Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Times They Are A Changin: Change Or Sink Like A Stone

Hantu Laut


Read Outsyed The Box "PM Confirms Malaysia Will Go Bankrupt Under Him !!"


As they say "The road to hell is paved with good intentions" 

Good intention is meaningless unless followed through.

I am not a trained economist, a bloody accountant, or a wiz-kid of some kind, but my business sense, which I hardly use nowadays had grown sharper over the years for not being overused.

I am not against the GST as I do believe it is high time such effective tax mechanism be introduced in this country to compensate for the leakages through cheating and tax manipulation. However, such exercise would be futile and of no use if the government continued with its extravagant and corrupt ways. 

Show me a wise government that foolishly spent RM7.2 billion in consulting fees, has 1.4 million civil servants, almost half doing next to nothing and spending over 80% of its recurring budget for operating expenditure leaving less than 20% for development expenditure. 

No where in the world you can find such caring government.....where there is 1 civil servant for every 20 people.

In the 2014 Budget of RM264.2 billion, a sum of RM217.7 goes to operating expenditure and RM46 billion for development expenditure, a meagre sum by comparison. Malaysians have been had, we give our money to people who had no money sense.

This government is spending beyond its means, good money chasing bad money, indiscriminate and unconscionable spending that's going to bankrupt the country.

Najib's 1MDB is full of big talking men in dark suits that's going to screw the country big time   They proudly say that many of their bonds are not backed by government guarantees, but these bunch of shitheads forget that 1MDB is wholly owned by the Malaysian government and if 1MDB goes down the Malaysian government goes down with it and Malaysia's credit rating goes down the sewer and no one would want to touch Malaysia with a ten-foot pole.


Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Selangor (The Richest) versus Sabah (The Poorest)


Hantu Laut

How do you reconcile this erroneous labelling of Selangor the richest state and Sabah as the poorest state in Malaysia?

I say it's erroneous because of the state budgets, which make no sense at all. The poorest state (Sabah) has a budget two and a half times bigger than the richest state (Selangor).

Selangor, mind you, joyously claimed the biggest budget ever at a measly sum of RM1.8 billion, while Sabah, the pauper state has a budget of RM 4.6 billion.

So, who you think is a caring government, the one who dares to spend more for the people, or the one who hoards the people's money ?

How come a state with the highest per capita income in the country has such poor budget.

Now, you know why Azmin Ali covets the MB post, they have a miser running the state.

Malaysian Media - watchdog or running dog?


New Mandala


Malaysia’s 13th General Election (GE13), held on the 5th of May 2013, was the continuation of a historical arc that begun at the 2008 general election (GE12), when the Barisan Nasional (BN), Malaysia’s ruling coalition for the past fifty-six years, lost the states of Penang and Selangor (and Perak temporarily) to the Opposition, as well as their coveted two-thirds Parliamentary majority. This was an unexpected shock to the system that immediately plunged Malaysia into an anticipatory political fervour. After 5 years of delays, civil unrest, and an increasingly unified opposition, with their term stretched to the far edge of expiration (and several state assemblies pushed beyond this point), BN failed to counter Pakatan Rakyat’s (PR) message of ‘Ini Kali Lah!’, returning their worst result ever. The BN not only failed to recover a two-thirds majority in Parliament but lost the popular vote for the first time, with only 47.38% support compared to PR’s 50.87%.
The anticipation and tension leading up to and extending beyond GE13 (with widespread accusations of electoral fraud and BN retaining power through systemic gerrymandering and malapportionment), was apparent not just within civil society but also within academia, surely going down as not just the most anticipated but the most researched election in Malaysian history. Non-governmental organisations, too, were on high alert, with extensive scrutiny of electoral processes and authorities. One of the main areas of interest and contention in political, academic, activist, and civil society alike was that of media bias.
The ‘Watching the Watchdog’ GE13 media monitoring project, a collaboration between the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus’s Centre for the Study of Communications & Culture (CSCC) and the Malaysian Centre for Independent Journalism (CIJ), brought together the intersecting goals of data-based media freedom advocacy and critical media and politics research. With much of Malaysia’s mediascape controlled by BN and its constituent parties through a combination of political/regulatory mechanisms (most notably, the Printing Presses and Publications Act and the Sedition Act), and the economic domination and control that exists in a state of symbiosis with these regressive and often selectively-mobilised pieces of legislation, most Malaysians have resigned themselves to newspapers and television news broadcasts full of what is best described as ‘running dog’ journalism, with little of the ‘watchdog’ functionality one expects from a free and independent media.
Several scholars, notably those from the Universiti Sains Malaysia School of Communication, have delineated the political-economic power structures behind this state of affairs (e.g. Mustafa & Zaharom, 1998; Wang, 2001; Zaharom, 2002), and there has been content analysis carried out at both the academic level (e.g. Abbott, 2011) and by NGOs (such as CIJ’s previous monitoring exercises) in an attempt to map the extent of the actually-occurring political bias in the Malaysian media. However, these content analyses have been relatively limited in scope and/or conducted at the article level.

Friday, November 1, 2013

Anwar: Spooking The Spook

Hantu Laut


Call a spade a spade. Now, Anwar talks sense.

My "Sugar And GST:Anwar:Scholar, Politician, or a Clown" posting derides him for casting aspersion on an universally accepted tax structure used by over 160 countries.

In Asean, only Malaysia and Myanmar were left behind, the rest have introduced GST into their tax system.

Malaysian oppositions must learn when to oppose and when to give credit, where credit is due. They don't want to, a sign of political immaturity.

Obviously, they are dead set in muck-racking, no matter what, for good or bad, they have come to a conclusion Malaysians are gullible.

Anwar made an about turn and admitted that GST is good and efficient way to collect tax. Some weeks ago he was contemplating organising a massive rally against implementation of GST.

Good on you, Anwar. 



Unfortunately, for Anwar his little green pasture in Sabah is withering. Some of his assemblymen are leaving the party, because they found, a little too late, that the leadership is as 'broad as it's long'. Read here.

A friend in PKR told me recently that they are no different from the devil they try to spook.

Anwar should have known better East Malaysians are different kettle of fish.

We are not easily spooked!