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Allah save Malaysia! We need divine intervention. We have Nero and Rasputin together in Malaysia now.

Retribution? Who are the jokers who voted them in?

Repent! Vote wisely in the next election.

Dear Jeff,

Thank you for your contribution. To a certain extent, I beg to differ from the previous commentator. Instead of beseeching for divine intervention, I'd like to think that the issues facing Malaysia are matters that we as citizens can resolve.

To do so, we (the citizenry) need to build an ability to think critically and react constructively. In that regard, given the freedom of the usual restraints that other "journalists" may face, bloggers need to realise that they can have an important role to play in achieving this goal.

In fact, maybe bloggers are one of the last bastions within the mass media that can still lay claim to proving the truth of this idiom:

"Beneath the rule of men entirely great, the pen is mightier than the sword."
Edward George Bulwer Lytton (1803-1873)

A man at 50 would have accomplishments, composure and wisdom. No different a nation at 50. Yet we ask ourselves whether our country hasn't gone backwards to infantilism.

What accomplishments can Malaysia take pride in after 50 years? We are going from agriculture to agriculture. The human resource asset has been stripped during the years when it could have been built with care to pump up innovation and research looking at a globalized world hungry for value-added products. Now we go back to commodities without the slightest notion what the next wave called biotechnology will engender of the same human resource asset whose future hangs precariously on the mercy of politically-appointed educationists who know nuts about how backward we have become, what more what types of education and training are needed to remain competitive.

And is a bunch of buildings, roads and bridges considered accomplishments? No country in its road to development could possibly exclude them. They should therefore not be used as benchmarks that we have achieved, arrived, or arsenalized our future. What more, while weak maintenance of our infrastructure built poorly in the first place at inflated, corruption-fuelling prices might have made fortunes for some, it will be the yolk that drowns the future of our international reputation when even these basic things fall apart from north to south, and with the higher tolls, fuel costs and utility bills in mind, at costs that will strike the resource curse at future generations - those you can see walking oblivious of the dangers at the last year-end Countdown where fireworks lit the skies only once a year in their innocent lives.

Is being ranked one of the most globalized nations an accomplishment? Let us not continue to take pride in selling low-value products from gloves to chip assemblies and delude ourselves that we have earned our badge of being a success story amongst nations while too many of our heartland citizens and their socalled leaders continue to face mind-enchaining limitations while we virtually have no innovation asset in any sector to talk about and corporate chiefs play their interview hand-wringings wearing looks of empty confidence, using hashed words just to prick their share prices. For what they're still worth.

Being globalized is not just about trade using money ultimately sourced from a shrinking resource called oil, it is also about having the right skillsets, commitments and worldviews to want to achieve more in faster mode, aided by a progressive and results-now government machinery, operating in a clean, safe, modern and inspiring environment, so that people can earn more to build their futures faster, to attract more brains, to create a better world.

Indeed, we have made a small start after fifty years of backbreaking, hellraising, soul-wrenching, nation building. We are starting with four hundred thousand ringgit automatic toilets, their prices inflated for leakages not of the sewerage kind, and proudly one may add, with the whole event internationally broadcasted by none other than the second man of the govt, supported by another minister, holding back traffic....when just the mayor, one of a string of bureaucrats, could have done the same.... so that this country for once can move on from form to substance. Our finest hour? Never in the field of human enterprise has so much been made by so few from so many so fast. Repeated everywhere in every nook and cranny. Count on that.

What composure do we have as a nation? The main component party, Umno, has finally defrocked itself to reveal it is nothing but a racist party. In a multiracial country, that's so very different from being a race-based party. We have recently seen and heard that loud and clear; we have also had to take a quick lesson on double standards; we have to be reminded by a young punk a lesson he should have instead served on the main student - himself. We have also learnt that what was a social contract that sought time for our malay brothers to catch up by using a special position clause has been subverted beyond the recognition and approbation of the original architects and players of that contract into a new animal called special right and that animal wants more and more each day, otherwise it will bite you without any remorse, guilt, shame or consideration. Even if it sinks the country.

Futhermore, the timeline of that special right has been extended ad infinitum/nauseum because the power-mongers consider it wise to see that the malay nouveau and newly-rich continue to get the best deals of the land, whether of scholarships or house subsidies, bank loans or contracts, franchises or speedier processing, land alienation or first-mover information, all subsidized by the other communities which have in turn become poorer, poor enough to join their fellow malay brethren who still after 50 years of supporting this government cannot understand what shame it is to put their hands out for some of the morsels strewn now and then by these special-rights elite groups who continue to drive a wedge not just between the communities, but also between them and their own, all the time making it appear they are doing the most glorious things in their lives. Meanwhile the rest of the world stands astonished how such apartheidism can take place in the country that has raised a hue and cry about apartheid policy in another part of the world. Did Allah construct their brains here differently? Did He forget to connect the circuit boards laterally?

And for the policy-makers, it wasn't good enough to find bogeymen to provide the reason for continuing their affirmative and denialistic policies. They have to create a perpetual cause, and so we have the rise of nationalism carried on the shoulders of malay political supremacy, defined to suit a few, ignoring the meaning of what being a malaysian truly engenders, cheating the rakyat blind. It was not good enough to blame the chinese community; they must also cast aspersions against the communists of the past, forgetting those very same ideological citizens had died fighting the japanese invaders, massacred off Batu Caves, hung by the dozens from the corner building opposite the masjid jamek mrt terminal, amongst many other instances of personal sacrifices to defend the very nation that umno says has been under four hundred years of colonialisation. Has umno replaced the british foreign service in malay(si)a?

Meanwhile, millions of the best have left, these most pragmatic and productive people of the land, and those who remain face the daunting spectre that the savings and accummulations of their past generations will soon evaporate because they now have diminished means to make more and a reducing value for their ringgit to spend on investments for an increasingly bleak future in which this government will continue to close one eye to the excesses of its own political lifeline, applying with increasing pressure right before your eyes their brand of forked-tongue double standards, loaded dice, jaded justice, blockages, malignant neglects, delays, blames, threats - why not just pinochet the entire community?

In such a setting, how can there ever be composure?

Indeed, will we go down in world history as a country where navels are banned, where young attractive women will soon not be able to take life insurance policies because they are given special accord - to be hunted, bullied, blackmailed, brutalized, bashed, raped, sodomized, strangled, stabbed and blown to smithereens with high-explosives? Whichever country they may come from?

Have we become a nation of maginot lines? humps, bumps, gated securities, billion-ringgit cctv surveillance contract to one company whose airport management system has been junked but after six years? While a teacher dies after falling through a termited-school floor, flood victims in chinese areas are asked by the national rescuers to pay RM20 apiece if they want to get on the boats to be saved from the floodwaters, students double as waiters to pay tuition fees while the elites get the best allowances and all-expenses-paid to the best of the west's tertiaries?

Are the lines crossed here? Do i look like i give a damn whether it's shaken or stirred?

Wisdom. Have we that? We have 50 years of collective learning. Or so we thought. One cycle of government administration seems to have cancelled the next with almost clockwork precision. They have learnt nothing. Now the favorite line is: "it was the past administration; we're just carrying on; write in your complaint, don't expect any reply though, we'll see". Why not just save the rakyat time and show what you can do with your little finger instead?

Malaysia will continue another 50 years but too many wiser people are saying they're not going to 'start all over again'. Until you have been through their type of fifty years, it is not possible to know the struggles and sacrifices they had made to take this country, where it counts, to where it is now, holding back further damage, pushing back stupidity and wreakage galore. When we look at the young ones, we pain what human greed and blinkered governance have already done to their future. Put all data through the latest and best server bank and the answer will come out the same. Race, religion and rights rule the wrecking of our rubrics.

So what next for Malaysia the mourning? Embrace diversity. Open up and make this country the best place in the world to work, live and play. That's the tagline. Start writing everything that needs to be done to make that happen. Observe sharply, learn quickly, work at it relentlessly. Roll off the cobwebs of the past, roll in the energy and dynamics of a new Malaysia. It doesn't matter if we think we will lose some of our illustrious sentimental harbourings. In a modernizing world, what is good will return in its own right. Have that faith in the intelligence of your own rakyat; make that effort to transform once and for all that we can be by shaking off trite formulas that serve only to create more lacunas that suck the living oxygen out of our lungs.

Can this bunch of jokers make it happen? I doubt if they even can convince themselves they want to. Why should national agendas be only articulated in the lead-up to an election by the very people who want to be elected? Surely they will leave unsaid what is too painful for them to carry out even if those tasks be the only ones needed to solve the problems and issues. See it as the weakness of democracy in this land. They create the problems, they define the problems, they promise the solution, they forget their promises, they serve themselves, they replicate their business model.

If this piece has stirred your heart as much as an unspoken vision here in me has resonated in mine, then propagate good thoughts and feelings as this new year opens up.

Happy new year! I want to see more issues covered in the media including blogs like this … there was a blackout on the newspapers on the toll hike protest on Dec 31. Remember there is another one on Jan 7.

http://blog.limkitsiang.com/?p=905#more-905

The first day of 2007 started off with a black-eye for Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi on his pledge when he became Prime Minister three years ago that he wants “to hear the truth”, however unpleasant, from the people as well as for nation-building, good governance, democracy and human rights.

This is the black-out on New Year’s Day by all the national media, whether newspapers or television stations, of yesterday’s protest by hundreds of Malaysians at the Grand Saga Cheras 11th Mile Toll Plaza against the latest toll hikes as well as at the barricade which blocked the access road from the Bandar Makhota Cheras township for the past 15 months since October 2005.

In Parliament on Dec. 13, when MPs were winding up the 43-day parliamentary budget meeting, Deputy Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Najib Razak, accompanied by the Works Minister, Datuk Seri S. Samy Vellu, the Information Minister, Datuk Zainuddin Maidin and the Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department, Datuk Effendi Norwawi, was having a hush-hush meeting with editors of all newspapers and television stations to direct them not to play up the Cabinet’s increase in toll hikes for five highways, Cheras-Kajang Highway, Lebuhraya Damansara-Puchong (LDP), Kesas Highway, Kuala Lumpur-Karak Highway and Guthrie Corridor Expressway.

The Abdullah premiership has prided itself practising a more open and liberal media policy than the Mahathir administration. This is true when compared with the last phase of the 22-year Mahathir premiership when there was very tight media control and censorship to the extent that Mahathir was repeatedly cited internatiuonally as one of the world’s top “enemies of the press”.

However, the claim that the Abdullah premiership has a more open and liberal media policy cannot stand up to scrutiny when compared with the first three years of the Mahathir premiership from 1981-1984.

With the Abdullah administration starting even earlier than the Mahathir premiership to muzzle the media, accountability, good governance, democracy and human rights may face even greater threats than the previous era unless such excesses are checked immediately.

Can Abdullah justify the government directive to muzzle the media to black-out all reporting about public protests against another round of unfair toll hikes, which are uniting Malaysians, regardless of race, religion, class or political affiliation against a most unfair privatization policy, completely without accountability, transparency and integrity?

Hasn’t he broken his pledge when he became Prime Minister that he wants “to hear the truth, however unpleasant” from the people, by shutting out the cries for justice and fair play by Malaysians of all races and religions against the toll hikes?

As the Minister for Internal Security with direct responsibility over the media, the first thing Abdullah should do on his return from his overseas leave is to keep his pledge “to hear the truth”, however unpleasant from the people, withdraw Najib’s directive to muzzle the media to “black-out” news about public protests against toll hikes and to reaffirm his commitment to be more open and liberal to respect media freedom- not when compared to the final years of the Mahathir premiership but the early years as well.

http://ronnieliutiankhiew.wordpress.com/2006/12/31/opposition-leader-lends-his-support-to-bmc-residents/

Hundreds of residents from Bandar Mahkota Cheras courageously broke the line formed by the FRU and marched to the Grand Saga Cheras 11th Mile Toll Plazas this morning to stage a protest against the toll hike as well as to mark their strong objection to the barricade which blocked the access road from the township since October last year.

A few hundred residents from BMC and Bandar Sg Long were unable to show up because they were blocked by the police at the road block. The police raod block has caused a massive traffic jam at the only outlet from BSL/BMC at the 12th mile this morning.

About 100 policemen(incl FRU) were there to control the crowd. I was informed by some residents that ASP Fauzi again showed his rudeness by holding on to his gun (he did not raise the gun though) besides shouting abusive words at Tan Boon Wah.