Mahathir’s Memoir - Being A Haunting of Old Buddies, Jekyll and Hyde

Mahathir opened Pandora’s Box upon himself. Seeking to have his last say no matter what, the ex-premier, riding on a wave of a popularity-comeback, the man, in his 800-pages plus memoir, is shown in the early reactions to the book as nasty.

It’s only been three days since he launched the great book and 5,000 copies had flown off the shelves.

Early reactions are making the monumental work like it’s entitled, A Doctor in a Haunted House - Memoirs of a Jekyll seeking for a place to Hyde.

He asked for it. From the reactions, Mahathir Mohamed, the doctor and long time premier (he stayed all of 22 years at the helm), apparently wants to be best remembered as a pugilist, squeezing into history a wondrous storm to batter him so the adrenaline will keep flowing in his twilight days. He is 86.

He wrote into his memoirs a series of nasty remarks and accounts of persons he had undone and those he crossed swords with to provide for him a clean bill of health.

Hundreds have not agreed with the one-eyed. The numbers will pile into the thousands within a month.

It’s the view of the personality from his lofty perch, his nest, that’s now being bombarded, the bombardment stretching into a force of willful destruction of Mahathir’s version by a popular force that wants history to reflect the people’s perceptions.

While Mahathir spent 20 pages of his book on his decision to sack and clobber Anwar Ibrahim on the basis of the dubious allegations of Umi Hafilda, most of the people simply saw Anwar as one of his rivals he clobbered to stay on as premier.

Anwar, he had written in his memoir, had asked four women for sex, two of whom said ‘no’ while the other two undressed.

That was according to Umi Hafilda, the sister of Anwar’s former confidential secretary who is now number two in the wracked Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR).

Umi Hafilda was featured in the recent twin by-elections, in Merlimau and Kerdau.

She was reported to have attracted large crowds, which she can, dragging sibling-rivalry sensationally through the mud and revealing succulent sexual stories about Anwar Ibrahim.

But that’s where Umi comes and goes, herself not a likely candidate for any virtue.

Anwar fumed. Still in court in a second leg of the sodomy charges, he combusted in Banting last night (10 March) and reached for Mahathir’s throat in an exchange of libelous and sub judicial remarks for a slanderous tirade, like Alladin’s bargain of the old lamp for new.

The storm has begun. The opposition pact requires unification, uniformity and unity. Now it can embark on a recall of the Free Anwar Campaign.

In court the last prosecution witness, a senior police officer, divulged the surprising detail that Saiful Bukhari, who is the man Anwar was alleged to have sodomized, had run to Najib’s wife first, and not directly to the Prime Minister as we have been made to believe before.

It’s a very small detail for the pact to ride on.

Saiful, it appeared, had had the DNA of several men in his anus. A scientist had speculated in court that it could have happened when the man sat on a toilet bowl. Take care!

Reactions to the earth-shaking memoir and the trial in court are happening as the world is going upside down, making Malaysia politically dicey.

China suddenly sprung a USD 7.3 billion trade deficit in February, said to be caused by the volatile prices of oil because of the “democratic revolts” in the Middle East and North Africa (Mena).

That revolt has become a civil war in Libya and in Bahrain Sunnis battle Shiahs on the streets.

The regional revolution is scheduled to happen in Saudi Arabia today (11 March). It’s the largest oil producer.

In Egypt the revolution has wound its way into Muslim-Christian unrest. Some 2.4 million barrels of oil run through the Suez-Mediterranean pipeline per day.

If China can fall into a trade deficit following a simmering oil threat, what will happen should oil prices surge to frightening heights will certainly be the Chinese economic crisis that’s predicted to happen in four years time.

Muslim violence against minorities has spread from Nigeria, Somalia and Egypt to Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and to Indonesia.

The environment could not have been more exciting for Mahathir to launch his exorcism.

People are waiting for the reactions of Razaleigh and Musa, the duo that teamed to challenge Mahathir for the leadership of Umno in 1987 and lost by 43 votes.

Of Razaleigh, the affable prince from Kelantan, Mahathir had said he sploshed more than Ringgit 20 million of his own money into the 1987 contest, an allegation most people in Umno can hardly believe.

In fact, about a couple of weeks before the contest, Marina Yusof and the writer together told Razaleigh to quit, seeing he would lose by a count of 26 votes at that point of time.

Votes are countables and we can know from the bundle of reports that had come in. Ibrahim Ali was the director of Razaleigh’s campaign for the 1987 contest. He too said Razaleigh would lose by such a slim margin.

Later some Umno members suggested to Razaleigh to purchase the required votes and he flatly refused.

Razaleigh and Musa are not the end of the complainants. Mahathir has asked for a tsunami to engulf him. The raving reviews are merely a preface.

In the given circumstances people he rubbed would throttle the godfather for a joyride that can be politically profitable.

If the forces are strong enough, the guards will change and heads may be made to roll at high speed, like in pinball. Najib, as premier, will have to keep himself at a safe distance. --- a. ghani ismail, 11 March 2011

WITHER THE PAS? TO HEAVEN OR TO HOSPITAL?

In the unfolding democratic revolutions of the Arab world the Pas’ stream of losses in by-elections in recent months is telling of the democratic distresses in Islam and it can prove to be terminal for the party.

While it is clearly indicated the Islamic party has lost the popular support it gained in the March 8, 2008 general elections, the fact the party is not equipped to overcome its constitutional, democratic and leadership crises forces the conclusion that the disease that had struck the Pas is a killer.

Who is really the leader in Pas? Is it the party president, Datuk Seri Haji Abdul Hadi Awang, 63, or does the power actually reside in the claimant to the throne, the stoic Datuk Haji Nik Aziz Nik Mat, the older Tuan Guru (Teacher), who, at 78and despite being in and out of hospital, has displayed a singularly beautiful temper that burst out repeatedly against the whole party leadership in the last couple of years.

The troubles that brewed first over the president’s inclination to discuss a “Unity Government” with Umno and the Barisan Nasional (BN) then turned into a nasty personal spat between Nik Aziz and the president’s deputy, Nasharudin Isa, that dragged the stoical Nik Aziz into a waste of nepotism.

He had been believed to have planned to appoint his son-in-law, Arriffahmi, as his successor, and his protégé, Husam Musa, the brightest spark in the Pas government in Kelantan, he had wanted to kick upstairs in the party's hierarchy and shunted to Kuala Lumpur.

Nik Aziz is the general guide (mursyidul Am) and elected by the council of scholars (Dewan Ulama) consisting of 15 members, all of whom are elected by the party representatives to the general assembly.

Hadi Awang, as president, is elected by the party representatives to the general assembly held once in three years.

Memories of party members do not admit of such a conflict between the mursyidul am and the president.

But this is a conflict of power that has made history and its expression as a serial burst of temper that began in 2009 and has not shown any sign of relief is best kept in a space capsule.

The party has had to pay heavily in losses of voters’ support. It has so far trailed through four by-elections in which the party lost and one more that reduced the winning votes from a full basket to a handful.

At the same time it’s a mess of constitutional, leadership and personal conflicts that visited the Pas after 19 years of Nik Aziz at the helm of the state government and as state party chief.

Following the differences between him and the president’s men over the proposed “Unity Government” discussions with Umno, the old man was reported on 16 July to suddenly lash out at the party deputy president, Nasharudin Isa, who had retained his position in the party’s supreme council election 10 days before.

Nasharudin, a mild-mannered scholar and among the best there is in the party was contested by Husam Musa from Kelantan and Mat Sabu from Penang on 6 June 2009.

It became clear from the ramblings of the party’s general guide he had wanted Nasharudin to make way for his protégé, Husam Musa, whom he wanted out of Kelantan to open the way for his son-in-law he had earlier appointed as CEO of the state’s commercial arm.

Husam garnered 281 votes against Nasharuddin’s 480 in the contest. The third candidate, Mat Sabu, won 261 votes.

On 16 June 2009 the old man thundered against Nasharudin ‘for not losing the contest to Husam Musa’.

He asked Nasharudin to vacate the Bachok parliamentary constituency the man represented and get out of Kelantan – a hit to the prostrate followed by a kick on the ass of the party deputy president.

The party, reeling in an agony of faith and of morale, never recovered.

It’s an infection of a super ego that has become day-by-day a sickness.

Nasharudin who apparently swooped himself into meditation mode for more than a year, remained silent in obvious political pain.

In the enfoldment of the violent schisms in Islam and the recent surge for democratic rights and of freedoms in the Arab world, how can the erudite gentleman explain the maladies that have struck Islam in his home turf now becomes mysterious.

Is this where we can find the element of uniformity in Islam? Is the egophiliac the final construction of Iqbal’s Secret of the Self or has there been a gross misreading of his Asrar-i-Khudi, with the magic of the “I AM” finally becoming a sub-equation of the wild over-empowerment of the political ego that is corruptible, and is corruptible absolutely in self-structured absolutism?

It did not take long for Nik Aziz and the Pas to face the consequence of his irascibility when a Kelantan state constituency, Manek Urai, fell vacant.

In the by-election of 14 July 2009 the Pas majority of 1352 votes won in March 2008 had been reduced to a meager 65.

Nasharudin visited the constituency during the by-election. But he remained silent in the lush speculation whether he would or would not speak.

The Pas was hit hard. Had it been generally clear at that time that the aged general guide had succumbed to senility and had wanted to also oust his protégé, Husam Musa, from Kelantan to make way for his son-in-law to succeed him, the party could have fallen straightaway into the slough of despond.

But most in the party did not know. Nik Aziz’s daughter, Nik Amalina, was to write in the net about the alleged nepotism later.

In the contrasts between the chief minister/general guide with the president and the deputy president, Nik Aziz, likening the Pas as a ship, claimed to be the “captain”, while Hadi and Nasarudin were merely the “anchorman” and the “oarsman”.

That’s a serious constitutional matter the party leaders should have found occasion to officially discuss and determined who, indeed, is “captain of the ship”.

But while the “ship” was floundering in troubled waters and the old general guide had been summoning the party leaders to his office in Kelantan to be told, the president, his deputy, the chief of the council of scholars and the secretary-general jointly and severally opted to remain silent like the whole caper had been a non-issue.

Party members panicked. The party was not stable and the constitutional integrity of the Islamic party is fictional.

Under pressure the Pas could have disintegrated at that point.

Nik Aziz Nik Mat is not a trifle. The charismatic religious scholar is well-known throughout the region and in the Islamic world. But his charm in Malaysia is certainly on the wane. He lost Galas, Kelantan on 4 Nov. 2010 by 1190 votes to Umno. Pas had won Galas in March 2008.

Then the party fell in Tenang, Johor by 3707 votes on 30 Jan. 2011. Tenang was won by the BN but with a smaller majority in 2008.

On 6 March 2011, two days before the third anniversary of the Pas’ big win on 8 March 2008, the party lost by larger majorities in Merlimau, Melaka (3643 votes) and in Kerdau, Pahang (2724 votes).

The old scholar was reported to be ranting against Malays for not supporting his party in Tenang, a certain sign of fatigue and weariness of one who had served with diligence from 1967 and who should have retired.

Without change, the Pas is likely to lose Kedah in the next general elections. It may also lose Kelantan. --- a. ghani ismail, 8 March, 2011

Bottoms Up! Revolutions On The Bitumen Of KL and Putrajaya?

It’s crunch-time. Now that Putrajaya has gone beyond the reach of Pakatan Rakyat following the serial losses sustained by PKR and the Pas since Bagan Pinang in Oct. 2009, are we to believe it is a chapter of the Jasmine Revolution that will finally unseat PM Najib Tun Razak and install Anwar Ibrahim on the throne with Lim Kit Siang and Azmin Ali as his deputies?

The Jasmine Revolution which startled the world in December 2010 in Tunisia has now phased itself into war over Libya. It’s American-led intervention once again, this time to force Muammar Ghaddafi out after 41 years at the helm. The next target will be Iran.

Will the same happen in Malaysia should Najib and the BN government refuse to surrender to Anwar, backed by his college of powerful friends the former US Ambassador to Malaysia, John R. Mallot, had reminded us in an attention-grabbing article he had written before?

The people need to know. People are asking is the Jasmine Revolution a fantasy of forces organized to actually remove kings, despots, tyrants and authoritarians from all over the Islamic world who refused to kowtow?

Is the “people’s revolution” we are witnessing really a powerful sweep of imperialism, as President Hugo Chavez said, ‘…for the oil.’

It would be the control of the Straits of Malacca in the case of Malaysia, the strategic waterway once said to hold Venice by the neck when Malacca was in ascendance in the 15th century.

Then it is about the containment of China. Indeed it is first and last about the containment of China whence once before, the beautiful Malaysian author, Han Su Yin (Love Is A Many Splendoured Thing), had been ambassador extraordinaire in the 60s to explain to the Western world China was not barbarian before Nixon’s visit in 1972.

It is like an old lamp traded for new. We are simply watching re-colonization unfold in the Middle East and North Africa branded as People’s Liberation Movements for a wider consumer market and that can be custom-tailored on order, like say for Malaysia and the remaining parts of Asean required to tail into the containment of China.

Prerequisites would include a divided house from which the military forces can be plucked from their barracks to reach the streets as prophylactics to protect from infections demonstrators who are raped by the police.

Or like it was in Indonesia in 1965, to move in a set of maneuvers nobody in the armed forces actually knew about.

Then, like puppets in a Punch and Judy show, they clobbered “the opposition” under a little known Col. Untung only to find General Suharto in command soon after.

He neatly performed a coup and he ruled Indonesia for 33 years thereafter.

But that was, of course, a military coup which was ostensibly triggered by the will to protect the Indonesian President (Sukarno) from being overwhelmed by the Communists who, we were later told, had also planned a coup.

Slaughtered in that historical event were more than a million before the blood-lust was finally spent and prayers reached the heavens for appeasing the lost souls in the blood-letting mayapada.

What shall be the picturesque history that shall be enacted in Malaysia after the Pakatan fail in its quest for power to rule over the Federation when PM Najib dissolves Parliament and call for the general elections?

And then, what will happen after the Pakatan fails in the power-grab?

In this near-successful quest for sea change that followed Anwar Ibrahim’s incarceration in 1998 and the Opposition came whiskers away from power in 2008, issues raised shifted from the seriousness of the police state and sustained detention without trial to the macabre sudden deaths of hundreds in police lockups to the heart-stopping death of a political aide, Teoh Beng Hock, at the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission building.

PM Najib Tun Razak’s leadersip is responsive. But those matters of public concern he has not dealt with as yet.

There is also economic inequity, no minimum wage and social security net worth the thumbs-up.

Still, despite the high prices of food and the bad behaviors among the super-privileged elite, we have to ask is Najib Tun Razak a king, or despot, tyrant or authoritarian?

Has his wife, Rosmah, said to spend lavishly, bought the Big Ben or the London Bridge in a swing of splendorous waste to prove she is rich beyond compare?


Trivia of some sorts can excite pleasure in politics, but in throwing stones the Opposition should have been careful to observe whether or not it is in a glass house.

After the serial defeats in by-elections from Bagan Pinang on Oct. 11, 2009 to Tenang on 30 Jan 2011, the Pakatan, looking more like a ménage a trios that’s gone wrong, is nearly altogether done.

The Pakatan has dwarfed itself. The PKR, with Anwar Ibrahim as de facto leader and his wife as president, and with his former secretary, Azmin Ali, as her deputy, is like a sodden whore nobody wants other than by desperation of sheer lust for power shift.

After some law-makers left the party in huffs for failing to work with Anwar or with Azmin or with both, the party that boasted of a registered membership numbering more than 400,000 has been shown to have merely the whereabouts of 40,000 members – not enough to fill the seating capacity of the Shah Alam Stadium.

In the other wing of the Pakatan, the Islamic Pas General Guide (Mursyid ul-Am), Datuk Haji Nik Aziz Nik Mat, 78, publicly ranted against his party leaders sending the whole of the Pas into political stupor.

He made the Pas unfit to lead and even less fit to rule, and as a result the party almost lost its seat in the Manik Urai by-election in July 2009, then lost in Galas which is also in Kelantan where he presides as Menteri Besar (Chief Minister). It lost again in Tenang, a Johor state seat.

The Pas, set to lose once more in the March 6 Merlimau and Kerdau by-elections, cannot any more be taken seriously as politically a challenge that can unseat Umno.

Several days before 1,800 members of the party in Pasir Puteh, Kelantan, walked out to join the Umno in a certain turning away from the failing reason of the twilight leadership.

In that sort of slide it is only logical for people to ask whether or not a street power named Desire will be invoked to wrestle against the BN to wrest control of the nation sometime in September.

When thinking about a possible street revolution against Najib Tun Razak and the BN, say beginning September 16, it will have to be noted again that Malaysia is not a dictatorship.

Once more the regret is about the police state, about detention without trial, corruption which comes with super-privileges, and inequitable distribution of income which, with rising prices of food and transport, is lowering the quality of life for most.

There are also Malaysians who are non-Malays that have long deserved a fairer deal.

The question before us is about how these will be redressed. Will we opt to do it by the vote and other manners of leverages or by power that can be blistering in the streets? --- a ghani ismail, March 1, 2011

From Jasmine Revolt To Armageddon

Inside the dank of dictatorships, authoritarian regimes and monarchs that have spun class miseries by a serial lark of severe unemployment and high food prices in an oil-rich region, a spreading waft of refined jasmine has inspired the world into believing a new culture will settle over the world.

What began with the self-immolation of an educated unemployed youth in Tunisia on 17 Dec. 2010 has spread across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), taking in Iran and the Ivory Coast as well.

President Zine El Abidin Ben Ali of Tunisia lost his foothold and slipped away to Saudi Arabia, a fallen star that was soon to be followed by Egypt’s long time president, Hosni Mubarak, said to have amassed a fortune estimated to be between 40 and 70 billion USD.

Today, after the fragrance has floated into Libya, the Jasmine Revolution, as it has been called because members of the Tunisian chapter had worn the flower behind their ears, has reached a crest that is likely to become a turning point.

In Libya it is civil war. From European reports it is clearly seen the “protesters” were armed. More than one third of those killed in the first several days were policemen, precisely 111 from about 300 dead as this is written.

Someone has apparently played out President Obama, now hard-pressed to intervene in Libya.

Muammar Ghadafi, the Arab revolutionary of a unique plumage, now under pressure inside that regional stress that is read as the making of the New Middle East and Greater Israel, has vowed to die as a martyr rather than slip out of the dank like a cur.

It may be naïve to say the Jasmine Revolution need not be about the New Middle East or Greater Israel. But it is a fact that the street uprisings are primarily about gross unemployment, averaging nearly 20 percent in the region and food prices that have gone out of reach for a lot of literate and lower-middle class families. Egyptian workers were also involved in the Libyan protests.

Still it settles the matter neatly as the making of an underclass from people who are often highly educated against a backdrop of heaven-reaching illiteracy that may be 40 percent of the adult population, in Egypt.

It is, in short, serious inequity, the power sustained by the police state, like it was under Shah Reza Pahlavi of Iran.

In Iran, where the unexpected turn of events has been said to be expected, street-showings of an assortment of citizens demanding basic freedoms and rights were quickly squashed.

But for whatever niceties Iran have stood for in the eyes of the religious, the Islamic Republic cannot escape global scrutiny for the incarceration of Jafar Panahi.

Jafar Panahi, 50, is the film-maker who drew on celluloid the tongue-in-cheek, Offside, which has been widely publicized.

Panahi made a movie showing a group of Iranian women who dressed as men to gain entry into a stadium to see a football match featuring their favorite team.

The good man was sentenced to six years in jail for that and banned from film-making for 20 years, a senseless reaction of paranoia over what is clearly a simple protest against cultural constraints stemming from patriarchal ridicule of simple freedoms for women, and against the social critics.

This is the difficulty about religion, and especially about Islam. It has little tolerance for the social critics and it is often a killer of ideas too.

Malays, influenced by the Farsi, had Amazons, women who were admirals, soldiers and into the 20th century, leaders of guerilla forces who fought against Dutch colonialism, and Ministers. In Indonesia and the Philippines women were presidents.

Iran is Shi’ah. The Shi’ah, still in sectarian combat against the Sunni school of Islam in Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, numbers 70 percent of Bahrain, which is a Sunni monarchy.

While Bahrain is also street-bound in the Jasmine Revolution and which can disrupt the flow of oil in the Gulf, the greater danger to regional stability issuing from the Sunni-Shiah contrast in the Gulf is the lurking Shiah community of Saudi Arabia.

They are between 12 to 15 percent of the oil giant, a number larger than what is required to stage a successful revolution of the kind that is rolling through the region.

Egypt’s revolution that ended the reign of Hosni Mubarak was performed, at its peak, by less than 2.5 percent of the whole population of 80 million.

But are we now reaching the turning point of the movement for rights and for equity?

In Libya Muammar Ghadafi reportedly ordered his country’s oil-plants to be closed, a clear address to the world that the Arab (and Iranian) reactions are on the way. Oil price surged as a result, and markets slid all over the world. Libya produces 1.6 million barrels per day.

Iran sent two naval ships through the Suez Canal en-route to Syria. About 2.4 million barrels of oil move through the Suez and the Suez-Mediterranean pipeline per day.

The threats are real, the warnings ominous. This is, after all, not merely an exercise for regional reformation but an existential conflict to the given cultures, some of which remain tribal and unaccustomed to the demands of open and democratic society.

These demands, for freedom of speech and expression, freedom of conscience, and the freedom of assembly, are anathema to many of the surviving tribal communities in the region.

While they are human essentials and for them we must cut across the boundaries of national sovereignty, making it our business to reach for democracy throughout the world, this view would be inadmissible in the monarchical Arab states or in the tribal reaches of Libyan society as well as with many communities in Iran and Iraq.

This is the underlying sensibilities in the Jasmine Revolution, an under-layer of sensibilities that may be diverse from our own and which can, in the given conflict of values, recoil as an intense and intimate conflict that is existential, and not merely a conflict of cultures.

In other words, it is clearly favorable to the making of Armageddon.

The movement for a free world will have to face the threats----a. ghani ismail, 23 February, 2011

IT LOOKS DONE – MALAYSIA A FAILED STATE

Little hope is left for Malaysia to avoid a regime change or a failed state after the serial rebuke of Prime Minister Najib Razak’s maiden New Economic Model (NEM) Budget he read on Friday 15 October. It was read to a nation that was still reeling from the aftershocks of the Economic Transformation Plan (ETP) Minister Idris Jala revealed weeks earlier.

It confirmed a business plan for selected companies to harvest super-mega projects mainly focused in Greater Kuala Lumpur ostensibly to overcome the declining foreign and domestic investments in 2009 and to revive a climate of growth.

Each costing tens of billions, the MRT alone running into RM40 billion and dwarfing all the previous mega-projects together, sunk all hopes that Najib had ever meant to deal by open tender.

The laissez faire of the NEM had with it a twist that could mean giving the Prime Minister and his select group of crony companies the right to be left alone to take as they please the cake, the cream, the cherry and the tables as well.

In every other way the Budget is an election budget.

Former Prime Minister, Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, was prompted to prophecy after the budget reading that the Barisan Nasional (BN) will not get the two-third majority in the 13th General Elections it heralded.

This writer, long an observer and commentator of elections in the country, reads Dr. M’s remark as directly meaning the BN will lose to the Pakatan Rakyat (PR), plus a sundry line-up of small parties and Independents that are expected to crown the extended rebuke of the BN’s leadership.

The BN was saved in 2008 by Sabah and Sarawak.

It could be different this time, the Budget and the Economic Transformation Program (ETP) providing too little to the Sabahans and Sarawakians. There had been extensive corruption in the two states.

The NEAC (National Economic Advisory Council) mentioned a slur of concern for the 40 percent of Malaysian households that earn RM 1500 per month or less, fearing most of these would not make it through in the conjugations of the high income society the NEM is about.

Truth is, households in Malaysia cannot make ends meet with less that RM 2000 a month and at least 70 per cent of Malaysian households earn RM 2000 or less, the bulk of these are Bumiputras with the larger numbers of households in the two states falling in the category.

The minimum household income in the urban centers would be RM 3000.

In the case of Malaysian workers, the Human Resources Ministry stated in August 2010 that the National Employment Return study of 2009 found that 34 per cent of the country’s workforce earned less than RM700 a month which was below the poverty line (RM720 per mensem).

Another 37% earned between RM700 to RM1500, giving 71 percent of the labor force earning RM 1500 or less of more than 11 million in a total population of 28 million, which also brings us to the question about where the consumption will come from in the super-spending of the New Economic Model (NEM) that will involve RM1.4 trillion of investments in 10 years to 2020.

In the fragile domestic and world economies, a high investment profiling of crony capitalism as imposed by the Budget and the ETP will certainly add to the inflation that is already severe.

It is easy to see the Najibian Economics will leave him a bread-and-butter villain to the larger number of households in the urban as well as the rural, meaning he will be voted out.

Looking at the Bank Negara (Central Bank) numbers about money will show the money supply had risen substantially between 2009 and 2010, suggesting a means to reduce the domestic debt. This adds to the inflation as do the reduction or withdrawal of subsidies for food and essential items.

Much more money will soon enter the market. With the super-mega projects the ETP has proclaimed, the tip of more than RM 110 billion for the first six opening salvos of the ETP [ahem!] will add a whopper to the money supply.

More monies will enter the market in the enhanced fluidity, making it pertinent to ask aloud how Najib will ensure that overall production will go up and stay up through the nine years to 2020 to avoid hyperinflation or even a Depression.

Should the supply of money show a steep upward curve because more money was printed and the same applies to the financial curve either because money is made cheap and/or it is made easily available, we will get hyperinflation if the production curve is stable. If the production curve goes down, the result is Depression. It’s plain and simple.

But who determines the level of production in Malaysia?

With that load of investments negotiated behind close-doors plus a larger-than-usual Operating Expenditure, and a smaller-than-otherwise Development Expenditure of less that RM 50 billion, plus monies that will flow into the market for the bubbly property market and the KLSE Casino Royale, it is hard to believe Najib’s game to draw Chinese votes will pull through even if we are calculating on a six-month run for the general elections.

He seems to be betting on large numbers, i.e. monies that are large enough to keep flowing and keep voters happy even if the markets shrink.

But what if the markets go down in a tailspin should the World Bank fail to convince the Europeans from applying austerity and them as well as others from devaluating their currencies?

The world economy is teetering on the edge of peril. Why do we deny that? What could be the reason or reasons for such a desperate lunge for the quick fix of an ailing economy and a disreputable party and coalition that should have undergone surgery but did not?

As the rebukes continue and observers sing the confusion in an endless chorus, it does look Najib is unlikely to bring the BN safely through the coming general elections even if Anwar’s PKR is a failing party.

Anwar’s repeat incarceration plus Teoh Beng Hock’s untimely and mysterious death will bring the tom-toms to a higher pitch than ever before. This time, whether or not Saiful was true that Anwar had not worn condoms and had done it in naked truth, he (Anwar, not Saiful) is Opposition leader.

It is done. What needs a close look is how Malaysia is to avoid becoming a failed state and/or fall under the micro-management of the UN global-mongers or of a colonial power. The Reformasi has lost its appeal. ----a. ghani ismail, 20 October, 2010

VISION 2020 BETTER THAN NEM

Is Prime Minister Najib Razak being openly sabotaged by Level Four? The question arises after it became clear ‘his’ New Economic Model (NEM) and the recently unveiled Economic Transformation Plan (ETP) are based on very big bucks for super-mega projects to run the country into a high income economy by 2020.

The ETP costs about RM 1.4 trillion from 2010 to 2020 without a minimum wage for workers, with no subsidies and affirmative actions allowed that can or may distort the operations of the market economy and which will also see many of the Government-Linked Companies (GLCs) privatized.

In short, it is a promised Laissez-faire Shangrila seeded at a time when the leading capitalist nation (USA) is slapping tariff protection on a large number of Chinese goods and while the USD and the Euro are likely to collapse at any time, the PIIGS in the EU having become bankrupt and Greenland recently busted too, giving a sum of 17 countries unable to service their external debts so far.

People with money are hedging themselves against the impending Depression and currencies collapses. They pushed gold price above USD 1,360. Yet some in Malaysia wanted to trade the Ringgit in the money market. What for?

There’s a currency war going on. Some say it is due to the cheap Yuan. But that is clearly only one of numerous reasons - money printing on hitherto unknown scales in a few countries is another.

We know when too much money is printed and flushed into the market and lots of loans are given to trail huge stimulus packages, the ensuing inflation will become a depression should production fall.

Now we are told the 33 industrialized (OECD) countries have collectively run a 0.1 percent negative growth in August 2010.

A world depression follows should that become a trend.

Truth is, economic experts have all been saying that depression is already a swinger in the neighborhood and should claim a space on your bed the next time you blink.

Hence, we need to ask what is Najib’s RM 1.4 trillion 10-year injection to bring in high income about in a world economy that is already going down once again?

He is an economist and he must himself know the NEM with its ETP (Economic Transformation Plan, or whatever) is seriously a threat, not merely to the 40 percent of households in Malaysia that earn RM1500 or less per month but to the reality of households that cannot make ends meet earning twice that amount because of (present) rising prices. More than 70 percent of these are Bumiputras.

Was there anything in the ETP or the NEAC’s NEM that suggested the price spiral of essential items can or will be contained?

There are plans for FELDA to produce food and for some pharmaceutical industries to produce an assortment of drugs. But will that contain the inflation that is rising on the back of stimulus packages, money printing, unwinding of subsidies and bubble-making like in the case of housing where prices suddenly leapt 35 percent in the space of three months?

Neat packets of projects have already been given out in principle to the country’s mega companies, the Gamuda-MMC rapid-transit trains alone said to be worth more than RM43 billion, much of the money to be raised by issuing bonds.

YTL will be building a high-speed (280 kmph) train from Penang to Singapore, a much needed facility no doubt but most of that money must be quickly mopped or it will add on to the burdensome inflation.

MMC, which is reported to be already super-geared, want to develop some pieces of government land for some tens of billions while it also wishes to buy out UEM, which owns the lucrative cash-cow, PLUS, that built, maintains and runs the North-South Highway with the right to raise the toll every few years, and it does that.

This is assets sale. It is rumored MMC along with a few other companies are also interested in buying over PNB, the largest Bumiputra trust company.

We are now running into “super-mega projects” to raise the per capita income to more than US15,000, projects that make the RM12 billion KLIA and the RM19 billion Putrajaya look like penny buns.

The seven entry-point projects of the ETP alone, which are earmarked for takeoff before the year ends, cost RM118 billion, you see. It does not include the 10th Malaysia Plan spendings.

People, therefore, find the NEM and ETP a big threat. Until now this writer has not read a single positive acceptance of both anywhere in the pages of Internet discussions. Even economists writing to the government-inclined mainstream media have been highly skeptical.

What’s up then? Can it be true Najib is stuck with a Level Four that’s making him look like a super-dreamer compared to his predecessor and find himself knotted into a rot in less than a year or is Najib so aloof he believes he can stand above the impact of another world depression?

The world is certainly going into a Depression again. Is the ETP and the NEM really some kind of a solution to that? Is the Laissez-Faire economy magic?

Every critical writer on the subject has decided the NEM and the ETP are threats to the larger body of Malaysians and this writer joins the chorus. It will fail. Vision 2020 was far better.--- a. ghani ismail, 12 September, 2010.

IN THE REACHES OF A MALAYSIAN EXISTENTIAL CRISIS - CAN WE OVERCOME?

While in high places serious questions are being asked about whether Singapore is deciding Malaysian policies in the midst of Lee Kuan Yew’s renewed comments on Malaysia, at ground level the distress is over continuously rising prices.

The compound is a serious erosion of Najib’s credibility, him being deliberately reduced to a compare with his predecessor, former Prime Minister, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi (Pak Lah), who was seen, among other things, to have been a Singapore dependent.

Taking over from Pak Lah without causing scarcely a ripple in the transition of power, Najib is unclear about his foreign policy, leaving him without an underscore to emphasize a difference of policy or of approach and hence, making him appear vulnerable to the recent protests in Indonesia staged by Bendera.

Some people here say his contestant, Anwar Ibrahim, may have a hand in the protests that were staged in Jakarta and somewhere in Sumatra, a speculation that could simply be meant to show Anwar as the larger regional and international personality between the two.

Najib must acknowledge he is under strong pressure. A lot of people are ready to quit on the Barisan Nasional (BN) and bring in a new regime.

He ought also to accept it as a fact that it is not merely the New Economic Policy that had been bastardized but the BN, and especially Umno, have been monsterized as well, making the coalition no longer feasible as an efficient conveyance of any development policy without “cost abundance” due to unrelenting corruption.

Umno has become overwhelmingly materialistic, led now at the divisional level by a posse of the super-privileged elite of millionaires, many of whom contractors and businessmen with the least interest in political ideology or of social policy. They simply buy power and pay for lucrative contracts.

Since corruption plus arrogance is a compound known to cause the disintegration of societies and bring empires (and nations) to a dead end, what we face is clearly an existential crisis – a final existential halt, or the breakdown and breakup of Umno, BN and Malaysia.

There must be a quick move to reinvent Umno and the BN. It is not possible to believe the coalition can deliver without a thorough structural and ideological change.

Corruption and indiscipline in the BN are, indeed, the root causes of the monumental administrative and developmental dysfunctions that have been causing the widespread despair.

Unless Umno, the backbone of the BN, which is patron-ridden and corrupt at the core, is quickly intercepted by a Golkar-like compact of workers-professionals NGOs (without the participation of the armed-forces), it does look likely that Najib Tun Razak will fail to gain the confidence and credibility he badly needs to make his One Malaysia and New Economic Model (NEM) into a winning number in the 13th general elections.

There is no other way that can be seen or theorized as a means to overcome the Malaysian ethnic-bondage that is back on a Hate-Malays campaign, a simple and sure way of undermining One Malaysia.

This Hate Malays syndrome is a fixed behavior in the Malaysian plurality. It has been there from even before the British Intervention of 1874, the Intervention being Chinese-secured following Chinese secret societies feuds with Malay warlords and rajas taking sides.

Racial conflicts exploded in 1942-46. In Malay perception it then blew into a long-drawn contest for power and resources in the form of the Communist Insurrection from 1948 to 1960 and then again in 1968-80.

The 1969 racial riots which followed a glorious “Sweep Out The Malays” victory parade after the elections in May 1969 had actually a trailer in 1967 in Penang.

Four Malays were killed by Chinese hoods when Chinese processions suddenly became wild and violent on the island.

The Malays retaliated causing sporadic riots lasting for months, the writer and three of his colleagues almost caught in one of these at the end of the year on the border of Penang and Kedah.

There was a trailer to the 1969 riots in 1967. In the Kampung Medan Incident we have a trailer for a catharsis that’s on its way if nothing is done to quickly stop the Hate Malays campaign which is now bearing fruits in heated Malay reactions.

In short, we have an existential crisis on our hands and in a region that’s being drawn deeper and deeper into a war culture.

With the Senkaku (Diaoyu) spat adding on to the Korean hot-plate, the existential well-being of this nation will need to be first secured in a clarity of purpose, policy, instruments and vehicle before we can remove the specter of the failed state from our minds and the eventual breakdown and breakup of Malaysia, 53 years old and clearly already debilitating.

A Malaysian disintegration will not be like Thailand. It will be more likely a Pakistan with the ethnic replacing the sectarian bases of contests and conflicts, the strings pulled by numerous saboteurs from military intelligence outfits as it is in the ill-fated Muslim state now looking like a nightgown in shreds, which is Pakistan serially raped.

Well, is there really Malaysian unity? Is there Malay unity for that matter? ----- a. ghani ismail, 20 Sept. 2010