e-Con e-News

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

e-Con e-News 17-23 November 2024

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‘It is the responsibility of AKD to see that that elite class will

not raise its head again & there will be a society in which

wealth & prosperity are shared more equitably by all.

If he fails, he will also face the same fate as his predecessors.’

– WA Wijewardena (see ee Economists, Economic Challenges

of New Government: Road ahead not smooth, but treacherous

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‘Remains to be seen if JVP has discarded

its turbulent past is true’ – Sunday Times

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‘Sri Lanka’s new government should do everything to regain

the ‘B’ credit rating by 2027-28 to pay back its creditors

including the IMF through affordable market borrowings.’

– World Bank Sri Lanka Lead Economist Gregory Smith

(ee Economists, SL needs ‘B’ credit rating to repay IMF: WB)

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‘In today’s times when flow of capital takes place globally &

many a time without any controls, it is important that Sri Lanka

becomes a strong sovereign state in the region to begin with,

a state that boldly spells its terms & conditions, & also cleverly wades

through the complex diplomatic tunnels in the region.’

– Ravi Kumar (ee Economists, New Sri Lanka & Challenges)

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‘In the East, & in practically all of the countries where communists had

taken power, the principal problem of political leadership was not the

‘withering away of the state apparatus’ but how to avoid the danger

of colonial or neocolonial subjection, & how, therefore, to make up

 for backwardness in relation to the more industrially advanced countries.’

– Domenico Losurdo (Western Marxism, 2024)

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There seems to be no end to the experts proffering good wishes & advices to the latest oarsmen, sightseeing on the Diyavanna. Others are demanding their slice of newly fried soya sausages, signing petitions demanding this & that percentage as usual. Academics, current & long retired, are speedily dropping their pants to flaunt chemically inflated & soggy credentials. None can even broach the inevitability of demanding a modern industrialization that must recapture our home market from the imperialist multinational banks & corporations – for only a machine-making industrialized society can cast off all odious debts. The foreign vampires also believe they have crippled (or made ‘independent’!) the Central Bank to prevent its investment in such modern endeavors.

     The ruling import-export plantation oligarchy still remains, also as the main ‘opposition’. Our fate somehow in the claws of an infamous New York District Court, with Exxon Rockefeller’s Citibank on both sides of the bargaining table (see ee Random Notes). The US government has apparently got ‘dirt’ on all our supposed leaders, past, present… Yet, the future still always appears uncertain…

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• Big bankers & the innumerable chambers of commerce (a narrow gang of importers), who hold a large amount of the so-called debt that the people supposedly owe, are all congratulating the NPP government, and wishing them luck. Good luck indeed! They must certainly know something, the people do not know? Certainly the ‘landslide’ proclaimed by all & sundry, appears less ‘land’ and more ‘slide…’, if the actual mathematics & the divisions among the ‘traditional’ ruling oligarchy are actually tabulated.

            With US, Japanese & Indian advisors & warships sailing in & out of the country, while a supposedly defeated & brain-dead US President is threatening nuclear war, midst the US attempt to shakedown the financial backers of India’s Narendra Modi government, the NPP government is said to have chosen that media-foggy day of Friday to have signed the long-debated 17^th IMF deal, a deal they once clearly opposed, that pension funds are being plundered for…

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• Other native informants including that breed of AC’d NGO ‘Marxists’, house-trained in London, are announcing to the world such fables as ‘Sri Lanka’s People have Kicked out the Old Political Class’ (see ee Economists). Others of their ilk, more cautious, are adding the disclaimer, ‘even if temporarily’. Now what kind of ‘Marxists’ are these, to confuse the electoral political class with the overall political & economic ruling class? Even the traditional electoral manipulators have not been defeated. They have simply stepped back, to lick their wounds, if any, and to regroup & submit in more monstrous & complete fashion to imperialist dictat. The vampire class has not been defeated. Having handed over a poisoned chalice of a rigged polity, this invisible highest class hopes to smash from this not-very-high electoral pedestal, what they feel is the last of the Sinhala Buddhist (in substance if not in name) resistance in the country.

     It may be karma? if we also recall the JVP role, however justified they may feel, in the undermining of the 1970-77 Sirimavo Bandaranaike ‘Left’ coalition, which subsequently imploded, soon after the US-plotted annihilation of the Salvador Allende ‘Marxist’ government in Chile in 1973… Karma, like those proverbial chickens, always comes home to roost (unless they end up as modified meat at a KFC outlet).

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• The weekly economist WA Wijewardena, with his 1,000 or more columns, has never sought to spell out how this ‘society in which wealth & prosperity are shared more equitably’ could come about, and why it is all hangs heavily on the shoulders of an Executive President – a post Wijewardena was often paid, along with other NGOcrats, to deride. He’s made a few references here & there to the need for an industrialized society, but they are among the rarest of rarest gems, of negligible weight. Concerned, like the fake ‘Leftist’ & ‘Marxists’, with ‘withering away of the state apparatus’, they dare not enlighten us on how but how to avoid the dangers of centuries-long colonial & neocolonial subjection.

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‘For millions of housewives there is no such thing as

a corporate entity called Unilever. There is just the

daily routine of choosing between Lifebuoy & Lux…’

Kwame Nkrumah, Neocolonialism, see ee Focus

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When he could not find explanations at home to analyze Sri Lanka’s still colonized economy, in order to transform it, SBD de Silva would search the wider world to obtain clues. One continent he directed much attention to in his classic The Political Economy of Underdevelopment, was Africa. It is in Africa, we find the origins of Sri Lanka’s still-dominant multinational corporations & banks, such as Unilever, Standard Chartered, Ceylon Tobacco Corp (aka British American Tobacco), who encash many of the so called ‘economists’ who daily & weekly clog the blogs & airwaves.

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• This ee Focus turns to Kwame Nkrumah, President of Ghana, who was eventually deposed in 1966, by military officers trained by Canadian ‘advisors’. All the ambitious industrial projects – eg, the Volta River dam to provide irrigation & electricity – were then stunted or dismantled. We also recall the Peruvian leader José Carlos Mariátegui, contemporary of the Angarika Dharampala (also see, ee 5 January 2019)

     There’s an interesting link between Nkrumah & Sri Lanka – one of Nkrumah’s teachers in high school in Ghana was Sri Lankan. But the more interesting link is with ee’s muse, SBD de Silva. ‘Sir’ Arthur Lewis was Nkrumah advisor, knighted (benighted!) by the English in 1963 and given a Nobel Prize in Economics in 1979! It may be no coincidence that SBD de Silva was working on his classic at the time, which was a full-blown critique of Lewis’ claim that the plantation system was modern & had impulses to share with the peasant sector.

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• ‘The new NPP government is sitting on the ticking time-bomb that is Sri Lanka’s 17^th IMF program…’ notes Shiran Illanperuma in this ee Focus. He wonders how the new coalition including Marxist-Leninists & liberal (libertarians, more like it) will step tenderly around & over the minefields of such ‘novel instruments’ as ‘governance-linked bonds’ & ‘macro-linked bonds’, whose only beneficiary would be the ‘private bondholders, like BlackRock, who own the largest share of Sri Lanka’s debt’. Add to the mix, the USA’s ‘Indo-Pacific Strategy to contain China’, which will be boosted under renewed President Trump, and the pressure to offer ‘refugee’ status here to the US military, as & when they see fit to barge in. Indeed this latest dispensation may very well inspire & propel the colonial alliance of merchants to regroup even more menacingly. He seems to see succour from the ‘resurgent’ bloc of BRICs, and wonders if the NPP can rekindle the Bandung spirit, and restore Sri Lanka’s leading role in such a worldly movement…

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• Meanwhile, just as so-called ‘autonomous robots’ turn out to be remote-controlled by humans, just as the modern ‘Cloud’ is merely someone else’s bigger computer – the so-called ‘independent’ Central Bank seems to be blithely unaware of the economic consequences of the CBSL losing control over interest rates”. Though much of the language is dense & maybe beyond the ken of us amateurs, apparently the CBSL, which loves to model old US Treasury tattered hand-me-downs, continues ‘to adhere to its flawed notion of money printing’ (a favorite bugaboo of the corporate thinktanks), remaining bravely committed ‘to the quantity theory of money (QTM)’ despite QTM being obviously discarded even by such leading researchers ‘in monetary policy, such as the US & England’.

     Worse, ‘even the IMF observes, the CBSL seems to be permitting the market, rather than policy, to set money market rates, while managing liquidity to prevent instability in these rates’. One hopes the Nicholases would at least come up with a clearer comic/cartoon version with eyeball-grabbing graphics to explain how increases in the ‘cash bases’ are linked to other factors such as the Central Bank’s dealings with imperialist commercial banks & other financial institutions…

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• Modern colonialism is also the worst form of imperialism. For those who practise it, it means power without responsibility and for those who suffer from it, it means exploitation without redress. In the days of old-fashioned colonialism, the imperial power had at least to explain & justify at home the actions it was taking abroad. In the colony those who served the ruling imperial power could at least look to its protection against any violent move by their opponents. With modern colonialism neither is the case. Above all, modern colonialism, like colonialism before it, postpones the facing of the social issues which will have to be faced by the fully developed sector of the world before the danger of world war can be eliminated or the problem of world poverty resolved.

     Neo-colonialism or so-called modern colonialism, like colonialism, is an attempt to export the social conflicts of the capitalist countries. The temporary success of this policy can be seen in the ever widening gap between the richer & the poorer nations of the world. But the internal contradictions & conflicts of neo-colonialism make it certain that it cannot endure as a permanent world policy. How it should be brought to an end is a problem that should be studied, above all, by the West, because it is they who will feel the full impact of the ultimate failure. The longer it continues, the more certain it is that its inevitable collapse will destroy the social system of which they have made it a foundation.” – Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism, 1965

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Contents:

The 100 Billion Dollar Question: Can US Citibank, Warships & Courts Postpone the Inevitable?