The articles, the opinions, the stories, the poems and the cartoons Ovi magazine covers for Saturday January 29th, 2022 – National Puzzle Day
Bleak Outlook for #Thailand in 2022 – Challenges on every front by Murray Hunter
Thai Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha has ordered the two-meter fence around government house raised, which critics describe as a metaphor for the government’s growing spate of dilemmas, especially with a swirling scandal over skyrocketing pork prices driven up by an outbreak of African flu that officials apparently tried to cover up, according to reports.
The country heads into 2022 as divided as ever and with the economy still in decline despite media attempts to dress it up. It is going into the third year of the Covid-19 pandemic following a 6 percent 2021 GDP decline according to the World Bank. Public debt is running at 58.8 percent of GDP, while household debt is now Bt14.27 trillion (US$430.2 billion), or 89.3 percent of GDP. Non-performing loans are increasing. Stagflation is a rising danger.
The official unemployment rate is only 2.25 percent, but it is believed that more than 2.5 million workers in the informal sector are either unemployed or under-employed. With the tourism sector still decimated, the only shining light within the Thai economy was the 16.4 percent increase in exports last year. Establishment-linked economists have downgraded their GDP growth expectations to 3-4.5 percent in 2022 as the latest Covid-19 wave sweeps the world.
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A chain of questions #poem by David Barger
“Will the changing climates
Continue shifting?
Will the seasons ever swap
With their ways?”
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Romain Rolland: The Cosmopolitan Spirit by Rene Wadlow
One of the major voices of the spirit of Citizens of the World is Romain Rolland (1866-1944). He is the symbol of those who would not let war destroy the cultural bridges between peoples, especially during the 1914-1918 World War.
Romain Rolland came from a French family with many generations in the legal profession. However, from his secondary school days on, his interest was in music, painting, history, and literature. Early he was drawn to German music, especially Wagner and Beethoven. Later he wrote an important biography of both Beethoven and Handel. He did his university studies at the prestigous Ecole Normale Superieure, a specialized higher education school which trains university professors. He was in the same class as Paul Claudel who became a diplomat and well-known poet.
At university he became interested in Russian literature and started a correspondence with Leo Tolstoy whose ideas he admired. After his studies, he received a scholarship to study in Rome in order to write his doctoral thesis on the history of opera. He also collected information for later articles on Italian painting.
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Screws & Chips #023 #cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas
For more Screws & Chips, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!
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