Paul Watson, Cikampek – On dust-blown flats that used to be good farmland, a grand shrine rises to honour the greed and sheer gall of Indonesia's first family.
President Suharto and his extended family have their fingers in every conceivable pie in Indonesia - from cellular telephone networks, to power plants, toll roads, banks, and oil and gas exploration.
The family is into so many businesses that Indonesians simply call it Suharto Inc. Estimates of the family's assets run as high as $56 billion.
Here, in these dusty flats, is the latest visible indication of the staggering fortune, estimated at $56 billion, of President Suharto's family.
At the centre of the scattering of huge, unfinished steel structures, is one that's three storeys high and as long as a football field. It's the perfect toy for President Suharto's youngest son.
Blue tarps hang from the girders, flapping in the breeze that stirs up rust-brown dust devils which swirl across about 100 bulldozed acres.
Out on the edge, next to the highway, there's a billboard that pictures two engineers in white hardhats and lab coats, a man and a woman smiling at their clipboards.
Even now, with the economic mess the country is in, Indonesians are expected to buy the same old dangerous illusion: that any cost is justified in the name of national pride. Or presidential privilege.
"We want to be blessed," the billboard says. "Here we will build the national car factory."
After six months of construction, the plant where the president's son, Hutomo "Tommy" Mandala Putra, is supposed to turn out Indonesia's national car is far from complete.
Lots of new cars are lined up just the same, all of them Timors covered in white cloth blankets to keep them clean of the construction dirt.
About 500 of them are parked in 25 rows beneath corrugated metal roofs. Every last one of these so-called national cars was built in South Korea and imported duty free to Indonesia.
Tommy's Korean partners, Kia Motors, went broke as the region's economic crisis mounted last year, reportedly leaving him stuck with close to half of some 40,000 Timor cars he imported.
By presidential decree, Suharto's son and his cronies have diverted millions of dollars from the country's treasury to build the myth of a national car.
The Timors that sold went for about half the sticker price of similar Toyotas, which led the Japanese to challenge the subsidies at the World Trade Organization.
It's one of several fantasies the International Monetary Fund (IMF) wants Suharto to snap out of before he drives the country over a cliff. But his son, for one, refuses to give up.
He needs a $1 billion loan to finish the plant, which will be tough to raise now that the collapse of Indonesia's currency has left most of the country's biggest corporations unable to pay their debts.
But even after giving in to the IMF under intense pressure, and cutting off government support for his son's project, Suharto is encouraging him to keep it alive with private money.
It doesn't take a Harvard business grad to see that the Timor is a giant turkey that an investor would have to be crazy, or very charitable, to feed with his own money.
Yet Tommy insisted recently the car plant will be finished, and Timors will start rolling off the line here, even though few Indonesians would be caught dead in one.
"I don't believe this is a very meaningful setback," he told reporters after his father signed the IMF deal earlier this month and the Timor lost its tax breaks.
"As I've said before, business has its ups and downs and I'm always ready to face the worst."
Just the kind of talk that makes investors deeply suspicious about Suharto's promises to knuckle under and stop the rot that's destroying the economy. Tommy doesn't even seem to get the message that Indonesians don't like his cars anyway.
Taxi drivers know cars. Jakarta cabbie Anthoni Ganda says few Indonesians are willing to risk buying a Timor because the engines are notoriously rough, the Korean makers are broke, and spare parts are hard to find.
People tend to whisper when they offer an even better explanation: driving a Timor is an invitation for a rock through the window, or worse, if anger continues to build and protesters attack anything associated with a Suharto.
At 76, and after almost 33 years in power, President Suharto is going for his seventh five-year term in March despite ever louder calls from his own people to step down.
His six children, three men and three women, must be glad to see him so determined to hang on. It's access to the very top which foreign investors want when it comes to doing business in Asia.
That they're willing to pay dearly for it explains why Suharto, who was an army general before taking charge in 1965, now has a family worth nearly half of Indonesia's gross domestic product, and at $56 billion, just less than the cost of the $60 billion IMF bailout.
Apart from supporting Tommy's car venture, Suharto granted him monopoly control of Indonesia's cloves, a key additive to local cigarettes and a once lucrative export.
Tommy made such a botch of the clove business the price collapsed, farmers destroyed their crops and the government lost several hundred million dollars.
The IMF insisted Suharto break up his son's clove monopoly as another key condition of this month's bailout.
Suharto's eldest daughter, Siti Hardijanti Rukmana - better known by her nickname "Tutut" - had her hand in the battle over Canada's Bre-X Minerals goldfield, which turned out to be a gigantic fraud.
Before the fraud was uncovered last year, Tutut was allied with Toronto's Barrick Gold Corp. in a struggle for a cut of the Busang goldmine, which was supposed to be the world's biggest.
That put Tutut up against her much weaker brother, Suharto's eldest son, Sigit Harjoyudanto, who backed the losing side in Busang and is also in the banking business.
The Busang field turned out to be worthless, and thousands of small Canadian investors lost a bundle in the scam. Tutut is still sitting pretty.
Her name also comes up in connection with a taxi company called Steady Safe, to which Suharto's daughter sold an 11 per cent share of her multi-million dollar toll road company.
Peregrine Investment Holdings, once Hong Kong's biggest investment bank, then loaned $370 million, a third of its capital, to the taxi company. The bad loan drove Peregrine into bankruptcy earlier this month.
Tutut is also one of the eight chairpersons who run the ruling Golkar party, one of three Suharto allows to campaign under strict controls that keep him in the presidential palace.
Tutut's other business concerns include tolls from national highways, power plants and a vast real estate empire.
Her name even appears on the short-list of possible successors to President Suharto, not least because she has high-level backing in the military - not to mention a vault full of money to buy support.
Another Suharto son, Bambang Trihatmodjo, tried to challenge his younger brother Tommy's national car monopoly by building Korean Hyundais, but his father refused to back him with tax breaks.
The family's vast wealth hasn't stopped Indonesia's financial hemorrhaging, or apparently, the family's grandiose ideas.
Naturally enough, critics of the move to prop up East Asia's economies with massive loans from the IMF are asking what's going on. The loudest complaints come from both sides of Capitol Hill in Washington.
The right wing demands to know why U.S. taxpayers are putting up billions of dollars to rescue foreign bankers who should have known better.
The left wing says the IMF is forcing millions of people out of work, and making life for millions more of the poorest unbearable, while the Suhartos and their cronies only get fatter.