Transcript of the above video: 

So we have this ongoing sort of political brouhaha going on here in Thailand and it is just getting hotter by the day, but I really am enjoying commenting on it. These things have policy outcomes and for that reason, I think it's good to keep expats and the English language community apprised of sort of these developments and what is going on. 

I initially thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Bangkok Post, but I first want to just comment real quick on why "Communist" is in quotes in the title. Coming from France 24, france24.com, we are talking about the acting Prime Minister here which I think it is important to note, there I think is a difference between "caretaker" and "acting". In the past, there was a caretaker government invoked in the aftermath of a PM being removed. Currently, the Prime Minister is suspended pending further adjudication whether or not she should be removed, so we have this "acting" Prime Minister who by the way has effectively disregarded statements by the Council of State regarding his own powers. I have serious issues about how he just seems to kind of disregard when institutions say, "hey you can't do that", and meanwhile he is not in the sort of protocol for who is supposed to be the Prime Minister. He's just in an acting capacity because we are in this limbo while the Prime Minister is currently suspended, so it's worth pointing that out. 

That said, the reason for the quotes is because let me just get into it. Quoting directly, and we are talking specifically about Phumtham Wechayachai, that's the acting Prime Minister. Quoting directly from a recent article in France 24, france24.com: 'Big Comrade': Former Defense Chief takes reins as PM. "He fled to the jungle where communist guerrillas were plotting uprisings against the nation's military, and recently he has been questioned over his associations." Quoting further, this is from wikipedia.org. "Phumtham was a member of the Communist Party of Thailand from 1977 to 1978." So I put that in quotes because I don't know, and on top of that, this Government since August of 2023, and understand prior to that for a decade we never saw the World Economic Forum set foot out here. The Prime Minister now suspended but at the time she wasn’t, hosted some envoy from the World Economic Forum at the Purple Room here and then the prior Prime Minister Srettha Taveesin, he went over to Davos, so we have all of this in my opinion, undue influence from the World Economic Forum since this current government coming in, especially since the "Core Coalition" Party of this government has come in and I question - I have talked about another videos - the World Economic Forum has basically it seems that their raison d'être is totalitarianism, be that of a rightist leaning or a leftist leaning, but they look more to me like the Comintern. You can get into the whole public-private partnerships for their own sake; I have discussed that in other videos. Yes I think they have a rightist kind of totalitarian bent as well, but to my mind they look way more like the Comintern and their methods are very similar to Bolshevism type Trotskyist type of methodology, where they just do things and they take control of things, and they disregard rules and institutions designed to be checks and balances to maintain the liberties of the people in the given jurisdictions in which they are in, and designed to maintain legal procedure and protocol within the jurisdictions they are in and I've discussed that in other videos. 

That said, I thought of making this video after reading this recent article from the Bangkok Post, bangkokpost.com: Key figures unfazed by axe threat: Quote: "Key Phue Thai key figures say they are unconcerned about the Election Commission possibly seeking the dissolution of the ruling party and six Coalition partners in the previous government over former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra allegedly having undue political influence over them." I have discussed that in another video. There was this whole “lobbyist” thing that has now come up, but now they are talking about a meeting that occurred some time ago. Quoting further: "The main allegation of undue political influence relates to Phue Thai and the other Srettha coalition parties," - so this is going back a year or more when the Srettha coalition was in play, - "most of which are also in the present coalition, meeting Thaksin at his Chan Song La Residence on the day Mr. Srettha was dismissed as Prime Minister by the Constitutional Court on August 14 last year. During that meeting, coalition members and Thaksin were said to have discussed possible replacements for Mr. Srettha. Thaksin also allegedly intervened," - I think that is an interesting word, - "intervened in the selection of a Prime Ministerial candidate after Mr. Srettha was removed from office." And it is important to point out that the implication thereof is he intervened in favour of his daughter, who became the Prime Minister and now is suspended from the Prime Ministership for getting on a phone call and making, I've made the videos already on it, we already know what we are talking about here, but if she didn't know what she was doing, if she didn't have the intentions to intentionally undermine Thailand, that tells me well probably she shouldn't be Prime Minister; in fact she shouldn’t be Prime Minister.  If she did, that's a whole other problem. But that said, there's the allegation that he intervened in that in order to make that happen. That said, quoting further, and this is the point I think we are making: "Deputy Prime Minister and Interior Minister Phumtham Wechayachai, currently serving as acting Prime Minister, said he was unaware of the meeting at the time as he was away on an official visit to Kazakhstan."

Now here's why I bring this up, and in the title: Curiously Convenient Absence. In a prior video we made, Jatuporn Prompan was talking about these coincidences and all of these different fact patterns that were sort of - like tumblers in a lock if you will - sort of falling together adding up to these outcomes that were not particularly in the nation's interest, and here we are in another situation where there's a possibility that all of the Coalition parties presumably, and maybe some not even currently in the Coalition, could be dissolved and we could be looking at a situation where we have an acting Prime Minister, who by the way is not currently on the list of the slated five individuals who were put forward to Parliament to be Prime Minister, but sitting as acting PM and in a situation where all of those parties could end up dissolved and then we are in a sort of limbo yet again and one in which we have someone who has prior Communist affiliations and is in a Party that has been dealing with an out outside organization, who in my opinion has been trying to exert undue influence on Thailand, and we would be sitting in a limbo situation, a very politically sort of unprecedented situation here in Thailand and left with the sort of shrugging, going “what are we going to do with that?” 

The only point of this video is I am tired of all the curious coincidences. Why don't we go back to the clear procedure set out in the Parliamentary rules and things, and get somebody in line who we know is the PM; they are somebody that's on the slate of the people that were put forward some two years ago and move forward from there.