Thailand Election Fun – 2011 Update

Posted on 3 July 2011 by christao408

(Updated Monday am) Sunday afternoon, the polls closed in Thailand’s second general election since the 2006 coup that saw Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra ousted by factions of the country’s military. The results, announced last night by the Election Commission, are that Thaksin’s sister Yingluck Shinawatra will be the kingdom’s next Prime Minister, and also the first female PM in its history.

Tensions have been high because this election is seen, more than anything, as a litmus test on how the political situation will go forward. First, let me make clear that I have no particular interest in any of the parties involved in this election. Here’s the long and short of it:

Thaksin was removed from office by a coup in September 2006 despite his party having won majority votes in two prior elections.
After a new post-coup constitution was ratified, a subsequent election saw the reincarnation of Thaksin’s political party (dissolved because of charges of breaking election law) again winning a majority.
The next two PMs, both from Thaksin’s party, were removed from office upon being found guilty of minor offenses and after a minority coalition party switched sides, the military-backed Democrats were able to form a government with Oxford-educated Abhisit Vejjajiva as Prime Minister.

Now, it looks like we’ll be back where we started, pre-coup. Or, at least, something close to it since Yingluck and her Phuea Thai (“For Thais”) party have run on the slogan, “Thaksin thinks, Phuea Thai acts” and a proposed amnesty for Thaksin has been openly discussed as a leading policy position.

Election campaigns in Thailand are every bit as much of a circus as they are in the United States, although they take place in a much more compressed period of time – less than 60 days elapsed between the dissolution of the previous Parliament and these elections. Yesterday, while waiting on the Skytrain platform at the Asoke station, Prime Minister and Democratic Party candidate Abhisit and his supporters were waiting for a train on the opposite platform, shaking hands and taking pictures with people.

Here’s a closeup of the man, described in one US Embassy cable that was leaked during the Wikileaks scandal as handsome and ineffectual.

Something that I will be glad are gone now that the election is over, are the large campaign signs that are tied to trees and poles along the streets, blocking the sidewalks. In some areas they are so thick that the footpath is entirely hidden from the street, which I suppose is not necessarily a bad thing!

These posters by the Phumjaithai (“Proud Thailand”) party showed male and female athletes with the face cut out, encouraging you to see yourself as one of the winners. I couldn’t resist.

Driving around the city after the polls closed at 3pm, I noticed many people in small motorcycle driven push-carts, collecting these election posters. “So quick to clean up!” I thought, until Tawn explained that these people were collecting the posters to use as building material. The heavy corrugated plastic sheets can be used as roofs and ceilings in the slums. Sadly, this may be the most any of these candidates actual do to improve the lives of the kingdom’s poor.

A Year After the Protests

Posted on 18 May 2011 by christao408

A year ago today, mobs set fire to various parts of Bangkok in the wake of the breakup by the military of a 40-day long anti-government protest. Those events, along with a related confrontation in April 2010, resulted in the death of 92 people (13 of those deaths have been attributed to “action by government forces” and if I recall correctly, four journalists were killed including two foreigners.)

The fires, set in at least a dozen locations around the city, resulted in an estimated 24 billion baht in damage (about US$ 950 million) and destroyed several structures including shopping centers, a department store, and one of the city’s oldest cinemas.

As of today, there are more than 130 people identified as participants in the protests who remain jailed, charged but not tried for their crimes. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission was unable to draw conclusions on many of the points it was asked to examine, including what role the military had in the deaths of protesters. The commission complained of the military not being forthcoming in providing requested evidence.

About a week ago, the Prime Minister dissolved Parliament and elections will be held 45 days from today. The only thing that seems certain is that, regardless of the outcome of this election, there will be further unrest from one side or another of the political spectrum. Whether the unrest is expressed in the same way is unclear. Hopefully, cooler heads will prevail.

In my coverage of the protests last spring, I received comments from various people passing by my blog, accusing me of being blatantly pro-government or blatantly pro-protesters. Of course, I have no horse in the proverbial race. I’m a foreigner living here over the long run, a person who loves Thailand and the Thai people and who wants them to be able to continue to develop as a country and not end up getting caught in the middle income trap.

I leave you with some before and after pictures borrowed from this Bangkok Post story.

The Central World shopping center at the Ratchaprasong intersection, where the protests had been centered.

The burnt-out remains of the Siam Theatre, one of the oldest single-screen cinemas in Bangkok. Today, the property sits empty, awaiting a redevelopment plan by its land-owners, Chulalongkorn University.

Along Rama IV Road, barricades of tires were set aflame and buildings were looted and burned.

Also along Rama IV Road near the Lumpini Boxing Stadium.

Another Inside Job

Posted on 4 May 2011 by christao408

Last week I finally made the time to watch Inside Job, the Academy Award winning 2010 documentary about the recent financial crisis. The film does an effective job of clearly explaining the complex series of factors that led up to the crisis, including a headlong rush into deregulation of the financial services industry as well as the creation of ever more complex and risky financial tools. The root of the problem, though, was the revolving door between government and business and the corrupting influence of money on both.

Needless to say, my blood was boiling after watching the film. You can imagine the effect, then, when I learned that on Wednesday, the House Financial Services Committee passed three bills that will cripple the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, one of the most important innovations in the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law that was a response to the conditions exposed in Inside Job.

(Details on the three bills are here, if you’d like to read them: HR 1121, HR 1667, HR 1315 on OpenCongress.org – a great non-partisan resource to keep tabs on what your Congress is up to.)

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has a simple and reasonable purpose: to shield consumers from unfair, misleading, and deceptive lending. While we can rail on and on about people getting themselves into bigger loans than they could afford, a large share of the blame (if not the majority of it) belongs to lending companies that made loans they knew the borrowers couldn’t afford. If you’ve ever looked at the fine print of a lending contract, a credit card agreement, or any other consumer financial services legal document, you know that it is unclear and opaque even for the most educated of consumers.

The purpose of the Republican bills is to deprive the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau of the power to fulfill its mission. Oh, and the fact that they stand to attract a lot of campaign money from financial firms by indicating their willingness to gut laws that protect consumers? Well, that’s probably a motivating factor, too.

As much as I love the idea of free markets and unfettered capitalism, I think there is a place for regulation: when an industry’s actions causes harm to the larger society. Especially in regards to the financial industry, we’ve seen over the last thirty to forty years that as it becomes less regulated, it takes greater and more irresponsible risks. Ultimately, it is the taxpayers of this nation who end up bailing out the shareholders of these companies.

I don’t know if this is an issue that bothers you. I try to keep this blog apolitical, but sometimes I think something of concern is worth sharing. If you’re so motivated, perhaps a quick email to your Representative and Senators to let them know your thoughts about gutting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau would help ensure that the voice of the citizenry gets heard over the sound of all that money.

Here’s the email I sent to Kevin Yoder, my Representative:

Dear Sir:
This week, the House Financial Services Committee voted to approve three measures that would considerably weaken the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. I want you to know that as your constituent, I would like you to VOTE NO on these measures, if and when they reach the floor of the House.
It seems that our politicians have forgotten how we got into the financial mess of 2008. As much as I like free markets, the financial services industry is incapable of policing itself and needs stronger, not weaker, regulation. This is particularly true of consumer finance, where every effort is made by financial institutions to be as opaque as possible in an effort to entrap consumers in a web of bad decisions.
Again, I’d like you to vote in favor of consumers rather than in favor of the financial industry and monied interests. VOTE NO on any reforms or weakening of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Regards,
Chris

Rising Inequality – Why Don’t We Care?

Posted on 24 March 2011 by christao408

There’s an interesting “Room for Debate” series in the NY Times titled “Rising Wealth Inequality – Should we Care?“. The series was sparked by an intriguing survey by Michael Norton and Dan Ariely that found that Americans generally estimate that wealth distribution is far more equal than it actually is and, if given a choice, they would select an even more equitable distribution as being the ideal scenario. The graph below shows the results of the survey.

Of course there will always be a uneven distribution of wealth, and that in and of itself is not a bad thing. Systems such as communism and socialism have proven to be an ineffective way of raising standards of living, whereas capitalism has done a pretty good job on the whole. But are the wealthiest 1% or 10% of our nation (or of any nation) actually contributing to their society in a manner proportionate with their wealth? Are they wealthy because they’re reaping the rewards of their hard work, or is it a matter of inheritance, loopholes, and offshore accounts?

It seems that the economic theory known as “trickle-down economics” – in which you give the wealthy more of their money through a lowering of taxes in the belief that they will spend more, thus fueling economic growth – has largely been proven to be bogus. The wealthy spend a proportionately smaller share of their income than do people further down the socioeconomic ladder. The rest goes into investments.

What most confuses me is why so many people who are middle class or lower, are against raising taxes on the ultra-wealthy. They seem to hold a belief that they may one day be in that top few percent and have to pay that “too high” a marginal tax rate, when in reality their only realistic chance of becoming a millionaire, let alone a billionaire, is to win the lottery. Heck, even Warren Buffet, one of the nation’s wealthiest men, says he needs to be paying a higher tax rate.

The debate series in the NY Times lays out the different perspectives, but I’m curious to hear yours:

Why don’t people seem to care about rising inequality? Is the rising inequality something we should be concerned about? Is that lack of caring about it also something we should be concerned about?

Response to Rep. Moran (R-KS)

Posted on 22 March 2011 by christao408

Trying to be an active participant in our American democracy, I subscribe to newsletter updates from my Senators and Congressional Representative. All three of them are very conservative, more so than I am on most issues, so their newsletters often provide an opportunity for me to write them with an opposing viewpoint.

I do have to give credit to Representative Jerry Moran, though, who has started posting video responses to questions from his constituents. At least he gives clear statements about his position on issues. Representative Moran recently posted the above video, ostensibly in response to a question from a constituent, “What do we need to do to get President Obama to let us drill for oil and natural gas here in the U.S.? It would certainly decrease our dependence on foreign oil.”

I shared my thoughts with Representative Moran through the following email:

Dear Representative Moran:
Just finished watching your video about drilling for oil. I appreciate you providing this kind of clarity on your positions; please continue doing so. Regarding your answer, though, I have two concerns as a constituent and pragmatic American:
First, you describe this as a “battle we must win” against the Environmental Protection Agency and the Obama administration. I disagree that it is a “battle”. The EPA continues to play an important role in protecting our fresh air, our clean water, and our natural environment. Perhaps you noticed the Gulf of Mexico oil spill last year? Perhaps you have read the considerable scientific concern about fracking? Fossil fuels are dirty forms of energy and their extraction comes with costs to our environment. The EPA plays an important role in us considering the bigger-picture and longer-term costs, not just reacting to the price of gas at the pump.
My second concern is that you seem to be giving short shrift to non-fossil forms of energy. Sure, you mention them twice in your video but both mentions seem to be an afterthought. Any way you cut it, fossil fuels are a finite resource. We can’t drill, mine, or frack our way to national security and energy independence. We need to be encouraging more investment and research in renewable energies because that is ultimately going to be a necessity in the future. China is already surpassing us in green energy technologies. Surely you want the US to remain competitive?
More drilling off the coasts or up in Alaska, more digging up of the northern plains, more fracking of the rocks beneath Pennsylvania and Ohio – all of these are very short-term, costly, and dirty fixes to our problems. It is time for a smarter, longer-term, more sustainable approach to our energy needs.

I’m curious, what are your thoughts about the U.S. energy policy? What should we be doing differently in order to ensure energy security?

Senators Call for Bipartisan Budget Decisions

Posted on 8 March 2011 by christao408

I read an interesting NY Times article yesterday about the efforts by Senators Mark Warner of Virginia and Saxy Chambliss of Georgia to create a bipartisan conversation about the nation’s budget deficit. This as Congress makes a grand show of nipping at the budget’s heels by cutting things like Head Start early education for children.

While I may be a cock-eyed optimist and a tad naive, I think most Americans can handle straight talk. They are willing to make sacrifices if things are explained to them clearly and without a lot of added fright. I’d like my Senators to join in this bipartisan approach, so took the time to send them the following email:

Dear Senator:
I’d like to encourage you to join with Senators Chambliss and Warner in their effort to hold an honest, bipartisan dialogue about our national deficit.
The current talk in Congress focuses on cutting discretionary spending, which only makes up 12% of our budget. Much of it goes to important programs, but even if we cut it all, we still would have a long way to go to fix the deficit.
I’d like you to be a part of an honest discussion that acknowledges that cuts in spending will have to include defense, healthcare, and social security costs. I’d also like you to acknowledge that revenue increases will also be a necessary part of the solution.
Please stop playing politics with our nation’s future. Join Senators Chambliss and Warner and others who will rise above politics and find a bipartisan solution to repair our nation’s finances.
Thank you.

That’s the action I’m taking. What action will you take? How do you think the deficit should be approached?

In other news, I’m heading out this morning on an overnight border run to Singapore (previous entry). Figured that the flight is the same price if I stay overnight, I’ll have time for dinner with friends, and I don’t have to get up so early to catch my flight. Except that I went to bed early and managed to have the garbage collectors wake me up at 4:30 as they rattled the bins on the street. Thankfully, this trip will include lunch at Din Tai Fung with two other Xangans.

These are Amazing Times

Posted on 16 February 2011 by christao408

For the past several weeks I have been following the news from Africa and the Middle East with great interest. First Tunisia, then Egypt. Now protests against dictatorships and in favor of democracy have emerged in Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, and Iran. Other governments in the region have tried preemptive measures to appease potential protesters, although who can say how long they will be placated, if at all. These are amazing times.

Photo courtesy New York Times

As I sit down to write my nieces letters about these events for them to open when they become adults, I find myself stopping mid-letter, waiting for the latest development, waiting to see how it all turns out. Because of course by the time they open these letters in more than a decade, the outcome will be much clearer.

There are those who are fearful that majority Muslim countries are not fit for democracy, fearful that “Islamists” (the latest bogeymen of the media) will take hold and turn the countries into America-hating and terrorist-generating nations. Maybe so, although that seems unlikely.

In the grand arc of history, people seem more concerned with jobs, food, education, housing, and healthcare. If they have those things – which, generally speaking, they have more opportunity to secure in a functioning democracy – they have less reason to turn to terrorism and violence. Most terrorists have come from countries with repressive governments and Al Qaeda’s initial grievances against the US were about American support for the Saudi monarchy and the presence of the US military in Saudi Arabia.

Sure, it is a gamble. We won’t know until many years how it all turns out. But it seems particularly undemocratic to tell people that they aren’t fit to have a democracy. Shouldn’t it be up to them to decide? And in the long run, which side of history do the Americans want to be on? The side that props up strongmen dictators whose regimes repress their population, or the side that supports the flourishing of democracy (albeit without invading countries to turn them into democracies)?

I’ll place my bet on supporting democracy. Twenty, thirty, forty years from now, we’ll look back at these times and realize not only were they amazing, but they were the start of the renaissance of the Arab world and an era that saw increasing stability throughout the region.

Filibustering My Request to Reconsider the Filibuster

Posted on 14 January 2011 by christao408

With the start of a new congressional season, a proposal has been made by Senator Mark Udall (D-CO) to change the rules about how the filibuster can be used in the Senate. Over the past fifty years there has been a gradual increase in the use of filibusters to bring legislative progress to a halt. Filibuster use (as represented in the chart below showing the frequency of cloture votes to end a filibuster) has skyrocketed in the past decade.

The Senate’s history as a calmer, more deliberative body than the House of Representatives is an important one to preserve, but filibusters have become more of a stalling tactic than a deliberative one and instead of protecting the interests of the minority, serve instead of hijack the interests of the majority to accomplish what they were elected to do: legislate.

Doing my duty as an actively engaged citizen, I emailed my senators to let them know I am in favor of the proposed changes.

One, Pat Roberts (R-KS), responded with a virtual filibuster. His email response explained that as a member of the Senate Rules Committee, he held hearings on this topic last year and is not in favor of any changes. “My statements are available on the committee’s website,” he wrote. On that page I found the link to download the 666-page Publication on the Filibuster Hearings Series.

I’m glad Senator Roberts feels that the clearest and most effective way to summarize his objections to changing the Senate rules is to direct me to a 666-page document. And one wonders why so few Americans participate actively in civic life.

Thoughts on Politically Motivated Violence

Posted on 9 January 2011 by christao408

Reflecting on the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) and eighteen other people on Saturday morning in Tucson, Arizona, an attack that appears to have political motivations, I’m concerned that not only is the political discourse in the United States growing increasingly shrill, but that in the past several years it has also become increasingly violent.

Threats of violence as well as cases of vandalism and assault have become more frequent, especially in the wake of significant legislative battles such as those over health care reform. Sadly, we can look at some talking heads in the media, commentators whose motivations are rating (and thus, earning) driven more so than purely ideological, as well as politicians who stir the pot (Sarah “lock and load” Palin) to see who fans the flames of political passion.

There is nothing wrong with passion in politics. It speaks to a robustness in our society. But that robustness unravels when disagreement can no longer be had with civility. All of us, regardless of our political stripes and partisan beliefs, need to condemn politically-motivated violence.

To that end, we need to remove the rhetoric of patriotism and Americanism from our vocabulary. While we may be at odds about the role of our government and the best way to address various problems in society, none of us is more or less patriotic or American than the others.

Addendum January 14: While we don’t know the motivations of Representative Gifford’s shooter, whether they were political or not, I still stand by my statement that we need to condemn politically-motivated violence and bring the level of rhetoric down, especially casting others as unpatriotic.

American Exceptionalism

Posted on 5 January 2011 by christao408

While waiting in a hotel lobby to meet a friend for lunch, I read a front-page article from USA Today: “Obama and America’s Place in the World.” The article talks about the way President Obama addresses questions of American exceptionalism and Republican attempts to capitalize on this in order to paint the President as un-American, without having to use those words.

American exceptionalism, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a belief that the country is unique and exceptional in comparison to other countries. Historically, it did not mean that America was better than other countries, but in the past few years the term has been coopted by those who would like to give that meaning to the phrase.

British writer G.K. Chesterton noted in a 1922 essay, “America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence…” The Declaration’s introduction defines this ideology as liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism, and laissez-faire.

The ammunition used by those who believe that President Obama is un-American doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism, is his response in April 2009 (his opponents have to go back twenty months to dig up dirt on him, it seems) to a question by a British journalist about whether America is uniquely qualified to lead the world:

“I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”

This strikes me, a passport-holding American who has traveled widely and has spent more than five years living overseas, as a tremendously reasonable, level-headed statement.

What also strikes me, as an American who has seen the way many countries in the world are rapidly moving from “developing nation” to “developed nation” status, is that no amount of arguing how exceptional we are or aren’t is going to help us compete in the 21st century.

Discussing the growth of China with a friend who recently spent two years working in Shanghai, he noted that in just the past few years, China has built the world’s largest high-speed rail network (already some 4,600 miles), and they are on track to have as much as 16,000 miles built by 2020. Compare this to America’s infrastructure, which the American Society of Civil Engineers currently grades as a “D” and will require more than $2 trillion to repair.

Is America exceptional? No doubt it is. But the issue isn’t whether we are exceptional or not, it’s whether we are willing to do the work necessary to remain exceptional in the century to come.

I think all of our mothers taught us that it is immodest to brag. We may well be the smartest kid in class (or at least want to think we are), but announcing it to our peers rather than spending our time studying for the next test is the surest way to become the schoolyard dummy. That’s a form of exceptionalism, too, but not one that I suspect any of us want to bequeath to our future generations.

What say you?

Related to this: do you remember the bruhaha surrounding a photo of President Obama reading a copy of the very insightful book “The Post-American World?” Blog entry from September 2009 about it.

christao408

The adventures of an expat American who moved to Bangkok for his husband.

Tag Archives: politics