Seeking a paradigm shift

April 3, p. 6

Rebuilding the future: Several workers construct houses to accommodate victims of the Gintung incident in South Tangerang, Banten. The wall of the Situ Gintung dam collapsed last month, killing about 100 people. (JP/P.J Leo)

The dam collapse that killed more than 90 people living below Situ Gintung Lake in Tangerang, West Java is indeed a sad tragedy. But this disaster is just the tip of the iceberg of hazards that lurk for the many people living in Indonesia’s flood prone areas. Disaster mitigation projects are expensive and require heavy government involvement are therefore difficult to sell politically, especially when the direct impact cannot be immediately seen. Indeed, when only the present is considered, the immediate benefits of investing in vulnerability reduction as opposed to the benefits of providing post-disaster relief are hard to fathom.

Your comments:

The comment from one of the readers in Thailand underscores a very ironic question. He uses China as an example, and then goes on to say a “functioning” democracy. China is not a functioning democracy and the “accountability” in China is merely finding someone as a public scapegoat, without looking at the root cause of the problem. The food safety issue is one example. Do you really think that shooting and killing public officials, or private in this matter, will solve the problem of food safety in China? Not so. Your logic is incongruent. And of course, when people are suffering, there is no time for the political blame game. It is time to start helping people, find the root cause and ensure such actions are sustainable.

Agus Sulaiman

The writer says that “it is no time for the blame game”, regarding the Situ Gintung dam collapse. This is part of what is wrong with Indonesian politics and government, i.e., a lack of accountability for public officials. In China, the negligent officials would probably be arrested, tried and then shot for avoiding their duties and exposing the public to disaster. Indonesia still has the feudal mentality that the people (governed) serve their masters in government. In most functioning democracies, it is the other way around.

T. Cotton

Pattaya, Thailand

Seeking a new global currency

April 5 p. 4 

The dominance of the US dollar as the global currency has been under serious challenge in the past few weeks. The Chinese Central Bank Governor, Zhou Xiouchuan, wrote an article on the need for a new global currency to replace the role of the US dollar. Is it an out-of-the-box idea or are there any stronger grounds for such a proposal?  This is a really hot topic that has been debated in the last few days and may become an interesting agenda item at the G20 meeting to be held in London this week. Is there any precedent in history for such a significant change to take place? The answer is yes.

In fact, the change was historic because it was pivotal to the transformation of the International Monetary System at the end of the Second World War.

Your comments:

There is too much pressure on the US dollar being the major reserve currency. Other countries use the US dollar as the major medium for trade, based on the vigor, health and size of the US economy. Theoretically, the US has some kind of valuable, such as gold, to back up each dollar it prints and sends into the global market place. But as time has passed, the US has printed more and more money without any valuable backup other than the US economy itself.

Now that the US economy is in trouble, what does the US have to back up its currency? If you hold lots of US dollars, would you not be worried?

Ben Gee

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