e-Con e-News

‘The USA is never going to pay its debts. It doesn’t have to.

Its debts are in its own currency. The US can simply print it.

The African debt is not in its currency. The African debt is in US dollars.

Africa has to earn the US dollars. And the only way Africa can earn its US dollars

is not to be assassinated for growing its own food & becoming independent

and doing something the US does not like.

The principle underlying the foundation of the World Bank (IBRD)

is that no country should grow its own food. Africa & the Third World

should only grow export crops: export in order to have an oversupply

of cocoa & other tropical raw materials. To keep down the price,

they must buy their grain from US or Europe.

     So that if they do something we don’t like

we can do what the US tried to do to China in the 1960s.

We can sanction them.

We can say we are going to starve you, we are not going to export any grain to you.

So owing their foreign debt in dollars, means that they have to somehow sell

something the US wants, not something they want.

The most evil organizations in the world today, are the World Bank & IMF.’

Michael Hudson (Random Notes, SuperImperialism)

‘Central Bank Independence’ is explicitly designed

by states and capital working together

to protect the making of global capitalism

from the progressive tendencies of democratic pressures

on elected governments, including by their own people.

Central Bank Independence has now been made ‘a touchstone

for the restructuring of all states in context of capitalist globalization’

(ee Focus, The Big Business of the Independent)

Question, questions and more questions – What does Sri Lanka’s Central Bank have to do with the powerful US Federal Reserve, the US International Monetary Fund, & the US Treasury Market Practices Group – ‘a private cartel of 24 Wall Street companies’? Why are they so interested in making Sri Lanka’s Central Bank ‘independent’ of the country’s sovereign elected body – Parliament – as announced this week? (see Random Notes)

• Why does the German government have a German official representing German industry parked inside Sri Lanka’s Export Development Board premises? Will a Swiss exporter join them too? (see ee Quotes)

• What’s behind this week’s announcement: that the government is withdrawing from providing fertilizer to cultivators, allowing the private sector to sell fertilizer? From where is the UN Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO) getting the funds to ‘assist’ this transition in that rather sensitive role, where the ‘food crisis’ is repeatedly being blamed on the banning of imported chemicals and going ‘organic’? Numerous other countries are undergoing food ‘crises’. Did they all ban fertilizer ‘overnight’? And why is the FAO and the World Food Program (WFP) garnering so, so many headlines in the media? Is it because USAID is now the largest donor to the WFP?

     The WFP Sri Lanka this week laid out the red carpet for (the latest Yankee banana in town) Dustin Shiau, Senior Regional Program Officer of the US Agency for International Development (USAID)’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance (BHA). Prolix job title! Shiau first scurried to sensitive Mullaitivu, which USAID claims is the most affected by hunger due to ‘high food prices and reduced incomes’. Shiau, a he-male expert on ‘pregnant and breastfeeding mothers and people with disabilities’, wishes ‘to better understand their nutritional needs’.

     Shiau also participated in a ‘mapping exercise in Moratuwa – an area susceptible to weather-related natural disasters’ – using Geographic Information System (GIS) software ‘to identify where the most vulnerable communities may be hardest-hit during an emergency.’ Is the government about to sign that SOFA agreement (see ee Quotes), which allows US boots on the ground? Will they enter through Moratuwa or their Kollupitiya Junction beachhead?

     Meanwhile, the Japanese-dominated Asian Development Bank (ADB) is giving ‘paddy farmers’ a Rs20,000 allowance each (Rs8 billion in total). What exactly must these cultivators buy, or grow? Sushi? Recall how Sri Lanka was made dependent on US wheat (see ee Quotes, Random Notes).

• When and how did corporations get to insert their ‘executives’ (agents?) into UN bodies, without permission from the General Assembly? The UN Secretariat surreptitiously signed a strategic partnership with the World Economic Forum in June 2019. Why has the English media, always so keen to splash UN press releases as news, not reported this? Is this corporate dollarizing the reason why the UN acts like it’s no longer accountable to its member states.

     The UN this week somehow found several million dollars (not for fuel, fertilizer or food, but) to enforce their human rights resolution against Sri Lanka, mainly pushed by the white (& honorary white) ‘international community’ (see below). Yet, after the US withheld funding from UN programs it disliked, it drained the UN regular budget – the ‘backbone of funding for the one-country-one-vote multilateral processes of intergovernmental cooperation & decision-making’.

     All of these moves accelerated with the 1990s ‘withdrawal’ of the USSR. We’re told, the ‘neoliberalism’ of ‘triumphant capitalism’ took over, increasing the power of corporations amidst the deregulation of the state. With corporations avoiding taxes to nation-states, multilateral institutions, which depend on government donors, kept being defunded (Random Notes, Whisperer Advisors!).

• The answers, answers, answers to all these questions could be provided by the all-new Sri Lanka Institution of Economics & Trade Institute (SLIEIT) set up by the SL cabinet this week, to ‘educate policymakers & public officials’. The media after all loves to blame politicians as genetically corrupt, so let’s see whether a, SLIEIT BA could override DNA.

     However the sphinx-ish sounding name itself is rather profound: an ‘Institution Institute’? And ironic: SLIEIT echoes ‘Sly-it!’ or ‘Sleight’: which means ‘using dexterity or cunning, especially so as to deceive’.

     The foremost reason for SLIEIT is apparently due to the demands of the IMF: For whom answers to our questions may therefore not be a priority. Indeed the reason for SLIEIT, our merchant media insists, is ‘successive governments have amended the 2003 Fiscal Management Responsibility Act 3 times after failing to meet, in particular the budget deficit rule, which has never been complied with up-to-date’. A stronger new Public Financial Management Act, will be imposed next year, appointing an Inspector General of Finance (IGF!, not IGP!).

      Next a new Monetary Law Act will ‘relieve the Central Bank from any provisions requiring to fund excessive budget deficits through monetary expansion (money printing), which has led to high inflation and deprecation of the Rupee. So why are the US government’s Wall Street fronts so interested in our shortcomings aka deficit? (Random Notes)

• United Nations groupies in Sri Lanka are thrilled that the money-hungry UN has allocated $3.4 million (Rs1.2 billion) to enforce the latest Human Rights Council (UNHRC) resolution on ‘promoting reconciliation, accountability and human rights’ in the country. The SL government maintains UNHRC Resolution 51/1, presented without Sri Lanka’s consent, was adopted this October.

The Whisperers of the Central Bank & UN Agencies in Sri Lanka