Everyone is looking towards a stage where a succession of monks, movement leaders and my former boss get up to give fiery impassioned speeches about how much Thaksin sucks. Everyone at the rallies (there is a HUGE one going on today, a march through the city) waves the Thai flag, the King's flag and these little orange flags calling for peaceful demonstrations. No one wants to start anything violent since that's all the excuse Thaksin needs to announce an emergency decree and trot out martial law and the army. I note that there was no such thing as an "emergency decree" until last summer when the Parliament voted in favor of such a decree in order to "deal" with the Islamic insurgency in the south. No one had a fit then but now people are realizing that if Thaksin can use it against people in the south, he can use it against people in the north, or people in Bangkok, or anyone who he doesn't like. Funny how those emergency decrees work. In the lower left you will see a "Stop FTA" sign ... the U.S. has been negotiating a free trade agreement with Thailand -- well actually with Thaksin and a handful of his cronies, since no one else in government or the country has been allowed to see a draft of what exactly is being negotiated. Someone in the US finally got hold of a draft and leaked it recently. From a health perspective, it would be disastrous for Thailand, yet again making HIV/AIDS drugs too expensive to treat its general population. People only stopped dying here from AIDS about four years ago when Thailand finally started manufacturing generic versions of "first line" HIV medication but after about five or six years people start to develop a resistance to those drugs, so they have to start depending on second line drugs. Those second line drugs are, however, still relatively new and so under patent by the US and European pharmaceutical companies that produce them and guess what -- they ain't giving anything away for free. The US FTA, among other things, seeks to actually extend patent times from 20 to 25 years. So Thailand would have to wait another 15 years or so to start producing generic versions of second line drugs. By that time all the little HIV kids will start dying again. It's sick stuff, and it's real. The US has already negotiated such deals with Central American countries (CAFTA).