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Posted byee ink.October 7, 2023Posted inUncategorizedTags:al-Mamlakah al-Maghribiyyah, Alexander Baring, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, Arabo Ewinyu, Aragalaya, Arkebe Oqubay & Imraan Valodia, Asia Internet Coalition, Athula Ranasinghe, Bank of Ceylon, Barings, Black Agenda Report, Brandix, Ceylon Shipping Corporation, Charles W. King, Colombo Commercial Fertilizer Company, Denise Cote, Deutsche Welle, East India Company (EIC), East India Marine Society, Elias Hasket Derby, Empress of China, Exclusive Economic Zones, Fanning & Coles, Fiona Tregenna, Forest lands, Forest Resources Conservation, Fraser Institute, Free & Open Indo-Pacific, Freedom of Navigation, George Cabot, Gideon Nye, Gunadasa Amarasekera, Hamilton Reserve Bank, Hardtalk, Hirdaramani, Human Rights Watch, Indian Punchline, Institute of Political Economy (IPE), Jaahnavi Kandula, James Fenimore Cooper, John Murray Forbes, John Perkins Cushing, John Renshaw Thomson, Juki girls, Kantale Sugar, Kilimanjaro, Lanka Ashok Leyland, Lanka Phosphate, Lanka Sathosa, MAS, Matt Pottinger, Ministry of Wildlife, Mohammed Muizzu, Multi-Fibre Arrangement (MFA), Nandalal Weerasinghe, National Equipment & Machinery Organisation, National Machinery Organisation, Naval Act, NewsClick, Nootka, Nuu-chah-nulth, Paranthan Chemicals, Paris Club, Patricia Susan Perry, People’s Bank, Peoples Bank, Prabhakar Kaza, Public Expenditure Review Committee (PERC), Robert Bennet Forbes, Robert Morris, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Russell Sturgis, Samuel Shaw, State Bank of India, State Engineering Corporation, Sunimalee Madurawela, Tamara Kunanayakam, The Last of the Mohicans, Thomas Handasyd Perkins, Thomas Randall, Thulhiriya, Tony Baldry, UN Convention on the Law of the Seas (UNCLOS), US Pacific Fleet, Vinod Moonesinghe, William Henry Aspinwall, William Shepard Wetmore

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

e-Con e-News 01-07 October 2023

Yet another Anglo-Amerikan settler-timebomb is exploded once more in West Asia, as the USA’s IMF & World Bank traveling-circus out of Washington, gathers on Monday for their annual diwan, this time in al-Mamlakah al-Maghribiyyah aka the Western Kingdom aka Morocco at a strategic mouth of the Mediterranean.

     Morocco was the USA’s first diplomatic outpost, set up in 1786, to lubricate US smuggling of opium from Turkey to China (see ee Focus). Sri Lanka is now put on stage there to play the reluctant but contrite schoolboy (yes, bwoy!) before a pleasantly glowering principal wielding a NATO-cane in hand, who has signed onto the wrong guidance report card 16 times before.

     Here Colombo’s Harvard-house-trained ‘bankers’ will stand, at a northwest African crossways where the war drum took Europe by surprise. These dollar economists gravely shake their heads at the unteachable slave. Bitter medicines they themselves don’t imbibe, they prescribe to others. Somewhere along the way to Seville and to Havana and then to Wall Street, the war drum began to play rock-n-roll for its supper. Hence, the IMF – is the only way – is their song.

     Those who have brought Sri Lanka to this pass are running for cover, or posing pusillanimous. Not a squeak from the US stinktank Advocata & slimy Singapore Salleys. Oh, US Advocata did this week remind that their partner agency, the Canada-based Fraser Institute rates Sri Lanka’s ‘economic freedom below Burkina Faso, Haiti’ (as, the Colombo US embassy’s lipstick, EconomyNext headlined this ‘revelation’).

     Why Burkina Faso? Why Haiti? Both are about to be invaded again by the whites. The US has placed Rwanda & Kenya to front the invasion of Haiti. Canada’s Foreign Minister says they are invading Haiti to prevent sexual and gender-based violence”! Advocata knows which side of freedom, their dollars are buttered on. Rwanda’s envoy in London however accidentally divulged: it’s a hypocritical hopelessness machine.

     The US NGO Human Rights Watch, Great Worrier & Cold-Warrior, has made a video featuring Sri Lanka to tug at the heartstrings of the IMF in Marrakesh. Painting the Sri Lankan crow on a tripwire as the canary in a mine, the HRW’s underlookers say the IMF is not fair, is disequalizing. Lovely. They want the IMF castor oil to conform to the US’s Human Rights Watchmen, who can’t see the Guantanamo from all that Guantanamera in their ears and Guacamole in their deep throats. The East is indeed a career for these human rightists!

     The US & India are trying to pull a Ukraine on Sri Lanka. Having been pushed into becoming a bloodiable Slavic pawn of NATO, a sizeable chunk (at least 28%) of Ukraine’s famed breadbasket is now owned by US agribusinesses (see last ee). Helping to manufacture the hopeless (renamed refugees), the salaries & pensions of conniving Ukrainian officials, civilian & military, are paid by the US. Is this the US plan for Sri Lanka? Certain ‘permanent’ Sri Lankan officials surely act as if only dollars pay their salaries.

     Under the pretext of giving title to forest lands tilled by cultivators for generations, the IMF is grabbing forest reserves for multinational agribiz & mining corporations. 80 national assets, including the misled Bank of Ceylon & People’s Bank – long prevented from investment in rural industrialization – are also under the hammer of an ‘independent’ god wearing a fake blindfold. Here is the price to pay to be paid after all the prizegivings. (see ee Random Notes, Put on Hold)

     The President at the same time seeks to capture a slice of the nationalist vote to extend the economic plans of his backers. But what plans do he & they have? The fire carelessly sparked, that even started to burn the future President’s home, will now consume the firemen & arsonists, amateur & professional. Some hope North Amerika’s prairie Midwest will beat us to the bonfire.

     The President is looking at making a withdrawal from this particular vote bank for the next election, to build a firewall around the popular demand for true nidhahasa. It’s all public relations. He’s saying basic things that shouldn’t have to be even said. Who is the US or England or EU to judge debt or human rights or corruption? A real accounting of ‘debt or human rights or corruption’ would put those torquing Torquemadas in the dock of Mara.

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– Black Agenda Report (USA)

United States of Amnesia – This week finds the USA escalating censorship over their internet, even as they deplore any attempt by Sri Lanka to assert sovereignty over its land, air or cyberspace. A white Asia Internet Coalition, whose members include Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta, X, LinkedIn, etc, deplore the SL government’s ‘draconian’ Online Safety Bill. None of the usual NGO-dollared suspects (CPA, NMSJ, etc) criticizing the Bill, even mention the need for a media truly independent from such imperialist monopolies & agencies from AP to BBC to CNN to Reuters, etc.

     Certain websites ee depends on for certain news have been blocked this week by the US. Black Agenda Report has been put down. Many rely on BAR for crucial news on Africans, Africa (especially East Africa) and the non-blanco Americas. One the last BAR articles we read, told former US President Barack Obama to please ‘shut up’. Obama was supposedly seeking donations recently to ‘help’ flood victims in Libya, a country he and his deplorable foreign secretary delighted in invading, openly murdering their leader. Obama, supposedly the real coherent in a doddering White House, is pushing the Presidential candidature of his George-Bush-hugging spouse Michele. Obama, let us recall, is the son of a white mother who was a CIA ‘economic anthropologist’ collecting names of nationalists to impale in the great genocide of 1965 in Indonesia. So Obama knows when & whom to shut up.

     USA’s Twitter is blocking popular blog Indian Punchline’s author, former diplomat MK Bhadrakumar, from being streamed. India has also arrested NewsClick editors, after a redbaiting New York Times hit out at a Sri-Lankan -linked tech entrepreneur. We do not always agree with NewsClick editorial policy (like their link to Germany’s DW) but have depended on them for news on India’s workers & cultivators available nowhere else.

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• Sri Lanka is being gamed, being played. Who is playing the game and who is gaming the play is easy to see. In New York, the US, English & French governments have ‘delayed’ a Hamilton Reserve Bank lawsuit against Sri Lanka. This ‘delay’ too is a source of speculatory profit, burgeoning Sri Lanka’s so-called debt, which is mostly interest payments anyway!

     Need here to remind that the ancient Sinhala system of loans & debts was always based on ability to pay when possible. Compound interest was imposed by English & Christian-controlled colonial courts on behalf of Muslim merchants & landowners, which resulted in massive landlessness, and the assemblage of large fertile holdings in Eastern Province.

     Media has focused on HRB’s ‘Chinese-American’ owner. A few weeks ago, Sunday Times or some such Anglo-marooned media, published an article by the Nikkei-owned London Financial Times, editing out the part that said HRB was founded by ‘prominent bankers & lawyers from London’, including chair Sir Tony Baldry (former aide to Margaret Thatcher). FT too did not mention that HRB CEO Prabhakar Kaza, an Anglo-Telegu town councillor outside London, was a former Chief Executive Officer of the State Bank of India, London (2002-5). Who is Nikkei anyway? As we remind, Japan remains a US-occupied colony.

     This reminds of ee’s muse – SBD de Silva understood the endearing links between Sri Lanka’s & India’s oligarchy and English (& Yankee) colonial power. The alliance of merchants & moneylenders to multinationals & their banks. There were and are elements in Sri Lanka whose interests were and are very much hewn by hooves of imported steel from and to London. And speaking of steel…

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• The much applauded and awarded ‘apparel industry’ in Sri Lanka ran out of needles in 2020. Three years later, they have yet no plan to make a needle or a pin in Sri Lanka!

     ‘Apparel manufacture being a strategic industry, filling this hiatus should have been a number one priority,’ figures Vinod Moonesinghe. His compelling glimpse – more than an undressing, of what ee likes to call the ‘garment’ fraud – offers what Moonesinghe calls a ‘vital asset’, dominated by 3 companies – Brandix, Hirdaramani & MAS.(see ee Focus)

     Are they really Sri Lankan companies? – their principals belong to regional Indian merchant clans who have long been local agents of colonialism – or fronts for larger multinationals. And are they an ‘industry’ if they insistently refuse to make a pin? Indeed, others note:

     ‘Apparel exports cannot contribute to industrialisation unless there is a significant amount of localisation: local firms, local supply chains & linkages to other industries in the domestic economy. The apparel export sector may have been ‘the first manufacturing industry in most countries’, but ‘the stronger industrialising potential came from textile production & not apparel assembly’.(see ee Random notes)

     Moonesinghe speaks of a ‘limited’ yet ‘fair degree’ of vertical integration, yet it’s unclear how much of the textiles & clothes, the tools & machinery that make up this ‘industry’, are sourced in Sri Lanka.

     Further, the foreign firms they are linked to for supplies & markets have no interest in sourcing locally. Worse, their foreign principals actively sabotage the emergence of competitive local firms. Indeed the Big 3 arose on the graves of the local textile industry – they destroyed the Thulhiriya textile manufacturing complex, and turned it into warehouses for the Gujerati-owned MAS.

     The destruction of national assets (called by capitalists when it suits them, as state-owned enterprises – SoEs – is the BBC an SoE?) and deindustrialization, is a tried-&-true science. A ‘Korean investor’ in the Thulhiriya Textile Mill vanished leaving a multi$bn loan unsettled for a local bank. The skilled workers were chased away by goons.

     Modern industrial capitalism is not about collecting gold & gems but the means of making machines, and the accumulation of such means of production, physical & mental skills. This is the real test. The real capital accumulation.

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• The capitalist media loves to wail, ‘The people (electorate, public, sheep, etc) have such short memories’. But it is not people but the capitalist media itself who promote amnesia. How long must we tag along, lemming-like, and steadfastly refuse to learn from the nearest & best examples of renaissance? – China. The so-called middle-class are not just children of 1977, they are spawn of 1815 intrigue & massacres and not just of 1818… For just as the sun & moon rise & fall, wax & wane:

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‘Here begins our tale.

The empire, long divided, must unite;

Long united, must divide.

Thus it has ever been…’

– Romance of the Three Kingdoms (14^thC Chinese classic)

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‘China understands the lesson of history –

that hegemony preludes decline’

– A Global Community of Shared Future: China’s Proposals & Actions

The US, its European forebears, its settler cousins in Australia & Canada, & all their house-trained suddha scholars of kolor, in Colombo as in Delhi & London and New York, have been spreading lively & deadly paranoia around the world against China. And not only. Denying the existence of ‘colonialism’ & imperialism’ (to the extent of removing books from libraries, let alone preventing the teaching of such history! – & by the way this is their statist prerogative), they are yet quick to sling at their enemies such phrases – ‘Colonialist!’ ‘Imperialist’ ‘Despot’ – emptied of all content.

     Indeed, the favored white mode of attack is to accuse others of their own transgressions. Projection, it is called. There’s no better example than Canada’s expertise on all genocides except their own, which they claim is a thing of the past. All one has to do is to speak to one un-salaried de-feathered ‘Indian’ in Canada, to have history clatter (& rise) about your feet.

     On September 26, just before celebrating its 74^th anniversary of liberation on October 1, China released a rather compelling 22,000 words, A Global Community of Shared Future: China’s Proposals & Actions. While the white West menaces & rages preparing for another round of mass cannibalism (aka world wars), threatening to drag Sri Lanka down with them, China is offering a recipe for a just, equal & peaceful world of many cultures & thoughts.

     Sri Lanka’s Tamara Kunanayakam was in Beijing during their festivities to the autumnal moon, meditating on ‘Humanity in Crisis – Will Sri Lanka Accept the Challenge to Build a Maritime Community with a Shared Future?’ She begins by noting that Sri Lanka ‘has had to pay a heavy price for resisting pressures to become a camp-follower of an increasingly aggressive global hegemon (the US) in decline…’

     Indeed, as Kunanayakam notes, the USA’s ‘Free & Open Indo-Pacific strategy is no different from the logic that propelled Western colonial expansion’. ee therefore offers a very short history of the US Pacific Fleet beginning with The Last of the Mohicans author Fenimore Cooper’s speculations on the first US ships to the ‘Chinese seas.’ Ships whose opium cargos would make the first millionaires in the US. And it is opium & the English wars to sell it, with the US demanding ‘equal opportunity’ to do so as well, that indeed quite literally awakens somnolent Asia to the machine reality of modernity (see ee Focus). Will Sri Lanka awake and open its eyes wider to its own history and the real world?

Our Forests & Banks on the IMF Slave Block: Outa Colombo On to Marrakesh