e-Con e-News

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

e-Con e-News 22-28 September 2024

Sri Lanka has elected a ‘Marxist’, ‘Leftist’ & ‘Socialist’ & ‘Communist’ executive president: The capitalist media keeps slobbering these labels out with studied stupefaction and saturated headlines to anybody who cares heed them. We do not have to guess what they will blurt out next. Happy endings are not their style – no matter what their bedtime stories and teleology promise about the ‘ever-after’ & ‘hereafter’.

     They are of course eager to erase: that Sri Lanka has also long been ruled by governments purporting to be ‘Left’, and including self-determined & party-affiliated ‘Communists’ ‘Marxists’ & ‘Socialists’ of more varieties than the English could ever dream of in their philosophies & newsrooms. Undermining them one by one: They wish to put an end to all this for all time.

     So what are the merchant capitalists cooking up now? Why is Germany’s Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom, more recently fingered in the coup in Peru, so interested in our upcoming ‘economic battles’? Germany after all is the birthplace of Karl Marx. Is this why? What then happens when history refuses to end, and keeps going?

     ee has noticed how fat our ee Economists section has become over the last few months and years. Sri Lankans are even being harangued about how we have abandoned ‘race’ & ‘religion’ in these elections and have now – thank their god – finally focused on economic issues.

     As a result, there appears to no end to the drivel dished out by experts, homegrown and imported, offering their panaceas, elixirs and other ointments to ‘revive’ Sri Lanka’s economy. Many of these so-called ‘homegrown’ experts are draped in export-quality fineries, but underneath….whoa? (see ee Comments).

     We have pointed out how Sri Lanka, well used to the thalagoya and kabaragoya, land and water monitors, has also had to endure: class monitors, war & peace monitors, UN & election monitors, the latest crowd of monitors being ratings agencies, which operate like heart monitors, shooting up & down, manufacturing suspense. One minute Bloomberg cries out: ‘Sri Lankan bonds slide as election result puts IMF loan at risk.’ Next minute: ‘Moody’s ratings: Gives optimistic update on AKD Presidency: We do not expect significant disruption to the country’s reform agenda or macroeconomic policies.” Perpetual price disturbance is the rater’s game, but it is no way to run a country. 

     In the Bloomberg story, however, we learn, ‘”A Dissanayake win is the worst possible outcome for Sri Lanka’s bonds,” Tellimer strategists Hasnain Malik & Patrick Curran wrote in a note Sunday.’ It turns out that Tellimer is owned by India Ports Global Limited (IPGL) a wholly owned subsidiary of Sagarmala Development Co, which is under India’s Ministry of Ports, Shipping & Waterways!

     So, why would India’s Ministry of Ports, Shipping & Waterways froth and foam so? Well, as the presidential election grew closer, the NPP began to take on many national concerns, associated with the dreaded pohottuva government, even driving up to the Dalada Maligava. One of those concerns was the protection of energy sovereignty, and Adani’s wind power projects (see ee Focus, Lasanda Kurukulasuriya).

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• This ee also reproduces Chandrasena Maliyadde’s rather rollicking rollout of the causes of Sri Lanka’s economic distemper. Rather than mumbling out such widely promoted symptoms like corruption etc, Maliyadde, once Secretary to the Ministry of Plan Implementation, first reels out ‘statistics – that are only next to damned lies’ – yet reveal: Sri Lanka is ‘a rather underdeveloped country’.

     For even as Sri Lanka can proudly claim the highest indices in South Asia like ‘life expectancy’, and ‘human capital’, at the same time, the Western Province’s share of the GDP is 40% and all other 8 provinces share 60%. 30% of the population lives below the poverty line, with the richest 20% owning 50% of national income, and the top 1% owning 31% of the wealth and the bottom 50% owning 4%. Maliyadde thus makes a distinction between development and growth. He points out that much of the analysis of Sri Lanka focuses on numbers and arithmetic, rather than human beings. He points to the need to show how the fruits of growth are generated & distributed – yet he fails to even mention once the need for modern industrialization, which alone can take us beyond ‘debt traps’ (see ee Focus)

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• The current expectation is that once the new NPP government kickstarts ‘debt’ negotiations, with the IMF, World Bank & Asian Development Bank: their controller, the USA, will block Sri Lanka’s access to investment, and prevent essential projects and initiatives, on some pretext or other, unless the country further implements imperialist dictat. The new President will then have to navigate all the IMF’s roadblocks and landmines, involving banking, debt management, financial management, economic transformation, and electricity acts, etc.

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‘Over 60 questionable bills were rushed through Parliament

by an illegitimate government, creating further complexities

needing immediate attention.’ (Charith Gunawardena)

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‘Ranil has left enough checkpoints in the economic front…

to impose fiscal discipline in the executive & the legislation’

(Sujata Gamage)

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Each failure to adhere to their demands, will ensure the new President faces the same turmoil as was dished out to topple previous national leaders. So, have they been lured into another trap? The US, after all, is expert at waging wars, forever wars, hybrid wars, cold & hot wars…

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Let’s take a hint about the oncoming plot from economist WA Wijewardena. After a decade or more of columns offering weekly anodynes about good governance and rule of law, WAW suddenly exclaims: ‘AKD’s top priority should be to appease a population boiling from within.’ Boil. Boil. Toil & Trouble!

     Meanwhile, one losing presidential candidate was urging the diplomatic corps and military chiefs to call for a curfew. Well, this is what the Sunday Times (linked to the last President’s kin) splutters out shocked. This same oh-so-English Sunday Times cast casteist cattiness at the very same candidate.

     Then we find out from another columnar economist, Sirimal Abeyratne, that the ‘Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom in Colombo is concerned about the ‘‘economic battle’ that Sri Lanka must win after the Presidential Elections’. Abeyratne believes any promise of ‘economic normalcy is based on a frightening assumption, while many are not even aware of how frightening it is’ for people assume, ‘there will be ‘no external shocks’ in front of us.          

     Abeyratne is the very embodiment of that Dutch painting called The Scream. Abeyratne wrings his hands as he strives to keep his head from blowing off, yelling about:

‘There is no reason to say that there won’t be another pandemic… a

global security threat affecting our tourism incomes & worker remittances.

There could be an escalation of ongoing wars out there, or an economic

shock in the US or the EU; what about a major cyber-attack or a global

energy crisis or any other external shock that can have a significant

adverse impact on our economy? They are external shocks!’

(see Post-Election Economic Battle

& Friedrich Naumann, ee Economists)

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Well. Well. Well. How fragile we suddenly turn out to be. What is cute is this Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom. FNFF operators seem to pop up in the strangest places at the eeriest moments. The foundation is named after one of those proto-Nazi Germans who ‘mapped a pre-war roadmap for imperialism’ in the early 20^th century.  And more recently ‘Naumann ‘has been fingered for promoting coups in Peru, Honduras, Venezuela, etc.

     In 2013, the CID investigated the Naumann Foundation, operating in Sri Lanka since 1974, for going ‘beyond its legal limitations in Sri Lanka’, after conducting workshops for opposition parties, and funding then opposition UNP leader Ranil Wickremasinghe’s foreign tours & political activities. A funder of Transparency International (TI) and thinktank Marga, etc, Naumann also sponsored US Advocata’s ‘Let’s Reset Sri Lanka‘ ReformNow Conference at the BMICH, in August 2022, in the wake (sic!) of the aragalaya, which demanded ‘Unlocking Land for Development, selling off national industries (SoEs, SriLankan Airlines), stripping Samurdhi (welfare), and dismantling labour laws (so-called flexibility).

     Abeyratne’s enthusiasm was therefore further triggered, when the outgoing President Ranil’s prolific Media Division (PMD) on election day, perhaps in contravention of election laws, got Abeyratne together with Borah merchant and US Advocata chairman Murtaza Jafferji to ‘circulate their views’. Borah scion Jafferjee seemed to have disappeared from public view, after he was appointed after the aragalaya by then-PM-&-Minister of Finance Ranil Wickremasinghe to form an ‘Economic Stabilization Dialogue’ between the Ministry of Finance & ‘independent’ economists.

     There’s an irony in all this. There are rumors being spread that the agents of the English & US multinational corporations – the cosmopolitan comprador bourgeoisie in Sri Lanka, who are largely non-Sinhala Buddhist, like the Borahs, Sindhis, Memons, Parsis and Chettiars, as well as the Muslim & Christian merchants & financiers – having long funded Sri Lanka’s bourgeois parties, this time also heavily funded the NPP to draw them away from their JVP roots, and turn them into ‘the alternate party of the compradore bourgeoisie’. Most prominent among them are supposed to be Soli Captain, with his son Rusi, the biggest shareholders in Sri Lanka, including John Keells, the son of Ken Balendran, while their economics consultant is another former director of Keells, Indrajit Coomaraswamy.

     Hanif Yusoof, recently appointed Western Province governor, is linked to Expolanka, a front for the Japan import mafia. He is also linked to Mustafa Cassim, founder of Roar, a major disseminator of aragala videos. Yusoof is also linked to Osman Kassim who supposedly introduced Islamic banking to Sri Lanka., and founded Amana Bank, and also was a chairman of Expolanka…

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The Masquerade of Tagging & Taming Marxists