Walking on Eggshells in India’s Greater ‘Hood
Posted on June 11th, 2023
e-Con e-News
‘Before you study the economics, study the economists!’
e-Con e-News June 2023 Part 2
‘Walk the pavement.
Observe what is the being sold,
and where, and how, it is made.
You don’t need an economics degree
To know what is going on…’’
– SBD de Silva
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This ee records the 5th anniversary of the passing of SBD de Silva, to whom this weekly blog eCon eNews is dedicated.
When illumination could not be gleaned from Sri Lanka or the current times, SB would scour and scan the world and history to seek glimpses and foreshadows of the mechanisms of underdevelopment, to fathom resonance in unearthing the roots of Sri Lanka’s discontent – which he identified in the ‘merchant & moneylender’ system.
SBD, as evident in his singular classic The Political Economy of Underdevelopment, was particularly intrigued by the experiences of the settler colonies imposed on Africa, the Americas and the Pacific, to which he contrasted the practices imposed on such non-settler colonies as Sri Lanka.
Yet it is from within Sri Lanka that he could focus himself, on the country and the world, reminding that most of all: ‘We know so little of ourselves.’
Indeed!
Know thy self. Know thy enemy.
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‘Sri Lanka’s economy is being ‘supervised’
by the International Monetary Fund (IMF)
while big power dynamics in the Indo-Pacific region
have brought the country under the radar
of foreign listening posts monitoring its every move.
Sri Lanka is truly walking on eggshells.’
– The Sunday Times (see ee Focus, Sri Lanka on Eggshells)
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Switzerland’s Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue (CHD) hosted the 3rd Bay of Bengal Maritime Dialogue in Colombo on 23-24 May, with the Pathfinder Foundation. Pathfinder has been funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, and is fronted by Milinda Moragoda, failed merchant, which has made him the ideal SL envoy to India. Which he is.
The Bay of Bengal Maritime Dialogue is most concerned with ‘marine environmental protection, opportunities and challenges for marine and scientific research’, etc. Who isn’t!? The closing statement at the Maritime Dialogue was delivered by the (white South African?) CHD South Asia Coordinator Willem Punt, about whom there is very little on the internet.
As for the ‘Swiss’ CHD, Wiki says it was launched in 1999 by career English Foreign Officer Martin Griffiths. Griffiths is presently a UN Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, under UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.
The CHD says it ‘works to prevent and resolve armed conflicts around the world through mediation and discreet diplomacy’. Yet, this ‘Swiss’ CHD’s Griffiths and the United Nations stand accused of gaming the war on the Ukraine and Russia, and the ongoing blockade of Black Sea grain and fertilizer, consequently sending prices soaring since January 2022! The UN’s Griffiths & Guterres were exposed this week of being behind this ‘manufacture of scarcity’.
‘Food is the cash of cash’, observed VI Lenin. Indeed, starting March 2022, food, fuel, fertilizer, pharma & finance would be ’vanished’ from before our very eyes.
In 2020-21, for example, Russia & Ukraine, together,exported 56.5 million tons of wheat – more than the 3rd & 4th largest wheat exports of the USA & Canada combined.
The withdrawal of such volumes of grain from the market
inevitably led to an increase in food prices. Wheat futures on Western exchanges have risen by about one and a half times since January 2022.
(see ee Random Notes).
• Women & men may be currently forced to work 15 hours a day – sometimes more – for instance in supermarkets sporting the glossiest global brands, promising diversity, inclusion & equality (DIE!). Sri Lanka’s labor laws however limit the legal working day to 8 hours. With exceptions. Employers however are now trying to weaken labor laws, by ‘legalizing’ – de-jure-fying – this de-facto state of temporal affairs, of unlimited hours, under the pretext of giving women ‘equality’. They are also deploying such fancy tropes as ‘flexibility’. The will of the USA’s IMF, to change labor laws, is being done. (see ee Random Notes)
• The US Envoy Julie Chung, whose rootings about the political real estate are prognosticated as mischief foretold, was found this week twittering of religious love, standing afore the Anglican ‘Christ Church Warleigh’ midst regimented foliage in yonder plantation Dickoya.
How could a ‘manager of the Governor’s Mansion’ afford to build that church? And why? And in 1878? The year the English imposed the infamous Grain Tax that led to mass starvation and land theft, in Nuwara Eliya and elsewhere. Of such, Chung manifests cluelessness.
1792: English expedition after expedition was sent to St Domingue
to attack first the French, and then the Africans,
who drove out the English! ‘1,000s of men and 1,000s of pounds!’
English army historian Fortescue lamented the useless ‘sacrifice’.
Sri Lanka has a very rich history alongside Haiti. We are sites of the greatest liberation struggles in world history. Spain’s Columbus landed in Haiti in 1492. Portugal’s Almeida in Sri Lanka in 1505. We have endured. But how. Now, like Sri Lanka, Haiti too has a white ‘Core Group’ overseeing our every move. Haiti too is also constantly threatened by military invasion and internal subversion by ‘gangs’ linked to the country’s multinational corporation (MNC) distribution networks.
The plantation system in Sri Lanka also has a long umbilical link to Haiti (Recall PJ Laborie’s Coffee Planter of Santo Domingo, 1798, reprinted in Ceylon in 1842, advocating anti-worker terrorism). After the English army suffered one of its greatest defeats, in Haiti, it is to Sri Lanka they turned their guns and pens, from 1796, where they had to place more stress on espionage and intrigue, after repeated defeats, here and there.
US Envoy Chung, by the way, is linked to the planning of the murder of the previous President of Haiti, before which, she was transferred here. Chung’s sighting and twittering could also be a diversion from their more ‘easterly’ interests, in that same tradition of daily duplicity (see ee Random Notes).
• There are other rumblings in them-there hills. And it’s not just related to Indo-Australian tectonics (see ee Industry)! Workers are pointing to the costs of living and loving. Others worry about the still unresolved imposition of settler plantation enclaves with loyalties & royalties enriching stashes elsewhere. No wonder the central provinces – and central they are and always been – have come to be known as ‘India’s Kashmir in Central Sri Lanka’ (see ee Sovereignty).
Meanwhile, Sri Lanka’s media is quiet about happenings just across the oceanic pond in Kenya and Somalia. These events portend further tectonic grating for Sri Lanka. In Kenya, the media is reporting ‘violence’, while the tea MNCs are involved in exploiting tea workers further under a limited mechanization, which fails to transform Kenya into a modern industrial economy. In Somalia, the US and United Arab Emirates (UAE) are said to be financing the fragmentation of the country (ee Focus).
‘SI leading raid on illicit liquor brewer bitten by snake;
sergeant set upon by ganja dealer’s dog’
(see ee Security)
Such headlines as this, are classic. They advertize the media’s ability to go to any lengths to hide the real ‘white-collar’ merchants staging the fraud of this import-export non-settler-colonial plantation economy. No blasphemy is greater than naming the ‘import-exporters’, especially those involved in the tea fraud, whose main crime beyond stashing surpluses abroad is the monopolization and misuse of vast resources, insistently failing to invest in a modern production economy.
Their headlines, posing as learned, prefer pointing to easier targets: ‘Only 40% poor among 1.7 million Samurdhi beneficiaries: LIRNEasia’. The moral police are worried, affecting a Malthusian zeal, about the undeserving acquiring benefits meant for the deserving poor.
The distinguished ‘LIRNEasia Senior Research Manager Gayani Hurulle, Welfare Benefits Board Chairman B Wijayaratne, US Advocata Institute CEO Dhananath Fernando, CEPA Sustainable Development Team Leader Karin Fernando and LIRNEasia Statistician Tharaka Amarasinghe’ – all agree. The thing is this inquisitor LIRNEasia, which claims to be ‘Pro Poor, Pro Market’, stands accused of facilitating the privatization of SLTelecom for a song, and the dominance of US Microsoft in Sri Lanka. This is the real steal. The literacy we learn desperately needs a value-added export-quality numeracy.
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