e-Con e-News

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

e-Con e-News 24-30 December 2023

Sri Lanka’s high-quality graphene & other abundant mineral resources do not belong to us: according to the USA & the EU. The EU has got the World Trade Organization (WTO) to block Indonesia from restricting its own nickel exports. Indonesia wants to process the raw ore locally. Nickel is used to also make steel and electric batteries etc. Jakarta has appealed but the US is preventing the formation of a WTO appeal court!

     Indeed, even as the EU & US are upgrading their industrial base, they keep preventing our industrialization, by fixing so-called ‘global trade rules’ – including this green whitewash etc – against Asia, against Africa & the darker Americas. So much for rule of law! (see ee Random Notes)

     Mineral-rich Sri Lanka – the media cannot tell us about this abundance – is also prevented from industrializing such resources (see ee Focus, Sri Lanka’s Red Economy). The last ees have reported on the World Bank’s ICSID (International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes). This global Supreme Court, & other supranational bodies, formed by multinational corporations (MNCs) are expected to reinforce predatory behavior under the guise of a ‘just’ energy transition and other ‘green’ nonsense.

     This ee looks at the how US-pitbull England still has the largest military-industrial base in Europe, and how its weapons makers & other industries have thrown countries into debt under the guise of aid. ee also examines the role played by such countries as Mauritius, in the so-called FDI (foreign direct investment) game. Mauritius acts as an offshore hideout, especially for Indian companies (eg, England’s Hindustan Lever?) ‘roundtripping’ money to avoid taxes. This hideout used to allow capital gains tax exemptions – a facility Sri Lanka is supposed to happily bow down to and mimic…

     Meanwhile, nothing displays the supine fealty of the media to England’s Unilever more than the photocopying of its Planters’ Association press releases in various guises (see ee Random notes, Kussi Amma Samath). The PA claims they cannot afford wage increases to their largely Indian Tamil workforce. Partly true – but mostly flatulence! What all this PA PR does not state is their refusal to mechanize production (still a muscular process over 200 years old now), is at the basis of their inability to treat workers more justly. This refusal underpins – sorry, no pins can be made here either! – and undergirds (with imported polyester loincloth) Sri Lanka’s underdevelopment and economic instability. Instead, the PA PR claims they will mechanize by using retired armed forces personnel! No mention of ‘Asian despotism’ in this instance! (see ee Agriculture)

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• Last week Bloomberg Economics claimed the rerouting of vessels from the Red Sea would mean higher shipping costs & longer delivery times, with ‘Greece, Jordan, Sri Lanka & Bulgaria’ among the economies that would be ‘most affected by the trade disruptions’:

The cost to send ‘a 40-foot container from Shanghai to Rotterdam jumped 44% from the end of October’ [September? – ee] before the attacks began, and by more than 26% to Genoa, but ‘they remain well below levels in 2021-22 during the pandemic’.

Well! Well! Well! How Sri Lanka was artificially starved of funds, fuel, fertilizer, food & pharma leading to the increased destabilization of the country after 2020 becomes more glaring in the recent attempt to block the Red Sea, exposing the role played by the US- & EU-controlled shipping monopolies, alongside their hiking of prices and restricting the movement of fuel. Dividing Africa & Asia within & without is an old game.

     Rogue Israel is aiming to deploy submarines east of Suez, under cover of this US escalation of war against Yemen, which is trying to block Asia’s access to the Red Sea. Their Quad dancing partners India, Japan & Australia appear to be acting shy of the US plans, perhaps because there are no open supporters among neighboring West Asian & East African states.

     The US is also trying to build a Nordic coalition to block Asia’s interaction with Russia via the Arctic Sea. Meanwhile, Algeria, one of the largest African countries in the Mediterranean, may sanction movements of Israeli-linked ships near the Mediterranean western mouth at Gibraltar, attempting to round South Africa.

     Hence the increased US bribery of Africa’s Kingdom of Morocco, also at the Mediterranean’s very mouth – a monarchy apparently so democratic, the IMF & World Bank’s recent annual meeting was held there, with that recent closed-door ‘Civil Society’ gabfest including US-funded ‘SL thinktank’ Verite and US-WB-linked Transparency International Sri Lanka (TISL). Civil Morocco indeed! Such ironies – with and without the iron of course.

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• The media-amplified opposition to VAT, appears to divert from even greater issues, like the destruction of local rice production, let alone the wholesale selloff of the country’s national assets, which trade unions highlighted this week.

     Take agriculture and paddy farming to be precise, whose main inputs are: water, seeds, fertilizer, pesticide etc & fuel. Subsidies on fuel & water have been removed, and fuel prices have been hiked over 200%, water about 50%. VAT is now added at 18% for seeds, pesticide, weedicide etc (previously VAT-exempted). So how much more will a kilo of rice cost? Perhaps US thinktank Advocata will then declare it cheaper to import rice, ‘freedom-fries’ & other ‘sophisticated’ GM foods, given such US-IMF policies! (see ee Random Notes, US Soybean Lobby in Sri Lanka)

    This ee reproduces Dhanusha Pathirana’s polemic against VAT & the rentier-dominated economy, again pointing to the irony of the article’s publication in President Wickremesinghe’s family media monopoly, The Financial Times, which occasionally wishes to act: ‘balanced’. While Pathirana importantly pinpoints such policies as being anti-industrialization at their core, his data and metaphors spin out of control. VAT is a blunt instrument hitting at both local & imported products. Others assert it is only for importing goods for re-export that is VAT deferred. Imports for consumption are not VAT exempted.

     But who has put Sri Lanka into this trap? Pathirana ‘despairs’ we’re even worse off than Ghana (as if African countries are benchmarks of congenital backwardness)! He speaks of world powers ‘from East to West’. Really? He can’t mean Japan, or South Korea or Taiwan, since they’re all US-military-occupied colonies. So then, China? – which for the last 75 years has been attempting to break out of the white imperialist siege. Recall that China was not allowed to join the UN until 1971! Pathirana’s essay ends by deploying the Zionist founding myth of a tiny Jewish David with stones confronting a giant Goliath (who’s Palestinian!). He calls for ‘indignation’ to flood the streets – yet didn’t such anarcho-nihilism already usher in these present VAT-dispensers?

    In the end, our colonial merchant-moneylending import-export plantation oligarchs & their media may not understand what Pathirana is writing of. They studiously act as if they have no idea what industrialization & production culture are all about. Then again, we cannot wake someone who is pretending to sleep! This just about explains the merchant media & their economists. The question is how the US & EU pay for their pretend-sleeping pills…          

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• Foreign-owned telecom Dialog just sent out an SMS warning of 24% hikes! Who will do this ‘new math’ to guess how they might fabricate 2024 price hikes? So then, why is a so-called white-only Asia Internet Coalition (AIC – Meta, Google, X, Booking.com, Amazon, etc) also joining in the harangue over the IMF’s VAT?  Pickme, whose CEO recently exposed these ‘global’ digital companies for legally stealing billions without paying local taxes, has also joined in the anti-VAT whine.

     This AIC even opposed Sri Lanka’s Online Safety Bill in October, calling it ‘draconian’ and a blow to Lankans’ ‘rights to expression’. How’s thaaaat! Amazing, there’s no greater censor than these US ‘digital’ monopolies – as the latest US massmurder in West Asia has exposed. Until Sri Lanka restrains these monopolies, as China & Russia have done, we will be subject to destabilization by so-called ‘social-media’, dominated by the imperialists.

     An AIC press release (see ee Industry), faithfully reproduced by all Sri Lankan English media, ends by actually claiming:

‘Asia Internet Coalition, which represents key players in the Internet industry and promotes the understanding & resolution of Internet policy issues in the Asia-Pacific region, disclosed that the international standard for adopting VAT on software & digital service providers is based on the authority of the consumer, not the jurisdiction under which a particular business operates.’

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• One of the conceits of this merchant media including artists, as well as economists (all run by MNCs) is that somehow politicians are the epitome of corruption – when all of them are doing ‘private practice’ or more accurately PPP – public-private pettifoggery!

‘De te fabula narratur!

It is of you that the story is told.’

– Horace

• Check out how the US is gaming Serbia’s government & the opposition (among who there’s little difference, except lesser or greater obsequiousness to the whites) in order to take away any so-called democratic control by the people of Serbia. Check out how they aim, along with the EU, to use elections to divide off Kosovo from Serbia. Whoever wins can then accuse the other of corruption and fraud.

     Take out Serbia, add Sri Lanka, and we get the big picture. Here comes 2024, the year of elections & paying off fake debts. Note how the media has been building up the JVP-NPP via unscientific surveys, polls etc, also based on capitalist ‘social media’ whose main function is to algorithm ‘virality’. So unless we agree to swallow their rosy panaceas full of bitter elixirs – eg, Eelam north, east, upcountry – here we go again?!

Green Whitewash & the Blocking of the Red Economy