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

e-Con e-News 21-27 January 2024

‘The similarities between Haiti & Sri Lanka are phenomenal’, notes national scribe Shenali Waduge. One such parallel is the plan to destroy rice production and make the country dependent on food imports. How has this come to pass in this our famed ‘Granary of the East’, and ‘Mediatrix’ – central node for over 2,500 years in the global naval traffic of this ocean (which we now hesitate to name as Indian, see ee Quotes)? The US, French & Canadian kidnapping of Haiti’s President, then the driving away of a Sri Lanka President who received the largest electoral mandate in history… is a tale that bears pondering over & over, even as it shapeshifts (see ee Focus, Will IMF/WB ruin rice production in Sri Lanka as it did in Haiti?)

• ‘If the country was turned into one giant tourist hotel, we would not need universities anymore,’ declared SBD de Silva. Tourism is yet another ‘rentier’ (making money off unproductive assets) game, that does not demand any new technological skills, but only making beds & serving tea, and trying to rip off the world’s greatest rip-off artistes – white people – who know well the real game in tourism. All the inputs are imported (airplanes, buses, furniture, utensils, equipment), most of the profits are ‘retained’ abroad, and all we really sell is the ‘scenery’ – a view! ee continues reproducing the Communist Party’s Way Forward program, this time on ‘Tourism’, pointing to its control by yet another mafia – ‘an oligopoly of the largest resort owners’. However, if anyone can give any proof of any country, town or village, dependent on tourism, able to ‘advance’ to modernity, while not being destroyed by drugs & prostitution, please do tell us, pronto! Meanwhile, the latest scam to ‘balance payments’ or import & export bills, has an expert suggesting we could depend on the escalating wars in Europe for more tourists with their persnickety foreign exchanges!

     And another classic story from this week, is the plan to privatize Peru’s Wonder of the World – Machu Picchu, about whose ‘heights’ Pablo Neruda once sang: ‘I scaled the ladder of the earth…/ up to you, Macchu Picchu, High citadel of terraced stones…’ This week also saw lost-Korean yankee-collaborator Julie Chung scale ‘Adam’s Peak’: ‘appreciating… interfaith reverence at the summit’. Peru, too, saw the US threaten to murder, then jailed their popularly elected president. If English fools can call Sri Padha, ‘Adam’s Peak’, ee was wondering if we could rename Canterbury Cathedral, or Jerusalem or Mecca, with Sinhala names, and get them to repeat it? So, so, so, any bets on a Greenpeace Debt-for-Nature-Swap for Samanalakanda?

• 2022 saw ‘independent’ Sri Lanka’s first successful coup d’état. Will it continue its ‘successes’ for the next 75 years, let alone 6 months? Like a stunted ‘independence’ was ‘successful’ for the last 75?  1948 did not see any Englishmen (or women) & their collaborators put on criminal trial, but they were instead welcomed to continue their domination through their colonial import-export economy. So was 1948 a coup too to install the USA as the latest colonial power in Sri Lanka? The intermittent mass murder is perhaps another testimony to its ‘success’? The next few months takes aim to tell us where this 2022 coup is going. This coup has had no (in 1962, mostly Christian & Tamil) military & police officials, leading the charge of the lite brigade, this time. They were told to ‘hold their horses’, for the moment.

‘War? No, not war but something more tremendous than war… 

an absolute isolation…that brings a nation to its senses

 just as suffocation removes from the individual all inclinations to fight… 

Apply this economic, peaceful, silent, deadly remedy & there will be no need for force.’

– US President Woodrow Wilson, 1919

     So-called ‘soft power’ (not a new tactic, as Wilson reminds us) was allowed to take the stage at Galle Face. This week in Galle & Matara, under the abstract guise of an unscientific & a-technological ‘art’ (the German word for art is techno, but denying us our right to make technology is indeed THE art!), the 2022 coup takes one more probing dance-step, displaying their concern for ‘freedom of speech’ while bombing West Asia & East Africa to prevent Asia’s need for energy to fuel its modern industrialization. This ee Focus therefore looks at the romanticized link between ‘art’ & colonialism (see Yaka and the Bloody Bankers), and also on the ‘soft power’ of US foreign policy wonk Joseph Nye, who advocated Obama use cruise missiles on Syrian President Assad (see ee Economists, ‘The USA can [also] coerce by economic means’ )

     Again, South Africa has further lessons for us and the world. An heir to the Anglo Vaal mining empire built on stolen land in Africa, and owned by Zionist Jews, Rob Hersov, signals their own impending not-so-soft coup in South Africa. The whites are now even demanding a separate state in the Cape. Sri Lanka is intimately connected with this Cape, as King Rajasinghe II executed the father of the first Dutch settler there (after whom many a stolen South African landmark is named! (see ee Random Notes)

     Zionist Hersov recommends allying with the white countries, opposing South Africa’s links with Russia & China, and promoting the standard ‘color revolution’ playbook used in Sri Lanka and elsewhere, deploying ‘activists’, politicians, ‘civil society’, entertainers & influencers, and businessmen, bewailing ‘corruption’, lack of ‘rule of law’ ‘human rights’, etc, while telling his allies to target 18-25-year-old Africans as voters, for they know little of South Africa’s history (see ee Sovereignty, Rob Hersov ‘Reserves a Special Place in Hell’). This week we also found out that Ghana’s textbooks have erased all mention of Kwame Nkrumah (see ee Sovereignty, The Most Dangerous African). So, was the temporary accession to Mandela, yet another staged ‘revolution of color’? (see ee Quotes, Zionists in the ANC)

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• Imperialism’s strategy in Sri Lanka becomes eminently clearer every day, not just in a new London Financial Times interview (see ee Focus, ), as the US & their neutered European pitbulls escalate terror in West Asia. And while bombing Palestine to smithereens (talk about, 10,000 children in 100 days! Save-the-Children indeed!), the US & England are happily funding ‘freedom’ at art festivals in Galle & Matara, etc.

     And since we cannot eat this art, we must not forget that real food is the cash of cash! This week’s media-diversion about the Online Safety Bill (ironically led by the US’ Facebook, Google, etc, calling themselves the Asia Internet Coalition!) like December’s media-amplified opposition to VAT, diverted from even greater issues, such as the wholesale selloff of the country’s national assets, and more particularly, the destruction of local rice production, by making cultivator access to its main inputs unaffordable: water, seeds, fertilizer, pesticide etc & fuel. US thinktank Advocata, as pointed out, will then declare it cheaper to import rice, ‘freedom-fries’ & other ‘sophisticated’ GM foods, given such US-IMF policies! (see ee Focus, Rice)

     Imperialism’s sabotage of health & education (led by the US’ World Bank) accompanies the overall attack on Sri Lanka’s economy, especially agriculture & industry (led by the US’ IMF) and just as importantly, on its sovereignty.

     This week it was revealed, not very widely, that the fake medicine scam is linked to the accelerated demands of the ‘Indian Credit Line (ICL)’. The revelation does not add that such ‘credit lines’ come sotto-sotto with commands about which foreign companies to buy from. This week also saw further undermining of the health system by allowing hospitals to buy their own drugs & equipment! Such moves are all part of the attack to divide Sri Lanka, and at its root lies the subversion of central state power. We will now be subject to the ‘Western Despotism’ of their multinational corporations (MNCs). Tamil Eelam in the north, and Muslim Arabistan in the east, are the default threats (see ee Quotes).

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‘The international order is dying in Gaza’

– Mohamed ElBaradei, International Atomic Energy Agency IAEA Director General Emeritus

(who received 2005 Nobel Peace Prize jointly with International Atomic Energy Agency)

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• Note this nuclear Nobel man’s English – ‘is dying’, since he can’t tell us that it’s the white man led by the US that is killing it! The English media in Sri Lanka (it’s by no means a ‘Sri Lankan media’) obliges the US in their ‘hard power’ wars, by claiming it’s somehow the West Asians who are creating trouble in the Red Sea, when by international law of the oceans & seas (which the US claims to uphold, unlike many other international laws & courts like the ICJ and ICC, it refuses to join), it is up to the neighbouring countries to decide such ‘freedom’.

     Recall that the US Marines (with their high-leather collars to protect their necks from scimitars!)  were first set up to wage war on North Africa to ensure the US’ illegal trafficking of opium from Turkey via the Mediterranean – we can say the US was only exercising their armed right to ‘free&open trade’ by ‘competing’ with what was to became their older English brother’s most-lucrative ‘commerce’ 19^th century – in opium, after their horrific 16-19^th trade in chattel slavery.

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‘• English as a Covert language – the use of the passive voice & infinitive, continue to dominate headlines. Not just dominate but extend their influence. Palestine comes to mind. From the President to his family’s newspapers, they all avoid naming the USA & England & Europe (in shorthand, the whites & their kneegrows) for organizing the horror in West Asia, from Yemen to Palestine. Whereas every story about the Houthis or Hezbollah never forgets to adjective it with ‘Iran-backed’, while US-bankrolled-&-armed Israel never get such modifiers. The infinitively tiny word, ‘to’ – gets to headline grand intentions and promises never fulfilled – from the US-backed World Bank, etc., to run-of-the-mill politicians. ‘To independence’ (meaning, to postpone) – is yet to make it as a verb, even as the noun ‘disappear’ was promoted as a verb during those brief postcolonial moments post-1973 – ‘to disappear’.

Contents:

A1. Reader Comments –

Haiti’s Lethal Lessons for Sri Lanka & the World