e-Con e-News

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

e-Con e-News 14-20 April 2024

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‘Firstly, the political parties & party politics,

and secondly the Executive Presidency;

both these structures should be abolished.

Thirdly, the independence of the judiciary

should be maintained. Fourthly all the appointments

in ministries & government institutions

such as Central Bank, Treasury, etc, should be managed

by non-political, non-partisan persons,

and all political appointees should be sent home.

Lastly, the religious institutions headed by Buddhist Sangha

should undergo a radical change’. – AT Ariyaratne, Sarvodaya’s Supreme Leader

92-year-old Ahangamage Tudor Ariyaratne, controverted founder of the Lanka Jathika Sarvodhaya Shramadana Movement has made the transition – into samsara; others suggest he may have exited samsara. ee is not qualified to pass judgement.

     US envoy Julie Chung’s media twit machine immediately twittered, that she was ‘grateful to the just deceased… for the ‘opportunities to partner with Sarvodhaya over many years’, having ‘supported his efforts to uplift the lives of countless…’ etc., etc. , You know the yankee prattle. Fill in the blanks!

     Then there’s the head of USAID’s National Peace Council of Sri Lanka, Jehan Perera, gushing: ‘Dr AT Ariyaratne, the most important person for all time!’

     Others point to Ariyaratne’s more honorable role as a young man in the Bauddha Jathika Balavegaya (BJB) formed following the abortive ‘Catholic Army Officers Coup in January 1962’.  They recall Ariyaratne speaking first at BJB meetings, always placing stress ‘on Ahimsa (non-violence) a cardinal tenet of Buddhism’. They recount Ariyaratne’s rendition of the proceedings of the Press Commission (1963-64), established by Sirimavo Bandaranaike’s Government ‘to highlight anti-Buddhist activities and focus attention on immoral acts treacherous to the nation’:

‘The Press is an instrument which is primarily meant to serve

the real interests of a country. It can also be misused. If we were not satisfied

that the newspapers of the Lake House & the Times groups were guilty

of anti-national & anti–Buddhist conduct on a large scale, we would not have recommended

a drastic change in the ownership of the newspapers belonging to these groups.

From the evidence placed before us, we are satisfied that the existing newspapers

did not hesitate to fabricate, suppress, slant, or distort news & views whenever it suited them.

They have been further guilty of anti-national & anti-Buddhist activities, which

are more serious than the earlier-mentioned lapses on their part. Indeed,

the most vehement critics of the present activities of the Press were the Buddhists

& some of their organizations, and we are satisfied that their grievances are genuine

& should be removed. Buddhist leaders have been falsely accused of being intolerant.

Their hopes & ambitions receive scant consideration, and their rightful place

due to their religion has been denied by the newspapers. This has been deliberately done

to help the minorities, in particular, the Christian minorities, to perpetuate

the unjust privileges acquired by them during the last 4 centuries

at the expense of the Buddhist Majority.

(Final Report of the Press Commission, 1964)

So why did Ariyaratne go where he went after that, and what made him go that way? Some are spreading gossip of his outré proclivities. Yet here are Ariyaratne’s own words:

‘I got disillusioned with politics. An idea was born in my mind

that a social revolution minus political colouring should be staged.

The Sarvodaya Shramadana movement was the outcome of this thinking’

– AT Ariyaratne

What matters to us at ee is that Ariyaratne’s Sarvodhaya has helped throw rural people (their proletarianization the cornerstone of any industrial modernity) into debt by getting them to buy imported Indian, Japanese & US agricultural machinery, rather than investing any profits they were allowed to make, investing in making those machines here, and upskilling rural people – developing a working class dedicated to capital accumulation:

     Instead, Sarvodhaya – now headed by Ariyaratne’s son Vinya (who this month was ‘judging’ corrupt public servants on behalf of Transparency International, and was also a guest speaker at Harvard Asia Pacific Regional Conference) – was turned into the country’s largest NGO (excluding private & multinational corporations, Unilever, Exxon, etc) – one of the oldest of the Rockefeller and US-government-funded NGOs (see Random Notes on Rockefeller & Ford Foundation).

     ‘Is Sarvodaya a credible NGO, being more or less a family-run organisation? asked The Island in August 2020, after the US government had announced another set of millions in funding some exercise in promoting those types of democracy and ‘free media’ that only dollars can buy.

     Sarvodhaya, in cahoots with the Norwegian government, had illegally settled in the Vanni those Indians being sent back to India under the 1964 Sirima-Shastri Pact. These later became ‘the last soldiers of the LTTE’… provisioning their ‘elite’ or hapless suicide bombers…

     ee also cannot forget Ex-JVPer & later-UNPer Victor Ivan’s Ravaya was started off with a nudge, elbow & heads-up from Sarvodhaya. Ariyaratne provided their ample printing facilities for Ravaya to print its weekly tabloid, on a pay-later basis. Ravaya was birthed along with the Canada-government-funded Yukthiya & Sarnihar, to attempt the impeachment of President R Premadasa. These tabloids were always one of the instruments used by their white masters, sotto-sotto on imperialism, enabled to disseminate their limited perspectives despite limited circulation and ads, which would have made any other papers collapse, unless funded ‘under the table’.

     Sarvodhaya also backed the allegedly nonpartisan General Mahesh Senanayake, linked to the US military, when he ran for President in 2019 against Gotabhaya Rajapakse. Senanayake as the topmost officer responsible for the Directorate of Military Intelligence, was accused of not preventing the Islamic attacks on churches, but gave no believable answers as to why he had not prevented them.

     During the so-called Aragalaya, which then led to the ousting of supposedly nepotistic Rajapakse, Sarvodhaya helped provide services for a 24/7 field hospital with St John’s Ambulance… (health facilities, which were not of much use, when he passed away at a private hospital). Perhaps it is such ‘opportunities’ engineered by Sarvodhaya, et al, that the US government’s Chung is so ‘grateful’ to Ariyaratne.

Sarvodaya has never challenged Sri Lanka’s big banks,

even the state-owned ones, who raise a significant portion

of their deposits at low cost from rural

& economically disadvantaged areas & grant most loans

in Colombo, to large businesses & the government.

Banks fund up to 90% of their business through

such rural customer deposits. Bank shareholders only fund around 10%.

Sarvodaya was ‘founded’ by the Rockefeller-funded and much-awarded Ariyaratne in 1958. Ariyaratne received the Jamnalal Bajaj Award in 1991, and was nominated to the US-installed Yahapalana government’s Constitutional Council as ‘a civil representative’ in 2015. Indeed, Ariyaratne and Sarvodhaya have earned their accolades: Ramon Magsaysay Award (Philippines) 1969, King Baudouin Award for International Development (Belgium) 1982, Niwano Peace Price (Japan) 1992, and Mahatma Gandhi Peace Prize (India)…

     By 1986 the import-export oligarchy were alerted to their failure yet again to fitfully employ yet another generation who had come of employable and martial age. The oilgarchy began stoking the great murderous war of terror on the South, and with another in progress in the north, Sarvodaya Economic Enterprise Development Services (SEEDS, a microcredit division of Sarvodaya) was thus licensed to entice rural consumption. Sarvodaya Development Finance (SDF) was formed in 2010 as the economic arm of Sarvodaya.

     52% of SDF is owned by SEEDS, 22% by Sarvodaya-related entities, and 13% by other shareholders.  Other investors ‘from Sri Lanka and overseas’ include Japan’s Gentosha Total Consulting, with its origins in paedophilic Manga magazines! There is no mention of who exactly owns which shares that have voting rights. This the media will not report!  SDF ‘debuted’ in Dec 2021 on the Colombo Stock Exchange, promising to use profits to develop villages. ‘Sarvodaya had committed over a billion rupees for development of 5,300 villages in which it operates. Though the company will be profitable, dividends from SDF will be put back into villages.’ The qualifier ‘though’ does seem curious.

     SDF now proudly proclaims that 80% of their multibillion+-rupee portfolio is lent (unlike the big banks) outside the Western province. Of this multibillion-rupee loan portfolio, several billion are for leases funding tractors. They’ve proudly noted: ‘None of its tractor loans [are] in the non-performing category’. So what is in the non-performing category? And what about harvesters too? We won’t ask what has happened to the buffalos, from whose milk Europeans make expensive artisanal cheese, and would like to export to Colombo’s.

     All SDF does is sell foreign (Indian, Japanese, US) machinery and goods to rural farmers (see ee Sept-Dec 2021). For Sarvodaya, whose figurehead leaders affect Gandhist simplisms and wear national couture, development is not investment in modern industry or upgrading technical (scientific & artistic) skills of villagers to make those machines they lease and sell.

     SDF’s deals with foreign ‘machinery retailers’are mainly Indian industrial fronts for imperialist industrial companies: (India’s Mahindra, Swaraj & TAFE, & US’ Massey Ferguson etc.) that ‘allow farmers to access modern farming machinery, such as tractors & harvesters… Leasing solutions are available for 2wheelers, 3wheelers, & other 4wheelers to enhance individual lifestyles.’

     Sarvodaya never demands that US Massey or India’s Mahindra or Japan’s Kubota build those machines here? His organization was an excuse for preventing actual agricultural policy to industrialize the rural so people coulda made the pencils and books and shoes and clothes their children needed …

     SDF is linked to US government media mouths (and they have many) in Sri Lanka like EconomyNext. SDF Chairman Channa de Silva is Founder Chairman of Capital Media, publishers of Echelon business magazine and web portal economynext.com. He previously served as a director of Summit Finance, Delmege, Pan Asia Bank, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) SL and the Board of Investments (BOI) SL!

     The autocratic Ariyaratne was incinerated with honors by state. Media reported that Sarvodhaya village upliftment program began in the Rodi village of Kanatholuwa in the Kurunegala district in 1958, and spread to 15,000 villages, praising Ariyaratne for freeing people from caste oppression. Researchers who have studied other ‘caste villages’ in Sri Lanka since the late 1970s, note that in the 20 years since Sarvodaya had started his ‘revolution’, the only difference that had taken place was that marriages had begun to be ‘mediated’ by government officials, who gave new birth certificates with surnames belonging to the govi (farming) caste. They note that the only decisive protest movements against casteism were organized by the scientific socialist movements. Sarvodhaya and other religious organizations only made caste divisions a ‘beggar’s wound’. Sarvodhaya and other non-governmental organizations [NGOs] went to caste villages only after these socialist movement were attacked and weakened. They have set up family corporations aka NGOs, which have ended up as colossal failures. The best examples of that can be found in Ariyaratne’s Sarvodhaya as well as his sister’s son, Harsha Kumara Navaratne’s Seva Lanka. Both those organizations are family companies, with the financial controllers also being close relatives of the family. Researchers ask how these the organizations that exist as clannish clubs can create any kind of a just society?

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‘In virtually every colonial territory a certain number had to be killed

before the survivors would accept the new prospects.

This might even be said to introduce a new concept

into the study of political economy – the indispensable minimum of murder.’

S. B. D. de Silva, The Political Economy of Underdevelopment

The Emperor is not only naked, he & she and they & theirs are thoroughly enjoying their nakedness, in open broad televised daylight, exposing what was previously relegated to so-called snuff porn movies. The Emperor’s minions are now shown raping, dismembering & murdering whole masses of people as evident in US-occupied Palestine and occasionally disclosed in their old & new theatres of horror, horror, horror, from the fragmented Congo to divided Korea, from 1965 Indonesia to 2002 Guantanamo, but now available on media, social yet mostly anti-socialist (of the scientific kind, that is).

     The lesson they wish to teach us is that those who resort to armed self-defence against their military invasions & occupations will be exterminated – a lesson supposedly taught to and imbibed by the original peoples of the Americas, and those Africans kidnapped and sold as enslaved chattel for their American plantations, and their present-day colonies in Asia (Japan, South Korea) and Africa.

     And ringing & resounding through these centuries and over & under all their forever wars today is their thoroughly absurd sermons, echoed by their NGO boys & girls & in-betweens, about human rights and rule of law, etc. And so, with the annual meetings of the USA’s international financial institutions in Washington – where corporate lobbyists have assembled 1,000s of prostitutes, male and female, to teach central bankers and their delegations from around the world the other bondage and discipline and sado-masochism (BDSM) – their perpetual news blows fire and ice, one minute demanding submission to IMF dictat, the next minute lamenting the lot of those they are stealing from. And so…

     Into the middle of a smouldering bonfire about to be exploded in Sri Lanka again, their media this week continued tossing their combustible gunpowders, which promise more glorious fireworks, some LGBTQXYZ rights, some so-called ‘ethnic’, so-called ‘minority’ and ‘gender’ rights, then in jumps an estate workers’ strike, with their kangany-turned trade union leader, son of a son of a son, invited into that global brothel known as the World Economic Forum, all flung head first into the conflagration with the required fogs and smokes and minute-by-minute ‘mirrors’ all needed to sell off people’s right to labor and life, and related national resources, all for a song to international bondholders who are really North Atlantic mass murderers & extortionists, who can stand back as far as they can from whatever toxic shrapnel & noxious gases they explode & emanate… all so that the import-export plantation oligarchy ruling Sri Lanka can rescue itself out of the hangover from the orgy it has indulged in for the last decades and centuries (choose your frame: 1948, 1795, 1659, 1505, etc…)

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This ee Focus looks at the role the JVP has been playing or has been asked to play, seemingly acceding to the selling of the country’s most treasured resources to USA & its chief colonies (EU, Japan, India. etc). ee also looks at the comparison made between Sri Lanka and Greece, in particular the Greek party Syriza, which once claimed to be ‘Radical Left’ and the JVP, once a cadre party that seems to have survived 2 annihilation campaigns, and still calls itself a Marxist-Leninist Party, which somehow got into a suicidal internecine war with other Marxist-Leninist Parties, leaving both sides open to infiltration by  ‘Third Forces’ – the Empire’s counter-insurgency political police… who create and run fake Leftists, socialists, communists, etc.

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Stefanos Kasselakis, a candidate for President in Greece suddenly appeared, out of the blue. He vied for and took over the leadership of so-called ‘Radical Left’ Greek party Syriza and then split it into two. He had once volunteered for Joe Biden’s 2008 election campaign and for Wshington’s CSIS (Center for Strategic and International Studies) foreign policy think tank, worked at Goldman Sachs and in the shipping industry. He then ran for the leadership of Syriza, whose state ballot he had joined, in a non-elected position, in 2023, as a representative of the Greek expatriate diaspora in the USA. Kasselakis lives within a same-sex marriage and helped to accelerate a division of Syriza into two components, weakening it rather than reinforcing it, as he had promised to do.

     ‘This saw a capture of Left ideology by the liberal Empire’: Imperialist ideology, because it is supposed to be pluralistic, ‘must create a semblance of pluralism, as long as this pluralism is under control. The Empire has its Right and its Left, which precisely do not question its essence and aims. Any other ‘Right’ is accused of being nostalgic of Hitler, and any other ‘Left’ of being nostalgic of Stalin – or at least of being merely backward, out of time, etc.’

     The party retains certain policies to prevent being cut off from its mass base, but then rather than leading, it ditches other more vital policies, basing leadership on so-called surveys and polls. In Sri Lanka, the latest ‘polls’ and ‘surveys’ promoting the JVP are funded by the CIA’s Asia Foundation, who is also tirelessly training Sri Lanka’s judiciary.

     These polls can pretend to be a more democratic way to govern, but they are a fake ‘democratic’ ruse to win elections. Some leaders given media coverage, start to feel vain, and come to be believe they are really talented and find themselves offered some ‘spontaneous’ help from those who have suddenly ‘recognized’ their talents. They then get easily manipulated, and are soon adjusting their positions to ‘electoral needs’ – which happen to be the needs of those who sponsor politicians… ahem… the ‘brought to you by’ folks. Guess who?     

     Societies of the past used to make warriors of the young people, and politicians of the old, who tempered the momentum of the younger. The warriors now are mostly traders and financiers, and the politicians do the biddings of traders and financiers. They are chosen, educated and sponsored by traders and financiers. And they sell out everything without any remorse of conscience… without even realizing what they are doing. They tend to believe that the only necessary qualification is intelligence. The neutralisation of all convictions and beliefs is pursued today in a very methodical way.

     The most powerful parties and manipulators of the establishment (Multinational Corporations and their boards of directors, the BJP’s RSS, Trump’s Bannon, etc) have justifiably adopted and distorted Lenin’s cadre-based political party, as the most efficient route to capturing power.

     The former leader of Syriza, Alexis Tsipras, opened the door to Kasselakis’ leadership by allowing ‘the people’ – not tried and true dedicated cadre from the grassroots but astroturf – to nominate party candidates: ‘Isn’t it all the more democratic, if, instead of the party members, it is the people who decide?

     ‘Now, which people are we talking of? Well, the voters of the party, certainly, only we don’t know them, not before the elections, since they have not voted yet, not after, since the election is secret. How are we to distinguish them from others then? Well, let’s say they will be the ones willing to pay a fee in order to vote. But this fee cannot be very significant, for that would not be democratic. Result: by paying 2 euros anyone can vote. Let’s face it then: the leader of a party can be elected by supporters other than those of the party (under some critical mass of a party they can even be a majority)! It is important to understand how this was made possible, what the underlying presuppositions are. The word ‘party’ itself underlined the discontinuity as a characteristic of the electoral body, it is a word belonging to another era. There are no parts in our ‘liquid times’, only hydraulic pressures to be managed; imperial ideology wants continuity and for continuity’s sake it has to liquidate everything. In this context parties are no longer parties, they are variables of adjustment. In the process, liberal democracy first ceases to be a democracy, and manages to be liberal only as long as it can export illiberalism at the periphery of the Empire and blackmail its constituents to conformity….’ (crudely adapted from Christos Marsellos’s Golden Boys & ‘Young Leaders: Syriza in search of a New Leader, Sept 2023, see ee Politics)

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Contents:
https://eesrilanka.wordpress.com/2024/04/20/the-naked-emperor-exxon-sarvodhaya-the-jvp/

The Naked Emperor – Exxon, Sarvodhaya & the JVP