Halloween for mining SOE’s
Halloween for mining SOE’s [Posted 31 Oct 2015, 75 views, 3 likes, 0 comments]
Halloween is a popular American festival that is becoming increasingly popular amongst Indonesian youth and I wonder if it applies to Indonesia’s mining SOE’s.
During the history of Indonesia’s independence, the Indonesian Communist parties’ tactics varied with the political situation. One strategy was to hide their true communist identity and join various political parties, state administration bodies and the military, wherein they would rise to positions of influence to steer such entities towards the communist philosophy, or to seize power. Communist Russia and China systems use the State Owned Enterprises (SOE) in preference to free enterprise. China’s recent rise to world prominence, along with their seemingly rich SOE’s has put some Indonesian’s under a hypnotic spell towards expanding the power and influence of Indonesia’s SOE’s.
After Sukarno, Indonesia’s development got started following the USA’s democratic and free enterprise model. There are many examples around the world where private business has gone to the extremes and infiltrated governments to exert their preferential influence. Indonesians love conspiracy gossip like that of the super rich business families being awarded lucrative government contracts, or manipulating political influence to defeat their competition. Thus stories of influential Indonesian business players squeezing out the foreign competition, and diminishing the influence of the SOE’s, to control more of the mining industry makes for a good bewitching story to scare some children.
So for this Halloween I wonder who in Commission 7, PERHAPI and other bodies of influence are dressing up as witches, zombies or superhero. Both SOE’s and private enterprise can each work well. Improving transparency is one way to determine if this current nationalistic trend is a “trick or treat” for Indonesia.