e-Con e-News

Who owes whom? Believe the English and their relentless media chatter, and it’s we who still owe them! Despite all talk (& so much art and literature!) about chattel & indentured & wage slavery, despite all talk of over 500 years of colonialism & imperialism – Is we bankrupt! Is we owe them!  Such is their mathematics! Their numeracy. ‘Tis a calculatedly expensive farce of course. A Private-Public Partnership (PPP)! Talk about LARPing – Live Action Role Playing! A defanged ‘state’ is blamed. Workers (mostly informalized) are lazy. Politicians (mostly eternal) are corrupt. White envoys (no matter their pallor) are non-stick teflon – tho toxic when their thin skin of white supremacism is scratched.         

     This week ee focuses on the first US colony in Asia, the Philippines. The US economic policies there were based on labeling the ‘natives’ as corrupt & uncivilized and therefore unable to administer a colonial economy. Welcome therefore to the latest not officially announced US colony, of Sri Lanka… One may notice the similarity of the charges.

     ee Readers may recall, the ‘founder governor’ of the Central Bank of Ceylon in 1950 – John Exter – was a member of the privately owned US Federal Reserve System’s Board of Governors. In 1948 he was made an adviser to the Secretary of Finance of the Philippines, and set up their Central Bank. Exter was then made Central Bank of Ceylon Governor, 1950-53, after writing the report to set it up. He promoted a culture of exorbitant consumption of imported goods, wasting profits from rubber sales during the genocidal US war on Korea. He bribed various political constituencies to ensure colonial rule, and prevented investment in a modern industrial economy (see Random Notes).

• A court in New York censored this week all matters relating to Sri Lanka’s ‘international sovereign bond debt’. The court also demanded – and was provided – a series of deadlines to chart a resolution of the lawsuit against Sri Lanka, involving a shady US Hamilton Reserve Bank (HRB) based in a Caribbean tax hideout, demanding full payment of what is owed them for their investment (in what?).

     Last week ee discussed a lawsuit in Scotland ‘on behalf of’ Kenyan tea pluckers. Those expecting justice from a New York court should not hold their breath.

     BlackRock, Sri Lanka’s biggest ISB debt holder, is linked to Unilever, the largest English multinational in Sri Lanka. ‘Private creditors such as Blackrock and Ashmore hold 47% of Sri Lanka’s debt via bonds that were issued post Sri Lanka’s civil war’. The HRB suit is a ploy by such large ‘asset managers’ as BlackRock. BlackRock leads the bondholder group that is negotiating a restructuring with the Sri Lankan government. BlackRock is the leading known holder of external private debt ‘in the global South’.

     New York State’s legislature recently passed a bill to ensure that private creditors can’t use courts to get better settlements than bilateral government creditors. China is demanding that all of Sri Lanka’s loan sharks, including multilaterals like the IMF & World Bank, as well as private bondholders, take equal responsibility, take their share for creating the ‘crisis’ in Sri Lanka.

     Our numerous experts on ‘China’s debt trap’, have no idea about the role played by the IMF & World Bank and other ‘conglomerates of conglomerates’ in Sri Lanka, let alone of the role of asset fund managers, family funds, etc. They actually don’t care. They have similar interests as those who brought us these ‘weapons of mass destruction and distraction’.

*

• Every news story mentions the previous government’s inauspicious organic policy, primarily opposed by England’s ICI-CIC, as being one of the roots of last year’s Aragalaya! Well, here now is Baurs, also part of the League of Multinational Corporations (LMNC) in Sri Lanka, now deciding what organic is: Baurs laboratory services to certify ‘organic fertilizers’ – Swiss multinational A Baur & Co was recently awarded Switzerland’s international standard accreditation for organic fertilizers – ISO/IEC 17025. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) are also based in Switzerland. ‘Baurs laboratory was firstly accredited for inorganic fertilizers in 2015!’ (see ee Agriculture, Baurs)

*

• Canadian media recently accused a ‘Native Indian man’ of ferrying Indian (Chowdhari) and Romanian (Iordache) families across the icy St Lawrence River, from Canada to the USA. The families had (been?) drowned, and the ‘native man’ pronounced as ‘missing’. The media is notoriously negligent when it comes down to staging cogent reality. The ‘native man’, Casey Oakes is from the besieged lands of the Akwesasne Mohawk Territory, straddling the border with the USA – a historical product of settler wars, yet an ancient trade route no doubt.

     This ee shares a report on a recent truck drivers’ strike in Europe, which sheds light on who is really behind so-called human trafficking to the West, based on their need for unprotected workers.

For Full Report

Wall Street Court Censors All Talk of Sri Lanka’s Real Debts