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Published on January 17, 2008

During the programme, he did his best to sound humble and soft-spoken, as well as acting like a victim. He said that his "passion for football" helps him keep his mind off "the situation at home", which he mentioned twice during the interview. Instead of focusing on his Manchester City football club, he found a way to make the interview about him and his "situation". The fact that CNN aired a sympathetic five-minute spot on Thaksin during a sports programme is quite odd.  Perhaps the American public relations firm he hired has something to do with it.

Hopefully, one day most Thais will see through his self-serving propaganda and realise that he cares more about his own image, power and wealth than the stability of Thailand.

Steve Beckett

Bangkok

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No sympathy for sell-out TV staff

I felt very sorry to see TITV staff crying and grieving about losing their jobs and their uncertain future. Some cried foul about the government's intervention and claimed unfair treatment. But if we look back at what TITV, or iTV, management did for the Thai public in the past, we might just want to laugh at them today. The professionalism and spirit of iTV died completely when it sold 53 per cent of its shares to Thaksin's Shin Corp in 2001. Worse, it arbitrarily broke the concession to reduce the news content from 70 per cent to less than 50 per cent and increase entertainment programmes to over 50 per cent. The breach of the concession leads to only one conclusion: that iTV's management wanted to focus on profit, not news presentation to the Thai public. The unacceptable breaking point was when Shin Corp sold the station to Singapore's Temasek, which meant Singapore owned the station.

The whole story can be concluded by saying that iTV, or TITV, is not independent, as it falsely claimed. It became the mouthpiece of Thaksin for years and it has broadcast biased information to the public all along.

You reap what you sow - that's how the old saying goes.

Who else is to blame but yourselves?

Yongyut

Pathum Thani

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Smokers are a danger to those around them

Re: "More personal freedom goes up in smoke", Letters, January 15.

John Arnone needs to be informed that his personal freedom on smoking stops where my health starts. I don't know what world he is living in, but it is a medical/scientific fact that second-hand smoke is dangerous.

Frank Pagnozzi

Bangkok 

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Please exercise your freedoms elsewhere

Re: "More personal freedom goes up in smoke", Letters, January 15.

I was very pleased to read the comments written by John Arnone. I was pleased not by what he said about smoking and go-go bars but rather the comment in his last paragraph indicating that we "... probably won't hear from me [him] again …" This is fantastic news and I hope that he does what he says. He might also give serious consideration to returning to his home county where, I am sure, the laws concerning smoking are much less rigid than here in Thailand. If he does return, I am sure that he will find so many go-go bars that he will be constantly entertained in the manner that he is accustomed to.

Bangkok Crawdad

Bangkok

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Credit crunch will come back to haunt us

What if the credit crunch is not just sub-prime and credit cards? A year ago it was reported that the amount of money at risk in credit derivatives had increased 93 per cent to half a trillion dollars. But at the same time, the total derivatives market, which was less than US$1 trillion in 2001, last year reached $10 trillion dollars. The Economist cited the British Bankers Association last spring as estimating an even higher number, that the market would reach $US30 trillion this year. That money, like sub-prime, is widely distributed and highly leveraged. It makes long-term capital management and the 1997 Thai baht crisis look tiny in comparison. Perhaps, in the end, we will find that Wall Street found a way to solve global warming. But in the meantime, having a new government in place in Thailand may be more crucial than we currently can imagine. 

I hope I end up looking like a fool, but right now I'm worried, and not only for Thailand. 

Steven Stoffers

Chiang Mai

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Park's owners try to shirk responsibility

The Siam Park owner said the water entertainment complex did its best to prevent accidents and had employed foreign engineers and advisers to train staff. He said some staff were "careless" and lacked experience. He blamed this for the accidents. That is a sweet Thai reaction. In the last four years that I have visited the park, I never saw any of the owners or the management around. But I saw that the water slide had thousands of children sliding in large groups together down the slope, and the parents cheering.

In all the other water parks of the world, there is a rule that only one user/child at a time is allowed to go down; never in groups. Where was the advice of the "international experts"? And regarding maintenance: a lot of expensive new rides were installed, but the old installations saw no, or lousy, maintenance.

The swimming lagoon gets a lot of chlorine, but there is no algae control. Why? Because it is easy to put litres of chemicals into the filters every day, but the algae problem is connected with hard physical work: brushing, cleaning by hand, removing by mechanical cleaners. Better to look away and re-paint the pool every two years.

The only way to save this park is the same as for every Western "invention": don't apply the nice Thai way but the appropriate procedure. There is no Thai way to repair a Mercedes - there is only a Mercedes way, or the car will not last long. There are international standards for water parks, which the management has to apply every day. Blaming underpaid personnel for being careless is a management disaster: it is the managers' job to train the personnel and educate them to care. But if the owners/managers stay at home and count their profits and losses, they are the ones responsible. If Siam Park is closed, they will lose money, but all the staff will lose their jobs, and Bangkok its only large water park. What a shame.

H Rudolf

Bangkok

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