Friday, July 11, 2008

PAS-UMNO in negotiations?


PAS president Hadi Awang has admitted that the two parties have met, saying the Islamist party had the right to do so. Saying PAS was the biggest party in the Pakatan Rakyat, Hadi said the party should not be marginalised. There been long been talk that the two parties have been talking although some leaders have denied. Speculations about the two parties began after the March 8 elections. The discussions were said to centre around Muslim unity. This is the first time a top PAS leader has admitted. Hadi has been quoted as saying that while DAP won in Chinese areas, the MCA and MIC candidates won in Malay areas, thus eroding Muslim representation, see Mstar for the rest of story, which it picked from Harakah today.

23 comments:

Anonymous said...

While PAS is seen to be very caring and sensitive to non-Muslims but deep down, they just want to take over the country and carry out its Islamic State agenda. I will "fight" for a democratic Malaysia and Malaysian Malaysia till my dying breath. No non-Muslims should by bound by any religious laws of a certain faith!

Anonymous said...

The rhetoric of "Ketuanan Melayu" yet again but this time, much more subtle!

wuzzup said...

what are they negotiating about? merging? crossing over? Wonder how the other PR members are reacting to this.

http://www.whatsupmalaysia.blogspot.com

Anonymous said...

History tell us that the PR collusion will not last.

Anonymous said...

dato' bro,

umno and pas can never work together in many aspects. yes, they are muslims but both facing different horizons. we have iran and iraq as co-muslim but they entered wars for 8 years. sudan and chad, too, are faded with similar problems.

we may breed few species of fish but not all can browse together. even we cant put 2 flowerhorns in 1 aquarium!

right?

amoker said...

Yes, Ketuanan Melayu.

Read Kit Siang's article sent to him on BTN... using tax payer's money for racial propogranda.

Anonymous said...

What??? PAS joint UMNO or UMNO joining PAS? Can it happen? What name they going to carry? Oh... yes... mabe they call themselves PASUMBOR!

crower said...

1. If PAS were to walk away from Pakatan, love it or hate it, it would mean a serious blow to Pakatan as PAS influence's in terms of supporters cannot be denied.

2. The thing is with PAS, you can expect the unexpected.

Anonymous said...

Money as Debt

August 24, 2007
by Carolyn Baker

Anyone who hasn't watched "Money As Debt," an animated DVD by Paul Grignon, should consider purchasing this extraordinary explanation of money's origin in an economy totally dependent on debt. Almost everyone has seen footage of federal printing presses cranking out paper money, and some of us have even visited a government mint or two and have observed the process firsthand. But like so many other illusions with which the U.S. economy is replete, money is not created by government printing presses.

During the first few minutes of "Money As Debt" I began feeling my eyes glazing over in anticipation that I would soon begin viewing photo footage instead of animation. I then realized that I, like the masses of Americans who demand that every video experience provide them with entertainment, was unconsciously holding the same expectation. I then promptly hit the rewind button and started over, this time listening and watching attentively.

"Money As Debt" is not entertainment-far from it. The film offers amazingly elementary facts about the creation of money in the United States, narrated by a soothing voice, which could make for a bland presentation, yet the film's message is anything but vapid. In fact, if it doesn't leave your blood boiling, it behooves you to check your vital signs.

Beginning with the most fundamental question of all, Grignon asks: Where does money come from? The answer to this question will almost never be found in grammar school-or even college. What we aren't told in formal education is that money is created by central banks.

Banks create money, not from their own earnings or from the funds deposited by customers, but from the borrowers' promises to repay loans. Most importantly, borrowers not only promise to repay, but to repay with interest, and the bank writes the amount of money of both into the borrower's account.

Grignon opens with a story from antiquity. In the days before paper money, goldsmiths produced gold coins and kept them safe for the purchaser in the same way that banks hold deposits today. These goldsmiths soon noticed, however, that purchasers rarely came in for their actual gold and almost never all at the same time. So the gold merchants began issuing claim checks for the gold which made the exchange of gold in the marketplace easier and less cumbersome. Thus, paper money was born which made doing business much more convenient.

Eventually, goldsmiths began loaning money to customers and charging interest on the loans, and borrowers began asking for their loans in the form of claim checks. The goldsmith shared interest earnings with depositors, but since no one actually knew how much gold he was holding, he got the idea that he could lend out claim checks on gold that wasn't actually there and soon started becoming enormously wealthy from the interest paid on gold that didn't exist.

Thus began the power to create money out of nothing, but it wasn't long before bank runs began, and banking regulations evolved regarding how much money could be lent out. However, the regulations allowed a ratio of 9 to 1-that is, banks could lend out 9 times the amount of the deposits that were already there. This policy has come to be known as Fractional Reserve Banking. Regulation also arranged for central banks to support local banks with emergency infusions of gold, and only if there were many runs at once would the system crash.

Fast forward to 1913 when that so-called progressive president, Woodrow Wilson, signed into law the Federal Reserve Act which created the banking cartel now in charge of America's money system.

For those who have not seen Aaron Russo's DVD "Freedom To Fascism" - run, don't walk to see or purchase it. It is required viewing for understanding the Federal Reserve System and the power it has over the U.S economy and over our individual lives. Very few Americans know how money is created and even fewer know how the Fed originated and what it actually does. Does anyone really believe this is an "accident"? As the media guru Marshall McLuhan is reported to have said, "Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity."

Whereas U.S. paper currency used to be backed by gold, that is no longer the case, and we have instead a fiat currency backed by nothing except the word of the Federal Reserve that the money is worth its stated value. Moreover, money today is created as debt, that is, money is created whenever anyone takes a loan from a bank. In fact, every deposit becomes a potential for a loan-a process which can be and is repeated many times, ultimately creating infinite amounts of money from debt.

Whereas the 9 to 1 ratio reigned at the beginning of banking regulation, today in some banks, ratios are as high as 20 to 1 or 30 to 1, and frighteningly, some banks have no reserves at all!

The bottom line is that banks can create as much money as we can borrow!

(Article Continues Below)

One wonders how individuals, banks, governments, and other entities can all be in debt at the same time, owing astronomical amounts of money. This question is answered when we consider that banks don't lend actual money; they create it from debt, and since debt is potentially unlimited, so is the supply of money.

But what is so wrong with this scheme? Hasn't it been working all these years? Actually, there are several things very wrong with it.

The first issue is that the people who produce the real wealth in the society are in debt to those who lend out the money in that society. Moreover, if there were no debt, there would be no money.

Most of us have been taught that paying our debts responsibly is good for ourselves and for the economy. We imagine that if all debts were paid off, the economy would improve. In terms of individual debt, that's true, but in terms of the overall economy, the exact opposite is true. We are continually dependent on bank credit for money to be in existence-bank credit which supplies loans. Loans and money supply are inextricably connected, and during the Great Depression, the supply of money plummeted as the supply of loans dried up.

Secondly, banks only create the amount of the principal of loan. So where does the money come from to pay the interest? From the general economy's money supply, most of which has been created in the same way.

A visual image is helpful. Imagine two pools of water-one full and one empty. The pool with water in it represents the amount of the principal of a loan; the empty pool represents principal plus interest. The pool of principal has only a certain amount of water in it, so that it can't possibly fill up the other pool of principal plus interest. The rest of the water needed to fill the pool doesn't actually exist and has to be acquired from somewhere.

The problem is that for long-term loans, the interest far exceeds the principal, so unless a lot of money is created to pay the interest, a lot of foreclosures will result. In order to maintain a functional society, the foreclosure rate must be low, so more and more debt must be created which means that more and more interest is created, resulting in a vicious and escalating spiral of indebtedness.

Furthermore, it is only the lag time between the time money is created to the time debt is repaid that keeps the overall shortage of money from catching up and bankrupting the entire system. It takes only a few second of reading the headlines of the financial pages during this month, August, 2007, to notice that foreclosure rates and lag time are threatening to meltdown the entire U.S. economy. The preferred method of the Federal Reserve and central banks addressing this calamity is, yes, you guessed it: to create more debt. The lowering of interest rates in recent years, the bombardment of credit card applications we find regularly in our mailboxes, the red ink in which the United States government is drowning are all an attempt to stave off the collapse of the entire system.

Can any sane human being believe that this situation can persist forever? What is the inevitable outcome of a fiduciary game of musical chairs? Monetary historian, Andrew Gause, answered this question:

One thing to realize about our fractional reserve banking system is that, like a child's game of musical chairs, as long as the music is playing, there are no losers.

And finally, a system based on fractional reserve banking is, to say the least, not sustainable because it is predicated on incessant growth. Perpetual growth requires perpetual use of resources and the constant conversion of precious resources into garbage just to keep the system from collapsing.

Grignon suggests that in order to begin addressing and resolving the nightmare of money as debt, we must ask four pivotal questions:

1) Why do governments choose to borrow money from private banks at interest when governments could create all the interest-free money they need themselves?

2) Why create money as debt at all? Why not create money that circulates permanently and doesn't have to be perpetually re-borrowed in interest?

3) How can a money system, dependent on perpetual growth, be used to build a sustainable economy? Perpetual growth and sustainability are fundamentally incompatible.

4) What is it about our current system that makes it totally dependent on perpetual growth? What needs to be changed to allow the creation of a sustainable economy?

A crucial assumption that must be questioned is the practice of usury or the charging of interest for lending money. Grignon asserts that it is a moral and a practical issue because it necessarily results in lenders ending up with all the money, particularly when foreclosures happen. Not only is debt deplorably profitable for lenders in terms of interest and service charges, but when borrowers cannot pay, as in the case of housing foreclosures, lenders walk away with the proceeds. In a recent article "Panic On Wall St.", Andrew Leonard explains how obscenely advantageous subprime and liar loans have been for lenders and provides damning evidence to support the long-time assertions by Catherine Austin Fitts that the housing bubble has been engineered by centralized financial systems.

In a transformed economy, which I do not anticipate happening in the twenty-first century, banks would exist as non-profit services to society-lending without charging interest at all. But, as Grignon says, if it's the fundamental nature of the system that's causing the problem, then tinkering with the system can't solve the problem. It must be replaced.

One solution might be the replacement of paper dollars with precious metals, which of course, could once again become cumbersome and inconvenient, unless the economic system had experienced collapse and digital and paper transactions were no longer possible.

Perhaps the best solution offered by "Money As Debt" is the creation of locally-based barter money systems in which debt is repaid by hours of work valued at a dollar figure. Additionally, government spending on infrastructure, not using borrowed money, would also create value locally and nationally.

The Federal Reserve banking cartel has been shrouded in secrecy and lack of information among the American people regarding its creation and functioning. One American president appeared to have understood it very well:

Whoever controls the volume of money in our country is absolute master of all industry and commerce...when you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate.

~James Garfield, 20th President
Assassinated, 1881

"Money As Debt" is not only a must-see for any American who wants to be politically and economically literate, but is particularly crucial for high school and college students to see in order for them to understand how the money works in the United States. Yet we should not assume that the film's simplicity of presentation ranks it as less than adult because most adults in this nation are clueless regarding the connection between money and debt.

I personally hold no hope of changing the money/debt system which is truly the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the American economic landscape. What I do envision, and what must happen, in my opinion, is its total collapse, whether gradual or sudden, so that the transformation and relocalization of the nation's economic system will be possible, which it is not in the current milieu. However, what we are presently witnessing in the bursting housing bubble and credit crisis may well be the beginning of the end of "money as debt."

Anonymous said...

This is the problem with PAS, a treacherous hive of scum and villainy.

At least UMNO is open and transparent about screwing the nons. PAS preaches honey but then delivers mold.

Anonymous said...

PAS and UMNO cannot work together. That had been proven.
PAS is making apparent moves to talk to UMNO as a negotiating techique to wrench more out of their Pakatan partners. They are using this technique to squeeze PKR balls.

Anonymous said...

I hope that malaysia's sake they also discussed how they were going to deal with life with petrol selling at RM$25 (or Australian $8.00) per litre in the next few years. That figure is from CSIRO, the Australian Govt research organisation. It won't do if PAS thinks that it can just look it up in their holy scriptures or UMNO can squeeze their (mostly Ali-Baba) towkay partners for a bigger cut to deal with that sort of price.
Ah Lee.
What about the rest of us.

Anonymous said...

After reading the article and letting it digest, it becomes apparent tha an alternative is already there but shrouded in religeous scancity.Read "Intrest is forbidden"...perhaps the Almighty knew the woes 2 thousand years ago for mankind to only discover it now.

Unknown said...

It is laughable to think that PAS joining UMNO will not have repercussions within Barisan Nasional itself. What will the other component parties do? Stand idly by and let PAS enter BN..maybe all the component parties will quit BN and join PR instead, then we can see who gets to form the next government!

Anonymous said...

to anon 1:46PM.

the fight you asked for, is a fight you will lose.

as long as you are a minority, what u feel now, is forever.

but hey, in malaysia, you still can buy land and houses, right to vote, right to voice your dissatisfaction, right to practice you religion, right to contest in GE and others.

what PAS and UMNO did, is for the sake of the majority. If no peace within the majority, how on earth the minority can live in this beautiful country?

from umno moden

Anonymous said...

PAS leaders need to have their otak examined. When they were partners with UMNO, they were treated as subservients, just like the MCA, MIC, etc. On their own,all they had was Kelantan. With DAP and PKR as partners, they got Kelantan and Kedah, and even an MB position in Kelantan. If they go partner with UMNO again, PAS will just go back to having Kelantan only again. And also becomes UMNO's lapdog as well.
PENANG BOY

BlueMoon said...

If Gerakan members are now very happy working with DAP, then there's nothing wrong with PAS collaborating with UMNO. Rightfully UMNO and PAS should have been working together. PKR is more confortable with DAP because both share common interest - Malaysia Malaysians. Unfortunatley PAS does share not this ideology as this party has different agenda. In fact Gerakan has lot more in common with DAP and PKR then PAS do. So it's only logial that Gerakan replaces PAS in PR.

Anonymous said...

PAS stupidity again! What can you expect from people who graduate from pondok schools, where their students are rejects from normal schools? PAS' role model country is Afghanistan, and their heroes are the Talibans. The only constants from PAS us their ability to keep doing stupid things to make Malaysia a laughing stock.

Dr Tang Weng Heng said...

PAS to join UMNO-led BN?

http://tangwengheng.blogspot.com/2008/06/pas-to-join-umno-led-bn.html

It started with the call by some of the PAS leaders in Selangor urging the state government to start ‘Islamising’ the public space of Selangor and promoting faith and piety among the Muslims of the state. Then came the calls by PAS Youth leaders to start Islamising the five states whose assemblies are under the control of the PR, with Kelantan to serve as the model.


It was met by Tony Pua's caution that continued and increased lobbying by PAS leaders for implementation of such laws will at some point make Pakatan Rakyat coalition untenable. However, Sultan of Selangor's timely "advice" should temporarily halt the PAS leaders' Islamisation calls.

Meanwhile, SAPP is going ahead with a no confidence motion against PM AAB. Farish Noor has discussed about the possibility of PAS hop-over to UMNO/BN should the PR be successful in winning over more MPs from East Malaysia or the non-Malay component parties of the BN.


As a matter of fact, UMNO’s posters with slogans like ‘If you want to really promote Islam, then join the BN/UMNO’ had been put up during the General Election campaign. Since March there has been speculation about PAS leaders being negotiations with UMNO.

Farish Noor opined that were this to happen, it would spell disaster for Malaysia, further splitting the country along racial and religious lines. He further urged the young 'Turks' in PAS to listen to the wise words of their spiritual leader, Tuan Guru Nik Aziz Nik Mat not to "fall into the trap of UMNO/BN".

Anonymous said...

Gerakan is not a significant player anymore. Slowly dying, but their members should start thinking where they want to enrol themselves (or to quit politics altogether), whether it be DAP, PKR or MCA. It is better for MCA to team up with PKR & DAP. Although MCA got a beating at the GE2008, the MCA membership is still very big, and the party has strong financial backers.
PULAU TIKUS KID

Anonymous said...

PAS share the same culture as the Talibans, their heroes. Given half the chance, PAS will implement whipping for women who are caught with guys unescorted by relatives.
APS would make all women wear burqas and ban the beautiful sarong kebaya. PAS would insist that women go swimming wearing head to toe robes and burqas, and only in women-only swimming pools.
PAS culture is therefore in conflict with UMNO culture. UMNO leaders and members are often seen frequenting night clubs, girlie KTV, and are also known to pinch women's bottoms after too much wine. UMNO leaders send their kids to study in UK,USA, Australia or France. But UMNO leaders will most likely send their kids to Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi, or some middle east country. PAS parents send their kids to pondok schools, and learn arabic, while UMNO parents send their kids to private international schools using English medium of instrucution. So how can PAS and UMNO get along?

Anonymous said...

What is it with the Malays that always think that the whole world is against them?

How can we make them understand that they are the masters of the land by their sheer numbers and it will continue this way if reproductive rates of the various races are anything to go by.

How can we non-Malays make them understand that we are not that stupid to challenge their place?

All we are asking for is fair-play and a right to belong to the only country we know, a land of our birth. Is that asking too much?

If there are any fair-minded Malays here reading this blog, please, please don't treat us as your enemy.

Your enemy are those of the same race as you, those who disguise themselves as the 'all-knowing protectors'.

Protectors of what? Protection of their own self interests at the expense of others, irrespective of race, religion and gender.

Unless you are connected by 'cables', even you the Malays are as excluded as we the minorities are!

To all fair-minded and non-partisan Malays reading this blog. Help us please, not to challenge your place under the Malaysian sun but to clear the clouds that will prevent the sun from shining down on all of us MALAYSIANS.

Anonymous said...

yo people
don't get too carried out by reports from main stream media. I thought we should know better by know to not believe most of the reports they brought to us right? Try read www.harakahdaily.net to know PAS' side of the story.

And by the way...a lot of people think that PAS members and committees only come from pondok schools or middle east institutions. In actual fact, PAS have members of many different backgrounds, uni students, oversea graduates, professionals, doctors, lawyers, successful businessman etc. You can run the background check on PAS' MPs and candidates and you'll be surprised to know they have more merit than many other politicians from other parties.MB Nizar is one example, but there are many2 more. And no, they don't have any 'cables' etc unlike UMNO members.So please don't think that PAS is a narrow-minded party..a lot of its members today are modern & progressive, though they are still God-fearing people (which means they can be liberal and all but not to the level of UMNO which corrupts everything for their own interest). But of course, human are still human. But like I said..before we make any assumptions, listen to their side of story first. And before we can condemn or judge people, get to know them first. Fear of unknown causes us to discriminate peopla and make our own (flawed) assumptions