e-Con e-News

blog: eesrilanka.wordpress.com

Before you study the economics, study the economists!”

e-Con e-News 23-29 March 2025

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‘If together we are not able to put enough pressure on Moscow,

then how can we claim that we can defeat China?’

– EU Foreign Policy Chief Kaja Kallas

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‘One of the first tactics in this US hustle strategy has been Trump’s

executive order restoring the lawfulness of US corporate bribery

for gaining strategic business advantages whether in critical minerals,

deep-water ports, or other key infrastructure or assets.”’

– John Helmer, ee Sovereignty, Like old-fashioned make-war

profiteering, this is end-of-war corporate profiteering

This week saw the passing of US-trained anthropologist Gananath Obeysekera. Anthropology used to be section in a US or English bookstore in those countries, where one browsed to be bewildered about whatever happened to the original peoples of the Americas or the Pacific (Just as ‘sociology’ was where one ‘learned’ about Blacks – especially urban African Americans). The real story of the white settler states is yet to be fully told. SBD de Silva’s attempts to differentiate between colonies of settlement & ‘colonies of exploitation’ goes a long way towards theorizing their different practices (see ee Focus).

     GO’s last official leavings were his public dispute with a white doyen of the discipline, over the native Hawaiian perception of the pirate Captain Cook (who they cooked). However, despite his otherwise exotic forays into Sinhala culture, the closest Obeysekera came to challenging the status quo in the real world of imperialism was his attempt to narrate the English assassination of the character of Sri Vikrama Rajasinghe, the last king of Sinhale. His book entitled: The Doomed King, hinted at the role of an increasingly import-export commodity culture, with which officials and others could be compromised.

     One of the main characters in that highland battle was the English spy John D’Oyly – patron saint of the English in Sri Lanka, if not of their English Departments. The book’s publication and dissemination was coterminous with the real-life English launch of another character assassination and seeming overthrow of yet-another-though-more-modern dynasty, the Rajapakses. The Rajapakses have been made synonymous with corruption, largely by the English media. But corruption, called many names in corporate reports – goodwill, charity, aid, etc. – has long been a hallowed European and US practice. And, yet, it by no means fully explains the deep roots and overarching branches of our discontent, let alone imperialist and capitalist practice…

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In 1952, the World Bank had suggested that the Government

develop SMEs rather than promoting large industries.

– Rohantha Athukorala, ee Economists

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Last week, the economic news was full of the thoughts and exertions of Indrajith Coomaraswamy, who worked under convict Raj Rajaratnam’s infamous Galleon Group, and then replaced the fugitive Arjuna Mahendran (supposedly hiding out in rule-of-law Singapore) as Central Bank Governor. This week, Coomaraswamy seemed to disappear from sight, and out popped again CB Governor N. Weerasinghe, uttering anodynes under numerous uneventful headlines (see ee Economists). While it is clear he can be replaced by a robot nattering IMF nostrums, it is ironic that Canada has a former Central Bank governor being ‘selected’ and perhaps soon ‘elected’ as head of the government (Canada remains an English colony in name, and a de-facto US colony).

     Mass media economics is a farce. Especially when it comes to industrialization. There are regular news items planted in ‘native’ media around the world, how so-and-so has invented or launched their ‘own’ computer, car, satellite, etc. We never ever hear about these wonders again. It is a drug meant to embalm a programmed inferiority complex. The other regular ‘industrial’ news items are about the joys and travails of SMEs. This week’s favorite is the so-called auto assembly farce, with the usual promises to make parts here. Tech culture requires a system of knowledge, a supply chain, etc. It is about the role of the state in the invention of inventors, the manufacture of manufacturers, machines that make machines, and the modern humans who make modern humans who make all of the above. None of this is discussed in the media. Ask JD Vance (see ee Focus).

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Dear Julie: Do you wonder as you stumble about the delicate china of our corner shop in this ocean of everybody’s business, why the top white English man is called the High Commissioner. And you? You are simply named ‘Envoy’ or ‘Ambassador‘ (with its assonance of ‘Embarrassment’). We won’t call you English even if that is the language you have to speak to earn your weekly pieces of silver. And as the top official white man here, we are sure you have to follow the orders of your handlers from those State Department kanganies via the white Rockefeller Sahibs of Delhi above you (and then thru an assorted supply chain of eager middle-level Mediterraneans pale Irish and East Europeans – Nazis and Zionists – under their WASP overlords).

     But why Commissioner? Cos, they secrete, siphon and steal the highest Commissions. And it is all legal. The English plantation system created an entire panoply of percentage men and women. An entire hierarchy was formed from the High Commissioners on down to the lowest commissioned, an army of retainers down to the dogs and cats, tigers and scorpions, and the humble nai-kumbi (cobra ants), who ecologically suck up the crumbs that fall off imported lips and other orifices and tables…

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So why do we have to endure the sermons of the US, English, EU? It is simple. Their multinational capital pools & corporations (from Citibank & BlackRock to Standard Chartered & HSBC, to Unilever & Ceylon Tobacco & ICI-CIC) still own & drive the import-export plantation farce which has captured the economy. England cuts its social services, says it is going to escalate war on Russia (& China), then gives us lectures on human rights. It is kayfabe ensuring yet another diversion, while the fish & sea-boundary poaching Modi flies in, threatening to ‘take back’ Kachateevu… It’s the art of the deal to foist an Ukraine on to our doorstep & backyard…A planned tsunami is on its way? Get ready then for organized chaos…

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Reduction & redaction (another word for both kidnapping & censorship) is one of their main missions.  One of the US Envoy’s jobs is editing editors. And ministers. We hear the US Envoy had demanded the removal of ‘certain words’ of a ‘patriotic’ nature from ‘the statement issued by Sri Lanka’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in response to the sanctions imposed by English government on former military chiefs.’

     The English state are of course trained killer poodles, deeply adroit in the arts of deception & doubletalk. They do the US writ in Europe & Russia, as they do in Sri Lanka. It is no surprise to hear that the Ukrainian President (poor chap!) is being guarded by England’s MI6, who influence the entire Ukrainian power structure, including their Nazi Azov divisions. We also hear that while Lieutenant Colonel Anthony C Nelson, the Senior Foreign Policy Advisor to US Indo-Pacific Command’s David Ranz, was in Colombo, the Deputy Commanding General for US Army Pacific had sneaked into Dhaka one night to plan the launch of a major military offensive to capture the 3 remaining towns in Myanmar’s Rakhine Province…

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So what’s the urgency of the US envoy barging again into Srikotha (UNP HQ) to perhaps make peace between the world’s best banker Ravi K & world’s best debater Ranil W? It was her first visit to Sirikotha since their ‘aragalaya’ in 2022. Of course, one thing the USA’s new leader has reinforced for us is that much of this media broadcast politics is what US’ World Wrestling Federation (WWF) calls kayfabe. The USA’s new Education Secretary is a founder of the WWF! Hollywood & Wall Street & Bloomberg are triplets joined at the front & rear.

     This week also found the US Envoy lounging about with Mano Ganesan, another peripatetic constantly moving between highland estates and low-country kotthu kadays, ‘representing the Tamils’ – one minute beckoned by the English, next minute by the US envoy (next minute in Modi’s furry arms?). The US envoy had the media tell us what she told Ganesan to tell them: that Sri Lanka can assuage Mr Trump’s oncoming April 02 Liberation Day threats on tariffs by importing something – anything! – like that famous or infamous US cotton (dripping with you know what?).

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• SBD de Silva, the closest we have got to a historian of the most important variety – of the economy – recalls much about cotton, which had kept the US South as a colony of Manchester & Lancaster, even after their ‘independence’ in 1776. With the threat of invasion by the US North, in preparation for their so-called ‘civil war’ in the 1860s, SBD also recalled:

‘The English cotton industry was eager to use Sri Lanka

as a possible source of raw cotton. In 1861, when the

Cotton Supply Association of Manchester favourably reported on

a sample of cotton grown in the Badulla district, the Board of Trade

recommended that facilities be developed ‘for irrigating the lands &

for carrying the cotton to the nearest shipping place’. Production was to be

encouraged only if it could subserve the interests of English industry.’

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SBD also noted the beginnings of the great divide in the 19^th century:

‘The slave-supplying states of West Africa were linked with

the cotton plantations of the southern USA, and the plantation South

was linked with the industrial North, just as were the plantation economies

of Asia with the industrialized West (in fact, the periphery & the centre).

The development impact of the linkages was, however, a one-way street.

It was felt beneficially in the cotton region of the southern USA rather than

in West Africa, in the industrial North rather than in the cotton South,

& in the centre rather than in the periphery. Instead of a levelling up process,

there emerged a hierarchy of production modes with a progressively widening gulf.’

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Ooops! The US President may not want us to remember such. He is bent on ‘Restoring Truth & Sanity to US History,’ and washing brains of memories that portray US ‘history & values’ as ‘inherently harmful & oppressive’. Yet, his advisors need to tell him not to be so nervous. He should be proud! Though it is their job to prevent us from growing and making our own cotton.

     Vice-President JD Vance seemed to worry about such matters, at that Dynamism Summit earlier this month at Washington’s Waldorf Astoria (named after that old opium dealer to China, the very first US millionaire, John Jacob Astor).

     Vance warned how ‘deindustrialization’ was a risk to both national security & workers. That it is technology that ‘increases the value of labor’. He recalled how US industry had once ‘become the envy of the world’, through such innovations as ‘the American System & the Interchangeable Parts Revolution it sparked, or Ford’s moving assembly line that skyrocketed the productivity of our workers.’ He lamented the outsourcing of manufacture and their reliance of imported ‘cheap labour’: ‘for it turns out that the geographies that do the manufacturing get awfully good at the designing of things’. This ee reproduces his speech, rather wooden, though he states openly what he believes should be the divisions & limits of international development.

     Vance is a manufactured product himself, a supposed ‘rags to riches’ politician engineered by such bald-headed tech bros as PayPal’s Peter Thiel, another unrepentant white settler from Southern Africa, like Elon Musk. And what the tech bros don’t know or haven’t told him is that ‘manufacturing’ & ‘assembly’ do not necessarily lead to higher tech awareness or higher wages for workers. Ask our so-called ‘garment’ fraudsters, who do not yet make a pin or needle or thread. In fact, their job is to prevent such a possibility. And much of their vaunted ‘access’ to the US & EU market, from which the garment fraud alone profits, is based on preventing any modern industrialization. In fact, what Vance leaves out is that modern industrialization is about the culture & practice of the making of machines that make machines!

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The history of the prevention of this modern machine-making industrialization is the tack of the concluding stream of SBD de Silva’s fascinating though complex examination of the link between ‘Plantations & Underdevelopment’. The plantation system has imposed & ensured a low-waged & low-tech economy, not just for the plantations, not just for the garment fraud, nor just for the tourist sham, but for the entire country. Most importantly, SBD’s analysis provides a method for viewing the wretched farce of Sri Lanka’s diversionary media, blatantly controlled by such multinational corporations (MNCs) as ‘Fair&Lovely’ Unilever here run via Hindustan Lever, and more surreptitiously by British American Tobacco (BAT)’s Ceylon Tobacco Co – a media filled with sensations about petty thieves, retail murderers, corruption & crime prefixed with Sinhala names, where the only good people are IMF officials, etc.

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• This ee continues looking into the formation & workings of such MNCs as BAT, an English company, with almost 99% of its equity then held by English stockholders, and listed as the 3^rd largest industrial group based in England. Looking at the dire urges & desperate urgencies of the US & EU leadership, there is no doubt that all their policies, political, military & economic, conglomerations and philosophies, have been aimed primarily at defeating the most powerful people-based organizations the world has ever known – the Marxism-Leninist Communist Parties of the USSR & China, etc.

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• Last week’s ee looked at how the sham of health warnings on cigarette packs was used to increase the monopoly over tobacco & cigarettes by this largest of tobacco manufacturers in the world & largest English cigarette makers. And of the failure if not the complicity of the state in regulating such ‘mergers’ & ‘acquisitions.’ It recalled how tobacco companies ‘diversified’ (early diversity indeed!) into other products, such as food, life insurance, pharmaceuticals, etc. This ee looks at the role played by the ‘Committee for Europe, comprising the chief executives of all the main European operating companies.’ They, along with management consultants & merchant bankers (such as Samuel Montagu & NM Rothschilds), tax specialists & industrialists coagulated ‘4 ostensibly independent companies’ into ‘creating a major multinational company, with 44 factories in 17 countries’ melding their distribution forces & sales organisations in order to avoid taxes as well as increase profits across increasingly enfeebled nation-states, to fashion a ‘corporate structure’ that would be the most desirable. Exploring the then-precedents of double-holding companies such as Dunlop/Pirelli, Agfa/Gevaert, Unilever or Royal Dutch/Shell, and where such a ‘master company’ would be based? Holland, Switzerland, Luxembourg, West Germany or England? England was seen as the best with its tax magicians & ‘sophisticated’ capital markets.

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Contents:

Doomed Kings, Captain Cooks & Brown Sahibs: From Washington to London to Delhi to Colombo