e-Con e-News

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

e-Con e-News 15-21 December 2024

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Sri Lanka’s merchant media has taken to wailing over mafias – Finance Mafia, Fuel Mafia, Fertilizer Mafia, Pharma Mafia, CEB Mafia, Rice Mafia, Coconut Mafia, Egg Mafia, etc – you name it. This is their guttural euphemism for the gang of merchants & moneylenders who mislead the country – tagging them all mafia. They dare not name the ‘legal’ practitioners of a seedy mercantilism on behalf of imperialist industry, who have successfully undermined every ‘national’ government in the country.

Of course, we believe the most corrupt mafia – if ee is to use such words – is the merchant media mafia itself. A word they will never use on themselves or their chief sponsors – such as Exxon, Citibank, Standard Chartered Bank, Unilever, BAT’s Ceylon Tobacco, ICI’s CIC, on whose behalf the pettier merchants & moneylenders run the country into the ground. Or call the IMF: theImporters’ Mafia Fund – as it becomes clearer that they are sorry sales agents for the castoffs of imperialist industry – comatose Japanese Toyotas & bakala US Beechcrafts, anyone?  One activity these mafias excel in is giving themselves awards, and if readers wish to watch the leading local corporate mafioso make naked love to themselves yet again – check out the Chartered Accountants (ACCA) who gave out awards this week to those they daily help conceal their mischievous foreign exchange flimflams within glossy annual reports (see ee Random Notes).

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‘Let us also not lose sight of hidden hands, especially from the West

who make matters worse through their cloak & dagger operations

worldwide as also was put into operation here during Gotabaya Rajapaksa

presidency, like even cutting off worker remittances from our banking

system thereby we couldn’t even scrape together a few million dollars

to clear even a shipment of cooking gas. They have done similar jugglery

to so many other countries, even in our neighbourhood, as has been the

case already in Bangladesh & Pakistan. Modi should not feel all that

smug as we do not know what plots are being hatched against him.’

– Shamindra Ferdinando, see ee Workers, How Prof Dewasiri’s FB post…

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We should whisper as an aside about: the cabinet ‘nod’ this week to amend that US-funded yahaplana government’s haemorrhaging Foreign Exchange Act of 2017, that was so beloved of the Rajendra ‘Chamber Pot’ Theagarajahs & Suresh ‘Sell the SoEs’ Shahs & Murtaza ‘Advokata’s Harak Kata’ Jafferjees of our world (see ee Economy). But even if this (legally or illegally) stolen money were retained in the country, would they invest it in modern industry? No way. They don’t even know or care what machine-making industry means.

     The US Embassy lip service, online business rag EconomyNext, suggests that ‘mafia’ is a term used by ignorant commoners. They prefer the term ‘oligopoly’ (rule of a few) hothoused by ‘protectionism’. To promote rice imports, this import-and-high-interest-friendly rag has even taken to quoting Marx & Engels at length –– fulminating against ‘protectionism’ & calling for ‘free trade’. Now this is not the first time Marx & Engels have been misquoted out of context, and it won’t be the last (strange this display of Marx after claiming for the last 35 years at least, that Marxism is dead). ee will deal with this anecdotal imposture about English laissez-faire (‘the only untried utopia’), and premature obituaries next week. All we can say for now, is that, yes, Marx & Engels examined everything with an eye to what would benefit the progress of the proletariat most, for they remain, still, the only class who can ensure a more just world. Yet, while all proletarians are working class – not all the working class is proletarian, etc. Does Sri Lanka have a working class, let alone a proletariat?

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Every now and again the USA has to pick up

a crappy little country & throw it against a wall

just to prove we are serious.”

– Michael Ledeen, American Enterprise Institute

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     Subjecting the people to horrific wars of terrorism & annihilation for decades, isolating & assassinating systematically both Communist Party and other socialist party cadres, burying alive the rise of a class of skilled artisans in modern-making industry, the long history of colonialism & imperialism in this country has sought to unravel any gains of the last 75 years, to ensure the zombie rise instead of a ‘lumpen bourgeoisie & proletariat’.

      Thus claims novelist Sena Thoradeniya in his latest excoriation of the current NPP government. He believes they are merely ‘lumpen proletarians’ (in Sinhala, Paadada Nirdhana Panthiya) – ‘performers’ – yearning after acceptance from the inbred high & low commissioners of Colombo 07. He believes the yearning for false glory, calling themselves professors & doctors & specialists (aren’t we all?), is a sign of such lumpen characteristics. But haven’t professors & doctors in Sri Lanka themselves debased their professions through their piratical ‘private practices’? – such that every artful dodger may consider themselves worthy of lettered accreditation. Never mind. Thoradeniya mines Marx & Lenin & Mao, delving into their Bonapartist definitions, recounting the rise of such lumpen classes around the world and in Sri Lanka (see ee Focus). Our question to Thoradeniya, however, is: Is this anything new? Haven’t the long line of local ‘misleaders’, starting with the Portuguese & the Dutch, and their local fidalgos & mudaliyars, to the English & their massaging of nobodies into somebodies, arrack rentiers into aristocrats, been necessary lieutenants in ensuring the suppression of all the (well, most) people of this land. And again, what of the Unilevers, & Standard Chartered Banks, the Exxons & Citibanks? What kind of mafia – oligarchist lumpen – are they?

     And while the USA has inspired another round of cackling about ‘corruption’ in Sri Lanka, this week saw not just the horrors of their Zionist & their Islamic terrorists spreading their claws, but also their more mundane dispensations of the ‘rule of law’: the outgoing US President pardoned a former Pennsylvania Judge who accepted $millions in kickbacks ‘for sending 2,300 children, some as young as 8 years old, to for-profit prisons, on false charges’. Another receiving US presidential largesse was Indo-American Mississippi doctor Meera Sachdeva, who gave her patients ‘diluted chemo drugs as part of a massive Medicare fraud’. And then there was a former Illinois comptroller & treasurer who embezzled over $53mn to breed racing horses. ‘Biden’s act of ‘mass clemency’ came in the wake of his presidential pardon for his arms&drug-dealing & child-abusing son Hunter’ etc, etc. Why bother recalling such? The US embassy’s stipendiary columnists in the Island newspaper even called it the act of loving father! But then again, the US is practicing the exceptionalism of the dictator (of the bourgeois kind): Do as I say, not as I do…

     And speaking of dictators (this time of the proletarian kind) let us celebrate the 146^th birth anniversary of the USSR’s great leader Joseph Stalin (Dec 6) and the 131^st birth anniversary of China’s great leader Mao Zedong (Dec 26). We now need 1,000 Maos & Stalins to bloom more than ever, for it is under their leadership that not just their countries but the world as well, defeated the fascist powers (colonial wannabes, really) then, and whose spirit can help us face this future as well. Let us greet the new imperial (Gregorian) new year with courage! Let us also recall that BR Ambedkar, architect of free India’s constitution, when Stalin came to power in 1922, shed tears of joy that a Communist country would accept the son of an impoverished shoemaker as its leader. And when Stalin passed away in 1953, Ambedkar observed a fast to condole his passing…!

     This ee Focus also looks at the history of attempting to divide Africa into North & South. This tale recalls how way back in the 1830s the English were preparing such artificial divisions, which came to rotten fruition in the 1884 Congress of Berlin’s ‘scramble for Africa’, with a blunt pencil slicing the great continent into ‘succulent’ morsels. It was in the 1830s too that the English saw the benefits of dividing the Muslim world into Sunni & Shia… And it was in the 1830s too (Colebrook-Cameron, anyone?), that the English saw the gains to be made of funding a so-called ‘independent’ media, as well, while stealing the lands of the hill-country to impose their slave plantation system, seeking to deploy Tamil settlers, north, east & central, to divide the lands of the Sinhala.

     This ee therefore reproduces Thakurartha Devadithya Guardiyawasam Lindamulage Nalin Kumar de Silva’s exposition of The Mahavamsa Myth. He explores the basis of the purported discrimination against Tamil people by the Sinhala, which was apparently ‘started after the Sinhala Only Act in 1956 & the SLFP led by the Bandaranaikes’ and then continued by the Rajapaksas, and was a product of the ‘Mahavamsa mindset’.

     The 5thCentury Mahavamsa has been called ‘the most important epic poem in the Pali language’ (Wiki): These chronicles twitched the noses of colonial busybodies – 38 ‘chapters’ were translated by ‘civil servant’ George Turnour, and the remaining 62 chapters were completed by ‘Mudaliyar’ LC Wijesinghe. Wilhelm Geiger (his son invented the Geiger Counter) in 1912 translated it into German, which was then translated into English by Mabel Haynes Bode. But not just the colonials – Karl Marx also commented on the Mahavamsa’s treasure of economic information (see ee 11 July 2020, Cool Marx on Sri Lanka).

     De Silva provides a fascinating look into related Sinhala literature of the time, and shows how the Mahavamsa was more a product of doctrinal battles within the Buddhist world, and had nothing to do with the so-called Sinhala-Tamil conflict of today. De Silva pinpointedly passed away on May Day, 2024, and while de Silva would surely have objected to our analysis of the roots of Sri Lanka’s discontents – such nationalists, misled by imperialist-promoted Trotskyism, seem to live in the clouds, failing to deep-mine the prevention of modern industry & an artisanal machine-making class, as the fundamental aim of the imperialists – he exhibited an enduring love for the country & (almost) all of its people, not just the Sinhala Buddhists, with erudite daily commentary …Jayavayva!

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This ee also reproduces the Yukthi ‘plural forum’ (whatever the heck that is) opposition to ‘a return to high-interest international capital markets, which have already created an intolerable burden for the people’. They point to the 13 December announcement by the Ministry of Finance of a ‘successful’ deal regarding international sovereign bonds (ISBs). They lament ‘the initial proposal for a deal had been concluded during a blackout period 2 days before the Presidential election that was held on 21 Sept 2024. So much for the USA’s much-admired cleaving to the ‘rule of law’. They believe the deal will ‘cost the country billions of dollars and… likely lead to repeated cycles of default in the near future’. Yet, after all that, all that gnashing & grinding of teeth, all these ‘pluralists’ can offer is a rather singular ‘calling for economic policies that lead to a process of sustainable development that uplifts working people’.  If we hear these NGO-funded words ‘sustainable’ & ‘development’ one more time, we fear will plurally puke… They offer no plan or program for an industrial… renaissance – now where o where have we heard that word?

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Contents:

Finance & Fuel & Fertilizer Mafias, Mafias Everywhere, Cries the Media Mafia – But What About the Importers’ Mafia Fund (IMF)?