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Before you study the economics, study the economists!”

6^th Anniversary Issue

e-Con e-News 15-21 September 2024

Welcome to ee’s 6^th anniversary issue: This ee doesn’t just recall our first tenuous scribblings (see ee Focus, 6 Years Ago: Who Took the Money? Shut Up!). The portentous perils under a Binara moon this week make us echo SBD de Silva’s advice to those seeking to unravel our dis-ease: ‘If you wish to learn about the state of the economy, talk a walk along the pavement, look at what is being sold, & where & how it is made. And why we cannot make it here?’ It is to SBD de Silva, author of the classic The Political Economy of Underdevelopment, to whom this sketchy blog ee is dedicated. He passed away on 15 June 2018, at the age of 92. ee blog began on 21 September 2018. Even more interesting times unfolded thenceforth. In such extremely ‘interesting times’ the world is facing now, ee would like to express our appreciation to all our supporters & critics!

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‘You go to the Bazaar & you talk nicely with the shopkeeper & get a good discount.

Why would you annoy him by asking stupid questions about the manufacturers?’

– Sri Lanka Daily Mirror Comment on News from Lebanon

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This weekend saw the presidential election uncurtain its expensive democratic diorama, with little mention (at least in English) of our actual political & economic challenges, leaving the country in its state of suspense. Yet more drama lies in store, and all from Negombo to Kattankudy & Jaffna & Chennai & Geneva, all must play their part. This election, we’re told, is about the US & India ‘prying’ a ‘debt-ridden’ Sri Lanka away from China’s ‘grip’. Thus spaketh Bloomberg Intelligence, another private lip service of the US State Department. It turns out we’re being ‘trapped in the US-led efforts to contain China’ (see Shamindra Ferdinando, Unprecedented 3-Cornered 2024 Polls midst External Interventions, ee Sovereignty). So, should we just bend or go limp in order that the NATO (S)Quad not be given further chances to devastate the country as they have done & would attempt, anyway, until they are rendered unable? Return to Sender!

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• ‘Bombshell’ & ‘A Can of Worms’ is how local media greeted NPP presidential aspirant Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s revelation in Kurunegala, on Tuesday, absolving former President Gotabhaya Rajapakse for the country’s 2022 downturn. So what was all that aragalaying all about? Then there was yet another ‘bombshell’ – when another presidential candidate, former Justice Minister Wijeydasa Rajapakse, pointed an invisible finger at the US & India for organizing the April 2019 terror. The terror turns out have been funded through the 2017 changes to the foreign exchange act, as demanded by the IMF. Here then is the wiggling tale of how dollars & remittances were ‘legally’ disappeared (see ee Random Notes & ee Focus), which is usually portrayed as resulting from our ignorance & corruption…

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• Just before Sri Lankans stepped up to our fabled polling booths to show how hip we are to the exorbitant democratic draperies of the imperialist world, we were given yet another powerful jolt by the USA, who demands that Sri Lanka & the ‘Indo-Pacific’ accede to their dictat. Or else!

     Soon after a Yemeni hypersonic missile jolted military installations in Tel Aviv, ‘Israel’ is said to have ‘retaliated’ by exploding pagers & walkie-talkies across Lebanon on Tuesday & Wednesday, 17-18 September. They also targeted hospitals, pharmacies, markets, shops, homes and vehicles. The exploding devices are said to have been tinkered during importation. So much for ‘smart’ homes & patriots.

     The so-called ‘oil-rich’ West Asians (Arabs, Iranian, who transmitted science & technology from East to West) have not invested in their own secure technology. And neither has Sri Lanka. And this is what ee’s 6^th anniversary issue is all about.

     The USA – the latest supreme conductor of the Concert of Europe, with colonies (in all but name) across Asia (from Turkey to India to Japan & Oceania), & Africa & the Americas (from the Arctic’s Beaufort Sea to Tierra del Fuego) – who funds & arms & gently nurses Israel, claims not to know who did it?! Their clangourous media, led by CNN & BBC, claim the ‘Israeli’ operation only targeted ‘terrorists’, and point shaky fingers along a supply chain from Taiwan & Japan to Qatar & Hungary, and now Bulgaria & Norway. To embed an explosive trigger within the new batch of pagers, ‘Israel’ was provided access to the supply chain of these devices, surreptitiously adding an explosive component & remote triggering mechanism into the Lebanon-bound shipment (see ee Random Notes).

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     It is most apropos therefore to peer into the controls over new technologies especially by celebritified(!) ‘entrepreneurs’ such as the South African & US settler Elon Musk, the head (who turns out to not exactly be the ‘founder’) of electric vehicle (EV) maker Tesla. Musk purportedly monopolizes certain tech as well as so-called (heavily corporatized) ‘social media’. After all, Musk is famous for twitting, ‘We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it,’ after the US coup against Bolivia’s Aymara President Evo Morales in 2020.  Musk wishes to grab Bolivia’s lithium, though he later backtracked: ‘We get our lithium from Australia.’

     ee already stated, Musk ‘has to perform as a celebrity frontman for organized capitalism’s more anonymous asset managers’. We therefore assess the JVP’s Sunil Handunhetti’s measure of Musk as an ‘economic hitman’, after the still-President Ranil Wickremesinghe touted Musk as yet another possible salvager of Sri Lanka’s economy.

     As a ‘celebrity’ entrepreneur he has to mimic a certain egoism, swagger & je ne sais quoi. Yet we know why he must be basking in former US president Trump recently calling him the ‘greatest cutter’, for his mass layoffs at Twitter & Tesla. And it is not a matter of setting up a faux assembly line in Kuliyapitiya with the aid of the import-mafia’s Ceylon Motor Traders Association. Indeed, for all his ‘disruption’, Musk has to operate within the ‘culture’ of the US automobile industry, and its supply chains, in Japan, in China. His ‘electric’ green economy has been enabled by the state enforcement of ‘climate’ laws. Meanwhile, their media ignores that China’s EV sales in July just surpassed 50% of all car sales; and instead rant about needing 100% North America & EU tariffs against the ‘unfair’ competition of China’s EVs (under $20,000, a fraction of US costs… The whites appear to be looking more than acting green!)

     Indeed, Musk may end up suppressing the ‘industrialization’ of our own abundant highest-quality graphene into batteries. Graphene batteries offer significant energy density, charge speed, and overall efficiency, over both lead-acid & the lithium-ion batteries that Musk uses (see ee Focus). Yet those invested in lithium batteries, like Musk, may claim graphene is more expensive, and difficult to mass produce at scale, than traditional batteries. ee sees no better time than now for Sri Lanka to develop its graphene and make our own high-tech e-batteries?

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The covert US-backed terrorist attacks this week on Lebanon reminds how our countries have little sovereignty over who & what comes in & goes out of our borders. This is evident, not just with capital & dollar transfers and ports, but in the maritime boundaries as well.

     ‘Why did successive governments adopt policies to aid fraudulent traders to misdeclare country of origin’ (asks former Director General of Commerce Sri Lanka, Sonali Wijeratne, Great import/re-export scam set to destroy local production, ee Economists). Indeed, in April 2024, Customs trade unions, themselves under attack by shipping company owners (led by Maersk) for being ornery & corrupt, instead pointed out how the new Customs Ordinance handed over executive power to private shippers. They added: ‘The government of good governance, which existed previously, had annulled the Foreign Exchange Control Act and …created relaxed policies [that] halted the scope for regulating foreign exchange in this country, and all of us are having to suffer its consequences as of today.’

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This is one more reason to simply despise & reject wholesale this media business of labelling politicians alone as corrupt. Let’s honor those national politicians who have strived to build the country out of 500 years & more, of devastation. Less than half the country was deemed literate when the English claimed to exit (but didn’t!) in 1948. Only 1% of the population was gauged literate in English. And infant mortality was 27%!

     What continues to hold us down is not corrupt at all. It is all perfectly legal! Like their genocidal wars on Korea & Myanmar. Like their genocides in Congo & Yemen & Gaza. Where are the UN ‘peacekeepers’, the loudmouthed UNHRC etc, basking in the sun on doing-goodism and ending up very-well on dollar payrolls?

     And as for our economy. It is all legit, this merchant & moneylender capitalism – to which we have been enchained. This Import-Export colonial plantation economy. But don’t depend on the USA’s IMF to tell us any different:

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 ‘If we analyse the key issues other than ‘Cost of Living’ ‘

that a typical consumer is up against [it’s] ‘Corruption’.

These were the key findings of the IMF 16-point plan that was presented.’

– Rohantha Athukorala, Qualitative Study by India’s

Quantum Research Agency (see ee Economists)

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It is the uncorrupt & innumerate IMF that calculates – after 500 years & more of this flim-flummery about the wonders of English colonialism – that somehow we owe them. That what they have been doing across the world should continue to be.

     The history of the franchise in Sri Lanka is not just of preserving colonial control through deindustrialization. It is a story of trying to prevent the actual role of the people, while presenting facades of representation: from official & unofficial representatives, appointed & educated (read: civilized), merchants & moneylenders, communal members, proportional representatives, etc.

     A true history choreographing the ballet of the ballot in the shadow of the bullet would array the delights of 76 years of English parliamentary parlez-vous while underwearing the straitjackets of a franchise limited by finance & fiat. At the first election held under colonial auspices in 1947, planters carried guns to deter workers, upper castes blockaded lower castes out of chaste voting booths, etc.

     After targeting the iron & steel workshops and related tool & weapon makers, the English (& that cavalcade of invaders before them) prioritized the destruction of a complex irrigation system on which the solidarity of the village was based. We certainly learn little about the purana Gam Sabha (village council) system, but it appears to be, given the historical context, much more ‘democratic’ than what claims to rule the country now. And this now, contentious as it is, still remains far more democratic than what transpired under colonial rule before 1948.

     Instead of clasping our long Sinhala Buddhist culture & civilization of production and the powerful hand of the state the guides such endeavours, a still-colonial education system & media & other ideological machines (you’re probably reading this on an imported device subject to all manner of imported ‘impulses’!) instead promotes an imported romanticism & fantasy which amounts to anarchism & nihilism and inevitable despair. Rather than the US, England & EU deploying spies in the guise of election monitors across the country, it is we, along with all our struggling comrade countries, who should really be monitoring them….

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Contents:

The USA is Paging Sri Lanka: Get the Message?