nothing different, except...
Ok, I'll add my 2 satays.
Thaksin is doing the same way as all savvy politicians do - get the mass of uneducated poor to support you by throwing a few token social programs here and there. Juan Peron did that in Argentina, any U.S. president do that with the farmers lobby, Fidel Castro did that in Cuba, etc, etc. Of course, the other side of the coin is to make them afraid of city folks because they'll take away all those few token programs if their candidate becomes elected. Hum, didn't chairman Mao do that in China?
But it is worse here. Thaksin doesn't really believe in those programs. He is not really a populist. It is just to buy him time to do what he wants - make his family (and hence, himself) richer. What most people feel unfair is the wholesale sale of a huge chunk of the backbone of the Thai enterprise system without any benefits being given back to the country. IMHO, the Shin corporation can be considered as the GE of Thailand. Can you imagine if a controlling shareholder of GE sells the whole GE to, well lets say, China, and then finds a way not to pay taxes to the IRS? I am sure the whole U.S. Congress would be up in arms.
Here Thaksin was able to sell through the use of his political power, more than a Billion Dollars of assets tax free. He may have been able to make it legal. But it stings. Even worse, the sale was to a foreign government (yes, yes, forget the bs that the Singaporean government is saying, it is a corporation wholly-owned by it). This is why that Bangkok shopowner is so angry.
Ok, back to regular programming.
Re: nothing different, except...
Quote:
Originally Posted by Davey612
Ok, I'll add my 2 satays.
What an interesting concept - would they be chicken, beef or pork satays? I've had goat satay in Bali - satay kambing - lumps of grilled goat meat on a skewer.
The Thai coins are satang, by the way.
It is clear, Bucknaway and boygeenyus, who the protesters are - at least according to Sebastien Berger, the Bangkok correspondent of the UK News Telegraph, who claimed that: "Students, office workers and aesthetic (sic) lay Buddhists installed themselves in front of these temples (i.e., Siam Paragan, etc) to Mammon to listen to speeches and denunciations of Thaksin Shinawatra..." Obviously, it is Thailand's "beautiful people" who don't like Taksin! See www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml ... world.html