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The military now controls 143 out of 250 parliamentary seats. Under the previous junta after the 2006 coup, the military held 67 out of 242 seats.
The cabinet is stacked with soldiers. Out of the 36 cabinet members, 12 have a military background. In 2006, only four military officers were among the 37 cabinet members.
The military is also entwined with the powerful monarchy - the name of Prayuth’s show is derived from the philosophy of the late king Bhumibol Adulyadej, who died last October after seven decades on the throne.
More than half of the 13 members of the Privy Council, the body that advises new King Maha Vajiralongkorn – himself a former soldier - are military men. It was just under half in the previous Council.
Cinema and television stations are increasingly showing pro-military themes and the school curriculum features military slogans.
“The military coup of 2014 offered the armed forces the chance to put in place a wider footprint and they are doing so,” Paul Chambers, a professor at Naresuan University and an expert on the Thai military, told Reuters in an e-mail.
“A younger generation of retired military officers are, since the end of 2016, sitting on the Privy Council,” he noted.
The public does not appear too concerned. The government says military recruitment numbers doubled in 2017 from the previous year and attribute that to public approval of their hard-line tactics in breaking a political impasse that had persisted for years.
Polls backed by the military government show Thais are content with military rule, although no such polls have been published in recent months.
Perhaps more revealing than a military government stacked full of military men is the number of orders issued by the junta: 358 in total since 2014.
The orders aimed to impose discipline on every aspect of Thai public life. They ranged from making seatbelts mandatory for passengers in the backseats of cars to holding parents accountable for student fights.
The junta has also launched disciplinary initiatives such as a hotline to deal with misbehaving Buddhist monks and so-called “attitude adjustment” programmes for drunk drivers. The campaign has covered everything from a crackdown on taxi gangs at airports to a clean-up of street food stalls, the latter with mostly mixed results.
Army spokesman Winthai Suvaree said those efforts by the junta, formally known as the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO), have improved Thailand.
“Overall, people are satisfied with concrete changes in the society,” Winthai told Reuters. He did not specifically address the militarisation of Thai society.
Thailand has been bitterly divided since a 2006 coup against then Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, a billionaire businessman turned politician who gained the adoration of rural voters through populist schemes but made many enemies among the military-royalist elite.
After the restoration of democracy, the military again intervened in 2014 to topple a civilian government led by Thaksin’s sister Yingluck Shinawatra.
Thailand’s military has staged 12 coups since the end of direct rule by kings in 1932. The 2014 coup was partly the military’s way of trying to make right what it viewed as the mistakes of the 2006 coup, including a failure to get rid of Thaksin’s allies and subdue his supporters, political analysts say.
Prayuth, then a major-general, was part of the junta that seized control of the government in 2006. He led the 2014 putsch as army chief, saying the military needed to restore order following a cycle of mass protests and violence.
The junta has been under pressure from some Western countries to return to democracy after repeated delays to the general election, now scheduled for some time next year.
Malaysia’s Petronas and Switzerland-based Vitol have agreed an initial binding deal for the long-term supply of liquefied natural gas, to be sourced primarily from the LNG Canada facility in British Columbia.
Vitol said it had signed a binding heads of agreement with Petronas on 1 October for a sale and purchase agreement that would see Petronas LNG supply Vitol with up to 800,000 tonnes per annum.
The agreement, set to commence in 2024, is for a period of up to 15 years and on a delivered ex-ship and free on board basis.
Petronas holds a 25% stake in the LNG Canada joint venture.
"We are delighted to be partnering with Petronas again, a global market leader and producer of natural gas and LNG. Petronas supplied our first LNG cargo in 2005 and we have now extended our LNG relationship until at least 2038," head of LNG for Vitol Pablo Galante said in a statement.
Shell operates LNG Canada with a 40% stake, partnering with PetroChina and Japan’s Mitsubishi each holding 15% while South Korea’s Kogas holds the remaining 5%.
Marchers make their way around Forsyth Park in Savannah Ga. to commemorate the August 28, 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and freedom led by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. The march was sponsored by Savannah Regional Central Labor Council AFL-CIO, St. Phillip Monumental A.M.E. Church, and Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance.
Over the next few days, the largest national group of unions, the AFL-CIO, meets in Los Angeles to look at ways to stem the long-term decline of American unions. African Americans and other people of color have a lot at stake.
Many people think of a union member as a white, blue-collar male, and historically that was true. In the early 1900s, nearly all U.S. unions discriminated against African Americans and refused to let them join. In 1935, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Wagner Act into law — guaranteeing American workers the right to bargain collectively with their employers — fewer than 1 in 100 union members in the U.S. was an African American.
But then, during the middle of the 20th century, unions experienced a remarkable racial turnaround. Competition between the fast-growing industrial unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the established craft unions of the American Federation of Labor spurred organizers to reach outside existing labor strongholds to recruit millions of new members. And in the run-up to World War II, many African Americans, eager to escape punishing agricultural work in the South, arrived in the Midwest and Northeast to look for new manufacturing jobs just as expanding factories were targeted by union organizers.
Black workers were understandably wary at first, given unions' history of racial discrimination. But before long they came to see organized workplaces as a partial refuge from racist practices that were common in many nonunion firms. After the war, stable employment, rising wages and robust benefit packages cemented the connections of African American workers to the labor movement, especially in the Midwest.
Nationally, union membership rates for black men in the private sector rose to nearly 40% by the early 1970s. What's more, by the end of the 1970s, nearly 1 in 4 black women in the private sector belonged to a union, double the rate of union membership among white women.
An extensive body of research has established that union members earn higher wages than their nonunion counterparts doing the same type of work. And our own research confirms a large effect of union membership on wages for both black and white workers, an effect that holds true even after we take into account other influences on wages such as age, education, occupation and the particular industry and state where workers are employed. Across the decades covered by our data, unionized workers in the private sector have wages about 25% higher than otherwise similar nonunion workers.
• Had union membership rates for women remained at late-1970s levels, racial wage inequality among women in private sector jobs today would be reduced by as much as 30%.
• If rates of union membership among African American men working in the private sector were as high today as in the early 1970s, weekly wages would now be about $50 higher. For a full-time worker, that translates to an income increase of $2,600 a year. Regardless of race, all male workers have lost ground in the private sector as unions have declined.
Our findings recast the modern American labor movement as a remarkably inclusive institution that gave a vital boost to the economic fortunes of African American as well as white workers and their families. The near disappearance of private sector unions in recent times has made many of America's economic and social problems worse, including racial wage gaps.
Meredith Kleykamp and Jake Rosenfeld are professors of sociology at the University of Maryland and the University of Washington, respectively. Both are members of the Scholars Strategy Network.
Alcohol?s effects vary according to the amount of food eaten, body weight and experience in drinking.
Alcohol does not need digestion. It is absorbed directly through the walls of the stomach and the small intestines into the blood stream. Once in the blood stream, alcohol travels to all parts of the body including the stomach, heart, kidneys, liver and the brain. Once alcohol is absorbed into the blood stream and distributed throughout the body, the process of oxidation begins.
The liver plays a major role in the breakdown or oxidation of alcohol. As a result of the process of oxidation, alcohol is changed into carbon-di-oxide, water and energy. The calories thus produced have absolutely no nutritional value. They are only empty calories, which may result in a ‘pot belly’.
The liver can burn alcohol only at a certain pace. It takes approximately one hour for one unit of alcohol (8- 10gms) to get out of the body.
Exercise, cold shower, hot bath, black coffee – none of these will help in making one sober. All that one can do is to wait and let the liver do its work.
Alcohol’s effects vary according to the amount of food eaten, body weight, experience in drinking and setting. For example, a person who is thin feels the effect of alcohol more quickly than a person who weighs more. Alcohol affects everybody, some more quickly than others.
The Memorable Faces Of 'Goodbye Solo' In Ramin Bahrani's new film, Goodbye Solo, a Senegalese immigrant cabdriver tries to save an elderly passenger who he suspects is suicidal.
Souleymane Sy Savane (rightt) plays a Sengalese immigrant who tries to save a suicidal man (Red West, left).
So much of a movie's appeal comes down to whether you enjoy staring at the actors' faces. In Ramin Bahrani's Goodbye Solo, there are two you've most likely never seen before — two tantalizing maps to pore over. The first belongs to Souleymane Sy Savane. He plays Solo, a Senegalese immigrant cabdriver in Winston-Salem, N.C. His face is wide and reddish-brown, with an indentation in his cheek the shape of a baby's foot and laughing eyes that can quickly turn quizzical.
The film opens, audaciously, with Solo in midchortle. That's because a passenger of his, an old man named William, played by Red West — the other great face — has just said he'll give him $1,000 for a trip one week hence to a mountain with a windy overlook called Blowing Rock. That's a one-way trip, and it doesn't take a weatherman to know which way that wind blows. The implication is unmistakable. When Solo realizes it's not a joke, he sets about injecting himself into William's life, to the point of moving into William's motel room. He's studying to be a flight attendant, and he attempts to engage the old man in his hopeful quest.
This is potentially a sentimental setup, and potentially creepy, too. You have a black man who could be said to represent the life force, and he's tying to revive the white person's spirit, which is so Driving Miss Daisy, so The Legend of Bagger Vance, and that "big dog big dog" thing Solo does can get on your nerves as much as it gets on William's. But Goodbye Solo never goes soft. To the end it's a tug-of-war between hope and resignation in which neither player openly acknowledges what's at stake.
Bahrani's first film, Man Push Cart, also centers on an industrious immigrant, a Pakistani ex-rock star with a hot-dog cart in Manhattan: The movie is somewhat contrived but gorgeously shot and evocative — the man's day-to-day rituals might threaten to grind him down, but to us, his outsider perspective on a world we thought we knew is endlessly fascinating. In Bahrani's grittier second film, Chop Shop, his protagonist is a pre-pubescent Latino orphan boy who lives above an auto-repair garage and earns a living doing odd jobs, some legal, some extralegal. You're forced to suspend your moral judgments — you watch his dogged survival with a mixture of pain and awe. You wonder how he can go on with so little positive reinforcement.
In Goodbye Solo, Bahrani has made a true drama: Solo engages; William parries. William yields — then his defenses fly up and he curses Solo out like the ex-biker he is. Solo keeps on: He's a hustler, in the best sense. He lives the way he plays soccer, guilelessly but inexhaustibly. He has a baby on the way, a family in Senegal, big dreams of flight. Yet it's fair to tell you that in some ways he falls short of his quest to reach William. Optimism, exhortation — they can go only so far. William has been places Solo will never understand. The actor West's eyes have bags under bags, yet they're almost lidless, huge and liquid. Those eyes let us in, while his harsh demeanor shuts us out. The director never gives up on William; his camera never stops searching that face. But he finally respects its mystery. The greatness of Goodbye Solo is in both faces. It's a film of overflowing humanism, yet it acknowledges, in grief and wonder, that some things can never be reconciled.
SURIGAO CITY (MindaNews/08 April) – After three days of speculations, the Barbers brothers finally broke their silence and announced to a jubilant crowd of loyal supporters that they have reconsidered their earlier decision to withdraw from the electoral race.
An estimated 1,000 loyal supporters of the brothers braved the heat of the mid-day sun and trooped to the Barbers’ mansion in upper Barangay Lipata at around 1 p.m. Sunday to urge the brothers to “continue with the fight” against those they claim “bring drugs, crime and dirt” to the city and province.
“Ato i-excuse si Ace ibalik ta si Batman… Laban que laban kita bahala walay ato kwarta,” (We will excuse Ace…we will fight, fight even if we don’t have the money), Lyndon addressed the euphoric crowd.
The eldest of the Barbers sibling, Lyndon was given the monicker Batman for his drug-busting activities on his first year as governor of Surigao del Norte in 2001. He initiated late-night operations against drug syndicates in the province including those threatening to enter the province and the city. Lyndon served as governor until 2007, when he ran for his brother’s seat in Congress but lost.
Ace, who ran for governor in 2007, won but lost his bid for reelection in 2010, to Sol Matugas. Lyndon lost the mayoralty race in 2010 to another Matugas.
For the 2013 elections, Lyndon filed his certificate of candidacy for governor while Ace filed his certificate of candidacy for the second district. Both are running under the Nacionalista Party.
Lyndon confirmed rumors that both are withdrawing from the race but vehemently denied they had been bought by the opposition at P50 million each.
“Ever since we filed our candidacy in October, talks of our supposed withdrawal have persisted and reached their peak since we arrived here Thursday. The talks are true that we are withdrawing from the race,” he said.
MindaNews was able to talk with a local candidate of its allied party Koalisyon nan mga Oposisyon sa Surigao (Kosug) headed by mayoralty candidate Alfonso S. Casurra, a former city mayor and staunch ally of the two and learned that an emergency meeting was held on Friday afternoon purposely on the rumored withdrawal.
But the same source declined to provide details of the meeting, saying only that the Barbers would call for a press conference on Monday, April 8.
MindaNews sought the Barbers’ camp Saturday, but Lyndon declined to issue a statement saying they would meet with the press either Monday or Tuesday.
“An ako desisyon sauna na mo withdraw kuman nautro…,” (I have changed my earlier decision to withdraw), said Ace. The crowd chanted, “laban, Ace, Laban” (fight Ace, fight Ace).
But Ace appealed to be given time to talk to his wife.
The brothers will be leaving for Manila on Monday for the birthday celebration of their grandmother, Virginia.
Lyndon told MindaNews they would call a press conference on Thursday, April 11, to confirm whether Ace will leave with his wife for the US and he campaigns in absentia or he will finally withdraw from the race.
Lyndon explained that the brothers’ decision to pull out from the political race was prompted by the critical condition of Ace’s wife who is suffering from Stage 3 laryngeal cancer.
“It has been a difficult period for us especially since we arrived here on Thursday. We couldn’t sleep and Ace and I have been constantly talking of this decision….But with your love and support, your pleas go beyond our (present) situation”, Lyndon said.
The former governor, who was sobbing as he spoke, said that as a brother he cannot turn his back and deny help for an ailing family member. He said what “little funds” he has will be given to support the treatment for his brother’s wife.
“This is really difficult on my part…but if this is what you want, may I also appeal from you to tell our people, the country and the rest of the world that a poor man can become a leader…we will go on and fight”, Lyndon said, to the cheers of the crowd.
“While we’re away I am appealing to everyone to give us your time of prayer, even for just 30 seconds, to pray for my wife and family,” Ace said.
He emphasized that what the family is facing now is similar to the time their father faced a similar ailment and considerable resources from the family were spent to treat their father.
But the crowd shouted “bisan way kwartahay” (even without money) while alluding to earlier speeches of supporters on the opposition’s financial resources to bankroll its campaign.
Ace is expected to leave for the US on the 20th of April for his wife’s treatment, according to Lyndon.
Political allies of the Barbers brothers who asked not to be named, told MindaNews that a withdrawal from the provincial opposition line-up could cause the downfall of the political clout of the Barbers.
Some raised concern that the Barbers’ move will only hasten the belief that “they sold out” to the opposition led by the Matugas’ husband-and-wife tandem Francisco and Sol and former ally Rep. Guillermo Romarate Jr., who is a re-electionist and strongest contender of Ace.
But Lyndon flatly denied the issues and told supporters their soul is not for sale.
Loyal supporters, however, expressed mixed feelings of sadness and agitation.
Robert Reich on America's inequality crisis: Trump's "greedy enablers" will "reap the whirlwind"
Superstar economist sees hope in the darkness: Trump's true legacy will be a "revival of progressive politics"
Some plain facts and hard truths: The top one percent of Americans own 40 percent of the country's wealth and 90 percent of its income.
When adjusted for inflation, the average income in the United States has remained approximately the same for the last 40 years. By comparison, over the last two decades the richest Americans have seen their income increase by three times, relative to those of the poorest Americans.
If adjusted for economic productivity, the federal minimum wage in America would actually be at least $20 an hour, instead of the $7.25 it is at present.
An increasingly large number of Americans are unable to retire and will have to work until they die. Roughly six in 10 Americans don't even have $1,000 they could use for an emergency.
Twenty-six individuals have as much wealth as the bottom half of the world's population. This is a global plutocracy.
Globalization and neoliberalism, the economic revolutions of the 1990s, have largely increased human misery rather than ameliorating it. This has fueled the rise of the racist and nationalist "New Right" and its reactionary brand of pseudo-populism in the United States, Europe and other parts of the world.
In the United States this global right-wing movement manifested itself as an upsurge of racism, nativism and economic angst that put Donald Trump in the White House in 2016. Trump has done nothing to improve those social ills. Instead he is doing everything in his power to make America a more economically unjust and unfair and divided society -- to his own personal benefit. It is entirely possible that this feedback loop of human misery will propel Trump to another victory in the 2020 presidential election.
Is wealth inequality a direct threat to American democracy? Is Donald Trump's regime the culmination of decades of increasing inequality as well as a broader crisis in American cultural norms and values? What would a post-Trump project of American renewal entail? Is it possible for liberals and progressives to fight back and defeat the highly disciplined and extremely well-resourced conservative movement? Do the policy proposals of Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other liberals and progressives reflect what the majority of Americans actually want from their government?
In an effort to answer these questions I recently spoke with Robert B. Reich, the former secretary of labor under Bill Clinton and now the Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. Reich was also an economic adviser to Barack Obama and has written 15 books, including the bestsellers "Aftershock," "The Work of Nations," "Beyond Outrage" and his most recent, "The Common Good." He is also the co-creator of the award-winning documentary "Inequality for All" as well as the Netflix documentary "Saving Capitalism."
Was the election of Donald Trump a surprise to you? And what do you make of his enduring popularity?
I did not predict Donald Trump per se. But for the last 25 years I have worried with increasing vehemence about the widening divide in this country between a majority that is losing economic security and social standing and a small minority gaining most of the benefits of economic growth. When I was secretary of labor in the 1990s I began to talk about the rise of a series of demagogues who would use fear and anxiety and then channel it towards their targeted scapegoats such as immigrants, African Americans and other minorities. These demagogues would divide the country in order to enhance their power. There was a great fear which seems to have been realized with Donald Trump about the appeal of authoritarianism for many Americans as an alternative to democratic populism.
How do we do a better job of explaining to the American people how this type of gangster-capitalist kleptocracy is a threat to them personally and also the country's democracy?
I think it's very important to emphasize that we are at an inflection point, and a very dangerous one, with great wealth at the top in a relatively few hands, This is incompatible with democracy. This is not the first time this has happened. Louis Brandeis, the great jurist, said in the 1920s, as the United States was coming out of the Gilded Age, "We can have democracy in this country or we can have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both." America made a decision at the end of the Gilded Age to revive democracy and that we called, in hindsight, the Progressive Era and then The New Deal.
But I think that my generation, the baby boomers, took our democratic system pretty much for granted. Our first real experience with politics was the civil rights movement and that was an affirmative experience. But the next experience was the Vietnam War and Lyndon Johnson's lies, and that turned many of us quite cynical. The last 40 years has been a time of testing. Can we keep our democracy when the median wage has barely risen and a large portion of the gains from economic growth have gone to the top? I do not think America can keep its democracy if that trajectory continues over the next few decades.
Many things are converging in terms of system shocks right now. There is elite overproduction. On the other end of the spectrum there are many poor and working-class people around the world who feel alienated by globalization. The neoliberal order has failed to provide prosperity for most people on the planet. What do these factors do to America going forward?
There are two forms of populism. One is authoritarian. We have seen this before in history when large numbers of people are afraid, and then demagogues emerge who pretend that they are the champions of the masses. These demagogues will target minorities as the source of these anxieties. Trump has chosen immigrants and forces outside the United States. But he has also gone after black athletes, and indirectly supported white supremacists. In total Donald Trump has fueled the ugliest kinds of divisiveness in the United States.
The other kind of populism is we might call democratic populism. In 2016 Bernie Sanders represented that alternative, and at this stage he is the only practical alternative to authoritarian populism.
To combat right-wing authoritarian populism there needs to be fundamental reform of our political and economic system. The two are intimately related. You cannot reform our political system until you reform the economy. And one of the deepest problems with the economy is that there are so many hidden upward pre-distributions from the poor and middle class to the wealthy that people do not see because they are buried in the new rules of the game. These structural inequalities are the laws and regulations that have been installed by wealthy interests such as big corporations and the very rich.
Corporations and the plutocrats have gamed the American political system and economy through a "too big to fail" strategy and narrative. They have an entire news media apparatus to circulate their propaganda. The right wing claims to love capitalism but the system they have created is actually antithetical to free markets and an efficient economy. Neoliberalism is socialism for rich people and free markets for everybody else. Republicans love to complain about "socialism," but they certainly love it for themselves.
Republicans and conservatives have been talking that way for 85 years. They opposed Franklin D. Roosevelt's plan for Social Security by calling it "socialism." They opposed John F. Kennedy and his ideas for economic development as "socialist". They opposed Lyndon Johnson's Medicare as "socialism." The right wing has called socialism anything that helps average working people. But it is much deeper than that. The actual rules and regulations and laws that the wealthy are increasingly able to create have tipped the balance in the United States largely in favor of socialism for the rich and a brutal form of capitalism for almost everybody else.
I recently wrote an essay about Jamie Dimon, who runs the largest and most successful bank on Wall Street, JPMorgan Chase, who recently, in his yearly letter to the shareholders, talked about the so-called scourge of "socialism." The irony here being that Jamie Dimon was the head of JPMorgan Chase when the bank got a huge bailout from the federal government, while homeowners who were underwater, owing more on their homes than their homes were worth, got little or nothing. Millions of Americans lost their jobs and savings because of the mismanagement and outright fraud committed by big banks like JPMorgan Chase.
Jamie Dimon was also instrumental in getting the big tax cuts from Donald Trump's administration. The business community predicted these tax cuts would generate more investment and higher wages. Instead, as many of us predicted, these tax cuts went directly into stock buybacks and higher executive wages -- which is another form of socialism for the rich. On top of all this, you've got a wave of CEOs who have lost their jobs over the last several years because they have not satisfied Wall Street's demands. But these same CEOs are walking away from their jobs with giant paychecks that reflect no success on their part at all. In fact, these payouts reflect a cartoon version of socialism where irresponsible people get ahead.