e-Con e-News

blog: eesrilanka.wordpress.com

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

e-Con e-News 06-12 April 2025

‘There is also a military build-up going on in the US base in Diego Garcia,

including B-52 heavy bombers with a range of 10,000km.’

– MK Bhadrakumar, ‘Steve Witkoff’s Iran mission’

*

Sri Lanka is 1,925km from Diego Garcia in the Chagos Archipelago. Delhi is 4,026km from Diego Garcia. The USA’s ‘eco-friendly’ vehicles of mass destruction boast they can flatten anything over double that distance, Gaza-styleee! Unimpededly, they hope. And they may surely try. India or Sri Lanka certainly have no means to respond in kind on US real-estate. Yet there has been a deafening silence from the media in India, as in Sri Lanka, over England recently handing over that archipelago, that is not theirs, for such horrific purposes – kicking out the original inhabitants – to the US, for another 100 years, in this purportedly ‘post-colonial’ age – once prematurely tagged and effusively celebrated by our funded social-scientists – ‘post-colonial’, a trope adorning many a dollared PhD thesis.

     India, after all, is said to have waged, or backed, a 30-year war of terrorism, on Sri Lanka, due to Sri Lanka’s then-President JR Jayewardene’s attempt to hand over the strategic port of Trincomalee to the US. Yet, not a word about Diego G. So what goes? Could last week’s ‘agreements’ with India lead to a division of the country, after some pretext is concocted, and include India invading the North & East of Sri Lanka, while the US invades the South?

*

• The US government is impounding countries’ gold reserves, throwing out diplomats from their country, sanctioning people & tariffing trade. They are imprisoning and deporting foreign students for criticizing the US’ foreign military policies. They are exporting migrants as purported ‘criminals’ to third countries. Rule of law, huh? Meanwhile, their so-called NGOs (multinational banks & corporations, included) fly capital in & out at will, while loudly complaining about feeling cramped. Sena Thoradeniya has been closely tracking the blatant & published interferences of US & Indian officials in the internal affairs of our country, led by a constantly going but never-departing ‘killer dwarf’ US Envoy. Thoradeniya ponders if ‘They want to make Sri Lanka a partner in their Indo-Pacific’ war games. He wonders, ‘Who amalgamated the Indian Ocean with the Pacific Ocean?’, evincing a nostalgia for his childhood cartography: ‘East of the Indian Ocean was bounded by the beaches of Western Australia was the Geography we knew!’ Alas, for map makers and sellers. One wag this week pointed out, when you buy a map of India, you get 2 maps for the price of one, for they always include Sri Lanka. Inclusive indeed!

     Thoradeniya concludes, ‘President Anura Kumara is trapped by previous agreements & Ranil Wickremasinghe’s commitment to take up commanding the USA’s ‘Combined Maritime Force’s Combined Task Force 154, CMF-Bahrain.’ He speculates if the ‘Malima government would sign the SOFA (Status of Forces Agreement) which Sirisena did not sign’, while noting that the USA’s ‘ACSA (Acquisition & Cross Servicing Act) [was] extended by Sirisena in 2017 without exit clause or duration’ (see ee Focus, Departing US Envoy Julie Chung’s Interference in the Tri-Forces)

*

• ‘The second Trump administration continues to intensify a New Cold War’ and ‘Peace in the Indian Ocean is once again at stake’, reckons Shiran Illanperuma. India’s participates in ‘the Quad (consisting of the US, Australia, & Japan), which is a component of the US Indo-Pacific Strategy to contain China.’ He yet optimistically examines the strivings of Asian & African countries, led by Sri Lanka’s dynamic Sirimavo Bandaranaike and Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere, to adopt UN Resolution 2832 – the ‘Declaration of the Indian Ocean as a Zone of Peace’ (see ee Focus, Sri Lanka’s Defense Agreement with India & the Prospects for Peace in the Indian Ocean)

*

• This week saw England send their Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) Deputy Chief Economist Fergus Cumming to Sri Lanka, to fish for business contracts here. You have to credit the English for their slimy crass! Then again, the FCDO’s origins lie in their ‘Secretary of State for War, for the Colonies’. The red carpet for Cumming’s visit began unrolling weeks ago with the so-called revelations by the BBC’s camel division al Jazeera, about the Batalanda abattoir, which will certainly not enable England’s fabled ’truths & reconciliations’. It is meant to only inflame divisions within the country, for the JVP (& not just them, but other ‘human rights experts’ as well) too would have to answer for their roles. The English then laid down sanctions against military officers. And now they send a businessman to fish for contracts! How’s thaaat! Craving market and visa access, this merchant oligarchy has to submit to these charades? Why can’t the nation come together to examine how the English bestowed a political economy on this country to enable such conflagrations? Former China PM Zhou Enlai once remarked: ‘The English left time-bombs in Asia.’

     In 1942, England poured 10,000s of Indian, African and English troops into Sri Lanka (then colonial Ceylon) to stage a last stand against Japan, which had evicted them from Malaysia and Singapore. India’s national movement was also in full swing (see ee Focus, When England Poured Armies into Lanka). The English then temporarily withdrew, ‘granting’ an independence, strangled at birth, to ensure remote control over the polity and a continuation of the colonial import-export plantation oligarchy. Midst attempts to remove ourselves from an administration of ‘Brown Englishmen’, Sri Lanka’s oligarchy sought, albeit half-heartedly (given the country was led by another compromised ‘Brown Englishman’) to join in the Non-Aligned Movement.

*

‘Unable to overcome the pattern of colonial underdevelopment

and the imperialist onslaught of coups & counterinsurgency,

the 3^rd World debt crisis ushered in a shift from a spirit of cooperation to the

law of competition. This crisis was used to divide & discipline the periphery

& reincorporate it into a global market on terms favourable to multinational capital.’

– SBD de Silva, The Political Economy of Underdevelopment

*

• The US government has declared economic war on the rest of the world, states US economist Michael Hudson. He recommends that to protect ourselves, we ‘must suspend dollar debt service’. He feels it is ‘inevitable’ that ‘countries will find themselves obliged to make their economies no longer dependent on US exports or dollar credit’, thereby ‘creating a new world economic system’.

*

‘Trump is telling the rest of the world that they must be losers –

& accept the fact graciously in payment for the military protection

that it provides the world, in case Russia might invade Europe or

China might send its army into Taiwan, Japan, or elsewhere…’

– M Hudson (ee Economists, Trump’s tariff

threats could destabilize the global economy)

*

We see such hallucinatory US projections about a bellicose Russia & China regularly planted in their compliant media in Sri Lanka. And not just in their robotic lip service, EconomyNext. Hudson also riffs on the rote diversions of economists: The oft-quoted David ‘Ricardo’s model and US neoclassical theory [are] simply an excuse for hard-line creditor policy.’ JM Keynes ‘emphasized that, if creditors want to be paid, they have to import from the debtor countries to provide them with the ability to pay’. ‘The political problem of the world’s overhang of dollar debts is that the US is acting in a way that prevents debtor countries from earning the money to pay foreign debts denominated in US dollars.’

     The USA’s IMF meanwhile needs ‘more time’ to ‘gauge the impact of global shocks on Sri Lanka’s economy’! They also speak of ‘Recent external shocks and evolving developments.’ Really! The IMF can’t bring itself to say their master has been preparing these ‘shocks’ quite openly for many months! Didn’t they game this scenario? These ‘reciprocal tariffs’ have been claimed as ‘an invitation’ to create equity, but it’s actually a demand, that the world submit to joining their wars on China or whoever else. The Silicon Valley billionaires, who have financed these present gaggle of the USA’s major politicians, are also ‘extremely’ anti-China, just like their ‘Democratic Party’ predecessors. And contrary to the ‘free trade’ bible of economists here, these eggheads also openly support monopolies, declaring ‘competition is for losers’, and ‘monopoly is the condition of every successful business’. There you go!

*

• Meanwhile, the present imperialist economic trap we find ourselves in has been laid for over 3 decades, where colonized governments were consistently ‘told that the only way we can develop is through export-led growth’. The media’s economists, of the so-called Left & Right, have also parroted this scripture. They have never considered giving our own workers a fair deal as a good option. They see ‘wages as a cost, not as a source of our own domestic demand & market’ (see ee Quotes, Jayati Ghosh)

*

‘The Trump administration’s use of the term ‘reciprocal tariff’ is misleading.

Reciprocity implies equity, yet the kinds of goods which the US & Sri Lanka trade

can hardly be equated. While Sri Lanka exports labor-intensive products

such as apparel to the US, it imports capital-intensive products such as machinery

& pharmaceuticals. Meanwhile, unlike the US, Sri Lanka does not

have the exorbitant privilege of printing the world’s reserve currency.’

– Shiran Illanperuma, ee Economists, Trump’s tariffs could intensify SL’s debt crisis

*

The brown head of England’s Standard Chartered Bank in Colombo acts ‘surprised’ at Trump’s ‘reciprocal tariffs’, They repeatedly use this trope, and it helps us identify those economists, thinktanks & politicians who are bribed by the US, English & EU governments to mimic such economic hogwash – for ‘reciprocal’ it is definitely not! And shouldn’t such bribes be included in their calculations of imports & exports? Nope, ‘services’ are excluded. The Sunday Times’ Namini Wijedasa, a stipendiary of Japan’s NHK & England’s Economist, has been deliciously lubed with some ‘Woman of Courage’ Award by the US government for her investigative journalism on ‘corruption’, even as that US regime has yet again legalized the bribing of foreign officials! And she loves it. We doubt the Sunday Times would dare investigate that! Wijedasa too provides a ‘service’: she ‘vows to fight for system change’. Tariff that!

*

Services, servants, domestic & civil & public,

like the word serf, service has its origins, according

to that equally capricious Oxford English Dictionary (OED)

in: ‘Middle English: from Old French server,

from Latin servire, from servus ‘slave’…

*

• There is very little discussion on how multinational banks & corporations control 80% of world trade, and this includes goods & services. Very little is reported on how much of Sri Lanka’s export trade includes costs inflated by importers & exporters to pay for the foreign machineries involved. The fake garment trade (it is not an industry), yearning for US market access, imports pins, needles, machines, threads, resins & fabrics & fuel. CIC & CTC & Unilever are major importers of chemicals, many deadly. US exports services including computer software, Starlink, and Sri Lanka students also spend millions of dollars each year to study in the US, none of which are captured in the trade data… Firms such as booking.com operate in the country so far tax-free, as does Uber, McDonald’s, Burger King, Baskin-Robbins, Pizza Hut, Domino’s, etc. (see ee Economy, Sri Lanka services imports, open door for US brands should figure in tariff talks: NCE’s Marikar)

*

• This ee Focus concludes for now our look into Anglo-American tobacco monopoly Ceylon Tobacco Company in Sri Lanka. It examines the early attempt of CTC’s English- and US-owned parent British American Tobacco (BAT) and linked ‘private’ tobacco corporations in Europe to form ‘leviathans’ through one of the 3 largest mega corporations outside the USA. They wished to take advantage of the formation of the European Economic Community to enable a huge home market to set up the formation of even large monopolies (on the pretext of countering China?), heralding England’s entry into that market. Apparently beleaguered by concerns for health, It looks at their efforts to move into and monopolize agricultural supplies, packaging, production machinery, as well as scientific & technical research. Very interestingly it examines BAT (CTC’s) link to CIC (Imperial Chemical Industries – ICI), who led the recent media war against organic fertilizer.

*

• An Island article on a Nexus Research seminar turns out to be ‘creatively’ composed by AI… Some AI programs report the article is 66% AI, others insist it is 100%! How reliable are AI checkers? This is what has happened to merchant capitalist journalism. Why not? What is most interesting is that the unattributed article completely overturns what the speakers said, and instead repeats the US-IMF bible! Knowing the record of some of the Nexus speakers, we know they would never have said such things… Meanwhile, much of the Island’s online sections are embarrassingly defunct and outdated. Their ‘foreign news’ is totally the English government (BBC)’s view of the world.

     The other top user of AI parading as ‘news’ is EconomyNext, which is supposed to be a Sri Lankan news site, but is a US lip-service. Every EN headline has to remind readers that it is in Sri Lanka… It then simply repeats the IMF rah-rah-rah, sometimes providing fake demurrals, as passed on to their naked Advocata & Verite & IPS choristers screeching falsettos. Their top reporter – famous for throwing softball questions to hardballed US envoys – is blacker than a black cat in a black room on a starless moonless night, but his reportage is whiter than a white cat in a blinding snowfall! (see ee Economists, Dr Kohona: developing countries should covet China model)

*

• In the end, trying to submit to imperialist whimsy is a waste of time. Has been a major waste of time. & will be… For they will keep changing their demands. The moral of the story is that the slave master has the right to change (or even lose!) their mind. And it is the brave unarmed slave who dares remind: ‘But you said this’ etc. Appealing to logic & morality & ethics etc is a Jewish slave’s tricks, according to the German ‘philosopher’ F Nietzsche. It makes ee wonder if the word ‘negation’ in dialectical materialism comes from the ‘negro’… the ‘nigger’ who say ‘No!’ And not just in the night…

     The liberals claim politics and economics are separate. Yet, their elections, are the most expensive democracy that money can buy. And after robbing us for 500 years they say we owe them. The debt is now the whip, and we supposedly must agree with their computations, despite the science of mathematics and arithmetic…

     ‘The phrase ‘When goods don’t cross borders, soldiers will’ is often attributed to the 19th-century French economist Frédéric Bastiat. Its origins are contentious and may be traced back to another Frenchman Montesquieu, ‘emphasizing the civilizing effect of commerce’ However, Benjamin Franklin is quoted by Marx: ‘War is robbery, commerce is generally cheating.’ And the US and their media do all that very very well.

*

Meanwhile, as ee wishes our readers, supporters and critics, a very super new year, we would love to be a co-sponsor of this latest of fictional awards in our prize-giving-and-taking colonial nation:

‘The British Council and the Gratiaen Award Trust are honoured

to announce the inauguration of the John D’Oyly Award. Nominations

should be submitted each year, one month before – with winners

announced on – March 02, the day of the 1815 Kandyan Convention.

Judges will include: the English High Commissioner, the US Envoy,

CEOs from Standard Chartered Bank, Hongkong & Shanghai Bank,

Unilever and Ceylon Tobacco Co., and non-voting unofficial members

chosen from leading NGOs and English Departments across the country.

The French and German envoys will be admitted in case of disagreement

among the English. The Indian envoy will also remain on standby. Those

nominated need to exhibit distinct character traits akin to those by which,

according to the known fictions, ceded Lanka to an English colonialism

that had failed to militarily conquer the highland kingdom of Sinhale. The

award is being funded off the interest of undeclared tea and other exports.

Send your nominations to ee, we have a long list already…Again, a really happy new year awaits us, once we truly free our country by building a modern industrial society…

*

_________

Contents:

US & India Still Plotting to Invade & Divide Sri Lanka