recent sales figures from the world's big cosmetic companies - L'Oréal, Beiersdorf and Shiseido - confirm that the so-called lipstick effect has returned as the global economy has headed into its first synchronised downturn since the early 1980s, with consumers increasing their spending on cosmetics even while economising on everything else.

In the first half of the year, L'Oréal showed like-for-like sales growth of 5.3%."The evidence shows that when budgets are squeezed, people simply substitute large extravagances for small luxuries," Joshi said.

The "lipstick effect" can be traced back to the Great Depression of the 1930s. In the four years from 1929 to 1933, industrial production in the US halved, but sales of cosmetics rose.

In Germany, the unemployment total rose to 6 million, but those working for Beiersdorf did not suffer. The company was able to boast that it did not lay off a single employee.

More recently, employment in the US cosmetics sector went up in the recessions of 1990 and 2001 while jobs in the rest of manufacturing were being shed. And while the squeeze on disposable incomes in Japan's long period of stagnation has seen department store spending on clothes fall by 25% since 1997, sales of accessories are up by 10%.

According to Joshi, the "lipstick effect" shows up in stock market performance, with the European personal products sector outperforming the broader market by an average of 100% in each of the three past recessions of the early 1980s, early 1990s and early 2000s.

"The European personal products index is an excellent proxy for the global cosmetics sector because it is dominated by L'Oréal and Beiersdorf.

So far in the downturn, this index has already outperformed the broader market by 45%."

Speak up now or drown in silence

• Larry Elliott
• December 28, 2008
• Page 2 of 2 | Single Page View

THE economic mayhem of the past 18 months has been a crisis for the right. Nationalising banks that have lent irresponsibly was not part of any laissez-faire script.

The prevailing economic model of the past 30 years has run out of road, just as the postwar social democratic model ran out of road after three (far more successful) decades in the mid-1970s. But it is a non sequitur to assume, as some on the left do, that the world has changed forever. This is lazy thinking. Without an intellectual critique of what has gone wrong and what needs to be done to put things right, matters will revert more or less to where they were before the flood.

When the postwar Golden Age ended in the mid-1970s, the right had just such a critique. It had spent the previous 30 years arguing that demand management would lead to inflation, that the strength of unions was eroding profits and that higher taxes were starving the private sector of investment.

Most of the heavy lifting was done by the free-market think tanks that were well-funded by business and could draw on academics to shape the policies of Reagan and Thatcher.

Today, there has been no equivalent for the left to provide the intellectual justification for more interventionist government. That is why the British Government is ideologically bereft as it tries to manage the crisis. Labour has control of the banks but wants to give it up. The thinking amounts to a mere hope that the clock can be turned back to July 2007.

This was not Thatcher's approach in 1979. Instead of exhorting the trade unions to behave better next time, she used the so-called Winter of (industrial) Discontent to impose statutory controls. Capital's Winter of Discontent has been much longer, more widespread and more damaging but the response is shaping up as a missed opportunity of catastrophic proportions.

Both the Marxists and the greens have a critique of what has gone wrong. These critiques deserve to be taken seriously. After all, it is easy to imagine Marx concluding that the global economic order since the 1990s was capitalism's last roll of the dice. The greens say living beyond our means brings higher debt levels and is symptomatic of a reckless disregard for the carrying capacity of the planet.

So the Marxists and the greens have explanations. Where, though, is what we might call the traditional left — the democratic socialists, the Keynesians, the non-revolutionary wing of the progressive movement? During the 13 years of Tony Blair's leadership, it was pretty docile.

There could be a simple explanation: the ideas promulgated by the free-marketeers at one end of the spectrum, and the Marxists and the greens at the other, have survived because they make more intellectual sense.

The ability of mainstream progressives to develop a critique of the neo-liberal world order is illustrated by the development NGOs, which from the mid-1990s onwards attacked the Washington consensus. All sorts of radical ideas were floated: free trade might not always be good for vulnerable economies; there was a role for an activist state in development; privatising health and education would lead to more sick people and fewer children in school.

The crisis thus presents both a golden opportunity and a threat to the left. Scholars, politicians and think tanks in Britain should concentrate on a few areas. One would be finance, where the argument should move to what Keynes actually stood for: permanent and tough controls on the financial sector so policymakers could pursue goals of social welfare and full employment. That means nationalising the banks, credit controls and action against tax havens — as a bare minimum.

Finally, there needs to be a vision of the good society, the world the left wants to create. The free-market right has one. The Marxists have one. The greens have one. Unless the social democratic left has one — and can articulate it fully — it is finished.

DAP: JAC Bill ignores Sabah, Sarawak's constitutional rights

DAP: JAC Bill ignores Sabah, Sarawak's constitutional rights
KUCHING, Dec 14 - The DAP today claimed that the Judicial Appointments Commission (JAC) Bill if passed will infringe the constitutional rights of Sabah and Sarawak.
Making it clear that DAP wanted the Bill tabled by Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi recently, to be further scrutinised, DAP secretary-general Lim Guan Eng said Sabah and Sarawak's rights would be affected if due consideration is not given to Articles 122B and 161E(2)(b).
"These two articles in the Federal Constitution serve to preserve, protect and promote the rights of Sabah and Sarawak over the appointment, removal and suspension of judges of the High Court of Sabah and Sarawak," he said at the 14th DAP Sarawak annual convention here today.
"In other words, Sabah and Sarawak rights are not consulted or taken into account as required under the Federal Constitution as agreed to when Sabah and Sarawak joined to form Malaysia in 1963," he added.
Later in the news conference, Lim explained that the bill will overide the power of the Yang di-Pertua Negeri of the respective states in term of appointment, promotion and suspension of judges.
Lim proposed that a separate committee that took into account the interest of Sabah and Sarawak should be formed in line with the Federal Constitution to ensure that the constitutional rights of both states were protected and at the same time ensure that the power to appoint judges should not rest solely in the hands of the Prime Minister. - Bernama

Kelak mun dak Dayak nguasa Sarawak,dak Malaya juak datang nulong kitak bah.Cakap janan sik bedindin you.

Kelak mun dak Dayak nguasa Sarawak,dak Malaya juak datang nulong kitak bah.Cakap janan sik bedindin you.