The Bollywood-Media Manufacture of Mock Entrepreneurs
Posted on July 14th, 2024
e-Con e-News
blog: eesrilanka.wordpress.com
‘Before you study the economics, study the economists!’
e-Con e-News 07-13 July 2024
‘Stay order issued on Gazette increasing daily wage of plantation workers’
– Ada Derana, July 04
‘National Chamber of Exporters expresses concern over Customs disruptions’
– Financial Times, July 12
‘Nearly 1,000 railway termination letters sent for print’
– Daily Mirror, July 11
Pantomimes keep being performed from port to plantation, and on the trains in between – the principal pressure points of the colonial import-export fraud of a merchant economy. The capitalist media (avenging teflon tribunes of the squeaky clean) egg-on the face-off between government & trade union officials. Rail services – left to rot at the behest of the car-import financiers – only have deadly problems when workers go on strike, or when trains fail to deliver fuel to the fast movers & high flyers.
But behold! We were treated once again to the ruddy pink faces of the departing old World Bank Group Country Management, coyly bidding ta-ta. The WB even got a supine media to publish yet another WB press release, issuing a public ‘Thank you!’ For what? ee (1 Jan 2022) already reported on The World Bank Driving Madness on Our Roads.
Perhaps the World Bank’s thank you is for the ‘good news’ about bondholding baldheads taking the shortest crewcuts, with odious debts being repackaged as dubious IMF my-way-or-the-highway package-tours to paradise (via Wall Street)… All this was reported out loud and in technicolor, and in the higher algebra of usury. All this in the week following the National Bankers Association’s celebratory gathering at Colombo’s Galle Face Hotel, Friday, July 5, of which there was less than the ever-little news we hear from bankers, other than their rates. Oh wait! They want their powers – to foreclose & dispossess defaulters on their loans provided for speculation – sustained, if not expanded.
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The Employers’ Federation of Ceylon (EFC) held their 95th Annual General Meeting this week. Remember 1929? It was a harbor & tramways strike, with the English police killing 5 unnamed workers, that led to the formation of the EFC. The signing of the first collective agreement on wages & working conditions with AE Goonesinghe’s Ceylon Mercantile Union (CMU), began trade union legislation in Lanka. (That was a ‘sweetheart’ agreement signed after Goonesinghe was wined and dined and whatever-elsed in London in preparation for the Donoughmore Commission’s constitutional shenanigans to ‘reorient’ colonial rule through the ‘depression’).
• This week also saw the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce (led by England’s Standard Chartered Bank, John Keells, Ernst & Young, etc) swarming the President to drape their Vision 2030 over his eyes.
The President may not have asked them why, as Sunday Times headline records: ‘Imported inputs eat up US$ 1billion of apparel trade export income of $1.9bn’ And then, about an almost adjacent headline of an upcoming ‘Global Textiles Sourcing Exhibition in Colombo 7-9 August’,where the‘SL RMG (Ready-Made Garment) industry sources [aka imports, a] vast array of natural & manmade textiles, trims, accessories, dyes, chemicals & software solutions by connecting with over 200 suppliers from over 15 countries.’ How long can this go on? It’s not that we should not have international relations. It’s just that this fancy rag trade proudly does not make a pin, refuses to reinvest profits in upgrading skills & making machinery, and instead parks its profits abroad. Are these all entrepreneurs too?
As SBD always said, if the country became one giant ‘garment’ factory, we would not need schools! Meanwhile, the white media celebrated, with white celebrities (incl. English mass-murderers Tony Blair & Boris Johnson!) in tow, the over-the-top half-billion dollar wedding of a scion of the family Ambani, which draped Indian & Sri Lankan bodies in plastic (for Ambani links to US Exxon & Dupont: ee 11 Sept 2021, How to Buy an Editor – Media & the Rise of the Polyester Prince).
It may also be timely to recall it was the EFC that called for the mass sackings of 60,000 workers in July 1980, that then escalated the carnage of the 1980s and beyond. It may also be timely to contrast their attitude to the latest branding in the North Atlantic to bribe (& weaponize) their workers, while threatening nuclear war:
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– US President Joe Biden (see ee Workers)
The traders’ media in Sri Lanka, rather than examine the merchants’ failure to invest in workers and technology, have to conjure various failings on the part of the population for their inability to employ people with dignity to build the country.
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‘Entrepreneurship the new mantra? – Well, I am writing
about entrepreneurship as it has suddenly become
the rave among politicians, trying to provide an avenue
for youngsters to enhance their skills & transform
into innovative businesspersons, & thereby secure their vote.’
– Feizal Samath, Sunday Times (see ee Economists)
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The Sunday Times’ snipers are being super snide. Their actual target is the new political manifesto on ‘The Entrepreneurial State’ by the Sarvajana Balaya (SB, see below). Also, the word ‘entrepreneur’ has been thrown around in English in Sri Lanka since the 1950s, and in the North Atlantic since the 1930s at least.
‘In underdeveloped economies… entrepreneurs are an extremely small tribe
& this is one important reason why development is so slow.’
BB Das Gupta, ‘Theory & Reality of Economic Development’,
Bulletin, Central Bank of Ceylon, Oct 1955
Entrepreneur: As far as we can tell, Gupta’s usage is the first official registration of this English word in Sri Lanka. ‘Entrepreneur’ is now part of the latest abracadabra invoking modernity, being used by politicians & their parties. It is apparently another civilizing trait we lack. Infected by economists, these civilizers like to piss these heavily machined words on our heads to display the power of their funders & their cojones.
SBD de Silva countered: Gupta assigns the capitalist entrepreneur ‘the role of a creator rather than the creature of the process’. Entrepreneurs are what underdeveloped countries supposedly lack. Yet what we really need is a process that produces entrepreneurs, invents inventors, manufactures manufacturers. (see ee Random Notes)
Our economic departments & their curricula appear nonchalant about such subjects. How the Indian University of Lucknow’s BB Das Gupta, Sri Lanka’s 1st teacher of economics (with the Hayekist BR Shenoy as assistant lecturer), came to be parachuted into University College of Sri Lanka’s Modern History & Economics department under the imperialist SA Pakeman, is indeed interesting, and tied into the history of the word ‘entrepreneur’ itself .
The USSR led by Joseph Stalin was at that time offering the world: the example of the first socialist state whose workers had rapidly transformed their country to become one of the most powerful industrial nations, and remains so to this day. English imperialism therefore sought to destroy the USSR & prevent any such transformations anywhere else, by imposing fake labor-intensive industrialization and a fake middleclass.
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The Central Bank has been hailed as
the counterpart of our political freedom.
– Walter Ladduwahetty, 1950 (see ee Random Notes)
This ee also examines the ‘colonial’ & ‘Indian’ origins of the Central Bank, which keeps promoting funny-money games, and has actively prevented investment of the country’s vast wealth, in modern industry. The new Central Bank Act proclaiming its so-called independence imposes similar constraints as were imposed by colonial England rule via India. Even after independence, the CB could ‘issue Rupees in Ceylon only when Rupees were deposited in India, with the Reserve Bank of India’ (see ee Random Notes)
By having to target inflation alone, the CBSL can now only respond & react to external shocks & changes in the prices of imported essentials like fuel, which drive inflation. The CB cannot expand the money supply to initiative productive economic activity. Neither can it selectively lower the price of money to fuel productive activity. The interest rate is the price of money. That is why it is so expensive to be poor, because money costs more when you are not ‘creditworthy’. Such shenanigans, all perfectly legal and not corrupt at all, have shut down the dream of a true development bank, which could have given flesh to deposed former-CB-governor WD Lakshman’s dream of a ‘school of development’:
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‘Yet, a dream I had of seeing the evolution of a distinct ‘school
of development‘ within the Sri Lankan university system remains
unachieved: an administrative outfit located in a university complex,
devoted for advancing its own independent thinking and policy positions,
particularly in issues of development. I hope the future generations of university
economists will seriously undertake this challenging task of developing
such an independent Sri Lankan school of development.
– WD Lakshman, ee Focus
An incomprehensible arithmetic has taken over the debates over odious debt bondage. Discussions of finance disengage economics from its exact effects on human relations. If wages & prices represent hidden labor, the media’s economists do not tell us in simple words what will happen to whom & when.
Clues as to how this number-crunching nonchalance has come about may be found in ee Focus’ final episode of WD Lakshman’s survey of the ‘Beginnings of Economics Teaching at University Level’. He examines how faculties of Management & Business Studies (but does not tell who – & how & why they were – funded) tremendously impacted the teaching of Economics. The increasing use of mathematics in teaching and writing on subjects in Economics, also enhanced student apathy towards Economics. WD recalls how with the ‘strong push towards a neoliberal package of economic policy in the 1990s, the earlier interdisciplinarity in Economics teaching, was dropped in favor of neoclassical hardcore Economics.
We have already tasted the toxic harvest of such pedagogy in the current crop of pronouncers on Economics. Check Chanuka Wattegama’s seemingly tongue-in-cheek ‘Should an Econ student take Harshanomics 201?, in the Financial Times, which gently laments the CTC-AOG twins Harsha & Eran, etc, for shunning Premadasa’s garment fraud. He provides witty summary of how newspaper column economists & thinktanks have come to unanimously toe the same Chicago gangsta gospel… (see ee Random Notes)
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