Obviously, an approved agenda-pushing protest do to the repetitive coverage.
"Protesters raise pressure in Bangkok" by Associated Press | April 6, 2010
BANGKOK — Thousands of defiant antigovernment demonstrators fanned out to other parts of Thailand’s capital and threatened firms with ties to the government yesterday after ignoring police orders to leave Bangkok’s paralyzed commercial district.
Then they are TERRORISTS, right?
Some protesters pushed their way into their newest target, the Election Commission, in anger that the body has yet to decide whether the ruling Democrat Party violated laws on financial donations, which could lead to the party’s dissolution. No violence was reported and all protesters — inside and outside the building — left the area after a compromise was reached.
Protest leaders vowed to step up their pressure today and lead convoys through 11 main roads in central Bangkok that authorities have declared off-limits.
The protesters, mostly farmers from impoverished provincial areas who have characterized their movement as a class war against the Bangkok elite, have sworn not to let up their pressure until Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva steps down and calls new elections. Abhisit has offered to call elections by the year’s end, but the protesters want quicker action.
The movement — known formally as the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship — contends Abhisit came to power illegitimately in the years after former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra was removed in a 2006 coup.--more--"
I have put this up a few times, but it's worth another look:
"Former Left-Right Alliance against Globalization and America
by Thongchai Winichakul
28 July 2008
Article
Almost all Thai rightists I interviewed for my recent research perceived that the threats to Thailand today are capitalism and America. Even lifelong anti-communist ‘Phor’, an alias used for this research, who has tenaciously held the idea of national security being under threat from two strands of communism, sees that Thailand has to be cautious of the CIA interfering and agitating groups of Thai people to the point of being a threat to security. Of course, they were well aware that the threats from capitalism and America are not one and the same as the communist threat.
The rightists’ discourse of capitalist threat obviously differs from the leftists’ Maoist anti-capitalist discourse of 30 years ago. These rightists speak pretty much the same anti-neo-liberalism and anti-globalization language which Thai intellectuals and activists have adopted since after Oct 6, 1976.
Although all the interviews were done years after the 1997 economic crisis, the pain caused by the capitalist crisis was still alive in their memories. Their discourse on the cause of the crisis turned out to be nationalist and against ‘farang’ or western capitalism, pointing to western capitalist giants led by the US bullying emergent smaller capitalist nations. For the ease of digestion and propagation, it was made a story of conspiracy among a handful of global political and financial figures, often including George Soros in particular. The ‘Washington Consensus’ was understood simply as a plot by western capitalist neo-conservatives to destroy smaller states. With the calamity besetting Thai nationalist capital which had eagerly embraced globalization over a decade earlier, globalization has become undesirable. Their discourse against western capitalism was therefore not of a socialist bent, but was outright nationalist, against those ugly farangs abusing decent Thais.
Most of the interviews were done during the years of Thaksin administration which was seen as representing the evil western capitalism, subsequently labelled as ‘vicious or immoral capital’. The exasperation against Thaksin and globalization and the global anti-American sentiment fed into one another. Among the rightists I interviewed then, only one person liked the Thaksin government, and the rest were suspicious of Thaksin because he was pushing the agenda of globalization.
--MORE--"Your NEWSPAPERS are LYING TO YOU, America!
