e-Con e-New

blog: eesrilanka.wordpress.com

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

e-Con e-News 28 July – 03 August 2024

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‘There is no part of this earth’s surface perhaps about which more

has been written than about the island of Ceylon.’ – JA Ferguson, 1898

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US Warship Michael Murphy (sounds like Irish blasphemy, but is part of the ‘US Destroyer Squadron 31 of Naval Surface Group Middle Pacific’) enters Colombo last week and departs after a ‘formal visit’. Then a sulky Indian Naval Submarine (INS) Shalki skulks in . The US envoy then welcomes Sri Lanka’s ‘announcement’ of yet another expensive (most of the expenses are for media, and the ‘returns’ on ‘investing’ in candidates) Presidential Election, while lauding our ‘longstanding commitment to democracy’. Miss Julie, the gunboat diplomat, must mean gunboat democracy. After all, they should know: after financing terrorist wars in the 1980s, assassinations in the 1950s and coups in the 1960s, economic sabotage in the 1970s, sabotaging the creation of a Central Bank that avoided investment in modern industry, setting up and manipulating failed IMF panaceas.

     This ee therefore looks at the year 1898, in Sri Lanka and the world. 1898 dates the rise of the latest phase of capitalism – Imperialism. 1998 is the year an upstart USA blew up its own warship in Havana harbor, to take over some Spanish colonies, invading Cuba & the Philippines in Asia, unleashing the genocidal expertise of the veterans of their Indian Wars of the late 19^th century on the North American Plains & Southwest.

     US politics over its almost 250-year existence has been explained as a conflict between 2 wings of the ruling Capitalist Party of the USA, between slave importer & slave breeder – between 2 robber-siblings of settler vintage, the elder brother who says they have robbed enough, and the younger sister who says they are yet to fully secure their loot.

     This contradiction is evident in the setup in 1898 of the American Anti-Imperialist League (AAL) tied to a wing of the US Democratic Party & its presidential campaign. AIA was supported by US Steel magnate Andrew Carnegie (who worried for his steel monopoly) & famous author Mark Twain. The opposing gunboaters supported William McKinley who claimed god told him to invade Asia (see ee Focus). McKinley is US presidential candidate Donald Trump’s current favorite presidential forebear, who he claims was the ‘King of Tariffs’ (see ee 27 July 2024)! McKinley was later assassinated to pave the way for roughrider Theodore Roosevelt (whose foreign policy was: Walk Softly & Carry a Big Stick. Roosevelt’s name now also adorns an aircraft carrier parked in the Persian Gulf with 6 destroyers). Trump’s previous model was US President Andrew Jackson, who genocided the South to set up enslaved cotton plantations there. We do not wish to be partisan. Trump & Harris-of-color are both part of the set menu… The more immediate origins of gunboat diplomacy are found in the US demanding ‘equal opportunity’ with other imperialists to impose the opium trade on China.

            Miss Julie’s gunboat democracy is most evident of course in the US policy of roiling their ‘Mexican backyard’: ‘The US Government Selects New President for Venezuela’! So runs a German headline this week (see ee Sovereignty). The US State Department’s coy mouth organ, the Washington Post shamelessly insists yet again ‘Maduro lost Venezuelan election’. Elections are now more openly announced and decided by the US State Department, through their capitalist media foghorns, regardless… Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro this week, noted how the US Pentagon have funded and produced Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos. Facebook was initially a Pentagon project called LifeLog; Google Earth used to be the CIA’s EarthViewer….

     Comrade Joseph Stalin concluded, ‘In capitalist elections, it is the not the voting that counts, but the counting.’ And now it turns out, it is who announces the count. This is recently evident in Murdoch’s Fox declaring Biden the President, despite their fan Trump’s demurral in that last contested election….

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• Then again, real literacy is based on numeracy. And the counting depends on the accounting. And England’s Ceylon Tobacco Co salaryman Suresh Shah, the man put in charge of selling off the motherland’s jewels (who ee calls SoERU Suresh), told us this week, that the plans to sell off Sri Lanka Telecom, etc, have been authenticated by the likes of such scandal-ridden tax-magicians as USA’s Price Waterhouse & England’s Delloite.

     Their political arithmetik derives from that numbering that calculates how, after over 500 years of colonial plunder, the whites have accumulated so much moral capital (as well), we somehow still owe them!. They therefore decide how much we owe them, and consequently, what words mean. Let’s look at this so-called ‘settlement’ of the ruling oligarchy’s debts, which we can never ever pay back, a deal that sets us up for yet another default:

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‘A senior executive of Rothschild (the largest ISB creditor of Sri Lanka)

moved to Lazard (SL’s financial advisory firm for the ISB restructure)

to manage debt restructuring. It could well be that the proposals that were

on the negotiation table, including Macro-Linked Bonds (MLBs),

was ‘a joint proposal’ of the creditor & the financial advisor of the debtor!’

– Samson Ekanayake, ee Economists, SL international bond deal

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This 17^th IMF deal aims to ensure the country’s underdevelopment until 2048 at least. The greatest guarantee of ‘perpetual debt’ amidst ‘forever wars’ is to prevent our economic, particularly energy & industrial, self-sufficiency & security. They aim to sustain the inferiority complex that we are an ‘island’, ‘poor’, ‘backward’ & ‘bankrupt’, etc.  We were told this week, ‘Unfortunately for Sri Lanka, many of our mineral deposits are present in or near ecologically sensitive areas’ (see ee Industry, Jathika Jana). The US warship entry, despite the purported ban on military visits, is meant to prevent our alliance with those who only have a true interest in assisting our modern industrialization, in freeing Lanka & its seas from over 500 years of piracy. Meanwhile, the US & their English & EU poodles are busy hijacking the International Seabed Authority (ISBA) leadership in Jamaica.

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‘The International Seabed Authority does not have the authority

to permit India to explore the Afanasy Nikitin Seamount…

Sri Lanka’s claim to this area, established in 2009, should be upheld…

the Afanasy Nikitin Seamount had been uncovered by Soviet researchers

in 1959 during the International Indian Ocean Expedition. This large-scale,

multinational hydrographic survey of the Indian Ocean ran from

Sept 1, 1959, to Dec 31, 1965, and was aimed at understanding

the fundamental features of the ocean. If a country discovers something

while exploring the ocean floor, it has the right to name it.

The Soviets chose to name the seamount after a Russian explorer who

was one of the first Europeans to travel to & document his visit to India.’

– Rear Admiral (ret’d) YN Jayarathna, former Chief Hydrographer

& former Deputy Chief of Staff of the Navy (see ee Sovereignty)

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July 2024 also saw, and overheard, the closest the USA has come to admitting it sabotages the industrial economic policies of our countries. This was revealed at the Aspen Security Forum. The Aspen Institute is funded by such corporate tax-shelters as the Carnegie Corporation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Gates, Lumina & Ford Foundations.

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‘The country that leads in technology tends to lead the world – Roman roads, Chinese

gunpowder, English steamships & so on & so forth. The USA & our friends &

allies have been the undisputed technology leaders for decades and now we have

someone who’s running the race & running really fast – and that’s China. So, the goal

here should be for the USA & our friends & allies to run faster in this race.

There’s 2 ways to win a race: One you hobble the other guy and Allan [F Estevez,

Undersecretary of Industry & Security, US Dept of Commerce] & team are

working on that. There’s another way to do it which is to run faster ourselves & this

gets to what our companies are doing – we need to be, remain, the fastest & best innovation

country in the world that used to be undisputed, but there’s more that we can do.’

– Anja Manuel, Executive Director of Aspen Security Forum, 16 July 2024

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If the US is openly using this ‘Tonya Harding strategy’ (the US Olympian who hired a gangster to beat up a fellow athlete) on China, after all this nattering about ‘free trade’, go figure what they have done to Sri Lanka!

     At this Aspen meeting, Eric Schmidt (former CEO of Google & currently on a US Department of War advisory board) congratulates Estevez (US Undersecretary of Industry & Security), telling him the ‘genius of your strategy [to ban semiconductors to China] is that you found a monopoly that exists in one company in the world that we had control over, which is ASML.’ ASML, the world’s ‘most valuable tech company’, is supposedly a Dutch company, that makes the machines that make chip-making machines. Its origins are traced to the Philips Co and the stealing of Karl Marx’s mother’s inheritance! (see ee 11 Nov 2023).

     Our economists & intellectuals are paid to shy away from such planned industrial ‘security’. England banned the emigration of machines & mechanics in 1695, they also banned the import of textiles from India etc to protect their nascent industry. US machine memorialists like to claim that an Englishman (Samuel Slater) defied that ban and sailed to the US, and from memory built the first machines that formed the basis of the US’ textile industry. Within such miasma & mythmaking & diversion is industrial policy befogged.

     The banning & banishment of an industrial culture has diverted us from a common-sense view of life, which should be our daily prayer:

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‘The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition

that the production of the means to support human life and, next

to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all

social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history,

the manner in which wealth is distributed & society divided into classes

or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, & how

the products are exchanged. From this point of view, the final causes of all

social changes & political revolutions are to be sought, not in men’s brains,

not in men’s better insights into eternal truth & justice, but in changes in the

modes of production & exchange. They are to be sought, not in the philosophy,

but in the economics of each particular epoch.’

– Frederick Engels, Socialism: Utopian & Scientific, 1880

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Part of the blame for our ignorance may be laid at the failure of our fake ‘philosophers of praxis’ to elucidate the real machinery gearing modern capitalism. This also explains the proliferation of political 3wheeler parties & academics, claiming to be ‘Leftists’, ‘Socialists’, ‘Communists’, ‘Marxists’, etc, while promoting ‘anarchism’, ‘nihilism’ & ‘Trotskyism’. And then we have the example of the latest Scottish Pretender (the Scots are still pretending), a King’s knight, Sir Keir Starmer, who claims to lead a ’Labour’ party:

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‘The dialectics of history were such that the theoretical victory of Marxism

compelled its enemies to disguise themselves as Marxists. Liberalism, rotten

within, tried to revive itself in the form of socialist opportunism. They

interpreted the period of preparing the forces for great battles as renunciation

of these battles. Improvement of the conditions of the slaves to fight against

wage slavery they took to mean the sale by the slaves of their right to liberty

for a few pence. They cravenly preached social peace” (ie, peace with

the slave-owners), renunciation of the class struggle, etc. They had very

many adherents among socialist members of parliament, various officials

of the working-class movement, and the sympathizing” intelligentsia.’

– VI Lenin, The Historical Destiny of the Doctrine of Karl Marx, 1913

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It is the duty of the capitalist media to promote a fake socialism that is unable to single out the role and significance of each class in capitalist society. They conceal the capitalist strictures of democratic reforms, with their incessant slogan-mongering about the people”, ‘justice’, ‘rights’ etc., while pushing US Amnesia about great historical crimes… Despite all that’s been written: ‘about the island of Ceylon….’

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Contents:

US Envoy’s Gunboat Democracy as US & Indian Warships Slip into Colombo