Thais have had it up to here with Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and 100,000 people are now in the streets demanding his resignation.

The billionaire-army cop-turned prime minister has used his office to pocket billions for himself in yet another ‘Corporate State’ business deal while the rest of Thailand languishes in the aftermath of the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 that continues to depress wages – despite some economic growth.

Thaksin isn’t the worst leader I’ve ever seen, but he has intolerable autocratic tendencies in a country whose very name means ‘freedom’ and a truly atrocious record on freedom of the press, turning Southeast Asia’s freest press into one of Asia’s weakest, a real loss.

My source in Bangkok says that Thais are really mad about a business deal Thaksin arranged for himself that involved selling his telecom conglomerate for $2 billion in stock. The concession had been handed to him instead of others a few years ago and now he’s selling the thing – to foreigners no less since currency-devalued Thais can’t afford to buy it – and pocketing the cash. If he hadn’t got the concession by way of privilege and connections in the first place, it might not have been so bad. But he did. And now Thais are seeing a bad face of globalization, not an organic growth of capitalism, and they want Thaksin out.

Of course you’d be mad if you saw such things, especially in light of his treatment of freedom of the press!

The mood, my Bangkok friend says, is very ‘1992.’ That is to say, the potential for violence and riots is very high. Voice of America, in an excellent report with lots of photos, says that thousands and thousands of Thais have come out to the streets, and more tellingly, Thaksin has urged them not to come out for the protesting, implying it was something only riffraff would do, people who’d been burned by Thaksin’s tough anti-drug and anti-mafia policies, and something that no proper Thai should want to associate with. The protests are being organized by a Shinawatra rival named Sondhi whom he’s no longer on speaking terms with. According to the China Post, Shinawatra said:

“Stay home. Don’t go out and join him. Don’t listen to that big liar,” he said, referring to Sondhi. “Just let the lunatic howl by himself.”

Yeah, sure.

Bangkok Post reports that so far, it’s gone peacefully. That report, however, is only available on Google’s index. It has since been erased from the Web site of the Bangkok-based paper. As far as I can tell, it was there and is now gone (when you click the link from Google citing Radio Thailand, all you get is an old ferry story) so I do not know what is going on and suspect the worst, given Thaksin’s taste for censorship and some Asian and U.S. editors’ cowardice and inclination for self-censorship in the face of Asian autocrats.

Global Voices has found an even more significant example – a Thai blog called CorruptionWatch.net has had its Thai service contract yanked due to political pressure, and has been forced – in the last few days – to take its server hosting abroad. This site hasn’t been updated in a few days so I wonder if they are encountering yet more trouble – or a high-traffic server breakdown? Could be either.

The Nation, which has been target of some of Shinawatra’s worst excesses, has a strong and intrepid report, saying 100,000 people have come out for this march. Their well-done story is here.

Stay tuned for further updates.