Tag: economy

2025: American Exceptionalism Redefined

American exceptionalism is the belief that our country is the best—because we say it is, loudly, with flags and fireworks.

Stephen Colbert

Ah, America… land of the free, home of the brave, and in 2025, the domain of the utterly perplexing. Face-palm level of perplexing, truth be told.

The second coming of Trump has certainly made for fascinating times, and we’re only in the 81st day of what looks to be a very long four years. And by ‘fascinating’, think of that morbid curiosity you have, forcing you to look when driving past a zero-survivability car wreck. Or train wreck, if you prefer.

As I write this, we’re enjoying a 90-day intermission in the latest tariff clown show episode, an across-the-board tariffpalooza announced on “Liberation Day”, a day many Americans saw themselves being liberated of their 401K savings when stock markets started tanking. And then the bond markets started to see yields rise as bonds were apparently being dumped as well. It’s speculated that it’s the latter that made Trump announce a 90-day pause on the announced tariffs – except for China, which is a side plot we’ll explore another day.

True to expectations, the stock markets rebounded, almost (but not quite) to where they were before the broad (and sometimes ridiculous) tariffs were unleashed on a bemused world. The bond market, too, has seen yields drop since then. Oh, wait… they’re up again.

And if you’re asking, “So wtf was the point of causing this worldwide distress?”, you are in good company. It’s almost mid-April, and it seems as though not a day has gone by since January 20th that news coming out of the US hasn’t induced a palm-to-the-face reaction. Or even laughter-induced nausea for those with tickle-prone esophaguses.

Be that as it retchingly may, Trump and his administration, through their schoolyard bully bravado, deadpan “I can’t believe it’s not butter bullshit”-styled press conferences delivered by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, aka Propaganda Barbie, and the many other seemingly inane actions and antics – too many to itemize – have given American Exceptionalism a whole new meaning in 2025.

America: Exceptionally Arrogant

America assumes it’s the best, and don’t you effing dare to even consider thinking otherwise. And that’s before Trump ascended to the throne.

This time around, it’s not just about believing it’s the best—it’s about declaring it louder, longer, and with way more ALL CAPS TWEETS FROM THE OFFICIAL PRESIDENTIAL ACCOUNT. For everyone else in the world? Tariffs. You get tariffs. Even if you’re a nation of penguins and seals.

Under Trump, it’s 100% more swagger, 0% self-awareness.

No, but seriously, in a record three months, Trump has managed to destroy whatever goodwill the US has built over the last eight decades since WW2. And destroyed it with gloating impunity, cheered on by imbeciles proudly wearing Made in China MAGA caps.

But hey, America is WINNING. Because despite whatever fake news reality has to offer, America thinks it’s the bestest of the best.

Which, as an aside, reminds me: remember this powerful monologue? It’s from Will McAvoy, a character from the HBO series The Newsroom (superbly played by Jeff Daniels), arguably the best monologue ever written for television:

But hey, don’t let reality get in the way…. USA! USA! USA!

America: Exceptionally Dense

In 2025, facts have become optional. Who needs facts when you’ve got vibes? And a legion of sycophantic podcasters to amp up those vibes?

Harsh Reality? Fake news by the lamestream media. Unless it’s from Fox News, the GOP’s answer to Pravda. Then it’s not so fake.

Science? More fake news!

Renewable energy? Who needs them woke windmills when you’ve got coal?

Now, mix all those ingredients up in a word salad bowl, and what you get is a daily dose of nonsensical diatribe that passes off as national policy. Never mind if the rest of the world howls at how incredibly stupid a lot of it sounds… MAGA like! MAGA approve!

And if that doesn’t illustrate how exceptionally dense the US has become with Trump’s second coming, America has taken concrete steps to ensure the nation gets smarter. How? By dismantling the Department of Education. Such brilliance! Such Multidimensional Chess! So much win!

America: Exceptionally Callous

America… the land of liberty and justice for all. Unless you’re you’re poor, sick, brown, queer, or just slightly inconvenient. Empathy, after all, is just a European invention for the terminally snowflake.

Wait, did someone mention “due process”? What radical leftist nonsense… the president can decree with impunity, and ICE will drag your ass to a maximum security terrorist prison in bumfuck El Salvador. No evidence necessary – no crime committed, no conviction, no problem! As long as you look like a gang banger, with a foreign gang banger sounding name (like Kilmar Abrego Garcia), that’s all the due process you get.

And if that ain’t star-spangled awesome enough, America… the only country in the world that gives you the liberty of choosing what flavor of medical bankruptcy you like. How awesome is that?

After all, nothing screams LIBERTY than dying or go bankrupt trying, right?

America: Exceptionally Great at Rebranding Failure

Trump goes on a tariff-spree; markets tank. Trump: Sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something. In other words, Sleepy Joe’s fault for leaving behind a horrible economy. But then again, when has Trump admitted accountability? For anything? Ever?

And except for China, the far-reaching tariff-ic exercise has been paused for 90 days. Not a “back-down”, naturally… all part of the masterful plan, a pre-defined time out to allow nations around the world to take a knee and “kiss his ass”. And what an ass to kiss, an ass whose beauty the world has never before seen! An ass greater than any ass the universe has ever witnessed! So fluffy and soft! (Cellulite sold separately)

In the Zero Sum Brain that inhabits the most enormous cavity under that most luscious toupee, this is yet another big WIN, on the glorious journey to Make America Great Again… one market crash at a time. Mutual benefit is for losers… plain and simple. Except, of course, when it’s for the mutual benefit of billionaire friends…

Trump’s America: Exceptionally Unpredictable… and Loving It!

Speaking of China, and the Tariff Ping-Pong match the US is currently engaged in, as of writing this, the score currently stands at 125-to-145 in favor of the US. In addition, China has indicated it will ignore further US tariff escalation because the situation has just gotten way too cray-cray.

That, plus China restricting selected rare earth exports and dissing LNG imports from the US, makes us wonder: what brilliant batshit move will Trump try next? There’s no telling what God’s gift to unpredictability has up his sleeve. Who knows… In the meantime, China – apparently the only adult in this Ping-Pong match – has been busy courting the EU to buddy up to face Trump’s star-spangled bullying.

I guess we’ll have to wait, since it’s almost the weekend in Trump’s world, and there are more important things to focus on, like golf at Mar-a-Lago. Courtesy of the American taxpayers, no less. So much Win!

But the biggest challenge to Trump’s winning reign might just come from the most unexpected of places. Like the place nobody expected would be slapped with tariffs.

Hell hath no fury like a penguin dictator scorned… (image from @kangaroos991’s X/Twitter post)

What other exceptional surprises can we expect in the coming days as Trump and company’s first one hundred days fast approach? Or the next hundred days? The Trump administration’s Tariffpalooza adds another notch to America’s exceptional wins to date in 2025. Like taking Russia’s side in the Ukrainian invasion and treating Israel’s genocidal frenzy against Palestinians as a golden opportunity to score some prime beach-front real estate.

So much WIN! So EXCEPTIONAL! So, what’s next, America?

Just to let you know…

I have too many responsibilities and principles. There’s no time for ‘guilty’ pleasures

A.R. Rahman

By now, you’re probably tired of me apologizing for not updating this blog more regularly. Well, be ready to get more tired: Sorry for not updating this blog as much.

Nonetheless, I thought I’d squeeze this posting in, if for no other reason, to let you know I’m still alive. Unlike most of my posts, this one will be a bit aimless.

What’s been going on since I last posted on January 9? The quick answer: a lot. Very, very a lot.

I should mention that since that last posting, I’ve not been in Malaysia a whole lot. And when I’m away – usually for work – the last thing I want to do is get my mood fouled by the political and social goings on in Malaysia. And so I stay off X/Twitter most of the time, and if I do get on the app (it’s how I get most of my news, by the way), I just read and don’t engage other than doing the occasional RT.

It would be a worthless exercise to try recapping everything that’s happened since then, so I won’t even bother. Maybe just a few highlights. Or lowlights, depending on how you view them.

Malaysia is chugging along okay for the most part. Apart, of course, from the tireless outrage farmers who never fail to find something to get pissed off about. The most recent being the 130-year old Hindu temple issue – which has apparently been settled amicably (more or less).

Elsewhere in the world, Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians continues, a year and a half since the October 7, 2023 HAMAS raid, which has led to the near annihilation of Gaza. The Russian invasion of Ukraine continues. And the cherry on the “world is total shit” cake, Donald Trump is once more in the White House.

If you thought Trump 1.0 was bad, Trump 2.0 (now in its 76th day) has been a daily routine of me going “WTF?!?“. It’s been literally a case of another day, another facepalm. The latest, of course, is the broad “tariffs” on the rest of the world, based on some really dubious math.

For those of you who are interested, there’s actually a tabulation on Wikipedia of what the Trump administration has done within the first 100 days. The sweeping tariffs include the base 10% on an island whose only inhabitants are… penguins (and reportedly one seal).

‘Nowhere’s safe’: How an island of penguins ended up on Trump tariff list

The more serious implication of the announced tariffs, made on April 2, 2025, or what Trump has called “Liberation Day” – stock markets in the US and around the world reacted as you’d expect them to react. They tanked.

It appears as if the only thing that got liberated that day was a chunk of the average American’s disposable income. Why? Contrary to what Trump’s sycophants and the average MAGA dimwit think, tariffs are an IMPORT TAX, and not some looney tunes made-up tax the US imposes on other countries.

And who pays for import taxes? The importer. Which then essentially INCREASES the cost. Which, in all likelihood, gets passed on to the consumer. Feel liberated yet?

So, there you have it. Four months into 2025, and the year already feels like if there’s something that can go wrong, it most certainly will.

On my part, no promises that there will be more regular postings. But I will try. I do write the odd bit now and again in other places, like on X/Twitter or Medium. If for some odd, unfathomable reason you actually miss my writing, go find me in either one of those places I mentioned.

Cope as best as you can, won’t ya? The world is a wonky place these days…

Reform Marty

Sadly, the overall trend in freedoms this past year has been to move backwards, not forward.

Bridget Welsh, Malaysiakini, Dec 10 2024

So, you must be wondering: who the heck is Marty and why does he need to be reformed?

For the longest time, Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s rallying call has been about reform – or, in the Malay language, reformasi – from the time he got kicked out of cabinet in 1998 pretty much.

Since I trust that you, dear readers, still have analytical brain cells swimming in your noggin, you’re now fully clued in to what this post is all about. I hope.

More and more we see on social media that PH’s promised reforms have thus far – two years on – remained just that: promises. The most recent examples being Fahmi Reza getting hauled up by the police for his satirical caricature of newly appointed Sabah TYT Musa Aman; excuse me… Tun Musa Aman to us the unwashed masses; and Hadi Awang getting called in for questioning over his opinion piece about the Batu Puteh sovereignty issue.

In other words, the optics (at least) indicate that freedom of expression is being curtailed at a level similar to them BN days of yore. Some even say it’s worse than those days. Granted, correlation doesn’t imply causation, but could it be that BN being in the unity government has something to do with these recent crackdowns? And by BN I really mean UMNO, since the other component parties are pretty much inconsequential.

Also of concern are the laws that give broad powers to certain individuals and agencies, for example, the recently passed amendments to the Communications and Multimedia Act (read the concerns raised by Article 19) giving MCMC almost unbridled and unquestionable powers. And then there’s the licensing of social media platforms, imposing a “strict liability on service providers for user-generated content” (from the Article 19 posting), which will very likely incentivise platforms to remove content that they deem may be ‘problematic’ – in layperson’s terms: arbitrary censorship by the platforms, potentially. And since social media platforms are fast replacing human arbiters with AI-driven algorithms, it may lead to a situation where anything with an iota of a whiff of being problematic may be removed.

In fact, I believe this is already happening: Fahmi Reza’s TikTok account was banned while he was livestreaming a lecture session at the Universiti Malaya campus a few days ago, without any reasons given other than the generic “multiple policy violations” excuse. As of the publishing of this post, however, it’s been reported that his account has been reactivated and accessible again.

So bottom line, when it comes to individual freedom of expression, it would seem like we’re regressing. Similarly, with human rights in general, as stated in SUARAM’s 2024 Human Rights Report.

On the economic front, Malaysia seems to be on the right track. On the macro level, at least. On the ground, however, we’re still feeling the pinch when it comes to the cost of living. Important reforms to subsidies are in the works, particularly to remove blanket subsidies on fuel to a regimen that’s targeted to the lower income groups that need them the most. At present Malaysia has the lowest petrol prices in Southeast Asia.

Anwar Ibrahim maintains, however, that promised reforms are in progress and will be delivered:

Screenshot

and even more recently:

Screenshot

It’s true that the primary focus of perceived regression has been on human rights and freedom of expression, and almost zero focus on governance. But if my assessment of sentiments based on my observations is accurate, I would also add that not enough has been done to properly communicate these governance reform initiatives; simply because next to no one is talking about them within the online sphere.

It doesn’t help when things like the dropping of charges in the Rosmah Mansor case, and the dropping of the appeal against the dismissal of charges in the case of Zahid Hamidi happen. Even if the former is due to faulty charges, thus rightly dismissed by the presiding judge (but not so much for the Zahid Hamidi case), as long as there’s no separation of the Attorney General and Public Prosecutor roles, there will always be the lingering notion that these were done at the behest of the government, and in particular, of the PM.

Anwar has denied involvement, but the optics have nonetheless been damaging. And optics contributes greatly towards perception, which in turn colours what’s regarded as “truth“. More damaging is what I’m seeing as an erosion of PH’s support base as a result.

And if that erosion continues, PH could just find itself in the same position of the Democrats in the recent US Presidential Elections. Academic Bridget Welsh, for whom I have great respect, outlines some valuable lessons to be learnt from Trump’s triumph and second coming.

The difference with Malaysia, however, is that Perikatan Nasional (PN) falls way short in the credibility department when it comes to being an opposition block. Sure, it has loads of support, particularly for PAS, based on their religious cred (and not much else) that has great appeal for the increasingly conservative Malay demographic who somehow yearn for greater control over every minutiae of their lives and somehow have lost the ability to think for themselves. Another downside of the tongkat mentality, perhaps?

In any case, back to Marty… are the prospects of reform completely dead in Malaysia? Anwar says NO, but increasingly voices on the ground seem to think so. And with systemic reforms to the economy apparently in progress, the short-term negative effects will likely amplify those on-the-ground voices even more.

The rollback of fuel subsidies – done for diesel, to be implemented for RON95 in the near future – is bound to cause even more negative sentiments towards the PH-helmed unity government.

I have always maintained that change isn’t easy, and that often with change things get worse before they get better. Inertia, part and parcel of governmental bureaucracies, is partly to blame; as is the fact too many basic needs in our lives have been subsidized over the decades.

And why have wages been stagnant? I don’t know for sure, but I theorize it’s partly because of the desire for wages to be suppressed so that we appear more “competitive” cost-wise, to attract Foreign Direct Investments. Similarly with the undervalued Ringgit.

Reversing things like these require systemic overhauls which take time to realize – the longer policies have been in place, the longer it’ll take to overhaul them. Even then, economic policies are not instant noodles – effects aren’t immediate and sometimes takes years only to discover that the world has changed (again), and so further adjustments are required. Compounding this is the fact Malaysia doesn’t exactly have a good track record of metrics surveillance nor the agility to make timely corrections. Oh, and the habit of perpetuating and repeating mistakes but hoping for different outcomes.

So yeah, things are gonna be a lot worse before they can get better. If they get better…

All that said, personally, I think there’s still hope, although I’m not entirely optimistic looking at things through reality-tinted glasses. We’re roughly two years into Madani, with three more to go if the current government goes the full term. What transpires in 2025 will be important to watch, and God-willing, I’ll update my thoughts as we stumble along.

Reform Marty? No, I wouldn’t exactly say that. Yet. Let’s just say Marty’s gotta up his game… by leaps and bounds.