The Anti-Corruption Organization of Thailand (people who made this video) want to become the country’s #1 watch dog. Well, they’ve certainly set themselves up for a pretty interesting task! We can all agree that this organization is a product of the political situation. A quick scroll through the organization’s site shows us the influential people that are involved. So it makes us think: just how many politicians these guys label as the bad guys. All of them? or maybe just some of them.

Will certainly be very interesting to see, as the organization continues to expose the wrong-doings in Thailand.

In any case, enjoy the video!

https://www.facebook.com/ACT.AntiCorruptionThailand/videos/517948575036561/

Oh Corruption… was originally published in Thai Politico on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Many members of the international community has called Thailand out for violating human rights during the deportation of Uighurs , the Rohingya crisis, and the detaining of the 14 New Democracy Movement students. For the most part, Prime Minister Prayuth has indicated that the government followed the necessary protocols, but the United States, European Union, and other international organizations seem to think that what the government has done is not right.

So, what do 1,250 people from across the country think when they were surveyed by Nida Poll?

In short, we are not worried. Haters gonna hate, right?

To be more specific, when asked if they were worried about the attitudes of the United States, EU, and international organizations towards Thailand…

36.32% were not worried at all

21.36% were not too worried

28.08% were rather worried

13.84% were very worried

The other part of the survey indicates that as much as 37.92% of people (the largest group) think these are efforts by the United States to interfere with internal Thai affairs. Have a look at the graphic below to see what the other sentiment were.

What can we take from these results?

Nationalism, nationalism, and nationalism. We love it. If you remember back to the Thaksin PM days, you will recall Thaksin stating to reporters that “the UN is not my father,” when questioned about his human rights violations during his infamous war on drugs.

Thailand, as a whole, largely gets extremely defensive when it comes to foreigners start to talk sh*t. I’m sure if the topic United States foreign policy was brought up at your dinner table, there’s always going to be someone there so say things like “Ai gun, don’t be nosey in our issues — why solve your own problems first?!”

This attitude and nationalism is a problem. We have to know that a kind of “I don’t care what you think about me” and “p*ss off” outlook does not help our country. Our leaders and people get overly defensive and even at times hostile when criticized by the international community.

I might sound like a psychologist, but this advice can be applied to both our country leaders and the average person: when criticized, we just need to calm down, listen to what others are saying, and revaluate ourselves.

With all this said, we should also acknowledge the progress that the government has made with the EU in dealing with issues about human trafficking and Thailand’s fishery slavery labor.

Do Thais Care About International Criticism? was originally published in Thai Politico on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

So, I thought it would be interesting to discuss one main problem of being a “one man show” ruler. Saddam Hussein was President of Iraq for 24 long and gruesome years. Being a “nice guy” is certainly not a reason to explain Saddam’s longevity in power.

As an authoritarian leader of a country, everything must be planned. Everything must be done with a purpose. You don’t simply go to bed at night and hope that you will wake up in the morning and expect your people to chant your name. So lets talk about what Saddam had to do to be in a position to rule Iraq for as long as he did.

You can probably suspect that earning LOYALTY is the issue at hand for many leaders. Sidetracking from Saddam, if you have been skimming Thai news for the past couple of weeks, you probably have come across incidents where individuals act in opposition to PM Prayuth. I won’t discuss this any further, for obvious reasons, but these incidents are good to keep in mind when we think about how ruling a country works.

What I would like to bring your attention to is Saddam’s way of demanding loyalty once he has taken power. The youtube video I have included below highlights an important event which changed the role of Saddam Hussein’s as the President of Iraq.

The Purge

Prior to the event that happened in the video below, Saddam’s Ba’ath party was the focal point of Iraq’s government. Focus on the party and not on Saddam can sometimes be an obstacle to ruling the country. You get people disagreeing with you here and not working with you there. So, what exactly do you need to do when you want to rule the country under your thumb? Please watch…

WHAT THE FUCK, right?! This, ladies and gentlemen, is what you call a purge. Saddam was as cool as a f*cking cucumber calling out people’s names to be killed. It really is quite messed up, but at the same time extremely interesting.

Why did he do this???

So what did this “purge” do for Saddam? It gave him the loyalty he needed from high ranking officials through government and people around the country. With this purge, Saddam transferred all the ruling power he needed into his right pocket and was able to wield it like his burning cigar. Party members now had the only option to fear Saddam. Whether you loved him or hated him prior to the purge, you ended up shouting “long live Saddam!”

“Long live Saddam” immediately became the new black. When that first person in the room makes an outright statement of allegiance, it really forces everyone else to do the same. This becomes a new norm. A deviation away from this would be a very very bad choice.

Saddam seriously just scored a 10/10 in Politics, Psychology, and How to be an Dictator 101. The purge got Saddam the unconditional loyalty and submission he demanded from his party.

After all, I like to think write about Thailand, so exercise your brain a bit and draw some connections. Think of Saddam’s methods as a very extreme example of earning loyalty through forceful ways. If anything, I hope, at the very least, the post has encouraged you think about how leaders or politicians use certain actions of events to achieve their desired ends.

So, to end, There’s one thought I would like to leave you with: Everything happens for a reason, and there is always a fundamental explanation why someone does something. It’s cliche, I know, but really, look around and think about it.

Saddam Hussein’s Way of Earning Loyalty was originally published in Thai Politico on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Kindergarten and Elementary education:

For the top international schools in Bangkok, you will be paying between 500–700 thousand baht per year of education. Multiply that by 8 years, you will be paying anywhere between 4–5.5 million baht total for your child’s early years education.

There’s no doubt that after elementary school, you will already be speaking english like a farang. Don’t forget to combine this with the fact that you have been rolling up to school everyday in a fancy van after being fed breakfast by your lovely nanny.

Middle School and High School:

Things seem to only go uphill from here…

If you chose to finish middle school and high school in Thailand, you will be paying no less than 600 thousand baht a year. And on the high side, you can even expect to pay as much as 850 thousand a year at the top schools. This totals to roughly 3.6–5.1 million baht.

However, if your parents decided to turn things up a notch and send you to boarding school, your family will be paying more than 1.5 million baht a year. Factoring that to the calculation above, we can roughly say it will cost you upwards of 8 million baht.

College:

Surely, the true ‘dek inter’ doesn’t attend an international program at Chula Thammasat or Mahidol. US, UK, Australia anyone?

Since the cost of tuition varies given country and university, we can average 4 years of undergrad to around 5 million baht.

The Grand Total:

So, by the time you are around 21 or 22 years old your family would have spent between 12–18 million baht going to school. That’s a lot isn’t it?

Don’t forget, we haven’t even factored in the cost for food, airplane tickets, SAT tutors, and all the many other things related. Depending on how lavish of a lifestyle you live, you can top that sum with another million or two. So its certainly safe to say that one child costs at least 20–25 million baht. Starting to regret the B’s and C’s you got in college now? Don’t worry, I do too.

This means that, on average, your mommy and daddy will be spending 1 million baht each year on your schooling.

Its extremely hard to debate the worth of this because we all lead different lives and follow different career paths. Some people come from families that own large businesses, having a child with a degree from a top university is subsequently an investment in the future leader of your company. For the rest of us, studying abroad often gives you a competitive advantage when trying to find jobs at big companies. But if you put that into perspective, without any monetary help from your family, how long would you have to work and save before you yourself can consider having kids and sending them to international school?!

**If you just came here to find out the numbers you can stop reading here. For some more commentary… keep reading :)**

Lets think of this in terms of social inequality and mobility. If you can relate to anything that I have written above we can all assume that you come from a wealthy family. By wealthy, I mean, really wealthy in comparison to the rest of the country. According to a 2015 Credit Suisse report, 75% of Thailand’s wealth is held by the population’s top 10%. So, in a country of around 67 million people, around 6.7 million people (probably even less in reality) possess almost all the money. Thats pretty sad isn’t it?

Wealth inequality is not a problem that can be easily solved. Given the case of Thailand, “we” the rich will continue being rich and the poor will continue being poor. Your nanny and driver who sent you to school every day can never expect their children or grandchildren to gain the same access to education as you.

According to the world bank, the average income in Thailand is around 190k baht. Therefore, you get a very very very small part of the population who can even think of affording this luxury for their children. Inherently, attending international school and going to study abroad is is an elite thing.

On the education front, people of different economic backgrounds live in separate worlds. Some children struggle to make it through high school. What job prospects do you think await them if they leave school at 14–15 because they need to get into manual labor to feed themselves and their family? The Thai school system in Bangkok is a bit different. The quality of education is much higher than the rest of the country and at the top schools you can find the brightest kids who go on to win olympic gold medals and obtain government scholarships to attend Ivy League universities. Your average middle class student has their future somewhat secured. They will most likely attend Chula, Thammasat, or Mahidol, and will most likely find a stable job in Bangkok.

However, true freedom of choice for education only exists for the families that have millions of baht to spare in their bank accounts. The option to get a degree from abroad is only reserved for the very few in society. You might be reading this and thinking, “well everyone is going to international school nowadays,” you must recognize that you are part of a very small bubble in relation to the rest of the country. Don’t forget, it will cost you around 20 million baht per child!

I mention all this because the difference in wealth and education is an important factor in Thailand’s political conflict. Although the divisions in society during the current government is not a visible as it used to be, it hasn’t disappeared. The poor state of the Thai economy does not give us much hope about anything in Thailand getting better.

What is surprising to me is the type of ignorant speech that sometimes spurs out amongst anti-Thaksin Bangkokians. You probably, at one point, have said or heard someone say something along the lines of “the poor people are uneducated that is why they get tricked by Thaksin.” This type of statement, I believe, has no place in the minds and mouths of “educated” people. If we have any hope of solving the deeply engrained conflict in Thailand we must start at the social level. Marginalizing statements such as the one above do nothing but divide people. It breeds a sense of “us” versus “them.” At the end of the day isn’t the goal of the current government all about fostering national unity?

What is most important here is the idea of respecting and acknowledging the existence and needs of people from different social classes. By no means is this discussion biased towards any particular political group. But the inconsistencies in Thai society about the good and bad guys in society are perplexing. Instead of consistently trying to identify dissidents and enemies, the “highly” educated Bangkok population should focus their intellect on understanding arguments presented by people that are different to them. Don’t just subject yourself to silly rhetoric. Its a waste of your brain…and money!

The Cost of an International Education in Thailand was originally published in Thai Politico on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We know there is something wrong with Thailand when you see a young boy celebrating his painting of Adolf Hitler in a government sponsored short film intended to teach people about Thai values.

This is a very big problem. We’ll say this here: Hitler should never be presented as a cool dude with a mustache. In case you’re too ignorant to care (like the government of Thailand and the director of this film), Hitler commanded the murder of over 6 million Jews.

Lets cross our fingers and hope this doesn’t encourage some weird dictator-loving fetish in our country again (oh wait…or was that the point?).

Glorification and idolization of Adolf Hitler is a big no-no, ladies and gentlemen. If you find yourself asking “why,” please give yourself a BIG smack on the head and go read a history book. This issue reflects very well on the problem of our education system and the people who are in charge of it.

Update: John Oliver even took a stab at this topic…

read more about this and watch the full film here: http://bangkok.coconuts.co/2014/12/09/director-12-values-film-doesnt-get-hitler-fuss

Adolf Hitler in a government sponsored movie was originally published in Thai Politico on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It is fair to say that the Thai conglomerate, CP, has been taking quite a beating on social media and other spheres of consumer society. We will certainly discuss the issue of CP in a later post, but we would like bring your attention to the main point: Wealth inequality.

According to a Credit Suisse Wealth Report, Thailand is categorized in the top 12 countries with “very high inequality” That’s the highest rank you can get on this honorable list. This means that the top 10 percent holds 75 percent of Thailand’s wealth.

Before you start going falling into the social-media hate trap and ranting about CP’s monopolistic business practices, start considering the bigger picture of Thailand. Wealth inequality is certainly hard to solve when you have business and political elites sleeping in the same bed.

(source: James Davies, Rodrigo Lluberas and Anthony Shorrocks, Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook 2014)

(https://publications.credit-suisse.com/tasks/render/file/…)

Wealth Inequality in Thailand was originally published in Thai Politico on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I can best characterize the military coup’s existence in Thailand by the famous Shawshank Redemption phrase: “same old shit, different day.”

Putting the “we need democracy” argument aside, Prayuth’s administration has done an extremely poor job in managing the Thai economy, which grew no more than 1–2% in the final months of 2014. This year, GDP growth is projected at around 4%. Thailand’s political mess has brought its average growth to a rate of 2.9% since 2007. For all you econ nerds out there… seems like we’re stuck in some sort of middle-income trap, huh?

Other than the economy, everything else should be pretty obvious. There won’t be any elections held until August 2016 — we’re supposed to get to vote on the charter sometime between then and now.

Its been one long year, and I hope most of you would realize that all this “bring back happiness to Thailand” is utter BS. All this military coup nonsense is just politics and nothing more. No one is out there to make your day happier and eliminate “corrupt” politicians from Thai society.

We all hate to admit it, but Thailand’s problems is about the old establishment fighting a non-status quo political force.

Bill Clinton’s campaign manger once said: “It’s the economy, stupid.” So, Mr. Prayuth, fix up the economy before you cannot justify your rule. With the economy going well, you’ll at least have some excuse. Other than that, I can’t really do anymore than say good luck and quote another f-ing movie.

“With great power comes great responsibility.” You’ve got all the power now, so don’t F it up, Prayuth!

Happy Coup Anniversary was originally published in Thai Politico on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Ethnic persecution is the best characterization of what has happened in Myanmar over the past decades. You wouldn’t expect it, but in 2012, the majority Rakhine Buddhist population have been largely responsible for systemic attacks against the Muslim Rohingya. You heard that right… in Buddhist nationalists killing people for believing in a different religion. The situation is truly f-cked up.

Since then, the government has done little to nothing to intervene in the violence against Rohingya’s. If anything, the government local and national governments have sponsored violence against the Rohingyas. Now do you see why these people have to flee the country?

Does the Thai government have a duty to accept Rohingya refugees on Thai soil? Is it justified that we just provide them with food and push them back into the sea for them to go back to a “home” that they don’t have?

Who are they Rohingya? was originally published in Thai Politico on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.