for long. Mirrors to our socio-political degeneration, the news channels particularly depress me ahead of a news day where I would learn about more crime, corruption and gutter politics. The escape is to a channel that shows an overaged hero jiving with a heroine 15 or 20 years younger than him, or to one dwelling on the hunting habits of the big cats. Somewhat tolerable are experts who babble about support and resistance levels of stocks, and advise suckers to invest in, or get out of, a certain scrip.
UMNO and MSMs think they have perfected the art of twisting the news. But I believe only UMNO people are convinced by the twisted news. The dwindled readership of the MSMs are proof.Desperation of UMNO exposed. Illegitimate child of corruption and sin going to be born soon and they need to find a “father” to take responsibility. UMNO desperately twisting the facts to find a marriage partner.
To all my comrades working in the BN controlled News Media, the Civil Service, the Judiciary, The Police, The Arm Forces and the MACC…. we know you all are loyal Malaysian but because of fear of losing your rice bowl, you had to be an accomplish to these UMNO BN corrupt politicians. But do you not see the slow and steady destructions of our beloved country and our multi racial society ? Drop what you are doing now, stay away from from your job and boycott this corrupt UMNO BN Government. Lets start THE WAVE to drown and destroy this UMNO BN government to bring in a new begining to a better MALAYSIA … A MALAYSIA THAT IS PEACEFUL, LOVING AND JUST FOR ALLTan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin gave a stern warning today to MCA over 
As expected, a damaging article from the msm. The state government should know better than to provide free ammunition to BN. The only consolation is that the Star's readership is in terminal decline, so the damage is far less than it might have been.There are plenty of journos and senior editors at Toiletpaper Central but only Wong Chun Wai, The Star and Joceline write the damaging crap when MCA bosses crack their whips. What better way to show their underlings and comrades just how journalistic heroism looks like when only these 2 carry out their work and cop all the public flak. So very MCA style. Pathetic!
This writer had conveniently forgotten why the State Government did or did not do what was expected of them.
The Royalty should be in a better position to know. And no one is saying it out openly.
This tendency to point fingers at the State Government could be a distorted representation.
It's so convenient to lay the blame on the host when it takes two to tango.
MCA president Chua Soi Lek appears to be on a warpath, defending his criticism of Muslim women who chose not to shake hands with the opposite sex for religious reasons.
In an angry reaction to questions from reporters, Chua insisted that the norm practised by many Muslim women to avoid skin contact with the opposite sex during handshake was contrary to “basic culture and manners to shake hands”.
“I have been in the public life for many years. It’s part of the basic culture and manners to shake hands,” said Chua, who also scolded a reporter from online portal Malaysiakini, which first broke news of Chua’s attack on PAS candidate Normala Sudirman.
A couple of days ago, I was riveted to a news channel for the same reasons that usually repel me. It was a much-touted interview with Maharashtra Navnirman Sena leader Raj Thackeray. If his insistence on being interviewed in Hindi on Times Now, an English channel, was audacious, his utterances were shocking (but not surprising). He had, earlier this year, given another English channel an interview in Marathi. Hence, one should thank Raj for speaking in Hindi and letting a larger number of people know the danger that lies in his exclusive agenda.
The pointed finger, the raised voice and eyes flaming with anger were symbols of the rowdyism Raj's uncle, Bal Thackeray, and his Shiv Sena created in the 1960s with ample help from the Congress, a street culture which both Senas have practised through the decades. Raj's refusal to see any other point of view; the harping on alleged crime by migrants from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Jharkhand; the quoting of a Bihar crime report while rejecting Maharashtra's own figures that a far larger number of people from Karnataka, Gujarat and Rajasthan have arrived in Mumbai than those from Bihar — all left no doubt that Raj (indeed, all the Thackerays and their outfits) will continue to play their dangerous identity politics.
Amid all his belligerence over migrants from Bihar-UP-Jharkhand, and Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, Raj had no mention to make of the Mumbaikar’s economic status or his living conditions. Wouldn’t a Marathi Manoos working in another state be stealing a local’s job? How should a Maharashtrian who breaks the law in another state be treated? The Thackerays will never have convincing replies to these.
The Senas, of course, claim their anti-‘outsider’ crusades have been for the rights of the Marathi Manoos. But the reality lies elsewhere. The goal is political power. When not in power, the Senas wield authority though the politics of intimidation and control. Witness how entertainment-industry personalities like Karan Johar, Boney Kapoor and Asha Bhonsle have had to kowtow to one Thackeray or another.
The Frankenstein didn’t come on its own. The Congress has been widely held responsible for the rise and growth of the Shiv Sena. An unchallenged political force in the 1960s, it is accused of funding and letting the Sena loose on the then powerful Communist Party of India in Mumbai, an offensive that would put McCarthy to shame. Bal Thackeray also tilted at other windmills: Gujaratis and ‘Madrasis’. His party’s attacks on South Indians were a shame on a Mumbai that took pride in its cosmopolitanism. Muslims have for long been Thackeray’s pet target.
The Congress has for decades looked singularly incapable of taking on the Shiv Sena ideologically. Right from the time Vasantrao Naik was chief minister, its leaders in Maharashtra have been cosy with the Sena. It has become a wimp playing with the Senas the game of "you scratch my back, I will scratch yours". Of course, the Congress (along with the NCP) has managed to keep the Shiv Sena (and its ally the BJP) out of power by playing one Thackeray against another. But that is not the point. Because the Thackeray clan is as powerful in opposition as it is in office.
To keep the Senas and the Thackerays from appropriating socio-political centre stage, the Congress must counter their divisive politics — as also the politics of those at the other end of the communal divide. The Maharashtrian must be stopped from gravitating towards xenophobes and their agendas of hate. The Congress is the only political force with the power to do so. Will its politicians allow it?
If you think I exaggerate, think about what has brought them to public ecstasy over the last few months, and the right’s obsessions in general, and tell me core members of the tea-party brigade aren’t addicted to symbol over substance. Think about it … Rick Perry. Paul Ryan’s unworkable budget plan. Chris Christie. Guns. The Constitution (at least their mistaken reading of it). Socialism. Bigger guns. Wall Street. American Exceptionalism. Really, really big guns.
This tendency to idolise people and objects makes it all the more amusing when loudmouth right-wing preachers start in with all the “cult” talk about Mitt Romney’s Mormonism. So let me get this straight, Romney’s version of Christianity is cultish, while those who handle snakes, speak in tongues and ask their arena-based parishioners for their very last dime, so they can erect Mammon-on-Earth, are not?
When one lacks practical, reasonable answers to the myriad problems this country is facing, from a continued economic debacle to ongoing civil liberties abuses at home and abroad to who Carly Simon’s singing about in “You’re So Vain”, the only thing left to do is turn to symbolism. For those on the Right that means trusting Jesus will just work things out for them, or Reagan needs to be on the $10 bill, or obsessing over the Founding Fathers, you know, such as John Quincy Adams, Alan Cumming and Darth Plagueis The Wise.
This is not to say some Democrats have not fallen into this same trap. Again, grasping at symbols, especially charismatic individuals, is encoded in human DNA. There are those who would stick with President Obama were he to break every campaign promise he made during the 2008 election (so far he’s only at about 82 per cent). But overall, education and civic engagement tend to lessen this tendency. Hence, it is not only a much more interesting, but foreboding phenomenon on the right.
The danger this poses to a functioning democracy are clear – it turns policy into public relations. Back in the late 1970s, neo-conservative godfather Irving Kristol admitted as much about supply-side economics. It was just a symbolic ploy to win over voters, or as he put it in Public Interest in 1995, “The task, as I saw it, was to create a new majority, which evidently would mean a conservative majority, which came to mean, in turn, a Republican majority – so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government.”
Today, even with evidence abound that their budgetary math is like Gary Busey’s driving, conservatives still adhere to this “voodoo economics,” as George HW Bush called it before embracing it, pretending tax cuts continually showered on our oligarchic overlords will somehow “trickle down” through the floors of their penthouses to the rest of the population.
The real-world consequences can be seen in President Obama’s not-big enough jobs bill the GOPers in the Senate (and reliable Democratic turncoat Senator Ben Nelson, as well as Sen. Jon Tester) have already rejected. Just when a report released by CG/LA – run by passionate infrastructure-improvement guru and colleague Norman Anderson – reveals a study conducted in nations spanning the globe that explains why US roads and bridges are literally crumbling before our eyes, with the United States ranked last in “leadership” and “vision” in infrastructure project development – the most potent short term job creator and long term economic stimulus.
Good news though, even though we’ve fallen way behind Brazil and India, we still hanging tough with Peru! And I’m just positive we’re totally schooling Botswana.
Meanwhile, Anderson’s firm has “recently identified 10 ready-to-go projects worth $90 billion, which would create nearly 1.5 million direct jobs.”
So what are we waiting for, a good logo for these projects?
Taib Mahmud’s $5million dollar a year ‘Cyber-war Campaign’ has conceded a humiliating defeat, with the final demise of the site ‘Sarawak Reports’.
Sarawak Reports was part of a vicious network of internet sites, set up by the crooked UK-based production FBC Media, in a hired attempt to undermine this blog and to attack the opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim.
By adopting a virtually identical name to our own, FBC clearly hoped they could confuse web-surfers into reading their pro-Taib propaganda, instead of our research into Taib’s 30 years of corrupt government.
However, there is little evidence that readers were in fact fooled but this costly exercise. The site never dared to publish the handful of comments it received for its stories, which were little more than dreary ‘puff pieces’ praising Taib’s ‘progress and development’ policies.
The site also carried a permanent section devoted to attacking the Editor of Sarawak Report and family members.
- Black propaganda – who did they think they were kidding?
Collapse of Cyber-war campaign follows exposure of FBC Media
After Sarawak Report started to investigate, the whole truth behind the scandal came out. We showed how FBC Media had commissioned a team of Republican bloggers in the States to write a series of attacking articles in a supposedly non-sponsored website called New Ledger.
- First put it on the USA’s New Ledger to give it credibility – then place it in Sarawak Reports!
These articles, by unheard of Americans, were then reproduced in Sarawak Reports as if they represented influential thinking in the US.
Worse, we discovered a similar campaign was being carried out by the very same people against the opposition leader, Anwar Ibrahim, and this time the person who commissioned the attacks was the PM himself, Najib Razak!
The scurrilous articles about Anwar, written for New Ledger by non-entities in the States, were being reproduced in a separate blog called Malaysia Watcher. Just this week the PM was forced to admit that his office has spent RM 84 million on such campaigns with FBC Media in just three years!
We can now report that Malaysia Watcher is likewise no longer accessible.
Who is Rachel Motte? She stopped writing for New Ledger after we exposed the FBC-lined campaign
Furthermore, since our exposes in late July, New Ledger has ceased publishing any stories about Malaysia, Sarawak Report or Anwar Ibrahim. In June approximately half of all the articles written for this supposedly US-focused website had consisted of attacks on Anwar and SR, which were then being reproduced in Malaysia Watcher and Sarawak Reports!
Illegal TV programmes commissioned by Taib and Najib
- TV lies – Taib bought the slot as advertising!
Of course, the most sensational part of the whole affair has been the revelation that FBC also did deals with both Najib and Taib to place promotional TV films about them and about BN’s policies on some of the world’s most respected news channels, including the BBC and CNBC.
FBC held production contracts for a number of supposedly objective news shows and documentary series and the company was illegally selling the airtime as advertising space for high-spending politicians and companies, including Malaysia and the palm oil industry.
Sarawak Report even gained copies of the contract between FBC’s Chairman, Alan Friedman and Taib, in which the Chief Minister was promised a series of opportunities to improve his bad reputation on human rights and the environment.
“Let’s shake hands on it” – Najib has paid Alan Friedman’s FBC Media RM 84 million to break broadcasting rules in a series of TV “puff pieces” and interviews.
One of these films, aired on CNBC’s World Business (a show produced by FBC Media), claimed that 80% of Sarawak’s forests have been left undamaged and untouched by Taib’s logging and oil palm plantations!
After Sarawak Report broke the scandal, both BBC World and CNBC terminated all contracts with FBC Media, pending investigations.
The UK regulatory authority Ofcom is also conducting a full-scale investigation into how politicians like Taib and Najib were able to spend millions of their own taxpayers’ money on such vanity TV projects, which was against broadcasting laws.
So, the FBC Media expose has meant a set-back not just for Taib’s ‘Cyber Campaign’, but for his whole ‘Global Media Strategy’, into which he has poured millions of taxpayers’ hard earned money.
Najib has likewise been exposed for the same misjudgement and complicity in the corruption of respected international TV stations, all at the enormous expense of public funds!
What about CNN?
- Back reporting Malaysia for CNN – did John Defterios mention to CNN bosses back in 2010 that he was President of FBC, which had received RM 84 million to promote Malayisa? CNN so far says it isn’t relevant!
Sarawak Report and other news media in the UK and US are awaiting the final reports of Ofcom, The BBC and CNBC into these scandals.
Meanwhile, the position of CNN still remains highly questionable. Because this station was also carrying programmes featuring Najib and other FBC clients at a time when FBC’s President, John Defterios was anchoring the relevant CNN shows and programmes.
CNN has so far claimed that it is not prepared to investigate such placement of FBC clients on their shows or the connection with Mr Defterios, because it says John Defterios had already resigned from FBC when he became a staff presenter in March of this year.
In fact the records show that Mr Defterios did not resign until 4 days AFTER our expose on FBC in Sarawak Report! Indeed, just three weeks previously he had aired a much-criticised interview with Najib Razak for CNN, letting him off far too lightly over the treatment of the Bersih rally, according to many commentators.
Under US broadcasting laws any such conflicts of interest should be openly declared, whether or not the interested members of the production team are on contract or staff. For this reason Sarawak Reports is reporting CNN to Ofcom for its refusal to examine the potential corruption of its content by a current senior member of its staff.
No comments:
Post a Comment