Taking your More Thailand much cheaper as a starting point I would offer the following hypothesis:

With first the United States and now the European markets for Thai goods likely to remain depressed for a long time only China and Tourism remain as significant potential external sources of revenue for big Thai businesses. China is focusing on developing its domestic demand as much as possible but there are suspicions that the government led attempts to stimulate demand will implode in the not to distant future. Tourism in significant numbers from traditional sources seems unlikely too as the people stop spending and start saving. The largest groups of tourists I have seen recently have been from India or the Middle East …

The question seems to be who are these established businesses going to sell to next?

Thailand, like China, needs desperately to stimulate domestic consumption. I think this is where the Reds really come into their own. An interesting article published yesterday on New Mandala points out that many of their supporters are a long way from being poor. Realistically, the people who support the reds are looking for the very thing that might save Thailand’s export based economy from imploding. They want a bigger share of the cake. In the absence of external markets to sell into (and obviously a lot of attention is being focused on China now so we haven’t quite got there yet), the rural population of Thailand could be encouraged, with a suitable political will, to consume and there must be a lot of pent up demand out there …

It’s an anathema to the free marketeers who have traditionally controlled the exploitation based economy because the political consequences of economic empowerment are obvious. In the past when civil unrest has created crisis moments the business class has always come down firmly on the side of less social development as the exploitation economy had plenty of customers. Now those markets are disappearing and I suspect the smart money in Thailand knows that from the point of view of business, the outcome of this political conflict is more complicated that previous ones …

The pinnacle was the last twenty kilometers into Suvarnabhumi Airport transit terminal along the main expressways into the airport “region,” seeing army personel, troop carriers, iron-cross barriers and even a f’n tank blocking what was once four lane expressways made me wonder why anyone who saw this would ever travel to Thailand again.

The protests have been pretty much limited to a small part of Bangkok and a few regions in Isaan but the use of army personel to conduct vehicle searches, carrying AK47s and god knows what else, is just plane crazy and would certainly scare any tourist away.

Perfectly safe? Where? When? Not bloody possible. Singapore may be more to your liking … much closer to perfectly safe. Bore you to death though.