Thank you for opening up this can of worms. However, what has crawled out are not facts based on irrefutable statistics but emotive anecdotes that appeal to those ruled by their hearts and not their heads.

What indeed are the facts which crooked politicians like Mahathir deliberately choose to ignore? Let me list just a few.

1. Urban poverty cuts across ethnic lines.

2. The urban poor have to struggle everyday to put food on the table (a more exhausting struggle than the one supposedly waged by crooked and immensely wealthy Malay politicians for "race and religion")

3. The urban poor (often clustered in ethnic ghettos) are used as ready vote banks by scheming politicians who view poverty almost always from an ethnic standpoint.

4. The urban poor are deliberately NOT discouraged from having large families by the same conniving politicians

5. The lot of the urban poor seldom improves unlike the wealth of the politicians who champion their cause.

6. The rural urban drift was actively encouraged by myopic extremist politicians who could not stand to see "others owning towns". "Rural Development" always a Federal Ministry since independence, clearly did not cause a reversal or discourage migration while creating economic opportunities in situ.

7. The same ethnically-motivated politicians who neglected urban squalor also encouraged the influx of foreigners into the same ghettos - by looking the other way as the new migrants took over low paying jobs, services and now even retail.