Continuing The Trial of our Finance Minister.

In a previous article, I wrote about prospective blackmailing. It is simply painting a doomsday picture of the future in order to stop people having the idea to change the present bad regime.

Better don’t change, the next person can be worse than Najib; the next government can be more oppressive and rapacious. Better the devil we know than the angel we don’t. The pot calling the kettle black.

The idea is to paint as gloomy a picture as possible about the uncertain future under the alternative leader and government.  

If we subscribed to this disingenuous blackmailing, we have missed the point.

The heart of the issue which riled up so many of us is having the public turning a blind eye to the abuse of power to avoid inconvenience. The inconvenience of taking a gamble with the future, the inconvenience of thinking, debating and articulating about the issue. Most of all the inconvenience or articulating the issue publicly so as to raise awareness.

The luxury of doing nothing, of standing down and agreeing to the debauchery, abuse of power, corruption, that belongs to the elite, which class, Najib serves as spokesman and cheerleader.

Why should we change- if the new government coming in, will do the same? The opposition will be the same as Najib- they will also embezzle and steal. The alternative leader of the government and government may be worse than Najib. So, why don’t we keep Najib?

The blackmail takes place, when the prospective leader and government are projected as equally evil. The difference is, because that takes place under a projected scenario or sometime in the future, we may be placed under greater risks. So why take up greater risks when at least we already know what people like Najib and government do?

We have to change because we need to- in order to ensure that decent public spirited persons and leaders who get power never abandon the Golden Rule of Morality. We must never let crooks get to the center of power. 

It’s a universal principle, known as the ethic of reciprocity, which means we believe that people should aim to treat each other as they would like to be treated themselves – with tolerance, consideration and compassion.

Najib and the government has taken our trust but reciprocated our trust with corruption, abuse of power, intimidation, and subjugation and so on. Najib reciprocated us with a government that has gone bad.

Now back to prospective blackmailing. It is a sting to take out our rejection of the present regime. So the longer the investigation on 1MDB for example takes place, people will just give up. They will start rationalising and even trivialising. The trivialising of course has been started by Najib.

Where in the world, a PM removed an attorney general who was investigating him? Where in the world is the institution responsible to ferret out corruption and wrong doing, abuse of power such as MACC is emasculated? Its officers subject to threats of arrest? Where in the world is the institution like Bank Negara responsible for ensuring the integrity of the financial system, is placed under siege by the executive?

That only happens in a country which government has gone bad, led by an executive who has gone bad. That happens only, generally speaking, in 3^rd world countries with 3^rd class quality leaders.

Malaysia under Najib is becoming a 3^rd class country because Najib is unfortunately is essentially and at core, a 3^rd class quality leader.

That has become clear when Husni Hanazliah stepped in to answer on Najib’s behalf and allowed himself to become the night soil career.

Apart from the possibility that Husni Hanazliah, our 2^nd Finance Minister is a mild mannered and likeable fellow- the answers he gave in parliament, were deliberately misleading and liquid. There were no substance in his answers-he was nervous and appeared to want to move on to the next issue at hand as quickly as possible.

I find is distressing the way he tried to explain away why the Ringgit has fallen in value. He should have directed our attention as to why is there too much Ringgit in the market? Why are people throwing away Ringgit in the market?

Not by explaining that despite having our Ringgit trounced, we are comfortable because other economies are also experiencing a reduction in their respective currencies.

Why is the Singapore currency is of higher value that ours? Which means people prefer to keep Singapore Dollars in their currency portfolio.  Singapore’s economy is not growing at a better rate than Malaysia; UK economy is not growing at a better rate that Malaysia, yet their currencies are better and higher?

It means, the strength of the currency does not depend so much as to the state of the economy than to the management of the economy, the manager of the economy, the government ruling the country, the policies they shaped around the economy.

These observations point to a salient fact- while the economy is shaped by the forces of free market and laisse faire, the market is shaped by the policies the economy undertakes.

So we look at the government, its leader and the policies they take to shape the market. 

So let us take a look at the leadership and the policies. 

The philosophy behind a budget says Husni, the ‘economics’ lecturer is as follows:-

The budget must reflect 3 aspects; Firstly, to ensure economic resilience which among others ensure job employment; secondly to improve capacity through increased productivity, among others; and to ease the burden of the people. The last is welfare.

I have no quarrel about        that. Economic growth has always been the function of amount of labour we have, its productivity (more and better) and the ideas that push the productive boundaries.

Except the 3^rd leg of the budget has always been overused and exploited unfairly.

The rationale of using the budget to take the care of welfare has been distended and used to its tiresome limits. At the state assemblies, BN MPs will parrot the argument that budget deficits are being caused by allocations on welfare. Yes- blame the poor for their laziness, less industry, dependent mentality.

Nothing can be further from the truth; just look at the proportion of a budget that is actually allocated for welfare purposes?  It will be found to be of small proportion.  But the helping of the poor, the infirmed, the weak, old single mothers, has always been used to justify and cloak the real reasons for deficit budgets.

It’s just caused by mis-budgeting and the tendency to inflate prices so as to collect dividends at a future date. In Malaysia, regulatory capture is the norm rather than exception.

Perhaps he can do that in front of pliant and more brawn-little brained UMNO members. But in parliament he appears before highly critical MPs including those from his own party. When he could not answer properly, the BN backbenchers will heckle in unison drowning the persistent questioning from opposition MPs.

At one point, Husni wanted to appear academic by explaining the type of inflation- cost push, demand pull or unfair pricing. That was when he sought to answer why after implementation of GST, there is always the accompanying inflation. Just say, it is caused by unfair pricing instead of saying, the customs department and others are studying them. After reading the raw data only the MOF has, Husni is not able to say what caused the post GST inflation.