Dean Johns deeply suspicious of safety of Lynas

Dean Johns is deeply suspicious of the safety of Lynas’s rare earth processing plant (LAMP) in Kuantan, Pahang. His main reason – suspicion of Najib Razak’s sincerity given his numerous lies and flip-flops.

Read his take on Lynas and Najib Razak in the article Lynas and the lyin’ ass reproduced here courtesy of Malaysiakini:

Lynas and the lyin' ass

Lynas and the lyin' ass

Dean Johns
11:07AM Feb 29, 2012

As neither a nuclear scientist nor an engineer, I wouldn't have the faintest idea whether the Lynas rare earths processing plant in Gebeng, Pahang, poses a threat to the health of people in the local or even wider community.
But along with the thousands of people who rallied around Malaysia last Sunday in protest against the government's licensing of the plant, and countless others who have expressed their opposition online, I'm deeply suspicious.
For several compelling reasons, the first and most obvious was prompted by the puzzling question of why Lynas wants, or needs to, do its processing in Pahang, Malaysia, rather than back in Western Australia where it mines its raw materials.
Could this be, like the Australian government's court-thwarted attempt to connive with Malaysia's regime to export its asylum-seeker problem offshore, a case of persuading or paying the same Umno/BN whores to tolerate the exposure of Malaysians and their environment to risks from radioactive ores?
It wouldn't be the first time such an atrocity has occurred. In 1982, the then Mahathir-headed Umno/BN government approved the operation by the Japanese-Malaysian joint venture Misubishi Kasel of the Asian Rare Earth (ARE) plant in Bukit Merah, Perak.
Though it persisted for just 10 years before closure by order of the High Court in Ipoh, this gross misadventure proved incalculably costly to the health of workers, residents and their children, and the Umno/BN regime and its media have done their damndest to dim and diminish it in the public memory.

Official obfuscation
A typically disgraceful exercise in official obfuscation that brings me to my principal reason for opposing the operation of the Lynas plant in Pahang: Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak's assurance that it is safe.
Because Najib has shown himself to be such a persistent and indeed pathological liar that only a complete ass would believe a single word he says.
Every time he opens his mouth and sets his lips flapping, he utters such a farrago of falsehoods and asinine attempts to fly in the face of self-evident facts that he's utterly bereft of any shred of credibility.
Every single one of his pronouncements ranging from "I, for one, believe that the Malaysian media is something that we can all be proud of", to his global message that he is a "moderate Muslim leader" working towards "the world's best democracy" is a breathtaking exercise in bare-faced deceit.
For example, he initially denied that he had ever met with the accuser of Anwar Ibrahim in the latter's second trumped-up sodomy case, then later admitted that he had indeed met this person, but added the patently false disclaimer that the young man had approached him for a scholarship.
And on an altogether larger scale of lying, the very slogan on which he has pinned his prime ministership, "1Malaysia. People first, Performance now" is a veritable monstrosity of perjury and hypocrisy.
"1Malaysia", which he and his low-life Israeli and other public relations flacks intend to imply a promise of one nation unified by equality for all Malaysians under the law, is revealed as flagrantly false by Umno/BN's one-eyed news media, mono-racial staffing and stacking of the civil services, sponsorship of race-hate and religious pressure groups, and organised thuggery against opposition ceramah and rallies.
"People first" is revealed as a pack of lies by everything from denial of the truth to the populace by means of a Printing, Presses and Publications Act (PPPA) specifically designed for the purpose of press suppression, spin and censorship in favour of the Umno/BN regime, to massive and systematic plunder of the public purse by regime members and their families and cronies.
As for "Performance now", Najib keeps promising reforms of such gross inequities and injustices as intended by the PPPA, ISA and prohibitions on public assembly, only to replace such laws with fraudulent and even less people-friendly new ones.
And his latest proposed ‘reform' is an even more outrageous example of his fakes. Still attempting to simulate some semblance of credibility in his notoriously false promise of "zero tolerance for corruption", he has promised to give more independence, and thus power, to the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC).
But only on the condition that Malaysian voters help Umno/BN regain a two-thirds parliamentary majority in the next general election.
In other words, Najib is extending his customary "you help me, I help you" bribery of the electorate (a crime that he justified after the Hulu Selangor buy-election with the statement that "we are addressing the genuine needs of the people. We are not buying votes")from the realm of cash to that of changing the constitution.
The trouble is, what Najib is actually promising, "God willing if BN is given a two-thirds mandate in the coming 13^th general election," is the formation of a commission to administer the MACC that "will enjoy the same authority given to the current Police Commission and Education Commission."

No end to fraudulence?
In other words, as I understand this to mean, if the people of Malaysia are happy to hand Umno/BN the two-thirds majority they formerly employed to pass such unconstitutional laws as the PPPA, then the MACC will officially become as politicised and thus pathetically compromised as the nation's police farce and public educational institutions are today.
Is there no end to Najib's falsehood and fraudulence? Apparently not. And there won't be any end to misleadership by this and other lying asses and their associates until the people of Malaysia seize ownership of the false 1Malaysia slogan, imbue it with genuine meaning, turn it to their own advantage and make it come true for themselves and their children.
It's time to rise up as 1Malaysian electorate; to put the people's interests first by finally electing a truly honest, intelligent, enlightened, transparent and progressive government; and to perform this feat if not now, this minute, at the very next opportunity.
In other words, witness the current NFC and MAS scandals, the still-unsolved murders of Altantuya Shaariibuu, Teoh Beng Hock and so many others, plus the high-handed approval of the Lynas plant.
It's time for the Malaysian people to get real with Najib and the entire Umno/BN gang of thieves and goons and liars, and throw them out on their lying asses.

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DEAN JOHNS, after many years in Asia, currently lives with his Malaysian-born wife and daughter in Sydney, where he coaches and mentors writers and authors and practises as a writing therapist. Published books of his columns for Malaysiakini include ‘Mad about Malaysia’, ‘Even Madder about Malaysia’, ‘Missing Malaysia’ and ‘1Malaysia.con’.