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e-Con e-News 06-12 October 2024

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Opposition forces are involved in an imperialist conspiracy

to make President Anura Dissanayake the 2^nd  Gotabaya”

– former Minister Wimal Weerawansa

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‘Si vis pacem para bellum –

If you want peace, prepare for war’

Some like their sutra in punchy praetorian Latin. The Washington-based IMF (Import Mafia Front) is making us an offer we apparently can’t refuse. The US even ordered their Pacific Fleet commander Steve Koehler to go after Sri Lanka’s new President this week. In ‘Greek’ fashion, they also ‘gifted’ us some mothballed antiquarian hardware to enable surveillance. But not too much, and not too farther afield.

     Slit loose skirt soon followed crisp starched uniform. After the US Navy Commander (steeled fist), USAID Chief (silk glove) Aunty Sam Power called on President AK Kumara virtually. US delegations seem to divide into these 2 sartorial subspecies: uniform & skirt. Though the corporate suits are never far behind…

‘Although IMF actions are said to be devoid of politics,

they may also be linked to the country’s strategic importance’

– Nimal Sanderatne, Sunday Times (see ee Economists)

Sanderatne, a weekly columnist in an oligarchic newspaper group (he’s also a shareholder in, famed for its anglomania), seems to have suddenly awoken from the hopium of ‘free trade’ – a policy pushed after England gained a monopoly over modern machine industry and the seas!

     The New York-based Fitch Ratings Agency said this week they will only erase the stigma of Sri Lanka’s ‘Default Rating (DR)’, after Sri Lanka has normalised the relationship with the international financial community”.  Normalization? This means: ‘The sovereign’s completion of a commercial debt restructuring.’

      ‘International financial community’ is an even more inbred subset of that ‘international community’: a humorous euphemism for the IMF’s master – the USA – and its armed poodles scampering along. The IMF is promising stability if we agree to their colonial number crunching which essentially casts us into forever debt-bondage to fund their forever wars.

     French news poodle AFP referring to Sri Lanka’s President as ‘Leftist leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake’ and an ‘avowed Marxist’, insists the IMF’s ‘painful austerity measures for Sri Lanka were ‘bearing fruit’ and ‘must be sustained’. All the thinktanks and import mafias feel they can tie any elected government in knots: ‘Dissanayake has little room to reshape the terms of the IMF deal.’ ‘There are certain red lines that the IMF will not agree to negotiate,’ declared India regional Borah merchant prince Murtaza Jafferjee, head of the US-funded thinktank Advocata.

     Perhaps it is this onslaught that has finally inspired the National Freedom Front’s Weerawansa & Democratic Left Front’s Vasudeva Nanayakkara to call for supporting the presently ruling NPP. They have not gone further and called for a ‘national salvation’ government. The nation however is being subject to another costly and bruising parliamentary election. Local elections will follow, aimed at dividing the country, if the NPP does not go along with NATO’s prescriptions.

     What may we do? India’s Foreign Minister S Jaishankar also dropped in on Sri Lanka this week to deliver their perfunctory amendments to any excessive enthusiasm. This week’s ee Focus reproduces Kalinga Seneviratne’s Sri Lanka: Home-grown ‘Color Revolution’ Needs Support Both from India & China. He believes it is time China & India form an alternative to the Paris Club dominated by the European & Japanese creditors to assist Sri Lanka’s transformation. India, however, remains a colonial outpost: Jaishankar believes ‘if India & China can cooperate, they can bail out more countries, not only Sri Lanka’. So then, what’s the problem? There are those pesky colonial borderline hangovers in the Himachal, etc, Jaishankar reminds. Not to mention, Trincomalee….

     But then The Island on 8 October offered this happy headline on an essay borrowed from The Conversation:

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‘UK’s deal with Mauritius will be a win for all’

For all? This ‘deal’ allows the USA to launch bombardments of Iran. Supposedly, Diego Garcia is the only land base from which they can bomb Iran (5,000km away – without retaliation from Iran?). The USA can also bomb Sri Lanka (2,000km from Diego Garcia) and India. India too, however, has agreed to this ‘deal’ that permits the US to maintain for another 99 years at least, an illegal base in the Indian Ocean (which somehow permitted ‘Sri Lanka Tamils’ to land there and demand refugee status from England, providing for yet another media diversion from the colonial question!)

     ee reported in August, on the US & Australia practicing bombing exercises there. African analysts see this deal with Mauritius (a member of the African Union/AU & the Southern African Development Community/SADC) as further evidence of the US escalations of war on Asia & Africa (see ee Random Notes). This is also evident in Colorado State University Prof Peter Harris in The Conversation’s puffery, stating England coulda simply played da tuff guy:

‘London could probably have defied international opinion if it had wanted to. Nobody would have forced England to halt its illegal occupation of the Chagos Archipelago. But such a course would have badly undermined England’s global reputation and its ability to criticise others for breaches of international law’:

This agreement will give England exactly what it wanted: a continued presence on Diego Garcia that conforms with international law… The US is another clear winner from the deal. In fact, hardly anything will change for the USA. Washington will continue working closely with London, and not need to negotiate an agreement with Mauritius on its rights to the base or the status of forces. Indeed, Pentagon officials should be thrilled that their base on Diego Garcia has been put on firm legal footing. This is something that England alone was unable to offer. The bilateral agreement with Mauritius will ensure the security of the base for 99 years – no small feat’ (ee Sovereignty, England claims deal with Mauritius and India to grab Diego Garcia to be ‘a win for all’)

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‘With the support of the non-aligned movement, Sri Lanka introduced a proposal to the United Nations General Assembly in October 1971, on making the Indian Ocean a Zone of Peace. Although no country openly opposed or voted against it – that would have signaled support for Cold War tensions & superpower rivalry – …the major powers – France, England, the Soviet Union, and the USA – abstained. In 1972, Sirimavo made a highly publicized and successful state visit to China, where she met with Mao. She described the relationship between the 2 nations as a model of inter-state relations”. By the end of 1976, China had become one of Sri Lanka’s leading trade partners.’ – Rathindra Kuruwita, Which Candidate Is China Likely to Back in Sri Lanka’s 2024 Presidential Election? (see ee Sovereignty)

• Sri Lanka had already become China’s largest trade partner outside the East European Economic Common Market, after entering into the 1952 Rubber-Rice Pact, which has remained Sri Lanka’s most successful trade agreement. The Ceylon-China Rubber-Rice Pact was fully opposed by a US-dominated Central Bank. The name Bandaranaike, at least of the elders, still resounds in the most populous country in the world.  

     Comparing present PM Harini Amarasuriya to former PM Sirimavo Bandaranaike, the world’s first female head of government, would be unscientific, let alone unfair. It’s still laughable to hear the tweets in oohs & aahs of the so-called ‘international (read: paleface) community’ about Sri Lanka’s civil-ized gender choice, as if apes had finally learnt to use imported toilet paper. The more apt comparison is between Sirimavo and AKD!

     As for Sirimavo, let’s see how they treated that first woman president! They had assassinated her husband after his government attempted to institutionalize investment (a development bank) for industry, and, worse, for establishing relations with the USSR & New China. They attempted to militarily coup her, after she nationalized petroleum distribution. After she kicked out the English military bases and the US Peace Corps, they bribed ministers to split her government to maintain the colonial media monopoly. They lubricated an ‘insurgency’ of more expeditious utopians to, again, split her government. They removed her civil rights, lubricated another internecine insurgency in the south to prevent her return. And it is unclear how they finally pushed her aside. Who is ‘they’, you may ask? Ask yourself…

     It is (or was) a litmus test to measure the political colors of Colombots by daring to utter the name Sirimavo – even the blackest face turns red, the whitest pales. New names have been added to the pandemonium & pantheon. Rajapakses, for instance. Will AKD minus his AK be next? His family is his cadre party. Does 1962 plus 1971 add up to 2024?  Or 1965, that year Hollywood claims was dangerous for living?

     It is strange that Sirimavo (if readers will forgive the familiarity) appears to have left no diaries – diaries we are told is a quintessential feminine art – and there is little scholarship about her statecraft, unlike about her husband, or her leading nemesis, JR Jayawardena. Instead, we are treated to the diversionary diaries of some of Sirimavo‘s secretaries, some of whom offer other readings of her ‘anti-imperialism’ – undermined as usual by political, military and economic warfare, overt and sotto sotto.

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So here we are, still in the midst of colonial warmongering and media fog. The whites keep blocking access to energy sources, and seek to maintain control over trade, hindering relations with the East. This ee Focus therefore reproduces Garvin Karunaratne’s scan of the history of Sri Lanka’s Divisional Development Councils Program (1970-77): ‘The DDCP addressed rural unemployment by encouraging cooperatives for agricultural, industrial and infrastructural projects.’ He believes, the DDCP is a blueprint that can be immediately implemented almost entirely with existing staff and can get into production mode within months. The DDCP was ‘a socialist concept’, engineered & promoted by ‘the Marxist group of ministers in the Cabinet’, until they were forced to leave the government in 1975.

     This 6-year-old ee blog is dedicated to SBD de Silva. De Silva was a secretary to the Minister of Industries during a part of the early 1970s. He believed the then-government underestimated the enormity of the effort involved in the setting up a modern industrial state, and the power of the import mafia. He concluded the country needs a coordinated political, economic and military program to overcome underdevelopment. Karunaratne himself notes that the DDCP had to weed out ‘people who pretended to have industries in an attempt to secure allocations of foreign exchange, import and sell the goods in the market instead of engaging in production’. But it appears to have been even worse. 

     SBD de Silva recalled how a rentier capitalist class arose during the ‘exchange controls regime’ from 1972-77. This stands as a warning to the present NPP. These rentiers solidified their economic rule by:

‘Evading exchange controls through bribery, deception, corruption & illegal smuggling in of foreign goods. Acute shortages of goods in the domestic market stemming from world oil price increase, world food shortage and dearth of domestic foreign reserves created stupendous margins for smugglers and traders of foreign goods whose rate of profit surpassed the industries operating within the legal framework and thereby increased their financial dominance over weakly constituted merchant-manufacturing interests’ (see Dhanusha Pathirana & Chandana Aluthge’s A History of Underdevelopment & Political Economy of Inflation in Sri Lanka).

The weak exchange controls ended up reinforcing the dominance of rentier capitalist class that arose after 1977.

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• There seems to be an overproduction of economic commentators offering Sri Lanka advice on how to deal with its economic challenges. All talk about numbers alone. From Harvard to Oxford to Gothenburg, none dare even come close to talking about the need for industrialization, let alone the types of modern industrialization we need to unshackle ourselves.

     Sri Lanka needs to prioritize our own industrialization, notes Radhika Desai & the Nicholases, no other country can do that for us (see Random Notes). This requires an enormous amount of state intervention – large-scale planning is required to break from underdevelopment. ‘It’s not going to happen via the free market.’ A new international division of labor based on export-oriented industrialization has been incubated at innumerable imperialist thinktanks. The IMF has also set a minefield for this government. A rather unique Central Bank Act now prohibits them from buying any government debt, inhibiting any type of activist intervention. They’ve tied the hands of this government – ‘virtually all the foreign exchange that’s going to be earned is going to be used to repay debt in the future and our debt burden is massive’. (see Random Notes)

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Contents:

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A1. Reader Comments –

The Fate of Sri Lanka’s First & Last Woman Prime Minister