e-Con e-News

blog: eesrilanka.wordpress.com

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

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US Blackrock’s Capture of the State of Sri Lanka

e-Con e-News 02-08 March 2025

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‘Dear Julie, I am writing to you in the softest electronic print, just in case you don’t already know what we are writing you about… We notice you are constantly running here and there in Sri Lanka, in places we don’t really expect to or should see a foreign diplomat, showing off your pale overworked knees, which it seems you like to expose below skirts, to perhaps distract our sex-starved or oversexed officials – the hetero males in particular, but not just that gender orientation – to help lubricate US deals (like Exxon Chevron lubes our imported cars). Imagine if our ambassador in Washington’s Embassy Row, Hippie Mike Samarasinghe, wearing well-hung tights, took pictures with little white girls (or boys) in Poughkeepsie or Baton Rouge, claiming he was standing up erect for their rights or equality. What on this white god’s earth would them good ole boys think? Lynch? Then again, who remembers all your sermons about ‘rule of law’? Not your latest leader, and payroll officer. And then, I hear you’ve been meeting judges, too. Poor fellows, you may be causing a lot of rustling under their august robes & woolly wigs… Approach the bench, indeed!

     Dear, dear Julie, we are yours, truly, truly. Until next week, then…’

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IMF warns Sri Lanka trade unions against strike over pay demand

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IMF: ‘Sri Lanka can decide public sector size with limitations’

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‘IMF wishes you have a happy women’s day!’

Welcome to the 360^th almost-weekly edition of ee. And we too wish our readers a thoughtful & happy International Women’s Day (IWD) – and not just for today but for the rest of the year & the rest of your life & the next one too, if you don’t take the exit ramp off samsara. For unless we take action soon, if we are reborn in Sri Lanka, we will be born in chains, shackled to an unpayable debt. For look, how the IMF is acting viceroy, warning trade unions and ‘rightsizing’ ‘human resources’….

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International Women’s Day is only celebrated as a national holiday in the socialist countries. Outside such countries, it has been hijacked like most holidays, almost wholesale by corporations. Though, with the US government signaling wildly that their DIE (Diversity, Inclusion, Equality) agenda is off the table (In fact, that third headline about the IMF wishing women is clearly fake. For unlike other years, the US-dominated IMF did not wish women happy days. Or did not make a big fuss about it. After all, ‘gender equality’ – even as the capitalist media has befogged what exactly gender means – has been an almost hourly business headline, alongside saving elephants & leopards & oxygen… Such virtuous talk of course is always being waylaid by those gentlemen who would offer you their seat in the bus – tho gentlemen don’t take buses or trains in Sri Lanka – but once you get to work, they pay you a whole lot less than other workers!

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All these economists & politicians who get daily-by-daily play in the media, due to being funded by the u-know-who, and have been promoting ‘export-led growth’, are now scrambling to revise their philosophies and soundbites (see ee Economists, ‘Harsha calls on Govt to prepare for US reciprocal tariffs). After decades of this free-trade business, their great father-funder in the Northwest Atlantic is about to slam the door shut, and worse, kick them out, dollar-less and handcuffed to boot.  So, what’s an unemployed de-dollarized free-trader and virtue-signaler to do?

     The Asia Progress Forum‘s Shiran Illanperuma in his latest computation of ‘The Price of Losing Economic Sovereignty’ has other ideas (see ee Focus). He believes the hour is long past due  – in this age and art of the no-deal deal – the only way we can get ‘a better deal’ is to sign up with the rest of the world – this time, with a South-South coalition of the more-than-willing – to take ‘coordinated multilateral action‘ through forming a ‘debtor’s club’, looking to fora like BRICS to provide a platform, especially when the US and its killer poodles have been pivoting their gunsights from Russia back on to the new powerhouse Asia and its ocean called Indian, with Sri Lanka trapped sitting squat in the middle.

     We have no choice – the ‘loss of monetary sovereignty remains the single most damaging element of the IMF’s conditions’. With ‘mammoth 41% of [budgetary] expenditure taken up by interest payments’ and ‘private bondholders’ accounting for 70% of these interest payments, with the government claiming ‘to restore economic sovereignty’, a confrontation with these capitalist bondholders is inevitable. ‘To pretend otherwise is either naïve or dishonest.’

     So who may these private bondholders be? Our monkey media won’t tell us. This week saw US ‘fund manager’ Blackrock grab 43 ports around the world, including 2 at either end of the Panama Canal from HongKong’s CK Hutchison, with a wink from the Don, who BlackRock nudged to publicly demand the Canal back (to see who was really behind it, see Random Notes). Not one word has been heard from the Panamanian government or its people. BlackRock is also the lead loanshark to which we must pay huge ‘interest’ payments. BlackRock is not just behind Adani’s ‘Green’ gas & wind, but also a major shareholder in our old fair&lovely Unilever, etc.

     Please bear with us. When we refer to monkeys, we are refer to our brand of merchants. Darwin’s theory of evolution, Marx quipped, was not talking about monkeys, but was referring to the survival of the craftiest English capitalists. ‘The capitalist state is a band of warring brothers’ (thus spake Marx). And Sri Lanka’s economy is also controlled not just by New York fund mangers and the Washington-dominated IMF, but also by the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association (JAMA), who dump their rickety cars on the country. ‘Sri Lankan is a cemetery for Japan’, a Japanese professor once told SBD de Silva. The philanthropy & largesse exhibited in the last weeks by Japanese NGOs (search ee News Index below) was due to Sri Lanka being forced to open the hatch of yet another ship bearing luxury vehicles: the MV Jupiter Leader, operated by Japan’s Nippon Yusen Kabushiki Kaisha (NYK).  The MV stands for Motor Vehicles. And the MV Jupiter is registered in Panama!

     And see how the IMF’s Senior Mission Chief Peter Breuer speaks not just with a tongue that is forked but spooned with silver as well (‘He stated that reopening the vehicle imports would increase demand for dollars, whilst stressing that the country’s reserves have improved significantly under the ongoing bailout program.’ So welcome MV Jupiter, by Jove (which also means Jupiter)!

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Politics is 10% ideas & 90% implementation (aka 1% inspiration & 99% perspiration). If we are to confront this blatant usury (for as President AKD rather belatedly remembered, ‘Our economy is running on conditions. There is no economic independence or sovereignty – it is under probation and being monitored’), there is little use just talking about ‘economic democracy’ and ‘economic sovereignty’. A budget (or some other plan) guides industrialization, by targeting specific sectors and activities conducive to technological change, and long-term productivity gains. Targeting firms by size (SMEs) is not really a priority, and not transformational. Praising and protecting the small business and the small farmer maybe good for elections to pull the wannabe petit-bourgeois to the booths, but there are larger forces which control these lovely ‘small’ people, which media columnists can only hint at. Take ‘Emeritus Professor Ranjith Senaratne, Department of Crop Science, University of Ruhuna’ on ‘Our rice crisis: A holistic solution’. He proclaims: ‘Needless to add that the hapless farmers are at the mercy of the large-scale rice millers and traders, including input and service providers.’ Note: ‘input and service providers’. Exactly who are they? And why are we not allowed to make these inputs here?

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Nestlé Lanka inaugurates new Rs1.1bn biomass boiler at Kurunegala factory

‘Nestlé Lanka has been delighting consumers with much-loved brands

such as Nestomalt, Milo, Maggi, Milkmaid for over 118 years’

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Look at these copy&paste corporate press releases, which are really advertisements or infomercials paid for to the ‘fair&lovely’ media under the table (corruption anyone?). And while it is dangerous to criticize anyone who has more ink & pulls more eyeballs than you, the media in Sri Lanka is one big sensationalist tabloid, posturing a fake gravitas, repeatedly insulting people and villages with Sinhala names as gangsters, etc, while diverting from the real gangsters. This ee thereforeexamines the capture of the Sri Lankan state & its agriculture, and the prevention of modern industrialization by capitalist banks and corporations. We also direct our readers’ attention again to our News Index (ee Agriculture) which overflows with worries, not about the state of agriculture or farmers, but about elephants, monkeys & leopards, etc. 

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‘The Trust’s desires are modest. All it wants is the earth

with a barbed wire fence around it. The Tobacco Trust is

a hog, and wants all the swill. The tobacco crop is short

this year. It ought to have brought 12 cents a pound,

but the Trust fixed it at 7 cents or 8 cents,

and that is all that is being paid.’

– Raleigh News & Observer, 1907

This ee Focus looks at the creation of monopolies and their restrictive policies that underdevelop agriculture in Sri Lanka, and elsewhere. It is not just a tale about British American Tobacco (BAT)’s Ceylon Tobacco Co (CTC) who puppeteer politicians like Harsha de Silva, etc, it is also the story of Unilever & Nestles and ICI’s CIC & Booker etc, who also operate through their local agents (Hayleys, Keells, etc.)

     The policies of BAT’s CTC by the 1980s, aided by the government, were mimicked by other multinational corporations (MNCs, or transnationals) like Nestles (milk) & Booker (sugar) in Sri Lanka. They sought to maintain the relative impoverishment of peasants and isolate them further, making them depend on a package of inputs: finance, machinery, chemicals, processing & marketing, etc, forcing them to sell their produce to MNCs alone at fixed prices.

     In 1936, the colonial government had set up a separate division within the Department of Agriculture to promote tobacco crops, permitting the Department to function as an adjunct of the CTC monopoly. CTC, rather than increase their own investment, then got the 2 state banks, with the country’s largest network of branches – the People’s Bank & the Bank of Ceylon, to finance the peasants, based on CTC approval.

     ee’s concluding segment of Charles Abeysekera’s study, recalls how peasants formed the All-Ceylon Tobacco Growers Association to push the government to end the CTC monopoly, as the peasants were trying not to be at the mercy of monopoly ‘market forces’. Abeysekera examines how the CTC reacted to break such collective action by shifting tobacco cultivation to the dry zone, and when peasants sought to sell to whom they chose, the CTC illegally got the police and other state authorities to search vehicles for ‘independent’ tobacco! They broke up barns into mini barns, creating barn owners as tools to harness peasant production to the needs of international capital, creating ‘entrepreneurs’ & ‘middle peasants’ linked to the state bureaucracy, to hide CTC’s actions from the peasant grower.

     Most importantly, the large sums of money accumulated were not productively invested in agriculture. The village were also hemmed in by tea plantations, unable to increase cultivable land. Instead, investments are made in trade & transport (imported tractors and lorries, etc. A shoutout to Sarvodaya, here). CTC’s manipulation of peasant agriculture in Sri Lanka was replicated elsewhere in Africa & the Americas. Corporate & state policies have not resulted in expropriation to proletarianize the peasantry, however they have caged them in their diminishing plots, under moneylenders & merchants, subject to international capital.

     The study also examines the limited nationalization of tea plantations in Sri Lanka in 1972-74, the difficulties of cheapening wages midst growing labour strength, and the resort to smallholder production, which amounts to a type of isolated wage labour, shaping ‘another trajectory along which agriculture is transformed along capitalist lines’.

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US Blackrock’s Capture of the State of Sri Lanka