Dr Ling immediately asked Dato' Tee Keat to reveal who they are or leave the MCA. No one would be so crass as to deliberately let gangsters do their dirty work on MCA members. It defames the MCA and its leaders. The refrain was picked up by his aides. Dato' Ong replied with a veiled attack on three MCA leaders for corruption, treason and political misjudgement. That shook the National Front [BN] Establishment to its boots. The deputy president and UMNO deputy president, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, summoned and heard both men, and told them cease and desist. Dato' Tee Keat told Pak Lah of two MCA leaders closely aligned to gangsters. That sent shivers down the MCA Establishment for one is Dr Ling's preferred successor.

So, the BN wants to punish two of its state assemblymen for their reservations at this collosal waste of public funds. Traffic in Penang sometimes mirrors the traffic jams in Kuala Lumpur. They followed their conscience for whatever reason to show their reservation of a scandal the deputy chief minister, no less, confirms. The PORR, on the government's own admission, is built because it insists it must. The people of Penang vehemently opposes it. The government is not about to give them what they want. I daresay the contracts have been given, or earmarked, for the usual cronies of the Establishment. The BN behaves as a runaway train, threatening all and sundry who tries to stop, insisting, to mix metaphors, like lemmings into disaster. The two state assemblymen must be punished. The BN will not be second-guessed. Not when there are lucrative contracts to be given.

The Multimedia Super Corridor is not what it proclaims. Its hopes and intentions, in the hands of the bureaucrat and cronies of the Establishment ensured it. Many high technology projects it started failed, running into debt of hundreds of millions of ringgit. No one talks of it, least of all he who wanted it to show Malaysia can be at the cutting edge of technology, the Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Mahathir Mohamed. So frustrated he is at it that he visited Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka states in India, where modest computer cities packed with solid professionals have the world beating to its doors. In India, the best talent is sought; in Malaysia, the mediocre backed by a money-man crony who wants the quickest possible return. A high technology film village costing tens of hundreds of millions of ringgit is planned, the money now gone, the village back to the jungle it once was, and abandoned. One in Andhra Pradesh, built quietly and by a business man, mints money. A well-regarded high talent advisory board advises the Prime Minister on the MSC, but besides giving them a free trip to Malaysia several times a year, little is achieved. It failes because it revolves around Dr Mahathir. No one else seems to be interested, or is allowed to hog the headlines. And he retires next year.

Ummi Hafilda's entry into the race is proof yet of the empire striking back. She is the vanguard of the barbarians at the gate who has climbed the walls into the city to spread her mayhem where she can. It upsets many in UMNO she is a candidate. But that she did is the accumulated dissonance within Malay and, to a lesser extent, Malaysian, society. She is the trailblazer of the modern reincarnation of the Visigoths that laid Rome to waste, a barbarian out to shake the complacency of the status quo. She came into the race precisely to shake up the Establishment, intent upon protecting the status quo from within. Ummi Hafilda is a rank outsider, even a figure of fun, but she frightens the Establishment. She charges into the race with a demand for justice for the man she helped destroy, but she is believed precisely because of this desire for a change that would not be allowed. She has become a proxy in the eternal battle for the Malay feudal mind, the one UMNO lost when its leader humiliated an UMNO chieftain, and threw UMNO into a tailspin. That is why, in this race, she is a bigger figure than she could ever be.

Both delivered judgements they have cause now to regret. Justice was not what they dispensed, nor the law, but punishment to any the Establishment decided should be. Dato' Gopal Sri Ram has a brilliant mind but flawed for his occasional (deliberate?) misuse of it, as an advocate and solicitor and as Court of Appeal judge. He has delivered some judgements that would stand the test of time in the annals of justice, but he has penned some he should be ashamed of. Dato' Nathan, on the other hand, ascended the Bench with no aim but to rout the enemies of the Establishment as he saw it. He cannot run away from that. He turned out in time, especially in Penang, to be a judge of some substance. But he too had skeletons in his cupboard which come up on appeal.

To be one of the Establishment is open sesame to untold wealth and debt. Many are chosen but few are called. Those who are not see themselves as failures, though they may be as wealthy as those who make it. They have a short shelf-life. It does not matter. A poor man dreaming of wealth only wants it, does not concern himself with losing it afterwards. The gold fish bowl is sufficient reward for him. How do you get in? One crony had an instant answer to any outlandish and outrageous demand of the Prime Minister: Can Do. He cannot do, but did that matter? He experience is limited to lorry driving, bankruptcies, and smooth talk. It did not prevent him from landing the largest public works project in South East Asia, and failing. Another forged business ties with the Prime Minister's brothers-in-law, and became the unrivalled self-proclaimed international business man of unquestioned repute. He did not complete what he was given, built up a huge portfolio of unrepayable debt, has his companies taken over by the government agency to rescue cronies, Danaharta.

IF THERE IS ONE thing wrong with the just concluded conference, "Malaysian Indians in the New Millennium", it is that almost every speaker barked up the wrong tree. There was hardly any seriousness in what they spoke, as if they had only one aim in mind: be taken seriously by the political Establishment -- UMNO and the National Front (BN), if not the MIC -- and be pole vaulted into the political hierarchy.

What the Prime Minister and his cabinet reflect in their irrelevant and self-fulfilling prophecies and homilies is to affirm it. There is no critical thinking on how to arrest this decline into the Third World. The Prime Minister and other government leaders, I suspect, know not how to reverse the trend. And every one else, especially business men and cronies of the Establishment look to see how quickly they can transfer their ill-gotten gains to safe havens elsewhere in the world. More than one cabinet minister I know have permanent residence and Western countries. When the lease of Malaysia Hall in London ran out two years ago, it was bought up by a crony of the Establishment using an offshore company, no doubt to be leased back to the Malaysian Government at a profit a few years down the road.

A fugitive from justice would not get such publicity as Dato' Soh basks in. He is in his view a business man wronged though every aspect of his businesses is no different from the cronies and courtiers of the Establishment. Like every crony, he has nothing to show for his wealth except the money stashed away and the unrepayable and huge bank loans. The only difference between him and that international business men of unquestioned repute is that the latter made it to be a crony. Otherwise, they are birds of a feather. He desperately wants to return to try his luck again, and he is brought in to knock Dr Ling off his perch. He has more help than he realises. Except for The Star, every mainstream newspaper highlights his criticism of Dr Ling. He is a suicide bomber in the tradition of the Sri Lankan and Palestinian, only in Malaysia, he could, at worst, expect a prison sentence but that only if he fails.

Establishment cronies are there to plunder and be plundered at will. They also are expendable and disappear into the woodwork as fast as they shot into the mainstream of Malaysian business. This Tan Sri Tajudin Ramli forgot. And pays the price. He was unlucky to be crony to the former finance minister, Tun Daim Zainuddin, who sequestrated UMNO and other assets through cronies, that he is now held to account. He cannot account for the UMNO and other funds in his care, and resigned as finance minister and UMNO treasurer rather than own up to what happened. He had absolute control of Malaysia's fiscal and economic policy. And, it seems, took full advantage. This put the Prime Minister (and UMNO president) in a spot. He protected Tun Daim, and it was he, not Tun Daim, who placated the UMNO supreme council that all would be accounted for. To his horror, the Tun resigned instead. He offers to pay up, but cannot produce the accounts. A deal is made. But it is paltry to what UMNO supreme council was led to expect. That is where Tan Sri Tajudin's travails begin. As of others like Dato' Annuar Musa.

This failures we are now told is proof of privatisation's unqualified success. The National Economic Action Council executive director, Dato' Mustapha Mohamed, says the government's takeover of several major companies is not proof enough privatisation has failed. It is bad management that caused it. The irony of what he says escapes him. If people given the privatised companies, all of whom cronies of the Establishment, cannot run it because they do not know how or run it to the ground, he believes it is proof that it is a success. And he is the man who makes pronouncements on Malaysia's economy on behalf of the government. Besides, he was also finance minister (one of two) until his electors in Kelantan decided to retire him from politics in 1999. He is a Daim crony for whom Dr Mahathir has more than a soft spot. In office, he was well-regarded, and even his detractors admit he did a good job. World Bank officials have told me that they welcomed his appearances, for he came well prepared, and could hold his ground, as many BN ministers cannot.

A non-Malay automatically assumes he is a lesser animal, disallowed in group activities except in extreme circumstances, to only survive as individuals not as from the community he hails from. If they work on their own, they can be as brilliant as anyone. He is at risk the moment he joins a partnership or a formal organisation. It does not matter who they are: cardiac surgeons, civil engineers, architects, mathematicians. Many give up the ghost and migrate. For they face an officially sanctioned handicap which penalises them for being good. Unless he is accepted as a crony of the Establishment.

What should be important is not funny pieces of paper we are over the years forced to sign -- the Rukun Negara; Leadership by Example; the Clean, Efficient and Trustworthy campaign, to name just three, and extinct as the dodo -- but the social contract the BN promised in its elections campaigns. That it jettisons the moment it is returned, insist it could do as it liked, without Parliamentary oversight, cheerfully leading the country in bankruptcy, but any who challenges it are traitors. So the cronies of the Establishment makes hay and the people pay for it. The debris and detritus of this -- MAS, MBSB, Renong, UEM, Berjaya, Ekran, Perwaja, the Bakun Dam, the privatised highways, the building of Putra Jaya, KLIA, the F-1 motor racing circuit, to name a few -- amplifies the BN government's disdain for its own election promises of a fair deal for Malaysians.

But the BN, without a principled opposition and perhaps because of it, severed its social contract with the electorate. No where is it clearer than how it mollycoddles the cronies of the Establishment, often at the expense of the people. It shortcircuited the legislative process so many projects are outside Parliamentary oversight -- and it is those which lands the country in unrepayable debt. If you take the top ten crony companies, they would have debts of more than RM100 billion. The government writes off the debt and hands the companies back to those who caused the debts to run it again into further debt. We are not told how much this sets the country back, but we see some gleamings of it when the companies run into trouble. The companies said to be under the control of the former finance minister, Tun Daim Zainuddin, were the largest debtor; just one country, Renong Bhd, had RM30 billion in debt.

The United States would not back down -- as Malaysia should not if the tables are turned. But, if Kuala Lumpur did not know already, Washington has a measure of Malaysia which is less than favourable. We desperately seek Washington's approval for everything we do; and sulk when we do not; or Washington takes a contrary view. Malaysia has not got over official Washington's sympathy for Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim. When the US ambassador, Mrs Marie T. Huhtala, put Malaysia on notice over the Anwar appeal against conviction and sentence, it sent a chill down the Establishment necks. The prime minister jumped on President Bush's war on terror, but he gets no where near the support his nemesis has in official Washington. There is one reason for it: he worked hard at it, as Dr Mahathir did not. Creating spurious issues like the two Malaysian Malays barred from the United Sates is not about to change present attitudes in Washington. Even if every Malay visiting the United States faces no hassle with US immigration.

Malaysia has more Enrons (or Renongs) in its corporate armour than it can handle. Every one is linked to the government. The special government agencies like Danaharta are created to rescue them and them alone, not the corporate sector at large. Only cronies of the Establishment and their companies qualify. In the United States, there is at least an attempt to put matters right when a scandal like Enron throws the country out of gear. In Malaysia, no one, not even MPs would raise the matter. The government does not want it discussed. And so it is. Parliament is never told, let alone given the right to question, ministers about such financial disasters.

The Indah Water Konsortium, to which was privatised the right to operate the country's sewage systems, is back in the news. The two Establishment cronies who operated it in succession racked up losses so high and without a system to operate it that the government took it over. Now a third group, in which a former cabinet minister, Tan Sri Megat Junid Megat Ayob, is the key crony, is given a letter of intent; but it also has a former Anwar Ibrahim comrade-in-arms suggests other political developments though he has nothing to do with the mess this new group is ladled with. Two failures, and one more in the offing. All was set, and the government was to have announced it. But it cannot. The cabinet suddenly got an attack of clarity and integrity and desired know from those who made the decision why they believed that after two failures, this would succeed. And getting no answers, it refused to approve. Those who thought it would provide them with million-ringgit Mercedes Benzes and BMWs must now wait longer.

The Sun Media Corporation is in the corporate stable of that internationally known business man of unquestioned repute, Tan Sri Dato' Seri Vincent Tan, who returns as a favoured crony of the Establishment and UMNO. He failed to make privatised sewage pay, and the government had to take it back; his business empire, with debts of more than RM4 billion, would have to be rescued, and yet he is to be awarded another another privatisation of which his share is worth up to RM3 billion.

Kuala Lumpur International Airport is one many an airport faced with too many passengers in cramped confines drool. It would ease air traffic woes if it were in Bangkok or Manila. But it is in Sepang, built to rival Changi and Hongkong, only to see it rival Kuching. For it was built in haste for no reason but to enrich the cronies of the Establishment, and built for no reason than ego. It was to put Malaysia on the map, to cock a snook at Singapore and others which have a view of Singapore best not said in genteel company.

You joined a plan with Touch 'nGo to allow unfettered access through regular transfer of money from your credit card? Well, it is, as bureacrats would say, inoperative. If the limit runs down, you must waste time by queueing up at toll gates to top up; at other times, Touch 'nGo has set up places where you can automatically reload at inconvenient places throughout the Klang Valley and elsewhere. I have since learnt that Touch 'nGo suspended its Auto Reload plan because its consultants, whose sole qualification is his closeness to the Establishment, are mere commission agents hawking the consultancy to the highest bidder. So, Touch 'nGo put in place a "state-of-the-art" system meant for no purpose than to rip it off.

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