Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing, well we are discussing the issue of OECD as it pertains to banking; I've discussed this at length in other videos. Unfortunately, the last Government started all this in motion and was bringing in the World Economic Forum to meet with the then Prime Minister in the Purple Room back in, I think it was like about a year ago now, and we have been seeing a lot of moves toward this stuff - OECD stands for Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. I don't know what development they seem to be trying to facilitate other than increasingly totalitarian protocols and integration associated with banking, so that all of our financial transactions and financial privacy can be destroyed, so they can create this supranational tax scheme whereby they can do all sorts of offsets with people, create a Global Minimum Tax as Janet Yellen was trying to push for. I did the videos about how there is undue foreign influence into Thailand and it has serious implications for Thai sovereignty that have arisen ever since all of this OECD stuff has been pushed. I've discussed in other videos, Trump, and look I disagree with Trump on many, many things and I disagree with him on more things as time has rolled by, but he got it dead right his first day coming back into Office when he promulgated an Executive Order regarding the OECD. It said look, “we are not going to do this anymore. It creates extra-territorial jurisdiction in our country; it's a threat to our national sovereignty; we're just not going to go along with it”. I don't understand why Thai Policy makers want to continue with this, and I am becoming increasingly concerned because it's one of these situations where it seems like this OECD stuff or when we hear about it, people are speaking out of two sides of their mouth. Let's jump into this real quick. 

I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Nation, that's nationthailand.com, the article is titled: Rule of law seen as key to Thailand's OECD competitiveness push. First of all, I don't want to be competitive for OECD. I don't want to compete for the favours of outside foreign undue influence on this country; there's no point to that. Thailand doesn't need to compete for anything. Thailand is fine the way she is, and she would be best off if all of this foreign undue influence left her alone. That said, quoting directly from this: "At the Thailand Rule of Law Leadership Forum 2026: Competitiveness and OECD Readiness" Well yes, the name is in the title. It's a Forum on rule of law, whatever that means, and as we will get to this, that phrase is used a lot and whenever I hear that phrase as a buzzword, I just start either feeling very negative about whoever is saying it or I really scrutinize whatever it is they are saying, because it's one of those buzz words that tends to belie even more nefarious policy ideas or whatever. That said, quoting directly: "A major Forum on Thailand's future direction" - says who? Why is this OECD forum a major forum on Thailand's future direction? Why aren't rank and file Thais having forums on Thailand's future direction? Why are a bunch of foreign bankers having forums on our future direction here in Thailand? Quoting further: "Two key representatives from the public and private sector shared the stage to outline a common direction." Now that's interesting because again the World Economic Forum, their whole raison d'être is furtherance of public-private interaction which as I have discussed in other videos, the definition of fascism is the marriage of state and corporate power; that's what Mussolini said. So to have this sort of rolling out and again I understand Thailand has public-private cooperatives all the time; Thailand comes from a different tradition. The things that organically occur here in Thailand are what they are. Quite frankly most of them work pretty well. I'm talking about undue foreign influence in the context of public-private interaction. That said, quoting further: "shared the stage to outline a common direction" - a common direction for who? for us Thais? If so, how about we just vote on things? Or how about our Parliament promulgates laws rather than this colour of law nonsense where we are getting into the OECD and they are bringing all this online, but they have never actually passed a law that says we are part of the OECD, just we are preparing for it in this nebulous way. You talk about rule of law and then when rule of law gets applied and people start saying "hey, you're not following the law",  oh but… there's just a bunch of non-answers and grunts and clicks that seem to emanate from these folks when you actually press them on "well if we are talking about rule of law. This is the law; this is the way that things work here." 

That said, quoting further: Representatives from the NESDC (Office of the National Economic and Social Development Council) and the Thai Bankers Association" - so yeah, that is real indicative of what us rank-and-file common Thais have to say on these things, isn't it? - "identified problems and laid out a roadmap" - I wonder what those problems could possibly be. Could it be all of us folks having too much financial privacy and being able to do business on our own without a bunch of government oversight, overreach, constant nanny-minding, constant telling us that we owe tax and nitpicking us all to death. - quoting further: "laid out a road map for OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) membership by 2028" - so we are not even in this thing and we are already seeing all this digital crap has rolled out in the past year where people have to jump through all these hoops, to access their own money, and yeah, yeah I know that people in the comments will say, "well when you deposit money into a bank you become a creditor; it ceases to be your money." Yeah, I understand the difference between a bailment and a deposit in a banking fiduciary context. That being said, these Banks provide a functional service that is a place for us to deposit our capital and then they are supposed to loan it out for profitable results and feed us back some interest on our capital for reposting it with them. Now everything is changing. Now the bankers are supposed to run our lives for some reason. Well I didn't sign on for that. I don't want my life run by bunch of bankers who tell us, “We all are going to own nothing and be happy".  Quoting further: "presenting a picture of structural weaknesses in the Thai economy while agreeing that the "rule of law" is an indispensable foundation if it is to compete sustainably on the global stage." Let's break that down. 

First of all, "structural weaknesses". As we will get to here in a moment, the big structural weakness is Thailand's "informal economy." Oh, it's black, it's gray. It's not quite everything we want. Yeah, yeah. You don't get to track and trace everybody in Thailand. People do business still out on the street; people buy food off the street; they live and work in a cash, real economy, not some fake financialized "rent everything forever; you'll own nothing and you'll be happy economy"-  hyper-financialized, everything is based on debt, nobody owns anything, and it's all just a bunch of ethereal or etheric notions of usage rather than actual ownership. Yeah, no thanks. Again that's not a structural weakness by the way, it's Thailand's informal economy that saved her in the aftermath of the '97 financial crisis. And if you read about any of that stuff, you will understand it. That said, quoting further: "While agreeing that the rule of law is an indispensable foundation, if Thailand is to compete," - okay, so first of all rule of law. I'm going to get to that here in a minute; I'll dive into that further. That said, "to compete sustainably on the global stage." What the hell does that mean? Does that just mean ‘Thailand needs to compete on the terms Western powers and former colonial or possibly even still putatively trying to be colonial powers tell us how Thailand should compete?’ Is "competing sustainably" another way of saying Thailand needs to hobble herself a la Harrison Bergeron. I may try to find a clip of Harrison Bergeron. There's a great version of that with Sean Astin where there's a scene - it's set in a dystopian, now it's actually set the past I think, but it's set in this dystopian future where it's in America where all men are created equal but they basically amended the Constitution to say, "and where they are not equal, it is the Government's job to make them equal".  And so people have to like hobble themselves if they play sports because everybody has to be equal; they all have to do things the same way. That's what “competing sustainably” sounds like to me. Thailand having to hobble herself for Western actors in order to be considered to be "operating sustainably", "competing sustainably" in the global market. It looks to me like Thailand is competing just fine. If anything, I remember when Rex Tillerson came over here - it was one of the few times,  just made my blood boil when a Secretary of State said much of anything, came out here and browbeat Thailand when he was Secretary of State under Trump's first Administration, basically about how it was producing too much, and the United States was standing with a trade deficit to Thailand, how terrible that was. Well the US imposed all of this on the rest of the world in the late Bretton Woods system, the post gold closure, Nixon gold closure Brenton Woods system, where they offshored all their heavy industry. You watch a movie by Michael Moore called Roger and Me that talks a fair bit about this. How Detroit, the auto system, started there, started offshoring everything offshore, basically the "Free World" led by the United States imposed all of this industrialization and manufacturing on countries like Thailand, not to mention China, Vietnam, other places, and basically said, "yeah, yeah, you need to make stuff like this and then send it back to us, and we'll send you paper." That was the privilege, what was it de Gaulle called it? The exorbitant privilege of the American position where they can send just paper in exchange for goods and services. Well Thailand obliged that. Then Rex Tillerson came along back, I think it was like '17 or '18 - and did this speech here where he was brow beating the Thais about basically how productive they were. So "competing sustainably" just means whatever these supranationalist folks say it means at any given moment. And as we will get to here in a minute, the rules based order or the rule of the law basically operates the same way. That said, quoting further: "Payong Srivanich, Chairman of the Thai Bankers' Association represented the business and financial sectors in presenting his vision," Well does it really represent the entire business sector? As a person that is in the business sector myself, I don't want all of this. I don't want all of this OECD; I don't want all of this tracking and tracing and digitally offsetting things with "oh, because I received something in some other country, now I have to pay taxes over there, even though I live here." I don't want to deal with all of that. I'm pretty sure most of the rest of the business sector couldn't agree more. That said, quoting further: "Pointing to the urgent need to improve the country's "software". There isn't any urgent need to improve anything having to do with Thailand's “software”. I moved to this country because of the more "primitive" version of this software. I like this place. It works. These people create value for money, and they create an economy that moves things around. Everything I have seen since OECD has come in, has been designed seemingly to trash that. Destroy velocity of money; destroy liquidity; destroy privacy of transactions and thereby diminishing demand for economic activity. This stuff is crushing demand for economic activity in this country; it's crippling us. That said, actually let me go back and re-quote this: "pointing to the urgent need to improve the country's "software" or the "rule of law" - so the rule of law is the software - "to build investor confidence" - investor confidence? You mean foreigners' confidence in how Thailand does things? I don't care about that. Thailand needs to do what's right for Thailand, not foreign investors. Not compete sustainably based on what some neo-colonialists say Thailand needs to do, period, end of discussion. And by the way, there's nothing wrong with Thailand's rule of law, and by the way, anybody that has ever been here who sees all the madness that is breaking out on streets throughout the West, we're now seeing all of that being imported by foreign, primarily westerners, but by foreigners coming to Thailand now and just acting completely beyond the bounds of decency here. And these people have the temerity to lecture Thailand on the rule of law? 

So let's get into this sort of Rule of Law stuff. I'm going to go over here, throw this up on screen, this is actually from Twitter, it's from comra on X, Twitter X @comrawire on X. This is Mark Carney. This is the current Prime Minister of Canada doing a speech at the World Economic Forum. I'm going to go ahead and quote the post: "The illusion of an international "rules-based order" was an open lie." Now first of all, Carney himself, and I urge those who are watching this video, go check out that link, I'll put it in the description below. Go check out that link and if you go listen to it, he actually says the rules based order was partially true, and he says basically it allowed for the strongest to sort of exempt themselves from whatever “rules” they would come up with. A perfect example of this by the way is Thailand's situation in 1997. In 1997, Thailand had problems. In comes the IMF. They tell him to do austerity. As I pointed out in another video, there was a person who actually studied this - it was on Tucker Carlson - that brought up the fact - I may put the link up again in the description if I can find it - that brought up the fact that basically all that happened was a bunch of international bankers came in here, kicked Thailand's legs out from underneath her, and then said, "well in order to help you out, you need to sell us your assets and pennies on the dollar." Now the Thais to their credit, did everything they could to not have to do that. They basically managed to right the ship but long story short, in '97, they said “oh, you need to do austerity, you need to do all these things”, which then when 2006, ‘7 and ‘8 came around, the United States did none of that. What did the USA do? Quantitative easing. They printed money, period. And everybody knows that doesn't work very well for very long. That said, we managed to kick the can on down the road. But when the Thais were told, "hey you need to do something to fix your economy", they were told "oh, you can't print money; you can't have fiscally irresponsible policies, financially irresponsible policies". So Thailand was put through the wringer. But meanwhile, when this stuff happens to the West, they just print money, so let's remember when they talk about "rule of law" and the "rules-based order" - well "Rules for me" but not for thee." "Laws for me, but not for thee." Let's keep that in mind. That said, quoting further:  "The West collectively agreed on, said Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney at the WEF in Davos. "This fiction was useful," said Carney, because the West was benefiting from the US hegemony." Yeah, and I get that sea lanes things of that nature, there was a system, it was working. It's changing. That said, this whole rule, every time I hear rule, rule of law, rules-based order, yeah it's rule of law and rule-based order as a smoke screen for other endeavours and also when the rubber meets the road, those who claim to be in favour of the rules based order, don't follow their own rules, vis a vis the other actors in the world. Again, as Carney points out, the trade rules, they were enforced asymmetrically, again and we saw Financial basically protocols were completely applied asymmetrically when you compare '97 to 2007-2008, and how the West responded to their own financial difficulties versus how Thailand did. Mr. Carney actually points out in that that it's a rupture that's occurring, not a transition, and I think that's important to note because we are going through this rupture right now. And Thailand is having to reorient herself and frankly I am hopeful that she sees where her national interest lies. I hope folks in a policy making position here in Thailand see where her national interest lies and they see it does not lie with the OECD. And he also pointed out the risk of extreme global integration. I urge folks who are watching this to check out that clip as I go further here, because again, even within the dynamic of this article, they say rule of law, but that's not really what they're talking about. 

Quoting further: again Nation, nationthailamd.com. Structural problems laid bare: The informal economy and inequality. "Payong cited data reflecting the fragility of Thailand's economic structure." What fragility? I'm sick of hearing this nonsense. We heard all of this - what can only be described as propaganda - this last summer when Phumtham Wechayachai was trying to claim that he had the ability to dissolve the House and at the same time Fitch was saying that Thailand's banking structure might have structural issues, or there were some problems and then the last paragraph in the article - I did multiple videos on this - actually said well they did stress tests on all the banks and the banks are actually fine." In fact I would trust Banks over virtually banks anywhere else. They have inoculated themselves against many, many problems since 1997. 

But the point I'm trying to make is, saying there is a “fragility” in the Thai economy. Any fragility currently in the Thai economy can be laid squarely at the feet of the fact that the Straits of Hormuz closed down and Thailand can't get the levels of energy that she was once used to obtaining, and that's a result of who? How did that start? Not wanting to get into that too much but if anybody is talking about - again it's always back to Thailand. Oh the fragility of the Thai Economy, the Thais need to be doing something different. No they don't. The Thais create value. That's what they do. They create goods and services, and they maintain a pretty tight fiscal ship and a pretty tight monetary ship in order that they don't have to repeat what they went through in the late '90s, early 2000s, That said, quoting further, so I'm going to requote this: "Payong cited data reflecting the fragility of Thailand's economic structure, saying the country is currently driven by an informal economy amounting to 48% of GDP, according to World Bank reporting." That is the fragility. That's the lack of "rule of law" that they want so badly. They're attacking us Thailand. 

I know that these videos don't exactly get out into the Thai Zeitgeist the way that perhaps a Thai language video would. People have actually asked me, they have said "you have some level of fluency in Thai." Yeah, not to the articulation levels that I can articulate myself in English. So eventually we get this stuff translated into Thai. By the way to our translator, if you can go ahead and prioritize this one as a Thai translation; that would be appreciated, and get that up on our channel, actually on our website in the resources section of legal.co.th, which is our website where we do that stuff. 

But that said, I think it is very interesting, this fragility and lack of rule of law all revolves around Thailand's informal economy. Quoting further: "This has led to informal workers accounting for as much as 55% of the labour force. The problem is also linked to a distorted tax base." Here we go, here we go. They are pushing this Negative Income Tax so that they can convince everybody that, "oh we're going to give you all these goodies, but everybody now because mandatory to file for taxes." I don't need it, I don't want it. The Thais don't need it. I do get there are Thais out there that may be struggling, but this is not good; this is not the cure. This is not the way to move forward. Going into some digital banking setup where all of our taxes are tracked and traced and the "informal" economy is now "formalized" - I'm not interested. Thais are free people. If they want to make their living on this land in their own way, that's their God-given right. It's not for OECD to run around and say that that's some lack of rule of law or that they are not competing sustainably. And I find it fascinating that the members of the WEF circle themselves, i.e. Carney goes out of their way to point out the fact that in fact all of this nonsense about the rule of law and about the rules-based-order was just a smoke screen for a bunch of racketeering activities basically anyway. Quoting further: "The problem is also linked to a distorted tax base, with only 11.2 million people among Thailand's total population filing tax returns, and only 4 million of them actually paying tax." Do you see it now folks? Do you see what all this means? Rule of law, rule-based order, competing sustainably, we just want to track and tax you; that's it. And that's what they're looking to bring to Thailand. It's got nothing to do with Thailand's lack of a rule of law. Anybody that has ever been here, women alone can walk the streets of Bangkok at midnight, nobody's going to bother them. The rule of law has no problem here in Thailand. The issue is a bunch of foreigners want to come in here and raid this place like they basically got away with in '97 and they are trying to do it again, only they are doing it soft now; it's a soft soap. They do it slowly and they say, "oh, you need to improve yourself; there's something wrong with you." There's nothing wrong with Thailand. Thailand's banking system is fine; its tax system has been fine up until they tried to pull all of this stuff. We need to go back to what we were dealing with prior to December 1, 2023. We need to sluff off all of this foreign undue influence and Thailand needs to pursue her national interest, lest we find ourselves in the terribly unenvious position of being one of these Western countries in their economic position right now.

Thailand, we need forge our own path here. Following these foreigners at this point is good for no one in this country.