e-Con e-News August 2023 Part 2

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

In 1782, while the newly ‘independent’ USA was beginning its forays into the Indian & Pacific Oceans, the French & English fought 4 battles: The Battle of Sadras south of Madras, the Battle of Providien near Trincomalee, the Battle of Negapatam off Cuddalore, where the French seized Trincomalee forcing the English to surrender; and the Battle of Trincomalee.

     In 2023, it appears Trincomalee has been captured without a shot. Or, is this what all that 3-decade bloodshed & terror, and this impasse, is all about? (see ee Quotes, Indian Warship in Trinco)

     Also in 1782: There was a 2^nd major English parliamentary investigation (1^st, 1772) into the English East India Co (EIC). Edmund Burke noted: When English employees of the Company squabbled, ‘their complaints inter alia reveal the misery of the natives, but when the staff are all in agreement, the natives are said to be likewise content.’

     The history that Canada’s ambassador in Colombo lives in, seems unsettled. He’s all ‘past tense’. He declared genocide in Canada was a thing long gone. Well, tell that to the ‘Indians’. (Or whatever it is they call the people whose land they stole and refuse to return – the ultimate ‘land acknowledgement’!)

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• Planning was turned into a synonym for sex in Sri Lanka. Most of the world – what English headlines always refer to as ‘developing’ – has a different meaning for the word ‘planning’.

     Yes, planning in Sri Lanka was turned solely into ‘Family Planning’ in the so-called public mind. What the f#$#^%$#! Well, it’s no wonder. ‘Planning the economy’ – as in the sense of the USSR & China’s, and our very own sabotaged 5-Year Plans – was banned by the USA’s World Bank after 1977. Soon, government ministries, departments and NGOs adopted the sunny word ‘development’ to their names. And 7 decades hence, we ‘keep on developin’ – as any Mississippi satirist might twang.

     ‘The voters in our villages didn’t elect us to tell them with whom or how many times they should make love every night.’ Did Philip Gunawardena say that? Or is it yet more patient English fiction? The means and media, schemes and plots, literary and other, employed to sabotage a national industrial plan, let alone kill leaderships, besmirch Philip Gunawardena and other national-minded politicians, and then massacre 100,000s more, is the real ‘underrepresented anglophone tradition’ – the unwritten English fiction in Sri Lanka. We doubt apartheid’s Standard Chartered Bank and opium’s HSBC would sponsor such an award.

• Policy analyst Vagisha Gunasekara asserts that ‘green energy’ is being distorted to thwart industrialization in our countries. She was speaking at the recent Gamani Corea Foundation’s Innovators Forum on Industrial Development. This ee concludes its look at that forum, complete with audience inputs and panel responses. Dhammika Fernando, chair of the Free Trade Zone Manufacturers Association, who also spoke, noted that the exports of the apparel sector add little (less than 30%) to their costly imports. Therefore, economists Bram & Howard Nicholas as well as industry experts provide the calculus of what is and isn’t industrialization. The main conclusions are: we need the audacity of a plan and we need the optimism of the will!

     Indeed, one question we’d have liked to ask JAAF director Fernando: How has the apparel fraud prevented its transformation into a bona-fide modern industry? – by not making a pin, let alone making a machine that makes machines that make pins, and other metalwork! Further, SBD de Silva linked high labor costs to the failure of rural industrialization that would reinforce rice production and labor.

     ee also carries excerpts from Russian leader V Putin’s meeting in the Kremlin with the heads of Russia’s industrial enterprises. There Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Manturov noted that the main driver of Russia’s economy today is the state-owned companies that provide procurement.

     This recalls SBD de Silva’s MA thesis, published in Melbourne, 1954, Long-term Contracts & Bulk Trading, about how the English government during their World War 2 bought and sold important commodities wholesale in Ceylon. Despite all the media rhetoric opposing state involvement in the economy, it shows how English government always intervene to ‘rescue’ themselves & capitalism…

White Green-Agenda Strangles Our Industrialization