e-Con e-News

from Kolamba to Dhaka, Kathmandu to Djakarta

blog: eesrilanka.wordpress.com

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

Welcome to the 7^th Anniversary of ee

e-Con e-News 14-20 September 2025

A Goldman Sachs banker & US economic advisor to their war on Afghanistan,Kristal Daniel Katz has been made the IMF’s 1st Deputy Managing Director. Katz is presently Chief of Staff to US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and claims to have also played a ‘central’ economic role in their wars on Russia & China.

     However, the USA’s latest wars are being waged though their overwhelming dominance of so-called ‘social media’, where those nations who try to maintain national sovereignty are destabilized by an amorphous mass of so-called ‘activists’:

‘Nepal’s social media ban backfires as politics moves to a chat room. The parliament of Nepal right now is Discord, a user said, of the platform popular with video gamers where 10,000s are debating the nation’s future.’– New York Times

We are ‘expected to believe a bunch of kids spontaneously organized & overthrew their country’, writes New Atlas’ Brian Bertelic (see ee Focus), ‘And now, somehow, they know how to use all of these online tools to organize a de-facto interim government.’ Bertelic goes on to detail how such media tools as VPNs, Discord and Bitchat, as well as the other more force-multiplied social media, from Facebook & X to Instagram etc, have been weaponized to overthrow elected governments. Politics, politicians & parliaments are now held captive on a US ‘Cloud’. Political parties, advanced largely through national working-class struggles, are no longer to be allowed, only ‘movements’, boosted by anti-socialist media algorithms (which also enable a profit incentive) promoting conflict or passivity, as needed, depending on their political and economic policies.

     If such machineries were truly democratic, how come such vicious imperialists & their killer poodles, from the USA to England & the EU, from Ukraine to Israel, still rule? Is it a matter of time before they taste their own medicine? Or is it that multinational corporations (MNCs), like Unilever, etc., most, larger than most countries, have now come to more openly rule our nation-states? Nepal links India and China. Bertelic goes on to point out how the USA is targeting those countries that seek to break out of the siege that imperialism has imposed on their lands – and especially if they do so, allied with China and Russia. Are Sri Lanka and other countries being set up to go the way of Libya? And is this why the USA virulently opposes any controls over their digital media?

• Trump or no Trump, Katz or Dogz, Discord or Bitchat, US foreign policy has however always been formulated by the Rockefeller dynasty’s Exxon Corporation, the USA’s leading industrial complex. So, it is no surprise that the IMF demands that Sri Lanka re-privatize the energy sector (petroleum & electricity) before they drop by again in November – promising to release a few dollars more, while stealing suntans during what is late autumn in Washington. However, there is no indication that their loans are anything but sharks’ teeth gnawing deeper into our flesh.

     A delegation from the IMF’s twin, the World Bank (WB), also dropped in last week ‘prioritizing’ the ‘mobilization of private capital’ to attract ‘foreign direct investment to expand services and create jobs’.  Services indeed. The private sector has no interest in developing the country’s resources, which they monopolize (see ee Economists, Bond Standoff: Banks swim in cash but shun government debt, also see ee Quotes, Mannar).

     As Shiran Illanperuma observes, the latest WB report on Sri Lanka, inadvertently reveals ‘a treasure trove of data that serves as a damning indictment of how austerity has suppressed investment, undermined growth, & deepened social distress in the country.’ Meanwhile, ‘the words manufacturing or industrialisation hardly appear in the report’. (see ee Focus)

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• Tearing off their mask of liberality, renaming their Department of Defense as their Department of War, the US nonetheless still claims leadership in democracy & civilization. England & the European Union (EU) & Japan, openly reduced to colonies, are waging horrific proxy wars on the world, also demanding we conform to their versions of honest & good governance, human rights, labour, & environmental standards. How ecological is war? The USA still funds the National Peace Council (NPC) in Sri Lanka, which this week proclaimed, ‘3 different international monitoring bodies have chosen to give the government good reports’ (see ee Quotes). Yes, massa! Other ‘monitoring bodies’, such as the ratings agencies Fitch and S&P, and UN agencies (with no authorization by the UN General Assembly or Security Council), are also handing out report cards, mainly to control Sri Lanka’s ability to industrially advance.

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• Welcome to our 7^th anniversary – ee began on 21 September 2018, a few months after the political economist SBD de Silva – to whose exemplary scholarship & practice this archive is dedicated – made the transition to a magical dust in June of that year, as his energy still enervates those who know his prognoses are most pertinent and vital if Sri Lanka is to survive and thrive.

     In an age of laser & drone, where we lack the precision tools and macro & micro statistics to analyze and truly change our own society, we vitally need to deploy SBD de Silva’s forensic methods of traversing the world, back & forth through history – where past & present meet to fashion the future. We hope we have done our nano part in foregrounding the country’s vital need for modern industrialization, even if a still colonial media and education system constantly seeks to divert and confuse such issues.

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One media diversion is to highlight such performing monkeys as Sashi Tharoor, who eloquently educates Oxford and the BBC on how much the English stole (‘drained’ from India) and may even speak of their destruction of industry – by cutting the thumbs of Indian weavers, destroying their tools, etc. Learning from SBD, we realize that Tharoor is an exponent of a 100-year-old ‘drain theory’, first ‘vigorously expounded’ by the even more fastidious Romesh Dutt, and later popularized by the ‘Dependency School’ in the 1970s by such ‘eminent’ theorists as Andre Gunder Frank, etc.

     Tharoor, however, steadfastly refuses to discuss the ongoing prevention of ‘modernity’– the making of machines that make machines, which Marx alone labels modern industrial capitalism, which media-amplified and domesticated Marxists and their parties apparently know nothing of – modern machine industry, which alone can enable & sustain any liberation we seek…

     SBD de Silva described how merchants & moneylenders & other backward elements promoted by imperialism prevent the development of a class dedicated to capital accumulation, let alone advance an artisanal and proletarian class. For, even when that ‘drained’, stolen surplus is kept here, our so-called capitalists and so-called bourgeois, would never invest in such modern production, as they waste it in rentier speculation (making money from money) and luxury consumption…

     Tharoor can never point to the English promotion of backward classes in our societies, let alone the English (& now US) promotion of so-called aragalists & Gen-Zs, lumpens, anarchists, nihilists & fascists, who also claim to want to change society (by the way, it turns out that only the Monarchist Party headquarters were not torched in Nepal! And only those Indian and Nepali businesses linked to China were attacked?) Tharoor, of course, would never claim to be a Marxist, and would definitely never invoke a Lenin, Stalin, Mao or a Kim or an Amilcar Cabral, who alone were and are the greatest 20^thC practitioners of Marxism made flesh…

     Hence the English are quite happy to have Tharoor entertain them with how ‘baaaad’ they were, and show how ‘big’ & ‘wide’ & ‘liberal’ the English still are, to allow such napuns criticism within their hallowed ivory towers and BBC broadcasts.

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This ee Focus begins reproducing Chapter 2 of SBD de Silva’s 1982 classic The Political Economy of Underdevelopment (PEU). Here is presented SBD’s weltanschauung – worldview – dividing the planet into 3 great encaged worlds – the Non-Settler Colonies such as Sri Lanka, the genocidal dominions of ‘new settlement’ such as the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand etc, and the Settler-Colonies, such as South Africa, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), Algeria etc, where the whites have still been unable to totally eliminate the original peoples. Here he describes the nature of the different roles Europeans played in these societies. SB also details the type of Englishmen who came to dominate Sri Lanka, unlike the Englishmen in their other settler dominions. SBD’s dedicated scholarship is such,  that he is also not afraid to list the exceptions to his thesis – countries where there were a large number of settlers such as the Congo, Indonesia, IndoChina, and did not fully industrialize, and thus occupy ‘border positions’ in his analysis. He then concludes that the ‘economic structures that emerged in the underdeveloped countries seem to be connected with the type of colony, which they represented.’

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• Also, in this ee Focus, Vinod Moonesinghe most succinctly recalls the pivotal role played by the much-maligned Anagarika Dharmapala (1864-1933) in shaping a more resilient Sri Lanka. Dharmapala is remembered as ‘a colossus of cultural & religious revival’, yet his equally profound ‘contributions to industrial training & economic upliftment are often overshadowed’. Dharmapala is often vilified by the so-called Left & Right, as a member of that demonic pantheon (pandemonium!) which includes the elder Bandaranaikes & Rajapakses, favourite villains of anglomaniacal Colombots.

     Anagarika Dharmapala (whose 161^st birth anniversary was on Sept 17) and DJ Wimalasurendra stand tall as pioneers of early attempts at industrialization in Sri Lanka. While Wimalasurendra’s efforts to enable energy security were actively sabotaged by the colonial English government (the Institute for Engineers recently claimed the English were just pathetic & indifferent to Wimalasurendra’s plans, which is simply not true – companies such as Shell and British Petroleum, Boustead Bros and Whitehall Petroleum (now Pearson PLC, monopolizing textbooks and examinations and helping to privatize education in Sri Lanka) actively colluded with MPs – later inducted as ‘knights’ –  to undermine his vision), Moonesinghe generously does not mention the insidious role played by the later so-called ‘fathers’ of independence, such as the Senanayakes and the Wijewardenes, about the English killing his brother Edmund in a Jaffna prison, and driving the Anagarika out of the country, so as to assure the continued dominance of merchants & moneylenders serving imperialism. They also promoted rumours still extant to this day about Dharmapala’s so-called chauvinism and his private life.

     Dharmapala, unlike Mahatma Gandhi who wished to go back to the spinning wheel, was a modernist. Moonesinghe mentions positively that the Anagarika met the controversial African-American Booker T Washington in the USA, and their consonance on the ‘dignity of labor’. Yet he cannot tell us who & how it was that such a meeting was arranged. Dharmapala was also taken, on that trip to the USA, to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. Carlisle was where the kidnapped children – of Native American leaders, who had fought the white settlers throughout the 19^th century’s ‘Indian wars’ (more correctly, ‘White Settler Wars’) – were forcibly boarded (incarcerated), after their long hair was cut, while being banned from speaking their own languages. The grounds of those residential schools are perennially giving up the bones of those children tortured and killed, unbeknownst to the UNHRC, apparently. It is also curious how AD was impressed by ‘Booker T’…

     One wonders if his itinerary was arranged by US Colonel Henry Steel Olcott. Olcott had headed the investigation into the assassination of US President Abraham Lincoln, and perhaps helped cover it up, for he seems to have headed East thereafter, dabbling in that theosophical mysticism, ‘stoned to the eyeballs with orientalism’, that AD later rejected… (By the way, speaking of mystery rather than mysticism, Mrs Lincoln was wearing a necklace with jewelry smuggled from Sri Lanka on the night her husband was shot…) Booker TW maintained that whites would never grant the formerly enslaved Blacks, political equality – they were then facing full-scale terrorism – mass lynching, etc. – by former Southern slave owners, who had allied with the northern industrialists in the Ku Klux Klan, etc., after the period known as ‘Reconstruction’, where Black people had taken over parts of the South, was dismantled.

     Booker TW stated Blacks should not demand the vote, but strive to be ‘separate but equal’, accepting their inferior status – enduring separate but substandard accommodations and schools – learning basic industrial skills (handicrafts, etc) that would not challenge more advanced industrial skills that whites monopolized. Immigrant white settlers were provided land and trained in agricultural and industrial colleges. Booker TW’s school Tuskegee was financed mainly by a Jewish merchant Julius Rosenwald, who owned the Sears, Roebuck department store chain, and wanted Blacks to work in his shops as manual labor, and buy his goods, handing over their home market, which they perhaps originally supplied themselves.

     Tuskegee was also the place that conducted secret experiments infecting Black people with syphilis. These types of industrial  schools recall that Thurston College was also originally called the Colombo Industrial School (?) and was meant for the children of the servants, whose masters’ sons went to Royal College next door (just like St Mary’s Kollupitiya was for the servants’ children whose masters’ daughters went to Bishops?). We also wonder exactly what type of industrialization Dharmapala was allowed to learn from Japan? Industrial countries are well known for protecting their processes and hiding their secrets. One wonders how the German Technical Training School in Moratuwa, linked to the writer and his father, compares to German counterparts like say Siemens-&-BASF-linked universities. And why are Germans so proud to promote SMEs and not real heavy industry in Sri Lanka? Were the local trainees taught to make the machines that make machines, which is what real capitalism is about? Assembling engines is not that advanced, if the raw materials, the iron and the steel, the screws and lathes and other parts are not produced in Sri Lanka? And, as SB insisted, one thing (product) must lead to another (product), upstream and downstream, to transform the economy.

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• Enter the MCC – The very first issue of ee was on 21 September 2018, just before a so-called ‘constitutional crisis’, engendered by the then-President Maithripala Sirisena sacking his Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe. Entitled Enter the MCC, the first ee noted how a delegation from the US Government’s Millennium Challenge Corporation had visited Sri Lanka and met senior government officials, including PM Ranil Wickremesinghe, Minister of Finance Mangala Samaraweera, State Minister of Finance Eran Wickramaratne, and Foreign Secretary Prasad Kariyawasam. Then too they claimed to be worried about the ‘constraints… holding back private investment and growth’, and wished to invest in ‘the transport and land sectors’. They promised to ‘improve road networks and the bus system’ in Colombo, improve ‘road connectivity between the central region and ports and markets in the Western Province’. They would also ‘improve land administration, and strengthen land rights and tenure security’. Here then is an additional reason perhaps for the continued mayhem & murder enabled on Sri Lanka’s roads – to usher in the USA’s millennial manoeuvres?

     That same week in 2018, the Central Bank directed the commercial banks ‘to impose a 100% margin deposit requirement against letters of credit (LCs) for the importation of motor vehicles with immediate effect’. Such imports threatened ‘macroeconomic stability’, the Central Bank said. ‘Recent global financial market volatility [had caused] ‘generalised pressure on currencies of emerging market economies. Continued excessive motor vehicle imports, partly driven by unwarranted speculation on future exchange rate movements, interest rates movements and budgetary measures…’

     That same first ee headlined how the then-Finance Minister Mangala Samaraweera warned ‘of further depreciation of rupee… New cash margin requirement for LCs would reduce the import of vehicles at this juncture. India has imposed regulations on non-essential luxury items as well.’ Well, well, well, the more things ‘change’ under merchant rule, the more they remain the same…

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Corruption, favoritism & blackmail were charged

against all the other departments controlled by Tammany,

though in the Police & Excise departments,

Republican & Tammany commissioners alike

were shown to have winked at the abuses.

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This ee Focus also continues looking at the inner nature of the USA on its late-19^th century march to birthing modern imperialism, through the political machinery of its foremost municipality, the great metropolis of New York. This excerpt of Gustavus Myers’ History of Tammany Hall, whose society was a murderous charade parading as a charity, records its transition from  one dictatorship to another: The Dictatorship of Richard Croker, 1886-97.

     Here we witness the early urban cradles of such US Presidents as Grover Cleveland (who applied the Monroe Doctrine, that they owned the Americas, to challenge England’s meddling in Venezuela – the US is now bombing Venezuela’s ships, threatening to invade it again) and Theodore Roosevelt, who participated in the invasion of Cuba. We met Croker in the last ee, where he was caught (and freed) buying politicians in order to appoint a Public Works Commissioner, to get 10 cents off every barrel on all cement used by that department. Here we see the rise of Croker, a former blacksmith, and machinist, who is recruited to work in the supreme court, even as he is accused of murder. Myers records the capitalist corruption of police, judges and unions, including the Knights of Labor, which ‘had reached the highest point in organization’. As one set of crooks is replaced by another, we see the use of ‘reform movements’, ‘commissions’ & ‘committees’ that selectively expose so-called corruption (capitalism by another name), and bring out ‘much valuable information’, though in truth, ‘constitute no bar to political advancement’…

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Contents:

Aragalaya & Algorithms: How the US Skyjacks Politics & Parliament