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Before you study the economics, study the economists!”

e-Con e-News 03-09 March 2024

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Sri Lanka at the height of its prestige was able

to initiate a resolution in the United Nations,

calling for a declaration of the Indian Ocean as a Zone of Peace.

However, the proposed international conference could not be held

due to intervention by imperialist forces.

Today, the US Empire’s Pivot-to-Asia under President Obama,

renamed the Indo-Pacific Strategy by President Trump,

has highlighted the strategic importance of the Indian Ocean region

in the West’s attempts to contain China.

Since Asia has become the vanguard of the world economy,

the world’s attention has shifted to the Asia-Pacific region,

and in particular the Indian Ocean Region.

This has made this region both strategic & vulnerable.’

– Communist Party of Sri Lanka, see ee Focus

The US & its designated ‘Major Defence Partner’ India (like a cowboy comic Lone Ranger & Tonto) have been sedulously softening and hardening the ground, sometimes latently, sometimes blatantly, to stomp their boots into Sri Lanka’s face, and divide the country. These words may appear needlessly inflammatory and provocative, yet there are escalating indicators that this indeed is what they are planning to do, attempting to ensnare us in their shoddy shenanigans to hinder and control industrialization in Asia & Africa by choking access to finance, fuel, food, fertilizer, and pharmaceuticals.

     Indeed, all this maneuvering recalls how England eventually poured 10,000s of English, Indian & African troops into Ceylon in 1942, in a desperate bid to maintain colonial power, soon after Japan threw England out of Myanmar & Singapore, just as India’s independence struggle was at its peak. These present moments also recall how the USA, then ‘allied’ with England, seeking to replace other imperialist powers in Asia & Africa, just as they were doing in the rest of the Americas. Extending their policy of Manifest Destiny, they saw such aggrandizements as ‘inevitable & justified’. These whites have maintained their still numerous colonies in Asia & Africa through bribery & violence. Indeed, recent decrees assert that the Atlantic Ocean (& NATO) laps up on all shores. Yet as the Communist Party of Sri Lanka forecasts, Sri Lanka’s future as an independent sovereign nation lies in maintaining its solidarity with the real world in Asia, Africa, & the anti-colonial Americas.

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     This ee records the flipping & flopping like a gasping goggle-eyed fish hooked out of the water, about sending the Sri Lankan Navy under the guise of a so-called ‘Red Sea Crisis’. The Sri Lankan oligarchy apparently cannot stop India, Japan and Taiwan from poaching our seas. So, protecting navigation in ‘Red Sea’ is piffling subterfuge for giving diplomatic solace to the internationally condemned US & European horror in Palestine, which China’s Foreign Minister this week perhaps sarcastically called a ‘disgrace for civilization’.

     This ee also highlights the mephistophelian compact made with the USA when Sri Lanka had its back to the wall during the imperialist-backed, Indian-trained terrorist war waged against the country, resulting in the 8-page 2007 US-SL Acquisition & Cross-Services Agreement (ACSA), which was then made public. Set to expire 10 years later, an 83-page ACSA was later signed in 2017, under pressure from then Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera and then-SL-envoy to the US, Prasad Kariyawasam (a paid agent of US Development Alternatives Institute – a CIA front – & implementing agency for USAID).

     This 2017 ACSA is still ‘kept classified by both Washington & Colombo’ (Transparency International, where art thou?) ACSA allows ‘US troops to make use of any military bases & ports whenever they want, with the Sri Lankan Government having to provide necessary support, joining in training exercises under US directives, with our Armed Forces taking orders from the US Armed Forces hierarchy’ (see ee Sovereignty, Shenali Waduge).

     In July 2019 then-PM Ranil Wickremesinghe announced in Parliament that the government was negotiating a fresh military deal with US, replacing the 1995 Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA, signed by then-president CB Kumaratunga), giving US military easier access to Sri Lanka. SOFA provides facilities & conditions to implement ACSA agreement. During the now-famous ‘constitutional crisis’, then President M Sirisena fired PM Wickremesinghe, and immediately recalled Karayiwasam, who as Secretary to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was attempting to brazenly ‘accept’ and sign an updated version of the SOFA. Waduge notes that signing the updated SOFA would mean the ‘US does not require setting up a military base in Trincomalee because the US has been given access to entire country. The USA will be using Sri Lanka’s territory as a permanent transit point for military activities.’

     Kariyawasam now parades as a member of the UN Committee on Migrant Workers. This week he fronted a Financial Times (SL) essay on ‘Collaborating for Regional Sustainable Development: Learning from History’, updating an earlier talk at the 7^th Indian Ocean Conference in Perth, Australia (9-10 Feb). There he called for ‘a security architecture’ to expand ‘protection of sea-based links, in particular undersea cable networks & freedom of navigation along major sea lanes crisscrossing the region’. Indeed, he is clearly parroting US Envoy Julie Chung, who wishes Sri Lanka to join in the US’ forever wars. Chung’s latest geography lesson is that ‘Oceans see no borders’. Up then squawks kindergartner Kariyawasam too: ‘The Indian Ocean, since time immemorial, has not existed as an isolated ocean.’ Ironically, it is a Sinhala envoy who first told the Romans about China, and taught them about the ocean’s monsoons! So now, the North Atlantic overflows all equators and continents…

     Kariyawasam makes the hilarious claim that ‘The EU – the region that gave rise to 2 world wars… is now well integrated, bringing human security and sustainable development to people living in the EU geographical space. In fact, as a result, there is a clamour among people living in vulnerable regions to enter the EU space even by illegal means.’ Perhaps he means Ukraine! If the EU is so self-sufficient, why does it keep invading our countries? He ignores how that ‘Concert of Europe’ has always meant waging horrific wars in unison on the rest of the world!

     Sri Lanka did not have to renew the 2007 ACSA deal in 2017. It came after the US & India finagled & funded the Yahapalana (good governance) ‘regime change’ in 2015. This enabled the signing of the still secret ACSA agreement that, along with the SOFA and the still unsigned Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) will lubricate boots on the ground. This agreement was done in the same year that capitalists in Sri Lanka were able to remove capital controls enabling them to stash billions of rupees abroad (see below).

     ee recalls the ‘secretive’ entry just over a year ago, of CIA Director William Joseph Burns to Colombo on their Valentine’s Day on 14 February 2023, accompanied by US Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs, Jedidiah P Royal: along with 29 ‘persons’ in 2 C-17 Globe Masters (see ee 11 March 2023) – one year after Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland had set the regime-change ball rolling in Colombo. The CIA had urged the immediate signing of SOFA. Pointing to the military ACSA in August 2017, MP U Gammanpila claimed New Delhi ‘would still be uncomfortable’ against the backdrop of a much-expanded US role here, in spite of ‘extremely close Indo-US relations in line with US Indo-Pacific strategy – Sri Lanka couldn’t afford to become a member of any alliance’. MP Gammanpila also cited the joint statement issued by the US Embassy & Sir John Kotelawela Defence University, launching what they called ‘a shared vision for the Indo-Pacific’.

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• This week, saw yet another fiasco involving Sri Lanka played out in a US courtroom, where various Wall Street vulture funds (no doubt wailing on behalf of starving US pensioners) are faking a fight to further plunder Sri Lanka. The real problem is the US refusing to democratize the voting at the World Bank, IMF & WTO (see ee Random Notes). Instead, the media keeps shrilling about ‘corruption’ & recent Central Bank salary hikes, while ignoring even more shocking normalized robberies by the import-export plantation fraud, led by such multinational corporations (MNCs) such as Exxon, Unilever, Ceylon Tobacco, CIC-ICI, etc.

     In 2017 the US-backed Yahapalana regime baldly removed the Exchange Control Act of 1953, which had required exporters to repatriate their export earnings via the Sri Lankan banking system, and had made non-compliance a criminal offence. The change exonerated 30 foreign-exchange racketeers who would otherwise have faced jail, and the confiscation of their properties. Even worse, the new Exchange Control Act No12 of 2017 made non-compliance a civil offence and allowed exporters to ‘park’ over $50billion overseas. This caused an even more massive drain of dollars, which along with more serious over-invoicing & under-invoicing by importers & exporters, with the blessings of a deceitful Central Bank officialdom. They stepped up their manipulations even after President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s government restricted imports in 2021. The ‘no alternative but to go the IMF’ for their paltry bailouts was therefore clearly a lie! Those responsible for the revenue collection mechanisms had no intention other than entrapping Sri Lanka further.

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• Former Central Bank Governor Indrajith Coomaraswamy has stated, Sri Lanka’s ‘rich get away with murder’, in the shadow of the killing of financier Dinesh Schaffter (ee 18 March 2023), Yet it was under Coomaraswamy’s ‘watch’ that the Foreign Exchange Act No12 of 2017 was enacted, repealing the Foreign Exchange Act No24 of 1953, opening the sluice gates for dollars to gush outward. As CB Governor, Coomaraswamy was also directly responsible for the Yahapalana government borrowing ‘a record $12.5billion from the international bond market, at high interest rates, from private lenders, primarily in the West’.

     Coomaraswamy was and is among those in the semi-shadows quarterbacking the economy’s US-IMF sabotage. He & his fellow economists keep blaming the policies of ‘populism’ promulgated since 1948 Soulbury independence. Is it populism that continued the import-export plantation fraud? Is it populism that has kept allowing the English (thru their banks, MNCs & ‘Ceylonized’ fronts) to continue to drain capital from the country? ‘Populism’ was in fact needed by these thieves to maintain the import-export plantation fraud. Welfare for the impoverished is the penance the merchants must pay for preventing the industrialization of the economy.

     Populism is of course also a thin cypher for ‘majoritarianism’ or ‘Sinhala Buddhism’. Indeed, former President Gotabhaya Rajapakse’s rather restrained biography points out that the humiliation of the majority of the people of this country was one of the aims of the ‘conspiracy’ to remove him. The use of the term ‘international’ to modify ‘conspiracy’, however suggests that our leadership still believes the world to be a predominantly white space.

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• We cannot expect a media pretty much ‘owned’ by MNCs to reveal the real ‘corruption’ (which is merchant capitalism) afflicting Sri Lanka. Look at the advertisements parading as news, how Unilever’s Lifebuoy & Brandix uphold International Women’s Day! The advertising agencies who create this ‘virtue signaling’ for the corporates call this PR – puka ridhenavaa – because they have to give ass to both corporate marketing executives & newspaper editors who demand ‘goodwill’ in return.

     64% of Sri Lanka’s ‘national exports’ are produced by these foreign MNCs (compared with 31% in China, 45-50% in Vietnam). This export production includes 83% of national industrial exports and 96% of national garment & textile exports. They involve only 6% of the total labour force, conducted through the 15 Export Processing Zones. These multinationals do not invest in developing the skills of workers, nor do they invest research & development. Only domestic firms could do so… yet instead, the media are paid off to promote an export-only economy, while handing over the home market to MNCs. Butt-hurt in deed!

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• The sharp reduction of capital, as a result of mispricing by importers, in respect of duty/tax free goods & taxable imports, has proved far more deadly than the parking of funds overseas by exporters. Capital flows occur through 4 forms of trade mis-invoicing, namely import over-invoicing & under-invoicing and export over-invoicing & under-invoicing. This capital, rather than being invested in modern industry, is invested in property overseas, ranging from luxury houses to art, particularly in the USA and Europe. This defalcation primarily involves MNCs, merchants, officials & politicians, so our capitalist leaders will always be subject to their manipulation & extortion. This became evident in the US trial of a relative of the ruling Rajapaksas – former SL Ambassador to the US, Jaliya Wickramasuriya. A former tea exporter, he was accused of fraud (speculating in US real-estate – that foremost US national religion!). The trial ran simultaneously alongside the aragalaya. He was finally sentenced ‘lightly’ on 20 July 2022, the very day a shutdown Parliament was resumed to choose a new ‘unelected’ President – Ranil Wickremesinghe.

     It was CIA agent Prasad Kariyawasam as Foreign Secretary who got Jaliya Wickramasuriya’s diplomatic immunity removed, enabling his arrest in Colombo and his eventual trial in the USA.  Kariyawasam had replaced Wickramasuriya as SL envoy in the US. Curiously, Kariyawasam, once an SL envoy to Jamaica, the Bahamas, Chile & Colombia, must surely be well-aware of these US-massaged tax hideouts & drug laundries, and their Sri Lankan clientele.

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• This has been a week like no other: SriLankan Airlines, one of the world’s more hospitable carriers, was put up for public auction, like a slave on a trader’s block, though no one seemed to take the bait.

     Gotabhaya Rajapakse published a memoir on the ‘international conspiracy’ that ousted him, though he refrains from naming ‘international’ names as such. The Russian Embassy called upon him to name those diplomats he refers to, as forcing themselves into military installations (see ee Quotes).

     A fake biography about Rajapakse by one Billie Wallace, Impromptu Resignation, clearly fabricated by an AI robot, was immediately released to divert from his book. It claimed to have been published a day after his resignation, though we only hear about it now, displaying Amazon & Google at the finest heights of its disinformation machinery.

     The US government retired their Gallican-Jewish settler fat-rat Victoria Nuland, who is being blamed for driving the slaughter of Slavs in the Ukraine. Nuland may not be celebrating International Women’s Day, which (outside of socialist countries who actually give women a holiday) has been hijacked by corporations such as Unilever and Brandix, who make their billions through ripping off workers, men included, using the usual ‘third-party’ sweatshops.

     The Royal-Thomian Cricket Match, which features teenage brown simians in white flannels, saw the President singing rather nostalgically about a decoction that promised to turn us white and instead caused unrestrained bowel movements, while Ceylon Tobacco MP Harsha de Silva danced drunkenly with US Envoy J Chung, whose dancing aped a crawling snake, while nervous bodyguards tried to act unconcerned and keep the MP from performing undiplomatic acts, beyond his oceanic limits.

     Reading the English media in Sri Lanka, one would have been at pains to know that the largest ‘parliament’ in the world, China’s 14th National People’s Congress (NPC) was in progress.

     This week also commemorated the 71^st anniversary of the passing of USSR leader Joseph Stalin, who led the Red Army’s smashing of the Nazi war machine and resurrected Russia to its modern industrial heights, on full display today in vanquishing the quislings of NATO.

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• The USA, Canada & France (The Core Group!) stepped up their plan to invade Haiti, using the pretext of a rise in gangsterism, especially after the massive prison escape this week. The US is pressuring the acting Haitian PM & president Ariel Henry to step down. Last week, Henry visited Kenya to discuss a plan to have 1,000 international police officers from Africa etc to provide a ‘Black mask’ for the invasion of Haiti. Meanwhile, a Kenyan Police Commissioner mysteriously died in a Washington Hotel. Henry is now stranded in Puerto Rico, unable to safely return home.

     The US installed Henry after they murdered their previous dupe Jovenel Moise. Last ee should have stressed that the information deducing the link to US Envoy J Chung in Sri Lanka comes from a radio podcast mentioning the ongoing Haiti court case in Miami. The revelations in court have been placed under a ‘gag order’, and only the indictments of Haitians are broadcast. The podcast however mentions that Nuland was clearly involved, but it was Nuland’s rep Chung who met Moise before he was unceremoniously knocked off. The US is blaming his wife instead! (see ee Sovereignty, Moise Assassination Investigation)

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Contents:

Sri Lanka Hooked in US & India’s Red Sea & Yellow Sea Hijinks