(Image: The Ryugyong Hotel in North Korea is the world's tallest abandoned building | Viktoria Gaman / Shutterstock.com)
Notable from the past week: some misguided tourism turns on the totalitarian highway, a few wrong turns on the mainstream Canadian economic thoroughfare and a truck stop serving of the new doctrine of greedism on the U.S. presidential candidate campaign.
Dispatch from Dictatorland
This just in from Kim Jong-un’s land of totalitarian delusions: the country now lays claim to the world’s tallest abandoned building, according to a Quirk story. North Korea’s aptly dubbed Hotel of Doom boasts 105 storeys of vacancy. No word on room service reliability. The Quirk story reports that US$750 million has been invested in the Ryugyong Hotel since work started on in it in 1987, after originally being conceived by Kim Jong-un dictator predecessor Kim Il-Sung as a monument to the country’s thriving tourism sector. Tourism has likely dropped off since Il-Sung’s salad days, however.
Kim Jong-un’s Dictatorland ushered in 2016 with claims that it had successfully detonated its first hydrogen bomb in a “national epoch-making event.” Epoch-making, perhaps, but tourism-attracting, perhaps not. Nor much of a place anymore for a political honeymoon.
Off to DefiCity and Debtsville, Canada, with Justin and Bill.
Aforementioned political honeymoon, according to deep thinkers across the land, is now officially over for Justin Trudeau and his majority Liberal government.
Left turns to Debtsville can do that. Winning annual Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) Teddy Government Waste Awards can, too.
Justin’s done both already.
As the new federal government closes in on delivering its first budget, estimates on the size of the country’s deficit keep rising: more than $10 billion, maybe around $18 billion or more than $30 billion or the sky might be the limit. Best to get the bad news out of the way in “Big Tax” Bill Morneau’s first budget and bank on returning to sunny ways further on down the road.
According to Ipsos, concerns over the economy consequently have more Canadians thinking the country is now heading in the wrong direction. Those would be the same folks who a scant few months ago were convinced it was heading in the right direction.
Trudeau likewise took a wrong turn with his 2015 COP Paris delegation. It secured his government the dubious distinction of a Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) Teddy Government Waste Award for ballooning to 283 attendees, hangers-on and junket freeloaders from the 69 who attended the 2014 conference.
As the CTF noted, the cost of the 2015 COP delegation for one ministerial office alone was $282,000.
Another Trump card: creed of greed gains traction
Were nominations open today for political brass, bluster and bilge awards, Donald Trump, Republican presidential candidate hopeful and Vancouver Trump International Hotel and Tower namesake, would be a leading candidate in the political category.
Trump, fresh from taking the Nevada caucus with close to 45% of the vote and borrowing from the freebooting trader hymn book of Wall Street’s Gordon “Greed is Good” Gekko, espoused the 21st century American greedism doctrine now sweeping the land in his victory speech.
Excerpts included: “I’ll tell you what we’re going to do, right? We get greedy, right? Now we’re going to get greedy for the United States. We’re going to grab and grab and grab. We’re going to bring in so much money and so much everything.”
More converts to the greed-and-grab cause will likely be in the Far East, as China and the U.S. now account for half the world’s billionaires.
According to the fourth annual Hurun Global Rich List, the China stock market boom was a key driver for adding 72 new faces from that country to the 2015 list. China also leads the billionaire brigade with the number of self-made women in its ranks. E-commerce tycoon Liu Qiangdong, 41, was the biggest gainer on the list. Hurun said his wealth jumped to US$6.7 billion from US$1.5 billion in 2014. Forty billionaires were also under 40 years old.
Cash rich; math poor
But before Trump’s global grabbing begins in earnest, The Donald needs to bone up on his math skills, say informed analysts tallying promises from presidential hopefuls.
According to the Business Insider report, Trump’s rightful railing against America’s staggering US$19 trillion debt belies hair-brained budget proposals that the executive director of spending watchdog group Concord Coalition dismissed as “stream of consciousness economics” that don’t add up.
Meanwhile, Trump’s performance in the February 25 Republican leadership debate in Houston exposed the paucity of policy beneath his Celebrity Apprentice reality TV appeal.
Proving yet again that more money does not equate to more brains.
