e-Con e-News August 2023 Part 3

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

This ee reproduces Pakistan’s Ambassador in Washington recounting the US demand to remove their leader Imran Khan…or else… This coup – though downplayed by the media as a coup – was apparently accomplished this week, with the collusion of Pakistan’s courts and military leadership.

     This ‘demarche’ makes clearer that the same shenanigan was accomplished in Sri Lanka last year, with an apparent threat to kill the President Gotabhaya Rajapakse unless he abdicated his massive electoral mandate (see ee Comments).

     This ee also reports how the US installed yet another ‘billionaire entrepreneur’ – aka launderer of drug dollars – from addicting 10,000s of US citizens, mainly Black – as the President of Nigeria. It is this President, as head of regional West African grouping ECOWAS, who is now attempting to invade Niger and other Sahelian nations. Such are the NATO-appointed ‘democratic’ leaders we are only allowed elect. Meanwhile, France’s frenetic attempt to keep robbing Africa perhaps explains the French President’s recent airport ‘refueling’ stop in Sri Lanka, after visiting French colonies in the Pacific.

     Which brings us right back to assertions that the US has given India the green (sic!) light to invade and divide Sri Lanka:

‘Western powers have given free rein – a carte blanche –

to India as their proxy in South Asia.’

(ee Sovereignty, 5 MoU between Ranil & India unpublished)

This appears even more evident in the attempt to get parliament to bulldoze the by-force 13^th Amendment to divide the country, and also hand over strategic and mineral-rich Trincomalee to India.

     Meanwhile, the Indian Finance Minister’s demand last week that China ‘join the debt relief efforts of Sri Lanka’ was even criticized by the empire’s lipstick in Colombo, the monopoly Wijeya Group’s Sunday Times:

‘Whatever [India’s] altruistic motives may have been,

any issues between Sri Lanka & China are issues

between 2 sovereign nations, and the recent Indian munificence

does not grant India the powers to intervene.’

     Of course, Japan keeps doing the same: ‘Japan has asked Sri Lanka to secure a debt restructure deal with China before any discussion.’ (see ee Sovereignty).

     And thus foreign fleas festoon the firmament, with the Australian envoy ‘warning’ that Sri Lanka’s ‘12-month mining permit would make investors ‘run away’’: ‘Australian High Commissioner had recently mentioned there were companies that were willing to invest but that the investment environment was not conducive’ (ee Industry).

*

• While the corporate media likes to focus on that July 1983 they label as ‘Black’, they like to forget the July 1980 turmoil – the IMF, Employers Federation (of Ceylon, apparently) and a compliant media – caused in demanding the government of the day sack over 50,000 workers to push the IMF’s anti-worker agenda. Few ‘social scientists’ attempt to even draw a link between July 1983 & the July 1980 outrages, and the transmogrification of forces pampered to attack trade unionists.

     It is hard not to see the recent ‘aid’ by the World Bank – to ease the destruction of the so-called ‘welfare state’ initially created to help prevent Sri Lanka’s real economic independence – and also Japan’s recent ‘Rs611mn grant assistance for human resources development in Sri Lanka’, as means to lubricate similar ‘free-market’ ‘death squads’, etc.

*

‘The economic path that various leaders have tried to implement since 1977

is not conducive to industrialization and a production-based economy.’

– Main Conditions for a Progressive Alternative:

Communist Party of Sri Lanka (CPSL, ee Focus)

The 1977 decision to open the floodgates to imports (see ee Economy, Import Liberalization) recalls the so-called ‘liberalization’ of the economy that some analysts see as pivotal to ‘consumption culture’ promoted by the Central Bank, under a US governor, since 1950. Now we have a so-called Sri Lankan governor of the Central Bank, even more eager to implement such imperialist writ.

     One of the features of the 1977 deluge was of course the World Bank’s Mahaveli Development Project (designed by Canada), which promised to even sell electricity to India! Now they wish to suture Sri Lanka to India to obtain electricity, along with a land bridge!

     So! Midst a devastating drought, and the cricketer Imran’s dungeoning, we found this interesting anecdote by a former envoy and MP about the link between Sri Lanka’s accession to ‘Test Cricket’ and the Mahaveli boondoggle, which cast Sri Lanka into further debt bondage.

     Irrigation is a fundamental input in agriculture. The Indians, the Portuguese, the Dutch and the English not only targeted our weapons-producing and related steel industries first, they also destroyed our granaries. When they figured out that the basis of our solidarity was in the sharing of water, they attacked the irrigation (see ee 11 July 2020, Cool Marx on Sri Lanka).

     It is to anecdotal autobiographies we must turn. Sarath Amunugama recalls that (the later assassinated MP and Presidential candidate) Gamini Dissanayake was funded by the Maharaja Group. He was the head of the Board of Control of Cricket. Gamini as Minister of Mahaweli Development had handed over the contract for the Victoria Reservoir project to English corporation Balfour Beatty. The head of the company in England was the chief fundraiser for Thatcher’s Conservative Party. Balfour Beatty then ‘twisted the [bowling?] arm of the MCC’.

     Of course Amunugama, who claims modern economics demands that we turn into a rentier economy, makes no link – with his proud recall, that later, with Gamini D, was ‘welcomed to the distinguished [MCC] visitors’ gallery and served champagne & wafer-thin smoked salmon as well as cucumber sandwiches ordered from Fortnum & Mason’ – to the absurd demands by Balfour Beatty that their overpaid Mahaveli consultants had to also import drinking water and other such luxuries from England, for which we are still paying! Indeed, Queen Victoria, 19^th century famine-maker & mass murderer (not just in 1848), symbol of constipation (due to opium) & sexual repression, is indeed appropriate for a dam that fails.

      ‘US State Department Coordinator on Global Anti-Corruption’ Richard Nephew and Dylan Aikens, the Anti-Corruption Analyst for the US Department of State who visited Sri Lanka from August 08-9, may perhaps not wish to recall such lugubrious lubrications…

     They also may not wish to delve into the rush to privatize SLTelecom. SLTelecom is not on the latest government list of immediate privatization projects postponed due to political opposition. SLTelecom is yet to respond to international accusations that it received bribes from the US envoy in Colombo. The US bribes were to get SLT to abandon an Indian Ocean submarine internet cable project with China and other Asian countries. (see, ee July 2023 Part 2, US Envoy Threatens & Bribes SLTelecom)

     MCC indeed! In case our intellectuals choose to forget, even if they don’t know, MCC to Sri Lankans means US invasion, cricket, and a lot of other things (see the very 1^st ee), but it sure ain’t ‘M-C-M’ (Marx’s industrial transformation of money and commodity into capital).

     And, what after all is capital, but labor? Which is why the IMF’s main demand is the further degradation of a skilled working class in Sri Lanka (see ee Workers, Labour & Labour-Power).

MCC Cricket, Mahaveli Drought & the Couping of Imran & Gotabhaya