1Malaysia - now vomiting

Friday, March 13, 2015

by Azly Rahman

Like many Malaysians, I am vomiting through the dungeons of my soul reading the reports daily on the 1Malaysia Development Bhd (1MDB), if it is true that the  leaders of this country are bankrupting it.

This is especially so when 1MDB may one day suck the blood, sweat, and tears dry out of the long and difficult years of investment of the Malaysian public, especially the kampung folk, the rubber tappers, the small businessmen and labourers of any race, not to mention the filthy work of secrecy we are seeing operating in the government, at a time when the nauseating hypocrisy of slogans such as "high-income nation," "world-class education" and "syariah index" are trumpeted and shoved down the throat of the people who are kept in fear and silence for criticising the run-amuck of the nation's "global-smart-partnership of Ali-Baba and John and Hollywood-hedonistic bloodsucker-filthy corporate-crony-useless-sons and daughters of sicko-capitalists".

Excuse me for the long running sentence. And excuse my little explosion too. The spirit of the New York beat poet Allen Ginsburg is running amuck in me today.


And excuse me while I kiss the sky and vomit through my bruised soul, as a Jimi Hendrix song would go screaming. What then must we do, in the midst of those in power pounding on the helpless crying for help in demanding justice and decency of making ends meet - especially to be reading stories of bloodsuckers and big-time conmen partying in yachts while the rakyat drowns in broken sampans and broken spirits?

And these premature talks about a replacement prime minister and who that might be too bores me to death.

Same old mould, I believe. These are mere dynastic wars over wealth and power that have become a disease of the nobility of politics as what it should be about: public service.

Same breed of emperors in new clothes

What do all these mean if what we are getting will perhaps be even worse vendetta and a continuation of the installation of the same breed of emperors in new clothes preying upon the poor and the helpless, using the state apparatuses to maintain a jet-setting lifestyle and lying to the people to beg for a mandate to rule?

Fools we have become and made to be, haven’t we?

My immediate worry is this:

With a bailout plan for 1MDB, even to pay just the interest of the loans and the new, horrifying numbers on the newly defined loan/bonds, what are we looking at? Will the rakyat's pension plan/life savings/national unit trusts and the like be used to help these crooks out?

Have we not learned from the experience of other countries how public funds were used to bail out such "Cayman Island" investments?  Do the people know enough about the kind of dictators, global CEOs and glorified money-launderers who stash their money in secret vaults in Switzerland, Singapore and those Islands?

What makes you think that your KWSP/EPF money is still going to be safe - when no one seems to want to tell the truth and what we are reading is about a barely 30-year-old kid and an investment punk partying till he pukes and investing our money till we all puke?

Why have we come to this point in history? You nationalists out there, tell me.

Now, parliamentarians we put to work - in your comfortable sittings, you better ask the government how the rakyat's savings are going to be wiped off dry!

This is totally insane a country! Yes - my beloved country I still love to see things go well for the next generation.

But in the next two generations our children may have to eat grass, wood and stones.

Progress towards a failed state...

Like Jonathan Swift’s suggestion to fatten up babies in The Modest Proposal to solve the Irish potato famine, I’d propose something less radical: just give each family a plot of land for them to plant food, raise chickens, and live in communes and live a life of dignity without falling prey to glorified gamblers. This country is gone and going to the dogs - with this progress towards a failed state.

Why do we still have these people running our country and running it down? And when the people speak up, you in power throw them in jail so that you folks in power can run free, looting and looting while speaking Greek and geek and those GST and your gobbledygook of your syariah index lying through your behind.  Excuse my little explosion again. Now the blood of the poets Rimbaud and Rendra combined, is boiling in me.

How filthy and corrupt can man get! Can't we teach one another to live within our means and be grateful and to think of others?

All these while I thought our economists, political scientists, and investment strategists in this and that national and high-strung high impact steering committees are well-versed in the Keynes-Hayek debate and the intricacies of the nation’s economy as it rides the wave of national reform and globalisation.

We seem to pride ourselves in this nationalistic obsession with our own version of command economy and be wary of letting the market solely dictate, and angry at any attempt by global empires to tell us what to do and how to behave – in the name of sovereignty. We seem to be in control of our “culturally-constructed commanding heights” but what is happening now?

Those entrusted to control the economy are gambling with it, big time, and letting the big-time gamblers sell the country off. Worse, do we not know what is happening to our national financial assets as many are guessing that they are being used to recover the money we lost through our secret wheeling and dealing in the world of casino capitalism, where “wolves of Wall Street” race with the velocity of money?

We can never know the truth – just like the truth of what happened to the missing Flight MH370, that I wrote about in April last year.

This is what we have become - a secret society of leaders making secret deals and using some acts to punish those who wish to know the truth – especially when the life savings of those who slog for this world of indentured servitude is at stake.

This is a case that might be worse than America’s Enron and Subprime Fiasco combined; a world too big to fail but crumbled like Humpty Dumpty and all.

What then must we do?

Source: http://azlyrahman-illuminations.blogspot.com/2015/03/1malaysia-now-vomiting.html