Cricket & Budget, Brandix & the Leaky Secrets of Victoria Dam
Posted on November 13th, 2023
e-Con e-News

‘Before you study the economics, study the economists!
e-Con e-News 05-11 November 2023
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An armed federal marshal was ordered to guard the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, where that Hamilton ‘debt’ charade is also being played out between a ‘vulture fund’ and the governments of the US, England & France – to hoodwink Sri Lanka. The guard is not there to protect Sri Lankan interests. The Manhattan Court was host to a hearing on November 9 – set for a Friday, so as to be buried in the weekend news – involving the largest US bank JPMorgan Chase. JPMC is accused of facilitating Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring – The Lolita Express. The plaintiffs say they were abused as minors to entrap top West Asian, Arab and Muslim leaders (and Israelis too?), who were all sextaped. ‘Both the New York Times & Wall Street Journal – the 2 newspapers previously active in reporting the case – have failed to share this latest intrigue with their readers’ (see ee Media, There’s a News Black-out on the Strange Doings in the JPMC / Jeffrey Epstein Sex Trafficking Case in Manhattan).
In an email dated Oct 24, 2023 to leaders of countries in West Asia, one of the girls abused (surnamed Ransome!) writes: ‘No matter how hard the US & Israeli Administration deflect that they indeed have broken the Geneva Convention and have been committing war crimes globally for decades… We all know that the material Epstein filmed for both governments has been used to broker deals in their favour for years.’
‘Another major Epstein tie to Israel was Epstein’s largest financial benefactor, Leslie Wexner, the former CEO of the retailing conglomerate that previously owned Victoria’s Secret, Abercrombie & Fitch, etc, and numerous other retail chains… In 1998 Wall Street Journal reported that Wexner was part of the ‘Mega Group,’ a loosely organized club of 20 of the nation’s wealthiest & most influential Jewish businessmen’, their charitable interests often a cover for lobbying activities on behalf of Israel.’
We wonder how this sexual bribery has worked to control Sri Lanka’s leaders to stay faithful to the colonials (all those manors in homonymous Kent!), prevent industrialization, and promote a fake garment ‘industry’. ee 10 August 2019 noted ‘Epstein funder Les Wexner, owner of Victoria’s Secret was linked to Brandix & MAS Holdings. Unsurprisingly, the Island story reporting this: ‘Brandix & MAS Holdings link to Epstein funder Les Wexner, owner of Victoria’s Secret’ has been erased (island.lk/index.php?page_cat=article-details&page=article-details&code_title=113895).
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• Cricket & Gaza & Victoria’s Other Secrets – With all the hullabaloo about the Sri Lankan cricket team being instructed to lose vital matches to India, with charges that the International Cricket Council (originally conceived as the Imperial Cricket Council) ‘has now become the property of India’. Some add this merely reflects Sri Lanka itself becoming another slice of Gujerati (aka Gujju! Good Jew?) real-estate.
As to why the emotional ups and downs of a country has been tied to another bookmaker’s circus, is obvious. It is not cricket being played. We are being played.
The so-called Balfour Declaration, which declared England’s plan in 1917 for a Jewish homeland on Palestine’s lands, made us recall the Balfour of the Mahaweli boondoggle. Sri Lanka was anointed with Test Cricket Status in 1981 in exchange for an exorbitant Mahaveli Dam contract given to English multinational Balfour Beatty, whose chairman Don Holland, was an MCC board member, and English PM Margaret Thatcher’s chief fundraiser. Balfour Beatty insisted Sri Lanka’s water was not pure enough for their employees, and had to import English water (London wastewater reprocessed 7 times!). Add that to the so-called debts Sri Lanka supposedly owes! Don Holland was chair of England’s Overseas Projects Board (OPB), made up of traders and industrialists, which directed the Department of Trade & Industry (DTI), that ran the Overseas Development Administration (see ee Aug 2023, Pt 3&4).
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• Professors Turn Kanganies – Maybe these English ‘overseas developers’ could tell us about these Sri Lankan workers paying enormous prices for visas, posing as students to qualify for greener (& icier) pastures abroad. Be forewarned. You may have to learn how to ‘spook the bots’. Earlier, such ‘students’ avoided going to classes at university so they could also work and earn, while cramming. To make them more dependent, universities now use an electronic online code, auto-generated when each student attends a lecture. An online site marks their attendance. Students can’t therefore share codes with anyone outside class because they have to do this physical register marking as well. Immigration officials apparently warn such ‘students’ via email, if they haven’t attended lectures. They then cancel visas and deport students (after stealing their fees). Students who do favors for their teachers (sexual as well as slave labor, where their research is stolen) may get perks such as jobs inside the university, and are also given connections to companies! It is no secret that many universities in the US, Canada, England & Europe have become solely dependent on this student-worker trafficking.
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• So what has brought us to this pass, where we are being forced to traffic workers and sell off vital lands, etc? Midst all this, the chief financial ‘Apache’ Indian agent also flew down to inspect strategic & mineral-rich Trincomalee and promote the Indo-SL FTA this week, while hailing ye olde ‘Buddhist connection’ and recalling 200 years of the colonial exploitation of Indian migrant workers brought to help rob the lands of Sinhale. They ignored the kangany role the colonial Indian government and their local sahibs have played in prolonging the plantation system, and instead want their merchants to target the ‘high-growth’ energy and pharmaceutical sectors.’ – not to develop Sri Lanka’s industries in those areas.
Indian Minister of Finance & Corporate Affairs Nirmala Sitharaman joined the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce recent India-SL Business Summit in Colombo, calling for ‘a new economic model focused on export-led investment and tourism, and facilitating the private sector as the engine of growth’! Isn’t this exactly what was called, ‘colonialism’?
Sitharaman was joined by Indian High Commissioner Gopal Bagley, Confederation of Indian Industry President Designate Sanjiv Puri, and Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry President Subhrakant Panda, ’Sri Lanka’s largest conglomerate’ John Keells’ CEO and Ceylon Chamber Vice Chair Krishan Balendra, MAS Holdings Chair Mahesh Amalean and Brandix Apparel Ltd CEO Ashroff Omar and Ceylon Chamber of Commerce Chair Duminda Hulangamuwa – ‘industry leaders’ – who ‘echoed the Ceylon Chamber’s views on pursuing an export-led strategy, begging Sitharaman’s industrial bosses to ‘increase the quota on garments to India’ (see ee Sovereignty, Ceylon Chamber leads private sector engagement at India-SL Business Summit).
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• This ee is therefore incited to reproduce ‘Advocata’s Privatisation Campaign: the Anti-Social Market Solution‘ by Dhanusha Pathirana, which demolishes (the arguments, at least, of) the well-greased privatization juggernaut. Pathirana points out that the US and England are lucky that US-funded Advocata never advised them when they were trying to industrialize! It is an irony that the vulture fund is named Hamilton. Alexander Hamilton, the foremost promulgator of US industrialization, notably quipped, ‘Don’t do as the English say, do as they do!’
We also reproduce ‘Sri Lanka’s Debt Trap & the Vultures’ by English economist Michael Roberts. Roberts suggests the ‘vulture fund’ Hamilton Bank lawsuit against Sri Lanka is yet another tag-team ploy by the US, England and the EU to corner Sri Lanka. Roberts adds, commercial lenders control at least 50% of Sri Lanka’s debt. China has been demanding that these capitalist lenders including the World Bank and ADB etc also ‘restructure’ – which they refuse to do. The media happily ignores this demand. They prefer to smear all over us, John Bull’s dung about ‘China’s Debt Trap’. And the white-Black NGO choirs parrot the same hallelujah.
Both Pathirana and Roberts deploy the most acute insights into Sri Lanka’s underdevelopment; perspectives rarely broadcast. Both however lament so-called ‘corruption’ as well. The issue is, if all our leaders are all brahmacharis, all we would do is keep prolonging disaster, and postponing nidahasa, if we do not industrialize.
In a week that saw the so-called financial ‘entrepreneur’ Lalith Kotelawala pass into the next world in shady circumstances (nursed along by certain helpers). In such a system as this, almost everyone is corrupted, some of course way, way more than others. ee insists that such ‘corruption’ is the only alternative in a patronage-distribution system, where the dominating parasitic merchant and moneylender capital is blocked from transforming into industrial (machine making) capital by their multinational sponsors.
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• ee also gapes at Europe’s and possibly the world’s ‘most valuable tech company‘, ASML (aka Advanced Semiconductor Materials Lithography), the only manufacturer of the machines needed to make advanced computer chips. ‘This market monopoly rests on a Dutch tradition of knowledge and industrial policy’ (see ee Focus, The Tradition of Knowledge behind ASML – Samo Burja). The US is preventing China’s access to such technology. The ASML chief however laments China will figure how to make it themselves, and not buy their products: Physics is the same everywhere.’
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• ee continues our examination into how the solidarity of so-called ‘international’ unions (many funding local union initiatives) have been hijacked by the NATO agenda to protect their own control over industrialization and its more capital-intensive supply chains (see ee Focus, Indian Labor Legislation & Cross-border Solidarity in Historical Context). It concludes, not surprisingly, and rather gently, that ‘the colonial effort to regulate Indian labor and laborers… often served to privilege the economic interests of the English state, its employers, and/or its workers’.
ee has also argued before that all these so-called UN and other US/EU initiatives about ‘decent work for women’ etc, are probes to grab certain sectors of workers for their own use.
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• Finally, with all this diversionary blather about damned cricket (a horrible waste of time?), we continue our look into the Communist Party of Sri Lanka’s Alternative Program, this time on ‘Sports & Physical Education’. The CPSL points out that games such as cricket and football arose during the industrial revolution in England, developing ‘the teamwork & excellence needed by modern industry’ – cricket for the wealthy and football for the working class. Though they forgot to add, rugby for the ‘human resource professionals’ to hone their skills at bashing workers’ heads. And then there’s tennis, swimming, ballet, golf, etc, for the wannabes who hope to seduce the ruling corpulent oligarchs while they try to diet. (see ee Focus)
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• Daily FT-ICCSL-SLID webinar on ‘Expectations from the Budget 2024’ – The Daily FT-SLID-ACCA and the International Chamber of Commerce Sri Lanka (ICCSL) webinar with Colombo MBA Association, CIMA, WCIC, AHRP, AAT, CSSL & CA SL had its keynotes plonked by Committee on Public Finance (COPF) Chair MP (& Assembly of God vote recipient) Harsha de Silva, Ceylon Chamber President and Ernst & Young (EY)’s Duminda Hulangamuwa, SL Banks Association President & Standard Chartered Bank native CEO Bingumal Thewarathanthri. The panel included MP Premanath Dolawatta, SL United National Businesses Alliance Chairperson Tania Abeysundara, Unilever’s Hajar Alaffi, EY’s Women’s Chamber of Industry & Commerce (WCIC) Chair Anoji de Silva, Hotel Association’s Anura Lokuhetty, Institute of Chartered Accountants’ Sanjay Bandara, India-SL CEO Forum Secretary and Airtel’s Ashish Chandra, Talliance Director & SLASSCOM’s Ashique Ali, PwC’s Sujeewa Mudalige, and CAL Group’s Kanishke Mannakkara. Moderated by Management Consultant Talal Rafi and ICC’s & SLID’s Dinesh Weerakkody
(ee Economists, Daily FT-ICCSL-SLID webinar today on ‘Expectations from Budget 2024’)
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