First let me apologize for attacking a bit too much on an ad-hominem basis, I never would want you to get quiet here – What would be the fun of a discussion without differing views? I still think though that my primary impression of his “sufficiency democracy” is still valid.
Chai-anand may have been a really brilliant thinker in the nineties, but he definitely is lost it with ideas like this.
There is really no-one buying into this “por piang”-anything stuff. His “botton-up approach” means nothing else than giving the majority of the population some community projects to decide and on the top the important decisions will be made by unelected technocrats.
Economically “por piang” never was meant to be anti-capitalistic, it was always (well, at least after it’s revival after the 2006 coup) used as a tool to keep the poor in place.
Lastly I want to cite from a comment of the article you referred to which I thing sums it up quite well: “All this talk of “Sufficiency” is just a load of cod’s wallop, total nonsense, sheltered desperate coddled Bangkok hi-so royalist elites desperately trying to comfort each other as their privileged fantasy world collapses all around them in a constant state of change…”
Do you also have a quote from the WSJ regarding PM Thaksin’s calling of an election solely in order to be held accountable to the nation by parliament over his dodgy business deals and gross human rights violations.
BTW Abhisit has recently made a comprehensive response in the international press to attacks such as that by the WSJ.
Pamela Hongsakul. Sorry to say that your comments only cause despair. As if such delusional and blinkered views really are widespread then indeed Thailand is simply screwed and civil war is probably inevitable.
Already we see headlines in the Bangkok Post like “Hunt For Yingaluck” and a general trend that see’s an “us” and “them” which when things really get nasty , can only assure an ugly and nasty conflagration in Thailand.
The better off within Thai society who are aligned to the likes of Suthepy and Abbshit or the Democratic party [misnamed clearly] are shooting themselves in the foot and will be the ultimate big losers. They will literally reap what they sow and those with the most have the most to lose.
That there are so many elements of greed, arrogance embedded within certain sections of the Thai populace and society evidently looks like insuring they will see their world collapse when it really gets bad, and they will only have themselves to blame.
At which point the outside world will have largely have washed it’s hands of Thailand and written it off as another basket case.
Let’s hope for some miraculous way to stabilize things and avoid chaos.
R.N. England: A very interesting take on the position and importance of Bangkok in the geopolitical situation of Thailand. A friend told me that some years ago the shelves of shops in the North were emptying due to disturbances in the distribution chain of goods from Bangkok to the provinces in the North and Northeast.
Regarding tablet computers:
We are talking 4-5 year olds here, children who have yet to develop their manual skills. No, tablet computers do not enhance manual skills. If you search the internet, you will find just as many articles critical to the use of tablet computers educating children as the other way around.
It doesn’t help that cars are cheap in other car manufacturing countries when the scheme doesn’t make any sense in Thailand. This country has a lack of skilled industrial workers anyway. Those who gained from the tax break were those who could afford to pay for the car with cash and the car companies. For the rest, it mostly meant more debts, and in many cases more debts than they can handle. I even know people without a driving license and with no driving skills or need for a car who bought one because they thought they could sell it with a profit later. The opposite has happened of course: Second hand car prices for small cars have plummeted and those who have to sell because they cannot afford to keep their car are the biggest losers. A friend of mine lost over 100,000 baht on his 5 year old Toyota Avanza overnight because the market is now seriously oversaturated with relatively new, very cheap cars.
If they had the money and didn’t pay the farmers, it’s even worse. That means they have knowingly created these problems for over a million farmers. That’s a crime.
What should be done:
Create infrastructure, particularly functional railways, that makes it attractive to build industry in parts of Thailand where it’s needed. That means Isan in particular. It’s absurd that there is very little industry in Isan, where people need work and the farming is the least profitable, while the industry is built on first class rice fields in Central Thailand, an industry that is mainly manned with people from the Northeast.
They could also stop spending 200 billion baht per year subsidising gas. Those who get the most advantage from that are people with large cars, taxi passengers in Bangkok and owners of transport companies. Gas for cars is around 40% cheaper in Thailand than in the oil rich nations of the Middle East, and much of it is imported.
They could create a more efficient passenger transport system all over Thailand by not issuing licenses to thousands of minivans where larger buses would do a much better job. Those losing their jobs in the transport sector could work in the industry if Thailand imported fewer Burmese workers, and Thailand would become more competitive.
The list is endless, but handing out cash is never a solution. It has been tried in other parts of the world, which has been pointed out by several posters here, with mediocre results to say the least.
All this really misses the point. Malaysia was originally created to protect British business interests and Malay feudalism. That is why Bung Karno labelled it a NEKOLIM plot. Konfrontasi was conceived as an anti-NEKOLIM initiative. Is Peter Cohen really taking the side of NEKOLIM??
“The government ran out of money for the rice scandal long before the demonstrations started.”
If the Thai government has ran out of money, how come Thailand has not defaulted? The rice scheme is a mistake, but I don’t see why it cannot be corrected.
“In most countries, agricultural subsidies are paid directly to the farmers…”
Yes, in the EU farmers are paid directly per hectare, regardless of whether they grow any crops. I bet that would not be viewed as populist in Thailand!
“Subsidies on new cars may actually be the weirdest.”
It’s a tax break, not a direct subsidy. It’s common for car producing countries to have low taxes on cars as it creates jobs, while car importing countries keep their taxes very high. For instance, cars in Denmark has been much higher compared to Sweden due to taxation. I may not agree with the scheme, but I wouldn’t call it weird.
“Or tablet computers to all school kids, when most research indicate strongly that learning to read and write by traditional means is far superior…”
This is speculative, Chris, but it seems to me that the main thing stopping the separation of the N and NE from Bangkok is that most of their world trade goes through Bangkok. Bangkok is their lifeline. The Bangkok régime throttles the lifeline to the extent necessary to preserve its hegemony and maximise its wealth. This lifeline status is the geopolitical raison d’├кtre, both of Bangkok, and of the violent, mendacious, conspiratorial, mafia-like régime there. Just like London many centuries ago. It explains the fight Bangkok is putting up against being ruled by a democratic government with much of its representation in the N and NE.
If a noxious Bangkok régime survives or revives in the future, is there any other possible relief on the way for the N and NE? Two possibilities are the proposed railway from Kunming to Vientiane, and increased trade via the Mekong, improved by the regulation of its flow made possible by the Chinese dams upstream. If that happens, it seems predictable that any entrenched Bangkok régime would attempt to preserve its hegemony by poisoning relations with the relevant neighbouring countries.
Here are two longish pieces by р╕Щр╕┤р╕Шр╕┤ р╣Ар╕нр╕╡р╕вр╕зр╕ир╕гр╕╡р╕зр╕Зр╕ир╣М from Pracha Thai, February 1 & 2. The Thai professional classes, he says, have grown up and prospered under the protection of non-democratic, military governments. Democracy, during its times of intermittent function, largely, until Taksin, served their ends in the same way.
But times have changed. Despite their best efforts to maintain advantaged opportunity, other folks are competing for place. They could — the elites — buck up and share the space, or they might instead try to stop these changes, hold on to their advantage, by whatever means seems likely.
George Thomas: The Thai media reports would appear to be correct. On Monday 17th February, whilst driving from Pak Chong to Saraburi, I was passed by a convoy of about 15 police minivans, presumably heading for Bangkok. The lead vehicle bore the logo “Buriram Police” and the “tail end Charlie” was a “Paddy Wagon” which may well have been brought into use, judging by the numbers of protestors arrested during the past few days.
With so many “weaknesses” that can be harped on by the Democrats and the PDRC, together with the supposed anger of the farmers, beating PT in an election would be a “no brainer”
Why the Democrats and PDRC are so fearful of an election defies logic UNLESS someone is lying.
Ha ha… I can see a Thailand divided into a chaos of more or less independent states: Thai Noi in the northeast, Khmer in the east, Lanna in the north, Tai Yai in Mae Hong Son, a muslim state in the south, a Thai-Chinese coalition in Central Thailand and a Farang State of Drunkards in Pattaya 😉
Here’s a little story about what turned a huge number of Bangkok people against Thaksin:
It’s a well known fact that Thaksin made most of his fortune from his mobile phone business, namely AIS. Since he had a monopoly on these services in Thailand, he could price them as he liked, and since only handsets bought through the AIS system could be used, he could price those as he liked as well. During the more than 10 years that Thaksin had this monopoly, mobile services and handsets were around three times as expensive in Thailand as in high cost European countries.
When Thaksin sold Shin Corporation, the owner of AIS, to Temasek without paying tax due to a loophole in the tax regulations, my Thai colleagues came to me, one after the other, both those who had been in favour of Thaksin and those who were against him. They all had the same question: He is our prime minister, and he’s very rich. Why doesn’t he pay tax?
This had nothing to do with royalism or political views. Many explained to me that they had paid dearly for Thaksin’s mobile services and felt that these values belonged to the Thai people as much as to the person Thaksin, the man they had elected to govern the country. This was a turning point for many, and was one of the factors that made it easy to gain support for the military coup in 2006 among large segments of the population.
It’s important also to remember that Thaksin broke with and important part of Thai corruption tradition. Although corruption can never be defined as positive, and many in Thailand get far too much, there has always been an element of sharing. When a police officer has collected his tea money, he shares with his girlfriends who share with their families and so on. Those who are rich never shared as much as those who had less, but that’s how greed works. Those who are greedy get rich.
Thaksin shares with nobody. When he hands out his populist schemes, it’s the tax payers money, not his own. With the rice scam, it’s even worse: Since the money didn’t exist in the first place, they had to be borrowed, so it’s future tax payers’ money. To make things worse, rice farmers get only part of the wealth. Much have disappeared into assorted corruption schemes, and it’s a sad fact that Burmese rice traders have made fortunes on money that should supposedly go to poor Thai farmers. This was easy to predict, but when a policy is designed for corruption, those who are corrupt will obviously not stop it.
Possibly because they just build, rather than dreaming up some green half-baked nirvana infused with Mao Zedong and Pol Pot, then presenting it so execrably in New Mandala.
> “which seems to contradict our learned friends”
Explain where it contradicts anything I wrote above.
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A Gramscian take on Thai politics
First let me apologize for attacking a bit too much on an ad-hominem basis, I never would want you to get quiet here – What would be the fun of a discussion without differing views? I still think though that my primary impression of his “sufficiency democracy” is still valid.
Chai-anand may have been a really brilliant thinker in the nineties, but he definitely is lost it with ideas like this.
There is really no-one buying into this “por piang”-anything stuff. His “botton-up approach” means nothing else than giving the majority of the population some community projects to decide and on the top the important decisions will be made by unelected technocrats.
Economically “por piang” never was meant to be anti-capitalistic, it was always (well, at least after it’s revival after the 2006 coup) used as a tool to keep the poor in place.
Lastly I want to cite from a comment of the article you referred to which I thing sums it up quite well: “All this talk of “Sufficiency” is just a load of cod’s wallop, total nonsense, sheltered desperate coddled Bangkok hi-so royalist elites desperately trying to comfort each other as their privileged fantasy world collapses all around them in a constant state of change…”
Thailand’s election: 2 February 2014
Do you also have a quote from the WSJ regarding PM Thaksin’s calling of an election solely in order to be held accountable to the nation by parliament over his dodgy business deals and gross human rights violations.
BTW Abhisit has recently made a comprehensive response in the international press to attacks such as that by the WSJ.
Rethinking Cambodia’s political transformation
My understanding is that Vietnam gets the largest take of the fees for Angkor Wat. Someone correct me if I am wrong.
Thailand’s election: 2 February 2014
Not much joy there either if you get the ‘farang price’.
The weakness of the Thai royalists
Pamela Hongsakul. Sorry to say that your comments only cause despair. As if such delusional and blinkered views really are widespread then indeed Thailand is simply screwed and civil war is probably inevitable.
Already we see headlines in the Bangkok Post like “Hunt For Yingaluck” and a general trend that see’s an “us” and “them” which when things really get nasty , can only assure an ugly and nasty conflagration in Thailand.
The better off within Thai society who are aligned to the likes of Suthepy and Abbshit or the Democratic party [misnamed clearly] are shooting themselves in the foot and will be the ultimate big losers. They will literally reap what they sow and those with the most have the most to lose.
That there are so many elements of greed, arrogance embedded within certain sections of the Thai populace and society evidently looks like insuring they will see their world collapse when it really gets bad, and they will only have themselves to blame.
At which point the outside world will have largely have washed it’s hands of Thailand and written it off as another basket case.
Let’s hope for some miraculous way to stabilize things and avoid chaos.
The weakness of the Thai royalists
R.N. England: A very interesting take on the position and importance of Bangkok in the geopolitical situation of Thailand. A friend told me that some years ago the shelves of shops in the North were emptying due to disturbances in the distribution chain of goods from Bangkok to the provinces in the North and Northeast.
The weakness of the Thai royalists
Thailand right now:
http://www.thairath.co.th/content/eco/404941
The weakness of the Thai royalists
Regarding tablet computers:
We are talking 4-5 year olds here, children who have yet to develop their manual skills. No, tablet computers do not enhance manual skills. If you search the internet, you will find just as many articles critical to the use of tablet computers educating children as the other way around.
It doesn’t help that cars are cheap in other car manufacturing countries when the scheme doesn’t make any sense in Thailand. This country has a lack of skilled industrial workers anyway. Those who gained from the tax break were those who could afford to pay for the car with cash and the car companies. For the rest, it mostly meant more debts, and in many cases more debts than they can handle. I even know people without a driving license and with no driving skills or need for a car who bought one because they thought they could sell it with a profit later. The opposite has happened of course: Second hand car prices for small cars have plummeted and those who have to sell because they cannot afford to keep their car are the biggest losers. A friend of mine lost over 100,000 baht on his 5 year old Toyota Avanza overnight because the market is now seriously oversaturated with relatively new, very cheap cars.
The weakness of the Thai royalists
If they had the money and didn’t pay the farmers, it’s even worse. That means they have knowingly created these problems for over a million farmers. That’s a crime.
What should be done:
Create infrastructure, particularly functional railways, that makes it attractive to build industry in parts of Thailand where it’s needed. That means Isan in particular. It’s absurd that there is very little industry in Isan, where people need work and the farming is the least profitable, while the industry is built on first class rice fields in Central Thailand, an industry that is mainly manned with people from the Northeast.
They could also stop spending 200 billion baht per year subsidising gas. Those who get the most advantage from that are people with large cars, taxi passengers in Bangkok and owners of transport companies. Gas for cars is around 40% cheaper in Thailand than in the oil rich nations of the Middle East, and much of it is imported.
They could create a more efficient passenger transport system all over Thailand by not issuing licenses to thousands of minivans where larger buses would do a much better job. Those losing their jobs in the transport sector could work in the industry if Thailand imported fewer Burmese workers, and Thailand would become more competitive.
The list is endless, but handing out cash is never a solution. It has been tried in other parts of the world, which has been pointed out by several posters here, with mediocre results to say the least.
Indonesia: Why you so like that wan?
All this really misses the point. Malaysia was originally created to protect British business interests and Malay feudalism. That is why Bung Karno labelled it a NEKOLIM plot. Konfrontasi was conceived as an anti-NEKOLIM initiative. Is Peter Cohen really taking the side of NEKOLIM??
The weakness of the Thai royalists
Don’t forget the line from Savannakhet to Laobao, and hopefully to Dong Ha.
The weakness of the Thai royalists
Some comments to J├╕rgen’s posts.
“The government ran out of money for the rice scandal long before the demonstrations started.”
If the Thai government has ran out of money, how come Thailand has not defaulted? The rice scheme is a mistake, but I don’t see why it cannot be corrected.
“In most countries, agricultural subsidies are paid directly to the farmers…”
Yes, in the EU farmers are paid directly per hectare, regardless of whether they grow any crops. I bet that would not be viewed as populist in Thailand!
“Subsidies on new cars may actually be the weirdest.”
It’s a tax break, not a direct subsidy. It’s common for car producing countries to have low taxes on cars as it creates jobs, while car importing countries keep their taxes very high. For instance, cars in Denmark has been much higher compared to Sweden due to taxation. I may not agree with the scheme, but I wouldn’t call it weird.
“Or tablet computers to all school kids, when most research indicate strongly that learning to read and write by traditional means is far superior…”
There are plenty of studies suggesting that technology enhances learning in education. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_technology#Benefits
“The current government’s schemes in many way look like some kind of socialist dream.”
Thailand is one of the most unequal countries in the world. It’s not an easy thing to solve. But what exactly do you recommend should be done?
Even if many policies and actions of the Yingluck government can be criticized, the massive response against it is hardly being proportionate.
The weakness of the Thai royalists
This is speculative, Chris, but it seems to me that the main thing stopping the separation of the N and NE from Bangkok is that most of their world trade goes through Bangkok. Bangkok is their lifeline. The Bangkok régime throttles the lifeline to the extent necessary to preserve its hegemony and maximise its wealth. This lifeline status is the geopolitical raison d’├кtre, both of Bangkok, and of the violent, mendacious, conspiratorial, mafia-like régime there. Just like London many centuries ago. It explains the fight Bangkok is putting up against being ruled by a democratic government with much of its representation in the N and NE.
If a noxious Bangkok régime survives or revives in the future, is there any other possible relief on the way for the N and NE? Two possibilities are the proposed railway from Kunming to Vientiane, and increased trade via the Mekong, improved by the regulation of its flow made possible by the Chinese dams upstream. If that happens, it seems predictable that any entrenched Bangkok régime would attempt to preserve its hegemony by poisoning relations with the relevant neighbouring countries.
The weakness of the Thai royalists
Here are two longish pieces by р╕Щр╕┤р╕Шр╕┤ р╣Ар╕нр╕╡р╕вр╕зр╕ир╕гр╕╡р╕зр╕Зр╕ир╣М from Pracha Thai, February 1 & 2. The Thai professional classes, he says, have grown up and prospered under the protection of non-democratic, military governments. Democracy, during its times of intermittent function, largely, until Taksin, served their ends in the same way.
But times have changed. Despite their best efforts to maintain advantaged opportunity, other folks are competing for place. They could — the elites — buck up and share the space, or they might instead try to stop these changes, hold on to their advantage, by whatever means seems likely.
He says it better. http://prachatai.com/journal/2014/02/51839
The weakness of the Thai royalists
George Thomas: The Thai media reports would appear to be correct. On Monday 17th February, whilst driving from Pak Chong to Saraburi, I was passed by a convoy of about 15 police minivans, presumably heading for Bangkok. The lead vehicle bore the logo “Buriram Police” and the “tail end Charlie” was a “Paddy Wagon” which may well have been brought into use, judging by the numbers of protestors arrested during the past few days.
The weakness of the Thai royalists
I am really tire of repeating myself.
With so many “weaknesses” that can be harped on by the Democrats and the PDRC, together with the supposed anger of the farmers, beating PT in an election would be a “no brainer”
Why the Democrats and PDRC are so fearful of an election defies logic UNLESS someone is lying.
The weakness of the Thai royalists
Ha ha… I can see a Thailand divided into a chaos of more or less independent states: Thai Noi in the northeast, Khmer in the east, Lanna in the north, Tai Yai in Mae Hong Son, a muslim state in the south, a Thai-Chinese coalition in Central Thailand and a Farang State of Drunkards in Pattaya 😉
The weakness of the Thai royalists
Here’s a little story about what turned a huge number of Bangkok people against Thaksin:
It’s a well known fact that Thaksin made most of his fortune from his mobile phone business, namely AIS. Since he had a monopoly on these services in Thailand, he could price them as he liked, and since only handsets bought through the AIS system could be used, he could price those as he liked as well. During the more than 10 years that Thaksin had this monopoly, mobile services and handsets were around three times as expensive in Thailand as in high cost European countries.
When Thaksin sold Shin Corporation, the owner of AIS, to Temasek without paying tax due to a loophole in the tax regulations, my Thai colleagues came to me, one after the other, both those who had been in favour of Thaksin and those who were against him. They all had the same question: He is our prime minister, and he’s very rich. Why doesn’t he pay tax?
This had nothing to do with royalism or political views. Many explained to me that they had paid dearly for Thaksin’s mobile services and felt that these values belonged to the Thai people as much as to the person Thaksin, the man they had elected to govern the country. This was a turning point for many, and was one of the factors that made it easy to gain support for the military coup in 2006 among large segments of the population.
It’s important also to remember that Thaksin broke with and important part of Thai corruption tradition. Although corruption can never be defined as positive, and many in Thailand get far too much, there has always been an element of sharing. When a police officer has collected his tea money, he shares with his girlfriends who share with their families and so on. Those who are rich never shared as much as those who had less, but that’s how greed works. Those who are greedy get rich.
Thaksin shares with nobody. When he hands out his populist schemes, it’s the tax payers money, not his own. With the rice scam, it’s even worse: Since the money didn’t exist in the first place, they had to be borrowed, so it’s future tax payers’ money. To make things worse, rice farmers get only part of the wealth. Much have disappeared into assorted corruption schemes, and it’s a sad fact that Burmese rice traders have made fortunes on money that should supposedly go to poor Thai farmers. This was easy to predict, but when a policy is designed for corruption, those who are corrupt will obviously not stop it.
The benefits of mud houses
> “green builders have none of the problems …”
Possibly because they just build, rather than dreaming up some green half-baked nirvana infused with Mao Zedong and Pol Pot, then presenting it so execrably in New Mandala.
> “which seems to contradict our learned friends”
Explain where it contradicts anything I wrote above.
A Gramscian take on Thai politics
So do you care to define the term ‘Thai elite’ yourself or do you try to avoid using it altogether?