Malaysia Today - Your Source of Independent News

MCA Has Lost The Plot
Focus On Real Targets
The Penan – Still Struggling to Save Our Jungle [FILM TRIBUTE]
Malaysia’s environment needs help

Posted: 17 Oct 2011 04:29 PM PDT

However, glancing through the paper, the MCA has used their mouthpiece to launch another salvo at the DAP. Wee Ka Siong, who still must be smarting over the "MCA girls" controversy has called on the DAP to make their stand clear on hudud and leave Pakatan Rakyat.

Obviously running out of material, he has returned to thump on the hudud issue once again. Hudud has traditionally been one of the favourite issues for Barisan Nasional to flog during the run-up to the election period. They continue to believe that this issue would drive non-Muslims away from the Opposition and return to them. How they are mistaken.

Yes, there is talk about hudud law being implemented in Kelantan. However, it's implementation is NOT possible, unless the Federal Constitution can be amended to allow it. Secondly, as hudud is not in the Common Framework Policy and the Buku Jingga, Pakatan Rakyat as a coalition government has committed that they will not implement hudud in any shape or form if they were to take federal power.

Wee Ka Siong and the MCA appears to be now reaching the point of desperation. Rather than looking at solving their own internal issues, they attempt to redirect attention to the DAP. He accuses PR of implementing hard line policies in the four PR run states. What are these policies? Can he prove that this is occurring? Where is he getting this information from or is he just shooting in the wind?

The MCA has steadily lost credibility, not just amongst Malaysian Chinese, but Malaysians in general. They accuse the DAP government in Penang of being anti-Chinese and yet they fail even to protect the interests of the people they purportedly represent. Shouting 1Malaysia at the top of their lungs, they still operate along racial lines.

In this year's MCA General Assembly, they passed their resolution to abolish school licensing. However, in 54 years of supposedly fighting for the education of our children, our education system has become the laughing stock of Asia. Form 3 students face having to learn Science and Mathematics in Malay once again, having learnt theses subjects in English for 9 years. What does the MCA have to say to that?

READ MORE HERE.

Focus On Real Targets

Posted: 17 Oct 2011 10:44 AM PDT

In addition, no action has been taken on Taib so as not to lose Sarawak. With Sabah in tow under Umno and its fast-tracked citizenship program for illegals, six fixed deposits are now primed for Barisan to retain its government, abetted by Umno-friendly royalty, judiciary, enforcement, mainstream media and election commission constructs. The last card is of course to cheat at the polls.

Two, where finance and education are concerned, the present government plays to only one gallery - the Malays, and with only one goal - to win the next general elections.

Money is spent minor for their targets, major for themselves - because Umno has become the official engine for whitewashing cronyism, with the result the bills including financing charges based on increasing debt servicing will be for the account of the still-dreamy young of the future.

And education is based on denialism which will result in irrelevance and loss of competitiveness. After fifty four years and billions, it is still a delivery issue. And their way of solving it is to entrench the challenges even further. Because the teachers can't, education will become less about imparting real and relevant knowledge, more about imparting grades made to look good by lowering standards, with the specter that one day overseas admitting institutions will deny entry because they will have avalanches of richer students from other countries, furthermore with better international results and stronger command of the medium of instruction - there.

Three, the demographics have changed. Once the Chinese were over thirty percent of the population; today in the twenties. The slide will continue because the birthrate has dropped since more will be too busy working harder to try and maintain livelihood while dispirited of future prospects in the face of increasing costs but crumbs in state support. How the latest budget has been distributed says it all. Ask the MD of SPSetia what he now thinks of the NEP rearing its real head, and for effects what is the size of Umno's political puissance over PNB's RM124 Billion in funds as well as Petronas and EPF monies?

Four, the US and European markets for our local products are going to be sundered on the shores of fiscal calamity. The rates at which they can service their debts will never catch up with the rates at which the interests on those debts are compounding. Ergo, even if they work flat out and unless a global trade miracle happens, they will be paying just the interests due without reducing the principal debt. In the next two years, another recession may spurt which will run contrary to the wild projections of revenue paraded in the latest budget of easy dispensations, all happening when one third of national revenues come from oil and gas, depleting commodities, with its attendant effects on the other two-thirds of direct and indirect taxes. Currently our national yolk is rm442 Billion of debts, and real productivity in terms of elastic skills, not population growth numbers, is stagnant. Meanwhile the present government continues to spin, and continues to hire expensive spinners, while living it up like there's no tomorrow. That, they are correct.

Posted: 17 Oct 2011 10:43 AM PDT

With just a few possessions, easily carried on their backs, they have had nothing to lose but the jungle they live from. Which is why they are the community that has fought hardest and longest to prevent its destruction by greedy and relentless logging.

However, we would be unwise to dismiss them as simple or backward people. One should reserve that judgement for those narrow-minded, unimaginative IQs who can think only of the ringgit and jewels and houses they can buy from cutting it down.

The Penan understand the deeper value of the Borneo jungle, the world's oldest and most bio-diverse environment on earth. If Taib had not been so eager to get rich as quickly as possible, he too would have done well to consider the pharmaceutical, DNA, tourism, scientific and other values of this region of enormous weatlh, variety and promise.

Instead he is turning it into a single crop plantation that will soon run out of soil due to to massive erosion and turn to desert. He is also converting one of the earth's two key 'lungs', the great jungles that breath water into the air and suck out dangerous carbon dioxide, into on of the major causes of Global Warming.

The Penan understand these things, even though few have gone to school, and they hold a deep love for the beauty and life that thrives in their paradise on earth. But, Taib either does not understand or worse, blinded by money, he doesn't care.

Victims who refuse to give up

It is because the Penan are still striving to live off the forest and to defend their hunting areas, that they have had some of the worst treatment at the hands of Taib's licenced loggers and unlicenced gangsters. Many, many communities in Sarawak have suffered from these problems, but it is the Penan who have been almost wiped out in numbers.

Taib refuses to give them the slightest respect or to allow them the smallest remaining area of jungle to call their own. His ministers are on record as saying that the jungle needs to be 'cleared' of such communities (to make way for their rape of the environment of course). For this reason we can add genocide to the list of crimes this man will one day have to answer.

One of the most shocking examples of his arrogant small-mindedness has been his refusal to perform his most basic duty as a Chief Minister in maintaining law and order and preventing vile crimes in these areas. There have long been reports of rapes by loggers against the gentle Penan tribespeople, yet he has refused to take action to protect them or to acknowledge the problem.

READ MORE HERE.

Malaysia’s environment needs help

Posted: 17 Oct 2011 04:56 AM PDT

Malaysia's forests, degraded by logging, replaced by plantations – oil palm or latex timber clones, fragmented by roads, and raided frequently by poachers hired by syndicates, harbour alarmingly declining numbers of wildlife. In the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's Red List (IUCN Red List), Malaysia has the world's third highest number of plants and animals threatened with extinction. The list warns of the disappearance of the tiger, sambar deer, rhinoceros, elephant, tapir, sunbear, pangolin, orangutan, hawksbill and leatherback turtles, among others, if business-as-usual continues, and it does. In a trade powered by demand from China, Vietnam and Thailand, Malaysia has emerged as a major hub in the smuggling of wildlife and wildlife products. To stop the demand and the trade, Malaysia needs help.

High conservation value lowland forests have been all but lost to plantations and urban development. More forests and habitats are being lost to oil palm, latex timber clones and mega projects to supply energy or water, phenomena mostly driven by top down decision-makers working in concert and non-transparently with private sector players. In this regard, Chief Minister of Sarawak Abdul Taib Mahmud's headlong conversion of peat swamp forests to oil palm, embarking on the "necklace" of twelve hydro-electric mega projects and concessions for high-impact logging (to clear the way for plantations), all of which simultaneously dispossess native people of their customary lands, show naked abandon. The judiciary and mainstream media do not enjoy sufficient autonomy to fulfil their check-and-balance roles. To stop Abdul Taib Mahmud, Malaysia needs help.

Meanwhile, Malaysian logging and oil palm companies take their plunder-for-profit expertise to countries around the world bringing little or no benefit to local communities, and sometimes misery. It would be useful to compile a list of such companies for worldwide reference. To reform these companies, Malaysia needs help.

READ MORE HERE

Kredit: www.malaysia-today.net

Selasa, 18 Oktober 2011

Malaysia Today - Your Source of Independent News

Malaysia Today - Your Source of Independent News

0 ulasan:

Catat Ulasan