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Economists in Sri Lanka: Bribed in Printed US$s

e-Con e-News 16-22 March 2025

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Minister Sirisena alleged that Ceylon Tobacco Company (CTC)

had offered him money ‘sufficient for 14 generations

 to live in a first world country’

(see ee Random Notes)

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• Dear Julie: We’re sure, you consider yourself a true-red-blooded yankee – yet you act like one of them East Asian comfort women cruelly forced into servitude by the Japanese imperialists. Even as you appear a most willing source of comfort, blowing them horizontal and genuflective relief midst all their incessant warring. Last week, your latest master massacred Yemeni women & children to engorge his flaccid polls. We imagine that killing women en masse is a form of gender equality. And a turn-on too.

     All your latest leaders seem to have a yen for the East in choosing their bedrests. Some of their trophy wives are East Europeans, some are B1 visa Indians (the next wannabe Canadian PM has even gone northeast-South American to marry a blanco gusano Venezuelan). This week your Vice President suggested his migrant Indian wife was ‘cheap labor’. JD Vance claimed: ‘importing cheap labor through our immigration system, cheap labor became the drug of Western economies’ (Though no labour is ‘cheap’ – only ‘cheapened’ perhaps!).

     Really! However your leaders are still all woke, in terms of who they wake up next to. But, it’s no more woke talk – it’s all sleep talk. All that woke talk about gender & diversity has gone fast-asleep or been put to sleep – along with all that chatter about multiculturalism & POC (people-of-color). POC em!

     You’ve already been replaced and yet still keep exercising your overactive knees, north, south, east & west (well, mostly north & east). It seems your political kanganies are making you work overtime-&-a-half to keep your job – like all those other migrant wannabes have to do. Maybe you’ have’ll get immunity from karma too – but for how long we don’t know. There you were again last week recruiting students in Sri Lanka to pay exorbitant foreign student fees. For whom? Every self-styled US bounty hunter is picking up people off the streets. They used to deport so-called illegals only after they brought in California’s abundant harvests, so that your industrial bosses wouldn’t have to pay their coolie wages. But now it’s a free-for-all!

     Maybe that’s why after you are replaced here (by another skirt!), they may hold on to you tighter. Sic em, girl, sic em! Yet you have so far failed to kill our last President and his family. Is that why you got your BBC Qatari camel caravan to go after Ranil, who supposedly protected them? Anyway, it’s not about the Rajapakses per se but about teaching any national leader a lesson! You were seen as something of an expert sicario, sent here so far from that Caribbean crime scene where you helped arrange the eviction and assassination of yet another Haitian leader. After pushing (the once ‘fabulous’ sugar plantation) Haiti into greater turmoil, your current leader now accuses Haitians emigres of eating Minnesotan pets! But surely that diet is better than that of the cannibalistic colonial Europeans who’ve eaten Haitians for 200 years and more! Perhaps you’ll be kicked upstairs just as you were kicked up here or down here or sideways, to retire our last leader, whose pension and security you also wish to downgrade. Anyway, just thinking of your knees has sent us far off topic. So sayonara (or, ‘Anneyong‘ in Korean, but you southerners are still ruled by those Japanese who colonized you, who themselves are also colonized). So, until we meet again, perhaps in some comfortable chamber of commerce… Dear, dear Julie, we’re yours, truly, truly….’

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This ee recalls the now-erased controversies around Ceylon Tobacco’s (CTC)’s bribing of politicians, apparently over labeling. Maithripala Sirisena as Health Minister also highlighted that over 20,000 people were killed in Sri Lanka by cigarette smoking every year (see ee Random Notes), with many more diseased. ee therefore continues snippeting from Maurice Corina’s Trust in Tobacco: the Anglo-American Struggle for Power, about the formation of CTC’s parent the British American Tobacco (BAT) monopoly. This week’s adaptation recalls how the BAT diverted the media, and England & the US’ politicians into label-composing: about how smoking ‘may’ damage your health. The tobacco monopoly pours millions into promotions of the ‘independent’ brands, bankrolling the advertising industry (with lesser but substantial funding of ‘Medical Research’). BAT sought to befog the link between cigarette smoking & ‘cancers of the throat, mouth & respiratory tract’. Their PR firms promoted campaigns to claim that woman could become thin by smoking, thereby promoting anorexic culture, as well as promising boys they would be more manly if they smoked. Corina looks at the power of the tobacco lobby, since tobacco was the top non-food cash crop for farmers. Interestingly, for students of ethereal philosophy, BAT was also one of the funders of the philosophy of ‘libertarianism’, which claimed that government has no right to tell people what they did with their bodies, which would include dangerous drugs & chemicals, and suicide. The US government now is being fronted by such ‘tech bros’ as Paypal’s Peter Thiel & Twitter‘s Elon Musk, who were themselves birthed by the white supremacist settler colonies in Southern Africa. Libertarianism & liberalism we may recall have their origins in justifying the right to own property, including slaves…

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‘We invited the then-chief of US Indo Pacific Command Admiral

[Japanese-American Harry B] Harris as chief guest to Galle Dialogue.

In his speech he pointed out 3 reasons why Sri Lanka is important to the USA.

They are Location, location, location. The place where Sri Lanka is situated

is most important for them. Even India’s one-time National Security advisor

Shiv Shankar Menon’s book noted that Sri Lanka is a permanent aircraft carrier

in the Indian Ocean. The Indian Ocean can be easily controlled from Sri Lanka.’

– Chief of Defence Staff, Admiral Ravindra Wijegunaratne (2019)

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With the USA and their English & European killer poodles playing ‘good cop / bad cop’ attempting a quieting on Russia’s Wesrtern Front while opening a more bellicose Eastern front against China, US envoy Chung welcomed this week Indo-Pacific Commander Samuel Paparo & his band to ‘Reaffirm our bilateral defense partnership with Sri Lanka’. Does Sri Lanka have a bilateral defense partnership with the US? As far as we know, President Gotabhaya Rajapakse signed the Acquisition & Cross Servicing Agreement (ACSA), with the US, at the height of the LTTE war against the government of Sri Lanka, in 2007. It was ‘only 8 pages including the cover’. In 2017 the Sirisena government renewed ACSA, with ‘voluminous annexes giving the names & addresses of almost all US military establishments that could have a footprint or boots on the ground in Sri Lanka’. With such a crime committed, the next step was to ensure that the economy was to be crippled to prevent any nationalist government from abrogating the ACSA agreement. Sirisena refused to sign the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), which directly led to the so-called sacking of Ranil Wickremasinghe and what the poodle-media called a ’Constitutional Coup’ in October 2018.

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• Economists are against money printing. At least those published in the ‘soapy’ media sponsored by Unilever et al. These economists are not against selling themselves to the dollars printed by the US Federal Reserve. A ‘meme’ doing the rounds this week named those economists we hear from every day in the media. Well paid in those green dollars, in particular by USAID, we are sure, it is not just them (see ee Who’s Who). Those Sanderatnes & Abeyratnes & de Mels & Coomarawamys etc. They who sing the praises of the US-controlled IMF & World Bank and incessantly repeat their talking points (see ee Random Notes for another house-economist WA Wijewardena’s listing of the ‘talking points’ of the Washington Consensus that he claims has now been thrown overboard, but are still parroted by the IMF lip services. And as for corruption, the Trump administration just legalized bribery of foreign leaders! See ee Quotes).

     Oh yes, Indrajith Coomaraswamy, who is constantly mumbling how post-Independence (now there’s an interesting coinage) leaders have promoted ‘populism’ & ‘protectionism’ etc. As SBD always asked: Was it ‘populism’ to maintain the colonial import-export plantation fraud after 1948?

     Indeed, a long line of Coomaraswamys have laid down, horizontal and genuflective, prostrate and prone, before their colonial masters – as interpreters, mudaliyars, knights, unofficial ‘native’ members of non-representative white legislative councils, and in these times, as unelected but chosen UN rapporteurs and economists.

     The economist Coomaraswamy (who appears to be increasingly eclipsing the shining star of present CBSL governor G Weerasinghe) confessed this week that putting the country in thrall by buying Wall Street’s ‘international’ sovereign bonds (ISBs, while blaming China for throwing the country into debt) was as inevitable as going to the IMF.

Pushing back against claims that large-scale bond issuances

were primarily responsible for Sri Lanka’s 2022 debt default,

Dr Coomaraswamy argued that these borrowings actually helped

delay an otherwise inevitable default. ‘If we hadn’t continued

to borrow or issue ISBs, we would have defaulted much earlier

because we were literally borrowing to repay the debt,’ he stressed.

(see ee Economists, SL must return to int’l capital markets)

Former Central Bank (CBSL) Governor Coomaraswamy is on the Board of Directors of Tokyo Cement, along with the Gnanam oligarchy. A possible Japan Cement front is ‘Siam City Cement’ which grabbed land and mineral rights for 50 years from the crippled Sri Lanka Cement Corporation (SLCC)’s land to extract mineral sands in the infamous Aruwakkalu area in Puttalam (where the April 2019 terrorists conducted training).

     Coomaraswamy is also a Principal Research Fellow & Director of England’s Overseas Development Institute’s International Economic Development Group, ODI Global. One Coomaraswamy ancestor was an interpreter for the English who betrayed the ‘doomed’ King Sri Vickrama Rajasinghe of Sinhale. No wonder he yearns for his ancestor’s earnest patrimony…

     As has long been noted of Coomaraswamy:

‘If China followed Coomaraswamy’s advice they’d be still exporting rice, no? Anyway,

I don’t think Indrajith Coomaraswamy, the honourable & well educated gentleman

that he is, can help the NPP government or Sri Lanka; he could be an excellent rugby

coach for SL but has been useless as an economist to find a way out of our debt crisis,

which has been in the making for a long time, from the English colonial conversion

of the country into a plantation and the subsequent failure to industrialise in

post-colonial times, especially in the post-1977 era of neoliberalism – which was all

about banking on the so-called open economy to bring back the old colonial masters

in the guise of investor-saviours to somehow help us produce profitable things for export,

as if these capitalists would have any interest in helping a small economy like SL

to industrialise and compete with them in the world market.

The prevention of industrialisation & economic autonomy for countries such as SL

has been the prime objective of the IMF, which is ultimately and immediately ruled

by the creditors hell bent on sucking everything they can out of our indebted people.

It is a pity that textbook neoliberals like IC – who are more IMF than the IMF and

must bear the responsibility for ruining our economy by peddling the perennial problem

as the solution – are still seen as good for the country. If the NPP is so naive as to think

so too, then not much is to be expected of them either. When people speak of

the IMF ‘bailout’, they should be required to ask: who is bailing out whom?

It is certainly not the people of SL – who voted for AKD because they just

cannot bear the consequences of the IMF/IC ‘bailout’. The real question is:

who can bail us out of one damn ‘bailout’ after another?’

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Meanwhile, economists in the drag of ‘House Marxists’ exported to Sri Lanka, who wax in such colonial lipservices as the Commonwealth Journal for International Affairs – that kneegrow division of England’s Chatham House – are calling for ‘a new alliance of liberal democratic regimes that can confront US, Russian & Chinese authoritarianism.’ We wonder who these ‘liberal democratic regimes’ would be? The US colonies of England, Germany, France, Japan? England imposed plantations on much of the incessantly developing but always ‘undeveloped’ world.

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The plantations had an inherent technological backwardness

which went hand in hand with a low wage structure.

–SBD de Silva

SBD de Silva was no House-Marxist, and no colonial lapdog. This ee reproduces a valuable find, since SBD published so rarely beyond his classic The Political Economy of Underdevelopment. In one of the his last published dissertations, in the volume Capital & Peasant Production: Studies in the Continuity & Discontinuity of Agrarian Structures in Sri Lanka (1985), SB explains clearly, in ‘Plantations & Underdevelopment’, how the plantation system has come to impose a low-waged low-tech economy on Sri Lanka. SB (to whom ee is dedicated, though often reminded how far we have strayed from his sharp analyses of the roots of our discontent) examines this non-settler colonial economy’s gestation in the white settler colonies of the Americas.

    In this ee Focus, SBD’s ‘Plantations & Underdevelopment’ recalls how white servants were first ‘indentured’ but then were able to buy their freedom and escape into cultivating their own ‘god’s little acres’ of stolen land. The only way a large ‘labour force’ could be created on land stolen in all its abundance was by state-sponsored slavery – at first the original ‘native’ Americans, who knew the terrain and resisted the swindles of the plantation economy like the Sinhala, and then the Africans. Chattel slavery stagnated the use of technology and promoted backward relations of labour. In fact, SB argues, ‘plantation crops could have been grown on smallholdings as cheaply and effectively as on the plantations’. He also shows how a hierarchy of commissions (ah! the high commissioner!) came to dominate the search for profits rather than investment in modern productivity. How’s that, for the original authoritarian & despotic occidental arts?

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Economists in Sri Lanka: Bribed in Printed US$s