The one thing you need to know is that there are people in Malaysia who pay themselves whatever they want with your tax money, grab whatever huge billion-ringgit government contracts they want, who break the law with impunity, who instruct the ACA on who to prosecute, who tell police what to do and who to let go, and who are obscenely rich.

You need to understand that there are such people, termed political elites, and that these people lead Umno. They became rich by allocating the country's resources to themselves, with your tax money paying for their profits.

They are capable of making any type of concession except that which threatens their source of income. Therefore Umno elites will never clean up corruption, never give you clean government, never allow the ACA to be truly independent, never allow any independent person to head the judiciary or election commission - that is, they will never stop stealing from you.

The thing they fear most are their victims - you, you, you, you and you. They made you pay for substandard education, substandard public transport, hugely expensive substandard cars, abusive police, a deeply-flawed judiciary and rampant corruption.

In order to make you forget who really calls the shots, and who is really responsible for the state of the economy and nation, they have to create racial and religious issues.

Banning Hindraf for supposed links to the Tamil Tigers when MIC clearly states it would love to support the Tamil Tigers, demonising minority MPs and kidnapping Teresa Kok under the ISA and then saying it was for her own safety, fatwa against tomboys and yoga - the list of possibilities for ingratiating themselves with the dominant ethnic majority, and upsetting the minority ethnic communities is endless.

If it creates tensions and mistrust between the different racial and religious communities then so much the better as far as the political elites in Umno are concerned.

It will give Umno leaders an opportunity to mediate in the racial and religious issues that they deliberately manufactured in the first place - to make themselves look useful and relevant in the eyes of the rakyat.

With the different ethnic communities nursing imagined grievances against each other, no one will notice what is really happening. The elites get richer, and you get poorer. They continue to steal, and you continue to blame the wrong person - the other guy on the street.

I spoke to a Malay taxi driver the other day. He did not have a taxi permit but rented the taxi from someone who has hundreds of taxi permits and who made hundreds of thousands of ringgit a month.

He will send his children to a school that does not allow them to compete in a globalised economy because they will not be taught English. He will not get a taxi permit of his own because he does not know anyone influential in Umno who will consider it worth their while to assist him.

His children are not going to get a scholarship overseas - you stand a better chance if you are rich and influential and already own hundreds of taxi permits and know all the right Umno people. I wondered if this taxi driver realises that we are both victims of Umno elite's self-serving ‘kleptocracy’.

Pakatan Rakyat needs to get its act together to educate the masses about how Umno's filthy rich corrupt elites will play the game. The real game is played with money, the real deal is the money deal, and Umno's elites are just protecting their enormous gilded rice bowl paid for by the rakyat.

Umno will never stamp out corruption, and Dr Mahathir Mohamad's empty threats to name names is a joke. They will do anything to protect their wealth and the status quo that brought them that wealth.

As expected, the ethnic minorities may have to bear the disproportionate cost of Umno's game playing.

Molotov cocktails hurled into minority women's homes, Hindu temples and Orang Asli churches demolished, Bibles banned, allocating resources according to ethnicity instead of need, and the list of possibilities for abuse and insults is endless, and limited only by Umno's creativity.

Umno's leaders are merely protecting it's access to your tax money to stuff their fat bank accounts, and demonising the minorities as a threat to Malay Muslims is an old trick, and the only way they will be able to convince the average Malay to vote for them.

When different ethnic groups are in conflict, then Umno will succeed in it's manipulations and designs and it will continue to steal from you and me.

The real deal is when your money is transferred into their bank accounts, and that is the real prize of national leadership in Third World countries like ours.