Apologies for my absence from Malaysiakini last week, but it would have been impossible to finish my year-end university essays if I’d diverted my attention to the latest antics of the crooked morons in charge of Malaysia.

The most laughable of which, despite some stiff competition since, was surely Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak’s address to the crowd of cretins he wowed at the National Deepavali Open House at City Square, Johor Baru on Nov 9.

What a masterpiece of meretricious mendacity this was, with its urging to Malaysians to “embrace the two fundamentals of harmony”. When it’s as plain as Najib’s pink lips that as far as he and the regime he heads are concerned, harmony is about nothing but harm and money.

Harm and haram money, in fact, considering the plunder is carried out behind a mask of ‘religious’ righteousness. So his sanctimonious urging for “people of all races to... work together in a strong bond of friendship to allow richness of culture to flourish” only served to remind most of us of the fiendishness of the criminal culture under which the regime’s filthy rich flourish.

So much so that pictures of Najib brandishing his briefcase prior to delivering the recent budget inevitably recalled the line from The Godfather that “one guy with a briefcase can steal more than a thousand guys with guns”.

And another frequently-appearing current picture of him obscenely smirking as he holds up a RM20 note is an absolute study in lust for lucre. 

So Najib’s going on in his Deepavali address to urge the Indian community to “continue to strengthen the bond of understanding between the government and the community that was built over the years through ‘nambikei’ (trust)” did little to divert attention from the fact that his regime’s insatiable money-lust is sending the nation steadily bust.

And in case there was any alleged trust left to bust, especially with the long-misused and abused Indian community, even as Najib uttered his honeyed words, Kuala Lumpur City Hall (DBKL) workers were busily demolishing a century-old Hindu temple, presumably for the benefit of some crony developer and his crafty, grafty friends in government.

An atrocity for which Federal Territories Minister Tengku Adnan Tengku Mansor quickly created the alibi that the demolition works were part of a government plan to “beautify” the temple.

However, apparently not content with his lame denial of this glaring example of the regime’s typically talking “harmony” while sparing no harm in pursuit of haram money, the minister denigrated the desecrated structure as “not a proper temple” but just a “shrine”.

Then he proceeded with the clearly false slander that “recently he sent a Hindu priest to the place, and the priest wanted to go to the bathroom... and in the bathroom he found liquor and alcohol, whisky.”

As scandalised as he was by this fictional “abuse” of the temple, however, he professed that his own intentions were pure. “I want to beautify it and make it a tourist attraction, I want to make it like the four-faced Buddha in Thailand,” he said.

Keeping the ‘haram’ money rolling in

Four-faced Buddha or two-faced bodoh balderdash, BN regime big-noters couldn’t care less as long as they bewilder the populace sufficiently to get away with the harm they cause the nation and keep the haram money rolling in.

Another classic example of this tactic recently was the ridiculous claim by Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Shahidan Kassim that an annual expenditure of RM2.2 billion for electric power at the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister’s residences is “among the lowest in the world” for comparable facilities.

Though conceding he had no evidence whatever for his claim, he went on to “explain” that “I believe our spending for the complex is the lowest because of the frugal spending system we have in place there.”

When of course “frugal” would be about the last word to describe spending by Najib and his BN regime except when it comes to those in dire need, like the disabled people whose paltry RM300 per month payments were summarily suspended back in July.

In fact “frantic” might better describe regime spending on its members, cronies and contractors. In fact, having long given new meaning to the “con” in contracting, these crooks are now stressing the “con” in consultant to an outright insulting extent, having paid RM7.2 billion or an average of RM4 million per day to consultantssince 2009.

Naturally with no public accounting to enable anyone to tell how much if indeed any of this expenditure has been legitimate, and how much has been siphoned-off as usual for the criminal enrichment of relatives, friends and all the usual BN blood-suckers.

Then there’s the so far from frugal as to be outright frightening level of spending by Najib on his own grossly and greedily inflated Prime Minister’s Department, whose budget is now even bigger than that of the graft-riddled Defence Ministry.

But perhaps the most notorious example of the nexus of harm and money that passes for “harmony” in BN’s Malaysia is the outrageous proposal to pressure government-linked corporations (GLCs) to prop-up the fortunes of Umno’s very own “newspaper” whose sole purpose is the promotion of racial, religious and political disharmony, the appalling Utusan Malaysia.

Regime ownership and support of this scurrilous rag, along with dominance of the rest of the harm/money machine that passes for the ‘mainstream’ media is a symbol of what massive amounts of whore-money BN needs to spend on keeping enough corrupt journalists, judges, police and other crooks on its side, and on buying enough venal voters to keep itself in power.

In short, however much Najib smarms on about transformation, moderation and harmony, it’s painfully obvious that he and his fellow big-noters in BN, not to mention the regime’s vile rank-and-file, couldn’t care less how much harm they do to Malaysia and their fellow Malaysians as long as there’s lots of haram money up for grabs. And enough of it left unspent and unsquandered to fund yet another fake general election ‘win’ in just over four years’ time.