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Executive socio-economic and financial outline with special reference to Sri Lanka
Executive socio-economic
and financial outline
with special reference to
Sri Lanka
©2002 Wendell W. Solomons
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From the inventor of the telecommunications satellite and the concept of the World Wide Web
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FOREWORD
How does one work through historical timelines rapidly? This little book chooses the sphere of credit in a specific country so as to accompany the reader through millennia.
Yet, the book also provides a service in helping the reader develop themes such as safeguarding the world city and its environment.
Taken in such light, this book would seem a boon to executives in business and those preparing for careers.
Sir Arthur C. Clarke
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The Governor-General was Sir Andrew Caldecott. He knew of several representations made at the State Council about the need for a bank to serve the island of British Ceylon.
When first proposed in the State Council in 1932 by Kandy-elected George E. De Silva, the motion received lukewarm support...
However, an appointed Commission explained that money-lenders had become the available source of commercial finance for the average Ceylonese. Such money lending had become the province of migrant Chettiar clans (of Natukottai, South India) and of Pathan clansmen (locally referred to as Afghans or Kabul beys).
As much as 18% would be absorbed in transferring cash realised, say - through selling black pepper - between market and home town by the Chettiar chit system (the word `chit' entered English from the subcontinent; Portuguese `caixa' was a still earlier adoption for `cash' from Sanskrit `karsa.')
The Commission's study and proposal for creation of a state-aided bank gained support from across the local political spectrum. In the State Council supporters included H. W. Amarasuriya, S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike, Claude Corea, E. W. Perera, G. G. Ponnambalam and P. Sundaram.
Someone had to take the hot chestnuts from the fire for the idea was a 50% government ownership of the bank. Here was futurism in contrast, say, to the private handling, then by Montegu Norman, of the Bank of England, dubbed the old lady of Threadneedle Street. Out in metropolitan London in consequence, an appointed committee of private bankers torpedoed the idea of the British government controlling 50% of the share capital in the proposed bank. However, with the support of devoted and articulate men, Sir Andrew Caldecott opened the Bank of Ceylon for business on 1st August 1939.
THE HISTORICAL SETTING
This thought for the island community contained millennia of history.
History tells us of the "Noble Eightfold Path" taught by Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha. In the fifth aspect of this Path, the great teacher taught that the giving of money on interest was not a "Right Livelihood" or in the original Pali language - Samma Ajiva. His teaching was encapsulated in the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, the sage's foundational and first enunciated discourse in the Deer Park, near modern Benares.
In the Commandments at Mount Sinai it appeared as "You shall not steal." In the island of Lanka, Buddhists expressed it as "Not to Take What is Not Given."
Buddhists consolidated resources - say for re-tiling a house - through interest-free savings put together by participatory savings circles of friends and relations (e.g., `Seetu'). Similarly, without raising loans on interest, infrastructure for the community domain such as roadways or reservoirs were defined for creation through (a) voluntary or (b) regally / clerically mediated donations of labour day (e.g., `Rajakariya.')
The commitment of Pali vernacular slokas (cf. Gk `logos') to manuscript came several centuries after the Buddha. About the same time the collation and translation of Hebrew scriptural writings into the Greek language Septuagint was completed. The inspiration came from Ptolemy II (Philadelphus) whose rule as king of Egypt began in 284 BC.
The Septuagint led the Greek annals of Christianity. In the New Testament the only act of violence recorded of Jesus of Nazareth is his taking of a whip into his hands to evict money dealers (`kermatistes' in the original Greek) from the temple. When the early Christian church developed, it too discouraged loans on interest. In the British Isles where Christianity had arrived through missionary Patrick, followed by the Benedictine abbeys of missionary Augustine, King Edward I banished money-lending clans from his kingdom in 1292.
In Islam of the 7th Century, Prophet Mohammed emphatically forbade the lending of money on interest.
THE MYSTERY
Today, lending money on interest has become commonplace.So here is mystery. What factors made it disparaged?
In the millennia that led up to the three leaders of faith, money had come into use in cities of the Indus Valley, Mesopotamia, the Nile Valley and other civilisations.
Before money came into being, to receive cloth in barter trading, a man would have to seek for salt if the man with the cloth needed salt in exchange It was product against product.
In time, for buyers and sellers, ready money provided a clear advantage over barter.
Many forms of money were first used. Black pepper was one, a prime source for it then being pepper cultivation in the island (the colonial tax annually paid by Canada till recent times was the equivalent of one pound of pepper.)
Many other items were used for circulation until silver and gold gained precedence. The two metals did not change in quality or weight in any major way when stored in damp conditions (for instance, during sea voyages in dhows and earlier small craft that sailed from the river Indus civilisation to Mesopotamia and the Nile valley.)
The popularity of metals led to the appearance of specialised trades. Metals would have to be assayed or proofed for purity. If coinage minted in a different city republic arrived, then the coins would have to be taken to a specialist money changer for exchange for local coin. Another property of metallic money was that it could be stocked for years. That supported professional money dealers who specialised in lending.
MONEY DEALER
IMPACT ON THE CITY
From the study of recent Hindu temples, we find that in a division of labour, books of account were maintained not by sages or priests - but often by money dealers. Sometimes meetings of the money lenders were held in a temple room.
Study of Hindu and Judaic temples reveals that money dealers sometime made arrangements to store their gold and silver stocks for safety within the temple compound. In addition, certain money dealers received stolen valuables and cemented ties with the underworld of thieves.
In modern times the underworld ring of Meyer Lansky and Moe Dalitz convened the mustering of money adequate to erect the gambling dens that made Las Vegas famous in the Nevada desert. Even more recently `reforms' in Latin America led by Harvard's Dr. Jeffrey Sachs (who you will notice according to the last quote in this account, in the role of a salesman for rich bankers,) that led to several business firms going to the wall and switching to trading in Crack cocaine. So, Dr Sachs and crime syndicates which imported the new drug into the USA contributed to hitting Americans with the recent Crack epidemic. It is the same legacy that created several private banks in Hongkong, Shanghai and elsewhere in the Far East through the sale of opium in China, resisted by the Opium Wars (1839-60).
In early urban settlements, if money dealers created an amalgamated and cumulative force, then in contrast to other traders and other lines of business, money lenders might exert an undue influence on the priesthood.
In a temple where accounts were controlled by money-dealers, the priesthood would in time be deflected away from serving the community as a whole. An undermined priesthood could not save the community at large from ruin at the hands of the unified force of money lenders (who in this case would be dividing the market from within the temple.)
Undermined priests could not keep intact a community that was being reduced to chattel slavery. The population would be sold as goods to foreign nations. The community and city would fall into decline.
We can now take up a narration that may be accessed in many a bookshelf today.
In the era when sage Siddartha Gautama began his teachings, the nearby Persian emperor sent Nehemiah as leader of Jews then in exile to reconstruct Jerusalem's walls. Here is Nehemiah's plaint during the reconstruction:
`After serious thought, I rebuked the nobles and rulers, and said to them, "Each of you is exacting usury from his brother." So I called a great assembly against them. And I said to them, "According to our ability we have redeemed our Jewish brethren who were sold to the nations. Now indeed, will you even sell your brethren? Or should they be sold to us?"
`... I pray you, let us leave off this usury.'
`... Then I shook out the fold of my garment and said, "So may God shake out each man from his house, and from his property, who does not perform this promise. Even thus may he be shaken out and emptied." ` (Nehemiah 5:5-13 NKJ)
The decay of a city and impoverishment of its population to a degree when families could be traded as slaves that helps us reason why money lending was tabooed by Nehemiah and spurned by Siddartha Gautama when he taught in India in that era of the reconstruction of Jerusalem.
Drama too is written in those lines. A split in the ranks of powerful money lenders could cause a split in community. In year 70 AD, rebuilt Jerusalem later fell before the eyes of Roman General Titus Flavius Vespasianus who waited for the population's weakening through an inner duel in which two Jewish leaders supported competing coins, one - silver and the other - copper.
REGULATION OF CREDIT
AND INTEREST
That discussion must now propel us rapidly through history to the British period.
The British period reached its maturity when transport and communications did not hinder the maintenance of a common money and credit system. A Central bank was allowed by English statute in 1694 and though it was private (nationalisation was carried through by a Labour government in 1946,) the bank did not cut the branch on which it was seated. It helped unify interest rates country-wide.
Though Uncle-Niece married financial clans were a powerful force, executive power in England was now in the hands of a Prime Minister not a hereditary ruler. The positions of the Prime Minister and Members of Parliament had to be filled through elections every four years. This provided in Britain for an improved balance between town and country.
As a result of these and other state and civic arrangements, usury and loan sharking declined. Britain became manufactory to the world, prospered in overseas trade and conquest. It is in such new circumstances that today's giant banking systems arose and re-tracked the world.
REFORMED CREDIT SYSTEM
AND ISLAND CEYLON
Ceylonese experienced the reformed system of banking and were interested in it. Sir Andrew Caldecott and his predecessor Governor-General Sir Reginald Stubbs, supported this interest.
This had led to the Bank of Ceylon commencing business in 1939, but larger events arose. WW2 intervened. Then came the 1948 grant of Independence to the island.
In the early 1950s, if Chettiars and Afghans charged 10% a month or more, the Bank of Ceylon was granting commercial loans at around 4% per annum. You can see a world of difference in the rates, the first a monthly rate and the latter - an annual one.
Though the benefit was manifestly clear, the Bank of Ceylon, transferred to local management from British, was not opening branches to multiply the benefit for business development to community. The reasons for this sluggishness need separate investigation but there was a senior banker at the Bank of Ceylon, its Inspector of Branches, who was prepared to attend to the technical groundwork of setting up another bank.
Educated in the school of R. E. Blaze', the originator of the island's first highway safety campaign, Wilmir H. Solomons, sportsman, scholar, organist and lay preacher, in 1961 accepted an appointment as General Manager of a proposed state-owned bank. He led several other banking professionals to the new People's Bank. Dozens of branches came up and then in a few years, hundreds. That released the energies of bankers at the Bank of Ceylon and they too expanded to several hundred branches.
No other service organisations have spread as rapidly as the banks did in the island. If taken in relation to population size, speaking internationally there was record activism visible - and in the public sector.
With the rise of banking, several manufacturing and trading businesses were founded. At that time, speaking once again internationally, there was opportunity for the island economy to develop using the formula of East Asia and Western European nations. The most rapid means known for economic development then was the formula of priority for manufacturing industry, notably used in Japan and shortly afterwards in Korea.
However, the latter nations served a strategic end in containing the Socialist block of nations. The island of Ceylon fell into another category - of non-strategic nation states.
The first post-WW2 method that money dealers used for tactical attacks outside the control of British Parliament, was to subvert economic achievement in non-strategic nations, including Sri Lanka.
In its first report of 1952 for the island, the World Bank began promoting the enterprise of removal of virgin jungle at state expense so as to distribute 2 hectare blocks of land for individual farmsteads. In Britain it was then an average of 80 hectares in contrast (in the context of a country practicing concentrated farming in fragmented farmland.) In the USA the average ran into thousands of hectares. Using tilling by tractor, harvesting by combine and crop dusting by airplane for competitive agriculture, some 5% of the population then fed the entire USA.
In 1948 in the new State of Israel kibbutzim-type farms for intensive or concentrated agriculture came into being. Such competitive agriculture was removed from the base of economic calculation for Ceylon. The World Bank report's medicine for development via buffalo-yoked plough was poured down the throats of the island's post-Independence statesmen.
Informed opinion in the island asked about that investment in terms of the future of the children of farmers walking barefoot in deep mud to till the soil with a water-buffalo-yoked plough and grow rice. In history agriculture is known to release young people into employment in towns. So in tribute to those dissenting opinions recorded for all time in the Parliamentary Hansard, we may ask whether these are the young people who were thrown out to grow hungry for employment - and become material in the hands of the insurrectionists and warmongers who rocked the island.
For twenty years the country graph registered slow development. As a result, students of economics began to consider the first model of the World Bank - charlatanry.
CURRENT MODEL FOR
ADJUSTING BELIEF SYSTEM
The ultimate trump then came out.
Network media had saturated literature with the words "Free World". By 1977 the World Bank and IMF began to tingle with the words "Free to Choose".
The title was created for a video series put out in the name of Milton Friedman and his wife. Friedman had climbed on the tribune of U.S. Presidential Advisor. There he intended to launch his video series on tax-payer funding.
From that tribune, he could also send out his band of apprentices to take control of U.S. university faculty and international bodies such as the World Bank and IMF based in Washington D.C. These apprentices came to be dubbed Chicago Boys (i) for the Chicago School (one subname of Friedman's discipline) and (ii) for the notorious criminal boys of the Chicago of Al Capone (of the Italian Mafia) who were beaten into underlings by the Meyer Lansky mob syndicate (Maier Suchowljansky, 1902-1983, Khazar Ashkenazim).
Friedman's model was originally dubbed "Voodoo Economics" in the USA. In a targeted nation, Friedman broached "Freedom" as a means of value system adaptation to set people spitting in the community well (an idiomatic expression in Hebrew and Russian) or to poison the well.
To this end, standing on a tribune at the expense of the tax payer, Friedman began an attack on the "collectivist" 3rd Class public sector on grounds that the private sector solely and alone is the engine of progress. A community body enters the Second Class compartment if it is taken over by a private company. A community body enters the First Class compartment if it is taken over by an individual.
A predecessor of the Chicago Boys had been installed in Margaret Thatcher's Downing Street office. The philosopher-in-residence picked to restyle the belief system of the British leader was Allan Walters. It was the restyled PM who exclaimed, "There's no such thing as society - there are only individuals and families."
Allan Walters had given his time of residence to persuading the PM to move Britain from 3rd Class "collectivist" compartment to First Class.
If collectivism is deplored by the Chicago Boys, then they denounce not only the Israeli adopted kibbutzim, a direct development from 19th Century agricultural communes in Tsarist Russia.
The Chicago Boys' logic decries as collectivist - learned societies of scientists and engineers. So does the logic decry every church, mosque, temple or synagogue. To listen to them and convert a learned society into a limited liability company gives it Second Class status. To go further and convert the society into the possession of a single individual raises it to unparalleled excellence the First Class ideal of the Chicago Boys.
Friedman's associate Ayn Rand scripted the performance this way in her book "Anthem" of the 1930s.
"The word `We' is as lime poured over men, which sets and hardens to stone, and crushes all beneath it, and that which is white and that which is black are lost equally in the grey of it."
If the British era bestowed a particular balance of private and public sectors (e.g., the Bank of Ceylon was set up under the aegis of the public sector), in the mid-1970's Friedman and his Chicago Boys began their inciting of the private sector against the public sector. A privatisation-mania was induced. Free-booters, fly-by-nights and marauders were emboldened to raid community assets in the public sector.
To trigger the raids on social assets, a first target was chosen in Sri Lanka. The choice was for a reservoir development scheme - designed a decade previously by a UN consultancy team. Free-booters put up shingles overnight to become `dam constructors,' `equipment suppliers,' `transport' and other contractors. Free-booting `constructors' creamed off profit overheads while the actual construction was done by overseas firms. In contrast to this, so as to reduce heavy foreign and local costs, the UN engineering design team had envisaged construction during a 25-year period.
To let Friedman's `engine of progress' run at full throttle, the time span was shrunk to 9 years. Besides the enormous increase of cost to tax-payers, the rush provoked environmental damage against which design engineers safeguarded by creating the original 25-year plan.
RAIDS BY DEBT SALESMEN
During the decades from 1977 when Friedman's model was implemented with a vengeance, we have seen the poisoning of the common well become intense. During the same period Singapore (which sent in children for education in Colombo in the 1950s), achieved classification as a developed country.
In August 1998, Milton Friedman had this to say in a CNN interview about the agenda which his own students practice at their desks at the IMF:
"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."
With every crisis and every induced increase in the country's debt, Friedman's Chicago Boy debt salesmen at the World Bank and IMF gain still more license to arm-twist the Sri Lankan economy. From 4% interest in 1950, business firms now have to pay above 20% for money from banks. It feels is as if the pawnbroker, by the intention of Friedman's salesmen, has broken through the roof and confounds the growth of business in Sri Lanka in contrast to Singapore.
A calm has just returned to the island after two decades of civil war. The war was preceded and accompanied throughout by the fanfare of economic reform hoax.
In year 2002, in the lull of fighting and before peace talks are completed, Chicago Boys of the World Bank and IMF were out with their brasswinds again, mechanically trumpeting Friedman's reform scam. Will not they wait for peace talks to be concluded before they exact their next pound of flesh from the population?
In the scam, "privatisation" is a boomerang that rebounds on the private sector as higher payroll costs for medical and transport outlays, which cannot be financed through bank borrowing at 20% upwards. In addition, morale in the individual firm is harmed by incitement to spit in the company's own well.
Friction and jealousies affect cooperation and productivity at work and therefore - customer service. As end result we find that for the past quarter century the Chicago School has been promoting through its macabre salesmanship, the dependency of both public and private sector on borrowings from outsize banks. The formula makes small David depend on Goliath. Yet, there is more. Since the IMF serves as proxy for outsize banks - in Friedman's own estimation these mammoth banks gain every opportunity to access information inside the IMF on forthcoming interventions. In that way Goliath gains an unfair opportunity to raid country currency markets. In Brazil, money was being syphoned overseas at the rate of
$ 300 million a day.
To take Japan and Singapore, to settle import bills the natural resource sparse countries pay their way through exporting goods and services.
In Sri Lanka the privatisation scam serves still one more purpose. The incitement to poison the well dissipates the energy of business and government. It removes the opportunity for focus by Sri Lanka's 18 million population on a group of goods or services that can be competitively exported by a population of its size.
The limits of reinforcement of stupor are being reached. So as to renegotiate debts induced by 25 years of poison-the-well prescriptions, a heavily dosed Sri Lanka must awaken and stand sentient on both feet. Millennia of history must remind the island to safeguard its domain from more of the lethal calamities it has experienced.
About the Author
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