Malaysia Today - Your Source of Independent News
Malaysia Today - Your Source of Independent News |
- The RPK-Haris Ibrahim saga
- Statement: MCLM
- A gift to the world?
- Opposition elites fight to the death – of the Rakyat
- Any time is a bad time for Najib
- Pakatan Rakyat : Dulu, kini dan selama lamanya?
| Posted: 02 Jan 2012 03:19 PM PST Brother Haris resigned as MCLM's president because he has been terribly upset by RPK's: I lament the end of a great RPK-Haris Ibrahim partnership in MCLM, a movement to promote good parliamentarians and parliamentary practice of first class Westminster-type democracy.
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| Posted: 02 Jan 2012 02:28 PM PST For the sake of clarity, I note here that at all times my agreement to stand as an independent candidate hinged on my being satisfied that there was cause for it. In this I firmly believed, and still do, that the Pakatan Rakyat was pivotal in any campaign for reform, though it was not necessarily the only actor of relevance. In that light, I had resolved to stand only where my doing so would not result in a three-corner fight or where it was strictly necessary to do so. Much has occurred since the announcement of the initiative. For one, the Pakatan Rakyat appeared to commit to a sustained effort to identify and field quality candidates. For another, Raja Petra Kamarudin felt it necessary to state his personal views as he did, in an interview with TV3 last year and recently in interviews published in the New Straits Times and the Utusan Malaysia. I will not delve into the matters spoken of save to say that they cast a less than positive light on the MCLM in so far as its commitment to principle is concerned. Furthermore, I do not share his views.
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| Posted: 02 Jan 2012 01:16 PM PST About global warming. The melting of the ice caps. The greenhouse effects. The complete reliance on fossil fuel by the whole world. The consumption of fossil energy which results in the production of carbon which in turn eats up the ozone layer. Which then makes the world warmer and even hotter. Which then makes all of us turn on our air-conditioners even more. Which means we consume even more energy. The power plants then burn even more fossil fuel to produce energy. Which means they produce more carbons which in turn eats up the ozone making the world even hotter. And the heat melts the ice caps. Making the sea level grow higher. And it goes on and on and on in an endless cycle. What will be of our children and their children? What are we doing about this? Personally, I must admit I have not done much about this issue really. Apart from trying not to use plastic bags when I shop or making sure the lights and air-conditioners are switched off if they are not of any use to anybody. For the future, I plan to buy a hybrid car for the family. That's about it! I did try though to sell an idea to someone within the corridors of power about 2-3 years ago. But the guy yawned after 15 minutes. Okay, perhaps I was not good at selling the idea. Hence the reaction. To my mind, why do we continue to build mega industrial, commercial and recreational parks? Can't we, as a nation, do something different? I was thinking of an Environmental Park or a Green Technology Park. Call it whatever you like, but the idea is simple. We take a huge swath of land – which we seem to have in abundance - somewhere. We turn that area into a park which only use alternative power/energy. Let that park be absolutely and independently sustained by powers generated from the wind, the sunlight, the water and whatever natural means that are within our possession. Well, actually, we cannot exactly say that we possess those natural means. I mean how can we say that we possess the sunlight or the wind. But we can always claim to have the ability to exploit them if we have the knowledge and technology to harness those natural resources and turn them into power or energy. So, let's imagine this huge area of land. We build all the infrastructures which are necessary for all those people and corporations with the knowledge and technology to come here to try to exploit those natural resources to produce energy. We create an environment which is conducive for these people to do research, to experiment and to produce. We invite all of them to come here. The locals can also join in. We do not lack knowledge. Our people have the expertise and specialist knowledge in all sorts of scientific areas. Our people have even managed to trace the Malay genome, for example (not that I know what genome is!). Bring them back here and let them research. And allow them to flourish in our own country. So, let's all of us imagine. This huge area of land is full of people, locals and internationals, doing research on alternative power and energy. Good, efficient and clean power and energy. It is for the good of the country. And the world at large. And within that particular land area, people live in homes powered by these alternative energy and power. People drive vehicles using those alternative energy. People exchange ideas about these technologies, conduct forums and seminars about them – in halls and buildings powered by alternative energies – and sell them to the world. I believe that will be a world's first because really I don't think any country in the world has ever done that. Even if there are, I don't think they have done that at such a scale and at such level of governmental supports. We love to create world records, don't we? We have the 1st astronaut who makes teh tarik in space. We have the tallest twin towers in the world. The biggest ketupat in the world. The longest shortest fattest thinnest roundest squarest whatever in the world. Why not the 1st Green City in the world?
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| Opposition elites fight to the death – of the Rakyat Posted: 02 Jan 2012 07:49 AM PST Take that statement and fast-forward to today's Malaysia (not just Malaysia Today), and then rewind a little to put it into the context of Malaysian political history. To me, there is much similarlity indeed between what the Frenchman said, with blogger Raja Petra Kamarudin's New Year's Day assault on Pakatan Rakyat. Critical historians can probably remind us how the elites' tussles for power throughout Malayan history, and also before and immediately after the formation of Malaysia, played out. History can relate how many struggling Malaysians died due to the elites' feud. Oh yes, I forget: mainstream historians tell us those who died in battle were not struggling poor people, but "baby-eating" commies, with guns and explosives, the devil incarnate, supposedly. Then fast forward Malaysian history – perhaps it is more appropriate to term it UMNO's or Malaya's history – to the Mahathir era in 1987. When authoritarian Mahathir was first threatened by the Kelantan prince, Tengku Razaleigh, for the prized and lucrative Prime Minister's post, it was the first "modern day" Malaysian elites' fight. Bear in mind that the top government post, in the Malaysian context, is lucrative not just for one's own self, but for an entire empire-building industry. There is more than enough documentation regarding those who suffered under political detention in that 1980s elitist struggle. Advance now to 1997, again, "coincidentally" as in 1987, during yet another cycle of economic collapse, we had another elites' fight. Mahathir, a practised dictator by then, was having to fend off another assault on his Prime Ministerial post and the treasure associated with the PM package, as perfected by King Mahathir. It is well known that Anwar Ibrahim, a rising political star within UMNO, was the "victim" in this elitist fight. He was imprisoned and received a black eye from the highest-ranking police officer, the Inspector General of Police. But Anwar was not the only victim. This time round, in 1997, the victims would again be the ordinary Malaysians, the working class and the proletariat, who had to suffer through another episode of Malaysian elites' fight. Opposition Elites also do battle Of course history is never discriminatory, in only recording the ruling front's elite battles. The Malaysian opposition politicians too, after all, are elites in our society. Since the birth of Pakatan Rakyat (PR), it has been an open secret who the elites are, with the exception of a few of those politicians with strong community-centred ideological foundations, There are plenty of examples of the kind of suffering among the ordinary Rakyat, when elites fight within the opposition. Before one jumps into saying opposition elites' fights do not produce any deaths among the poor, think again. The elites' battles left the poor under continuing oppression and suppression, and left them to be denigrated, and termed the 'poor' (in fact, in the Malaysian context, it is not enough to be 'poor,' but we have even created another category of "hardcore" poor, so that this last category of Malaysians – neglected Malays, Indians, Chinese, Dayaks, Kadazan Dusuns and "lain-lain" – are left to die young). The opposition elites' fight became more feverish after March 2008. Opposition numbers grew in and out of Parliament and State Legislatures in Malaya. Sarawak and Sabah elites had of course been fighting, long before Malaya were in any position to fight as they did after March 2008. The latest battle lines The controversial blogger, Raja Petra Kamarudin, or RPK, has now openly declared war on the opposition PR with his latest "interview" by the UMNO media group. His broadside has been picked up by various other online news portals. As he expected, all sort of insults and accusations have been thrown at him after his savaging of Anwar Ibrahim and the PR. RPK knows what he is doing. After TV3 had twisted the content of his previous interview in April 2011 from Australia, RPK had written about further attention by UMNO's media. He had even named his terms and conditions before he would grant another interview to the UMNO media.
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| Any time is a bad time for Najib Posted: 02 Jan 2012 06:38 AM PST Although the constitution provides for a five-year election cycle, Abdullah had set a pattern of waiting for only four before he decided to go to the polls. There were exactly four years between his landslide victory in the 11th general election of March 2004 and his loss of Umno-BN's two-thirds majority in Parliament in the March 2008 polls, a descent that spelt disaster for Abdullah. Four years between one general election and the next seems like a reasonable stretch; five is a stall.
These calculations are not arbitrary: issues have a way of simmering for some time before they reach a boil; four years appear about as long a time as one could keep them on a backburner. Having taking over from a beleaguered Abdullah in April 2009, Najib has been waiting for the right time to seek a mandate that new PMs consider essential to gaining the legitimacy to make changes, especially after they have taken over from a predecessor who appears to have failed. Road to hell is paved with good intentions On assuming the reins, Najib would have reckoned to wait some time in which to introduce reforms before seeking a new mandate. He spoke the jargon of reform, liberalised aspects of the economy, particularly the rules on equity ownership, and shaped up to introduce political reforms. The latter score was where he ran into trouble. Because Malaysia is not like China where the ruling communist party could liberalise the economy while maintaining tight control over the politics and appear to get away with it, Najib discovered that an undertow of stale thinking dogged his intention to liberalise the obsolete regimen of rules and regulations by which Malaysia's politics is conducted. After belatedly conceding that the popular demonstration last July in support of the changes electoral reform pressure group, Bersih, were clamouring for needed to be reckoned with, Najib had, what in retrospect appeared as a fast-fading chance, to make good on his reform-seeking agenda. He grabbed at it, or appeared to be intent on doing so. In a Malaysia Day address last Sept 15, he announced there would be credible reforms to a host of repressive laws on internal security, public demonstrations and the press. What eventuated, in respect of the Peaceful Assembly Bill 2011 tabled, amended and passed in Parliament at its last sitting, only served to remind people that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Aspects of the Bill turned out to be worse than what the benighted military junta in Burma had condescended to introduce in their hapless country. Malaysia on a par with Burma is bad enough; Malaysia worse than that mothballed country is intolerable. Even as the image of Najib as credible reformer lay exposed by the end of last year as a delusion, the notion is taking hold among the electorate that power which is never transferred from one coalition to another – as distinct from being slightly shuffled among its existing holders – is power that will be abused.
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| Pakatan Rakyat : Dulu, kini dan selama lamanya? Posted: 01 Jan 2012 11:10 PM PST But really, people, what new news has RPK brought from London to Singapore and from thence to you all in Malaysia and then to me in Adelaide? All things considered what upset me most was the arrogance displayed by RPK in giving that interview! More arrogant than Nazri Aziz, than KJ or even the great man himself, Mahathir! But then that has been RPK style all along - so what's me worry? Apart from the arrogance displayed by RPK nothing else interest me enough to want to sit down and dash of my comments to what he said onto my blog quick smart. I read about it at around 10 p.m. in FMT on Sunday night. Slept on it and it was only after I read about Haris Ibrahim's resignation because of what Haris alleged RPK said and did, at around 6 p.m. today – then and only then did it move me to write. And that too, to write more on Haris resignation as President of MCLM then on what RPK said in the MSM. When all is said and done the only revelations that RPK made that was unknown to me was the prosecution's insistence for a free hand in the sodomy two case. Everything else I know. And if I know then I am sure you too know! That PKR is having problems. Check. That Azmin is having problems. Check. That Nurrul is talked about as the next Messiah. Check. That Anwar is guilty. Check. That Anwar was in the Carcosa tapes. Check. That Anwar will be found guilty. Check. Bribery in Selangor. Check. Anwar may become irrelevant. Check. Rights group not a third force. Check - there are a work in progress! Anwar morally unfit to become PM. Go check my blog - I have been saying this from way back when! Check!
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