All Hell Breaking Loose In Thailand, Stock Exchange On Fire

Developing... my twitter has a play by play of today's events so far @vincefernando

All hell is breaking loose in Thailand now. The army moved to clear protesters out of their main Ratchprasong encampment this morning, moving slowly inwards towards the main protest stage while encountering sporadic resistance in the outer area of the protest site. There were some limited casualties, including foreign journalists, though we'll wait for official confirmation of the exact counts.

Yet even after the key Thai protest leaders surrendered themselves to police and told their followers that the protest was over, riots spontaneously broke out across Bangkok and in upcountry provinces.

There are now multiple locations in Bangkok where protesters are angry and burning tires, burning buildings, and clashing with security forces. Even upcountry, Thai television has shown mobs of protesters storming some town halls and lighting them on fire. Symbols of the Thai establishment appear to have been targeted. For example, protesters immediately tried to burn down the luxury Central World shopping mall next to their main protest stage. One Thai TV station, Channel 3, is also reportedly besieged by people.

One odd occurrence in our view has involved the Thai stock exchange. It actually ended in the green today, despite Asia being generally down. Apparently investors under-estimated the implications of the army crackdown today. It's not as easy as forcing a few people into submission. Well it's been now made pretty clear, especially because the stock market building itself is now on fire:

Are the Red Shirts Commies?

How to you tell a Commie?

If you tell a Commie by a belief in Marxist ideology, a belief that all property should be commonly owned, that the historic march of man passes through feudalism, capitalism, late capitalism, on to socialism, then communism, and the withering away of the state, and all that other “theory”, no, they are not communists.

Thais like to follow a strong leader (puu yai - sometimes translated as VIP, sometimes translated as “big shot”) who will give them things. Thaksin promised to do that for the rural poor, and to some extent he delivered. The entire country runs on patronage — think of the Chicago but with 60 million people.

I’ve seen this time and time again. You catch someone doing something illegal, try to take criminal or civil action against him, and next thing you know you get a call from a Senator, who says he’s the guy’s sister’s aunt’s father, and why are you picking on the guy? So you size the Senator up (I had to rely on my Thai colleagues for this) figure out who he knows, where HIS support comes from, whether you have any friends in common, and if so, who is the senior person in the relationship, and whether you have any friends who are stronger than him, or could “break his rice bowl”, and go from there. It becomes a question of who has the bigger puu yai.

If you can approach the Senator through a mutual friend, you can probably work something out where you get a deal you can live with, no one admits wrongdoing, and everyone saves face.

If you have to resort to muscling the Senator, then you have to do it in a way that makes it look, on the surface, like it was all real friendly-like, just a big misunderstanding, and now everyone sees reason. You can get an idea how this works by watching any good Mafia movie.

This works reasonably well so long as everyone understands the game. However, as happened once, the guy you are after is a member of the Royal Family, and the thing he did that your client did not like was done with the help of a highly placed government official, and your (non-Thai) client’s first step in dealing with the situation was to send off a severe and threatening letter. The you grovel. Luckily we got involved after the letter was sent, so we could not be accused of being involved in it.

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