Rotten Cheese By Any Other Name Is Still Rotten.

Hantu Laut

Raja Petra wrote "The East Malaysians are not concerned about transparency, accountability, good governance, human rights, civil liberties, etc. Those are values and notions of those in West Malaysia, in particular the urbanites. In East Malaysia it is about nationalism and self-rule. And they do not feel by voting PKR or DAP they will achieve that."

Wrong! We do care and much more. However, we don't want to suffer a fate worse than death............... from the frying pan into the fire.We are not about to replace the devil we know with the devil in sheep clothing.

So, we are likely to vote BN again.

Anwar Ibrahim does not impress us at all. His slate is not as clean as what he projects himself to be.We still remember what he did to Sabah before.He was DPM and No.2 most powerful man in the government that he now accused of massive corruptions.What was he doing then, sleeping or participating ?

The unfortunate things about West Malaysians, when it comes to politics, they are emotional and irrational, they can't separate the wheat from the chaff.They want to change just for the sake of change without looking at the replacement government under the microscope, blinded by the opposition's rhetoric, they missed seeing the very same kind of germs they wanted to get rid off .

In the case of RPK, East Malaysia is a lost horizon to him, he may know the Malays and West Malaysians' psyche well but he knows little of East Malaysians.

RPK has forgotten the fact that Sabahans are politically more savvy and practical, we have been through four different governments, we don't make as much noise as the West Malaysians, we don't scream, shout, drum the empty cans or throw insults, we quietly wait for polling day and quietly cast our votes and when the results came out the following evening. Shabas!, Sabahans have exercised their democratic rights wisely, we sent the incumbents off to the twilight zone.

We have changed wayward government at least three times in the past.We sent USNO to the dustbin of history, Berjaya to the grave, both never recovered, USNO was de-registered, Berjaya was dissolved and someone pocketed the money from sale of the Berjaya building.The same ex-Berjaya leaders are now in SAPP screaming their heads off calling for clean government and Sabah for Sabahans.These political eunuchs think Sabahans are stupid.What good is Sabah in the hands of uncaring and corrupt leaders like them.

Than came Anwar Ibrahim with his politics of federalism, culture of fear, threatened a few PBS leaders with prosecution for corruptions and, unashamedly, engineered a coup, offering the few PBS kataks money and positions to jump ship that brought down the thin-majority PBS government.

Today, the same PBS turncoats are either in SAPP or BN, also screaming their heads off against corruptions and Sabah for Sabahans.

Why should Pakatan leaders complain about Najib and the Perak coup when their de facto leader was as guilty as sin in the Sabah coup.The three dinguses in Perak must have been offered attractive packages using the Anwar's well tested formula, accept the red package or prosecution for corruptions .

Sabah and Sarawak will again be the kingmakers and let hope this time around, unlike the ungrateful Pak Lah, our PM Najib Tun Razak give more credits to Sabahans and the Sabah CM for delivering the seats.I am positive Sabah and Sarawak would deliver a comfortable majority.

We are likely to lose a few state and parliamentary Chinese seats to DAP .The others, PKR, PAS and local parties SAPP, Star and the one suffering the same malady as Anwar of wanting to be NO.1 and Huguan Siou of the KDM people would be severely trounced.Yong of SAPP and Jeffery Kitingan of UBF have lost credibility with the people.

West Malaysian politicians learned a lot about dirty money politics from East Malaysians, particularly Sabahans.

There were no money politics and "politik katak" (strangely, some Malaysian writers are confused between frog and frogging, they are not the same, frogging is a coat fastening consisting a loop and a button and leapfrogging has nothing to do with politics either) in Peninsula Malaysia before.

Nothing to be proud of, Sabahans do it all the times, as they strongly believe in democracy and no one should be deprived of the freedom of association, which kind of the same as the First Amendment of the Constitution of the U.S.To protect their backside and to stop elected representatives from leaving the party for another, PBS during its tenure, introduced anti-hop law in Sabah

The only difference, in Malaysia, freedom come, freedom go, with the dirty hands of politics.

PBS "anti-katak" law passed in the Sabah state assembly was later abrogated by the BN, reason being it was against Article 10 of the Federal constitution.The irony is, the same article also made it illegal for the government to stop peaceful assembly and they did, everytime without fail, forcefully stopped such assembly, knowing it was against the constitution.

Even more ironic when Anwar Ibrahim blow his trumpet of an impending coup in the BN, where he claimed to have enough support of BN MPs to topple the BN, one clown in UMNO, a minister with very short memory, one Zaid Ibrahim said he would proposed to the cabinet to pass an anti-hop law.This same man later joined Anwar Ibrahim's PKR.

What happened to Article 10? Isn't it supposed to be"What sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander?

Can you trust politicians?Aren't they all the same. A bunch of liars and lawbreakers.

Money politics has become a way of life for our politicians.It has nothing to with principle or conscience, it's all about money and position.Unfortunately, in UMNO some are made sacrificial lambs to appease the opposition when everyone in the party, including the top echelon are rotten to the core.

In Malaysia those who joined politics are out to make money, don't kid yourself that they are out to serve the people.

Sabahans have learned a bitter lesson, changing government in the hope of getting better leaders and better administration of the state is like chasing the receding horizon, you can see it but never able to reach it.

Every succeeding government do exactly the same as the one you gotten rid off.

So, we may, again stay with the devil we know, not, as RPK says, we don't care about good governance, human rights and civil liberties, we do, but we are just fed up with every leader that came along with empty promises and lies.

Rotten cheese called by any other name is still rotten.

Shahrizat Coming Home To Roost

Hantu Laut

Shahrizat sacrificed herself says the PM. She should have in the first instance when the scandal was exposed to the public tendered her resignation voluntarily.

She rejected the clarion call for her to step down gracefully.She ignored ignominious public opinion against her. Sad to say a little too late, the damage is done, her resignation has lost its value.

Though the PM tried to save her the embarrassment and soften the blow to her pride, it's obvious she was under pressure to resign.As they say pride comes before a fall.

UMNO leaders should discard their politics of arrogant if they want to win the coming election.

Najib should also drop half of his cabinet ministers from contesting the elections.I will not name who are the deadwoods as the PM should himself know who they are.

Story here.

Karpal, Letter Of The Law or Spirit Of The Law?

Hantu Laut

Find fault with the judge if you can't find fault with the judgement.It's a trend among opposition leaders to ridicule judges when they couldn't find flaw in the judgement.

Anwar did it many times, asking judges to be removed from his case accusing them of being bias, his tactic to delay the trial.His Sodomy II trail ended with him off the hook more out of incompetent evidence provided the police rather than anything else.The prosecution appealed the case.

In his sedition case Karpal the nutty as a fruitcake lawyer couldn't find any flaw in the Court Of Appeal's judgement decided to insult one of the three judges, Datuk Clement Skinner for not being fluent in Malay and implied he couldn't have understood the written judgement in Malay because of his poor understanding of the language.It's obvious he is scrapping the bottom of the barrel.There were two Malay judges on the panel,there must have been discourse among the three judges before they reach a consensus.The written judgement is just academic.

Here, he politicised punishment by the court for contempt of a crazy imam who threw his shoes at the judges because he was not happy with the judgement.He was sentenced to a year imprisonment which Karpal and a few other half-past six lawyers say too excessive.If the imam were an UMNO man they would say the opposite, too lenient.

Throwing shoes at people is the biggest insult in any culture and are not taken very lightly in the Malay culture.

This ex-imam and ex-Mat Rempit is lucky, if I were the judge I would give him one for each shoe, two years in prison and five stroke of the cane.

One year is not enough deterrent, particularly, for 'kurang ajar' imam.

Mahathir's Bashing Fever

Hantu Laut

Anwar Ibrahim was DPM and Minister of Finance from 1993 t0 1998.The question is why did Anwar continue to serve Mahathir even after the Bank Negara debacle. Why stay and serve a bad leader if you are so morally upright?

As finance minister wasn't it his job to advise Mahathir and if he refused to listen than Anwar should have, as a matter of principle, resign his position as finance minister.Now, he disclaimed everything, making Mahathir the sole badass.

Some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness trust upon them.....(Shakespeare)

Unfortunately, Anwar has none of it, and he should know "God's mill grind slow but sure". If you are not yet fated to be prime minister, you'll never be, no matter how hard you try.

This excessive Mahathir's bashing may have negative effects on Pakatan.Mahathir is still a very popular man in spite of all the mud slinging against him.

Mahathir's Disastrous Financial Speculation

A murky and embarrassing case is closed, hiding top government officials’ involvement

Sometime over the next few days, a court in Kuala Lumpur will put the finishing touches to an agreement that allows Tajudin Ramli, the former head of Malaysian Airline System, not only to walk away from charges that he had allegedly looted the airline of tens of millions of US dollars but with an RM580 million (US$293.2 million) out-of-court settlement from the government.

It appears to be a settlement that the government would rather keep to itself. At the heart of the agreement with Tajudin is a convoluted story that began as long ago as the 1980s when Malaysia’s central bank, Bank Negara Malaysia, at the urging of then-Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, began speculating aggressively in global foreign exchange markets, at one time running up exposure rumored to be in the region of RM270 billion -- three times the country’s gross domestic product and more than five times its foreign reserves at the time.

Eventually, playing with the big boys came home to roost. In 1992 and 1993, Mahathir became convinced he could make billions of ringgit by taking advantage of a British recession, rising unemployment and a decision by the British government to float the pound sterling free of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism.

Mahathir ordered Bank Negara to buy vast amounts of pounds sterling on the theory that the British currency would appreciate once it floated. However, in what has been described as the greatest currency trade ever made, the financier and currency wizard George Soros’s Quantum hedge fund established short positions borrowing in pounds and investing in Deutschemark-denominated assets as well as using options and futures positions.

In all, Soros’s positions alone ac counted for a gargantuan US$10 billion. Many other investors, sensing Quantum was in for the kill, soon followed, putting strenuous downward pressure on the pound. The collapse was inevitable. Quantum walked away with US$1 billion in a single day, earning Mahathir’s eternal enmity and earning Soros the title “the man who broke the Bank of England.”

Mahathir and Bank Negara, on the other hand, walked away with a US$4 billion loss, followed by another US$2.2 billion loss in 1993, the total equivalent of RM15.5 billion. Although the disastrous trades destroyed the entire capital base of Bank Negara, after first denying it had taken place, the then-Finance Minister Anwar Ibrahim repeatedly reassured parliament that the losses were only “paper losses” and, now that he is Opposition Leader and head of the Pakatan Rakyat opposition coalition, has managed to skate free of the controversy.

Eventually, the Finance Ministry had to recapitalize the central bank, almost unheard of for any government anywhere. It is reliably estimated that Bank Negara lost as much as US$30 billion in this and other disastrous currency trades, costing the head of the central bank and his currency trader deputy their jobs.

It was at one with Mahathir’s unfortunate penchant for believing he could beat the global financial system in other ways. In the early 1980s, at his behest the Malaysian government attempted to corner the tin market through Maminco Sdn Bhd, a dummy company set up to buy tin futures and physical tin to push up prices on the London Tin Market. Malaysia at that point was producing 31 percent of the world’s tin.

However, the rising prices as a result of Malaysia’s action caused miners to increase production in the other 69 percent of the tin world. At the same time the US government released its tin stockpile. The price collapsed, costing Malaysia RM1.6 billon with the subsequent low prices wrecking Malaysia’s tin industry. Mahathir has repeatedly railed against western governments for rigging the rules against him.

The attempt to corner the tin market and the subsequent loss established an interesting precedent in terms of what would take place with the speculation in the pound sterling. Rather than acknowledge the losses in the tin speculation, the government set up another dummy company called Makuwasa Sdn Bhd, creating new shares supposedly reserved for ethnic Malays which were allocated to the Employee Provident Fund, the country’s retirement fund for private and public workers. The plan was to sell these cheaply acquired shares at market price for a profit to cover Maminco’s losses. Finally, in 1986, Mahathir was forced to admit that Makuwasa was created to recoup the government’s losses from the Maminco debacle and to repay loans to Bank Bumiputra.

Fast forward to today and the out-of-court settlement between several government-linked companies and Tajudin Ramli, in which the government quietly cancelled Tajudin’s debt of RM840 million. It is believed to be the biggest such sum awarded in Malaysian history. Read more.