Published on January 31, 2005
Tardy response by the fire department demonstrates a lack of regard for safety
I am not surprised that the fire department took such a long time to respond to the emergency practice drill in the subway. Nor was I amused by the department’s slow response.
Are we to assume that the people manning the ticket booths will now be responsible for dealing with fires because the fire department can’t get there in a timely fashion? And while we’re on the issue of safety, isn’t it time that Thailand address two obvious traffic problems that it has been ignoring for so many years? One, drivers need to get in lanes and stop making new lanes or using emergency/service lanes on the side of the road. Why are four-lane roads allowed to turn into six-lane roads? Second, why don’t the drivers in Thailand have any respect for the siren or flashing red light atop a fire truck or an ambulance? It should be the law to get out of these vehicles’ paths when they are the process of responding to an emergency. It makes me want to explode in anger when I see an ambulance with its red light blinking, siren wailing, sitting in a traffic jam, possibly with a heart-attack victim in back, and nobody is making any effort to get out of the way. Ridiculous! The only time I see people move is out of fear when a policeman tells them on his loudspeaker to get out of the way because he is escorting some fat cat to the golf course. (Well, that is where some of them are heading!) The solution would be to issue tickets and fines for lane violations and for ignoring emergency-service vehicles. However, it is important that part of this solution is to make the fine difficult to ignore, like Bt2,000 for a violation, because it is causing a possible threat to the public good. (Hey, a few years ago that was the fine for littering in Bangkok; surely it is not too much for somebody to pay for blocking an ambulance.) Start making traffic violators pay, and a fairly large percentage of the traffic problems will go away. Give ambulance-drivers and fire-truck drivers the right to issue tickets to violators. This will give them something to do since they can’t move forward in the traffic anyway. A guy in a simple mood Bangkok -------------------- A graphic of the bird-flu report would be useful An article like your “Bird-Flu Watch: High-risk areas marked” [News, January 29] report would have been much more useful if it included a simple list of the districts in question and an outline map showing the towns/areas sited in the Livestock Development Department report. Charles Marden Fitch New York -------------------- More competition needed in the energy sector Thailand has been pursuing the free-market ideology since the early 1990s, when the global market headed in that direction, and today it has achieved a certain degree of success because of it. However, despite the country’s vigorous performance, there are still many segments to be addressed. In the transitional phase, there were certainly some loopholes in certain industries that were out of the public eye and which presided over large cash flows. These were dominated by large shareholders who pushed for the expansion of their corporate managing power. For example, look at the recent developments at PTT, where the management seems to have confused the functions of a semi-state agency and a semi-private one. A semi-state agency has its own special obligations and functions, just like a semi-private agency does. Having private shareholders does not mean that the company can be manipulated according to the whims of the larger shareholders. As a semi-state firm, PTT’s activities were limited to searching for oil and gas, transmission and trade. As a publicly listed company, PTT is obliged to become a profitable oil and gas trading business and to respond to the expectations of public equity-holders. PTT must operate two auditing systems, ie state auditing and public auditing. The company’s foray into the petrochemical sector represents an entirely new direction from its past operations as well as from the direction it was supposed to have gone in the future. If PTT tries to adopt some Western trading system such as the Chevron or Dow or Shell style, Thailand must set up one or two more PTTs, like PTT B and PTT C, so that these PTTs can compete among themselves. PTT enjoys a monopoly right to supply fuel oils and gas to Egat and is now trying to move into new areas as an exclusive oil-supplier. This is not a fair thing to do for a company with a natural monopoly. If PTT is allowed to pursue the downstream hydrocarbon business, in the first stage it should independently privatise its oil- and gas-pipeline systems. In other words, these exclusive transmission facilities must be split from PTT to become new entities, or perhaps a separate National Oil and Gas Transmission Corporation. PTT’s state equity would then have to be transferred to this new corporate entity. If Thailand had such an independent transmission-service company, Egat or any other electricity-generating firms would have the freedom to seek energy sources, build terminals and use them by themselves. The fuel-transmission utilities, including Egat’s power-transmission grid, can be operated as 100-per-cent state enterprises for a set period in order to encourage more downstream investors to become energy-suppliers and generators. The national energy-hub project (the southern land-bridge project and the Siracha regional energy-trading hub) must be split into such state-run transmission corporations. If this does not happen, the privatisation of PTT and the ongoing privatisation of Egat will fail. Somchai Liu-na-Han Bangkok -------------------- None of the competing parties is very appealing The people of Thailand should protest to the Election Commission that this time around nobody is really suitable to run the government! We have to face the truth that this country is in a crisis and any plans to solve the nation’s “poverty” are utter lies. Having lived in Australia, I have seen the Labor government, namely under Bob Hawke’s cabinet, which stated in the 1980s that by 1990 there would not be any poverty in Australia. And yet poverty still exists Down Under. Poverty and exploitation are here to stay on this planet as long as mankind is greedy. The policies of the Thai Rak Thai and the Democrats are equally bad, particularly their promises to eradicate poverty and raise education standards. Haven’t we been fooled enough by the government’s materialistic and debt-creating policies? It is time to have the clear wisdom that all politicians have tangled-up business interests that keep them alive. Mr Oldman Bangkok -------------------- There are ways to resolve conflicts of interest A law to resolve the numerous problems associated with the business interests of politicians is long overdue, and there are precedents to look to. In the United States, I understand that all aspiring politicians and their families must transfer all of their business assets to “blind trusts” which oversee these assets (and investments) without the politician knowing where his stocks, bonds etc are invested. If Thailand’s system of economic checks and balances are not mature enough, then the extreme alternative would be the one taken by India (at least as I understand it) that requires aspiring politicians (or maybe it’s elected ones: I’m not sure) to sell their business interests in the open market! Without solutions like these, I wouldn’t trust any “CEO” as prime minister. Solutions for Mr Thaksin Bangkok -------------------- The progressives should start working together The Campaign for Popular Democracy and the Student Federation are on the right track in launching a Green Flag campaign to build an effective opposition. They should go further and begin to create the basis for a progressive people’s movement that could serve as the beginning of a Green Party Thailand, modelled on the Green Party in New Zealand (one of the most successful and progressive in the world) or the Greens in Australia. Pool resources now for an effective opposition in the upcoming Parliament and think beyond to plant the beginnings of something new after the election. Otherwise this upcoming poll will be a kind of non-election. Kedsirin Bangkok -------------------- Chuwit has a distinct and distasteful image problem The image of Khun Chuwit Kamolvisit wielding a sledgehammer on his election campaign posters was obviously intended as some grandstanding symbol against corruption. The significance of this image is perhaps somewhat different for those who made an honest investment in the hope of making an honest living in Sukhumvit Plaza. Khun Chuwit seems to have developed something of a taste for alienating those of us who happen not to be Thai, at least if the photograph appearing in the January 27 edition of The Nation is anything to go by. In the photograph you featured on page 3A, he is clearly giving a straight-arm, Nazi-style fascist salute from behind his billboard. It seems an odd coincidence on the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Germany’s concentration camps. I wonder if Khun Chuwit would care to step out in front of his billboard and explain exactly what he meant by this gesture. Failing that, would Bangkok’s English-language newspapers care to indulge in some genuine journalism and investigate what this man’s policies actually are, and, if he has none, the would they be willing to ridicule him accordingly? Yours in hope rather than expectation, John Anyan Bangkok
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