Multinationals & the Hiding of Import-Export Dollars
Posted on May 28th, 2023
e-Con e-News
The uninterrupted interregnum of the aragalaya, from March 2022 – that removed in 3 months a popular President elected by a huge landslide just over 2 years before – took place during the US trial of a relative of the ruling Rajapaksas – former Sri Lanka Ambassador to the US, Jaliya Wickramasuriya – and a former tea exporter.
Wickramasuriya’s sentencing in a US court for alleged fraud (speculating on land – that foremost US national religion!) was postponed from April to 20 July 2022. With an executive rendered vulnerable in Sri Lanka, coordinated violence (signaled by the May 9th arson attacks on 74 MPs’ homes) then escalated midst threats of foreign invasions, military coups, and assassination by ‘death-dealing 1980s sparrow units’ (see ee 16 July 2022).
Thus it came to pass that on that 20th day in July 2022, a shut-down Parliament was resumed to choose a new ‘unelected’ President – Ranil Wickremesinghe. Jaliya Wickramasuriya was lightly sentenced later that day in a somewhat quiet Washington ‘show trial’ (minus media ‘perp walk’).
The US hostage-taking of a Rajapaksa relative may cast further enlightenment on the yet-to-be-shed splotchy snakeskin camouflaging the head-scratching events unfolding before us. It offers private tuition on the limits to a white-west-embedded kalu-suddha leadership (ee Sovereignty, The Ambassador, His Swanky New Embassy & the Limits of Diplomatic Immunity).
What Washington’s courts have to overlook is that the real scandal of Sri Lanka’s economic practices lies – not just in real-estate speculation – but in the whole colonial import-export plantation game. Yet how could a Washington court or an IMF or World Bank rule against such a system. Why not? The slave plantation system arrived in Sri Lanka via Jamaica and Haiti, etc., wholesale from Washington on the Potomac, hub of the domestic US slave trade.
Sri Lanka’s ruling class and related wannabes are made up of those fully invested in the Anglo-Saxon-led colonial universe anchored in the icy North Atlantic. Their money (the bulk of it ‘legally’ transferred by ‘exporters’, led by the multinational corporations: see, ee Focus) is in the white west. Their children are brainwashed in the ethos and mores of the white west (they just love love love their hollywood & rock’n’roll: Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!). They own property in the white west (property the white west could confiscate or wield as a weapon at will, as shown with Venezuela or Cuba, Russia or Iran, regardless of the so-called ‘international rule of law’).
The policies enacted to maintain the reckless lifestyles of this Sri Lanka rock-n’rollin middle class have been crashed. At the same time, this middle class seeks to extend by any means this very same untenable unsustainable lifestyle. The Anglo-American media encourages Sri Lanka’s middle class to act more arrogant and lazy, with no constructive plan allowed, driving them full of outrage – not against themselves, though:
‘The Budget has no answer for all these issues.
Despite the crash in the exchange rate,
despite the increase in the interest rates about 2 to 3 times,
the incomes that are already generated in the economy by workers
are not accessible to the government or the public in general.
It is captured by a business elite in the import-export sector
who are more inclined to keep the capital outside the country.
(ee Focus, Budget 2023: Heal the Wound or Worsen it?)
Grand robbery has been taking place. For a long time. But the robbers are not those who the white media and their embassies, and the IMF keeps promising to name: The Chinese. Workers. State enterprises. Corrupt politicians. Not them. It’s the old colonial import-export plantation game. What is downplayed however is that this ‘import-export sector’,that’s preventing productive investment in this country, is led by the major MNCs in this country. The national envoys – representing these MNCs – are in a constant state of sermonizing – of undiplomatic tirade and harangue – dutifully reproduced by a salivating hang-tongued media. We will have to await a more incisive hermeneutic of the real role MNCs play in Sri Lanka.
• This ee reproduces an Island analyst’s exegesis of the State Minister for Defense’s promise last week to a visiting US official to ‘right-size’ the military. This visit seemed timed for two anniversaries, largely ignored or disparaged by the English media in Sri Lanka. The defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam on 19 May 2009. The inauguration of a republic on May 22 1972, that finally released Sri Lanka from English political but not economic thrall.
The US Official arrived midst the President’s promise to carve out an ‘Interim Administration for the North & East,’ and demands for a ‘non-territorial community council’ for Tamil settlers in the hill-country. What does all this portend for the imposition of US troops and extraterritorial laws via the MCC, SOFA & ACSA. The Island analyst declares, given the economic threats:
‘The country is in such a precarious situation,
political leadership may tend to conveniently ignore basics,
especially to please Uncle Sam, the obvious king-maker here now,
thereby jeopardizing the country’s national security’
– ee Focus,Blind Security Reforms
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