Readers following the recent protests and crackdowns in Burma may not have seen a recent commentary by Kyi May Kaung.
She writes:
For the last 14 years the junta has been dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on a document it calls a constitution, in a process it calls the “National Convention.” Now it has ratified its statement and there are no surprises for anyone. The ugly new flag shows one big star, clearly symbolizing the military’s intention to remain dominant.
A boot crushing everyone underneath it would be a more apt symbol.
2 responses so far ↓
1 jonfernquest // Sep 13, 2007 at 1:42 pm
Not much new information there, except the section quoted below which doesn’t really cover as much ground as say Larry Jagan’s Op-Ed piece in the Bangkok Post last week.
“Sham effort to place blame for the price hike on concerned citizens”
“In a disturbing new development, a report supposedly written by an advisory group of Rangoon-based economists and scientists recommended the price hike to cover higher budget expenditures by the military government. It was leaked to exile groups and the Burmese media outside the country. However, Dr. Maung Myint, a prominent Burmese economist and a member of the group, denied the authenticity of the report in a letter to The Irrawaddy, a Thailand based dissident magazine.
“I believe the report was a fake and an attempt to make scapegoats of the academics. It betrayed a poor and mechanistic “understanding” of “bringing prices in line with the world market.” It did some rudimentary arithmetic and said the budget deficit, caused by the government’s raising salaries of civil servants, could be covered by raising fuel prices. It did not go into the inflationary affects of this increase in money supply at all. The Burmese government has been continuously printing money to cover its expenditures since 1962.
“It was a sort of watered down version of the IMF/World Bank 4 step program of privatization, market based pricing, free trade and capital market liberalization that has been criticized by Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, formerly chief economist at the World Bank. Allowing prices to float to market levels as per IMF/World Bank recommendations also caused demonstrations in Indonesia in 1998. “
2 Kyi May Kaung // Sep 16, 2007 at 6:20 pm
I was not trying to “provide new information.”
Rather to provide an analysis of the structural reasons behind the current economic problems by incorporating available information into a logical framework.
I am not a reporter but an analyst.
An earlier article is available on my blog site
http://kyimaykaung.blogspot.com
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