In what can only be described as poetic justice, Thaksin is getting a good taste of corruption in his own ranks. Thaksin’s wonderful little practice of gouging funds for himself seems to have been well learned by the Red Shirt leaders.
It was absolutely no surprise that a video surfaced with Red Shirt organizers peeling 1000 baht notes off a stack to pay protesters to attend the March 14 rally in Bangkok. By all comparison 1000 baht is a lot of money being paid for this rally. In the past a few hundred baht was enough to get supporters from the Northeast to attend. It would seem Thaksin’s criminal convictions along with vivid memories of the April 2009 riots have raised the price of a rally participant a few hundred percent.
So assuming that Thaksin is the source of all that Billion + baht that has flowed into Red Shirt bank accounts over the past 6 months, it becomes painfully obvious that this exactly matches what Thaksin must do to stay popular. Essentially Thaksin must pay people to be his friends or helpers. With Thaksin’s increasing stench from convictions and obvious problems staying ahead of the law, an extra layer of money deodorant is now needed to get people to hang out with him.
So now if you look at things from the Red Shirt leaders viewpoint, the moment they are successful in overthrowing the Thai government, they will find themselves suddenly unemployed. After all this is another one of Thaksin’s signatures, when you are of no further use to him you are discarded like used toilet paper. So in the sense of job security, skimming just enough money to make the rally impotent insures yet another day of employment as the next rally gets planned.
Reading news reports that protestors are getting significantly less than promised to attend the March 14 rally, many have simply decided it is not worth the aggravation and risk of personal injury to attend. So that simply gives Thaksin a good taste of his own medicine as what was once ample money suddenly becomes short of what is needed. As the Red Shirt leaders line their own pockets, Thaksin is quite helpless to stop this because he needs to stay out of reach of the law.
But who is to place the blame on the Red Shirt leaders for doing this, after all Thaksin taught them exactly how to do it so it must be the type of behavior Thaksin wants (wink – wink) ;-).
Needless to say it does not take much of an imagination to visualize Thaksin bursting a few blood vessels with rage as he gets a taste of his own doctrine. Certainly it is not wise to be in Thaksin’s line of sight while all of this is going on as there is no telling what he would do. It is highly doubtful Thaksin has reached this level of rage before seeing that it all is on the line. So once again it would seem that what goes around, comes around.
