Transcript of the above video: 

I don't usually like to make particularly political videos although it has been kind of straying that way on this channel recently. That said, politics has a bearing on policy and as we have moved into this sort of new era with regard to Thai Government Policy and the Thai Government itself, yeah you're probably going to see me discuss it a little bit more. Let me get into what we're talking about here. I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Bangkok Post, bangkokpost.com, the article is titled: Critics warn Thaksin off politics. Now I'm going to quote an excerpt here, and seemingly at first glance it sounds like I am being semantic, I'm not. Give me a minute and I'll just sort of go through my analysis here. Quoting directly: "Jade Donavanik, a legal scholar and President of the College of Asian Scholars faculty of law, told the Bangkok Post that Thaksin's attempts to micro manage the Government will only backfire on the new Prime Minister and his daughter, Ms. Paetongtarn." So when I first read that, that was a really awkwardly sort of put together sentence. So when I first read it it's, “the new Prime Minister and his daughter”, I mean who are you talking about? That was kind of my question because he used to be a Prime Minister and we all know the story with that, and then now he is not, but now his daughter is; his sister was before. Great, more power to him; he's got a lot of family that likes being in public office, that's great. What's the point of this video? A couple of things.

One thing, we know that we have gone through something of a sea change. For those who are unaware, yes we do have a new Prime Minister here in Thailand. That said, the Cabinet has yet to be installed into their Offices, so we're still dealing with as of the time of this video what is called a “Caretaker Government” which is basically the people that were in office before the recent change, sort of are staying there as sort of placeholders; they don't have as much latitude with regards to making policy or setting new policy, but again caretaker is a pretty good name for what they are. They are there to just sort of act as a steward if you will for the Office until the next person comes in. I would almost liken it a little bit, although not quite analogous fully to the notion of sort of shadow MPs or Shadow Cabinet members in the British system. When they are out of power they are considered a Shadow, the Shadow Exchequer, whatever you want to call it. Well these guys are Caretakers. When one Government basically goes down for whatever reason, they sort of hold down the fort waiting for the next one. So we're still sitting here at the beginning of this week, at the time of this video waiting to see what the new Cabinet is going to look like, so that remains to be seen. 

That said, and I just got done doing a video contemporaneously with this one where we discuss the fact that Thailand is now, they are imposing Thailand Pass again for the ostensible reason being this Monkeypox, whatever you want to call it, issue. They're using all like "oh it's a concern", a disease of concern or whatever it is. My big thing is why doesn't Thailand just go back to making those decisions for itself? I don't understand why it needs to be opposed by the WHO upon Thailand. Let me be clear, it feels very Colonial to me; maybe the right word is Neo- Colonial but whatever. Then meanwhile the hackles on the back of my neck also go up because it kind of feels like kind of Comintern kind of stuff but okay, let's set that aside. 

My only point in making this video is can we just, with the advent of this new Government, stop the nonsense. I'm tired of the pageantry. These people that work for the people of Thailand, can you just get in there and start working instead of running around having this prom or whatever it is where we have got to see all running around like some kind of celebrities. You're not celebrities, you are public servants, do your job please. The economy has struggled mightily the past roughly 4 years now. Now there is talk that we are in some kind of new problem that requires all of this extra modern monetary theory type government spending but that also imposes totalitarian tokens on all of us where all of our financial transactions are going to be tracked and traced, again ostensibly for a financial or economic situation that really doesn't exist; we've done the videos already. Consumer spending was up nearly 7% in the first quarter of the year; GDP is not lagging the way that they say it is. Now meanwhile, yes the export sector is having some problems, well let's deal with the export sector.

The other problem is again this Thailand Pass can be a real issue going into the high season and hysteria and all of this quite honestly absurdist gameplay in the public sphere and I am not just blaming Thailand here because in the last rodeo of this, I felt like the Government here was acting in good faith. Now once bitten twice shy. This next time around, I don't think I'm going to feel so great about that if they use the exact same playbook as before; meanwhile for something that really didn't seem to warrant it. As we discussed in many other videos, at the end of the day, COVID which had a 99.8 survival rate, did that warrant the shutdown of the entire world economy? Basically the decimation of Thailand's tourism sector? And now we're talking about imposing the same type of restrictions upon something that looks to be a reaction to the initial hysteria to begin with. It's like a byproduct of that hysteria in a way, and now we're going to be imposing it on people trying to travel into Thailand. Is that a very good idea? Long story short, it's time for some serious people in the Thai government to act seriously and do what is in the best interest of this country.