e-Con e-News

blog: eesrilanka.wordpress.com

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

e-Con e-News 27 April – 03 May 2025

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‘This is why Harry Dexter White of the US Treasury

fought so hard at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference

to have the 2 institutions headquartered in Washington.’

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After the shutting down of USAID and the US withdrawal from the WHO (World Health Organization), there was much headlined chatter that the US government would move to shutter (or at least shut up) the IMF & World Bank. Well, there’s no such fire to such pipe-dreams – just smoke. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has declared that the ‘return on investment’ from their terrible twins, is unparalleled. Unlike in the UN and other such multilateral institutions, the US government has ‘effective veto power‘ over the WB & IMF, making them ‘efficient tools of US foreign & economic policy’, as Zambia’s Grieve Chelwa highlights (see ee Focus). And Bessent wants to ensure they keep promoting US interests ‘at the expense of the rest of the world’, with his boss Mr Trump cluck-cluck-clucking that we all pay even more for our own further entrapment.

     As for those who believe all of this gushes from the brains of Bessent & his darling US President Don Trump, we now are told that Mr Trump’s ‘change of mind’ on his tariffs – calling for a 90-day pause – was ‘prompted’ by the tweeting of Bill Ackman, CEO of hedgefund Pershing Square Capital Management. Ackman apparently moves markets with his statements… and rewrites politician’s policy statements. We learn that US policy is made by such bankers as Jamie Dimon (JP Morgan Chase), Ken Griffin (Citadel), and Ackman (see ee Quotes, Flattering Trump).

     These bankers are at least the more-public faces of those capitalists who decide economic shifts and shapes. They also own mega media conglomerates. Ackman owns Universal Music Group Inc, who for example wasted young people’s time by promoting a ‘feud’ between rappers Kendrick & Drake – both of whom are owned by Universal Music. The same goes for ‘feuding’ politicians & parties? Maybe the NPP should have met Bill, Jamie & Ken, instead of wasting time hankering after Don, JD or Kristalina at last week’s IMF & WB annual meeting in Washington? Instead, we’re told the NPP delegation met with a Mormon missionary & a fake blonde Texan queer (see ee Who’s Who).

     And speaking of ‘feuds’, see ee Random Notes for an excerpt of Sena Thoradeniya’s stalking of the itinerary of twisted sister Julie Chung, the US Envoy, as she sets about attempting to promote a highland Eelam aka Malayagam…

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• All such fragmenting fissiparousness is being turbo-charged by a backward multinational-corporation-run economy. Perhaps the media in Sri Lanka should be renamed The Import-Export Daily News, The Import-Export Sunday Times, The Import-Export Island, The I-E Morning, The I-E MTV… 99.99% of economic commentary in the media promotes the export game. And this is not new. The colonial economy was/is a classic import-export plantation economy, and see how it still runs, like the 3 Blind Mice of English rhyme. And even so-called ‘local’ companies should be prefixed with Import-Export: Import-Export Keells, Import-Export Hayleys, I-E Maharajah’s etc.

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‘Before the advent of the English, the economy of

the coastal districts & parts of the interior which

had passed under European rule, had already lost to a

great extent its old localized & self-sufficient character

& had become linked through extensive external trade

with European commercial capital.’

– ‘The Program for Ceylon’, 1946

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• The world is divided into at least three parts: the imperialist countries of Europe, the settler states of the genocidal colonies ‘of new settlement’ (USA, Canada, Australia, etc), and such expatriate-dominated non-settler colonies as Sri Lanka, according to ee‘s muse, SBD de Silva (see ee Focus). However, if you really wish to see the differences between countries, de Silva suggests, we should look at countries like South Africa & the Congo where there are/were both settlers & expatriates:

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‘In South Africa, the expatriate investors were confined

mainly to mining & foreign trade; but the shift to

agriculture & manufacturing which was to transform

the economy was brought about by the settlers.’

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Indeed, as de Silva eloquently asserted, ‘The metropolitan-based commercial bourgeoisie were wholly export oriented and concerned with already existing markets, whereas the settlers relied on the home market. The stimulus to industrialization came largely from the settlers.’ And now we are reminded again, why England’s Unilever & the USA’s Exxon & the Anglo-US CTC are still allowed to monopolize Sri Lanka’s home market. And how they enable the news to hide how they actually keep stealing from us – contrary to the prompted ravings of Mr Trump…

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• Ex-Minister of Foreign Affairs, Finance & Justice MUM Ali Sabry goes on & on in a prolix 5-part series in The Island newspaper, on the USA’s tariff hoopla. It is only at the very end that he struggles to say it is the US that is robbing Sri Lanka, not the other way around, but then only feebly:

‘Take Sri Lanka, while it may appear to run a surplus

in goods trade with the USA, that surplus is more than

offset by: Payments for US-based tech & streaming

services (Google, Netflix, Apple); Outbound tourism

& overseas education costs; Interest payments on

sovereign debt owed to institutions like the IMF &

World Bank, whose returns flow back to major

shareholders, including the USA… Sri Lanka is

taking part in a(n)… economic relationship that

is already tilted toward the US economy.’ – Ali Sabry,

see ee Economists, Trump tariffs, world trade, Parts I-V

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     Malaysian economist Jomo Kwame Sundaram (see ee Economists) is much more explicit than Sabry: Trump Wants the World to Subsidize US Empire. US President Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers chairman Stephen Miran’s A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System told the Hudson Institute, a thinktank funded by media czar Rupert Murdoch who controls Fox News, Wall Street Journal etc:

‘US military spending provides the world a ‘security umbrella’ that others should

also pay for. Second, the US issues the dollar & Treasury bonds, the main reserve

assets for the liquidity of the international monetary & financial system. Miran

seems blissfully unaware of longstanding complaints of the USA’s ‘exorbitant

privilege’. The dollar’s reserve currency status has provided seigniorage income to

the US while Treasury bond sales have long financed US debt at very low cost.’

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Indeed, Trump’s Rumpelstiltskin fussing & stamping about is not new. The English Chancellor of the Exchequer (later PM) Benjamin Disraeli in 1852 declared: These wretched colonies… are a millstone round our necks.” But he was referring to the North American settler colonies, who the English claimed should pay for wars, just as Trump now wants Europe & its settler colonies plus their non-settler colonies to do. But few explain as SBD de Silva has done that imperialist exploitation of our economies is much more pernicious than just taxes & terror:

‘The conglomerates can defend their interests abroad (without colonialism

based on conquest of territory), for the reason that they can control activities

by their monopoly of technology & markets. First, a good portion of their

income is in the form of technological rents, royalties, licensing rights,

technical assistance fees, etc. The technology is rarely transferred, and its

diffusion outside the orbit of such corporations is rigidly controlled. When

deprived of this technology & marketing know-how, the natural resources &

cheapened labour of the host countries become idle assets at least in the short run.’

– SBD de Silva, The Political Economy of Underdevelopment, 1982

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• With all this talk about corruption, we wonder why US-occupied Korea ‘granted’ US$8.5 million to ‘automate Colombo municipality revenue systems‘ while the country is just about to hold local elections? Meanwhile, Japan too has funded a 137million-yen ‘Project for Promoting Economic Governance through Anti-Corruption Policy Support’. Will the Japanese yen (JP¥) now investigate the Korean won (₩)? Keep smoking! ee continues therefore examining the US model of ‘the general prostitution of civic ideals’, through Gustave Myers’ 1917 History of Tammany Hall. This ee Focus records how by 1820, ‘manhood suffrage‘ had dominated Tammany’s political posturing. Another demand was the abolition of the law for imprisonment of debtors. Tammany claimed to represent ‘the farmer, the independent blacksmith, the shoemaker with an apprentice or 2’, who all had the vote if propertied, yet it remained an envious ‘middle-class’ institution. They coerced and bribed lawmakers into passing bank charters and franchises, even while publicly promoting the abolition of speculation and banks. See also how the bankers who had promoted the genocidal General Andrew Jackson (one of Mr Trump’s idols) for President, the banks then arrayed the ‘combined power of the propertied classes’ against the ‘laborers, mechanics, farmers & producing classes’ to bring him down.

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• May is a month of memories. There was May Day, which contrary to the perennial media bad-mouthing, is still heartily celebrated (even if only permitted in some hearts) around the world (as Labor Day, it’s a 5-day official holiday in China). May is indeed a month of action & memories. May 4^th recalls the youth movement in China in 1919 against the imperialist decision to cede former German concessions in Shandong province to Japan, which led to the formation of the Communist Party of China (CPC). May 5^th is the 50^th anniversary of the victory of Vietnam over the US-led imperialists (France, Japan, Canada, etc., were also actively complicit). May 9^th recalls the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany (who was backed at first by England, USA, France, etc.) in World War II. And since the USA always relies on its standard shystering ‘art of the deal’, threatening war, here & there & everywhere & all at once, we need to also recall the Communist Manifesto:

‘Bourgeois & Proletarians! –

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class

struggles. Freeman & slave, patrician & plebeian, lord & serf,

guild-master & journeyman, in a word, oppressor & oppressed,

stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an

uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time

ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large,

or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

– Karl Marx & Fredrick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848

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Contents:

How an Import Media in Sri Lanka Aggrandizes the Colonial Export Trap