e-Con e-News

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

e-Con e-News 19-25 January 2025

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Ceylon Chamber of Commerce. Actually England’s Chamber…Yes, despite the name, it is not a Sri Lankan grouping. It is made up of unrepentant and inveterate importers of foreign goods. Their commerce serves someone else’s industry. Not ours. This Chamber is sponsoring yet another ‘Economic Summit’ titled ‘Shaping Sri Lanka’s Future: Transformational Growth Rooted in Sound Economic Policies.’  

     Then there is England’s Overseas Development Institute (ODI) offering ’27 actionable policy proposals’ by 24 experts, in a book titled Sri Lanka: From Debt Default to Transformative Growth.

     But just what do they all mean by ‘transformation’? Replace the word ‘development’, with the word ‘colonial’ and you better get their idea. Overseas Colonial Institute. It is the old business of tea & tourism & transportation to transit lounges afar. Chambers of Commerce & Boards of Trade are all rusty colonial instruments, And they were all part of the English offensive launched last week, in their usual obstreperously unobtrusive modus operandi, hiding in plain sight. Touting debt-for-nature swaps. Meanwhile their troll armies & columnists are set to escalate attacks on ‘Leftist’ incompetence, as well as openly pooh-poohing whatever deals the government has had to make with an elderly New Delhi and a buoyant Beijing.

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Political and economic history in Sri Lanka only begins to make more sense if we glare at it as a long rigorous sentence of preempting modern industrialization and of hindering the formation of a class that enables any such advance. To put it more abstractly: our colonial history has always been about preventing capital accumulation and crippling a class that could enable capital accumulation. Capital accumulation? What is that? It is more than money. It is about wealth that creates fresh wealth. And who may this class be? Our merchants & moneylenders have no interest in any such long-term endeavours. And one cannot expect the English-controlled media in Sri Lanka, as agents of the merchant, moneylender, and multinational banks & corporations (MNCs) in Sri Lanka, to tell us of what such a class could actually accomplish.

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So there was that garishly hued Anglo-literary affair led by the ‘premier opium dealer’ in Asia, HSBC, at the popular though defunded Colombo Public Library! The HSBC were irritably stealing a march on those effete litterateurs at that renovated (minus the defused canons) and overpriced Dutch Fort in Galle. The merchant bankers strode out of their closets. Peppered among the tired pallid Northern Anglo-Indian hacks were the perennial privatizers and their Advo Kata stipendiaries, plus that species of performative ‘executives’ performing as ‘artists’, spluttering smooth in those elevated tonalities and fatuous phraseologies usually discernible only in airconditioned nooks and crannies. (Who or what these executives ‘execute’ is not exactly a popular subject for our mystifying mystery novelists.)  

     The Summit includes English Standard Chartered Bank’s Bingumal Thewarathanthri and Keell’s Krishan Balendra, not to mention pharma-importer Hema’s Kasturi Wilson. And the ODI (odious?) book includes the usual suspects (see Random Notes) one sees paraded perfunctorily across electronic screens and down news columns, as experts in unison demanding fungible conjugal rights with the IMF.

     Last week, that top official Englishman visited a Dutch ‘World Photo’ Exhibit at the Independence Square Arcade awash in gloss about Russian ‘atrocities’ against over-armed NATO. The Russians were perplexed how the thieving Dutch had gotten so snowy white in Sri Lanka? This tottering English envoy also met Colombo MP Mano Ganesan to discuss ‘Malaiyaha Tamil issues’. Then there was England’s ICI-CIC announcement about the ‘World’s 1^st Red Basmathi-type Rice’. Cutting-edge, the English kaduva always are.

     The neo-English invasion continued this week with ‘Artisanal Tea Importers’ surveying the green plantations (even as Unilever is diluting our teas with their latest chemical cocktails). Oh yes, a turbaned English Trade Commissioner too was seen about – how exotic these newer Anglo-Saxons have gotten… Meanwhile, in a fit of petulant pique, the Planters Association, in order to keep avoiding payment of remunerative wages to plantation workers, points defensively at the country’s ‘2.3 million agriculture workers’, and wonders out loud why ‘paddy farmers cannot also be given a monthly salary…?’ Like executives, perhaps. (see ee Agriculture, RPCs want state plantations to show the way)

     All these literary and oh-so English diversions are to try to make us forget not just history but the latest painful strangling daily economic twists of their astronomically growing debts, thanks yes to the IMF! As Tricontinental Research’s Vijay Prasad says: From 1980 when Tanzania’s leader Nyerere warned – ‘Every few years, countries in the Global South go through the same cycle. After surrendering to the IMF & its debt-austerity regime, a deep crisis inevitably takes hold & leads to political turmoil’… no independent agenda has been possible…’ (sound familiar?) But now – ‘The emergence of China, and other Asian countries… as finance for industrialization in the Global South has tilted the balance of forces for developing countries. Now, they no longer have to rely on the IMF… No country has developed without modern machine industry, and – as far as we can tell in our time – it is not possible for any country to develop without building up its industrial capacity.’

     Meanwhile, ‘UNCTAD’s A World of Debt, shows us that global public debt is at a ‘record high’ of $97trillion (2023)… in developing countries and ‘has grown twice as fast as in developed countries’ since 2010. …for decades, Global South countries have been told by institutions like the World Bank & IMF that the only way to climb out of debt is to borrow – ie, take on more debt. In 1998 the Wall Street Journal wrote bluntly that the IMF ‘has not been fighting financial fires, but dousing them with gasoline’. (see ee Random Notes)

     So, while we burn in their debts-on-debt fires, they want us to join their ‘fireside chats’ (in AC-d rooms) to try to douse it with a little bit more tea and light literature, anyone??

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• The Useless Arts? – This ee Focus looks at the doings of the ostensible founder of US industrialization, Alexander Hamilton, who planned ‘raids’ on England’s industrial secrets, famously declaring, ‘Do as the English do, not as they say’. The English treated their ‘economic discoveries’ as ‘precious state secrets’, outlawing the export of machinery and banning the migration of skilled mechanics. This was a time when the USA was not ‘yet in full possession of workmen, machines & secrets in the useful arts.’ Of course, the US now vigorously joins in those English tunes of exclusion… Which makes us wonder, what the ‘useless’ arts may be? Perhaps England’s Hongkong & Shanghai Bank (HSBC) can now tell us…

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ee also continues the attempt to depict Sri Lanka’s ancient historical links with China, which peaked during the 8^th century Tang Dynasty. Sri Lanka was building some of biggest ships in Indian Ocean, with the powerful Buddhist kingdom of Srivijaya in what’s now Indonesia. The tales of such famous travelers as the monk Xuan Zhuang, who traveled along the northern Silk Road and eventually further south to Lanka, gave rise to the Chinese classic ‘Monkey King’ novel Journey to the West. Buddhist learning in Sri Lanka, its important texts and leading teachers were the main attractions for some Chinese pilgrims as cited by I-Ching…(see ee Focus).

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It was one of SBD de Silva’s favourite questions: He would ask – as if he already knew the answer, as if he was just verifying his suspicions or conclusions, or perhaps as if testing the listener’s dedication to analysis & transformation: ‘What enabled US-occupied Korea (UoK)’s industrialization?’

     He would dismiss our ready, relatively thoughtless, or automatic answer: US colonialism! After all, there are 130 US bases stationed in occupied Korea, and those 40-50,000 soldiers have urgent industrial and biological needs. Did SB feel UoK was not really industrialized?  He would point to the UoK’s huge shipbuilding industry. He would speak of the role Japan played in developing Korea’s agriculture, cementing channels for rice cultivation (in order to provide less-expensive food to feed Japan’s industrialization).  

     This ee Focus examines the Heavy-Chemical Industrial (HCI) policies, their origin in the 1972 coup-d’etat by General Park Chung-hee, and their demise with his later 1979 assassination. Those policies directly targeted certain industries, and nonetheless shifted Korean manufacturing into ‘more advanced markets’. The writer echoes the prejudices of the imperialist historiography of Korea (all but ignores the example of an industrialized north – DPRK!), but places the UoK’s policies midst increasing militarization and offensive actions, including US President Richard Nixon declaration that ‘the US would no longer provide direct military support to its allies in the Asia-Pacific region’. Heavy industrial policies were seen as key for military-industrial modernization, and pursued despite the ‘scepticism by foreign lenders’ such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and several European nations. The article provides a rather extended but related excerpt of a bibliography of references to those HCI policies.

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• Financial Times columnist WA Wijewardena (see ee Random Notes) has taken to listing those economists who have at least feebly challenged certain capitalist orthodoxies, like the joys of ‘the market’, ignoring that large multinational banks & corporations clog its arteries. He quotes Kautilya calling merchants thieves, and others who did not see the milk of human kindness as flowing unmetered in the workings of capitalism, such as Adam Smith, and Thorstein Veblen and Ken Galbraith and Joe Stiglitz. And JM Keynes, too. The problem is with just talking about Keynes as some benevolent, while ignoring how a large part of his ‘welfare’ schemes was for boosting the war machines.

     Apparently, IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva was in Davos this week, reminding another set of chosen people about Keynes’ optimism in 1930:

‘I predict that both of the 2 opposed errors of pessimism which now

make so much noise in the world will be proved wrong over time: the

pessimism of the revolutionaries who think that things are so bad that

nothing can save us but violent change, & the pessimism of the

reactionaries who consider the balance of our economic & social

life so precarious that we must risk no experiments.’

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However, what followed Keynes’ good cheer was a huge Depression in the biggest economies, the rise of Fascist & Nazi forces, and World War 2, and 60 million killed… (see ee Economists, Davos 2025: Trump v Von der Leyen – Michael Roberts)

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• The US embassy in Colombo’s lip-service EconomyNext, an online business tickertape, largely written by rusty robots it seems – considering the number of nonsequitors and odd mistakes they make – alongside their routine sermons and flaccid invective against – take your pick! – state-owned enterprises, import substitution, money printing, etc… – has taken to hitting Sri Lanka via Bolivia, accusing both of some macroeconomic demeanour, as seen from the heights of Mont Pelerin via Washington DC. Several new items, the latest headlined: ‘Bolivia blames supply factors Sri Lanka-style for 9.97% inflation in 2024’ also hits out at NATO’s most-favored demons: ‘In 2024, so-called blockades linked to ex-Presidenet [sic!] Evo Morales, who is embroiled in a case over sexually abusing a minor… Bolivia had been printing money and running out of reserves… Bolivia’s central bank has gone to the IMF 20 times… Bolivia has a Leftist government which came to power as the commodity bubble was fired in 2006, amid protests over petroleum privatization. After nationalization, gas production had gradually petered out.’ Such is the quality of business journalism! It is no surprise the merchant media have taken to rewarding themselves with even more lavish awards & prizes & trophies – all of which can be ordered online from you-know-where, complete with printed honors & honorifics…

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• The Rockefeller family’s Exxon Corporation wields influence over both local & foreign US policy. When US President Don Trump cries out, ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’, he is not just invoking a caricature of 1960s Black radicalism ‘Burn, Baby, Burn’…, but also moistening the wettest dreams of the oil & mining corporations.

     Last week, one of the USA’s longest imprisoned political leaders, Leonard Peltier (now 80 years old) was told almost 50 years later, he could serve out the rest of his sentence in his home on an ‘Indian reservation’ in the Dakotas, starting on February 18. While his many supporters around the world wonder if the ailing Peltier will make it home alive, this ‘commutation’ (for being accused, with only falsified evidence, of killing 2 US undercover FBI agents) – was one of demoted US President J Biden’s last acts – along with rather intriguing ‘pre-emptive pardons’ of his supporters involved in trying to jail his opponent, D Trump. What balm was Biden applying to assuage the guilt of his fellow genocidaires?

     Leonard Peltier was sent to prison after the US invasion of Wounded Knee, midst the US government’s COINTELPRO campaign of assassination & jailing of the leaderships of the American Indian Movement (AIM) & the Black Panther Party (BPP). The US Vice President at the time was Nelson Rockefeller, who in the decades previous had been Governor of New York, ordering the massacre of prisoners at Attica penitentiary in August 1971.

     Peltier’s release (after 2 hospital stays last year) was curiously signaled by a letter from an ‘Indian front’ (NDNs) of the Rockefeller Foundation, 3 days before Biden’s ‘pardon’. Nelson Rockefeller had also notoriously ordered Diego Rivera’s murals removed from the walls of the Rockefeller Center because they depicted Lenin! He had vacated the MoMA presidency, 1940-46 to work as President Franklin Roosevelt’s Coordinator of the Office of Inter-American Affairs, where he was made intimate with the CIA’s covert training of terrorists & torturers in the Americas. He was also assistant secretary of State for US Republic Affairs under Harry S Truman, as well as Undersecretary of Health, Education & Welfare (HEW) under Dwight D Eisenhower. Nelson Rockefeller often spoke of the need to develop a Black Bourgeoisie. He died in 1979, just as Leonard Peltier was beginning what ended up as being entombed for 50 years.

     An entire generation of US political prisoners and their stories have been tightly locked away…

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Contents:

Victoria’s Secrets of De-Industrializing Debts: What English Literary Festivals Never Tell