CEO style benefits only the family business

In this country, even large companies listed on the stock exchange are still mainly owned by families, and the CEO is the head of the household. In other words, the owner is the CEO and does not have to answer to shareholders. He runs the company for his family's benefit and does what he likes. Trade unions are almost non-existent. Thaksin's promise showed that he is a dictator with no wish for democracy, even if he has grasped the meaning of the process.

A short while after Thaksin was elected, a group of about 30 people got together and complained they had been in new jobs for three months and no one had got them together to tell them what to do. Those people were newly elected MPs! That subservience to authority and unwillingness or inability to think for oneself is far too prevalent in Thai society.

GARETH CLAYTON

BANGKOK

A new idea to draw in the tourists

The Tourism Authority of Thailand should contact Ripley's Believe It or Not to register Government House as a bizarre place. No country in the world allows mobs to besiege its Government House and turn it into a shanty town. They even grow rice on the House's lawn. The TAT should also promote the House as a tourist attraction, under the slogan, "That's Incredible!" This is truly Amazing Thailand.

MEECHAI BURAPA

CHIANG MAI

The world needs fewer people, not more

Re: "Does Obama's 'change' call hide a dangerous agenda?" Letters, November 10.

Paul Kokoski comments: "... few seem cognisant of the inherent danger in Barack Obama's opposition to the fundamental 'right to life' of every human being" and "Obama also fully supports contraceptives and homosexuality, which thwarts the natural generation of life."

This is yet another fanatical right-wing fundamentalist Christian view. Do you have any idea what a mess the world is in and how much worse it's going to get if we fail to rein in population growth?

WWF director-general James Leape recently commented: "For more than 20 years we have exceeded the earth's ability to support a consumptive lifestyle that is unsustainable, and we cannot afford to continue down this path." He continued: "If everyone around the world lived as those in America, we would need five planets to support us."

And here's a letter inferring that world population should actually increase. As Christopher Hitchens would have said to the writer: "Monotheistic religion is a plagiarism of a plagiarism of a hearsay of a hearsay, of an illusion of an illusion, extending all the way back to a fabrication of a few non-events."

TIMOTHY THOMPSON

UDON THANI

New US president will protect individual rights

Re: "Does Obama's 'change' call hide a dangerous agenda?" Letters, November 10.

Whether we love or loathe Barack Obama, it is absurd to claim that his support of abortion is equivalent to denying a human being the right to life. Until late in pregnancy, well after the vast majority of abortions are performed, the foetus cannot be seen as either a human being or a person. It cannot think or feel, and it has no demonstrable sense of self. Abortion is a right that every civilised and moral society will make readily available to any woman who wants it. Abortion is the wiser choice to reduce crime, solve teenage pregnancies and alleviate other social ills.

That Barack Obama supports contraceptives is also a good thing: they are proven to reduce Aids and other STDs and to reduce unwanted pregnancies. Obama does not support homosexuality; he is just not irrationally and immorally prejudiced against it.

That Obama is consistently decent and allows other human beings to freely choose how they live their own lives where it harms no one else proves not the idiotic claim that Obama is a communist, but that he takes seriously the idea of human rights.

 Obama has stated that he will not "bring to the US constitution same-sex marriage". What he will do is allow states free choice in the matter without interference from Washington, as is the reasonable course of action, consistent with the idea that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," as the writer quotes and then refuses to either accept or practice.

PETER FILICIETTI |BANGKOK