e-Con e-News

Posted byee ink.April 26, 2025Posted inUncategorizedTags:China, economy, India, politics, tariffs

blog: eesrilanka.wordpress.com

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

e-Con e-News 20-26 April 2025

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India’s External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar’s son Druva Jaishankar has joined a US War Department-linked thinktank to advise US President Donald Trump on their plans for war on China, while pushing Europe to also fight Russia. The younger Jaishankar is the Quad personified: half-Toyota, half-Tata & Totally Disoriental. The Marathon Initiative thinktank is a brainchild of Trump’s earlier Assistant Secretary of State for European & Eurasian Affairs, A Wess Mitchell. Mitchell has teamed up with former CIA director William Colby’s grandson Elbridge Colby, now the third-ranking official at the Pentagon, as Trump’s Undersecretary of Defense for Policy.

     Colby wishes to fabricate a ‘counter-hegemonic coalition’ in Asia, against China. Both Mitchell and Colby are considered anti-China hawks. They spend their time ‘sequencing’ world wars – which countries should the US attack first, second, and third, or all at once: Iran, Russia and/or China. The Marathon thinktank is expected to stuff dollars in their potted bellies as fast as the US Treasury print them, and the Pentagon finds ways to burn them in forever wars. The Jaishankars appear overjoyed to stage such wars (see ee Quotes, Marathon). They wish the NPP government to tag along, tail wagging.

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‘International media reported that the US has shown a willingness

to use trade concessions to isolate China – potentially by lowering

tariffs for third countries, like Sri Lanka, in exchange for those

countries preventing China from shipping goods through their territory.’

– ee Economists, Lankan Delegation to Meet US Trade Chief on Tuesday

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Last week, the NPP apparently refused entry to a Pakistani naval vessel. They then entertained a US-colonized-Korean junk, armed to the teeth. Pakistan, like China, Russia & Iran, has always stood with Sri Lanka, through thick and thin, while the US & India, England and Europe, have waged war, covert & overt, against the country.

     Veteran Communist leader DEW Gunasekera suggested last week, the NPP government is bent on creating chaos: Not only the government but the opposition too, all feigning a studied ignorance about the larger world foaming and frothing around us. This week, CPSL leader G Weerasinghe declared, that having made Sri Lanka totally dependent on the USA, the ruling merchants wish to abase ourselves even further to the war-mongering imperialist camp (see ee Random Notes, CPSL).

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Comments by US Vice-President JD Vance in India suggests that the US deeply seeks to massage Indian conflict with China, proclaiming India’s supposed economic power and provoking border conflicts, to threaten the routes through which China takes its oil from West Asia across the Indian Ocean to China.

     The US is also using Europe to threaten the northern route, the Russians have developed to carry oil from Russia to China. They want to use India to begin to assert control over the Indian Ocean potentially against Chinese movement of oil to China. Vance’s recent statements in India indicate the belief that the US can manipulate India into an even more hostile posture towards China. It regards the Quad as an anti-Chinese alliance. Indian may not fully see it that way, but this is the plan of the Australian Japanese and US point of view.

     Having replaced England and France as the top colonial power in West Asia, the US government wants to cement its domination of West Asia and constrain or limit China’s access to the fossil fuel resources of the region. This is why West Asia is crucial to international trade routes. The US foreign policy elite decades ago decide to destroy 7 West Asian states, first the secular and then the religious, to cement their control of the resources and trade. (see ee Sovereignty, Trump’s ’Grand Protection Racket’)

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Vance, playing angel of death, met with Pope Francis, who then died one day later. Vance & his Indian visa-wife then waddled to India, where US allies in India & Pakistan staged a massacre in India-held Kashmir. The last massacre in Kashmir was when US President B Clinton (‘Killington’ as Sri Lankans evocatively elocute him) came to visit. Wearing eyeliner made in China, the Yale-educated & PayPal-funded hillybillly Vance, also took time off to call the Chinese, ‘peasants’. ‘Peasant’, to the meth-brained faux hillbilly, is a bad word. Yet the synonyms for a peasant – goviya, paisan, fella, are words for cultivators, beloved around the world, for they provide us food. Pity the over-skooled kraka!

     Meanwhile, a lot of ink was spilled groaning about the failure to name the ‘mastermind’ behind the April 2019 terror, with the US and India providing their ‘evidence.’ In the classic Japanese movie Rashomon, there are as many versions as there are witnesses to one murder, yet here everybody is being implicated. From the assassination of SWRD Bandaranaike to the mass sackings of July 1980 to the pogroms of July 1983 and the horror of the late1980s onward, all our great intellects can only offer their doubts, and like social scientists submitting a grant proposal keep stating ‘This matter needs further investigation’…

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A foreigner who has acquired a US dollar in 1982 by sacrificing

a dollar’s worth of a real good or service has been condemned

to hold a worthless piece of paper today. Therefore, by having

a trade deficit with other countries, it is the US citizens who

have looted from the citizens of those countries. Hence, instead

of punishing them, Trump administration should compensate them.’

– WA Wijewardena (see ee Economists, Trump(dis)order:

Harsh tariffs rates – wrong philosophy & wrong formula)

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Meanwhile, a Sri Lankan delegation met with the IMF’s masters in Washington, who then divulged the terms under which Trump’s tariffs are being weaponized to buy temporary friends and destroy their permanent enemies. The NPP visit is being touted as a win-win, for Sri Lanka has passed yet another ‘review’. These ‘reviews’ appear to be as excruciating and never-ending as their human-rights versions. Another EU delegation is expected, which is threatening to get their citizens not to wear our underwear threaded fully with foreign imports, unless we remove our prevention of terrorism act!

     Indeed, as Henry Kissinger reminded us: it is dangerous to be their enemy, and absolutely fatal to be their friend. Kissinger perhaps stole his aphorism from Karl Marx, who noted that the English treated their Indian allies like the Romans did theirs: fattening them before they were worth devouring (see ee Quotes). The question is when the USA will decide to gobble Sri Lanka’s bribed classes whole, who have been fattened so well by the import-export plantation farce. The US also wishes to, among other demands, put Sri Lanka’s relatively lean populace on a high-fat diet!

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Not only do we not have the capacity to fatten more chickens with the USA’s (genetically engineered) soy, which is our biggest agricultural import from the US, Rathindra Kuruwita records (see ee Focus) that the poultry industry here is overproducing right now. Increasing US imports would be neither ‘economically viable nor strategically sound’, without first bolstering domestic production through state-led industrialization. Trump’s tariffs are gifting us a grand opportunity to re-imagine our economic policies, but we should not be rushed into ‘making hasty bilateral concessions without a strategic long-term vision’.

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Meanwhile, our mollycoddled, thoroughly fake, ‘manufacturers’ are threatening to ‘Walk the Palk’ to India, ‘where export access to the US’ will be significantly cheaper. But this export bull, beloved by our economists, has to cease. Sri Lanka’s best hope lies ‘not in bilateral deals but in collective bargaining’ with other ‘recovering’ colonies, facing similar disabilities,  a structural rethinking of Sri Lanka’s trade & industrial policies. The current US tariff game is being sold as ‘a short-term diplomatic problem’, but it has exposed ‘the long-standing weaknesses in Sri Lanka’s economic model. We have lost decades, marooned in low-skill manufacturing which is fully addicted to imports.’ ‘This is the moment to rethink everything, from how we produce to what we consume, & whom we trade with’. Meanwhile, there is no shortage of those promoting a servant… oops… service economy and destroying the remnants of any manufacturing, primitive as they may be – and by ‘primitive’ we mean the pre-industrial methods of production.

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Shiran Illanperuma (see ee Focus) explains, why is manufacturing ‘so special’? – He points to the ‘transformative nature of manufacturing and its unique ability to drive economic growth, generate technical innovation, and provide positive spillovers to other sectors. Manufacturing profits provide the basis on which modern services thrive.’ However, thanks to our merchants, ‘Sri Lanka exhibits the telltale signs of ‘premature de-industrialization’, which has become a trend in underdeveloped countries. The importance of modern industry is exhibited in the ‘US ruling class’s panic over China’s rapid industrialization, which has shifted the centre of gravity of the world economy towards Asia and threatens their ‘unipolar’ dominance.

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‘What we are dealing with is a legacy of China

having never properly transitioned from its

Soviet-era Material Product System (MPS)

system of national accounts to the UN System

of National Accounts standard. MPS accounting

is only concerned with material production. Services

are considered costs of production & excluded by design.’

– Han Feizi (ee Economists, Consumption in China: Is it really that bad?)

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• With yet another election around the corner, the PM Harini ‘the Harried’ Amarasuriya, has called municipal administrations: the ‘nursery’ of corruption. The oh-so-spotless US & their Europeons are also ever ready to give us yet another lecture on corruption. This ee recalls the role of that ‘most ingenious and most pretentious’ of yankee political influence peddlers in the USA: The late 18-20^th-century tale of the ‘Tammany Hall’ machinery that controlled New York, using ingenious methods that were soon spread by their missionaries of vendable democracy across the world. The ‘American’ style of ‘democracy’ – a particular subspecies of capitalist politics, is evident in our take on Gustave Myers’ 1917 History of Tammany Hall.  We thought of Tammany, after hearing the earnest and ubiquitous US Professor Jeffrey Sachs (who helped dismantle the former USSR and now repents). At a meal organized by the Exxon-Rockefeller-funded Asia Society in Hong Kong, Sachs claimed that the current state of US politics had to do with the increasing capture of the political process by moneyed interests, which has become more evident in the last 30 years. The Tammany Hall story, which involves the origins of the Chase-Manhattan bank and the JP Morgan fortunes, tells us how organized plunder & corruption is a great and long English & US tradition, where only the suckers who do not rob enough, get crucified in full display.

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Contents:

India joining USA Wants Sri Lanka to Wage War on Asia