e-Con e-News

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

e-Con e-News 29 June – 05 July 2025

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‘Energy Minister Kumara Jayakody has lashed out

at the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA),

Asian Development Bank (ADB), & the World Bank

over their public criticism of amendments to the Electricity Act,

accusing them of bypassing diplomatic channels & politicising

the issue. ‘This is not how it should be done. They can’t work with us

like this,’ Minister Jayakody said in a tv interview on Thursday,

‘They should have handled it more diplomatically instead of going public.’

– see ee Industry, Energy Minister lashes out at international funding agencies

It is no surprise to discover the USA’s bankers & their Japanese bunraku (puppets)  – the whites & the honorary whites (yes, the US Envoy too!) – striding about the country, spreading legs & wiping mouths across the media, cozily contravening any Vienna diplomatic conventions. Colombo has long been an occupied colonial enclave – and it is no surprise to find India’s merchants & their military moving in creepy lockstep to replace the old imperialist powers, this time as the USA’s front paws & claws. Shenali Waduge tells us Sri Lanka’s ‘commercial capital & nerve centre’ – Western Province – is today the ‘epicenter of India’s strategic control & influence. The prolific & indefatigable Waduge has begun a series (by province) to unravel this steady Indian infiltration, which she dedicates to ‘SL’s foreign ministry, national defense thinktanks & those tasked to secure Sri Lanka’s sovereignty’ (see ee Focus).

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This week saw the passing of naval historian Somasiri Devendra. An ee maritime correspondent once asked Devendra about the 19^th century English sabotage of Sinhala shipbuilding, and shipping, via insurance restrictions, etc, because the English ships could not compete with the Sinhala designs, etc. Devendra responded, ‘Not only Sinhala, but Tamil & Muslim shipbuilding & shipping too.’

     Yet, the English had to permit their settler colonies to build their own ships. We wonder what the dearly departed Devendra would have thought about the 51% stake in state-owned Colombo Dockyard, first sold off to Japan’s Onomichi, which now seems to have been allowed to sell it off to India’s Defense Ministry–owned Mazagon Dock Shipbuilders. Japan took over and ruined Colombo Dockyard because it was a threat to Japan, just as they saw the building of a state-owned cement plant in Kakesanthurai as a threat to cement traders from both India & Japan (Tokyo Cement, Insee, etc).

     The secretive decision to facilitate the divestment of Colombo Dockyard to an Indian company was taken during Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Sri Lanka in April 2025. Even then concerns were raised over national security, economic sovereignty & transparency in the deal-making process. Sri Lanka possesses a wealth of local expertise in shipbuilding & maintenance, making foreign intervention unnecessary. Did Onomichi only promote the more toxic parts of production (fibre-glass use etc) to Sri Lankans? Did they ever reinvest their profits or share expertise in the making of engines, etc? We doubt it. Which is why we snicker when we hear about Japan’s yen largesse along with amplified sermons on petty retail corruption in Sri Lanka (see ee Random Notes).

     This week saw a slew of largely unnamed Indian merchants & officials including the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) enter Colombo. The CII’s 15 members were led by England’s Imperial Tobacco Co of India (ITC) Chairman & CII Immediate Past President Sanjiv Puri. ITC is linked to the Ceylon Tobacco Co (CTC), which is owned by British American Tobacco (BAT) – about both whom ee began a series from 22 February. The CTC also plays a major role in both exacerbating our health budget but also the economy – it claims to be ‘the most valuable company in Sri Lanka’. CTC Chairman Suresh Shah was put in charge of ‘SOERU – the State-Owned Enterprises Restructuring Unit’ – to sell off our national assets, and he appears to have disappeared into strategic camouflage…

     BAT-ITC-CTC’s forward role is curious as it has been a commonplace for India’s largest fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) company, the English-owned Hindustan Lever, to send down their trainees to head Unilever SL, as their corporate satrapy. Unilever is of course the illegitimate child of the East India Company, just like the Anglo American plc, which controls South Africa…

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India (& its south in particular) has indeed deeply sought to play an outsized role in Sri Lanka’s political & economic life – before, during & after European invasions (which US patronage now wishes to continue forever, despite claims otherwise). The roads & rails inside & in between such slavish institutions as port, fort, prison & plantation were first built by England’s terroristic Pioneer Corps composed of mercenary Indians, Malays & Africans, then by unfree Sinhala labor (road taxes) & then indentured enslaved Indians. More recently, attempting partition, they trained terrorist gangs and suicide squads, recruited mainly from the North, Central Highlands & East, to facilitate the invasion of 70,000 Indian troops in 1987, which saw a united struggle, south & north, with great sacrifice, to drive them out.

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‘There had never existed before a ‘government by which so

much is written & so little done, as the Government of India’.

When the East India Company was only a commercial association,

a most detailed report on every item had to be sent from the managers

of their Indian factories, like any trading concern. When the factories

grew into an Empire, the commercial items into ‘ship loads of

correspondence & documents’, the Leadenhall clerks went on in

their system, ‘making the Directors & the Board their dependents.’

They succeeded in ‘transforming the Indian Government into

one immense writing-machine.’ In one single dispatch

45,000 pages of collection were sent!

– Karl Marx, New York Tribune, 1853

India was England’s largest state (slaughtering & dividing & ruling) machinery, dispatched to invade China & Africa, etc. And India, having supposedly ‘saved’ Sri Lanka by lending us more rupees, is now calling in its debts. They, too, are also giving us sermons about fiscal fidelity & human rights along with England & Japan & Germany etc. So, we found it downright curious to finally hear the Energy Minister ‘lash out’.

     We have heard no responses from these institutions seeking to make us even more energy-dependent with their patented solar & wind technologies. They normally saturate the media with their mundane press releases. Meanwhile, bankers are raking in dollar profits through remittances and the exports of mainly raw materials, while foreclosing on their debtors. What criteria these bankers use to lend money in the first place, to invest in what modern production, we are not told. But the WorldBank-financed ‘private’ Commercial Bank says it is thrilled to help Toyota export its ‘pre-loved’ vehicles to Sri Lanka. No wonder the IMF has been demanding vehicle imports!

     Despite such high-level malfeasance, the media is having a field day – outragificiation personified – calling for ‘setting politicians to catch politicians’.Yet, such ‘corruption’ (including the high & low commissioners, really!) is very much part of the merchant & usurer  capitalism that dominates such economies as ours. Yet no media owners, and the multinational corporations & bankers who own these owners, or the accountants who magically cover it all up, have been and will be arrested and paraded – perpwalked in handcuffs, like they do rural politicians wearing ‘national’, who tried to make a quick buck but don’t have the E&Y and KPMG accountants to magically make it disappear in Delaware, USA, or the Isle of Man, England.

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Some of the last conversations SBD de Silva had with his friends & enemies, centred on the nature of Sri Lanka’s famed large irrigation systems, and how the ancient village councils (purana gamsabha) strictly maintained them, becoming the basis of solidarity among people. Interestingly, this was also what occupied Karl Marx in his last years, especially from evidence freshly gathered from Sri Lanka (see ee 11 July 2020, Cool Marx on SL).

     This ee also continues looking at the largely unsung role played SBD de Silva in unearthing the roots of our discontent, by searching the world over for vital clues. ee has dutifully dedicated this blog to SBD, throughout these 7 years after his passing in June 2018. This ee therefore offers Shiran Illanperuma’s examination about why de Silva has been largely ignored by so-called Marxist movements & intellectuals. He suggests it has to do with SBD going against ‘the leading theoretical trends among Third World radicals of the time’. We should add, these ‘radicals’, by no means insistently pro-USSR or pro-Communist Party of China, were largely promoted by white academe & such institutions as the UN, NGOs, etc. Illanperuma interestingly explores de Silva’s London School of Economics (LSE) PhD thesis, which SBD himself soon rejected. SB’s book took on the Caribbean’s Nobel Prize-winning Arthur Lewis, who was even knighted by the English monarchy. Illanperuma also notes SBD took a relatively unpopular side in more famous inter-Marxist debates of that era. For SB it was more a question of where we are going, than where we are coming from. By the way, England’s universities like LSE hoard & prevent easy access to these knowledge productions by Sri Lankan & other students, and instead use them against us. Also, Illanperuma refers to an interview given by de Silva. SBD never gave ‘interviews’, so it’s surprising (then again, not) that the (hijacked) Social Scientists Association  (SSA) of all places, claims he did (ee has excised the misleading reference in honor of SB’s memory!).

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George V wished that the Secretary of State for the Colonies

would do something to ‘stop these horrible exhibitions…’

This ee Focus continues Chapter 6 of SBD de Silva’s classic, The Political Economy of Underdevelopment, which examines the great lengths the imperialists went to, to prevent us from finding out about each other across the divides of continents. It tells of the restrictions on Indian crews on vessels trading with England, who supposedly reported back on the scenes in England which divested them ‘of the respect which they had entertained in India for the European character’. It examines the various devices whereby white supremacy was maintained, noting that many prejudices arose due to ‘the jealousy of the European women’ who had to endure the double-standards white men upheld to enable liaisons with Black women. SBD also added, how ‘the ‘greater threat… came much later from cinema: In Africa, films viewed by the Africans were censored to exclude scenes suggestive of disreputable behaviour by Europeans.’

‘The racial privileges of the settlers were most helpful

to the small farmers, artisans & traders… The extensive

repression of the indigenous inhabitants in the settler colonies

was also due to the widespread economic involvement of the

settlers & to their monopoly of political power…

Political rather than economic forces were…

allowed to determine the structure of production.’

SBD detailed how the settlers developed a sense of local identity in such colonies, unlike the non-settler expatriates in Sri Lanka. He examined the role played by white supremacism especially in the settler-colonies, which are like a halfway house, between the genocidal white dominions (US, Canada etc) & non-settler colonies such as Sri Lanka.

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• The media keeps blaming corruption on politicians, with their whitewashed news awash with lectures by Indian & Japanese & German envoys & commentators about our primordial corruption. They should know! A simple perusal of ee’s mind-numbing News Index (see below) would expose the sheer blatant repetition (photocopies, copy -&-paste jobs, really) of corporate & state & NGO news releases. The main culprits are the corporates, who seem to spend their time, giving each other awards and claiming them as tax-breaks, as well as the IMF, the WB, the Indian, Japanese, English, German & US embassies. The Germans only recently (2010?) banned the bribing of officials, while the US just OKed such bribery again, even as they are giving ‘free media’, ‘investigative’ awards to their favored hack scribes in their favored hack rags.

     Yet, politicians are just the temporary actors in this game, while there is a permanent, invisible government, which some conspiratorially call the ‘Deep State’, without ever acknowledging such capitalist subterfuge has always been the realm & power of the state as state. This permanent government or senior bureaucracy is ruled by bankers & their corporations, and this role & power is hidden by the media, the chief proponents of this ‘deep state’ business. Which is why it was therefore a surprise to hear our Energy Minister supposedly ‘lash out’ at the WB, ADB etc… Meanwhile, the IMF & World Bank are parading a slew of their favoured coolios & kneegrows (Singhs & Gopinaths & Woldemichaels) to basically repeat the same mumbling their white handlers mouth. They could all be replaced soon by US Treasury or US Federal Reserve AI drones which travel the globe, alternately bombing babies & weeping about the corruptions of barbarians…

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• In honor of the current wrangling for municipal office, with the ruling party ‘inextricably grounded between a Black Economy & a Debt Economy’ (so says CPSL President DEW Gunasekera on the Communist Party at 82, see ee Random Notes), ee Focus continues Gustavus Myers’ 1917 History of Tammany Hall about the New York ‘charity’ Tammany Society. A secret political machine, it sought to harness ‘the dangerous strength of the worst classes of the city’, to get ‘the foreign born, the native rowdies & the usual mass blinded into voting for their candidates’. He described the role played in the mid-19^thC by ‘gamblers, brothel-keepers, immigrant runners [‘traffickers’?] & swindlers’ in the ‘manufacture’ of ‘1,000s of voters’. This episode describes a municipal election – ‘the first in which the Democratic voters of Irish nativity or lineage insisted on a full share of the best places on the party’s ticket. Previously they had seldom been allowed any local office above Coroner’. The Irish Catholics appear to have now attained an uneasy acceptance in US politics, and who knows, may even colonize England again!

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• Humanities, Anyone? Imperialism now seems to feel secure or deluded enough to have its lesser genders & shades & ‘artists’ front its inner gateways & genocidal machineries. Blaise Metreweli, the next head of England’s MI6, the first female spy chief in that agency’s 116-year history, who from September will take charge of all of England’s grimy, filthy, bloody secrets (they just bombed a Russian oil tanker this week, & blamed it on the Ukrainians), read anthropology at Cambridge’s Pembroke College. But not to worry. Her anthropology may not extend to excavating the angry ghosts surrounding her grandfather Constantine Dobrowolski, ‘a Ukrainian dubbed ‘The Butcher’ who became their World War 2 Nazi’s chief informant in Ukraine’s Chernihiv Oblast’. She resembles a blue-eyed dwarf killer doll from Hollywood’s Barbarella flick.

     Meanwhile, the USA’s latest Deputy Chief of Mission in Colombo, Jayne Howell, originally from South Carolina’s Charleston (the major North America receiving port for kidnapped Africans), holds a BA in Archeological Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. Dig that: an expert on bones, dipped in petroleum no doubt!

     The World Bank’s latest Vice President for the South Asia Region, Dutch national Johannes Zutt has a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Oxford! We all should know by now what Oxonian Philosophy amounts to…

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• Meanwhile, since ee noted on 15 March, ‘IMF Managing Directors are All White’, the USA has started sending us their token brown memsahibs & sahibs. One occasion was the commemoration of the ‘75^th anniversary of the IMF’s engagement with Sri Lanka – a relationship that began with the founding of the Central Bank SL’: we got Gita Gopinath, IMF’s First Deputy Managing Director and Krishna Srinivasan, Director of the Asia & Pacific Department (IMF) attending the CBSL’s Sri Lanka’s Road to Recovery: Debt & Governance conference in Colombo. We had the pleasure of having the World Bank’s Punjabi Sikh President Ajay Banga visit Sri Lanka even earlier. But what does it matter? Their tanned lips all splutter the same white schlock about sticking to the IMF’s shaky guardrails and dutifully swallowing their prescriptions. So it doesn’t matter what color or shade or headwear they don, they might as well be US Treasury robots spouting the same tired algorithms. Their mathematics is the same: After all these centuries of imperial looting, they calculate we somehow owe them!

     Gopinath was sent all this way to warn us, ‘the shock from Trump’s trade war is worse than Covid-19’. Really? Gopinath told the English-Japanese Financial Times: ‘Monetary authorities are steering through the fog without coordination or a shared crisis playbook’. And the head of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) concluded at the OECD annual meeting, about international cooperation – ‘We’re really where we were before the meeting, which is nowhere.’ Meanwhile, ‘Poverty rates (even those unrealistically set by the World Bank) are rising…’  So, all their forecasts somehow have not taken into account their big bosses’ propensities to wage wars, hot & cold – instead, they refer to ‘global turbulence’ etc. So…, fasten your Toyota & Ford seatbelts, everyone!  All that the USA wishes to ensure is that we don’t industrially link with China (see ee Quotes, Vietnam). Beyond that, they have absolutely no constructive plan for us. Meanwhile, our leaders still keep insisting we must follow the white man over the edge….

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