Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, and maybe the thumbnail suggests, this is going to be a video I'm probably going to be a little bit more passionate on than normal. So the thumbnail is actually based on a clip from the movie, Stripes: link in the description below where you can see the actual clip. I love that movie by the way. I am a big Bill Murray fan if you are unaware. I did a clip from the movie Wild Things where Bill Murray plays one of my favourite on-screen lawyers, Mr. Bowden, I think was his name, in the film Wild Things when I was talking about the neck brace that Thaksin was wearing. So whenever I get a chance to bring up a Bill Murray movie, I really kind of relish it and Stripes is such a great film. 

I was thinking about making this video, let me actually jump into the citation and then I will kind of get into everything around it here in a moment. But basically I thought of making this video because I read a recent editorial in the Bangkok Post, bangkokpost.com, the article is titled - I guess I should say it was sort of an opinion piece - Police Immigration Bureau faces new scrutiny. Again the thumbnail is from Stripes, and I thought about it after reading this excerpt: "The Police Immigration Bureau (IB) is fuming over a Reuters documentary-style interactive graphic report based on interviews with nine people who had allegedly been trafficked to scam centres in Myanmar between 2022 and 2025." I want to get back to Reuters here in a minute but let me keep going. Quoting further: "Moreover, instead of outright denials, leaders in the Government and the RTP should take criticism as a warning sign or view it as valuable information that can help address such matters and any suspected rot within its ranks." Well I already did a video on this. I read about it in the print edition to begin with and I quoted it, where some guy from Ethiopia said that he had been rounded up by Immigration and thrown over to some hotel personnel and then taken up to the border and put in a call centre scam. Look, I have dealt with Immigration. Our staff deals with Immigration all the time. I found the whole thing kind of hard to believe. I am not dismissing it out of hand and to be clear, I don't think that necessarily Immigration did either. As we discussed in the prior video talking about immigration abductions - I'll try to put the link in the description below - but it is on our channel, just go into the search function and search ‘abduction’ and it will probably be the first thing that comes up. And you will get this article. I cited the print edition of Bangkok Post. The head of, I believe he is a Police General, Rimpadee is his namsakul, his surname, and he is Head of Immigration Division 2. He immediately had them check the database. If anybody with a similar name, African descent came through, and nothing came up. The point I'm trying to make with this is not the substance of it, but it is this attitude. Again quoting again: "Instead of outright denials, leaders in the Government and RTP should take the criticism as a warning sign or view it as valuable information". And then again, this is the Press and the article is titled: Police Immigration Bureau faces new scrutiny. And the whole article is geared at, it is like shaming or brow beating or whatever, the Thai Police, "you need to be doing something about this because Reuters said so!". That's the kind of basically the message of the whole thing is, "oh the foreign press said so”, so like the thumbnail says, so Foreign Press says "jump" and Thai police need to say, “how high!" To my mind it sounds like they at least started looking into it. What are they supposed to do? Pull their hair out and wear sack cloth around because some Foreign Press outlet has said that there was some issue here? And meanwhile, and I urge those who are watching this video, read the article, it is titled: Police Immigration Bureau faces new scrutiny, Bangkok Post, bangkokpost.com. But I just kind of took issue with it just as a Thai insofar as when I read the news article the initial time, I mean they went in, they checked the Immigration database; there wasn't anybody like this. I don't know if you are aware but a lot of the folks that come over here, not all of them, but a lot of the folks come over here from Africa, they are not all exactly telling the truth all the time with regard to their intentions on being in Thailand, and they may not have actually told the truth regarding their backstory of what they have been doing in Thailand etc. I am not necessarily calling anybody out; I'm not casting a broad net, but facts are facts. Look, when I deal with US Immigration, there are certain people from certain places that have a tendency to make up stories about their backgrounds and things more than others. It's just a fact. I didn't really see where the Thai Police, RTP, Royal Thai Police or the Immigration Bureau specifically, fell particularly short here. And again, foreign press says jump, Thai Law enforcement is supposed to say "how high"? I mean what more are they really supposed to do? I mean are they supposed to set up a whole task force because Reuters published, as they referred to in the prior print news article, it was a cartoon or something and they are calling it now a documentary-style interactive graphic. So they put out one interactive graphic and now Thai Police are supposed to run around and make a big deal out of it? 

Meanwhile, let's look at the background of Reuters here for a minute, okay. I remember reading in the book The House of Rothschild about Reuters, and I think in that book it was described as like, if I recall, I looked it up - I am going to get to Google AI's response here in a moment - but I remember in that book, it was just off the top of my head, that Reuters was described as effectively an intelligence arm of the House of Rothschild back in the day. And I have recently done videos, I am not trying to engage in conspiracy theory, and I hate that term, thinking now is conspiracy theory. It was conspiracy theory to do your own research on COVID, and we all saw how that worked out. So the point I am trying to make is I have done recent videos most notably Fitch came out and started making, there was an article in the Bangkok Post where the headlines and the first paragraph was all about how, "oh, Thailand looks like it is in trouble with its Banking Sector" and then if you read the last paragraph, "well actually they have done stress tests and things and everything looks fine." I am starting to wonder if foreign interests and foreign Interest being in the financial and non-financial sector, are not targeting Thailand at this point. And by the way, let's get over to Reuters because I went over and I didn't want to say this out of school so I googled Reuters, and I will put this on screen; we did a screenshot of this. Reuters was the intelligence arm of Rothschild, and AI overview from Google says, "no Reuters was not the intelligence arm of the Rothschilds" - okay fair enough - "it was a news agency founded by Paul Julius Reuter that initially supplied financial and political news to the NM Rothschild & Sons Bank" okay. "among other clients." Okay. While Reuters and Rothschild & Co have shared history dating back to the mid-19th century, with Reuter even offering his new service to the bank, they are and always have been independent entities." Well I didn't ask if they were non-independent entities, I asked if they were the intelligence arm, and they are supplying news to them back in the day, NM Rothschild, so okay. News, intelligence, potato-potato, fair enough, fair enough. Let's just be clear what everybody is, where everybody is at: "with Reuters being a news provider and Rothschild & Co a Financial Services group." Okay. Notably off here to the side in sort of a related article, Edmond de Rothschild CEO says a merger with ... Reuters", who knows, okay, but they look like they are somewhat closely affiliated and if you go back and look at their history, the agency initially their client was NM Rothschild, okay and that is a foreign financial institution. I think to this day, if I'm not wrong. I think that is still around. 

The point I am trying to make, first of all I'm not anti-bank; let me be clear, I'm not anti-bank; I'm pro-Thailand. I like this place. In fact I love it. That's why I want to live here forever. Frankly I'm also an Attorney and Lawyers and Banks go together like chocolate and peanut butter; it's not a bad thing necessarily. Actually if you look at the history of the legal profession and banking, there's a lot of commonality. Same root word as Bank is Bench, as in where a Judge sits, or when like Appellate Courts will hear cases, "en banc".  There is a lot of commonality. Look, to quote the movie The Ninth Gate, the character Boris Balkan, "there's nothing more reliable than a man whose loyalty can be purchased with hard cash." I'm an Attorney. In many ways I'm very mercenary like: "mercenary" - there's another word root word, mercury. Mercury is sort of the God of Banking and all of that good stuff and commerce and all that. Hey, Rothschild, I got no beef with you guys. If you are looking for a good attorney out in Southeast Asia, I'm here okay. That said, I am not going to stop, I am not going to necessarily - I think there is a way that foreign financial interests can interact with Thailand where we all can benefit, and for example hey, maybe we don't lock down everybody's accounts over "mule account" activity and try to instigate all this totalitarian nonsense and really constrict the liquidity in the Banking and Business Sector here in Thailand and the velocity of money. Maybe we do things that are conducive to business out here and we can all make money. And like I said, if anybody from that sphere is looking for a good legal advisor out in this area, all the better. That's my only point. I'm not anti-anything. I just want to see Thailand prosper; I want to see everybody prosper. 

Meanwhile, I really don't like this trend that seems to be percolating up of the Foreign Press: we recently saw this Dark Side of Paradise, where they were referring to Khao San Road as a red-light district which please, come on. If that was really what they were doing and I am going off of Mr. Barry Kenyon down at Pattaya Mail's basically coverage of that, but if they were really calling Khao San Road a red-light district, I fail to see where you can even call that journalism. You are clearly not looking into the subject matter you claim to be covering well enough. That said, this whole notion coming from the Bangkok Post, that the police need to be like jumping up and running around because of the account of one person in an “interactive”, what do they call it, an “interactive graphic report”, I find that spurious; I find it, it is not reasonable under the circumstances. It sounded to me like the Head of Immigration Department 2 or Division 2, basically got on it, they did a background check; they couldn't find anybody. That sounded like a reasonable initial response. Now if there are further data points, there is further evidence that this may have actually occurred, okay, let's bring it up, let's go through it. 

But my point is, and I urge those watching this to read the article, I'm not necessarily saying the coverage here, the underlying subject matter is completely disingenuous. What I am saying is the notion that the police just need to jump up and run around here in Thailand because of some Foreign Press report is as nonsensical as I found the whole Fitch Rating Agency saying "oh, we may have problems in Thailand", in the midst of from what I perceive to be political developments that were not necessarily going the way foreign financial interests might have wanted them to and it looked to me like they were possibly setting up Thailand to have to go through another 1997 like sort of situation; I find the two things to be somewhat similar. It looks to me like there is a lot of undue foreign, I won't say influence but perhaps attempted interference, and why? Thailand is a sovereign country. Is anybody going to the United States and saying, "oh well, because there was a report in I don't know The Daily Mail in the UK about something that happened in Florida," that then the Florida Police, the State Police need to just get up in arms and get a bee in their bonnet over all of this.” I don't. It's not reasonable but for whatever reason, because it's Southeast Asia, because it's Thailand, it's viewed as being reasonable that the Police just need to jump up and run around at the very mention of anything from a Foreign Press outlet. I find it concerning; it needs to stop. It's nonsense it is almost this neo-colonialist attitude, and I hate using terminology like that, but it really, it smacks of it. Our press says that you have a problem therefore you need to jump up and run around. Okay but what's the problem? We checked into it. There's nobody by that name that came in; we checked the database. What do you want us to do?

That's kind of my two cents on it. The whole thing just seems odd to me so who knows. That said, again, nothing against foreign banking per se. I would love to see this all work out in a non-totalitarian way where everyone can benefit. Thailand can benefit from foreign direct investment; foreign investors can benefit from economic activity here in Thailand. Foreigners can feel safe here which they should. Anybody that has ever been here, this is not by any stretch of the imagination an unsafe country. The Police are strictly speaking, the majority of the time, the vast majority of the time, conscientious and diligent in enforcing the law here. And quite frankly, they deal with a lot more outlandish stuff than Police in other places, and they do it in a much more cool-headed manner than frankly folks would do in other jurisdictions. So I just think all of this is unwarranted and hopefully we will kind of see a change in paradigm with respect to this stuff moving forward.