e-Con e-News

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e-Con e-News July 2023 Part 4

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With the US & India fertilizing chaos in Sri Lanka, while threatening division and invasion – the US Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), to allow troops on Lanka’s soil, has apparently been ‘unanimously’ endorsed – Sri Lanka’s President is now summoned to pose at Delhi’s Red Fort – final citadel of the Mughal invasion, of England’s East India Company (EIC) and of the current Brown-Sahib Raj – to embrace the role of the coolie’s coolie.

     Last ee reported that Washington assigned India to a subordinate industrial caste during Indian President N Modi’s recent overhyped junket there. India has accepted this industrial harijan status – they will labor-intensively assemble & test semiconductors within the US supply chain. Sri Lanka thus has to learn to conjure kotthu from broken chips that fall off their table, just as we have creatively concocted kotthu from discarded Chennai roti, while the IMF hands over our national enterprises to the World Bank and other dubious ‘international accounting firms’ like Deloitte to sell (see ee Quotes).

     The origins of the word ‘coolie’ are gps-ed in the Chinese characters for ‘bitter strength’ and turned into the word for ‘wages’ in South Asia – kuli.

     China rejects such a bitter world-ordering, and seeks to design the latest chip-making machines. This ee looks at the belligerent extents the USA is deploying to prevent China from achieving such modern industrial autonomy. Such industrial retardation is finally aimed at all our countries (see ee Random Notes)

     The Sri Lankan President’s beckoning to Delhi – unleashed over-the-top promises to physically lash Sri Lanka to India at that hip joint called Trincomalee, with an oil pipeline running through, offering a common currency, dividing Sri Lanka via a 13^th Amendment wrought from India’s arming of terrorists. The President has also rammed through a ‘new’ Central Bank Act, which will further enthrall Sri Lanka’s economy to Wall Street’s croupiers. The US thinktank Verite, severe school master, keeps count of the government’s failures to adhere to the IMF dictat (see ee Economy). Yet there is no thinktank to recount the failures to fulfil a so-called independent state’s sacred covenant with its own people.

     Gone are the days when this President’s uncle, then-President JR Jayawardene, with Margaret Thatcher highkicking chorus, promised their over-priced and destructive caricature of the CPSL’s Mahaveli Project would electrify India as well! And where be all the daily wielders of ornery orientalisms as despotism, chaos and corruption of just last year, now? Let there be light! The Wickremesinghe offshoot of the oligarchy outdistances all in their obeisance to a dire anglomania, despite exhalations resounding non-alignment.

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• Then there are the Indo-Saxons atop us. India seeks to kettle economic & international policy by preventing Sri Lanka from pursuing a direct Free Trade Agreement with China. India wants Lanka’s engagement with China only through the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)’s Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). Critics wonder if Sri Lanka is being asked to play again the same Bandung-Buru spoiler role it was assigned to play in Indonesia in 1955, to undermine the 1^st conference of the historic Non-Aligned Movement (NAM, see Bandung Buruvo, Bailouts & Giveaways, ee 23 May 2020).

     A senior Sri Lanka government delegation was dispatched to Jakarta, Indonesia, from 12-14 June 2023. Their PR hailed the occasion as the ‘First-ever Fact-Finding Mission to RCEP by any country after it entered into force on 01 January 2022’ The US, it turns out, is openly attempting to sabotage ASEAN. NATO’s Jens Stoltenberg recently stated, ‘security is not a regional, but a global task’. Hence concealing their iron Euro-Atlantic priorities within their silky ‘Indo-Pacific Strategies’.

     To this end, India pushed Sri Lanka’s envoy there, Milinda Moragoda, to get President Ranil Wickremesinghe to appoint Jayanath Colombage as the Ambassador to Indonesia. Indonesia is the current headquarters for ASEAN. Colombage, belonging to Moragoda’s Exxon-funded Pathfinder NGO, is held culpable for misleading former Gotabhaya Rajapakse into major foreign policy faux pas (see Random Notes, Politics of Hedging in the Indo-Pacific).

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ee has been examining the US sabotage of China’s participation in building & laying the latest submarine internet cabling in the ocean (see ee July 2023, Parts 2 & 3). SLTelecom is fighting shy about being lubricated by US ‘compensations’ to deny Sri Lankans access to the latest technology.

     Reader indulgence is requested therefore, as ee seeks to trace the US imposition of its ‘Euro-Atlantic’ (NATO) architecture of war on the Indian Ocean. To track first sightings of the US in the Indian & Pacific Ocean, just after its ‘war of independence’ from England, and enthusiastic involvement in the English-dominated opium trade imposed on China, leading to the USA’s 1^st millionaires, the ‘Boston Brahmin Bankers’ etc.

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Last ee quoted Eric Williams’ classic Capitalism & Slavery. Williams points out that some of the most philanthropic English ‘humanitarians’ of the 17^th, 18^th and 19^th centuries made their glittering lucre from the Atlantic slave trade in kidnapped Africans. Let’s not forget that ‘father of English liberalism’ John Locke was a slave trader.

     Rivers of ink were emptied in denouncing this horrific trade. Some proclaimed, such ‘humanitarians’ would change their investment options if they saw the choked holds within slave ships, or a plantation’s whip-in-hand human-resource policies. Williams said none of this curtailed English investment in the chattel slave trade. Vast profits overcame any shyness. Williams points out that many abolitionists were directors of the East India Company, which turned to the indentured slavery of predominantly Chinese and Indian people, of coolies and opium, etc. (Williams as Prime Minister of Trinidad was inspired to ban his own book! Also: see EIC history below, ee Focus)

     Meanwhile, the USA’s 1^st envoy to China, a former pirate himself, noted how the slave trade required an apropos joy in the horrific suffering of other humans. He also recorded how the English were already resorting in the 18^th century to armed thuggery to extend their attempts to rob China. ee here recalls that the ‘liberal’ expression ‘equal opportunity’ originates in the US demand to also do what other European imperialists were doing in China!

     ee has also extensively quoted former Ceylon Central Bank official Michael Greenberg’s 1969 classic British Trade & the Opening of China 1800-42. Both Greenberg and Williams appear to subscribe to the theory that our ‘non-settler colonized economies’ were crafted to absorb the surplus output necessary to keep the imperialists’ ‘new machines running when the home market sagged’.

     Storm Sewer! Runway Truck Ramp! Coolies indeed! Those constantly craving capricious export markets – even as the US & EU raise their own ‘walls’ and blatantly weaponize access, GSP+ etc – to develop the economy, should take careful note. ee here marks, too, the curious and total silencing about our own home market.

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PS: Last ee had some egregious ee errors. We have corrected and reposted a complete Harnessing the Mahaveli – our excerpt of Chapter V’s ‘Relief of Ceylon’ in CPSL leader SA Wickramasinghe’s 1955 classic, The Way Ahead. And the entry on Paris is Burning, etc.

Ranil in the Family: Coolie’s Coolie to the Red Fort