<p>Pandemonium reigned in parliament yesterday after the vote to choose a new Prime Minister descended into farce.</p> <p>After the House had failed to choose a Prime Minister from among the candidates declared before the election, the appointed Senate was constitutionally required to join the House in voting for any candidate, including persons who had not stood for election.&nbsp; Predictably, the incumbent Prime Minister and leader of the 2014 coup d’état Gen Prayut Chan-o-cha was nominated.</p>

<div> <div><em>Since ISIS has made headlines in international media, many analysts have linked the insurgency of Thailand’s three southernmost provinces to the transnational jihadist groups. Hara Shintaro, an expert on the Deep South conflict, argued that the struggle was more distinguishably nationalistic since it was led by the local elites and was strongly influenced by the atmosphere of post-World War II </em><em>decolonisation</em><em>.&nbsp;</em></div> <div> </div></div>

<p><em>A small tornado bursts through the door of the meeting room</em><em>.&nbsp; And stops dead in its tracks</em><em>.</em></p> <p>‘Where is everyone?’</p> <p>‘Sir?’</p> <p>‘Why is there no one here?&nbsp; There’s supposed to be a meeting.’</p> <p>‘Quite so, sir.’</p> <p>‘I rushed like mad to get here on time and look, by my watch I am in fact a bit late.’</p> <p>‘Late, sir?&nbsp; But the meeting isn’t scheduled to start for another quarter of an hour.’</p> <p>‘What are you talking about?&nbsp; Look here, my watch says I’m ten min-&nbsp; Oh.&nbsp; Two hours and ten minutes late.’</p>

<p>The Dao Din are Thailand’s best known student activist group, with one activist (Pai) in prison for lèse-majesté and others facing charges of illegal assembly. Started fourteen years ago at the beginning of the Faculty of Law of Khon Kaen University, the nascent Dao Din consisted of first year students who went into the field on a project-by-project basis to survey the injustices faced by villagers in the Northeast. The Dao Din mainly consist of Faculty of Law students, around 90%, with another 10% coming from Humanities and Social Sciences, Economics, Engineering, Education, and Nursing.</p>

<p>With a new inheritance tax introduced last year and the Land and Building Tax Law coming into effect on January 1st, 2019, Thailand is taking steps towards addressing its reputation as the third worst country globally for wealth inequality. Still, the amount of additional income that is being raised is small, and the government’s position is that expanding the amount of state income obtained via more progressive taxation should be the task of the next parliament.</p>

<p>President Trump has just been to China.</p> <p>Just before he arrived, the trial of Taiwanese NGO worker Lee Ming-cheh was streamed online from Yueyang City Intermediate People’s Court in Hunan province. Lee had been arrested on 19 March when he crossed the border from Macau.&nbsp; He then disappeared into the gulag that is the Chinese judicial system. He had not been seen for 6 months before his trial for “subverting state power” under a new Foreign NGO Management Law.</p>

<p>The political struggle in Thailand can be seen as the unfinished democratization project. Although we have already had the revolution for establishing the democratic regime since 1932 by a group of democrat bureaucrats and military, there were military-led 13 coup d'etat, and the constitution has been changed for 20 times during the "85 years of solitude" of Thailand politics.</p>

<p>A post-Yingluck Shinawatra Thailand is not a reconciled Thailand, and nor will it be if her Pheu Thai Party ceases to exist.</p> <p>The political arena will remain as polarised as it has been for the past decade. Yet this predicament can be overcome through a strategy laid out in the well-known Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Longzhong Plan. The plan was to divide China into three realms of roughly equal power. Adapting that plan can lead to positive change that will help move Thailand out of the current deadlock.</p>

<p>So when are we going to get there?</p> <p>I told you.&nbsp; In about two hours.</p> <p>But you said that two hours ago.&nbsp; The farther we go, the longer it seems to take.&nbsp; At this rate I don’t think we’ll ever get there.</p> <p>No, it’s just that I have follow the roadmap.&nbsp; It says we have to go through here and here and here before we can get to there.&nbsp; And it takes time to get to each one.</p> <p>But you drew the roadmap yourself.&nbsp;</p> <p>No I didn’t.&nbsp; It was him on the back seat.</p>

<p dir="ltr">"During the past three years, my despair about my country has never reached the depth it did when I learned of the judgment in the case of Pai Dao Din," said Nidhi Eoseewong.</p> <p dir="ltr"><img alt="" src="https://c2.staticflickr.com/8/7500/15514383088_8477f9efc0_b.jpg" /></p> <p dir="ltr"><span>Nidhi Eoseewong (file photo)</span></p>

<p>It’s rather nice of the Bangkok Post to ensure that we get a regular dose of capitalist economics through a biweekly op-ed from the Thailand Development Research Institute, a corporate-funded think tank that can be trusted to think corporately.</p>

<p>Two weeks before he was unleashed on the United Nations General Assembly, President Trump gave a speech in Bismarck, North Dakota, supposedly to outline his plans on tax reform.&nbsp;</p> <p>(<em>A quick aside for the historically-minded</em>: Bismarck is named after the Iron Chancellor who invented realpolitik and Germany.&nbsp; Could there be a starker contrast?)</p>