This is perhaps once of the worst Septembers in my life. It’s been nothing more than one bad news after another.

Firstly, melamine contaminated dairy products in China caused harm to some 53,000 people. Some of that harm is permanent. I read that some babies will be subjected to kidney dialysis for the rest of their lives when they grow up. And this is not the first time we heard of Chinese food products that is hazardous to our health. Here are some other incidents I can actually remember:

I felt so let down and disappointed because I grew up eating some of these Chinese food products. In fact, you can give me 5 cans of SPAM for the price of 1 can of Ma Ling Luncheon meat and I wouldn’t have traded it away. The reason being I have grown to love the familiar taste of some of these brand names and I felt sad because their products are now no longer available on the shelves in supermarkets.

Now, Chinese food products have become synonymous with ticking time bombs. You basically won’t know which one will be next. I am appalled and disgusted when I looked at the list of dairy products taken off the shelf here in Singapore.

White Rabbit Milk Candy too?! Damn those unscrupulous mainlanders who introduced this infernal substance into the milk. Is there nothing you would stop at just to make a few more quick bucks? Is getting rich so important for you that it doesn’t matter to you another fellow human being will be consuming this crap? Stop that bullshit about this being some kind of Western conspiracy simply because the same has been practiced in America or elsewhere… that argument is as good as it is safe to eat shit because you seen another animal ate it.

The Chinese consider years with the number ‘8’ are good because the pronunciation of the word ‘8’ in Chinese is almost the same as the word for striking it rich ‘发’. But to me that word also has the meaning of fungal Bloom in Cantonese [‘fatt mold’] which to me isn’t really a very good thing since you can’t eat your moldy stuff, can you?

I am convinced that my view of ‘8’ is the right one because in the past 10 years, both years ending with ‘8’ have been nothing but disasters. In 1998, there was the Asian Currency Meltdown. In 2008, we are confronted with this financial mess in the U.S. that has caused financial markets worldwide to fall as if down a bottomless pit!

Since early March this year when Bear Stearns went bust, one financial institution after another went belly up. Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Merrill Lynch, and Lehman Brothers. Even AIG, a famous insurance company, is threatened.

Now, investment banking is history in Wall Street – both JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley have become banks. But is this the end yet of the woes yet? Or is there really more to come? Just only a few days ago Wachovia was driven into the arms of Citibank and even now I read about the problem spreading to Europe. It makes one wonder at times if the light at the end of the tunnel is not actually an oncoming train. Just don’t be surprised that when you wake every other morning, you hear news about trillions of dollars wiped out in the financial markets overnight and yet another financial institution going bust.

If you think this doesn’t affect you, then you are terribly wrong. There is going to be lesser money moving around, or money is going to be moving around slower. Jobs are going to be lost because these financial institutions are going to cutback on spending. It is going to be harder to get loans and investments are going to fall which means that less new jobs are going to be available. Finally, if you have investments in unit trusts which you haven’t been looking at for awhile, don’t faint when you see that half of your money had been vaporised over the past 10 months!

I was thinking that it would be the last day of September 2008 would past uneventfully but it has one last ‘fxxk you’ for us all. The U.S. House of Representatives failed to pass the US$ 700-billion ‘bail-out’ bill and for us in Singapore, one of our main opposition figures, Mr. Joshua Benjamin Jeyaratnam passed away in the hours of the early morning.

Personally, I have seen Mr JBJ selling his party newspaper (when he was with the Workers’ Party) and then his books at either Raffles Place or the exit of the MRT near the Starbucks at Raffles City. It is to my eternal regret that I have never spoken to the man, though I did buy the WP papers off him when I was either a kid or a teenager.

There’s not much I could remember of the man, except the intensity in his eyes and that determined look on his face. While I have written my disagreement with his methods on some of my blog entries and also with some of the things he championed, I nevertheless respect the man’s tenacity and his ‘never give up, never say die’ attitude in doing what he believed is for the best for Singapore’s political landscape.

There will be some of us who will miss you, Mr Jeyaratnam. Rest in peace.