Chang Noi's article in Monday's Nation was good. These uprisings around the world are indeed related to globalisation, as Ian Buruma puts it in his excellent article on Saturday, "Elites under siege in every corner of the world".
However neither of these commentators go far enough with their analyses. Buruma's Thai elites - "the ruling class, backed by big business and the army" - are clearly a dying breed and sound at odds with their counterpart New York liberals or "multiculturalists" in Europe. Chang Noi is closer to the truth calling them "middle-class urbanites".
What Chang Noi only hints at, however, is the massive growth of this vast new middle class - people who were poor during the last century, but who now have access to more money, consumer goods, education, healthcare, mobility and entertainment than at any previous time in their history. As GDP growth surges ahead, so too do the numbers of people gaining access to the middle class. All across Asia the growth of this demographic is radically changing the political structure and threatening the old feudal societies that had always depended on patronage and corruption for their power.
Thailand's rural population, like the Philippines, is and has been ruled by locally powerful families, mafia thugs, police chiefs and village chiefs at least since 1938 and the military dictatorship under Marshal Phibul. Such people are terrified of progressive democratic changes in society, social welfare, tax policies and tough legal constraints on what they consider traditionally legitimate (but illegal) behaviour. Such changes, however, are inevitable as more and more people join the expanding middle classes and demand the same as their counterparts across the globalised world.
The revolt has been precipitated and supported by these corrupt feudal families. Thaksin is their hero - and because each fiefdom controls its own group of rural people, they have been able to make it look like (to the naive foreign press) a large crowd is clamouring for democracy. But it is their intense focus on violence that gives them away entirely. They have a powerful military wing that has no qualms about killing its own protesters in order to lay blame on the government. They had been clamouring for blood since the beginning of this protest. There is no idealism here, unlike the student-led uprisings of the past. Instead they are fighting back tooth and nail against democracy, education, the welfare state (attacks on hospitals) and in particular the legal system. They are, in the end, the dying breed.
EARLY WORM
BANGKOK
Change the electoral system
When Democracy is: 1. the right to sell your vote; and 2. the right to hire a peasant militia plus their wives and children as protection to hide terrorists and hold a country to ransom, Thailand does not need it.
What they need is a government that truly reflects the needs and the wills of each sector of the economy, with elected members from within that sector. The agricultural sector in such a government would have a big voice as the breadbasket of the nation. It requires the whole nation to work together. The sectors would pay their own members of parliament. If they are corrupt, they steal only from their own people.
RICHARD BOWLER
BANGKOK
Tomorrow a nuclear power plant?
Egat is hell-bent on getting four nuclear plants built along Thailand's coasts. It announced two months ago that it would name the four sites this month. It doesn't take a genius to see that nuclear power plants would pose a plum target for future protesters or insurgents. Go figure.
It's also a no-brainer that solar power plants won't carry that concern. Indeed, producing large-scale electricity from the sun is cheaper, cleaner and safer than producing the same from uranium. Solar has become a lot more than a few PV panels on a roof. Current technology is mind-boggling in its feasibility, efficiency and low cost - even for large-scale municipal applications.
KEN ALBERTSEN
CHIANG RAI