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By Ooi Kee Beng, Editorial for Penang Monthly, August 2016 Artists – be these painters or sculptors, musicians or even authors in many cases – need sponsors. They need patrons. In our commercial age, there is of course the market, through which some artists can succeed. Those are few though, and the so-called market often … Continue reading
By Ooi Kee Beng for The Edge Malaysia, 31 July 2016. The income gap, technically defined, is quite an easy concept to comprehend. One can compare Gross Domestic Product per capita or per household within a given country; and collectively, one can use the Italian sociologist Corrado Gini’s measure of statistical dispersion developed in 1912 … Continue reading
By Ooi Kee Beng For The Straits Times, Singapore. 22 July 2016. The civil lawsuits filed by the US Justice Department on 20 July 2016 to seize assets worth over US$1 billion stolen from Malaysia’s state fund, 1MDB, are sending tight ripples across the globe. Not only are these the largest set of cases brought … Continue reading
By OOI KEE BENG Editorial, Penang Monthly, July 2016. Penang’s free port status began eroding after the final boundaries of Malaysia were defined with the exit of Singapore in 1965. By 1974, the federal government had made it a thing of the past. Luckily for the state, the state government that was voted into power … Continue reading
By Ooi Kee Beng Editorial in Penang Monthly, June 2016. This morning (May 20, 2016), my 12-year-old daughter asked me “what is Capitalism?”. Since the Cold War is over, this is actually a harder question to answer than one may think. So if you, dear reader, do not mind, I shall use this space to … Continue reading
By Ooi Kee Beng For The Straits Times, Singapore, 26 May 2016 On 5 May, in the midst of the Sarawak state election campaign, a helicopter crashed in the jungle and killed five people, including the Malaysian Deputy Minister for Plantation Industries and Commodities, Datuk Noriah Kasnon, and the Member of Parliament for Kuala Kangsar, … Continue reading
By Ooi Kee Beng For the Edge Malaysia, 16 May 2016. Practically all pundits predicted that the Barisan Nasional (BN) in Sarawak, headed by the PBB under the leadership of Chief Minister Adenan Satem, would win big in the Sarawak state election held last Saturday, 7 May. They were right, no surprises there. What was … Continue reading
By Ooi Kee Beng For The Edge Malaysia, 27 April 2016 In an age in which we constantly assert the Paramountcy of the Law and in which we proclaim equality before the law, we carelessly assume that obeying the law, or at least not breaking the law, is all we really need to do for … Continue reading
By Ooi Kee Beng Editorial, Penang Monthly May 2016. Being a late-bloomer, I seldom took part in sports when I was in school. They felt too physical, too competitive and too regimenting. That did not stop me though from admiring those individuals who could excel not only in sprint, long jump and high jump, but … Continue reading
By Ooi Kee Beng Editorial in Penang Monthly, April 2016. Thinking about the liveability of cities makes me wonder in what ways cities are similar enough to each other for us to compare them to each other, not to mention their liveability. By virtue of size and significance, it is common that one differentiates between … Continue reading
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