e-Con e-News

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

e-Con e-News 27 October – 02 November 2024

History is a joker who slaps us awake while its paid-up historians (anaesthetists, really) try to dope us asleep. Yet history is also recorded in our muscles & memories. More & more Sri Lankans are forced out of the country to seek more dollared work. The state keeps being obstructed from enabling skilled employment. We end up having to contend with the wage slavemasters of the world. And history, if we do not recognize it, wishes us to turn the other cheek, to give us another slap.

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     One candidate for next week’s s/election for President in the USA – the most powerful imperialist state the world has ever known – turns out to be the child of parents both linked to the profiteers off England’s slave trading from Africa, and from India. Linking the 17^th-21^st centuries, chattel to indentured to wage slave, Atlantic to Indian Ocean – this ee awakens us to a future we can’t refuse.

     Trafficking in labor, free and unfree, remains the most lucrative capitalist industry, more profitable than weapons & opium. Its roots pierce deep into our bodies. Our failure to track it, trips us. What they are deliberately showing us of Gaza, is also of their ‘settler success’ stories through genocide. Chattel slavery came next. Indenture, after that…

     This ee examines the ‘coolie trade’ out of South India, and the great machinery that arose from it for the displacement & recruitment & exploitation of workers. We also look at the consequences of imposing a plantation system & ‘alien’ workforce on the peasants & workers of Sri Lanka.

     One of the favorite top-of-the-pops songs of our economists is the laziness of Sinhala workers, and their riotous indiscipline. The English called the Tamil worker in India lazy too, but miraculous baptism in the cool waters of the Palk Strait scrubbed them diligent in Sri Lanka. Another favorite pop-song has been to play plantation workers against rural workers, whose lands were stolen for the plantations. Land acknowledgements are the latest fad in white settler countries. But no such acknowledgement is forthcoming here.

     The plantation economy, like some crippling dye, corrodes and shrivels the rest of the body politic. The JVP was charged at one time of wishing to uproot and fling the tea bushes into the Arabian Sea. Indeed, if we really wish to root out so-called ‘corruption’, we could first haul up English multinationals Unilever and Ceylon Tobacco Co, and Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI-CIC). We could invite the Congo to join in the trial (the biggest funder of the butcher Leopold was William Lever of Lever Bros fame) and maybe invite Zimbabwe to sue CTC. Let us examine, where their profits have gone, and into what?

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As this ee Focus recalls, indentured populations have helped colonial government to expand territory. The power of the multinationals to pay plantation workers the most minimum of wages has also operated as a brake on the rest of wages in the economy. Colombo’s rich do not have to venture far to encounter this phenomenon. Look at the terms & conditions under which supermarket workers are employed, by Keells & Cargills etc. See which villages these workers hail from? Foolish is the employer who does not play ex-plantation workers against urban worker, and vice-versa. Then again such is the nature of an economy dependent on exporting raw materials and low-level assembly of garments & electronics, plucking tea, serving tourists. As SBD de Silva (to whom this blog is dedicated) pointed out:

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The predominance of labour-intensive sectors of production, in which

any given wage increase has a substantial impact on production costs,

also makes employers more averse to granting wage increases…

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So why are we not permitted to perambulate beyond the ‘labor intensive’ to the ‘capital intensive’? Instead, we are destined to be relegated to the media’s fake ‘manufacturing’ and ‘assembly’ as ‘industry’. Meanwhile most of Sri Lanka’s so-called art ‘industry’ extols handicraft etc – acts amounting to quasi-necrophilia – fornicating with the half dead. The Sunday Times has an almost regular paean to such ancient acts, like this:

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‘Ruk Kala: Preserving traditional wood carving in a modern world’

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These features are usually accompanied by a photo of a long-bearded, bald, thickly bespectacled sarong-wearing shirtless hairy-chested denizen amidst ancient tools. Who made those tools? What happened to those makers of tools? Dripping with the melodrama of dubious despair, we are told, this ‘art’ is facing ‘growing pressure from mass production & modern manufacturing’. Oh really? Since when? So, what does the Sunday Times propose we do about it? Nothing. Weep and turn the page. Judging from their glossy 4-color ‘Education’ supplement – the weightiest of their news sections – we should all get the hell of out of town, posing as ‘foreign students’ to deliver almost-frozen burgers in the freezing subarctic (see ee Random Notes, Canada Restricts Brown Immigration?)

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• The white man never hands over ‘aid’ without the alms-getting beggar having to endure severe sermons. The US envoy, a brainwashed Korean mandu (dumpling), who apparently has to pay out a lot of dollars to keep her photo & name & dire wardrobe in the news, informed us once again this week that ‘transparency & governance reforms’ are ‘key to attracting manufacturers to Sri Lanka’. And who are these manufacturers? The Indiana-based Shield Co wishes to shift its seatbelt factory from China to Sri Lanka – ‘a testament to the growing interest of US investment in Sri Lanka’. Really? And why is this?  What skills will they impart? No idea? Instead:

‘The USA is already the largest export market for Sri Lanka…

From boosting farmers’ crop yields to, expanding the school lunch

program to address the urban poor in Colombo, to strengthening

Sri Lanka’s maritime security, our collaboration is driven by a common vision.’

Really! And what, pray, is this vision? Will we make the machines that make seatbelts, or even a button? Will our vision keep being blinded by further largesse?

     As a local ‘assembler’ of seatbelt-related accessories, Rohan Pallewatta pointed out about Toyota, there are certain operations modern industrialists will not outsource ‘to a labour-intensive country such as Sri Lanka’. Any outsourcing needed the approval of the Automobile Association of Japan (see ee 16 Oct 2021).

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‘Sri Lanka’s Central Bank responds to reports of ‘money printing’.’

– AdaDerana

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‘Govt Denies Claims of New Loans & Money Printing’

– Financial Times, News1st, The Morning, The Island

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‘Sri Lanka prints Rs100billion through open market operations’

– Bellwether, EconomyNext

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Much of this week’s economic news headlines were dedicated to whether the government was secretly printing billions. The ease with which such accusations are made (rarely in a court of law), and the sheer amounts (who has seen a billion?) involved, are only meant to dish out cynicism and distrust in its wake. The JVP’s detractors argue: they are getting what they dished out. But the overall purpose is to keep preventing the government guiding investment in modern industrialization.

     This is why the Central Bank has been declared ‘independent’ of the need to invest in our real independence. The World Bank, their mentor, has also always diverted local policymakers from large-scale industry and promoted ‘peasant colonization, services, & micro-entrepreneurship’ (fake cutlis-making MSMEs) instead. Meanwhile, we hear that the World-Bank funded Commercial Bank’s Chairman met the Central Bank Governors of Bangladesh & Maldives in Washington, to check on the private bank’s investments in those countries’ industries. The Commercial Bank is supposedly Sri Lanka’s largest so-called local private bank, which gets a lot of funds from so-called development (read: imperialist state) banks.

     The pseudonymous Bellwether column (see above) invokes the word ‘print’ as in ‘printing money’ 14 times in his/her recent column! Now this word ‘printing’, is a trigger word, meant to invoke profligacy, inflation, devaluation! Colonized governments like the poor are to be always accused of living beyond their means. The idea is that the state must not invest and guide the economy, but rely only on the so-called private sector. What this covert printing of money by the new administration is for – industrial investment? – is not mentioned.

     Bellwether goes on to blame the ‘malnutrition of children (which led to start the Thriposha program)’ in the 1970s on ‘import controls, import substitution & price controls which created blackmarkets & hit the food production base.’ Bellwether only loves his Miss Margaret: ‘Thatcher… kept tight monetary policy, cut direct taxes, boosting individual freedoms and raised VAT.’

     Indeed, if we are to remain an import-export colonial appendage of the USA, maybe Bellwether’s prognoses are the way to go. A recipe for further colonization. Bellwether is the pseudonym behind which the main columnist of the US government’s Colombo newsmonger EconomyNext hides. Bellwether echoes all the shibboleths of the Advocata Institute, & Cato Institute, thinktanks set up by the Atlas Network, founded by Exxon’s Rockefeller-funded Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) (see ee 16 March 2024: Economists in SL Echo White Atlantic’s War on the World).

     So how will our children (not to mention adults) learn about the need for modern machine production? The Ministry of Education bribed by the World Bank will not tell us. We did hear this week that a ‘shift from state- to donor-funded higher education (including the World Bank & Asian Development Bank) started in Sri Lanka in the late 1990s, specifically with the 1997 educational reforms’ under the earnest Tara de Mel (now Executive Director, Bandaranaike Academy for Leadership & Public Policy, BALPP).

    We are indeed confused about all the brouhaha about travel advisories & tourism. We imagine intelligence services are constantly sending each other warnings. These particular warnings came in the run up to the 16^th BRICS Sunmit, and a UN resolution against the USA’s favorite parked aircraft carrier, Zionist Israel, the IMF & World Bank Annual, and that gloriously misnamed Commonwealth meeting in Samoa, again signalling virtue about reparations by non-dollar apologies! Two of these meetings the USA would have liked us to desist from? And desist we kind of did.

     But was the warning a fake alert to observe and chart the chain of command in the new government’s security apparatus?  Also, is tourism, really ‘local’ and an ‘industry’? Most of the profits that accrue to this tourism business always stay outside the country. We make no airplanes or ships or cars or buses to transport tourists. Iron & steel and most hotel construction material & machinery, linen and cutlery are imported. It bends backs bent by lifting over half-a-millennia of colonialism, and bends them even further, as service workers often have to do, to do what they do best – serve. 

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• For Sri Lankans, elections are the number one sport, with cricket a distant number 2. So, it is said. And bookies (the turf accountants & stock exchange mavericks) are involved in both. US & European elections provide the most elaborate performances of capitalist democracy that power & money can buy. In US elections, the identity of mega rich donors are hidden, while in Sri Lanka, the USA many envoys give us lectures on transparency.

     The nominally Nikkei-owned Financial Times of London portrays the US election as a battle of billionaires. Billionaires appear now to be a dime a dozen, so 5 minutes ago, etc. They even appear on unpaid television channels as ‘celebrities’ & ‘entrepreneurs’ begging for our attention. As far as we can count, zillionaires are the new trillionaires.

            Financial Times lists the names of some of these billionaire donors. The Mellon bankers of Pennsylvania, a so-called swing state, are listed among Mr Trump’s biggest donors. The Mellons financed the Duponts (who sell us paint for our walls). The Duponts were 19^th century refugees from 2 revolutions: in France & in Haiti. Napoleon’s rainmaker & PM, and later architect of his employer’s downfall, Charles de Talleyrand gave the Duponts the contract to make dynamite for the French in Delaware (De la War!). Delaware is now the USA’s main inland corporate tax hideout, which their demented President Biden represented. Dupont is also linked to India’s polyester prince, Dhirubhai Ambani, whose war over DMT had certain ‘side-effects’ on Sri Lanka (see ee 11 Sept 2021: How to Buy a News Editor). Yet Mellon’s Pennsylvania is all about oil, and industry. And so it turns out that the billionaires (& bankers) on both sides of this battle, are satraps of Rockefeller’s Exxon. Recall that Exxon demanded Trump change laws promoting corporate bribery before they allowed their CEO Rex Tillerson to become US Secretary of State (see ee 28 Sept 2019 – Making Made-in-Sri-Lanka)

     The Mellons financed the white-supremacist ‘Black Legion’, ‘an armed anti-labor terrorist group active in the 1930s, reputedly also financed by sections of the automotive industry’ – so recalls the George Jackson, one of the theoreticians of Black liberation in the USA. Jackson was assassinated by prison officials in San Quentin prison in 1971. ee publishes excerpts of his 1971 classic Blood in My Eye, which discuss the rise of industrialization in the USA, and how it helped bring white supremacism into sharp focus for Black workers. We should recall how Europe’s WWI caused a shortage of European migrants to the Americas. Also, European workers had built unions in industrial North America and the US state responded by bringing 500,000 rural Black workers from the south to the north where they encountered about 30,000 migrants from the Caribbean.

     SBD de Silva observed the relationships between the employment of Black (& migrant) workers in ‘unproductive’ sectors where automation was yet to take place. Black industrial workers, who were a considerable section of the overall working class & trade union movement, formed the core of the US Black liberation movement, whose leadership was imprisoned and killed, midst the move to offshoring, de-industrialization, dis-unionization, biological (health) & chemical (drugs, food) warfare, and imprisonment.

     Half of Asia, most of Africa, almost all of Europe & the rest of the Americas, remain colonized, now under the USA. The Americas includes the Caribbean. The soil and culture of resistance is rich.  The situation is as much then as now. But the world keep changing… and surprises are always brewing…

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This ee concludes our recent look at the industrial path taken by the USSR, the first socialist country in the world. 20 years after independence, by 1937 the USSR’s industrial production was first in Europe and second in the world. By 1940, the share of means of production in gross output of all industry was over 60%. In 1928, on the eve of the first 5-Year Plan, the USSR imported one-third of all its machinery. By 1940, they not only ceased to import automobiles, tractors and other agricultural machinery from the capitalist countries, but exported them.

     We understand why the US Treasury and its underlings, IMF et al, have been so concerned about any lessons we may still learn from the USSR. There were many even then, Soviets, who opposed the USSR Communist Party’s path to industrializing the country. They were accused of wishing to return the USSR into ‘an agrarian appendage of imperialist countries’ – just as has been done with Sri Lanka.

     The Soviet Union had to mainly rely on itself to build socialism amidst capitalist invasion, and quickly develop all the basic branches of heavy industry. They learned: ‘A large-scale machine industry is the material basis of socialism’, and ‘heavy industry is of decisive importance for building socialism’.

     Meanwhile, ‘the process of industrialization in each country taking this path depends on both internal & external conditions’, as China had to learn after 1949. China did not have much industry and its agriculture was underdeveloped, ‘at a low cultural and scientific level’. China set out to ‘learn all that is genuinely good in the political, economic, scientific & technological fields and in literature & art’ from other countries.

     On the other hand, as ‘a colonial & semi-colonial country’, yet ‘not an imperialist power’, who ‘was always bullied by others’, there were still in China, ‘people who, having been slaves too long, feel inferior in everything and don’t stand up straight in the presence of foreigners’.

     ee therefore also concludes our recent look at the lessons China learned from the USSR, on the need to seek criticism so as to learn, and to criticize people while being aware that people have 2 sides and can correct themselves. ‘How to deal with people who have made mistakes’…

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The world consists of contradictions.

Without contradictions the world would cease to exist.

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‘Since it is easier for those who have not erred to become cocky,

they are prone to make mistakes. Let us be careful, for those

who fix people guilty of mistakes will more often

than not end up finding themselves in a fix.’

(see ee Focus)

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Contents:

Kamala’s Mother & the ‘Coolie’ Trade to Sri Lanka