Transcript of the above video: 

Well the Hit parade just keeps on coming from the fantastic ideas and policies of this present Government of Thailand, and I state that unequivocally, because quite honestly, it's getting to be like just watching The Three Stooges or something at this point, where everybody's just getting slapped in the face as foreigners here. And quite honestly, there is clearly one place to sort of look to, and it is this current "Rump Coalition" whatever you want to call this thing, under the acting Prime Ministership of Mr. Phumtham Wechayachai. I don't know what to say other than that.

Real quick before I get into all of this, it is worth pointing out, I do get into deeper dives on this stuff in our paid news service, Integrity News Service. Those who are interested in that you can email us: [email protected], and get on the mailing list for the longer form videos I do on that. Most of them are at least 30 minutes long. The last one I did was going on 1 hour and 20 minutes long. I expect the culmination of this week I will probably have another hour of stuff minimum to be talking about with respect to what's going on with respect to all the politics moving and shaking around here in Bangkok and greater Thailand, and how that plays out for expats both here in Thailand, and throughout the region. So maybe check that out if you are interested in more long-form content on that. While I'm talking my book as well, my better half and I have set up a restaurant here in downtown Bangkok, Pancake Palace. As the name implies, breakfast anytime including American style breakfast, pancakes. We have a big English breakfast, we also have American Diner style food: hamburgers, cheeseburgers, buffalo wings, chilli bowls, pork chops and all of that good stuff and glass bottled Cokes. So we have got taste for anything that fits your fancy. If you want American Diner style food, come check out Pancake Palace. Link is in the description below. Come on by and see us. 

Now I'm going to get into this here and going back to how I prefaced this video: I did a debunking video a couple, I don't know at this point a week, 10 days ago, whatever it was. There was this talk of a grand conspiracy against foreigners. It’s getting kind of harder to debunk that as time is going forward here. That said, I genuinely do not believe that there was some big cabal that sat down and said let's get rid of all the foreigners. I do think that the policies coming out of this government at this point are just terrible. They are primarily driven by World Economic Forum thinking and it's awful. I mean facial recognition at the beach, for what? Now they are coming after driving licenses for people. Let me just jump into this.

I found this actually via a viewer and hats off to you sir, thank you for the email, but over here in Pattaya Expats - it's a Facebook group - and then it looks like Mots Services put this up, quoting: "Breaking News: The Land Transport Agency (DLT) in Banglamung and Rayong have announced today that you can not (I think they meant no longer) no longer renew your Thai driving license to a 5-year license unless you have a Visa that is a residency visa and more than one year remaining on the Visa." Well the only people that have a Residency Visa are those with Lawful Permanent Residence in Thailand, and no, the Long Term Residence Visa is not a Residence Visa, it is just a visa, it's a Non-immigrant Visa; they can call it whatever they want. There's Lawful Permanent Residence as defined by the Immigration Act of 1979 and there is everything else. So they have made up a lot with regard to that and most of it has been nonsense. Meanwhile, most people don't have Lawful Permanent Residence. But more to the point, the real underlying policy that needs to be looked at here, you have got to have a Visa with more than one year validity on it. Now there could be circumstances where if you are extending off of a 90-day for example O Visa, there could be a situation where maybe you could make that work and I can maybe see finding solutions for folks like that in the future. If you are interested in that, trying to get a five year, you would have to jump through a million hoops - it would be like threading a needle - but you could in theory do that if you had a 90-day O Retirement Visa, you extended off of that by a year, in theory you could have like 12 months and 26 days or something on there, but as a practical matter most people have to, especially when you are just renewing in-country, you are going to renew in one year increments and you are always going to be less than a year, if only by a day less than a year, on total Visa status. So again, this is not great news. Quoting further: "This means Non O and Non OA Visas are no longer sufficient to get a five-year driving license renewal at the above Transport Agencies." There was a time when if you used the O-A right, if you did a Border Run right, you might have been able to get enough status to be able to do this but of course they clamped that off some years ago. And now O-As are contingent upon your insurance which generally speaking doesn't go out past one-year increments. Quoting further: "Mots Services are as shocked as you will be by this latest development. Please do not shoot the messenger. We do not understand the reasoning behind this decision. Hopefully common sense will prevail. Love Mot and her team." 

Yeah thanks very much for putting that out there and getting the information out there but no one is shooting the messenger. In fact, thanks to the messenger down there. Again Pattaya Expats is the group on; Mots Services on Facebook is where we found that.  

I don't understand the reasoning behind any of this either at this point. I mean this really looks punitive and why? Does this Rump Coalition Government just hate foreigners that much? I mean the people that are coming here. I can kind of understand maybe tourists or something okay, we are not going to give them a driving license of any kind, or we are not going to let them have five-year driving licenses, but the retirees especially, I can even maybe see hey we won't do that within your first two years of extension, but to just say no, you can't have a five-year driving license, we are going to torture you once a year. When I last had my driving license and by the way for anybody who wants to know, I did have a driving license here at one point. I only ever wanted it for ID purposes. Once I became Thai I didn’t feel the need to use it anymore, I have never driven in Thailand; have no desire to do so. But when I got mine, the first one was for a year and then it was 5 years thereafter. It is my understanding now they are issued in 2-year intervals, or they are issued for a one off, 2-year temporary and then you get 5 years thereafter. If you go back far enough, I remember when I first got here in 2008, they were ending the program of lifetime driving licenses, so it has only been 15, 16, 17 years disconnected from the time we used to be able to just go down, do your test, get a license and you were licensed. It has just been this continuous march towards totalitarianism frankly; throughout the world, I am not just blaming Thailand for this. But I have got to be honest, this is acutely punitive. I don't know what the underlying policy reason would be for this. I mean you could maybe make an argument some of the older retirees, but it is not really targeted at retirees. These folks seem to bring up the fact that Non O and Non OA specifically, I thought of even putting that in the title, but I decided against it because it actually does pertain to everybody. In theory, a B Visa holder now is not going to be able to get a 5-year driver's license here. I mean unless they are considering that “residency”, which again are they just arbitrarily and capriciously deciding what residency is here at this point. I don't get it. 

That said, that's the most latest update. If this changes, we will certainly keep you updated on this channel as the situation evolves.