As long as Malays remain ignorant and poor, they will be dependent on Umno.
That has been one of Umno’s main strategies in its divide-and-rule policy to remain in power for 55 years.
We want to alert Malays to stop allowing themselves to be perbodohkan (made a fool) by Umno.
Umno fears wise, intelligent, independent and informed Malays. Instead, we have no fear of that and we want to raise the thinking capacity of all Malaysians, especially rural Malays.
The Najib (Abdul Razak)-led BN is only interested in propagating falsehood through its control of the media and to disunite Malaysians via racial and religious issues.
When it comes to really important matters that affect the people, they lose all their courage and do the disappearing act.
The land grabs by state governments nationwide, especially in Johor, are also clear examples of Umno making fools out of Malays.
Mahathir Mohamad, in 1991, amended the Land Acquisition Act 1960, to enable state governments to legally rob people of their land and then alienating the land to their cronies for property development.There is absolutely no doubt that those who have committed a series of financial frauds need to be punished. We already know the massive land grabs of native land in Sarawak. But this has also been happening in Johor – Pasir Gudang, Denga Bay, Gelang Patah and now Pengerang. Mahathir and his family members have benefitted by their endorsements of such fraudulent scheme, they need to pay the price. For all that the police need to be ‘independent’ of political influence peddling so that an impartial investigation can be carried out and the money trail, But Malayalis like to tilt at windmills such as corruption and sexual teases when they are sufficiently bored
Thousands of Malay villagers have been evicted from their customary land under this Act. This is the nasib of orang Melayu under Umno (This is the fate of Malays under Umno).
All natural resources in the country belong to the people and country, not to any individual or organisation.
What has happened to Petronas’ trillions of ringgit in oil revenue? Why is the government in heavy debt?
Has anyone seen the accounts of Petronas, other than the prime ministers?
Anwar, as deputy prime minister and finance minister, has never seen the accounts. Not even Parliament.
What have the last three prime ministers – Mahathir, Abdullah Badawi and Najib – been hiding?The government will not spend on productive assets, we’ll scare the foreigners away and we will never have good infrastructure, schools or hospitals. So what? At least we care for poor people. We`ll keep caring for poor people until our money totally runs out, the nation gets bankrupt, inflation is out of control and there are no more jobs.Of course, that means far more people will be poorer than from where we started. But isn’t that a good thing? After all, it gives us a chance to care for even more people.. Did i miss something in that? Oh yes, nuts. We do need nuts. Some nuts for all Malaysian, please. You know the kind of nuts I am talking about, right?
Urban Poverty is a terrible thing. There are few things as demeaning to a human being as not having the means to fulfil his basic needs in life.The continuance of urban poverty is particularly surprising because there are so many smart and powerful people who claim to be representing the poor. Politicians like Tengku Adnan, academics, poverty economists, NGOs — there are so many people trying to help the poor. It is baffling, then, why we can’t seem to get rid of poverty. Our public debates are virtually controlled by left-leaning intellectuals, who are some of the most pro-poor people on earth. And yet, they seem to be get-ting nowhere.Well, they won’t. Because while they may be experts on the poor and their suffering, they have little idea about the one thing that eventually removes poverty — money. Yes, it is over-simplistic, but it is perplexing how little our top thinkers and debate-controllers know about wealth creation, true economic empowerment, productivity and competitiveness. For, if they did, they would not support one of the most hare-brained schemes to have ever come out of our illusionist politicians` hat
Try arguing with that! You may see financial ruin for the nation, but how will your data-filled presentation ever compete with the picture of a malnourished hungry child in the urban village. You can’t. I submit all economics, basic arithmetic, common sense, rationality, practicality fails when someone confronts you with ‘so basically you don’t want to help the poor, right?’Nobody does not want to help the poor. Nevertheless, after being labelled anti-poor, you will be labelled an MNC-favouring, FDI-obsessed capitalist. Stay long enough; you will be branded right-wing, perhaps with a ‘communalist’ slur added too. Welcome to India where one doesn’t debate on reason. We debate on emotions, moral one-upmanship and attacking the debater rather than the argument.
Therefore, like any sane, self-preserving individual, i’d say my official line on is not important to remove poverty. It is only important to come across as a person who cares for poor people. And i do, more than you. That is why my Bill has fruit and vegetables. Does yours? So what if our fiscal deficit swells, the rating agencies downgrade us to junk credit and foreign investors stop investing in our country? We don’t need them. They are all our enemies anyway.
Spurred by a flourishing market, jobs in Detroit’s car factories are moving to India. But India’s growing appetite for cars may not be a good thing in the long run.
The dog days of August are when many Washington DC residents decamp to escape its muggy, humid weather. India is not an attractive option given the distance, and there is the fact that most cities in India have identical weather. But Bangalore, for all its busted bravado about being silicon whatever, still retains its fabulous weather for the most part, and it is to its salubrious environs that your correspondent repairs for some R&R, and to reconnect with the roots since DC in August is deserted in more ways that one.
As one prepares for this getaway, news has arrived that Detroit has just declared bankruptcy, the largest American city to go broke. In 1971, two realtors put up a hoarding near Seattle’s Sea-Tac airport that said, “Will the last person to leaving Seattle please turn off the lights?” It was a facetious crack at the city’s downturn after the airline industry went belly-up, primarily on account of Boeing’s nosedive that brought down its employee strength from over 100, 000 in 1967 to less than 40, 000 by 1971.
But Boeing recovered, and Seattle reinvented itself with Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks and other storied companies. Somewhere down the line, it passed the doomsday mantle to Detroit, America’s Motor City – or Motown – that once employed more than a million people with the Big Three (General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler) dominating the landscape. When the city declared itself broke earlier this week, GM and Chrysler were the 9th and 10th largest employers in the city with about 4, 500 employees each. The top eight: Detroit Public Schools, City Government of Detroit, Detroit Medical Centre, Henry Ford Health System, US Government, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Wayne State University, and State of Michigan.
In other words, the government and healthcare business (or the sickness industry) are locked in a clinch for the most part. Where did Detroit and its Motown jobs go is a question that brings us to your correspondent’s upcoming home visit and his newest gripe about India’s maladroitness – or maldetroitness. At a recent US-India business engagement, someone asked if Detroit’s loss was Chennai’s gain, considering the number of auto-manufacturers who have flocked to the city. Well, not just Chennai or Tamil Nadu’s gain, it turns out – the world’s auto manufacturers have flocked to all of India. To Gujarat, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Haryana, Punjab, Kerala. India is now one of the world’s largest automotive markets, both in manufacturing (6th, ahead of UK, France, Italy, Canada etc and behind only China, US, Japan, Germany, South Korea) and in sales, including export. Every auto manufacturer worth his dime is in India.
This has been flogged a great success story. Overheated accounts of hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs, developing ancillary units, export earnings etc are being bandied about. Meantime, we are adding four to five million passenger vehicles each year to our rudimentary road network and zooming past 50 million vehicles, the world’s second fastest growing auto market after China. Chennai itself is on track to becoming the world’s largest auto-hub by 2016 with a capacity of over 3 million cars annually – India’s Detroit.
See any dark foreboding in this whole unfolding scenario? What is more frightening – Detroit Redux, or a road system that is clogged bumper to bumper with 300 million gas-guzzling vehicles – while the west has quietly graduated to smarter forms of transport and communication just as the price of oil, a finite, fast diminishing commodity, is going through the roof? At the heart of India’s economic trouble, to keep it simple, is its trade deficit – primarily the difference between what we export (say about $300 billion worth of stuff) and what we import (about $500 billion worth of stuff). India’s No. 1 import is oil (about $140 billion last year) and its No. 2 import is gold (around $60 billion). Dump both and we’ve bridged the trade gap easily.
Easier said than done. Gold buying is cultural custom that is hard to erase quickly, although the finance minister has done a great job educating people without telling them you are anti-national if you buy gold (” Most people in India think they are buying Indian gold in Indian rupees, ” he told me glumly last week. “They are not. It’s foreign gold in foreign exchange. “) But there’s not a word about reducing oil imports or energy consumption. As if buying SUVs and heavy-duty air-conditioners has always been the norm for India.
Some three decades ago, hoardings at gas stations pronounced in banner headlines, “Save that drop of oil or walk to your destination 20 years from now. ” Didn’t save, not walking. Instead, we are crawling, in vehicles, when walking would indeed be quicker in some instances. Trapped in a carapace that is very American in its essence (wasteful, extravagant, profligate ) we don’t even apply our minds to simpler, more elegant solutions, suckered into the oil trap that has made a mess of the United States.
Which is why, when your scribe is in Bangalore, road trips are restricted to the bare minimum, made with bated breath and gritted teeth. Local sorties are conducted on a bicycle or by walking, with imminent danger to life and limb. Soon, there will be plenty of new energy sources, fuel technologies, and nifty automobiles that will disdain oil, but will we be left holding the can for the traditional industry by then? And what will we do with our 100 million gas guzzlers? How much will our maldetroitness cost us? And will the last person to leave Bangalore/Chennai/Mumbai/Kolkata please put out the light – if there is one.
