In what is classic behavior for Thaksin Shinawatra and fallout for his cronies, people are about to take a fall for Thaksin’s doings. It seems that in classic Thaksin style, he manages to distance himself from the problems he causes and other people will take the fall for him.
To the casual onlooker it is very clear Thailand’s government is starting to wobble like a spinning plate on a stick that has slowed down. The massive corruption that is tied to the rice pledging scheme is too big to hide. The numbers don’t add up, and the amount of unsold rice continues to pile up in warehouses. When you look at the reason for the rice scheme it is two fold. One is to keep the voter base of the poor Thai rice farmers, and second is to pocket the money.
Although it will be difficult to prove directly through legal means, it is clear that Thaksin has set this rice pledging scheme in motion for himself. The size of this single issue is so big that only Thaksin would dare attempt it. Also the amount of corruption and graft that is going on has grown substantially since the Yingluck Shinawatra government took the reigns of power. So as one would recall in the last cycle, this would place us in August 2005 when at that time Thaksin could no longer hide all the corruption.
As for the Ministers taking a bullet for the boss, they will take the fall for this in one way or the other as technically they are the decision makers even though Thaksin is calling the plays. So Thaksin will reap the rewards and the others will be once again discarded like used toilet paper. Seeing that the Thaksin ‘A’ team is back and available now that their 5 year stay in the penalty box is over, benching the ‘C’ team make sense in anyone’s play book.
So what will happen next is not too hard to figure out. Thaksin will move people around giving the appearance that things have been fixed or at least dealt with. This will buy some time as it will reset the scoreboard to zero and it will take time to prove the new bunch is no better than the old bunch. This will take place either when the government’s popularity starts to take a major hit, or the corruption finding process finally catches up with the Ministers.
It is important to keep in mind that Thaksin must stay in power long enough so he does not need the help of others to resume being Thailand’s dictator. That can only happen after the Constitution has been changed, and seeing that news of that is starting to find its way back into the news, it will not be long before this cycle will be equal to January 2006 of the last cycle when massive anti Thaksin rallies became the norm. No matter how you look at it, things look to get messy very soon in Thailand.
