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‘Before you study the economics, study the economists!’

e-Con e-News 10-16 March 2024

How many think ‘liberal’ only means extending ‘freedom’ as in ‘liberate’? – yet, think again – what ‘liberal’ really means is: the right of some individuals to own private property, not just land, but humans – by enslavement – as European history amply demonstrates!

     ‘Neoliberalism’ – a misnomer widely popular among both so-called Left & Right – was coined by European economists, all funded by the Exxon-oil-tax-hideout, the Rockefeller Foundation, who sought to extend their white power. Those European economists who later formed the secretive Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) –later touted by token off-white mimics, too – warned of an imminent ‘suicide of the West’, deeply concerned about controlling the ‘hordes’ of non-white countries who could take over the United Nations. They wished to block the rise of a so-called ‘postcolonial world’, especially to maintain white power (protecting settler white South Africa & Zionist Israel was essential) anchored in the North Atlantic aka White Atlantic (buttressed by its military wing, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization – NATO), which now bleeds through US & EU warships into our ocean called Indian.

     Politicians, media & economists in Sri Lanka gaily parrot this imported ‘neoliberal’ dictat. In 2004, then-Prime-minister & now-President Ranil Wickremasinghe held a special Mont Pelerin meeting at that swanky Kandalama Hotel. In April 2015, just 3 months after his 2^nd appointment as PM, Wickremesinghe appointed fellow Mont Pelerinist, Singapore-based ‘Professor’ Razeen Sally as Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) Chairman. In 2016, the US’ Advocata thinktank – funded by the Atlas Network, a fingerling of the MPS – was formed at the Lakshman Kadiragamar Centre.

     Sally, who seeks revenge since his father was jailed in Sri Lanka for foreign-exchange fraud in the 1970s, is the Mont Pelerin point-man linking US-funded thinktank Advocata & online media outlet EconomyNext, also tied to ‘1^st NGO’ Exxon-Rockefeller-funded Sarvodaya. Sally ghostwrites EconomyNext’s run-on&on column Bellwether, which splatters many of the names & terms beloved & despised by these neolibbas. The Atlas Network too is funded by ExxonMobil & the US government, including John Templeton etc, who bestowed a $10,000 award on a former ‘poor Moratuwa boy’ who is grandly named CEO of Advocata, for their ‘research work’.

     However, the real power within US$thinktank Advocata, is wielded by its chairman, the regional Borah merchant Murtaza Jafferjee, appointed in May 2022 by then-PM & Minister of Finance Ranil Wickremasinghe to form an ‘Economic Stabilisation Dialogue’ between the Ministry of Finance and certain ‘independent’ economists. It is these ‘independent economists’ who demanded & got an ‘independent’ Central Bank, and pushed the Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA) which allows ‘investors’ to ‘take your profit away as & when you wish, without having to obtain any formal, regulatory approval from the authorities.’ Sally’s father is thus posthumously pardoned from samsaric bondage!

     Now both Sally & Jafferjee are careful not to be seen or even heard of in the media during these days of auctioning national resources to Wall Street. Sally after all blames Sinhala-Buddhist ‘majoritarianism’ for all the country’s woes. It’s no coincidence therefore that those European economists, who coined the term neoliberalism, proclaimed that ‘rich countries are rich’ because they have a certain ‘geist’ (spirit) emanating from Christianity! – the true spiritual ‘genealogy of economic organization’.

     This Christian spirit can only be found in the ‘fully developed industrial countries of the free world’. The ‘lack of punctuality, reliability, the inclination to save & to create’ meant that industrialization schemes in the global South were ‘doomed to fail’.

     Indeed, what we have now come to understand as ‘independence’ is what these founders of the neoliberal movement recommended: ‘formal political sovereignty but a diminished economic autonomy’, regulated by ‘the free flow of capital and investment over borders.’ A loose world federation’ (read, UN, World Bank, IMF, WTO!) ‘would help prevent mass popular expectations from becoming reality as the ‘ever-present threat of capital flight would curb campaigns of expansionary social policy’ as embodied in such policies as the USA’s ‘New Deal’, they label as Keynesian.

     This ee reproduces an interesting exposé of these economists, even as this exposé uses such dubious terms as ‘postcolonial’ and fails to see these so-called ‘Rightist’ opponents to the so-called Leftist FD Roosevelt’s New Deal & JF Kennedy’s New Frontier as 2 sides of the same dud coin. Roosevelt, Kennedy (& his tanned grandsons B Obama & paler J Biden) escalated wars on the world. US ‘War Keynesianism’ is the father of their US Military Industrial Complex. Keynes, who still dominates the thinking of trade unions & NGOS etc (who deploy ‘gesturing’ & ‘virtue-signaling’ as their signboards), was also a boorish & vehement opponent of Karl Marx. Marx, unlike Keynes, saw that only labor creates profit, not capitalists or machines (see ee Focus).

     How then did this ambiguous trope ‘neoliberalism’ come to be so widely used by aficionados, both white & off-white, of the ‘Left & Right’? Why not use, straight & simple, ‘capitalism’? In fact, these European economists chose ‘neoliberal’ from several labels ‘of self-description’, including ‘neocapitalism’, which would have been more honest! These economists were brought together by Rockefeller to oppose not just the USSR & socialist movements elsewhere. The transatlantic alliances of Germanic neoliberalism & US conservatism make it clear that world economic issues in the mid-20^th century were always also about white supremacism, fearful of any alliance between Asia, Africa & African Americans. This North Atlantic front seethed like a hidden virus beneath so-called civil rights & anti-colonial movements, during the period spanning the Non-Aligned Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, in April 1955 & the declaration of the New International Information Order (NIIO), in 1974 (which sought to challenge the power of the imperialist news agencies) and the New International Economic Order in 1975 (which sought to challenge the power of multinational corporations) – all of which was carefully undermined by bribery, assassination & mass murder.

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• Cuba, about to celebrate in 2025 the 50^th anniversary of the declaration of the 1975 New International Economic Order (& its subsequent sabotage), this week exposed a detailed US plan to subvert their economy, which eerily mirrors what is taking place in Sri Lanka (see Random Notes).

     Former President Gotabhaya Rajapakse’s new revelations – which one analyst hysterically compares to Hitler’s Mein Kampf, threatening to provoke communal rioting – recalls the attempt to destroy longstanding relations with China & Russia – by eg, preventing Sri Lanka from obtaining inexpensive oil from Russia, and organic fertilizer from China. ee has had need to point to the endless ingenuity of our merchants (yes, predominantly, but not only, of a ‘minority’ vintage) to sabotage any attempt to actually industrialize the country. Anybody who seeks to liberate this country from its thrall, must recognize how imperialism corrupts & fattens its allies in order to control (& later destroy) them, as the US trial of a relative of the ruling Rajapaksas – former SL Ambassador to the US, Jaliya Wickramasuriya – which ran concurrently during the aragalaya, displays.

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• Central Bank Governor Nandalal Weerasinghe, a gentleman with hallowed links to the IMF & World Bank, has interesting origins. He mirrors the Colombo oligarchy’s own rise to power, as licensed rentiers in the colonial hard liquor business. Another ‘nobody to somebody’, Weerasinghe’s family are rumored to be infamous ‘enforcers’ in Dickwella. Their origins are in the ‘herbal’ business, Nandalal’s father Hichchi Mahaththaya was a ‘herbal’ mudalali. It’s said, he used to produce a ‘herbal’ extract+ghee concoction, which they smuggled & sold everywhere. His uncle Jinadasa Weerasinghe, known as ‘Herbal’ Hutan, apparently looked like that Hollywood cowboy John Wayne, a tall fair man like Nandalal. Adding eateries & lorries etc, they later became bigger businessmen, but carefully remained importers, and not industrialists, not wishing to tread on the Colombo importer-mafia’s toes. Jinadasa was a UNP MP, who was shot & killed (by a suspected JVP assassin). They had their UNP office in Tangalle. One of their men was killed during an election. The Rajapaksas & the Weerasinghes were also arch enemies. Yet, how to explain then the same Rajapaksas inviting Nandalal to become CBSL governor during the Aragalaya?

     N Weerasinghe studied at Rahula College, Matara, got his BSc in Kelaniya, PhD in Australia. He became Deputy Governor under CBSL Governor Arjuna Mahendran during the 2015 bondscam. In April 2022, he was appointed as the 17^th Governor of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka, which had declared Sri Lanka bankrupt (but not bankrupt enough to deny their officials huge golden handcuffs & golden handshakes?). This too is yukthiya.

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• Another interesting character, whose father was a UNP MP, involved in the attempt to damage links with Russia, to prevent Sri Lanka from importing oil from Russia by seizing an Aeroflot plane at Katunayake, is Captain Themiya Abeywickrama. Abeywickrama, who worked at India’s Kingfisher Airlines, was appointed CAASL (Civil Aviation Authority Sri Lanka)’s Director General & CEO in April 2020, after his predecessor HMC Nimalsiri was retired. Abeywickrama is the son of late MP Sumandasa Abeywickrama, a landed proprietor who was Deputy Minister of Agriculture Development & Research Minister, 1977-83, a period which saw the booming of import-export fraud, and the massive applications of imported chemical fertilizers.

     In May 2020, Abeywickrama as CAASL CEO had to reject ‘false rumours’ circulated on social media accusing him of the ‘illegal transport & removal of any person or persons from Sri Lanka’. He also denied that he ‘in any manner or form threatened any licence holder/pilot by interfering in the legal performance of their flying duties’. No ‘guwan seeya’ commented on this matter.

     In September 2021, the attempt to import organic fertilizer from Qingdao Seawin Biotech Group of China was sabotaged, which former President GR in his recent book, attributes to the regime-change project, much to the chagrin of chemical importers like USA’s Exxon, and England’s Unilever & ICI-CIC.

     At that time, ee noted that a major law firm was behind an illegal act involving bribery by the US embassy to seize a Russian Aeroflot aircraft. This ‘first’ law firm is linked to the colonial robbery of lands to set up plantations, and the undermining of true independence, such as the assassination of a Prime Minister and an attempted coup d’etat against another.

     The drama involving the seizure of the Russian plane began on 2 June 2022. The operation was funded by the US embassy via one of Lanka’s most powerful & infamous old law firms, FJ&G de Saram. De Saram sent their lawyers to impose a now apparently never-given court order to seize the craft.

     The ‘junior attorney representing the plaintiff served notices on my client instructing to stop the aircraft… Can a lawyer perform the duty of a fiscal officer, while the duties of a fiscal officer are being governed by Fiscal Ordinance?’ asks an Additional Solicitor-General.

     The Aeroflot case centred around the antics at the Colombo Commercial High Court (CCHC), set up at the urging of the US to fast-track ‘justice’ for big capitalists. A CCHC ‘Court Registrar’ stands exposed as having ‘given several telephone calls to the Airport Navigation Centre requesting them to implement the Court Order in an unprecedented manner’. To make matters worse, newly appointed PM Ranil Wickremasinghe declared the game was ‘a matter between 2 private parties’, as did the Foreign Ministry… Online or offline, Sri Lankans who have made their names as writers of fictions, including ethnic historiographies, will surely fill in the blanks of how a government & a leader that won the largest majorities in our history, was laid low.

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• Coterminous with the release of former President Gotabahya Rajapaksa’s book, Reuters news agency, this week, released an ‘Exclusive: Trump launched CIA covert influence operation against China’ story.

     This Reuters ‘exclusive’, reveals a US ‘clandestine campaign on Chinese social media aimed at turning public opinion in China against its government’. This is news? ‘A small team of operatives used bogus internet identities to spread negative narratives… leaking disparaging intelligence to overseas news outlets.’ Reuters yet adds: ‘the disparaging narratives were based in fact!’ It quotes China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs saying ‘The CIA initiative shows the US government uses public opinion space & media platforms as weapons to spread false information and manipulate international public opinion.’ What resonates in Sri Lanka however is that: ‘Sources described the 2019 authorization uncovered by Reuters as a more ambitious operation. It enabled the CIA to take action not only in China but also in countries around the world where the USA & China are competing for influence… Covert messaging allows the USA to implant ideas in countries where censorship might prevent that information from coming to light, or in areas where audiences wouldn’t give much credence to US government statements.’

     The joke of course is that Reuters itself is a covert operation, displaying itself as a news agency, which ends each news item, proclaiming ‘Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles’, whatever they mean! Reuters is named after that ‘baron’ who, working in tandem with the Rothschilds bankers, monopolized the new 19^th-century news services, before grabbing all of Iran’s economy in the mid-19^th century. And that was just a start. 95% of Reuters news is ‘exclusive’ business data unavailable to the masses. Until Sri Lanka has its own news media (the current set promote Exxon’s oils & Unilever’s palm oils, which greases a lot of palms), there will be no independent country.

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Contents:

Economists in Sri Lanka Echo White Atlantic’s War on the World