e-Con e-News

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

e-Con e-News 09-15 January 2025

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‘I know that return to my island is quick & to my political life is impossible.

The pace of colonial events is quick, the turnover of political leaders rapid.

I have already been forgotten; and I know that people who supplanted me

are themselves about to be supplanted. My career is by no means unusual.

It falls into the pattern. The career of the colonial politician is short & ends

brutally. We lack order. Above all, we lack power. We mistake words, and

the acclamation of words for power; as soon as our bluff is called we are lost.

Politics for us are a do-or-die, once-for-all charge. Once we are committed

we fight more than political battles; we often fight literally for our lives.

Our transitional or makeshift societies do not cushion us. There are no universities or

City houses to refresh us and absorb us after the heat of battle. For those who lose,

and nearly everyone in the end loses, there is only one course: flight.

Flight to the great disorder & emptiness: London & the home counties.’

– The Mimic Men (1967)

This passage is from VS Naipaul, this Trinidadian’s work of fiction about a colonial leader exiled in England. Dystopian. ‘We lack order’. Really? We deliver tea, rubber & coconut on time, don’t we. To others. But then, Naipaul too is a mimic man who mouths the colonial tale, faithfully parses its chattering points. The English appeared to like him so much, they even anointed him a knight! Sir Vidhya… Sans a horse or a lance. Sans a continental missile. Or even dynamite. They only gave him that dynamite & oilman turned missile-maker’s Nobel Prize. They only permitted him a pen (at that time, perhaps, patted on a typewriter, massaged by his English wife, published in London in 1967). But it was a sponsored pen. He liked to laugh at Black people’s delusional foibles, in thinking we can long escape the enslaver, with our silly permitted ‘protests’ & ‘demonstrations’ & ‘independences’. It is the type of literature adored by our mimic literati at their English literary festivals, run by tourist agencies (aka land speculators aka plane & car importers) and the English banks (HSBC, Standard Chartered etc.) that ‘sponsor’ them, where they play at words.

     Naipaul is from the Caribbean. To which Sri Lanka is umbilically tied. A colony of Tate & Lyle (yes, the Tate of that ‘London Art Gallery’). Yes, a sugar plantation! Naipaul is an Indian. The indentured Indians were taken to supplant the Africans, who were themselves enchained to supplant the ‘native’ Amerindians, whose land they stole, where now the whites feel at home. Sound familiar?

     Note: it is written in an almost passive voice. Who is it who ‘supplants’ our leaders? Tate & Lyle. Unilever. ‘Leaders’ in the US & Canada are usually employees of Mr Rockeller’s Exxon Corporation (in Sri Lanka, perhaps known as Caltex, Chevron, etc). Many multinational corporations (MNCs) operating in Sri Lanka, have larger budgets than so-called sovereign nations combined… Naipaul, by the way, was critical about his father, a journalist. His father had not fathomed the ‘postcolonial’ shift in the power centre post-1945, from London to Washington, and failed to give lip, cater to those interests…and had a nervous breakdown.  Sir Vidhya chose not to….

     In media in Sri Lanka, foreign news means BBC and CNN… English affairs ancient and modern, artistic, literary and other, therefore led the way to this week’s arrival of the latest English minister-in-charge of colonies, now appropriately named ‘West’ and entitled ‘Minister for Indo-Pacific’ – an English verbiage no doubt ordered by USA’s NATO. And just as s/he/it arrived, a northern politician threatened to demolish a Buddhist temple… Meanwhile in Munich (‘Little Monk’) a security conference was arranged, with the US Vice-President’s speech presaged by an attendant ‘terrorist attack’ blamed on an Afghani ‘refugee claimant’, while in Palestine, the Anglo-American mince-meating of the innocents was continued, producing more refugees… and headlines…

     This last week (look at ee’s news compendium below if you dare), the English media in Sri Lanka was preoccupied with the antics of the US agency with ‘AID’ suffixed to its title, whose origins along with the ‘internet’ are in ensuring the repression of any real (industrial) resistance to continuing colonized underdevelopment:

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The SLPP delegation asking Chung to investigate how USAID funds

were disbursed in Sri Lanka is like setting a thief to catch a thief,

thief & the master of the house combining!

– Sena Thoradeniya (see ee Sovereignty,

It’s time for Julie Chung to Bow out Gracefully!)

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While there was much talk of USAID interference in Sri Lanka, the truth is Sri Lanka’s economy & related political life have long been tied to the capitalist system, with our artists & economists (they are artists too, with their prevarications) in tow.

     In this ee Focus, Shenali Waduge asks, ‘Are there any economists in Sri Lanka who can give an alternative to IMF?’, a question ee is somewhat dedicated to. Waduge wonders: ‘Why are Sri Lanka’s economists ignoring ground realities of IMF conditions? When water, food production, fuel, gas (essentials to citizens) fall out of government hands into international corporate hands or even local corporate hands & when these entities begin to raise prices at will, when they decide to deny supply – what can citizens or the government do, especially when companies are now taking governments to international courts…’ Indeed our economists & literati are stipendiaries of various colonial embassies.

     ee Focus also reproduces Usvatte-aratchi’s inquiry into ‘Education & Schools’. He points out: ‘The modern equivalents of liberal arts are mathematics and science’. Well, tell that to the funny literati who claim to inform and entertain us, like monkeys (who can also turn off the lights!). Usvatte-aratchi describes how: ‘The relationship between universities and the economy & society was rapidly transformed in the latter half of the 19^th century. From an institution that the church dominated, universities became partners in innovations in the economy.’ He should have emphasized this was largely a European phenom. Indeed, as one ‘young Joseph Needham’ (so intimate we are!) was told, ‘the future lay in ‘atoms & molecules, atoms & molecules, my boy’.

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The expression ‘Green Revolution’ is said to have been first used by

an administrator of USAID to describe developments in Asian Agriculture following

on the introduction of IR8 by the International Rice Research Institute in 1966

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Rice & its prices were also another preoccupation of the media, which variously blames local millers & politicians, but leaves out the role played by the English in the destruction of the ancient village irrigation systems, and as usual leaves out the names of such players as England’s Unilever & BAT’s Ceylon Tobacco & ICI’s CIC, et al…

     Which is why ee continues to reproduce SSA’s Capital & Peasant Production: Studies in the Continuity & Discontinuity of Agrarian Structures in Sri Lanka, this time introduced by Newton Gunasinghe. He records the ‘unprecedented boom’ in the 1980s of research institutes (state & NGO) and superficial academic analyses of agrarian studies, which all fail to unearth the underlying interests and attendant weeds, leading to:

‘Indeed, ironically the most pronounced facet

of the Accelerated Mahaweli Development Project

seems to be the accelerated speed at which the

resettled peasant is being evicted from his land.’

     The Introduction scans the book’s various analyses, the overriding of local initiatives that developed local seeds resistant to disease, soon supplanted by varieties requiring imported fertilizers by ICI’s CIC, etc (yes, ICI’s CIC who pays devalued rupees for the recurring media meme that somehow an organic fertilizer policy was to blame for the melting-down)… It also looks at the role played by England’s Ceylon Tobacco Co, and the growth of agricultural ‘entrepreneurs’… and the failure to examine the variety of agrarian systems in the country that promote the pauperization of the peasant.

     Gunasinghe also mentions SBD de Silva’s examination of the backwardness & stagnation, which he attributed ‘to labour-intensive methods of production, which ruled out technological innovations, [to] the control exercised by agency houses over the plantations which were basically trading monopolies, and the separation of ownership & management…’

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Hit your competitors in the pocket book, hit ’em hard.

Then you either buy ’em out, or take ’em with you.

– James Buchanan Duke, US Tobacco Trust, 1889

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Which brings us back to the perfidious and obsequious role played by our Mimic Men, so-called artists & glitterati & economists who are paid to ignore, and worse, muddle up such matters… As we have noted before, what the US President is saying is neither new nor original. Recall, and it is important to recall if we wish to comprehend:

The US government made 371 treaties with the original people of their ‘America’,

1776-1871. As one of their leaders, called ‘Red Cloud’ in English, recorded:

‘They made many promises to us, but they only kept one:

They promised to take our land and they took it.

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As noted, the celebrated literati, the economists, the media (let’s not call them ‘our’ literati, ‘our’ media) simply refuse, or are paid to refuse, to listen. The idea that the USA under Trump will stop interfering in the rest of the world is pure delusion… regardless of their concerns for further genderization, they still want to turn both women and men into their ‘bitches’?

     This week also saw pompous Anglomanic claims about ‘digital privacy’ & ‘freedom’, about control over the ‘data’ machinery, whose machines we are not allowed to make… There has also been continued hype about so-called ‘artificial’ intelligence (AI), which turns out to be not very artificial at all… Machines cannot create value; only humans, and working humans in particular, can do that. All AI, especially in English, is still colonized & biased, just the newest high-tech mimic men… As a Russian analyst noted, how even with China’s new open-source DeepSeek, which has popped their pompous balloons and shaken their stockmarkets:

‘…bias comes from being trained on liberal western media. All you get are

summaries of what all the Anglo-American media have been writing. This is the same

for ChatGPT & comparable western LLMs [Large Language Models]. As future models

get trained on voice & video they will be biased further, unless the Chinese & Russians

refrain from training on more English content and avoid the biases in that content.

Russians & Chinese would be wrong to train on data from the Anglo-Saxon world.’

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Contents:

Sri Lanka’s Mimic Media & Their Artificial Intelligence