Amazing.....a rumor spread like wild fire this week creating huge demand and shortages in Northern Florida for gas.....giving retailers an opportunity to raise prices to almost $6 gallon.
The present Thailand political situation is nothing new and there have been 18 virtually bloodless coups since WW2 nothing really changes here. Thai democracy is in its infancy and when you consider democracy started in England in 1295 though King Edward I, it took the English 700 years to get it right!
The present squabble between different Thai parties and factions will be sorted soon with probably another coalition government with or without present prime minister Samak Sundaravej and the state of emergency in Bangkok lifted. In 3 months it will all be forgotten.This sums up Thai politics which is a bit like Italy which has had 60 governments since democracy started in 1946 and politically no one can ever agree on anything.
As expats living here, you will not find anyone who is really concerned with the present situation and it effecting their lives. When things get messy the King intervenes and normality returns until the next time.
The world is in a mess but Thailand is the second largest economy in SE Asia and 4th richest nation per capita in SE Asia and continues to prosper even with a shaky government. Capital controls have finally been lifted, exports are up 32% over 2007, GDP is expected to be in the range of 4-5% in 2008 although inflation was at 9% in July but should come down significantly with oil prices falling back to under $100 USD a barrel, so all said and done not too shabby!
Property is 40-50% cheaper than UK and Europe and cost of living is at least 33% less.
You have to live here to really begin to understand Thai democracy and the worlds media have alot to answer for in their reporting on Thailand. The Tsunami was a case in point. It was reported that Phuket was devastated showing reporters outside their Phuket 5 star hotels and the TV showing devastating Tsunami pictures of Acheh in Indonesia which gave the impression it was Phuket! We as a property broker did not lose ONE property (Phuket is a mountainous island and beach side property is all hotels/resorts). Only the west coast and in particular Patong,Kamala,Bangtao beaches were really affected with the main damage happening in Khao Lak on the mainland 1 hour north of Phuket.
The current reporting on the political situation in Bangkok is very much overplayed by the media and you would not know there was any problem if you go to Bangkok. As for other locations such as Pattaya, Hua Hin, Samui, Phuket life goes on and if you did not watch or listen to the news you would not know there was a problem.
So please take the media reports with a pinch of salt as they make their money from sensationalism!
from Andrew Tobias blog.............
Only Sarah Palin - who lobbied for the Bridge to Nowhere, and raised taxes in Wasilla, and left her tiny town, which had been debt-free, $22 million in hock, and says she got a D in macro-economics at the University of Idaho - only she has what it takes to cope with our country's enormous economic challenges and regain the respect of the world. She and her running mate, the hot-tempered "maverick," fifth from the bottom of his class of 899, whose campaign is run by lobbyists and who voted 95% of the time with George W. Bush.
To augment her prayer and facilitate the pipeline, Governor Palin has sued to strip the polar bear of its Threatened Species status (tell thatto your 10-year-old and ask her how she wants you to vote in November), ignoring the scientists (here we go again) - or worse. "Essentially, she lied," said
Both she and Senator McCain are fine Americans and remarkable people. But they are running this campaign out of the same mocking, dishonest Republican playbook (Obama is ready to lower almost everyone's taxes, not raise them), in the urgent Republican hope of getting four more years.
For months, the United Way of Central Carolinas board said Gloria Pace King was worth every penny of her controversial $1.2 million pay package.
Tuesday, 37 of those board members unanimously called on their longtime CEO to resign or be fired.
King's fall was breathtakingly quick, but not clean.
Critical questions remain. How the board handles them will affect 91 nonprofit agencies and the thousands in need that they serve.
Can the board regain enough public trust to rescue its ongoing fundraising campaign?
How will it settle accounts with King, even as it pays her interim replacement $20,000 a month?
And the most fundamental question of all: How did a group that includes some of the region's savviest corporate leaders allow all of this to happen?
At its hastily called Tuesday press conference, the board offered no specific explanation about what had gone wrong and why King has been asked to leave.
“This was not an error made by a single individual at a single point in time, but a collective breakdown at many levels over a period of time,” board chairman Graham Denton said.
“We owe the community a sincere apology.”
M ost places, when the president of a wildly prosperous medical clinic comes under investigation for defrauding Medicare, we first hear about him in the dry text of a federal indictment.
Justo Padron didn't reside in one of those places.
Padron was a quintessential South Florida character. His downfall might have been plagiarized from the books of Carl Hiaasen or Dave Barry, who've often complained that real life here keeps stealing their plotlines.
His clinic in Hialeah had racked up 12,290 Medicare claims -- worth $7.4 million -- for HIV treatment. Except this particular HIV treatment (intravenous infusion) was all but obsolete. It was obsolete everywhere, it seems, but South Florida.
Justo Padron's résumé probably didn't allay suspicions that his operation reeked of fraud. At 36, he was already classified as a habitual criminal whose rap sheet included more than a dozen arrests for robbery, assault, trespassing and cocaine possession.
In 2002, the future president of Tamiami Medical Center finished up a six-year prison stint for burglary.
When investigators talked to Padron, he seemed to be having trouble accounting for $355,000 in the clinic's bank account.
THE GATOR WINS
The FBI was closing in. Not fast enough. This is South Florida, where reality likes to dress up as outlandish fiction.
On Nov. 8, security guards surprised the medical executive outside the Miccosukee casino attempting to steal a car. Padron fled into the darkness (no doubt reasoning that attempted grand larceny can't be good for business). He hurried out of the casino parking lot and leaped into a nearby lake.
Most places, jumping into a lake would seem a fine strategy for eluding authorities. South Florida is not one of those places.
He was mauled to death by a nine-foot alligator. So much for Padron.
The ex-con's $7.4 million clinic scam was among the astounding examples of local Medicare fraud schemes exposed by The Miami Herald's Jay Weaver.
Jay found that that bogus HIV treatment clinics in Miami-Dade County were paying kickbacks to low-life scoundrels and crackheads to pose as patients. In 2005 alone, our fake clinics hit up Medicare for $2.2 billion.
AND MORE SCAMS
HIV infusion fraud was just one of the rip-offs. Half of Miami-Dade's supposed medical equipment supply houses appear to be no more than mail drops for yet another variation of the Medicare hustle.
Not only is South Florida roiling with a wildly disproportionate number of Medicare scamsters, Weaver found that when federal investigators get close, local actors often skip the country.
Some 56 suspects in South Florida fraud schemes are on the lam. Weaver reported that $142 million in filched Medicare money disappeared along with them.
The FBI thinks many of the suspects, in a reversal of the usual migration pattern, are immigrants who fled back home to Cuba.
The numbers Weaver added up in local Medicare schemes were so large, so many billions, that they challenged the imagination.
But one of those numbers took a permanent grip on my imagination: Nine. As in the nine-foot alligator that, when it came to catching a South Florida Medicare cheat, was way ahead of the FBI
The U.S. must become energy independent ASAP....We need leadership to get us there!!!
