absolutelyBangkok archive · Business & Economics
Originally published Feb. 23, 2011
Fascinating stuff, all the conspiracy theories out there. But you won’t find much material on this one; one you could call something like “The Great Thaksin Thai Sellout Conspiracy,” as outlined by Bangkok-based analyst Anthony Cartalucci who has a soft spot for Thailand’s hardly understood, color-coded liberation struggle.
Tony, who has something to say about every conflict in this world, recently published a 2004 piece on his blog:
Thailand’s Thaksin and the U.S.-FTA. Says Tony: “It should be of no surprise that the very corporations pushing this FTA (…) are now behind Thaksin Shinawatra’s efforts to overthrow the current Thai government.”
In the second part of Tony’s blog post you can read an analysis of the implications such a deal would have had if Thaksin succeeded in passing it. Now the hardly understood part is the one when Tony refers to the very corporations pushing for this FTA. In an email he says it took him “years to figure all of this out”:
Tony suggests to go to the Council on Foreign Relation’s (CFR)
corporate membership list
– the prime suspects behind every U.S.-FTA deal. And they sit on the CFR specifically because the organization, and those like the Chatham House, collectively represent these corporations and their interests.
Thaksin’s lawyer Robert Amsterdam isn’t just any lawyer, Tony goes on: “He is co-founder of Amsterdam & Peroff, a major corporate member of the globalist nexus Chatham House, an organization that represents the collective interests of the largest corporations and banks on earth.”
Or someone like Robert Zoellick, he implies, who attempted to negotiate an FTA with Thaksin in 2004, he works for the corporations, not the U.S. government — the government is the corporations. Anyone can google “revolving door” if one is not already familiar with this concept. “Revolving door Monsanto” is probably the most obscene example.
So someone like Robert Amsterdam (Chatham House), James Baker (of Bush/Carlyle fame), Kenneth Adelman (Edelman PR) or Robert Blackwill of Harvard’s Belfer Center, who have all defended Thaksin since 2006 as lobbyists, lawyers and PR representatives, all do so on behalf of these collective organizations like the CFR, Chatham, International Crisis Group, etc., on behalf of their corporate members.
So, concludes Tony, it’s not the corporations individually or directly. They have their collective interests represented via these groups.
Leaving us with the question, did Thaksin himself get cold feet? Did his enthusiasm to sell out his country to these foreigners wane?
Was he actually more nationalist than his pseudo-royalist arch nemesis is today?
Outdated conspiracy?
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