Latest news with #politicallandscape
Bloomberg
08-07-2025
- Automotive
- Bloomberg
Could Musk's New Political Party Plan Deepen Trump Feud?
Bloomberg Contributor & Stonecourt Capital Partner Rick Davis, and Jeanne Sheehan Zaino, Bloomberg Contributor & Iona University Political Science Professor share their thoughts on Tesla CEO Elon Musk announcing he wants to create a new third political party called 'The America Party.' They discuss whether or not this third political party will benefit anyone and continue the rift between Musk and President Trump. Both Davis and Zaino speak with Kailey Leinz and Joe Mathieu on the late edition of Bloomberg's 'Balance of Power.' (Source: Bloomberg)
Malay Mail
05-07-2025
- Politics
- Malay Mail
Bill to increase Sarawak assembly seats set for tabling at July 7 special sitting
KUCHING, July 5 — A Bill to increase the number of members in the Sarawak Legislative Assembly will be tabled during a special sitting on July 7, in response to a sharp rise in voter numbers and changing public expectations. Speaker Tan Sri Mohamad Asfia Awang Nassar said the surge in voters followed the lowering of the voting age to 18, which has significantly reshaped the state's political and constituency landscape since 2014. 'This, in turn, has raised public expectations and created a new political landscape for leaders and elected representatives. The size of both parliamentary and state constituencies in Sarawak is vast and increasingly challenging to manage,' he said at a press conference here today. He said the proposed legislation, titled Dewan Undangan Negeri (Composition of Membership) Bill 2025, will be tabled by Sarawak Tourism, Creative Industry and Performing Arts Minister Datuk Seri Abdul Karim Rahman Hamzah. All three readings of the Bill are scheduled to take place on the same day, he added. Mohamad Asfia noted that the last increase in the assembly's composition was in 2014 and that under Article 113(2) of the Federal Constitution, such changes may be made after a period of eight years. The Sarawak Legislative Assembly currently comprises 82 members. — Bernama
News24
22-06-2025
- Business
- News24
New unity government, same old habits
The government of national unity is struggling to address South Africa's deep socioeconomic crises as it buckles under a toxic mix of ideological divisions, chronic indecision, and the ANC's reluctance to make tough policy choices. Further decline is inevitable unless immediate reforms are prioritised over more endless consultation, writes Khaya Sithole. Over the past 12 months, South Africa's political landscape has been buttressed between two difficult conversations regarding the nation's future. The first was ignited by the lack of a decisive victory for any single party in the general election. The consequence of the lack of a majority, forced various parties to cobble together a government of national unity (GNU) whose working mechanics remain – even to this day – dubious at best. President Cyril Ramaphosa – as the leader of the coalition – has presided over a house divided by perpetual ideological orientations and chronically overwhelmed by the scale of the problem they have been elected to solve. The scale and spectrum of the nation's problems are plenty. From poor governance across different facets of government, to a wholly inept crime and security cluster, to the persistence of unemployment and infrastructure decay, the national canvas of things that must be addressed is wide and unwieldy. Since the beginning of the year, internal divergences between the GNU have that led to litigation, delayed budgets and threats of walkouts, have only been matched by the truly bizarre fixation that a certain Donald Trump has had with the country's social and economic policy orientation. The state of the GNU today is that it is an alliance learning to work whilst the country at large is not working. In recent weeks, the publication of labour force statistics have reiterated perhaps more cogently than any other metric – the scale of the problem. From a working age population of 41.7 million and a labour force of 25 million, the ability to find employment for just over 16.8 million citizens illustrates the structural fractures of the country's economy. The consequential effects of these low employment numbers, is the reduced scope for tax revenues and the inevitable squeeze on spending priorities. The longstanding solution that the ANC has preferred over the past 15 years – borrowing to obscurity – has created concomitant effects on the intensity of spending squeezes. Debt service costs have outpaced key priority areas and, left unchecked, will keep displacing other priorities that are already squeezed for resource allocation. The boring answer to these problems – getting the right economic blueprint for the sociopolitical and socioeconomic canvas that we have – eluded the ANC until South Africans lost faith in its ability to unilaterally solve the problem. Over the past year, the question has moved to whether an alliance, armed with additional political persuasions and orientations, can turn the ship around. The importance of this deliberation is the simple – yet sometimes bizarrely unpopular fact – that decision-making about national resources, policies and strategies – comes with often painful tradeoffs. The tradeoffs required to address South Africa's unique problems, have often proved difficult for the ANC to countenance and rather than biting the bullet at critical decision-making points, the party preferred to defer to the future. Examples of this perpetual planning and consultation loop include the unresolved questions around the SRD grant versus the basic income grant; private sector liberalisation versus creating new state banks and state pharmaceutical institutions; and the long-term plight of state enterprises. In between the episodes on lethargy, public institutions declined, public resources were mismanaged and inefficiently managed; and the public purse was squeezed. The budget showdown in 2025, which led to three versions of the budget being drafted, was highly influenced by the need to start dealing with difficult and long-deferred questions about the right model that balances revenue generation and resource allocation in light of the state of the economy in its current form. The difficult reality is that in its current form – the economy is ill-suited to address these intersectional facets. The focus on the budget season was on the extraction of more resources from the current model. The problem evident in that, is that the primary canvas is one that is no longer suitable for the problems we seek to address. Whilst the finance minister was forced to abandon his preferred method of addressing longstanding issues with a once-off injection of pain through a VAT increase – or so he wanted us to believe – the difficulties that created the issue remain unresolved. The wide cleavage between the resources we can marshal and the priorities we wish to fund, is only getting wider. Options at narrowing it – from repurposing the state bureaucracy through incentivised attritions or simply spending less than necessary on frontline services – come with consequences that very few have mapped out yet and since they are issues that require difficult choices; they are issues that fall within the scope of the decisions that the ANC is historically reluctant to confront. And for as long as the ANC is at the heart of the GNU and remains fixated on its old habits of perpetual consultation and peripheral implementation, it is unclear how its fellow bedfellows can get it to accelerate the pace of addressing difficult issues. The one-year anniversary of the GNU has coincided with the decision of the president to initiate a National Dialogue whose purpose is said to be 'an opportunity to forge a new social compact for the development of our country, a compact that will unite all South Africans, with clear responsibilities for different stakeholders, government, business, labour, civil society, men and women, communities and citizens.' In addition, the National Dialogue 'is anticipated that the National Dialogue will drive progress towards our Vision 2030 and lay the foundation for the next phase of South Africa's National Development Plan.' Having been instrumental in the development of the current national blueprint – the National Development Plan – the President would be well versed in the mechanics and complications of trying to find any blueprint that speaks to the various persuasions of all stakeholders and maps out the right priorities for the nation. The problem of the National Development Plan, is that the government – led by the ANC – conspired to reduce it to a document whose habit of missing key milestones has become the one aspect of it where there is universal consensus. Given what we know about the limitations we have in managing multi-sectoral and intersectional national projects and priorities, it might be prudent to find the narrow range of issues and priorities that have the greatest multiplier effect on everything else we need to fix. The obvious dilemma is that whatever we end up signing for, will require resources, and we now know that in the absence of an economic fix, none of these resources will materialise. Within the spectrum of priorities, it is time to acknowledge that an economic and skills blueprint are priority issues that will aid in addressing the immediate issues – finding resources to fund everything else – and investing in the future social and economic blueprint of the nation. The old habits of trying to please everyone and turning out a document that is merely an equal opportunity policy of appeasement must for once yield to the difficult questions of what must be done immediately in order to arrest the national decline. Any model that traps us all into another consultation loop and deferral of difficult decisions will not only be a monumental waste of resources but for President Ramaphosa – the possibility of championing a National Development Plan, a government of national unity, and a National Dialogue that still all leave the country in socioeconomic and strategy limbo, will be blight on his legacy that will be hard to ignore.
The Guardian
15-06-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
‘Stay below the radar': corporate America goes quiet after Trump's return
From vast protests and all-caps social media posts to acrimonious legislative hearings and pugnacious White House statements, Washington has perhaps never been noisier. But since Donald Trump's return to office, one corner of civil society has been almost eerily quiet. Those leading corporate America rapidly turned down the volume after the president's re-election. Gone are the days of political and social interventions, highly publicized diversity initiatives and donations to important causes. For months, some of the most powerful firms in the world have nervously navigated a dangerous US political landscape, desperate to avoid the wrath of an administration as volatile as it is vocal. 'CEOs like two things. They like consistency and predictability,' said Bill George, former chairman and CEO of Medtronic and serial board director. 'They like to know where things are going. No one can figure out where this administration's really going, because everything is transactional.' 'Stay below the radar screen,' George has been advising senior executives across the US. 'Do not get in a fight with this president.' Industry leaders from David Solomon of Goldman Sachs to Dara Khosrowshahi of Uber extoled the benefits of 'Trump accounts' for babies this week. It was the latest example of knee-flexing that began on the patio of Mar-a-Lago in the aftermath of Trump's victory last November. The genuflections have been backed by big money, with millions of dollars thrown into the president's inaugural fund by companies and executives. That started to look like chump change before long. Amazon reportedly paid $40m for a documentary about Melania Trump. Apple announced plans to invest $500bn in the US. But those moves do not appear to have bought much favor. The White House accused Amazon of being 'hostile and political' following a report (upon which the company later poured cold water) that it would start disclosing the impact of Trump's tariffs on prices. And the president threatened Apple with vast tariffs. No CEO seemed closer to Trump than Elon Musk, the billionaire industrialist behind Tesla and SpaceX, who gave almost $300m to Republican campaigns last year, and worked in the administration for months. Their explosive fallout, days after Musk's exit, prompted the president to threaten the cancellation of federal contracts and tax subsidies for Musk's companies. The pair's rupture underlined why many executives are struggling to trust the president, according to Paul Argenti, professor of corporate communication at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. 'The mercurial nature of this guy kind of just seeps in, and people start to realize they're dealing with something that's a bit more difficult.' His advice? 'Proceed with extreme caution.' 'Loyalty only goes one way with Trump,' said Dan Schwerin, co-founder of Evergreen Strategy Group, and former speechwriter for Hillary Clinton, who has previously worked with firms including Levi Strauss and Patagonia. 'This is like doing business with the mafia: you're not going to win, and you're not going to be safe.' The standard playbook is clear: 'You make a big splashy announcement: the details don't matter, you don't have to follow through, but you placate the White House,' said Schwerin. 'That maybe buys you a little time and a little goodwill. 'But history suggests that Trump will do whatever is best for Trump, and he will turn on you in an instant, if it's better for him. And that is true for his friends, so it will certainly be true for a company that he has no loyalty to.' Extreme caution has become the name of the game – anything to avoid your company getting drawn into the crosshairs of this administration. But companies can't just focus on the president: they have shareholders, customers and employees to answer to. 'You can't base everything on getting through the next four years,' said George. 'Yeah, it's going to be chaotic. Yes, it's going to be challenging. But you better hold firm to your purpose and your values.' He pointed to retailer Target, where he served on the board for 12 years. 'They were very, very big on differentiating themselves from Walmart, using diversity as the criteria – and particularly being, they called themselves, the most gay-friendly company in town. 'And then [Target CEO] Brian Cornell, six days after the inauguration, abandoned all that,' said George. The chain faced a backlash – and boycotts – for abruptly announcing the rollback of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Breaking his silence in an email to employees three months later, Cornell claimed: 'We are still the Target you know and believe in.' Contrast this with Costco, another retailer, which in January faced a shareholder proposal against DEI efforts from a conservative thinktank. The firm's board robustly defended its 'commitment to an enterprise rooted in respect and inclusion' before the proposal was put to its investors for a vote. 'They got a 98% vote to stay the course, to stay true to what they were,' said George. 'And their customer base is very conservative. This is not like they have some liberal customer base.' Argenti believes the period of strategic silence by many companies, and knee-flexing to the White House, might be coming to a close following Musk's messy exit. 'We're at an inflection point,' he said. 'There's going to period where people realize you're damned if you do and damned if you don't.' CEOs of companies counting the cost of Trump's policies are 'not going to suffer in silence', he said. 'You can't win. It's not like you can be secure in knowing if you follow this strategy, he'll leave you alone.' 'We are starting to see the pendulum swing back,' according to Schwerin, who claimed the administration's erratic execution of tariffs had 'opened some people's eyes' that its policies were bad for business. 'I think it's crucial that we start to see a little more pushback. Better to have a backbone than to just bend the knee.' On controversial issues at the heart of political discourse, however, George does not expect much of a shift from CEOs. 'It is radio silence, and I think you'll see that continuing. There's not much to be gained from speaking out today.' 'Stick to your lane,' he has been counseling executives. 'If you're a banker, you can talk about the economy. If you're an oil expert ... talk to the energy industry. But you can't speak ex-cathedra to everyone else.' 'Only a handful' of business figures are deemed able to stand up and make bold public statements on any issue, according to George, who points to Jamie Dimon, the veteran JPMorgan Chase boss, and Warren Buffett, the longtime head of Berkshire Hathaway. 'There are certain people who are really hard to take on. Jamie's one,' he said. 'If you were president of the United States, would you take on Warren Buffett?'
Washington Post
12-05-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
Attorney general's brother vies to lead D.C. Bar, upending contest
A fight to lead Washington's influential bar association has drawn triple the votes of a typical cycle, animated by the candidacies of two lawyers connected to Trump appointees who some members fear could transform the body into a retaliatory arm for the president's administration. Less than halfway through the online voting window that ends next month, more than 25,000 members have cast ballots, said outgoing group president Shaun Snyder — interest that reflects 'the political landscape we are experiencing,' he said.
