Why?

EXAMPLE OVERSEAS

In 1992 I told of 1/7th of the world's territory. I sent a 3000-word petition to alert Chief Economist Lawrence Summers. He was the specialist at the World Bank in Washington D.C.

I was a person writing to the World Bank from the far island of Sri Lanka, my text proof-edited by Revd. Graeme Muckart of the Church of Scotland. I said that a faddist reform in Russia would convert that country into a source from which nuclear material and lethal weaponry would disseminate. However, Dr. Summers shelved the alert (one of his reactions to it appeared in VOA Editorial of April 9, 1998.) The complete text of the alert can be viewed on the WWW at the site:

Chief Economist Summers rushed ahead as convener of a reform group for Russia, headed by a man who barely knew Latin America where his reforms there contorted business and are considered to have led to the Crack cocaine epidemic in the U.S.

Out in Russia later, one of the early follow-on reports on the reforms arrived in kind. Members of the Japanese AUM group were able to buy classified Sarin gas in Moscow. In that city, payroll had been thrown into shambles and servicemen had not been paid for months on end; families had run out of food.

Then finally on 17th and 18th August 1998, the crash of the reform in Russia reverberated through world commodity and financial markets.

This reform led by ex-Latin American specialist Dr. Jeffrey Sachs was done on a contract for years 1992-97 of U.S.AID.

Later, even on the very surface, white-collar crime was alleged by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Therefore, in September 2000 the Department sued Harvard University and two scholars who worked under Dr. Sachs -- Andrei Shleifer and Jonathan Hay. The Department of Justice accuses them of [abusing] "their positions as high-level and trusted advisers to, and on behalf of, the United States in Russia," and of having "defrauded the United States" of $40 million.

The Department has retained research professor Janine Wedel, who had been investigating the reform in several publications. She wrote in 'The Nation,' June 1, 1998:

"...any serious inquiry must go beyond individual corruption and examine how U.S. policy, using tens of millions in taxpayer dollars, helped deform democracy and economic reform in Russia and helped create a fat-cat oligarchy run amok."

It was a reform based on fad. Among other analysts of these events is Anne Williamson and an article written by the New York journalist is at the Geocities web site. The American taxpayer is left to ponder over the question of indemnity or compensation to nations for stabilisation after faulty U.S. contractor services. In the case of Russia, during the faddist reform GNP is estimated to have fallen by more than one-third.

The next World Bank Chief Economist Joseph Stiglitz was able to see with his own eyes the aftermath of Harvard's Dr Sachs' fad in Russia. So he publicly said that the reformers had forgotten "the foundations of a market economy."

THIS WRITER

If Harvard 'reformers' had heeded my alert of July 1992, they might have saved the U.S. taxpayer and the world many things.

A note of mine forecasting the imminent collapse of the rouble was later printed in a World Bank bulletin in 1998 through the work of a scholar who had served as Polish Finance Minister.

How and why did I study the facts and make the report?

My uncle returned home after service in WW2 and spoke sometimes of his wartime experiences. During the war, people in the distant island of Ceylon had been concerned for Europe.

The continent was overrun then by German troops who were energised and mobilised to chase fellow citizens of Jewish ancestry. This was the scapegoat chosen by the Nazis against a backdrop of the management of German currency into record devaluation. The principal manager of money was Max Warburg, a member of the German clan, which won a statute in 1913 across the Atlantic from Congress to create the private Federal Reserve cartel and control the U.S. money supply as it did the German. Today the German Central bank is publicly owned, but then, to shop for groceries required carrying a satchel of currency notes. The daily frustration in German homes would provide fuel to create a war machine.

The Nazi war machine in Europe expanded by April 1940 as far north as Norway (its citizen Vidkun Quisling donated his surname to history to denote puppet regimes installed in a country.)

Across the Atlantic, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, sought encouragement in the Opposition at a time when his countrymen still opted for isolation. People said, "Europe's wars are not America's business."

Roosevelt's opponent in the recent U.S. presidential elections Wendell Willkie came forward. Willkie's own political career had begun in campaigning locally against supremacists in Akron, Ohio, in 1925 -- the Ku Klux Klan.

In August 1942, Willkie went out to serve against the Nazis. He went forward in the role of Roosevelt's special emissary to Joseph Stalin. Willkie's journey symbolised a revigoration of Allied cooperation. Shortly afterwards, in February, the Battle of Stalingrad turned the tide and began the welcome return of Europe to its peoples.

The family named me after Wendell Willkie.

SRI LANKA

Today this tropical island is troubled. As I write the scapegoat of an island in trance is its own government.

Such an opinion was registered by the capital's businessmen. When the radio reported that the government had lost its majority in Parliament and might be dissolved -- businessmen expressed an opinion by sending the stock exchange into a resounding rally.

Just before that another scapegoat had been found. A group of gangsters was foiled when allegedly collecting protection money. The gang responded by raising a civil commotion in the provincial town of Mawanella. Townsfolk set ablaze the shops of fellow citizens of Muslim faith.

Still earlier in 1995, there was another scapegoat to chase. The State Minister of Defence had decided on a government troop run into Jaffna, an operation designated "Leap Forward".

Retired head of Air Force Air Vice Marshall Harry Goonetileke knew the logistics involved. He spoke out in several broadcast interviews to stop the offensive. In effect, the rush offered a diversion in scapegoating of both the North's Tamil civilians and militants.

Friends of Sri Lanka, including Western nations -- were aghast. In the country, I myself pointed out that rushing the new helmsmen of the Popular Alliance government of Chandrika Kumaratunga would cause pointless bloodshed. I did this in an article placed in the middle-pages of the large-circulation 'Daily News' although in the Opposition United National Party (UNP) members did not use the opportunity to unequivocally reject the run into Jaffna. The die was cast for 6 years of continuing rampage. _1/

The above sequence of scapegoating happened with a PA government at the helm. For balance, to look at the UNP shows that under its government the country's Tamil citizens had also served term in 1983 in the role of scapegoat._2/

To locate resources on the WWW on scapegoating in Nazi and Machiavellian statecraft, a useful investigator to start with is Prof. René Girard.

SRI LANKA, SINGAPORE & INTERNATIONAL LOAN SALESMEN

Let us turn to glance at what elder statesman Lee Kwan Yew wrote in his memoirs when he remembered the country where Singaporeans once schooled.

"It is sad that the country whose ancient name Serendip has given the English language the word 'serendipity' is now the epitome of conflict, pain, sorrow and hopelessness."

For expediency in historical study, let us use a socio-linguistic survey.

"Serendib" was an old name of the country carried to the West by the Arab civilisation. The ending "-dib" meant island. The suffix is still used as "-dives" in the geographic names Maldives and Laccadives.

Let us take the significance of "Seren-" now. "Budu saranai!" is the ancient Pali greeting used since 500 BC by Buddhists everywhere. "May wholeness of body and mind as of the Buddha's be yours!" The Pali word "sarana" is etymologically related to "serene" as in the old form of address, "Your Serene Highness."

It is related to the Latin salutation "Salve!" which may still be heard in the aisles of the Church of Rome. It is also related to the Spanish "¡Salud!" and to the old English "Hail!" Thus, our modern "Hello!" is related to "salutary," "hale," "health" and "wholeness." We also find that in the Semitic languages group in the middle of the Indo-European language stream appeared the greetings "Salaam" and "Shalom." Both salutations signify peace.

Our socio-linguistic survey confirms the same question as posed by Lee Kwan Yew. How could an island so associated with peace and tranquility in history have become the "epitome of conflict, pain, sorrow and hopelessness"?

CAUSING LOSS OF FOCUS

Smaller Singapore, ingloriously torn by race riots, was allowed to focus. Then Lee Kwan Yew began the development of the port as an East-West transit point for petroleum-laden ships to the East -- and different products travelling West. On the other hand, Sri Lanka's energies -- without focus -- were directed into destructive pursuits. Abraham Lincoln had observed in his day:

"The money power prolongs its reign by working on prejudices." _3/

For his large and wide country in the 1860s after the trauma of civil war, Abraham Lincoln had himself chosen focus. Lincoln used railways as a national focal point. With that centrepiece, industrial linkages appeared in machine-building, steel and other industries. In 50 years the U.S overtook England in industrial output. This approach to development emerged from the work of publicist and writer Henry Carey who is classified with German-born Friedrich List in the American Nationalist School of Political Economy.

Since Emperor Meiji, modern Japan had followed the American school to focus energies. In recent memory, the first products applied after WW2 to restore industrial linkages in Japan were children's' wind-up toys made of scrap metal. Thereafter, Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry (the famous MITI) chose groups of new products for chronological focus. This took the country forward into the position of world leader in industrial output.

What Abraham Lincoln in particular had caught in the air was brought out by Lord Shelburne on Jan. 27, 1783 in Britain's House of Lords:

"Situated as we are between the old world and the new, and between southern and northern Europe, all we ought to covet on Earth is free trade ... With more industry, with more capital, with more enterprise than any trading nation on Earth, it ought to be our constant cry: Let every market be open."

In our tropical island, senior local business leader Mahendra Amarasuriya interviewed recently by the 'Lanka Monthly Digest' noticed a periodisation. He pointed out, "There has been a general deterioration in all standards in the country, including the standards of ethics and professionalism amongst all sectors, including the business sector. This is the result of the steady deterioration over the last 20 to 30 years..."

It was the "Open Economy" ("Let every market be open") experiment of the IMF and the World Bank that contributed to a loss of focus and destabilised Sri Lanka from 1977.

The principal architect of this policy, Milton Friedman, revealed two decades later_4/ that he was no less aware than Lord Shelburne as to who derives profit:

"We speak about the IMF bailing out ... Thailand; the IMF isn't bailing out Thailand. It isn't bailing out the poor people in Thailand now suffering from the recession they're in. It's bailing out the bankers in New York and in London, and Berlin who made loans to Thailand."

For thirty years since 1977, in contrast to Singapore, Sri Lanka has functioned without focus on a new industry (that would phase out methods of economic activity that the world prices have rendered incompetitive.) Instead, Sri Lanka's currency is the asset that has been devalued every year by IMF arrangements.

The explanation aired to the island for three decades has been that focal new export industries need support through the realignment of currency rate.

In 1950 the U.S. dollar exchanged for Rs 3.50. Currently, the rate is above Rs 90.00. If real incomes were crushed, that would serve to destabilise business and industry - whereas South Asia is an ancient centre for industry. The original sugar industry of the world was situated in the region; from rich cauldrons of "jaggery" (Sinh. "hakuru") came the words "sucre," "sucrose," and "sugar."

So while Singapore's population, forced to import fresh water, focused on economic activity and went on to join the league of developed nations, business in Sri Lanka began to sputter and slip. Sri Lanka began to need more loans. The government was therefore set on course to collect resources from the population to pay interest on loans, for which rich bankers gloat.

In effect, IMF officials had became loan salesmen for international finance houses such as Goldman-Sachs (its 23-year associate Robert E. Rubin took over the post of U.S. Treasury Secretary and thus the major voting share of the IMF, illustrating a conflict of interest in what Friedman mentions.) Over the years IMF doctrines influenced their counterpart economists in Sri Lanka. The locals had been implanted with the prejudices Lincoln noticed in his day. They participated in an "economics" faculty geared to sell loans to their own nation of Sri Lanka.

DEVALUATION AS LOAN SALES TOOL

In contrast to that, British administrators decided that the island must specialise. In their era they focused on tea, rubber and coconut. In addition, they protected their developing market with Imperial Preference tariffs. Today, a country of 18 million population like Sri Lanka must obviously specialise in a group of products.

Erstwhile poor Ireland faced the same technology and country-size issue. When Ireland joined the European Union in 1973, the EU supported its specialisation. Through focus on producing computer peripheral hardware, small Ireland became the fastest growing economy of Europe.

Instead of specialisation we see devaluation was being done in Sri Lanka. Why devaluation of all things?

Devaluation during the year may make Rs 100 of a local bank worth just Rs 90 at year's end (say, at the Bank of Ceylon.) To buffer the loss in its IMF-depreciated assets, the Bank of Ceylon must add the cost of devaluation to its existing interest rate. So to an interest rate of 4% the Bank of Ceylon is forced to add 10%.

The rate of interest of 4% and less of the British era was upped in the IMF era to 25% and more. In the "Open Economy" of 1977 a transnational firm that has already advertised internationally such as Unilever or Coca-Cola, can expand in Sri Lanka by borrowing money at low transnational rates. Any local business firm in countries like Sri Lanka, in contrast, is placed in a situation of unfair handicap where it must pay 25% and more whenever its market operations need cash for expansion.

In short, "Open Economy" manipulates bank rates and makes it difficult -- and mostly impossible -- for local business to compete with transnationals.

In conditions of the handicap created by the IMF, "Privatisation" becomes a call to "eat cake if there is no bread." Since business cannot focus local constructive energies, these IMF mechanisms can be viewed as contributing to economic holocaust or selective genocide when they target an unprepared nation state.

WHY SRI LANKA BECAME EASY PREY

In the case of Sri Lanka, we are dealing with a society which for historical reasons did not perceive that (a) loss of focus and (b) devaluation are mechanisms that benefit loan salesmen.

Witnessing money lenders in 6th Century BC, the Buddha taught that the business of lending money on interest was as offensive as trading in slaves.

Coinage was used in the Indus Valley civilisation well before 2000 BC. Later, by the time of the Buddha's teachings, sages had observed that dealers in coin could impoverish communities, devastate agrarian villages and induce chattel slavery. The Buddha's teachings therefore placed money lending in the class of pursuits that did not make for a Right Livelihood (Pali: "Samma Ajiva.") During two and a half millennia, therefore, Sri Lanka's Buddhists did not rely on banks but on interest-free, savings circles (Sinh: "Sittu.")

In the British period in the island it was discovered that the population was unaware of the danger posed by loan sharks who had appeared in the island (such as the Kabul beys and Natukottai chettiars.) Therefore British Governor-General Sir Andrew Caldecott heard the voices of H. W. Amarasuriya, G. G. Ponnambalam, S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike, George E. de Silva and several other concerned local people.

With Sir Andrew's support, British government incepted the Bank of Ceylon in 1939. The new communications and roads of the era of British commerce made the offsetting of usury possible on a nation-wide scale thanks to new banking, which was based on state-regulated interest. The new era of this state-regulated interest contrasted infrastructurally with the era of the Buddha. It also contrasted infrastructurally with the later eras of Jesus Christ, who ousted dealers in coin from the temple, and of Prophet Mohammed, who had imposed on all faithful a ban on usury.

As I write, self-awareness and consciousness do not disclose to most people in Sri Lanka that the nation can be caught in the web of rich bankers who use the IMF to apply debt-creation policies in the island. As a result, when the fall of real wages crushes the population, people's energies can be diverted towards a false escapism. German fascism is not alone in history. People can scapegoat and attack fellow citizens without knowing that a loss of economic focus, fall in currency and fall in local business development is debilitating and destabilising their lives.

THE WAR & U.S. SECRETARY OF STATE COLIN POWELL

Critics describe Gen. Colin Powell as a poster boy drawn in to figure as U.S. Secretary of State.

Gen. Powell, a professional soldier of Jamaican descent, understands not only the prairie, pampa and steppe; he understands the domain of island too. His is an island of calypso, reggae and long-admired cricket:

Cricket lovely cricket,
At the Oval did I see it -
With those little friends of mine,
Ramadhin and Valentine!

The denial of industrial focus to Sri Lanka is tellingly revealed through the rise of its technicians in matches with the world's strongest traditional teams.

In 1994, at the German national day celebration in Colombo, I recognised a local service commander across the hall. This senior commander chanced to be in conversation with the Indian diplomatic mission's head, but the latter stepped back when he noticed my sense of urgency. Offering my thanks to the gracious diplomat, I spoke personally to the general-staff rank officer mentioning that the whole of Haiti had been taken over by insurgency and its President forced out. I mentioned the method used by Gen. Colin Powell and former President Jimmy Carter to restore authority in Haiti without bloodshed. The flag-rank officer asked me to prepare a two-page report on the method used to restore order in Haiti. I did so on the following day.

I discovered later that my report was used for discussion among servicemen. Yet, the idea afterwards suffered collision in mid-air. In 1995, a tea plantation manager by training transformed into a Cabinet minister, then promoted to general, he led the diversion of Sri Lanka into six years of errant, dumbing, ongoing destruction -- instead of the two weeks that Gen. Colin Powell's idea needed in Haiti.

With the war done and finished, Sri Lanka's tasks and requirements seem to be:

(a) To focus energies on constructive economic activity as Singapore did;
(b) To gain a respite from currency and other resource erosion by the IMF;
(c) To gain a respite from high interest rates in the local market which makes 'privatisation' the promised land of transnational corporations with access to cheaper banking;
(d) To reconstruct physical infrastructure and rehabilitate people war-disabled; to rehabilitate the criminalised.

1/ If Air Vice Marshall Gunatilleke was moved to call 'Operation Leap Forward' a catastrophe, that was because the retired commander clearly perceived the tactic would commit a government to ruin in defending its gain in territory. Any serious observer knew then that the LTTE had penetrated the information pool of military general staff. Therefore an apprised LTTE detachment could ambush a whole defending cantonment of government troops. In their strategy, the UNP saw here the chance to trigger rises in the cost-of-living and thus cause voters to turn down the PA. So, though voted out of office, the UNP still grasped a strategic lever. Unlike the convent-educated lady President of 1994 for whom sabre rattling, spit-and-polish and parades could raise an impression of a Great Wall of invincibility, UNP top brass had control of military commanders - and staff promotions - all the preceding 17 years.

_2/ The person who wore the mantle of President during the house burnings was Junius R. Jayewardene. Through a promotional speech at the San Francisco Peace Conference of 1952, he set up in business. Soon, Jayewardene's grandmother's old house, unrealisable among locals because of a receding, salty ocean shore, would be purchased by the U.S. embassy. All metal equipment and cars would be subject to heavy corrosion (with better advice sought locally, French, German, Italian and Scandinavian embassies were not set up near salt spray.)

Public money wasted to fight salt today is but a token illustration of the corrosive aftermath of John Foster Dulles. Besides J. R. Jayewardene, Dulles proxies included Fulgencio Batista, Ferdinand Marcos and Reza Pahlevi. All left a price for their respective nations and some, for U.S. interests. When he took the harness of U.S. Secretary of State at age 62, Dulles was merely enlarging his private service of international 'step-and-fetch-it' to financial magnates (a) by levering into his domain, immediate control of U.S. foreign relations (b) by costing to government resources. His business partner and brother Allan Dulles' first corporate activity was as a director of the cloak and dagger J. Henry Schroder banking company in London, a Montegu Norman private financial instrument in helping raise supremacists for Germany (the correspondent bank in Cologne managed the personal monies of Hitler). For Alan Dulles, such roles preceded the CIA and tax payers' money (he was finally shown the door when his Bay of Pigs plan, at bottom a means to restore casinos in Cuba to their original backers, misfired). The family is rather well documented on the Net because the Dulles ancestor accumulated a fortune thanks to service to the forefathers of Montegu Norman in British India, a fortune unwisely invested in a slave plantation in South Carolina.

_3/ Social scapegoating does not overawe bankers of Friedman's affirmation. Similar banking houses profited for centuries from blood and gore through war loans taken in Europe by two adjoining nation states whenever the two nations were persuaded to perceive each other as enemies against whom arms must be taken up. Loans to governments are gilt-edged because the loans are not guaranteed merely by a mortal individual; they are guaranteed outside the life span of an individual by the nation state itself.

_4/ Milton Friedman made the disclosure in a 1998 CNN interview. I discuss the fallacy of logic built into his foundation and that of his associate Ayn Rand at the Geocities site. Ayn Rand (born Alice Rosenbaum in 1906 in St. Petersburg) imported old Russian nihilism, which Friedman incorporated in his broadcasts to the U.S. and the world no sooner he got into the position of U.S. Presidential Economics Advisor.

Friedman arrived there in 1976 after he failed twelve years earlier to enter on the shoulders of Presidential-hopeful Barry Goldwater, a man discovered by campaign newsmen to be linked to Gus Greenbaum, Bugsy Siegal and Moe Dalitz. The threads of the campaign thus led to Meyer Lansky, whose underworld net convened the build up of the easy-money laundering casino circuit in Las Vegas and Cuba while in the fullness of time finance capital mustered newsmagazine, paper-back, film and TV gatekeepers against rival Italian godfather syndicates.