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Thailand’s Fight over who Should Rule

An anti-government protester and riot police at a barricade near the Government Complex in Bangkok, Feb. 14, 2014.Kerek Wongsa/Reuters

BANGKOK – While the world’s attention has been focused on upheavals in the Middle East and, most recently, Ukraine and Venezuela, less attention has been given to the political impasse in Thailand. For nearly a decade there have been large-scale protests, primarily in the capital, Bangkok, with supporters of royalist elites confronting those who favor representative democracy.

The current protests calling for Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra’s resignation began in November. Amid fears of impending civil war, tensions have eased in March through a combination of pressure from the army and negotiations between representatives of the protesters and the government. Nonetheless, the deep divisions in Thai society will continue. At stake is whether Thailand can remain a democracy and, if so, what kind of democracy.

Rule by moral people

For the past five months, protesters assembled under the banner of the People’s Democratic Reform Committee (PDRC) have rallied in the center of Bangkok. The movement’s leader, Suthep Thaugsuban, is a former deputy leader of the Democrat Party, the oldest political party in Thailand. Despite constant references to democracy, Suthep and his followers are far from seeking democratic reforms.

In December, the 150 Democrat Party representatives in parliament resigned en masse from their positions, and the party refused to participate in early elections last month called to resolve the ensuing political crisis. Suthep and his allies in the PDRC are insisting on Yingluck’s withdrawal from politics and for her democratically elected government to be replaced by a royally appointed committee that could properly guide the Thai democracy.

Given the large turnouts at opposition rallies, there is no question that a significant number of people support the PDRC’s vision of a government under “khon di” — meaning rule by moral people — appointed by the king. However, as majorities in the last five elections have demonstrated, they prefer a democratically elected government that is held accountable in periodic elections.

The Democrat Party and its middle-class and royalist backers dismiss Yingluck’s Pheu Thai Party supporters as ignorant peasants whose votes were bought primarily through populist government programs. In contrast, villagers in the north and northeastern parts of the country — Pheu Thai’s stronghold — are committed to democracy and believe they should have an equal say in determining Thailand’s political order.

Cosmopolitan villagers

I have been following the political evolution of rural people in northeastern Thailand, a region that constitutes more than one-third of the country’s population, for a half century. During my fieldwork in the early 1960s, the lives of Thai villagers in northeastern Thailand were primarily agrarian and centered on festivals at village Buddhist temple-monasteries. The northeast has seen dramatic changes over the last 50 years.

From the 1950s to 1970s an increasing number of northeastern villagers began to seek temporary or permanent nonagricultural work, mostly in Bangkok. Since the 1980s, many have gone to work in the Middle East, East Asia and Singapore. Their remittances home led to a substantial increase in household income. Over the same period, the villagers attained more education, with most today completing secondary school. Far from remaining peasants, they have become cosmopolitan villagers, with a sophisticated understanding of the larger world. Still, until recently, the villagers had little influence on shaping the policies that affect their lives.

The current stalemate threatens to degenerate into tit-for-tat violence, if not civil war.

After several upheavals from the early 1970s through 1990, the urban middle class gained power through parliamentary democracy, wresting power from the military. The Democrat Party became the primary vehicle for advancing their interests. However, the Democrats never succeeded in gaining much support among rural dwellers, especially in the north and northeast, because the party always championed the interests of their primary supporters in Bangkok and the upper south, where livelihoods are based on commercial fishing and rubber production.

The disgruntled villagers from northern Thailand found their voice in parliament through the Thai Rak Thai party, founded in 1998 by Thaksin Shinawatra, a media mogul from a Sino-Thai family and Yingluck’s brother. Since the 2001 elections, villagers from the north and northeast voted overwhelmingly in support of Thai Rak Thai and its successor, Pheu Thai. The new parties championed policies such as universal health care, a village loan program, agricultural subsidies and devolution of power to locally elected councils that have strong approval among its constituents in the northeast and north.

Unfortunately for these constituents, Thaksin and his family, including Yingluck, have generated widespread disapproval, even hatred, from the old royalist and bureaucratic elite, the middle class and many nongovernmental organizations. The rancor stems in part from legitimate concerns about Thaksin’s presumed corruption in using government power to favor companies owned by his family or cronies, majoritarian rule that ignored the grievances of the minority parties and civil society organizations and hostility toward labor unions as well as dismay over populist policies that favor villagers.

The Red Shirts

In 2006 after a series of anti-Thaksin demonstrations, the military staged a coup and installed an interim government. The military-backed government replaced the country’s 1997 liberal constitution with one that placed significant constraints on electoral politics, the most significant being a senate with half its members elected and the other half chosen by a committee made up of judges and representatives of state agencies. The military’s actions triggered protests by supporters of Thaksin, mainly from the north and northeast and urban workers with roots in the rural northeast. These supporters subsequently coalesced into a movement popularly known as the Red Shirts.

New elections were held in early 2007 on the basis of the new constitution. Its outcome exacerbated the standoff between Thaksin supporters and opponents. His opponents succeeded through legal maneuvers to ban pro-Thaksin parties, including Thai Rak Thai, and to restrict its leadership from political participation for five years. But the Peoples Power Party (PPP), which replaced Thai Rak Thai, won a plurality of seats in parliament. Although the PPP, in alliance with several smaller parties, managed to form a government, its support dwindled as legal decisions compelled two prime ministers to resign, barred several other politicians from politics and saw the withdrawal of coalition party members. In December 2007, anti-Thaksin protesters took over the international airport. The PPP government resigned under pressure and was replaced by the Democrat Party, led by Abhisit Vejjajiva, an Oxford-educated upper-class politician.

Thaksin’s supporters were incensed by what they saw as a legal and parliamentary equivalent of a coup. After months of sustained protests, Red Shirts occupied Bangkok’s central business district from March to May 2010. The Abhisit administration ordered a military crackdown on the protesters. The violence left at least 90 people dead and hundreds injured. The protest ended with Red Shirt leaders under arrest and most of their followers returning to their homes, mainly in the northeast.

The Democrats called for new elections in July 2011, assuming the backlash against the violence associated with Red Shirt protesters favored the Democrats. Much to the surprise of many, Pheu Thai, led by Yingluck, won a clear parliamentary majority. This result once again enraged the middle and upper classes. They alleged Thaksin and his associates rigged the election through vote-buying fraud. However, two prominent academics — Pasuk Phongpaichit and Chris Baker — recently characterized such an assessment as a “dangerous nonsense.” Impartial observers also found the election fair and transparent. The villagers voted for Pheu Thai and its predecessors because it was in their interests to do so.

Threat of civil war

In November the Pheu Thai party overstepped its electoral mandate by promoting a highly unpopular amnesty bill for those involved in the protracted conflict from 2006 to 2011, including Thaksin. It triggered another round of demonstrations on the streets of Bangkok, and the bill was removed from consideration.

The current stalemate threatens to degenerate into tit-for-tat violence, if not civil war. The civil society is deeply polarized. There is a lack of moderating voices with moral authority that can transcend the political schism. Several Buddhist monks led by the respected Phra Paisal Visalo have called for the end of hatred and revenge.

At the moment, the standoff has mostly moved from the streets to the courts. Regardless of the legal outcomes, which could mean the removal of Yingluck from office or the arrest of Suthep and other protest leaders, the street confrontations could well resume. However, an increasing number of Thais, led not only by monks but also by civil rights leaders and academics, embrace a shared identity and commitment to the country’s integrity that transcends the political divide. The country’s future hinges on the manifestation of these differences in electoral democracy, not confrontations on the streets.

Charles Keyes is a professor emeritus of anthropology and international studies at the University of Washington and the author of “Finding Their Voice: Northeastern Villagers and the Thai State.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect this newspaper’s editorial policy.

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Google’s Search Dominance Is Unwinding, But Still Accounting 48% Search Revenue

Google is so closely associated with its key product that its name is a verb that signifies “search.” However, Google’s dominance in that sector is dwindling.

According to eMarketer, Google will lose control of the US search industry for the first time in decades next year.

Google will remain the dominant search player, accounting for 48% of American search advertising revenue. And, remarkably, Google is still increasing its sales in the field, despite being the dominating player in search since the early days of the George W. Bush administration. However, Amazon is growing at a quicker rate.

Google’s Search Dominance Is Unwinding

Amazon will hold over a quarter of US search ad dollars next year, rising to 27% by 2026, while Google will fall even more, according to eMarketer.

The Wall Street Journal was first to report on the forecast.

Lest you think you’ll have to switch to Bing or Yahoo, this isn’t the end of Google or anything really near.

Google is the fourth-most valued public firm in the world. Its market worth is $2.1 trillion, trailing just Apple, Microsoft, and the AI chip darling Nvidia. It also maintains its dominance in other industries, such as display advertisements, where it dominates alongside Facebook’s parent firm Meta, and video ads on YouTube.

To put those “other” firms in context, each is worth more than Delta Air Lines’ total market value. So, yeah, Google is not going anywhere.

Nonetheless, Google faces numerous dangers to its operations, particularly from antitrust regulators.

On Monday, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled that Google must open up its Google Play Store to competitors, dealing a significant blow to the firm in its long-running battle with Fortnite creator Epic Games. Google announced that it would appeal the verdict.

In August, a federal judge ruled that Google has an illegal monopoly on search. That verdict could lead to the dissolution of the company’s search operation. Another antitrust lawsuit filed last month accuses Google of abusing its dominance in the online advertising business.

Meanwhile, European regulators have compelled Google to follow tough new standards, which have resulted in multiple $1 billion-plus fines.

Pixa Bay

Google’s Search Dominance Is Unwinding

On top of that, the marketplace is becoming more difficult on its own.

TikTok, the fastest-growing social network, is expanding into the search market. And Amazon has accomplished something few other digital titans have done to date: it has established a habit.

When you want to buy anything, you usually go to Amazon, not Google. Amazon then buys adverts to push companies’ products to the top of your search results, increasing sales and earning Amazon a greater portion of the revenue. According to eMarketer, it is expected to generate $27.8 billion in search revenue in the United States next year, trailing only Google’s $62.9 billion total.

And then there’s AI, the technology that (supposedly) will change everything.

Why search in stilted language for “kendall jenner why bad bunny breakup” or “police moving violation driver rights no stop sign” when you can just ask OpenAI’s ChatGPT, “What’s going on with Kendall Jenner and Bad Bunny?” in “I need help fighting a moving violation involving a stop sign that wasn’t visible.” Google is working on exactly this technology with its Gemini product, but its success is far from guaranteed, especially with Apple collaborating with OpenAI and other businesses rapidly joining the market.

A Google spokeswoman referred to a blog post from last week in which the company unveiled ads in its AI overviews (the AI-generated text that appears at the top of search results). It’s Google’s way of expressing its ability to profit on a changing marketplace while retaining its business, even as its consumers steadily transition to ask-and-answer AI and away from search.

google

Google has long used a single catchphrase to defend itself against opponents who claim it is a monopoly abusing its power: competition is only a click away. Until recently, that seemed comically obtuse. Really? We are going to switch to Bing? Or Duck Duck Go? Give me a break.

But today, it feels more like reality.

Google is in no danger of disappearing. However, every highly dominating company faces some type of reckoning over time. GE, a Dow mainstay for more than a century, was broken up last year and is now a shell of its previous dominance. Sears declared bankruptcy in 2022 and is virtually out of business. US Steel, long the foundation of American manufacturing, is attempting to sell itself to a Japanese corporation.

Could we remember Google in the same way that we remember Yahoo or Ask Jeeves in decades? These next few years could be significant.

SOURCE | CNN

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The Supreme Court Turns Down Biden’s Government Appeal in a Texas Emergency Abortion Matter.

(VOR News) – A ruling that prohibits emergency abortions that contravene the Supreme Court law in the state of Texas, which has one of the most stringent abortion restrictions in the country, has been upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States. The United States Supreme Court upheld this decision.

The justices did not provide any specifics regarding the underlying reasons for their decision to uphold an order from a lower court that declared hospitals cannot be legally obligated to administer abortions if doing so would violate the law in the state of Texas.

Institutions are not required to perform abortions, as stipulated in the decree. The common populace did not investigate any opposing viewpoints. The decision was made just weeks before a presidential election that brought abortion to the forefront of the political agenda.

This decision follows the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that ended abortion nationwide.

In response to a request from the administration of Vice President Joe Biden to overturn the lower court’s decision, the justices expressed their disapproval.

The government contends that hospitals are obligated to perform abortions in compliance with federal legislation when the health or life of an expectant patient is in an exceedingly precarious condition.

This is the case in regions where the procedure is prohibited. The difficulty hospitals in Texas and other states are experiencing in determining whether or not routine care could be in violation of stringent state laws that prohibit abortion has resulted in an increase in the number of complaints concerning pregnant women who are experiencing medical distress being turned away from emergency rooms.

The administration cited the Supreme Court’s ruling in a case that bore a striking resemblance to the one that was presented to it in Idaho at the beginning of the year. The justices took a limited decision in that case to allow the continuation of emergency abortions without interruption while a lawsuit was still being heard.

In contrast, Texas has been a vocal proponent of the injunction’s continued enforcement. Texas has argued that its circumstances are distinct from those of Idaho, as the state does have an exemption for situations that pose a significant hazard to the health of an expectant patient.

According to the state, the discrepancy is the result of this exemption. The state of Idaho had a provision that safeguarded a woman’s life when the issue was first broached; however, it did not include protection for her health.

Certified medical practitioners are not obligated to wait until a woman’s life is in imminent peril before they are legally permitted to perform an abortion, as determined by the state supreme court.

The state of Texas highlighted this to the Supreme Court.

Nevertheless, medical professionals have criticized the Texas statute as being perilously ambiguous, and a medical board has declined to provide a list of all the disorders that are eligible for an exception. Furthermore, the statute has been criticized for its hazardous ambiguity.

For an extended period, termination of pregnancies has been a standard procedure in medical treatment for individuals who have been experiencing significant issues. It is implemented in this manner to prevent catastrophic outcomes, such as sepsis, organ failure, and other severe scenarios.

Nevertheless, medical professionals and hospitals in Texas and other states with strict abortion laws have noted that it is uncertain whether or not these terminations could be in violation of abortion prohibitions that include the possibility of a prison sentence. This is the case in regions where abortion prohibitions are exceedingly restrictive.

Following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which resulted in restrictions on the rights of women to have abortions in several Republican-ruled states, the Texas case was revisited in 2022.

As per the orders that were disclosed by the administration of Vice President Joe Biden, hospitals are still required to provide abortions in cases that are classified as dire emergency.

As stipulated in a piece of health care legislation, the majority of hospitals are obligated to provide medical assistance to patients who are experiencing medical distress. This is in accordance with the law.

The state of Texas maintained that hospitals should not be obligated to provide abortions throughout the litigation, as doing so would violate the state’s constitutional prohibition on abortions. In its January judgment, the 5th United States Circuit Court of Appeals concurred with the state and acknowledged that the administration had exceeded its authority.

SOURCE: AP

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Supreme Court Rejects Appeal From ‘Pharma Bro’ Martin Shkreli, To repay $6.4 Million

Washington — The Supreme Court rejected Martin Shkreli’s appeal on Monday, after he was branded “Pharma Bro” for raising the price of a lifesaving prescription.

Martin appealed a decision to repay $64.6 million in profits he and his former company earned after monopolizing the pharmaceutical market and dramatically raising its price. His lawyers claimed the money went to his company rather than him personally.

The justices did not explain their reasoning, as is customary, and there were no notable dissents.

Prosecutors, conversely, claimed that the firm had promised to pay $40 million in a settlement and that because Martin orchestrated the plan, he should be held accountable for returning profits.

Supreme Court Rejects Appeal From ‘Pharma Bro’ Martin Shkreli

Martin was also forced to forfeit the Wu-Tang Clan’s unreleased album “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin,” which has been dubbed the world’s rarest musical album. The multiplatinum hip-hop group auctioned off a single copy of the record in 2015, stipulating that it not be used commercially.

Shkreli was convicted of lying to investors and defrauding them of millions of dollars in two unsuccessful hedge funds he managed. Shkreli was the CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals (later Vyera), which hiked the price of Daraprim from $13.50 to $750 per pill after acquiring exclusive rights to the decades-old medicine in 2015. It cures a rare parasite condition that affects pregnant women, cancer patients, and HIV patients.

shkreli

He defended the choice as an example of capitalism in action, claiming that insurance and other programs ensured that those in need of Daraprim would eventually receive it. However, the move prompted criticism, from the medical community to Congress.

Supreme Court Rejects Appeal From ‘Pharma Bro’ Martin Shkreli

Attorney Thomas Huff said the Supreme Court’s Monday ruling was upsetting, but the high court could still overturn a lower court judgment that allowed the $64 million penalty order even though Shkreli had not personally received the money.

“If and when the Supreme Court does so, Mr. Shkreli will have a strong argument for modifying the order accordingly,” he told reporters.

Shkreli was freed from prison in 2022 after serving most of his seven-year sentence.

SOURCE | AP