IMF Stalls for India to Destabilize & Divide
Posted on January 1st, 2023
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‘The growing Indian role in Sri Lanka is accelerated by the US-controlled IMF deliberately delaying much needed assistance’, observed National Freedom Front (NFF) MP Wimal Weerawansa in June 2022. The PM (then: Ranil Wickremasinghe) was also ‘delaying getting fuel from Russia’. Weerawansa suspected the Quad and the West would use their ‘Right to Protect’ policy to launch ‘international’ military operations against Sri Lanka, (ee 18 June 2022, IMF Delays Dollars to Fuel the Flames).
• 6 months hence, it is the end of 2022, and IMF stalling continues. They keep beating about the tea bush. They are threatening the collapse of local banks and pension funds. The stalling enables the US, India, Japan and EU to make studied inroads into the polity and economy. Meanwhile, a supine capitalist media has amplified their blaming of China for the deliberate dawdling by the IMF (see Random Notes, IMF Aiming for SL’s Pension Funds).
• Back in early 2020, as the pandemic struck, ee called for the Sri Lanka government to initiate a system of planning, production and distribution to ensure food and military security. ee pointed to certain ’emergencies’ in Sri Lanka: such as when the colonial English assured wages for workers and prices for cultivators, wishing to buy goodwill, while fearing invasion from Japan (ee 15 February 2020).
ee also recorded how US President D Trump invoked their powerful Defense Production Act (ee 21 March 2020), while Spain declared a state of emergency, mobilized their military, and nationalized all private hospitals & all healthcare providers.
No such ‘defense production’ or ‘nationalizing’ talk is allowed in Sri Lanka. Only the selling of national assets. So, despite the ‘landslide’ election of an at-least nominally nationalist government in 2019, foreign merchants, moneylenders and their media – anti-social media – have continued to rule. Their unchecked power has led to a struggle (aragalaya) not against these bankers and merchants, but to a hijacked and paralyzed administration.
• The ongoing standoff in Kosovo, with the NATO-EU-backed Albanian warlord demand to remove all Serb imagery from public buildings previews the playbook closer to home, deadlined for the 75th anniversary of independence (see Random Notes).
The push for an election to legitimize the IMF’s toxic therapies at the point of a brutal economic shakedown, manipulates petit-bourgeois anarchy and lumpen nihilism to impose the US and India’s writ, politically economically and militarily.
When the USA was 75 years old in 1851, it was on the verge of indulging in a major blood-slaughter on US soil. One more war to determine its future as a united and modern industrial economy. It was still trying to shake off its cotton plantations as a colony of England’s textile mills. It was a war finally decided by a large general strike of workers on those very southern plantations…
• The Central Bank of Sri Lanka has always been against the independence of the country, said SBD de Silva (to whom this blog is dedicated). Now the Central Bank wishes to be independent of the country. This week, the Central Bank Governor N Weerasinghe declared that only dollar-earning businesses will survive. He was then hailed by another of The Island‘s (newspaper’s) numerous anglomaniacs as ‘one genuine public servant and most important person to the economy of the country approved of by almost all’. Overmuch praise doth damn!
This is the governor whose first order was to declare one of the best-endowed nations in the world, rich in sweat and soil, as bankrupt. Not only that. After over 500 years of continued invasion and plunder – our interrogators have never come here to save souls and teach elocution – it is somehow we who owe the invaders. What accounting, what mathematics, what numeracy? And since the numbers are not forthcoming from our ‘chartered ‘accountants, and we only have words for almost free – what literacy is this?
Our illiteracy is the failure to fathom the field before us. The whites always preferred to hand over so-called power to a trained well-schooled (tanned) minority, with artistic airs and elocuted wit, who have no idea about what an independent nation requires: a modern industrial economy.
Speaking of governing central banks, the last Central Bank Governor of Afghanistan, before he had to book a seat on one of those overloaded US flights from Kabul, allowed the US to grab its entire reserves. Perhaps the ticket out was the reward. Now the US is giving Afghanistan lectures on their expertise of feminism, while promoting good-old terrorism from Tajikistan
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