Rob's Flash Messages
Rob's Stories
The morning after
After some exciting weeks with a Holland-Turkey clash and serious fear around the uprise of populism, Dutch PM Rutte can call himself the winner with 33 seats of 150 in the house and the next 3 runner ups at 19-20. According to international newspapers he is the "hero of Europe" having drawn a line to "the wrong populism". Although his party lost 8 seats too, cabinet partner and left-winger PvdA took a very hard punishment of 29 seats to 9 for helping the Netherlands out of the crisis. Obviously their original supporters felt that they had to pay the price. Not entirely untrue, but unfair it is. The price would have been a lot higher without the impopular measures the now dimissionary cabinet had to take.
Populist Wilders, second in a tight race with christians (CDA) and democrats (D66), was disappointed and acknowledged already that he will take another round of opposition where he would "oppose the new cabinet as hard as possible".
Among others, German BK Merkel congratulated Rutte and is looking forward to continue the cooperation for a stronger Europe. However, the new cabinet is not there yet and it might take quite some time. Formation is only possible with 4 parties or more. Rutte's VVD would like to cooperate with close allies CDA and D66 but together they fall 5 seats short for majorities in the house and senate. A left coalition is possible but only with 6 and if the heavily hit PvdA is willing to step in again. Not very likely. So the King might have to wait a while before taking pictures.
I wish "agile development" could be a format for cabinet formation as well. That would be some "democratic reformation" :) ... Stay tuned.
(big thanks again to Mirjam Vissers for another awesome cartoon)
How Erdogan shoots in his own foot
Last Saturday the relationship between the Netherlands and Turkey escalated. Turkish ministers wanted to campaign in the Netherlands about the coming referendum giving Erdogan more power. Not only like many others the Dutch government believes this is a step back in democratic development, but didn’t want violent uproars like happened many times earlier with minority groups with a Turkish background at specific Turkish political gatherings. The Dutch PM kindly asked the Turks to stay away or keep it neat and on a small scale. The Turks immediately started to insult and threat and after various attempts to come to an agreement, the Dutch PM decided that “this kind of verbal aggression was not acceptable anymore” and as a consequence to withdraw the right to land an airplane with Turkish ministers. Of course more insults and threats and moreover another Turkish minister entered the Netherlands by car with several decoy convoys to mislead the Dutch police. Meanwhile the Turkish consul lied to the Dutch government about what he knew and his communication to the people. The Turkish minister was stopped 30 meters before the Turkish consulate and after hours of negotiations escorted back to Germany as persona non grata. As expected the Turkish demonstrants misbehaved and after a violent night 14 people were arrested en 7 were injured one policeman included. Not surpisinglyTurkey responded with more insults and threats.
Phone(y) tap claims
While taking a rest for a week to see how the world was developing without responding to it too eagerly every time, I admit I was gasping for air after last Sunday's Trump tweets. Without any visible proof Trump accused Obama for tapping "his" phones while insulting Obama viciously (and still has not stopped doing so with almost every tweet he blasts). It was not only embarrassing to see that happen but moreover it is starting to feel awkward and dangerous that a man who is obviously not smart enough to be a president of any country, is in charge of the most powerful one.
Trump obvioulsy does not seem to understand that even a president of the US is not in charge of everything and everyone and that in a democratic system there are "checks and balances" and a division of powers to avoid that a single man can do what Trump now obvioulsy seem to aim for. His phone tap rant on twitter, as a response to probably another Breitbart story he had read earlier, shows that he is unaware of or even simply does not accept the Trias Politica and the existing legal procedures of the US. He also does not seem to understand that this will most likely backfire in his own pocket, whatever the outcome is.
The Apprentice
It's soooo funny watching an episode of Trump's TV show again and project that onto his current job. In his show contestants were split into two teams to compete with each other in business with one of the team-members acting as their team leader. The teams were evaluated on tasks and behavior like communication, team building and results. At the end of every episode the losing team attended a boardroom meeting to evaluate why they lost and who contributed the least to the team. Trump ended an episode eliminating the poorest contributor from the competition with "You're fired!"
Well, "communication, team building and results". Up until today Trump didn't manage to get any of these into his pocket. His twitter behavior and press conferences are weakly expressed like from a overhyped teenager on drugs. Every morning when he wakes up and switches on the tv, his thin skin is penetrated by "fake news" based on facts he created himself. Of course "he didn't mean it that way" and still in his pyama's, he starts spitting on Twitter. Hours later poor KellyAnn Conway and Sean Spicer bend their body's and minds into weird twists to defend their boss discarding the effects on their resume's. After this, they will never get a decent job again.
Team building is obviously not his real strenght too. After almost a month, Republican grumble gets louder and louder and he still does not have his full cabinet in place and already the first resignations are in the past. Some potential candidates even refuse to be a member of this team. Of course Trump complaints about resistance from the Democrats but obviously he is not used yet to cope with a country were not everyone is "hired and fired" as he pleases. He still has to cope with a majority (2.9 M difference in popular vote) of the American people who didn't vote for him and a growing number of Republicans who are starting to recognise that this win was actually a big loss and that they should have gone with an experienced and reliable protector of their ideals.
And results, well mmmmm . . . Nothing but chaos. Lots of presidental decretes and lots of noise around them but only symbolic stuff up until now. All his election rethoric about Obamacare, the Mexical Wall, the Muslim ban, infrastructure investments, jobs, pffffffff ... A poll unveiled that 35% of the Americans do not know that Obama-care and the Affordable-Care-Act are the same. A significant number is against the former and in favor of the latter :))). For the Mexican Wall and his trillion dollar infra investment, there seems to be no Congress majority to approve the spending. He obviously forgot that Obama already did the same thing to restart the American economic engine in 2008 with an 800B dollar infrastructure investment. So what's new? The Muslim ban was illegal and still pending. His announcements about new jobs at for instance a new plant of chipmaker Intel are just hollow. Intel would have built that plant in the US anyway as all their other sub-14-nano plants, except one in Ireland. By the way, most of the chip making machines are designed and built by the Dutch :).
Soooooooo . . . nothing, nothing, nothing.
YOU'RE FIRED!
(big thanks to all the great cartoon artists in this article: Signe Wilkinson, David Horsey, Mike Thompson and Steven Camley)
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