Letter from Thailand: PEOPLE POWER, THAI STYLE

The people of Thailand are once again on the streets battling against the corrupt government of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra (left)-- a billionaire former policeman -- after a successful boycott of yesterday's elections. France 2 TV reports this morning that, in clashes between protesters and police, there have so far been 12 dead and dozens of wounded at the hands of the police, mostly in the Muslim-dominated south, where armed Muslim seperatist insurgencies have been fighting the government. (More than 1,100 people, including insurgents, police, soldiers, civil servants and villagers have been killed in more than two years of unrest in the three southernmost provinces.) The following report was written for  DIRELAND from Thailand and filed last night by ALAN PLATT, a writer and former journalist whose work has appeared in the Village Voice, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, and The Guardian, and who has just completed a book of comic travel memoirs. Alan was a former colleague of mine on the late, lamented Soho Weekly News (the avant-garde paper for which he covered New York's counter-cultural scene), and has been dividing his time between Thailand and New York for the last few years:

Bangkok -- Hard on the heels of All Fools Day, the Shinola hits the fan here in faraway Thailand, or at least the first few fistfuls do, as an educated, sophisticated population, realizing that it has been fooled, has taken to the streets to oust the puppeteer who has done the dunning.

Today (Sunday) is Election Day here in this democracy within a monarchy (think UK, but with a king -- His Majesty Bhumibol Adulyadej, right -- who displays actual wisdom). But this is no ordinary E-day for this fairly-functional democracy/kingdom. This is a historic moment. Half the nation – the educated half – is trying to bring down the guy who conned them all into re-electing him on a platform of anti-corruption and modernization, while quietly selling off the country's modernized assets, piecemeal, for spectacular personal gain. And to do it, they've taken to the streets, up in arms – or at least dressed up in some pretty stylin' outfits.

Instead of burning cars, they've adopted an entirely non-violent approach. For the last month or so there have been a series of mass rallies, where upwards of a 100,000 – often twice that – have used oratory, irony, humor, put-down, stump rants, song, prayer, and good old megaphones to unite a fractious and fractured opposition into the Peoples' Alliance for Democracy, the PAD (drolly referred to as the Pad Thai, naturally). (Photo left by Alan Platt of anti-Thaksin demonstrators.) It may still get ugly, of course, but so far it has been almost a textbook paradigm of what an ad-hoc peoples' movement can aspire to, peacefully. Whether or not it achieves its aim of bringing down the hated Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and his Thai Rak Thai (Thais Love Thais) Party, it's another reminder that, done right, this shit works.

Done right, this is how you coalesce and magnetize your amorphous disenchanted into an actual movement. This is how you go from vague smoldering to focused, contained, articulate rage at the machine that just screwed you. And it's fun. You should see it.

Oh, sure, Bangkok Thais are educated and worldly. But most of all they're funny, stylish  and hip. So everything is done with humor and panache - even deadly serious demonstrations. There's a carnival atmosphere to this thing. The outfits are hilarious, the slogans ditto (Thaksin=Toxin is one in English) there's constant music, and this being Bangkok, heads are always bobbing to the MP3 tracks on every cellphone/camera/i-pod. And it's all stylishly color co-ordinated in chic royal yellow, the color of the king - the beloved, saxophone-playing, cultivated, humble, exemplary (but divine) monarch. Plus there's a palpable feeling that this is all actually achieving something, a sense that win or lose, 'we won't get fooled again.'

Thaksin rode into power as a gun-slinging tech mogul, boss of ShinCorp, which among other things, owned the satellites that dominate the communications of the region. His pitch was that he would run this corruption-infested country not like some graft-hungry pol, but like the dynamo CEO he was, so damn rich he didn't need to steal. The Thais bought in, thinking: New era, new paradigm, new tech, new broom, etc..

Now, just a few years later, the Shinawatra family is so vastly, surreally, unimaginably more wealthy than they were before, that half of those same voters are ready to eviscerate the guy. But through peaceful means, of course. What he did, or at least the parts that are surfacing, are positively baroque in their criminal beauty and their cold political savvy. This was not, after all, a straight-shootin' John Wayne. No, sir. This was Machiavelli in a cowboy hat, a man who truly does not give a damn.

Once elected, he solidified his power base. Not among the fickle smartypants of the cities, the educated ones now on the streets. No, he went to the farm villages, especially in the poor but massively populated agricultural North-East. Thaksin (left) handed out money. Simple as that. Well, well. Hey, there. How you doin'? Here, have some money. Not his money, of course. Thailand's money. He raided the treasury for truckloads of tiny handouts. 50 bucks here, 50 bucks there. Money they needed desperately to fix a roof here, buy a cow there, money that did genuine, short-term good for people with none. And they loved him for it. He was like Robin Hood. Pictures of him covered the newspapers for years handing out cash, with a buffalo in the background. He was even cute, with his funny square head and his sweet smile and his bullshit. He also handed out promises, mostly about cheap health care and education and the likes, none of which will be acted on, but it sure sounded good to poor folks who knew nothing and needed everything. And there are millions of them up there. Thaksin voters. And that's where this gets complicated on election day.

In the five years he was being Robin Hood up in the sticks, he was doing his CEO thing in the real world, but not in the sense of turning the country into a well-run business, as he had promised. He was running the country as if he owned it. And the press was being systematically either bought or openly intimidated.

The legislature in his pocket due to his landslide victory and who-knows-what closed-door influence-peddling, he passed a raft of laws favoring businesses that he and his circle were in – construction, real estate, energy, all the biggies -  and initiated a slew of mega-construction projects to enrich same, all the while putting together his masterpiece; a mega-deal whereby he would sell ShinCorp (logo left) to the great secretive omnivore of the East, Temasek of Singapore, an asset-laden iceberg of unknowable vastness that has the same direct family ties to Singapore's PM as ShinCorp does to Thailand's. Thaksin tried to sell this to the press as a commendable attempt to prevent a conflict of interest between his public and private responsibilities. But it smelled more like a mafia marriage. And things were coming to light. Numbers, like bodies, were surfacing.

In 5 years of comically favorable lawmaking, ShinCorp had ballooned in value nearly 140%. The size of the deal now approached $200 billion. Added to which, ShinCorp, with its satellite network, was a key national asset. How could the steward of the national interest even think of selling it? Especially to Darth Vader? The issue was a clear moral one, but Thaksin's defense was legalistic. Laws had been passed that made it OK. This was too much for the Thais, who were already adding up the cost of 'Thaksinomics' and the precious few benefits, but while his integrity was being publicly debated and the first calls for his resignation appearing, he bulldozed the deal through. As far as the press was concerned, this was war. Then came the real bombshell. The Shinawatra family would walk away clean from the sale with billions and would pay no tax on the astronomical profit. The champion of the poor would not pay taxes, like the poor had to. He was too powerful to cough up his own part of the social contract, to payback the fraction he owed for the fortune he had made, for the benefit of the people in whose name he ruled.

He was flat out pilloried in the media. Again on purely moral grounds. Again, he replied with nitpicking legalese. No actual laws had been broken, blah blah. Worse, when the inevitable press investigations began, it was found that in order to evade the taxes, he had created a labyrinth of opaque offshore shell-companies and distributed assets invisibly among a network of family members, kiting a giant rococo meringue of deniability, smoke and mirrors worthy of Meyer Lansky and the Numbers Racket. And how did he react when confronted with this three-tiered wedding-cake of criminality? The usual.

His goose was long cooked among Thais. He was toast. But he was barefaced. He was Richard Nixon. The dogs may bark. The caravan would continue. There were more lopsided laws to be passed, more money to be made. Screw the educated. He still had the North. So off he went, North. He created – no kidding – a political Reality TV show, wherein he would meet locals up there and dispense money and promises, while listening, tearfully, to their travails.

This was a very comical time to be in Bangkok. The press, smelling blood, and with a well-honed sense of political satire, lampooned the show-boater mercilessly. But nothing was as hilarious as reality, as in Reality. It was hard to believe this was happening, but there it was on TV, with local officials – all owing Thaksin favors – bowing and scraping and acting like the second coming had touched down in their village and old Squarehead, the multi-billionaire pirate of their patrimony, cooked in their kitchens and kissed their babies. With a buffalo in the background.

Fast-forward. His stranglehold on power is threatened. He calls a snap election, basically a plebiscite. Do you want me? Yes or no? A slick move. The speed of the thing gives opposition parties no time to organize. They decide to boycott the election. Meanwhile, a wild talk-show host with a grudge organizes anti-Thaksin rallies in the park. They are mobbed. A movement is born. The various opposition parties coalesce and join it. There is joy in Mudville. Marches begin, history is made and here we are. Election Day. Right here. Today. One day after All Fools. No results are yet in. It's evening here, morning in New York. (Photo above right, an anti-Thaksin demonstrator dressed as a space-man.)

Thaksin says if he fails to get 50% of the vote, he'll go. But if any unopposed candidate fails to get 20% of the vote, that candidate loses. That will definitely happen a lot, creating complications. The papers are begging people to vote, but to vote "No Vote". A nice touch. [Reports this morning say more than 50% of Thai voters boycotted the elections.] Tomorrow? The costumes are still warm. The people are still enraged. Will they have something to cheer about? Will Thaksin Shinawatra continue to not give a damn? The king is in his palace and all is well with the world. For the moment. The country now goes to bed. What, exactly, will they wake up to? If the boycott works, as it seems likely to, a constitutional crisis, no doubt -- and the Thais back in the streets. [The Times of London reported on its website within the last hour that in 38 districts,  " the ruling party had failed to win even the 20 per cent of the vote needed to return an MP.That leaves Thailand facing months of legal challenges, uncertainty and by-elections to elect a full parliament."] -- by Alan Platt in Bangkok

If you want to follow unfolding events in Thailand, check out the daily Thai newspaper in English, The Nation.