Malaysia Today - Your Source of Independent News
Malaysia Today - Your Source of Independent News |
- Behind and Beyond the IPPs
- 7 sins of addiction
- Anwar Gets SNAPPED: The Failure of an Opposition Leader Comes Home to Roost
- Nakhaie buries Najib’s 1Malaysia!
- Walla’s commentaries on UMNO’s unfinished Revolution
| Posted: 01 Jun 2011 10:12 PM PDT
As we all know, power rates have increased by an average of 7.12% or 2.23 sen per kilowatt hour (kWh). Natural gas will rise to RM13.70 per British thermal unit (mmBtu) from RM10.70 and go up by RM3 every month until December 2015, after which market rates will apply (Source: FMT).It is a hefty increase to a retiree like me. Filled with much indignation, I started to read up on IPPs to unravel the true story behind the energy puzzle.  According to Jeff Rector in his paper The IPP Investment Experience in Malaysia: A massive blackout in 1992 shut down much of the country for up to 48 hours, prompting a fierce public outcry and threats of lawsuits against Tenaga. An inquiry cleared Tenaga of negligence but the incident severely damaged its reputation. READ MORE HERE. |
| Posted: 01 Jun 2011 09:39 PM PDT Najib has pin-pointed the cause of decades of budget deficits – Malaysia has a bunch of irresponsible addicts that consume petrol subsidy like as if there is no tomorrow and the solution is really market forces efficiency. Read more at: http://wangsamajuformalaysia.blogspot.com/2011/06/7-sins-of-addiction.html |
| Anwar Gets SNAPPED: The Failure of an Opposition Leader Comes Home to Roost Posted: 01 Jun 2011 03:56 PM PDT Earlier this month, Anwar was sharply criticized by Sarawakians for only offering the Sarawak National Party (SNAP) three seats, which many Sarawakians considered to be an insultingly lowball number. Anwar attempted to deflect criticism for this move by claiming that he had an agreement signed in writing with the President of SNAP in which SNAP agreed to only contest three seats. SNAP's response, essentially, was to call Anwar a liar:
Fortunately (or, one suspects, unfortunately) for Anwar, his claim was not that he had a formal understanding or a verbal agreement with SNAP regarding the allocation of seats, but that he had an agreement in writing. Therefore, this whole matter ought to be easy to clear up for Anwar – all he has to do is produce the written agreement and all will be well. Given SNAP's flat denial of its existence, and given Anwar's failure to produce the written agreement when he first claimed it existed, it is not difficult to guess whether or not Anwar is lying about this agreement. More ominous than SNAP's flat rebuttal of Anwar's specific claim, though is the clear signal from SNAP that it is willing to walk away from Anwar and PKR, if necessary:
These political troubles are anything but welcome for Anwar, who is trying together a bizarre coalition with disparate interests – almost none of which are any sort of good news for Western interests or for the ultimate fate of Democracy in Malaysia, especially given that Anwar has been apparently caught on a DNA test doing what the kids today refer to as "pulling a Dominique Strauss Kahn."
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| Nakhaie buries Najib’s 1Malaysia! Posted: 01 Jun 2011 07:32 AM PDT This is exactly what happened when Mohd Nakhaie Ahmad, the former president of the Islamic Da'wah Foundation Malaysia (Yadim) and one-time lawmaker-turned-traitor to the voters who elected him, came out with statements which are clearly scandalous, seditious and atrocious regarding the non-Malays in this country. Nakhaie questioned the loyalty of non-Muslims in the country declaring that the community's rights must be re-evaluated – obviously forgetting his own shameful past when he showed no loyalty to the party that sponsored him as a candidate and those who elected him. He had displayed a total absence of integrity without any qualms when he became a frog and leaped over to the Barisan Nasional. He is not in the least qualified to talk about loyalty. According to him, the treatment of non-Muslims must be based on the agreed social contract; he pointed out that the government had been too gracious to the community. Nakhaie absolutely doesn't understand that the social contract agreed upon is reflected in the Federal Constitution. The Federal Constitution is the outcome of that social contract. The rights and responsibilities of all Malaysians are laid out in this framework and guaranteed. He is, of course, talking nonsense when he says, "Civil rights given to them include the right to vote, participation in politics, hold office, involvement in the military and so forth but we cannot just willingly give them everything." For the information of Nakhaie, these are unquestionable citizenship rights. For a one-time lawmaker to be totally ignorant of this fact indicates that he is hardly an enlightened leader and scholar. He shames himself by his ignorance and intolerance. He declared, "If the agreement is broken then action must be taken against them. If they break our agreement then they are our enemy and must be expelled from the country. We must not compromise with them. We must be stern with them when it comes to the social contract agreed." The social contract is only broken when narrow-minded and intolerant bigots like him preach hatred and spread lies to inflame a certain strata of our citizens to view the non-Malays as enemies. He should be charged for stirring up inter-ethnic passions which could be dangerous for our multi-ethnic Malaysia. He proclaimed that it is important that high level government positions not be awarded to non-Muslims for national security. "We cannot give them important government positions as it is not allowed for non-Muslims to become ministers in a Islamic state. Head of military must also not be given to non-Muslims." Nakhaie is totally ignorant of the Federal Constitution which laid the foundation for this nation to exist. He doesn't understand the concept of "equality before the law" and that the Federal Constitution does not discriminate against its citizens. The rights of Malaysians are guaranteed under the concept of equality before the law. It is unfortunate that in all his utterances and ramblings there is no notion of justice or understanding of our history. He is blind to the fact that all citizens irrespective of race have an equal stake in this land of ours with unequivocal and inalienable rights as conferred by the Federal Constitution under Article 8. For the information of Nakhaie, the government doesn't confer these rights. These citizenship rights and the responsibilities that go with it were put beyond the pale of discussion following our return to parliamentary democracy in1971 after the worst racial riots in our history in 1969. It is a criminal offence to question or challenge the citizenship of non-Malays.
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| Walla’s commentaries on UMNO’s unfinished Revolution Posted: 01 Jun 2011 07:19 AM PDT A: 'I miss you, Sir.' B: '(eyes pop, jaw drops, kretek embers land on sarung, burning hole size of ten sen coin)..You do? Well then, goodbye pink mop, and hello Sofea!' A: '(looks at smoke spiraling up) Oh dear, is it hurting?' B: '(grins bravely) Not yet.' A: 'Emm, Shall we not focus on your sartorial simplicity for the moment but ponder what our blogger has written? I think he has written another intelligent piece.' B: '(flicking ash off) that's hardly surprising, Sofea. With only a few exceptions, the others in the Umno leadership also display intellect too. Unfortunately all bovine. Kekeke.' A: 'I see you have not lost your bite.' B: 'But the other wire has also broken off....oh, never mind. What is it that weighs on your lovely brows, Sofea?' A: '(eyes roll). I think Umno's revolution will never be finished because the brobdingnagian challenges it has been facing will soon consume it completely.' B: '(jaw drops again, twenty sen coin). You mean its legacy problems of economics and politics? Give me a minute to respond. (Turns away, opens kamus)... I think it's like this, Sofea. Every organism in life goes through its own phases of growth and decline. Under normal circumstances, they trace a sigmoid curve. First, slow palpable growth, then rapid accelerating growth, and finally slowdown to a plateau before decline to end somewhere. The key to maintaining growth, or in this case political relevance, is to continuously find new S-curves before expiry of the old one. What has been happening to Umno, Barisan for that matter, is that it has not been able to locate new relevance for itself anymore that can not only equal the original kickass spirit at the time of the formation of this country but also provide a real counterbalance to the emergence of new forces of change demanded by the rakyat.' A: 'But, Sir, Umno's government has been delivering the goods to the rakyat, don't you think so?' B: '(eyes glint). You really think so, Sofea? Let me ask you two questions. Firstly, which government can govern for long if it doesn't deliver goods to the rakyat? In other words, any government run by any political party worth its salt will have to deliver goods to the rakyat. That's what governments are for, isn't it? So don't arrogate to Umno some transcendental right that only it knows best or can do best. It hasn't and it doesn't and, by the denouement of recent events, it won't. Remove the fulcrum of its spin and you will see its politics has devastated this nation. Let me put it bluntly - even if Umno wins the next general elections, the country loses, and frankly, i think it'll be the end. Which comes to the second point. By itself, politics is just a tool. It is just a tool to levitate and moderate the economics of nation-building. And the fortunes of Umno and Barisan have risen and fallen with the economic fortunes of this land. We must understand why. When Malaya started, much of the country was relatively under-developed so that the potential for growth and development was assured. With expansion of the population, demand for goods and services increased until we reached the high-flying days of the 70's when hot money flowed in followed by massive FDI that had helped build an industrial base beyond our plantations. Public finances were also shored up by oil and gas revenues. Today, all that has changed. Hot money is only here to take occasional pot shots at punters in a market where share prices have had to be quoted in sen so as not to reflect how minute are the valuations. And that is because the fundamentals of good management to build real enterprises have been sacrificed for window-dressed performance not shored by real capabilities. Next, FDI where it really matters is only going into industrial bases in Opposition-run states like Penang and Selangor. The others? Buildings again, as if another complex can produce things for export to earn currency to discharge deficits. Come to think of it, what has happened to Zamry's Perak state projects? He's quiet as a tikus, no? And other investment projects? The announcements are reruns of the same projects, like Rais' tv movies. And let's not belabor how our oil and gas resources have depleted, even for their half-hearted verisimilitude of new finds. Aren't we now importing gas as well? Sofea, the economic legacy of Umno's politics of the 70's is the problem today. That period was growth but few saw that it was growth borne by subsidy. Instead of realizing it hard enough then to build real capability for the future, they just sat back and milked the cash register. So that now when reality has finally bitten, the entire Umno leadership is amok, and right after the Sarawak elections, if you would care to note. Because they have suddenly found the twin threat to their personal survival from the convergence of economic non-sustainability and political irrelevance. All those wild spending in the 70's went into crony projects and piratisation schemes but with financing charges for the treasury's attention. Just imagine, one of many such financing charges is no less than USD1 Billion. The rakyat are indirectly asked to pay for generations to come for a project that was not tendered out properly but benefited cronies who declared huge dividends to themselves while protecting their turf by cabling into Umno to bear the risk on some flimsy rakyat-centric excusatory spin. Now, how did this happen? It happened because someone whose son has just been paid RM90 million for the land where resides Pudu wet market thought he was clever by buying early ahead of future inflation but clean well forgot how financing charges can balloon the final cost, what more on depreciated items. And who will ultimately be paying for these mega-projects from future benefits foregone? Our momentarily happy, jomhebohing, rakyat.'
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