Or words to that effect

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Was it Michael Falzon who insisted that we do not call an amnesty an amnesty? You know that measure being touted by the Taghna Lkoll government whereby any environmental and planning injustices can be righted by the payment of a proportionally small fine? Well he wants us to call it a fine or something like that – but not an amnesty. Because words have effects – and Labour bloody well knows that.

Which is why Prime Minister Muscat, a master of obfuscation, has thrown this pile of peppered bull about hospitals, investments and Queens Mary (sic) into our face in a brilliant mish-mash that would make Lewis Carroll proud. It did not take an investigative genius to see through the intentional misdirections this time round. The moment I heard the news I googled Barts (and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry). There, on their web pages I came across the information that the school was moving to a magnificent new hospital after 40 years.

Located in London, the school had cost a stunning 100 million pounds sterling – and it had taken them forty years to raise that amount of cash and make that move. Why then would Barts (or QMUL) be suddenly spending close to 200 million euros to open a school in Gozo?

Well it isn’t. The two pieces of news are separate. The first, an agreement to set up a medical school in Malta, had been signed a year ago by Godfrey Farrugia before he was hounded out of his ministry to be replaced by Konrad of the Many Promises and of the Wife On Public Payroll. Yesterday was the moment that agreement came to fruition.

The second is an attempt to get the private sector to invest 200 million euros to upgrade the Gozo (Craig) Hospital and Saint Luke’s Hospital. Muscat’s government once again shows a non-socialist approach to the management of public assets. Nothing wrong there – attracting private investment while still guaranteeing free public services is laudable. Of course the private sector will want their moneys’ worth so expect the use of such extensions for private purposes (two-tier public/private services). Also expect possible abuses if left to their own devices.

Another suprising element about this move is that Labour is replicating a move suggested by the PN government a good while back – when Mater Dei was still in the pipeline as San Raffaele and there was a public-private proposal that was gunned down by heavy Labour opposition.

Back to the word games though. Muscat deliberately plays on confusion – and is hoping this stunt about “investment in Gozo” will return the right dividends come the local elections on April 11th. You can bet your last dollar that any criticism such as this one regarding the deliberate confusion will be shot down with “mhux xorta investiment?” which is definitely not the point.

Our Prime Minister continues to prove himself to be a master of deceit and manipulation. Will the public go along once again?

#maltaottimista #maltamazzuna

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The Infamous Vote

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It’s great that people like Joseph Calleja, the Archbishop and other ‘VIPs’ such as Vanni Bonello have lent their support to the “NO” vote. I do find it a little disturbing though that there have been calls from some quarters for more “famous” people to “come out” and proclaim that they too will be voting to ban spring hunting on the 11th April. This referendum offers very little openings in terms of debate and conviction. The battle lines were drawn at an early stage and quite frankly I don’t believe that there are many people who need to be convinced either way. Convinced in favour or against hunting that is.

The crucial part is probably actually getting people to the ballot and voting. Getting them to care. In a sense that is the only value we could give to this obsession with what “VIPs” will do. It might trigger the lazy and uninterested into going out there and casting their say. Both the YES and NO camps have tried their luck with the fear factor. The NO campaign has warned of the dire consequences of a YES victory – with the images of cowboys taking over the land having been convinced that nothing will stop them now. The YES campaign has found a very convincing element in its fear-inducing threat to other “hobbies”. By spreading the lie that next on the line will be such hobbies as firework production they seem to have managed to draw what would have been a wholly uninterested sector of the population to the polls.

It’s no mean point that the expat community is once again being “treated” to the AirMalta subvention. Exercising your right to cast your opinion on Referendum Day costs your average expat 70€ (the flight), a couple of days leave, and if like me you live a 2 hours drive from the nearest airport you also can factor in the costs of diesel/petrol plus an exorbitant airport parking fee. All this because our bastions of democracy and democratic accountability still have not wrapped their heads around the idea of a ballot in embassies as all First World Democracies tend to do nowadays. Still, every penny will be well spent in my case if the NO vote carries the day.

If they do carry the day we must still bear in mind that this is a political message to the parties more than anything else. Parliamentary rules and the EU acquis are here to stay – no matter what the result – and that means that the possibility of using the derogation in the future will still exist. Which is why the NO vote should be stronger than ever. It must be a clear message to pussy-footing politicians such as those who make up the present government and who have already set the wheels in motion for the next spring hunting season (in case the YES wins).

You don’t have to be famous to vote on April 11th but by going out and voting you could be making history for Malta.

Vote wisely. Vote No.

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Passport Kings and Joseph

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An article published on Bloomberg on March 11th speaks about Christian Kalin – the Passport King – and how he managed to turn from editor of a guide to doing business in Switzerland to a key figure in the budding passport industry, as well as a main protagonist in the infamous Henley & Partners. The article outlines how Kalin first set up a Passport Selling scheme for the Caribbean island of St. Kitts and then proceeded to sell the formula to five other countries. Including Malta. As has become par for the course under Joseph Muscat’s Labour we find more information here about Malta’s scheme than was ever tabled in parliament by the Optimist Party. The tone of the article and critical analysis of how and why passport schemes will not be lost on most readers.

Particularly jarring is how part of the Henley contract includes an obligation for the Prime Minister of a sovereign state to act as some kind of ambulant salesman and participate in fairs across the globe pitching a sale. Jason Azzopardi is quoted as saying that the scheme “prostitutes citizenship”…. to say nothing about how it insults the whole institution of the office of the Prime Minister  – transformed into a cheap cosmetic salesman: but hey, cosmetic salespersons get somewhere nowadays no? After all  isn’t Phyllis Muscat using her great expertise as an importer of waxing products to “run” the CHOGM show. Malta Ottimista indeed.

From the article: The Passport King (Bloomberg)

In the summer of 2013, Kalin took his product to Malta, an island of 420,000 people near Sicily. The stakes were now much higher. Maltese citizenship confers the right to live and work anywhere in the European Union and to travel visa-free to the U.S. “That’s pretty much the entire story,” says Demetrios Papademetriou, an expert on investor immigration programs and founder of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington.

In January of last year, Malta started selling citizenship for €650,000. (Over the next few months, it added additional investment requirements.) During its first year, the program raised more than €500 million—an amount equal to 16 percent of the government’s 2014 budget. Henley earns a 4 percent commission on all the funds paid to Malta. The firm also gets €70,000 from each of its clients, and additional fees if their spouses or children apply.

Kalin says he designed the program with higher barriers to entry than elsewhere. Applicants are run against law-enforcement databases and checked by a due diligence firm. Even then, a candidate who comes up clean might be rejected simply because something doesn’t feel right, Kalin says, offering the hypothetical example of a Pakistani national with a pharmaceutical business in the Central African Republic.

Despite these apparent safeguards, then–EU justice commissioner Viviane Reding blasted the program in January 2014. “Citizenship must not be up for sale,” she said. The truth is, though, the EU can do little about the program other than make speeches. There’s no legal basis for stopping a member country from exercising its sovereignty. “The reason the EU commission really slammed down on this,” says Papademetriou, “was because it amounted to selling an EU passport and they didn’t trust Malta to do the due diligence.”

Jason Azzopardi, a Maltese lawmaker from the opposition Nationalist Party, calls the program the “prostitution of our citizenship.” He says the prime minister deceived voters by waiting until after being elected in June 2013 to mention the idea of selling passports.

Kalin brushes it all aside. “This is the key point,” he says. “The opposition realizes that this program is going to keep them out of power for a long time. It’s going to bring in a lot of money, and whoever is in office is going to benefit.”

Malta’s Individual Investor Programme was eventually modified to include a residency requirement that is vague even according to the program’s CEO, Jonathan Cardona. “It doesn’t say physical residency,” Cardona says. “We expect an individual to be in Malta for a number of days; we don’t go into the specific number. If you’re asking me, are these people going to move here entirely, I would say, ‘Listen, let’s not fool ourselves.’”

“Forget residency,” says Apex Capital’s Katz. “There’s not even an educational requirement. You don’t have to have graduated high school. The only criteria are you have dough and you’re not a criminal.”

Prime Minister Muscat presents things differently. He describes Malta’s citizenship program as an exclusive membership club open only to the best and brightest of the wealthy. “If you are after the cheapest route to citizenship,” he tells the audience at Henley’s Singapore conference, “Malta is not for you. If you’re after a program that allows in all and sundry, then, sorry again, we’re not for you. But if you want to join the highest-end talent program in the world, we welcome you.”

As the prime minister speaks, a PowerPoint glitch plays an unfortunate trick on him. He’d come onstage after a slide show introducing Henley’s salespeople, the last of whom was blond-haired Christopher Willis, the firm’s rep in St. Kitts. Willis’s giant head shot, next to a map of the Caribbean, is frozen on-screen. It looms over the prime minister’s shoulder the entire time he’s pitching Malta and its better class of citizenship program. However Muscat tries to sell it, nobody watching will be able to forget where it all started.

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Ten

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So You Want To Be A Writer – Charles Bukowski

if it doesn’t come bursting out of you

in spite of everything,
don’t do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it for money or
fame,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don’t do it.
if it’s hard work just thinking about doing it,
don’t do it.
if you’re trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.
if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you’re not ready.

don’t be like so many writers,
don’t be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don’t be dull and boring and
pretentious, don’t be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don’t add to that.
don’t do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don’t do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don’t do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.

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Dix

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– Dès les Considérations inactuelles Nietzsche s’était calmé, il avait compris qu’il n’est pas possible d’infliger au lecteur une quantité exagérée d’idées, qu’il faut composer, lui laisser reprendre son souffle. Vous aussi, dans Vertiges des néologismes, vous avez eu la meme évolution, et ca en fait un livre plus accessible. La différence, c’est qu’après, Nietzsche a continué.

– Je ne suis pas Nietzsche…

(Michel Houellebecq, Soumission)

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Politics, for example

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Yes, Giovanna Debono should resign. Her position in parliament as a representative of the people is untenable so long as her husband is under investigation for abuse of office. The sad truth is that the moment a minister employs his or her spouse or close relatives within their own ministry their position should no longer be tenable. Robert Musumeci, still posing as some kind of visionary for the hypothetical “movement” (that is none other than an opportunistic collection of gravy train riders) believes that we should wait for a “fair hearing”. Musumeci sat for a law degree virtually by correspondence (he will tell you presence at a lecture does not a law student make – which could be true) and regularly suffers from literal reproduction of positivist garbage you would expect from the vast majority of what is regurgitated from university today.

Fair hearing is for the criminally accused. Sure. It has absolutely nothing to do with the recognition of administrative and political responsibility. The basic manual of political representation (let alone constitutional law principles) would tell you that in order to be above reproach a person in political power should not employ close relatives. The assumption being that the mere employment of such relatives is the beginning of the path to abuse of office. It would be hard for someone in Musumeci’s movement to grasp such a concept. Impossible even. The Gozo Minister employs his spouse within his ministry. Our energy minister’s wife was “employed” by this government without so much as a justification and with a contract of employment the terms of which are shrouded in secrecy. Even the Emperor’s (sorry, PM) wife is prone to carving out for herself a role that is nowhere mentioned in the constitution. It would be ok if such a role were not costing money to the electorate. Yet it does.

Back to DebonoGate. There is no doubt in my mind that Debono will join the blacklist of ex-PN ministers tainted with a whiff of corruption – even if Anthony Debono manages to survive the trials and tribulations of a court of justice. Ninu Zammit, Michael Falzon, Giovanna Debono. The “old way” of doing politics that was allegedly swept aside two years to this day is still waiting to be judged. Simon Busuttil’s party will still be answering for this kind of sins for quite some time yet. Incidentally, the PM should take note that he risks becoming an accomplice to covering up any crimes of corruption if he chooses to sit on reports and whistleblower information until when it pays him to cause a fracas and deviate attention from the troubles within his house. Today’s Debono news paid perfectly to help people forget that we should be inaugurating the promised Power Station.

The PLPN way is still very much alive. This blog, born in 2004, has long warned that the system is one that promotes a race to mediocrity and that will constantly produce stories of corruption, nepotism, cronyism and abuse of power. The former PN government’s sins are now being brought to light – and however erred must pay. Muscat’s government has proven only that it is a case of “same, same but different”. In many cases it is even worse because this government that was supposed to herald change is only good at justifying blatant abuses by claiming it is only repeating what was done before – u hallik mill-ottimista. Simon Busuttil is discovering that change is not only about words but also about deeds and that in order to make a difference actions must follow.

It sucks being bang in the middle between two behemoths that struggle to catch up with the twenty-first century. It sucks being so right about what is so wrong with this country. What sucks most is that we seem to never learn.

Today is a three-fold anniversary. Franco Debono turns 41, the labour government turns 2 and Internazionale FC turn 106. It never rains….

In un paese pieno di coglioni ci mancano le palle.

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