Every good cause can gain a victory when the majority of the people are united. The final triumph for the Maltese electorate on 8 March will mean that over the past four years, their efforts to grasp the truth behind questionable motives caused them to understand the urgency of what would happen to their small island if they failed now.
This great patriotic cause to speak now or all will be lost erupted in Malta because finally the people understood that this matter of national importance cannot be decided by individual animosities. Neither can the harmony of partisan cliques weaken national efforts.
Throughout its history, Malta has on different occasions, especially since the 1500s, embarked on a national cause to correct social repression against her people and turn them into proud deeds of great patriotism. In the Great Siege of 1565, the Maltese joined forces with the Knights of the Order of St John to repel an invasion from the Ottoman Empire.
During the French occupation under Napoleon, this proud island assisted by the British navy chased their conquerors away in 1880 and became a colony within the British Empire. In 1964 Malta gained Independence, and Maltese ambitions gave birth to the notion of declaring Malta a republic. In 1971 this miniscule island embarked on a journey that saw it transform itself from a naval base earning foreign aid to an economy of building national entities, educating its future generation in commercial enterprises and the enrichment of its population by encouraging home ownership.
Over the last two PN administrations, the government persuaded this nation to apply and achieve membership of the European Union. Malta’s membership status was confirmed in 2003 and this year adopted all the rules and regulations within the euro zone.
The first five years of EU membership have been filled with volatile propaganda and a national urgency has emerged to stop in its tracks this entanglement in sophism against gullible citizens. In this coming election, Maltese wit will be the frontline of awareness and will march to defeat hypocrisy brought on by years of a manipulated media, greed and corruption, which created a culture of entitlements for a score of crusading spinners in cahoots with an accommodating administration that has bankrupted this island’s assets to retain power at all costs.
Despised Maltese journalists in the island’s English language media are a prime example of everything that is repulsive on a national scale. Exchanging pictures to alienate cosmetic comments has really served to emphasize the transformation between images of a desperate housewife longing for recognition to a contented plump mouthpiece. It’s as if someone without basic needs from Rwanda or Darfur, landed suddenly in the middle of the wheat fields of the Canadian prairies.
Degrading journalism should be registered as a “D Cause of Gabble” that will likely qualify for another hand out from the government’s distribution of funds.
I do not despise this priggish paranoia because it is politically overdone or because it serves as a callous calling within the entitlement circle of this PN administration. But I do detest any harridan who can manipulate truth by reciting Maltese history in old fashion theatrical satire, extremely hypocritical and self-serving to no end. Imitating a hyena that stalks prey while marking territory, over the years it has been profitable to be disgracefully vicious and ravage the country’s carcass to the detriment of the working class and those less fortunate who have fallen below the social safety net.
When journalists on a mission fabricate half-truths and insinuations, they become wit. This same wit emerges periodically to concoct derogatory personal remarks against Dr Sant to obscure this government’s policies of tax, borrow and spend.
Xarabank and Bondiplus
In the last two Where’s Everybody programmes on MTV, which continues to be managed as a national subsidized entity, providing this PN administration with another propaganda machine, it was impressive to watch Dr Sant finally expose his superiority over mediocre media entrepreneurs who have been trading bureaucracy favours for a ride on this government’s tailcoats. Naturally the taxpayers have been footing the bill. The art of Dr Sant’s leadership consisted in consolidating the attention of the Maltese electorate against such adversaries and taking care that nothing will split up that attention. His leadership has the ability to make different opponents appear as if they belonged together in a barrel of rotten apples.
Dr Sant has finally gotten through to the voters who now understand that the horse named Morality rarely got past the post in the last two PN administrations, whereas the nag named Self-Interest always ran a good race in the Maltese political derby.
Keith Micallef of Media Link is selected quite often to question Dr Sant however the situation has become rather pathetic. It seems hardly encouraging to see and hear this same journalist exhibiting the same photo copies over and over again because he refuses to accept that the MLP in administration will find a way to succeed within the EU on the Maltese shipyards. Or the constant boring lament about the total amount of funds Malta stands to collect from the EU.
On the EU agenda questions and discussions of subsidies are a normal procedure. There is the question of Britain’s yearly refund from its EU contributions and the extravagant subsidies that French farmers are allotted.
There are concerns about the subsidies for the Airbus conglomerate.
While it has been announced that Malta’s budget over seven years was e855 million, this country needs a new administration that can authorize a full audit so it can report to the people exactly how much funds Malta will benefit from yearly when the credits and the debits are transparently balanced. After 2013 Malta will be a net contributor and such pertinent questions will be irrelevant.
Are the Maltese people to believe that their little island has become a member of a dictatorial statehood that refuses to listen and be sympathetic towards its members?
Amanda! She looks like a smart and vivacious young Maltese woman, yet it pains me to see someone of this fibre who is so eloquent and ambitious fall into the same pit. Those rosy red cheeks were a dead give away about how uncomfortable and embarrassing those repetitive interruptions felt.
Young people whose integrity has not been damaged in childhood by being protected, respected, and treated with honesty will be intelligent, responsive, empathic, and highly sensitive. They should take pleasure in life and will not feel any need to hurt others. They will use their power to defend not to attack, to respect and protect those weaker than themselves, because this is what they have learned from their own experience.
The thought of acquiring even a smidgen of national integrity in adulthood is better than any career full of political connections and partisan favours.
Last Monday night the Maltese television audience saw Dr Sant tame that pompous Larry King wannabee by proving to the Maltese nation that even a certain brand of investigative reporting has a way of fizzling out when the substance of good journalism is tampered with.
2013
As the vital signs of a stunned nation keep emerging, this time the electorate will choose to do things differently.
Anybody who is within five years of retirement, the working class and especially those below the social safety net will all be in the same compromising position if this country’s management is left unchecked and unaccountable, as they will become the sacrificial lambs of higher taxes, higher rates of inflation and a non-sustainable medical health system, void of social assistance.
The poverty of this new century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon a free market economy devised by the formation of global entrapment. The modern poor in the ageing working class are not reformed but written off as unproductive. The 21st century cashless consumer economy has produced the first debt-ridden culture that look upon those who fall below the social safety net as unworthy credit risks.
If these nuggets of information show anything, it’s just how unhinged and paranoid right wing policies have manipulated the social conscience.
The myth of equality can never become real unless today’s schools, the institutions traditionally called upon to correct social inequality are suited to the task. Without economic opportunity to follow education provided with so much advanced technology and information, a student’s cumulative knowledge will change the ebb tide of what appals and stuns his generation. A change in administration is not only necessary but of the utmost importance because this nation needs to take an inventory of its assets and its resources. It needs a serious and independent audit to balance its ledgers by building credits and reducing its debits. Now that privatisation has left the cupboards bare and the country adopting legislation dictated by Brussels, the Maltese electorate had better speak with one voice and act in unison to elect a new administration that will protect their heritage and their future.
In the next five years, Malta has to bridge build for the future so that by 2013 its economy will be ready and privileged to hold its own among the leading economies of Europe; that its citizens are gaining their rights through the EU and that any disadvantages that the initial negotiations had caused are rectified with the assistance and cooperation of the EU.
In this election of 2008, the Maltese electorate must break the cycle that has cost them the endless hardship of higher taxes, which were squandered and derailed the gravy train, to ensure that the over bloated passengers will have to disembark and the Maltese taxpayers will be that much better for it.
Abelard and St Francis would not attract us, if we could not to some extent share their hopes and fears. The traditional Maltese values need to make a comeback and bring with them the winds of change for a new beginning.