e-Con e-News July 2023 Part 3

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

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‘The US decided to undertake… an influence campaign

behind the scenes, providing favors…through grants,

training grants & money for individuals involved

in participating to get them to flip their decision…

Stakeholders from China have left that project

and have struck out on their own to try to construct

what has been seemingly seen as competing cables

at the same time along similar routes…

A key pressure point in this process is:

Who is going to actually manufacture & lay the cable across the ocean?

Not necessarily who’s going to own the cable or where the cable is going to land.’

(see ee Random Notes)

NATO-media outlet Thomson-Reuters dates this cable drama as unfolding rapidly under cover of the covid roller-coaster of the last few years. ee gathers together here some English media bric-a-brac, which chose not to directly report on such underwater soundings at the time. We start with a grab of random historical references (especially about the ongoing attempt to monopolize the Indian Ocean), then to recent news about the financing & construction of telegraph & submarine cables. These sources could not or simply do not wish to flash some oxygen (to mix a metaphor) into the do-doings of those professing a ‘free & open Indo-Pacific’.

     The story intrigues. Encapsulated within it is the perfidy of SLTelecom, whose privatization is hailed as a success story – the hijacking of a public service done just as the move from landlines to mobile phones was being effected. Now it is being handed over to the World Bank!

     SLTelecom long refused to invest its vast profits in producing any equipment, much of which is imported via Japan. Japan’s claim that Colombo Dockyard is Sri Lankan, to then demand government contracts, is also here examined. Colombo Dockyard apparently ‘built’ (actually, assembled!) a ship for Japan to lay submarine cables. The local English media views industry as only children’s building-block games! The ‘cable’ business has however always been linked to European imperialism and economic exploitation. ee has recalled the English sabotage of the boat-building industry. ee now records here again the supine and backward nature of Sri Lanka’s grandly elocuted ‘IT industry’ – which does not make a screw! (see ee Focus, Fake Dockyards)

here we whirl between rivers named red & yellow

a himalayan dance of fire pivots on our head

as about us waves from west & east are roiled

to dash on the rocks. o how they froth!

time streams fast at the edges of the planet

as the receding tides of the beach

try drag us into the wider ocean

Last ee reported, the US ‘compensated’ & warned Sri Lanka Telecom and other country providers not to work with China’s subsea project. Yet China produces and supplies the most modern and efficient internet submarine cabling. This production & supply is the main issue, not the English media-blasted charges about using the cables to spy on other countries. The ‘English-built’ Kandy Road still links plantation, fort and port. This very internet to which we are bound – hand, eye, ear & mind – is set up after all by the US military to primarily connect its researchers & suppliers – DARPANET, etc. Sigh. The US is always projecting its own grimy practices onto others.

     The US threats & bribes directed at forcing countries to submit to the US’ monopoly over subsea cable routes, did not rate attention by free traders (who whinge about rule of law & laissez-faire) and the protectionists (who oppose encroachments on our sovereignty) – all radio silent.

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     This submarine cable hullabaloo arrived midst all manner of ‘digital’ news: The Washington-based World Bank’s International Finance Corporation has been ‘selected’ to ‘help’ sell off Sri Lanka Telecom, SriLankan Airlines, etc. The World Bank & their IFC already have their fingers deep in the orifices of the country’s banks, openly manipulating the ‘rigged’ stock market, etc.

• US financial ratings agency Fitch has fallen in love with us again. Fitch is ‘positive’ (not like an AIDS test but), about the government ‘unbundling CEB’s generation, transmission & distribution process by transferring CEB’s resources to 14 companies established under the Companies Act as part of the country’s energy sector reforms.’ Let there be light?

• The cabinet has also cleared an Indian-financed digital identity for every citizen, in addition to a national identity card – India promises 300million Indian rupees to this Sri Lanka Unique Digital Identity (SL-UDI) project.

• The IMF has threatened Sri Lanka to desist from taxing telecom providers. Digital multinationals should be paying at least a $100mn annually. A set of media-made-eminent economists – Stiglitz, Ghosh, Piketty – belonging to an NGO funded by the German & Norwegian state has kindly objected, on our behalf. The IMF has denied this. Very kind indeed! Yet the roots of our discontent lie deeper and relate to the prevention & sabotage of industrial production.

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‘Of all countries in South & Southeast Asia,

Ceylon has the most unstable economy.

The present crisis in the country exhibits many features born of this instability

…different in character from the earlier economic crises…

The present crisis arises from a deeper cause…

The present crisis is much more serious & much less temporary than earlier ones.

It is not a passing disturbance capable of adjustment. It is not possible to meet it

with relief schemes or other ad hoc remedies. In fact, it is fundamentally different.

It is of the greatest importance to understand this new fact about the crisis.

It is not caused by prices or demand for our gods, but by lack of produced wealth.

The question we have to ask is this:

Why is production remaining static?

Why do we not produce more?‘

– The Way Ahead (Idiri Maga), Introduction, SA Wickremasinghe, 1955

ee was curious about the Communist Party of Sri Lanka’s role in proposing the Mahaveli’s revitalization back in the 1950s. Some readers have been led to believe the Mahaveli project was of colonial or UNP origin. ee is curious about the link between DJ Wimalasurendra’s exertions to formulate an energy policy and his influence on later CP thought. This ee excerpts references to the Mahaveli’s power in Wickremasinghe’s Idiri Maga classic (see, ee Focus).

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‘Sri Lanka must ensure adequate nutrition

for pregnant, breastfeeding women: Amnesty International’

(see ee Sovereignty)

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‘A child needs 2 packets of powdered milk per week’ – Daily Mirror

(ee Agriculture)

So! The media is bullish – that’s stockmarket-speak for ‘optimistic’. Hard-to-please Fitch is optimistic about the Domestic Debt Restructuring (DDR) renamed DDO – removing ‘restructuring’ and adding ‘optimization’. Brilliant PR stuff, huh? And happier still is Fitch that the Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) is being ‘unbundled’ to private companies. And duly the stock market doth sing hallelujah in falsetto to the IMF’s dictat. And now, Amnesty International is giving Sri Lanka advice on breastfeeding! Maybe because the Minister of Agriculture is being breastfed by the World Bank and USAID’s soya lobby. The Ministry of Education is similarly learning tuition lessons after hours. The WB sets their menu… um, curriculum. The UN World Food Program (WFP) has taken over the Ministry of Health’s dentures chattering about diet and malnutrition. No caveats against imported gluten, Unilever’s carcinogenic Astra Margarine or New Zealand’s powdered milk, banned in their own countries.

     While the government sets about their ‘labor reform’, the UN International Labor Organisation (ILO) is promoting youthful ‘disruptors’ with the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce & the US government. The ILO is even teaching us to grind chilies! Those who daily deemed Gota a despot, now admire the suave callisthenics of Batalanda Wicka. US media outlet EconomyNext has an earnest Englishman recounting India’s independence struggle – full of the old orientalisms and the hookah fragrances of idealism. Maybe, the local brownies need to be reminded about the yards of indigenous airs they wrap themselves in.

     Amnesty Inc’s latest concerns are timely. Dr Priyani Soysa, once hounded by Swiss Nestlé for exposing their attempt to ‘substitute’ mother’s milk, passed away a few months ago – with several obituaries but none recalling her monumental MNC (multinational corporation) battle (ee calls Soysa, Dr, cos she was a real doctor, albeit with the most human afflictions). Amnesty Inc was quiet then about such MNC moves. They’re even more quiet now despite the ruckus. Nestlé meanwhile, after posting record profits, has opted to go ‘private’, delisting from the stock market. Shareholders, some feel milked. Others creamed.

     Since we cannot trust the English media to divulge the truth, we have to divine astrological signs to sense changes in the world. The Indian Foreign Secretary dropped by to meet the President. Then came Bollywood superstar Rajinikanth, plus the good news that ‘top stars’ are attending the Mrs India Inc Season 4 in Colombo! Does this stellar fog in this latitude of the Bay of Bengal augur greater turbulence? – to use a meteorological metaphor – as we approach the 2023^rd twenties of July. Refer here to the annual markings to recall what some call ‘Black July’ – yet we always see these & other such Julys (Julies?) as white: July 1980, July 1983, July 1987, July 2022. Why White Julys? Because we have always seen the old ‘hidden hand’ – an euphemism quite popular in the 1980s, when such horrors unfolded – to manifest the agenda of genuflection, evident in full array.

     News arrived this week that the US & Canada – another infamous Core Group – sponsors those gangs in Haiti, to pave the way for invasion (see ee Sovereignty, Caricom Caves). Such news shows why we have to go near full astrological, cos we do not have all the information, and only can read signs that barely manifest, at least openly, in the media. About Julys then and now and thenceforth. And as usual, with time, we get to see subtleties, nuances, facets and other vertebral narratives that put these apocryphal events in their time and place.

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‘Without economic freedoms to import something,

or transfer a legally earned rupee,

grand plans to develop the country will come to nothing’

– ee Economists, US EconomyNext’s Bellwether

• US state-owned media in Sri Lanka, EconomyNext constantly harangues about ‘free trade’, and liberalizing imports & exports. This made ee recall the integral English & US ‘free trade’ in slaves & opium. After all, ee was busy catching up on news about China beginning to provide their own internet submarine cabling to Asia & Africa, which would be more advanced and built faster. The whites wish China will pack up and go home 15^thC Ming-dynasty style, and leave the ocean open to the savagery & underdevelopment that the Portuguese & Spanish unleashed on these seas beginning about the 16^thC.

     ee’s tale this week begins to look at the origins of European transgressions in the Oceans, named Indian and the Pacific. From the Atlantic Triangle Trade of chattel slavery – the largest commerce of the 16-19^th century – to the largest triangle business in the 19^th century: the English opium trade in the Indian Ocean, which brought us modernity by gunboat.

     The triangle of financing English manufactures, Indian opium and Chinese tea, give us background into the banking practices of Standard Chartered & HSBC. Here then are the origins of ‘accounting’ games played by ‘exporters’ of all kinds to bleed Sri Lanka – goods mostly ‘assembled’ via inflated imports.

     This week reinforced again the unreliability of economists. The Sunday Times’ Nimal Sanderatne admitted that contrary to the President & the Central Bank governor’s promises,the ‘EPF & ETF would suffer losses & retirement benefits of private sector employees would be eroded’. Sanderatne attempts Churchillian charlatanry calling such promises – ‘factual inexactitude’ (see ee Economists).

     For such ‘inexactitudes’, we may have to thank the ‘communication strategy’ of London Ceylon Tobacco Co’s Suresh Shah, who is the government pointman in charge of selling off government resources.

     Meanwhile, over 100 academics have objected to the government undermining labor laws. Interestingly, they note the obsession with an ‘export-oriented economy’. Yet they notably avoid mentioning the IMF (see ee Focus). They observe: ‘The economy of the plantations is on the cusp of change and the Malaiyaha worker is staring into a future of fragmentation…’ Why use the ‘passive voice’? Why not tell who is making the ‘change’. Don’t they know? They may have forgotten the great English expertise in human resources bestowed upon this country’s plantocracy:

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‘During the whole of the 18^thC, English slave traders

furnished the sugar planters of France & Spain with half a million Negroes…

England was not only the foremost slave trading country in the world;

she had become… the ‘honourable slave carriers’ of her rivals…

By 1795 Liverpool alone had five-eighths of the English slave trade and

three-sevenths of the whole European slave trade…’

– Eric Williams, Capitalism & Slavery

1795 rings bells for us. English multinational Unilever now dominates Sri Lanka’s economy, economically and culturally, and holds our home market hostage. Unilever is directly traced to the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa (later Royal African Company, now Unilever). The RAC shipped more African slaves to the Americas during the Atlantic slave trade than any other company. Unilever’s founder, chief patron to English Queen Victoria’s Belgian cousin Leopold obtained control over palm oil production in the Congo & West Africa…

     Incorporated in 1663 for a period of 1,000 years, 64 years after the East India Co (EIC) was set up, the RAC was founded by the beheaded Charles I’s orphans – Charles II and his brother, the Duke of York. We now have one head hunter who is called Charles III. And the RAC’s offshoots still cripple us…

     In 1698 the Royal African Company lost its monopoly in slaving, and the right of a free trade in slaves was recognized as a fundamental & natural right of Englishmen. 90 years later, England’s Privy Council Committee in 1788 paid special attention to the fact that, of the annual English export of slaves from Africa, two-thirds were disposed of to foreigners.

     The East India Co too would in the 19^thC lose its monopoly. Out of this arose the private merchants who then reassembled as Unilever in the 20^thC. Unilever today outsources its production to 3^rd-parties who appear ‘independent’ and thus defy the country’s labor laws. They control media through advertising. Our academics have to use euphemisms, yet our politicians and media openly ensure Unilever’s will will be done.