Thai protesters (200,000) take aim at utilities, airline

[grantcart]

Source: MSNBC/AP


BANGKOK, Thailand - State workers threatened Monday to cut off water, electricity and phone service at government offices and disrupt flights of the national airline in support of protesters trying to bring down the Thai prime minister.

A coalition of 43 unions representing workers from state companies including water, electric, phone and the national airline said they would cut off services to the government starting Wednesday. They are already disrupting rail service and plan to cut back public bus transportation as well.

"The government has beaten protesters, and that justifies our retaliating by stopping water, telephone service and electricity to some government agencies," Sawit Kaewwan, secretary-general of the State Enterprise Workers Relations Confederation, or SERC, told a news conference.

The labor federation said 200,000 members would stop work from Wednesday in support of an alliance of right-wing protesters who have occupied Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej's office for a week, trying to bring down the government.

The group and its sympathizers — monarchists, the military and the urban elite — complain that Western-style democracy with one-man, one-vote gives too much weight to Thailand's rural majority, who protesters say are susceptible to vote buying that breeds corruption. They have proposed a system under which most lawmakers would be appointed rather than elected.

Public bus workers will halt service on 80 percent of Bangkok's 3,800 buses, with the remainder running for free, he said.

Workers for state-owned Thai Airways plan to delay flights Wednesday, said Somsak Manop, deputy chief of Thai Airways International labor union.



Read more: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26498577/

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Samak has been a tool for corperate interests, and for 30 years he has helped them frustrate democracy by going to the really poor areas in the country and openly buying votes (my inlaws still sell theirs). This time however the coalition which is a front for the deposed Prime Minister Taksin (now fled from his bail while awaiting corruption prosecution) failed to get any support at all from the middle class and did not pick up a single seat in the Central Region or Bangkok.

This is an effort by the largely devout Buddhist activist and the middle class to tell their rural cousins that they refuse to yeild to the 'tyranny of the corrupt majority' who sell their votes and don't care about policies.

The leader of the protesters Maj. Gen. Chamlong Srimuang who has been a peace and poverty activist for 30 years. He is a highly respected man living an ascetic lay lifestyle which inlcudes owning almost no personal possesions. When he served as Governor of Bangkok he had to relent and accept a gift of a radio so he could listen to the news and an old car so that he could make his appointments. He lives a celibate life with his wife in a house that has three rooms but no outside wall so that anyone wanting to take his meager possessions can.