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e-Con e-News 09-15 March 2025

Dear Julie – We who believe in karma, even when it takes its time, have a theory. It’s about why we find you – a lost, truncated ‘Korean-American’ – constantly scratching & poking about our country. Is it because our rubber exporters made lots of dollars off that US war on Korea (it’s not a ‘Korean War’) that officially began in 1949 and hacked that country into 2 pieces? That’s the US plan for Sri Lanka, no? Partition envy? Segregation complex? Should we call you: Julie Pokey?

     Surprised we are then to find you not poking into these urban housing schemes tagged as ‘Koreava‘. Soulbury independence in 1948 gifted us another yankee, John Exter forming and running the Central Bank. Exter invested those rubbery dollars not in building factories but in pure consumption! ‘Independence’ was to mimick a white lifestyle, in rupees. Brought in to build up Colombo 7’s fake mansions, workers were then ghetto-ed into tenements, with pethi- & ganja- & kassipu-dealing lumpens set among them, causing regular uncivil ruckuses – Korea having become a place name for unending conflict, with the US ‘freezing’ their war there in a melty icy-choksy-way. The US then poured heroin through those Koreava into this country after that 1977 ‘open’ economy, midst another war on the Kush (Afghanistan)… More vulli, indeed!

     We thought of Korea again, last week, after that mimic-Museum of Modern & Contemporary Art (MMCA) in Colombo put on (it’s a put-on, alright) a ‘Total Landscaping’ exhibition to ‘end conflict’ in Uva, and the North & East provinces! The MMCA are experts on such vulli – as they’re ‘sponsored’ by the NATO brothers & sisters: the US, English & EU.

     ‘Total landscaping’ huh? That’s what the English did to Uva in 1818 through scorched-earth genocide. Just as the US did in Korea, 130 years hence, flattening their North through massive carpet-bombing, slaughtering millions while castrati ululate K-Pop falsettos about the ‘free’ world. 100,000s of US troops are stationed over those lands – Korea, Japan, China’s Taibei, Guam etc – with US leaders now claiming they’ve been doing it all for free – one big ‘summa-iri sanksthava’ – that’s Kolamba-Koreava multi-lingo, for a free ride. Really! So, when the US hops from Diego Garcia to Trinco, they can say we owe them an even bigger favour!

     Perhaps when real karma – like a stretched rubber band – whips back, it’d be the descendants of Kim il Sung, who’d be accorded first reception in Colombo? Until then, you keep jumping ahead of the line. Why don’t you go preach to your own lost colonial leaders in South Korea to desist from constant assassinations, massacres & coups?

     C’mon Julie baba, let’s meet without your bodyguards at 12 midnight in one of those ‘Koreava’? Let’s ask them about all those rights that you preach to us about? Mebbe together we can exorcise all these ghosts? But do wear something looser. It’d be hard to flee in a tight skirt, better to wear a reddha or sarama. You can more hastily hoist it up into an amuday (aka loincloth) of sorts. Until then, dear, dear Julie Pokey, we remain yours, truly, truly…

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• Makandura to Medamulana – Now almost the entire country has been turned into a Koreava – ie, if we’re to believe the English media: Sinhala village and people’s names are made into epithets for corruption, criminality and murder – Makandura Madush, Ganemulla Sanjeewa, and now Batalanda Wicka!… Though their real target is Medamulana Mahinda & Gothrika Gota. Ganemulla near Gampaha once sited a famous class struggle in 1959, when Buddhist bhikkhu Daevamottave Amarawansa Thero led workers who were protesting, to overturn the class system on trains for daily commuting workers (So then the merchants sabotaged the train system for the Japanese car importers). But why this media stereotyping? It has to do with their mission to divert from the power of multinational corporations (MNCs) & banks who are responsible worldwide for the current rule of capitalism (wholesale), whose retail merchants & moneylenders actually run this country into the ground…

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• CTC’s Private Courts – This week saw a parliamentary oversight committee chairman (SJB’s footnote MP Harsha de Silva) block an inquiry into Ceylon Tobacco Co (CTC)’s avoidance of excise taxes (see ee Random Notes) . This ee therefore continues the hoary tale on the birthing of an MNC monopoly based on snippets from Maurice Corina’s Trust in Tobacco: the Anglo-American Struggle for Power. In 1902 England’s Imperial Tobacco and the USA’s Consolidated Tobacco (American Tobacco & Continental) formed in England: the British-American Tobacco Co Ltd (BAT), to control exports of tobacco outside their 2 countries, setting up CTC, et al. It tells of how they staged secret subsidiaries, secretly buying out competitors, acquiring their shares secretly, preventing transfer of shares. They also punished distributors who did not abide by their variable promotions, using private detectives and ‘private trade courts‘ to ‘try’ enterprising traders for price-cutting, even controlling how shop-windows were decorated and shops designed! What Corina’s story about tobacco teaches us to ask is this – how many of the so-called Sri Lankan conglomerates like Keells & Hemas & Hayleys & Sunshine Holdings & Brandix & MAS (run by oppressed minorities, apparently) are mere ‘independent’ fronts for Anglo-US MNCs. Ammo! Oh, and this week also saw Unilever oppose the attempt to label soaps, etc… (see ee Random Notes)

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• The US has expelled South Africa’s ambassador for pointing out that the US regime is white supremacist. His mistake, and we agree, is to point only at this US administration. We can’t blame the envoy too much though. The main backers of US President D Trump & VP JD Vance, like the wannabe-trillionaires Paypal’s Peter Thiel & Twitter’s Elon Musk, are white-supremacists birthed by genocidal settler regimes in Southern Africa.

     A 1931 sci-fi novel called Black No More by George S Schuyler (see ee Workers) recalls our famous 1955 Vadhaka Sudhiya – about a chemical that when drunk turns Black people white. In 1944 Schulyer went on to note that ‘of the international capitalists who control the lives of over a billion colored people practically all are white, and so, also, are the technicians, brokers, lawyers, generals, admirals, artists and writers who serve them’. He may have to amend that now, for the political white is a very variable hue. Meanwhile in the 1960s: ‘All the top administrators in the UN system at that time seemed to be English or Indian retirees from the prestigious Indian Civil Service (ICS)’. (see ee Agriculture, On Land Reform & Ford Foundation in Nepal – LC Arulpragasam)

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• This week’s ee Focus points out that: All the IMF’s Managing Directors are white (with the token ‘honorary white’). At the IMF, 1 White Equals 9 Blacks (to put it algebraically). The IMF, & the USA that dominates it, doesn’t really believe in ‘one person, or one country, one vote’. In fact, IMF Senior Staffers decisions are whetted by the US Treasury next door on that Washington strip. They can also steal a country’s reserves at any time, as they have done with Venezuela. Africa meanwhile has more IMF members but less votes. No African country – & no Latin American country – has ever had a permanent seat at the UN Security Council (they’re called ‘Verandah Boys’!) Yet Trump’s US is threatening to quit the IMF if its veto power is eroded. Which is why a popularly elected government like in Sri Lanka, which had promised to renegotiate a mythical & odious ‘debt ‘with the IMF, has had to eat crow or is it parripu (which is imported from Canada and Australia, by the way): see, ‘At the IMF: Global North has 9 Times More Voting Power than the Global South’ by Vijay Prashad.

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• The global undressing of a politician from Sri Lanka, who along with his influential family have long been loyalist-royalist servants of empire – foremost exemplars of English media, with English ink in their veins – offers another English lesson. This time, in the latest imperialist tactics & propaganda, of how to adopt & discard, dignify & then demean their puppets. There exits Volodomyr! Entre Ranil! How sad and easy it is to lure an apparently ‘veteran’ and wily politician of Sri Lanka into an English leg trap, shows how many of our so-called leaders appear to be dupes. Though here we must contrast the supposedly urbane Ranil Wickremasinghe’s naivete with the so-called rustic Mahinda Rajapakse’s adroit handling of such white conceit.

     Why then did RW agree? What assurances was he given, by whom, and what diplomatic protocols did they agree to adhere to? RW seems to blame the EU for his travails. But why would he believe those killer poodles? The interview was recorded in February and released in March! Did he not know they would cut (‘edit’) the interview to suit the English blood-sucking vampire’s latest fashionista needs? Did he agree to the presence of a fatuous BBC hack, for whom the ‘East is a Career’ (as Disraeli noted). And if he agreed to being questioned by an LTTE rump, why could he not point to the long-term nurturing of the separatist cause by England (going back to the 1830s!), or that the LTTE operated its International Secretariat in London, even after it assassinated former Indian Premier Rajiv Gandhi, or that the LTTE and others were military trained by the Indian government in the 1970s and 1980s?

     And as for Batalanda, could he not at least recall it was a part of a war on the South? There are just wars and unjust wars. The Sri Lankan oligarchy was aware that a new and large generation of unemployed was coming on to the ‘market’ in 1986. They had no economic solution. But all war is terror – to claim otherwise is a tiresome joke. Ranil refused to air the English constraints on the Sri Lankan state that led to the rise of the JVP & the LTTE. Or that the JVP & LTTE have also allied with him?

     Perhaps NATO wishes to punish RW for his failure to join in the assassination and murder of the Rajapakses in 2022, Qadafi-style?

     So, here then is Al Jara aka Al Jazeera, the camel caravanserai of the BBC, based in a happy monarchy, Qatar which claims to be an expert on democracy. It’s a good old English make-believe, a joke, like India being the ‘largest populous democracy’ (see, ee Random Notes).

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• Diaspora Masks – Those searching for those rare & alternate points of view in English are herded to many ‘experts’, midst the almost but not fully overwhelming English media foggery. That Chicago boy John Mearsheimer (author of 2017 The Israel Lobby & US Foreign Policy) is another fog maker. He was made famous by his claim that US policy is made by the Israeli (or Jewish) lobby in the US. Lobby is a nice word for corporate buying of officials. But is the ‘Israeli’ lobby wholly Jewish? Are there other interests involved? Like the weapons-selling & oil-grabbing banks & corporations. Do New York Jews determine West Asia policy? Do Miami ‘gusano’ Cubans make Caribbean & non-Anglo American policy? Do Boston Irish determine Irish/English policy? Do ‘diaspora’ Tamils or Tamilnadu make NATO or US policy on Sri Lanka? Do Khalistani Sikhs or NRIs (Non-Resident Indians) dictate US policy on India? Or, are they mere window-dressing manikins fronting for Kapital, whose names & ethnic essentialities never make the headlines? Mebbe as Mao Zedong suggested, they merely help to direct and steady the gun in certain political directions… While the trigger finger belongs to someone else, whose political economy ultimately decides, when to tighten those ligaments & at whom…?

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• CEOs & Popes – The Catholic Church in Sri Lanka lends its pulpits to the ‘NGO’ (aka NATO) attack on Sri Lanka’s ‘Executive’ Presidency. And yet they have to defer to an Executive ‘infallible’ Pope in Rome. In China too, Christians go to heaven, but first thru Beijing! After all, Napoleon, centuries ago, put priests on a state salary and told the faithful they can go to heaven & hell through Rome but first through Paris. While in Rome’s Italy, the mafia have their executive capo! So, are there any corporate shareholders who demand the removal of CEOs (Chief Executive Officers)? We never hear about them. Meanwhile, these ‘executives’, chiefs (CFOs, CDOs, etc) and others, are paraded as badges of stability to inspire investors to loosen their purses… Anyway, the English cabinet, as Marx noted, was the executive committee of the bourgeoisie.

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• These days see and hear more calls for reparations to the victims of the horrific April 2019 attacks, with compensations promised and whether paid, by whom and why, we do not know. Whatever happened to the JVP-dominated Uva Provincial Council demand for England to pay reparations for the 1818 genocide in Lanka? And not only. You would think with all our English & US-chartered accountants, who mostly cook & doctor multinational books, they could calculate the actual bill about how much Portuguese, Dutch, English and now the USA, owes us. The head of the Anglican Church is the King of England. So how about what the Catholics & Calvinists, Anglicans, Born-Agains, Assemblers of God, funded atheists & secularists owe us? We won’t mention how much the Muslims & the Saivites et al owe. Though there is problem in maintaining this discourse at the level of religion & nationality, for inevitably it seems it is the impoverished & vulnerable congregants who end up having to pay, and dearly, for the merchants & moneylenders who lead them into such tribal ‘ethnic’ dead ends.

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The whole continent of Europe is an old battlefield;

The Europeans love war & don’t compromise lightly.

Today 6 great emperors divide the continent among them,

Each boasting that he’s the strongest leader of the world.

These fellows resemble the proverbial kings in a snail shell,

Who wasted their time chalking up victories & losses…

– ‘On Climbing the Eiffel Tower’, Huang Zunxian, 1891

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• The sacking of the New Zealand High Commissioner Phil Golf in London last week came after he told his colonial masters in England’s Chatham House that US President Donald Trump does not know history. But Trump, the ageing ‘Indian’ killer, sure knows more than that salaried NZ Maori-killer. With the English penchant for euphemism, Chatham House actually houses and camouflages the Royal Institute of International Affairs, named for English PM William Pitt, 1^st Earl of Chatham. Pitt Sr (1756-61, 1766-68) led the conquest of French colonies in India and the Americas. He died (1778) soon after the ‘loss’ of a part of Anglo-North-America, aka the USA. His son, Pitt the Younger, also a William & PM (1783-1801, 1804-6), quarterbacked the invasion of maritime Sinhale in 1796, but died after major English military defeats in Haiti, and highland Sinhale in 1803. It was after this major defeat that the English resorted to establishing a spy system under John D’Oyly to tarnish and then overthrow the rulers of Sinhale.

     But the German-Scottish settler Trump is rather right on, no? He wishes to sweep away the nominal cobwebs of the still-English colony of Canada (long the putative 52nd State of Amnesia), and the still-Danish colony of Greenland, and bring it under the steely US imperium. While our US embassy columnists, part of the teasing cocktail-party green-card circuit – have continuously diverted from the USA’s real history, replacing it with the usual Hollywood song-&-dance semi-porn tragi-comedy, Trump represents ‘the return of the real’ – pure Anglo-American white-settler killer history…

     Unlike presidential predecessor Thomas Jefferson (1801-9), who assumed office midst the white horror at their defeats in Haiti, resorted to stealing North American lands from the ‘Indians’ by burdening them with debt and getting them to kill each other for imports & exports, Trump I, in his first term, invoked Andrew Jackson’s ‘spoils system’. As President, Jackson (1829-37) massacred the so-called ‘Civilized Indian Nations’ (the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee-Creek, & Seminole) to ‘cleanse’ the South for enslaved cotton plantations. The ‘populist’ Jackson promised poor whites that they, too, could join in the land-thieving as slave-owning gentlemen. Trump II recalls predecessor Thomas Monroe (1817-25), who declared all of the Americas belonged to them, and not the old colonial empires. US history may be seen as a conflict between 2 murderous thieves, old and young, the former wishing to enjoy their spoils, and the latter, to rob even more. Trump II therefore also recalls William McKinley (1897-1901), who not just grabbed Spanish colonies of Cuba & Puerto Rico, but went beyond Monroe, to their first colony in the North Pacific, Hawaii, but also their first colony in Asia, the Philippines, with the US Army implementing genocidal practices learned from their ‘Southwest Indian Wars’. McKinley was also the ‘Tariff King’ imposing 50% tariffs on imports to protect industry – something Sri Lanka (& the rest of the world’s South) has never been allowed to do. McKinley was killed by a so-called Polish-American ‘anarchist’ or fall-guy (like so-called ‘terrorists’ today), to herald in the ‘roughrider’ Theodore Roosevelt (1901-9), who sent in the US army to carve out Panama and its canal from northern Colombia.

     Which bring us to the so-called ‘post-World-War-2 US Empire consensus focused on ‘integrating the old colonial empires, expanding capitalism, and containing competitive nationalisms’, based on ‘commonly accepted trade rules’ such as the US-dominated Bretton Woods’ triplets – the World Bank, IMF & GATT-WTO. There were always ‘exceptions’, as successive US leaders, while proclaiming the ‘rule of law’, downgraded or ignored the rulings of these trade regulation bodies. Trump is declaring the end of that kayfabe – he wishes to remain the sole superpower – Make Imperialism Great Again (MIGA!)

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IMF Managing Directors are All White