Moe Aung’s comment on ‘all inclusive unity’ has me thinking about the Thai border. There continues to be armed conflict between ethnic minorities: cease-fire signatories vs. non-signatories. Sanctions mean little to people living along the Thai-Burma border and most are not familiar with the NLD. While in theory, there is one ‘enemy’ (the Tatmadaw) and one fight (democracy), in practice there are multiple clashes and a number of ethnic minorities who do not see themselves as Burmese and are fighting for independance/autonomy, not a governing system, be it democracy or other. For engagement to bring about effective political change in Burma, businesses, governments, whomever chooses to engage, must do so not only with the Burman-lead government, but also with the ethnic minorities.
A very valid point. The military elite and the people of course do not exist in isolation from each other. The former needs to exploit and the latter must make a living somehow. Many families have members in both camps. The army rank and file are sons of ordinary people who bear the brunt of military misrule, whether they live in the Delta or in the hills. It’s not even democracy, a catch-all term handy as a slogan, but peace, rule of law, fairness, opportunities and progress for all the diverse peoples of Burma that are conspicuous by their absence. It’s the inability to share the national pie, not content with just the lion’s share.
That’s precisely why we must involve the army rank and file, not just civil servants, in our struggle for freedom in order to improve the odds, to level the playing field, to have a fighting chance for the people to win through. The crucial emphasis has to be on an all inclusive unity and self-reliance, not having to depend too much on international support, be it sanctions or engagement.
A few other thoughts to add to this discussion, which is often framed in terms of farm/non-farm, rural/urban, sedentary/mobile.
First of all, it is evident that the increasing personal mobility of many rural Thais (best exemplified in the motorcycle ‘revolution’) has led to some relocalisation of living. Whereas in the 1970s and 1980s villagers would have to leave home in order to engage with non-farm work, they can now continue to reside in their natal villages while working elsewhere. In the central plains, factories will pick up daily from a radius of 100 km. And many younger women and men, of course, have their own means of private transport. I do not think, however, that we should be tempted to see in this process a reinvigoration of the village and rural life; far from it.
Notwithstanding this relocalisation, and second, there is still an interesting stretching of families and households over space – something that was particularly striking when Albert Salamanca and I recently re-studied two villages where I originally worked in the early 1980s. This raises interesting questions about the nature of the village ‘community’. And there are two ends to this: the changing nature of source communities, and the changing nature of destination settlements, where an influx of migrants changes the nature and functioning of the host settlements.
Finally, I got a great deal from a recent book by Eric Thompson on rural change in Malaysia in which he argues that rural spaces are becoming ‘socially urban’. This certainly resonates with what I have seen in Thailand and requires us to think about ‘the rural’ and ‘the urban’ in new ways.
In response to C. Baker, the OAE data on “income, expenses and debt of farm households” are available for the following years: 1978/79 (47% of total income from farm income), 1982/83 (41%), 1987/88 (50%), 1991 (33%), 1995 (37%), 1998 (32%), 1999 (33,9%) and 2000 (35%). The data only concerns cash income; whatever is produced for self-consumption is not computed as income. The data suggest there was not a gradual and unilinear decline of the share of farm income within agricultural hh.
What is to me most intriguing in the OAE data and the Basic Needs Survey (tab 50+) is the great infra-country variations in the capacity of farm income to grow at an acceptable rate. The Basic needs survey suggests agriculture is by far most lucrative in the South (probably in large part because of great farm profits in rubber cultivation). Regretfully, very few studies focusing on agriculture in the South have been recently published, at least in English.
Note that although agriculture can be very lucrative in the South, it seems cultivated land declined markedly on the eastern coast. This also would deserve more studies.
Vicary /Turnell is correct in saying that the disastrous turnaround of Burma’s economic woes has nothing to do with sanctions imposed, it further went on to say that it was chronic economic mismanagement, might I add that it is due to chronic political naivety and tunnel-vision simple-mindedness as well.
It just happens to be very convenient for the junta to put the blame on sanctions and the opposition as the source of their woes.
Fifty years ago, when the Ne Win regime took over, the xenophobic regime isolated itself from everyone and refused all aid, including and especially from China. The current regime is now at the other extreme end. It has opened itself up to whoever would like to engage with them, China, India, Russia, South Korea, North Korea, Iran, ASEAN …
I do not agree with Vicary/Turnell that lifting sanctions will greatly deleverage the power of the West to influence the regime. What leverage have they got anyway? If there is a ghost of a leverage, it could be now when it is combined with other circumstances. Yes, the financial targeted sanctions are hurting; the junta feels threatened by the fast growing influence and its economic dependence on China; the junta is displeased with China’s reluctance to cooperate with its ambitions to unite/control/eradicate the cease-fire groups; Than Shwe is getting old and will be looking for his future security and that of his off-springs; most of all the military regime is very “Sino”-phobic and will always be.
On off-farm income, I recall that Suchai Treerat at Chulalogkorn University was doing research that reflected on this for Suphanburi back in the early and mid-80s and I believe he has updated this in recent years. If my memory of his papers is accurate, I believe he was showing that off-farm income was the only thing keeping the family farm going back then in the area he studied.
It seems to me that one problem with the sanctions debate is the assumption that there is a clear separation between a small group of evil generals and “the people of Burma,” a large, oppressed mass who manage to avoid having any connection to the regime. In reality, aren’t there many people in between, who may have family members or friends in mid-level bureaucracy or in the USDA, but who may also favor political change? There may be some people who are totally innocent and others who are absolutely guilty, but there are many more on a spectrum between these extremes. The whole good vs. evil, people vs. generals rhetoric doesn’t seem to reflect the compromises people living inside Burma make in order to survive, protect their families, and keep their jobs. The problem is that people in the West are usually only willing to help poor, downtrodden angels (or monks!) who struggle single-mindedly for democracy. But we don’t want to get our hands dirty by reaching out to say, most civil servants, whose labor props up the regime, but who are certainly not raking in the cash or executing people.
Yes, the Burmese generals happen to occupy the lowest rung of the lowest, and you’ve got to draw the line somewhere.
Engagement, maybe, since sanctions have proved to be a very blunt instrument and ineffectual in the end. Appeasement however is politically untenable and plain stupid given the total intransigence on the part of the junta, never mind Webb and the rest of the business lobby itching to get a piece of the action. Let’s see if the US gets anywhere with this change of tack.
The importance of non-farm income is not new. Using the old Agricultural Statistics data, we reckoned that almost two-thirds of farm households’ total cash income was earned away from the farm in the mid 1990s. That data series seems to have been discontinued. This Basic Needs survey may have different methods, and the categories in play look a bit different, but it seems as if the picture may not have changed that much over the last decade. Does anyone have anything like a series on this income breakdown?
Another key indicator changed trend over the 1997 crisis. Over the prior decade, about 3 million people transferred from farm to non-farm employment (the exact figure depends a lot on which years and which month of the LFS is used, but the trend is clear). Since 1997, employment in agriculture has not only stopped shrinking but on trend has even grown a bit. The net increase in the total labor force is going to non-agricultural work, but there is no longer a net outflow. Now, this figure and its interpretation are complicated by the fact that we now have a large (2 million? 3 million?) immigrant labor group which is not being counted.
On Rick’s point. Our formal/informal calculation was rather rough. NSO did a survey in 2007 which put the formal:informal split at 37:63. I’m not sure of their definition criteria, but the report (in Thai) is on the NSO website. The breakdowns by age, gender, and sector are quite interesting. I’m sending Andrew a pdf. [AW: Here it is.]
I wonder if this delicate balance between farm and city – under which rural families export labor to the city in return for wage and remittance incomes that allow the family farm to survive – has been rather stable over the past decade. And perhaps one reason for that is the large labor in-migration which has reduced the capacity of the non-farm economy to absorb more (Thai) rural labor.
Meanwhile two other things seem to be happening, though a bit obscured. First, the farmers are getting older. The median age of all agricultural workers has risen from 30 in the 1980s to 39 in the 2000s, and last year some government agency announced that the average age of a rice farmer is now above 50. Second, a process of land consolidation may have begun, but is still obscured because the land statistics are so opaque.
I was not impressed with this article by Vicary and Turnell/ Burma Economic Watch. I usually look forward to inciseful economic commentary from Turnell and team…
Perhaps because of its format (op/ed in mainstream newspaper), this article washes over the nuances of sanctions policy.
The way it is written is confusing… I think that the differences between the U.S. blanket sanctions policy and Australia’s targetted sanctions policy need to be explained in the article in order for the reader to comprehend the authors’ statement.
The recent debate that has been discussed is different in Washington than it is in Canberra… the conversations that have been happening as of late have been in reaction to the U.S.A’s decision to re-orient their policy towards some of as yet, undetermined form of ‘engagement’. The possibility of easing on sanctions would certainly be a bargaining chip to use once negotiations get much, much deeper, but is certainly (as stated by Mr. Kurt Campbell) not on the cards for the time being.
When it comes to Australia, I don’t think that anyone in their right mind is promoting the removal of Australia’s targetted financial and travel sanctions towards the generals who run Myanmar, and their business cronies. I highly doubt that Canberra is going to let Than Shwe or U Tay Zar visit Surfer’s Paradise on holiday anytime soon.
Australia maintains a policy that is neither encouraging or discouraging towards Australian businesses investing in Myanmar. This is a seperate debate, and on that was discussed on New Mandala earlier this week after the Burma Campaign Australia released some comments on boycotting some Australian companies.
I am very surprised that these major differences in sanctions and investment policies were not discussed in The Age article by Turnell and Vicary.
Additionally, the article fails to discuss how U.S. and E.U. sanctions have hurt farmers, villagers, and small business owners. While yes, there are things like ‘national prestige’ projects, and large industry projects such as those in the oil and gas sector, there is a thriving business class in Myanmar that no one cares to discuss, who are suffereing majorly from bans on exports of textiles, seafood, and other agricultural products to the west…
I agree with you, Frank G Anderson (30), about the generally low standard of public morality in Thailand. This contrasts with the often high level of morality on a personal and family scale. However, history elsewhere provides good evidence that the concentration of real power in elected institutions is a mechanism that selects for higher public standards. Democracy improves public morality: it’s not a system that works only for the high-minded.
Very useful, Andrew. I’m also interested in whether the increase in non-farm income has contributed to a rise in the informal sector, a sector that, according to Pasuk and Baker’s article “Thaksin’s Populism,” accounts for around two thirds of the Thai labor force. The issue of informality, and its link to inequality, seems to be an increasingly important issue.
Unfortunately once again, even the people’s representatives treat the people with utter contempt, depending on who the representatives are, of course. If they really hail from grassroots honest activists who are seeking justice, they will likely die trying. If they are aligned with the normal politic where promises are better than results, then no, they will not be treated with contempt. They will, instead, be welcomed and allowed to pipeline money to that fabled central machine that determines how long Thailand will remain Sakdina Siam.
I am not sure just how deeply some of the commentators on this blog become entrenched with local groups, private citizens and officials at various levels, but in my experience it is difficult to find someone, anyone, who will act on the behalf of the right thing per se. There are a few, but to cite either the police, the upper echelon elites or militarists without also including general society may not be adequately analytical.
Johpa Deumlaokeng (28) insults the world’s democracies by suggesting that they are on a par with Thailand, where the royal/military mafia treat the people’s representatives with such utter contempt.
I have been visiting a province near Bangkok for the past two decades. For many years, I used the train. In the evening, you always had scores of women in their company uniforms getting on the train at one point and leaving at others, that is, rural train stations, to return from their daily work in the factories to their rural villages. Similarly, in the morning and the evening one could observe buses shuttling factory workers, mostly women, from their rural bases to their work places, and back. Finally, the Teachers’ College, later renamed the Rajaphat University, certainly has not mainly been serving people from urban areas. Rather, many of its students have been people who lived in agricultural villages. To be sure, these students, though living in the countryside, did not study for their BAs as a preparation to till the soil of their parents.
$25 for a plate of stirfry! That is cheap for Sydney standard.
A glorified Thai Restaurant in Surry Hill of Sydney will lighten your wallet $39.90 for a couple of glasses of cheap house wine and a plate of 6 vegan spring rolls ….
OMG! On a related point, I find that food rarely taste quite as good when I perceive it as expensive. The high price inflates my expectations, raises the satisfaction threshold. As in, “this better be the best bloody Thai food I’ve ever tasted!”
It just politics, whether it is local politics or geopolitics, it is the same.
Western countries, like the USA or Australia, does not fare any better on the moral scale than any eastern countries, like China or japan when it comes to geopolitics. Screaming loudest about democracy does not make one right. This is particularly true when it comes to the US. In any “democratic election” in the third world that the US has influence in, only acceptable “freely” elected candidate must be the one supported and favoured my the US. If someone else gets elected, then he / she is not recognised and the elected govt is called a “regime”.
Why “regime” has become a dirty word beats me.
The same goes wih saunctions. The reasons that it doesn’t work is because, saunctions are never applied evenly. It is only applied on the insistance of western “powers” and only on “regime” unfriendly to western “powers” Given that scenario, how should the rest of the “non-aligned” world respond?
$25 for a plate of stirfry! That is cheap for Sydney standard.
A glorified Thai Restaurant in Surry Hill of Sydney will lighten your wallet $39.90 for a couple of glasses of cheap house wine and a plate of 6 vegan spring rolls while you and your partner are waiting at the front bar for your table booked 2 weeks prior.
The whole dinner bill for two was so large even the accountant didn’t believe that. A very small bowl of Tum-Yam-kung for one with 3 smallish prawns in the tasteless liquidy soup was $14.90.
(Pardon me for mentioning 90 cents since it is a standard practice here not to round up to nearest dollar so that people wouldn’t think the price they are paying is expensive.)
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In the same breath: Burma, China…Thailand
Moe Aung’s comment on ‘all inclusive unity’ has me thinking about the Thai border. There continues to be armed conflict between ethnic minorities: cease-fire signatories vs. non-signatories. Sanctions mean little to people living along the Thai-Burma border and most are not familiar with the NLD. While in theory, there is one ‘enemy’ (the Tatmadaw) and one fight (democracy), in practice there are multiple clashes and a number of ethnic minorities who do not see themselves as Burmese and are fighting for independance/autonomy, not a governing system, be it democracy or other. For engagement to bring about effective political change in Burma, businesses, governments, whomever chooses to engage, must do so not only with the Burman-lead government, but also with the ethnic minorities.
In the same breath: Burma, China…Thailand
rose metro,
A very valid point. The military elite and the people of course do not exist in isolation from each other. The former needs to exploit and the latter must make a living somehow. Many families have members in both camps. The army rank and file are sons of ordinary people who bear the brunt of military misrule, whether they live in the Delta or in the hills. It’s not even democracy, a catch-all term handy as a slogan, but peace, rule of law, fairness, opportunities and progress for all the diverse peoples of Burma that are conspicuous by their absence. It’s the inability to share the national pie, not content with just the lion’s share.
That’s precisely why we must involve the army rank and file, not just civil servants, in our struggle for freedom in order to improve the odds, to level the playing field, to have a fighting chance for the people to win through. The crucial emphasis has to be on an all inclusive unity and self-reliance, not having to depend too much on international support, be it sanctions or engagement.
Thailand’s new rural economy
A few other thoughts to add to this discussion, which is often framed in terms of farm/non-farm, rural/urban, sedentary/mobile.
First of all, it is evident that the increasing personal mobility of many rural Thais (best exemplified in the motorcycle ‘revolution’) has led to some relocalisation of living. Whereas in the 1970s and 1980s villagers would have to leave home in order to engage with non-farm work, they can now continue to reside in their natal villages while working elsewhere. In the central plains, factories will pick up daily from a radius of 100 km. And many younger women and men, of course, have their own means of private transport. I do not think, however, that we should be tempted to see in this process a reinvigoration of the village and rural life; far from it.
Notwithstanding this relocalisation, and second, there is still an interesting stretching of families and households over space – something that was particularly striking when Albert Salamanca and I recently re-studied two villages where I originally worked in the early 1980s. This raises interesting questions about the nature of the village ‘community’. And there are two ends to this: the changing nature of source communities, and the changing nature of destination settlements, where an influx of migrants changes the nature and functioning of the host settlements.
Finally, I got a great deal from a recent book by Eric Thompson on rural change in Malaysia in which he argues that rural spaces are becoming ‘socially urban’. This certainly resonates with what I have seen in Thailand and requires us to think about ‘the rural’ and ‘the urban’ in new ways.
Thailand’s new rural economy
In response to C. Baker, the OAE data on “income, expenses and debt of farm households” are available for the following years: 1978/79 (47% of total income from farm income), 1982/83 (41%), 1987/88 (50%), 1991 (33%), 1995 (37%), 1998 (32%), 1999 (33,9%) and 2000 (35%). The data only concerns cash income; whatever is produced for self-consumption is not computed as income. The data suggest there was not a gradual and unilinear decline of the share of farm income within agricultural hh.
What is to me most intriguing in the OAE data and the Basic Needs Survey (tab 50+) is the great infra-country variations in the capacity of farm income to grow at an acceptable rate. The Basic needs survey suggests agriculture is by far most lucrative in the South (probably in large part because of great farm profits in rubber cultivation). Regretfully, very few studies focusing on agriculture in the South have been recently published, at least in English.
Note that although agriculture can be very lucrative in the South, it seems cultivated land declined markedly on the eastern coast. This also would deserve more studies.
Vicary and Turnell on Burma sanctions
Vicary /Turnell is correct in saying that the disastrous turnaround of Burma’s economic woes has nothing to do with sanctions imposed, it further went on to say that it was chronic economic mismanagement, might I add that it is due to chronic political naivety and tunnel-vision simple-mindedness as well.
It just happens to be very convenient for the junta to put the blame on sanctions and the opposition as the source of their woes.
Fifty years ago, when the Ne Win regime took over, the xenophobic regime isolated itself from everyone and refused all aid, including and especially from China. The current regime is now at the other extreme end. It has opened itself up to whoever would like to engage with them, China, India, Russia, South Korea, North Korea, Iran, ASEAN …
I do not agree with Vicary/Turnell that lifting sanctions will greatly deleverage the power of the West to influence the regime. What leverage have they got anyway? If there is a ghost of a leverage, it could be now when it is combined with other circumstances. Yes, the financial targeted sanctions are hurting; the junta feels threatened by the fast growing influence and its economic dependence on China; the junta is displeased with China’s reluctance to cooperate with its ambitions to unite/control/eradicate the cease-fire groups; Than Shwe is getting old and will be looking for his future security and that of his off-springs; most of all the military regime is very “Sino”-phobic and will always be.
Thailand’s new rural economy
On off-farm income, I recall that Suchai Treerat at Chulalogkorn University was doing research that reflected on this for Suphanburi back in the early and mid-80s and I believe he has updated this in recent years. If my memory of his papers is accurate, I believe he was showing that off-farm income was the only thing keeping the family farm going back then in the area he studied.
In the same breath: Burma, China…Thailand
It seems to me that one problem with the sanctions debate is the assumption that there is a clear separation between a small group of evil generals and “the people of Burma,” a large, oppressed mass who manage to avoid having any connection to the regime. In reality, aren’t there many people in between, who may have family members or friends in mid-level bureaucracy or in the USDA, but who may also favor political change? There may be some people who are totally innocent and others who are absolutely guilty, but there are many more on a spectrum between these extremes. The whole good vs. evil, people vs. generals rhetoric doesn’t seem to reflect the compromises people living inside Burma make in order to survive, protect their families, and keep their jobs. The problem is that people in the West are usually only willing to help poor, downtrodden angels (or monks!) who struggle single-mindedly for democracy. But we don’t want to get our hands dirty by reaching out to say, most civil servants, whose labor props up the regime, but who are certainly not raking in the cash or executing people.
In the same breath: Burma, China…Thailand
Johpa Deumlaokeng,
Yes, the Burmese generals happen to occupy the lowest rung of the lowest, and you’ve got to draw the line somewhere.
Engagement, maybe, since sanctions have proved to be a very blunt instrument and ineffectual in the end. Appeasement however is politically untenable and plain stupid given the total intransigence on the part of the junta, never mind Webb and the rest of the business lobby itching to get a piece of the action. Let’s see if the US gets anywhere with this change of tack.
Thailand’s new rural economy
The importance of non-farm income is not new. Using the old Agricultural Statistics data, we reckoned that almost two-thirds of farm households’ total cash income was earned away from the farm in the mid 1990s. That data series seems to have been discontinued. This Basic Needs survey may have different methods, and the categories in play look a bit different, but it seems as if the picture may not have changed that much over the last decade. Does anyone have anything like a series on this income breakdown?
Another key indicator changed trend over the 1997 crisis. Over the prior decade, about 3 million people transferred from farm to non-farm employment (the exact figure depends a lot on which years and which month of the LFS is used, but the trend is clear). Since 1997, employment in agriculture has not only stopped shrinking but on trend has even grown a bit. The net increase in the total labor force is going to non-agricultural work, but there is no longer a net outflow. Now, this figure and its interpretation are complicated by the fact that we now have a large (2 million? 3 million?) immigrant labor group which is not being counted.
On Rick’s point. Our formal/informal calculation was rather rough. NSO did a survey in 2007 which put the formal:informal split at 37:63. I’m not sure of their definition criteria, but the report (in Thai) is on the NSO website. The breakdowns by age, gender, and sector are quite interesting. I’m sending Andrew a pdf. [AW: Here it is.]
I wonder if this delicate balance between farm and city – under which rural families export labor to the city in return for wage and remittance incomes that allow the family farm to survive – has been rather stable over the past decade. And perhaps one reason for that is the large labor in-migration which has reduced the capacity of the non-farm economy to absorb more (Thai) rural labor.
Meanwhile two other things seem to be happening, though a bit obscured. First, the farmers are getting older. The median age of all agricultural workers has risen from 30 in the 1980s to 39 in the 2000s, and last year some government agency announced that the average age of a rice farmer is now above 50. Second, a process of land consolidation may have begun, but is still obscured because the land statistics are so opaque.
Vicary and Turnell on Burma sanctions
I was not impressed with this article by Vicary and Turnell/ Burma Economic Watch. I usually look forward to inciseful economic commentary from Turnell and team…
Perhaps because of its format (op/ed in mainstream newspaper), this article washes over the nuances of sanctions policy.
The way it is written is confusing… I think that the differences between the U.S. blanket sanctions policy and Australia’s targetted sanctions policy need to be explained in the article in order for the reader to comprehend the authors’ statement.
The recent debate that has been discussed is different in Washington than it is in Canberra… the conversations that have been happening as of late have been in reaction to the U.S.A’s decision to re-orient their policy towards some of as yet, undetermined form of ‘engagement’. The possibility of easing on sanctions would certainly be a bargaining chip to use once negotiations get much, much deeper, but is certainly (as stated by Mr. Kurt Campbell) not on the cards for the time being.
When it comes to Australia, I don’t think that anyone in their right mind is promoting the removal of Australia’s targetted financial and travel sanctions towards the generals who run Myanmar, and their business cronies. I highly doubt that Canberra is going to let Than Shwe or U Tay Zar visit Surfer’s Paradise on holiday anytime soon.
Australia maintains a policy that is neither encouraging or discouraging towards Australian businesses investing in Myanmar. This is a seperate debate, and on that was discussed on New Mandala earlier this week after the Burma Campaign Australia released some comments on boycotting some Australian companies.
I am very surprised that these major differences in sanctions and investment policies were not discussed in The Age article by Turnell and Vicary.
Additionally, the article fails to discuss how U.S. and E.U. sanctions have hurt farmers, villagers, and small business owners. While yes, there are things like ‘national prestige’ projects, and large industry projects such as those in the oil and gas sector, there is a thriving business class in Myanmar that no one cares to discuss, who are suffereing majorly from bans on exports of textiles, seafood, and other agricultural products to the west…
Jakrapob on the state within the state
I agree with you, Frank G Anderson (30), about the generally low standard of public morality in Thailand. This contrasts with the often high level of morality on a personal and family scale. However, history elsewhere provides good evidence that the concentration of real power in elected institutions is a mechanism that selects for higher public standards. Democracy improves public morality: it’s not a system that works only for the high-minded.
Thailand’s new rural economy
Very useful, Andrew. I’m also interested in whether the increase in non-farm income has contributed to a rise in the informal sector, a sector that, according to Pasuk and Baker’s article “Thaksin’s Populism,” accounts for around two thirds of the Thai labor force. The issue of informality, and its link to inequality, seems to be an increasingly important issue.
Jakrapob on the state within the state
5 October 2009
Unfortunately once again, even the people’s representatives treat the people with utter contempt, depending on who the representatives are, of course. If they really hail from grassroots honest activists who are seeking justice, they will likely die trying. If they are aligned with the normal politic where promises are better than results, then no, they will not be treated with contempt. They will, instead, be welcomed and allowed to pipeline money to that fabled central machine that determines how long Thailand will remain Sakdina Siam.
I am not sure just how deeply some of the commentators on this blog become entrenched with local groups, private citizens and officials at various levels, but in my experience it is difficult to find someone, anyone, who will act on the behalf of the right thing per se. There are a few, but to cite either the police, the upper echelon elites or militarists without also including general society may not be adequately analytical.
Jakrapob on the state within the state
Johpa Deumlaokeng (28) insults the world’s democracies by suggesting that they are on a par with Thailand, where the royal/military mafia treat the people’s representatives with such utter contempt.
Thailand’s new rural economy
I have been visiting a province near Bangkok for the past two decades. For many years, I used the train. In the evening, you always had scores of women in their company uniforms getting on the train at one point and leaving at others, that is, rural train stations, to return from their daily work in the factories to their rural villages. Similarly, in the morning and the evening one could observe buses shuttling factory workers, mostly women, from their rural bases to their work places, and back. Finally, the Teachers’ College, later renamed the Rajaphat University, certainly has not mainly been serving people from urban areas. Rather, many of its students have been people who lived in agricultural villages. To be sure, these students, though living in the countryside, did not study for their BAs as a preparation to till the soil of their parents.
Burma-U.S. relations
Two days later, on Sept. 30, Sen. Webb chaired a US Senate hearing in which Campbell testified.
I was there. The Senate hearing raised various concerns. This is a good place to start:
http://jotman.blogspot.com/2009/10/us-senate-awol-on-burma.html
Other recent posts explore further controversies related to the hearing.
Thai food better in Sydney
Hla Oo
$25 for a plate of stirfry! That is cheap for Sydney standard.
A glorified Thai Restaurant in Surry Hill of Sydney will lighten your wallet $39.90 for a couple of glasses of cheap house wine and a plate of 6 vegan spring rolls ….
OMG! On a related point, I find that food rarely taste quite as good when I perceive it as expensive. The high price inflates my expectations, raises the satisfaction threshold. As in, “this better be the best bloody Thai food I’ve ever tasted!”
In the same breath: Burma, China…Thailand
It just politics, whether it is local politics or geopolitics, it is the same.
Western countries, like the USA or Australia, does not fare any better on the moral scale than any eastern countries, like China or japan when it comes to geopolitics. Screaming loudest about democracy does not make one right. This is particularly true when it comes to the US. In any “democratic election” in the third world that the US has influence in, only acceptable “freely” elected candidate must be the one supported and favoured my the US. If someone else gets elected, then he / she is not recognised and the elected govt is called a “regime”.
Why “regime” has become a dirty word beats me.
The same goes wih saunctions. The reasons that it doesn’t work is because, saunctions are never applied evenly. It is only applied on the insistance of western “powers” and only on “regime” unfriendly to western “powers” Given that scenario, how should the rest of the “non-aligned” world respond?
ps – my apologies for all the ” ” quotation marks
Thai food better in Sydney
$25 for a plate of stirfry! That is cheap for Sydney standard.
A glorified Thai Restaurant in Surry Hill of Sydney will lighten your wallet $39.90 for a couple of glasses of cheap house wine and a plate of 6 vegan spring rolls while you and your partner are waiting at the front bar for your table booked 2 weeks prior.
The whole dinner bill for two was so large even the accountant didn’t believe that. A very small bowl of Tum-Yam-kung for one with 3 smallish prawns in the tasteless liquidy soup was $14.90.
(Pardon me for mentioning 90 cents since it is a standard practice here not to round up to nearest dollar so that people wouldn’t think the price they are paying is expensive.)