e-Con e-News

blog: https://eesrilanka.wordpress.com

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

e-Con e-News 28 December 2025 – 3 January 2026

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‘They took all of our oil…’‘We are going to run the country’ – USA

The New York Times & Washington Post proudly admit how they were told in advance of the US military attack on Venezuela, and the planned kidnapping of its leaders, and loyally ‘held off publishing what they knew’ (see ee Media). On the contrary, it is not a matter of ‘holding off’: their news media actively censors, diverts, whitewashes and enables the military, economic, and political intrusions of their paymasters. While the US media likes to claim ‘unprecedented mutual hostility’ with the current US regime, the close collaboration between this media & the US security state is nothing new, or unusual.

     The English media have tried to downplay the steady guiding role by the monopoly capitalist interests behind each US regime, blaming policies on the quirks & clownishness of its leaders, sometimes even claiming the USA is tired of war & seeks peace. The recent US National Security Strategy (NSS) document is a case in point, which makes claims about the USA’s withdrawal from Asia (another pivotal turn around). The wilful naiveté of the capitalist media is endless. The continued dependence on US & European media systems (including so-called social media) and educational institutions sabotages any pretense to ‘independence’. The primitive use of AI videos to spread misinformation is also much more widespread. Meanwhile, the USA’s Meta (Facebook, etc.) is schooling the Sri Lankan government about data protection (see, ee Industry)!  

     What may be new, with its current actions, is the steady wiping away of the mists: The USA still aims to be the top imperialist, the sole hegemon. Along with its fellow settler satellites & non-settler satrapies, alongside the older colonial powers of Europe, they view & treat Sri Lanka & much of the world as its colonies.

     The kidnapping and/or killing of leaders, therefore, is also not new to Sri Lanka. It’s more rarely broadcast on TV, and with such glee. In 2022 – as only now being slowly revealed – the USA & India attempted to kidnap & kill Sri Lanka’s President Gotabaya Rajapakse (see ee Sovereignty, Julie or Gopal). Prior to that, leaders exhibiting any attempt at straying off the English script charted for Sri Lanka, were assassinated or blown up (with the non-governmental varieties, shot or incinerated – again, not broadcast live).

     English media has been repeatedly reporting the ‘capture‘ (rather than a ‘kidnapping‘) of yet another leader (& his spouse) in the Americas. They even decorate it as an ‘extraction’, after a ‘surgical strike’, adding there were no Venezuelan casualties, even as 32 Cubans & other civilians were also killed in the recent invasion. In October 1983, when the US invaded socialist Grenada, they first targeted the Cuban and other foreign civilians helping to rebuild that country. As the first English-speaking Caribbean country, to strive to be truly independent, the US viewed Grenada as ‘the threat of a good example.’

     The latest US ‘surgery’ is said to have involved 150 planes & the ‘largest armada ever assembled in South America’s history’, by their own admission. An operating theatre. The costs of such surgery are also to be borne by US citizens (many of whom cannot afford their own healthcare) to enable the owners of Exxon (Standard Oil, of New Jersey) to gain access to the largest oil reserves in the world. But it is even more than that.

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I spent 33 years & 4 months in active military service

& during that period I spent most of my time as a high-class

muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Sreet & the bankers.

In short, I was a racketeer; a gangster for capitalism. I helped

make Mexico & especially Tampico safe for American oil

interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti & Cuba a decent place

for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped

in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the

benefit of Wall St. I helped purify Nicaragua for the

International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-12.

I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar

interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American

fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that

Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it,

I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do

was to operate his racket in 3 districts. I operated on

3 continents. – Major General Smedley Butler,

War is a Racket, 1935

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Indeed, the role that such corporate ‘titans’ as Exxon (richer than most countries) have played in such acts of gore are not new, either. They determine US policy, & not just foreign policy. The act was committed just after the USA’s meeting with the leader of their fellow white settler satellite, Israel, to extract more blood money from their Zionist patrons, who have already prepared the world, with their display of real-time horror, that even Hollywood’s copious splashing of tomato sauce, pales in comparison.        

       The latest ‘surgery’ involves a larger attempt to exclude ‘non-hemispheric actors’ from the Americas. Exclusion recalls the legislative acts to remove Chinese people from Anglo North America (as a ‘reward’, perhaps, for introducing citrus farming to turn western USA into the world’s largest granary, while building the railroads there to carry out those harvests).

     Meanwhile, the US envoy in Colombo who failed to kidnap & kill Gotabaya Rajapakse (she has previous hemispheric experience in Haiti, Peru, Bolivia, etc) has (again?) been recalled (by 16 January) for failing to accomplish said assignment. She has kept repeatedly blabbering, along with all her fellow peripatetic officials their embassy has had to host, about the US’ desire for a ‘free & open Indo-Pacific’ (though no one has so vociferously heard of a free-&-open North Atlantic!).

     The envoy has apparently sought to remain here by any means, including tattooing (self-mutilating?) a washable map of Sri Lanka on her crusty ankle to show dedication to finish a job she was sent to do, to apply the final coup-de-grace to an operation begun by her predecessors. Perhaps only Frank Sinatra has been retired so often, and it had to take death for him to finally get to do things his own ‘way’. The envoy’s replacement, told their Senate in wintry Washington this week:

‘Sri Lanka’s strategic location makes it a focal point

for US efforts to promote a free & open Indo-Pacific

& counter adversarial influences, including China’s

growing presence in the region.’

Someone should quietly inform the new envoy, that as ‘presences’ go, China has always been in Asia, and part of this ocean now called Indian, long before the USA was even dreamed of…

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• Every 1 January has forced the USA, on this their settler New Year’s Day, to recall through gritted teeth, the liberation of Cuba on that day in 1959.  2025 sees Cuba enter the 67^th anniversary of their ‘libertad’. The US government now says it envisions a path to invading Cuba (again), through their purported ‘capture’ of Venezuela, with the pigs baying for blood, as it were (Playa Giron –Bay of Pigs – was the site of a 1961 failed US attempt at invading Cuba). 

     Jan 1^st this year was also the222^nd anniversary of the victory of the Haitian people, in 1804, who defeated 3 imperialist European armies, to declare their independence from Spain, France & England. These once-were-slaves set up the first ‘free’ Republic in the Americas, banning slavery, an act which the USA failed to accomplish for decades (some say a century & 3 score years hence, if waiting until the 1964 Civil Rights Act) thereafter. This Haitian act of liberation drove the white slave powers of the Americas into a frenzy, hastening the English to drive out and replace the Dutch in Sri Lanka in 1795, and turn to Asia to continue their slavery under that label called ‘indentured slavery’, or the ‘coolie’ trade.

     The sharp defeat inflicted by the Haitians informs the very core of the North Atlantic’s epistemologies (knowledge systems) & ontologies (theories of being) to this very day. It is a memory they keep seeking to erase. The then-US President, Thomas Jefferson, who is passed off as a democrat, even as he was an ardent slave owner, called the free Haitians, ‘Cannibals of the terrible republic,’ where the ‘course of things in the neighboring islands of the West Indies [appeared] to have given considerable impulse to the minds of the slaves… a great disposition to insurgency has manifested itself among them’.

     Haiti is indeed linked to Sri Lanka, as it was Spain’s invasion of Hispaniola (now Haiti & Dominican Republic) in 1492, that made a Borgia Pope divide the world into 2, sending the Portuguese to invade Lanka. Both Sri Lanka & Haiti have struggled to fight off European invaders for 500 years. Haiti supported Venezuela‘s war of independence from Spain, after Simon Bolivar promised to ban slavery in the Spanish Americas. In 1802, France invited Haiti’s leader Toussaint l’Ouverture for peace talks & kidnapped him to France, where he died in jail. In 2004, the US, Canada, France & England kidnapped Haiti’s president JB Aristide. In 1915, US Marines invaded & took all the gold in Haiti’s Central Bank and deposited it in Rockefeller’s Citibank of New York. As we have to keep saying, it is not new or unusual.

     Germany’s attempt to colonize South America’s Paraguay in the 19^th century was fronted by the husband of the sister of the German ‘philosopher’ Frederick Nietzsche. Nietzsche argued that ‘reason & morality’ were a creation by slaves, and not for masters. Another European ‘philosopher’ French Marquis de Sade, decreed that if a thief robs you, it is you who must be put on trial for allowing such theft. The US & European governments have long practiced such Nietzschean & Sadist ideas. The USA’s recent invasion of Palestine was a dress rehearsal for open genocide, sans claim to reason & morality.

     The real backer of this ‘surprise’ invasion of Venezuela, and related kidnappings & unreported mass murder, is Rockefeller’s Exxon – Standard Oil, the chief beneficiaries of such depredations; the ‘oilers’ who determine US foreign policy. Yet this too shows there is ‘reason’ behind the unreason.

     The US government is now brazenly taking the veil off what European & their settler governments have always done, sometimes surreptitiously sometimes openly, for the last 500 years.   

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• The Sunday Times suggests that the Indian High Commission here forced employees of Sri Lanka’s Presidential Secretariat to provide extended applause as India’s External Affairs Minister (EAM) announced an ‘aid’ package of US$450million. It was broadcast off Google’s Youtube (their preferred means of Indian compunction these days) after the EAM was sent here on an hurried emergency mission as the Indian PM’s special representative, to take the shine off a visit by a Chinese delegation scheduled for 24 hours later. India’s ‘aid’ package comprises: ‘$350mn in concessional Lines of Credit & $100mn in direct grants’. As MDD Peiris, a former servant who is called ‘civil’ (as opposed to all the uncivil servants), recalls for us (see ee Random Notes, Rejecting Rs900mn Grant), such ‘concessional’ charity comes with handcuffs…

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‘The same blind eagerness for plunder

that in the one case exhausted the soil,

had, in the other, torn up by the roots

the living force of the nation…

Capital cares nothing for the length of life

of labour-power. All that concerns it is simply

& solely the maximum of labour-power,

that can be rendered fluent in a working day.

It attains this end by shortening the extent of the

labourer‘s life, as a greedy farmer snatches

increased produce from the soil by robbing it

of its fertility.’ – Karl Marx, Capital Vol 1

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‘Sri Lanka’s agriculture as a whole is using over 50%

more fertiliser per acre compared to India

while yielding less per acre’ – D Pathirana

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• This ee Focus reproduces Dhanusha Gihan Pathirana’s intricate survey of the depth of the destruction wrought by the recent ‘weather event’, but also by historical practices that cannot go on.  He concludes that the government must prioritize the recovery & restructuring of affected agricultural land, also by creating industrial employment. He also explains how the overextension of agricultural cultivation has been a trap, catalysing climate-related disaster. However, any large-scale agricultural & industrial transformation would be impossible by depending on an extremely vulnerable external sector: ‘Foreign reserves declined particularly in Nov 2025 to $6,090mn.’ He calls for the increasing of national savings through ‘restricting luxury imports, particularly personal vehicles, and reducing the foreign debt burden through creditor renegotiation (despite the alarms by so-called central bankers). The government is relying on luxury import taxes that deplete reserves to generate revenue, and Pathirana wants savings channelled into ‘a dedicated Treasury foreign exchange account through Central Bank (CBSL) market purchases’, to transform agriculture & industry.

     Mechanization is vital to increase agricultural productivity, as Sri Lanka’s agriculture is using more fertilizer than India & high-income economies, while the ‘massive increase in chemical input has not translated into better yields’.  Rural industrialization is a must, as the historical dependence on unproductive methodss ha:

…likely left the civilisation vulnerable

to invasions due to the difficulty of sustaining

a large standing army on a fragile food base.

(see ee Focus)

Pathirana of course could also help us understand the odds against carrying out such progressive endeavours. One of the earliest US-sponsored coups d-etat in South America, was carried out in Guatemala in 1954, against the government of Jacobo Arbenz, who had dared attempt minor agrarian reform, opposed by the USA’s United Fruit Co. It was a coup, whose propaganda was devised by Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays – the ‘father’ of  US ‘public relations’, and functionary of banker JP Morgan’s General Electric (GE).

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• The Nazi war machine’s industrial infrastructure was by 1941, reinforced by 250 US corporations, recalls Roy Singham as ee Focus also continues his invaluable rendition of the 80^th Anniversary of the Victory in the World Anti-Fascist War (WAFW). He uncovers the links in the vast scale of  US corporate collaboration & capital infusion into Nazi Germany’s war machine. Even more startling is his exposure of the rehabilitation of German & Japanese war criminals. The Quandt dynasty, enriched by concentration camp labour yet never prosecuted, became BMW billionaires, and are today Germany’s richest family. Japan’s war criminals were given even greater protection.

     While many major German war criminals & their organizations were banned, zero Japanese organizations faced prohibition. Instead,  they were transformed into Japan’s current Ruling Elite. The Japanese army’s Unit 731,which conducted horrific experiments on Chinese & Korean prisoners, recounted here in macabre detail, were given immunity along with their leader, Emperor Hirohito, with war criminals made cabinet ministers. This infamous unit was later let loose on Koreans, during the US war there in the 1950s. Ryoichi Sasakawa, ‘the world’s wealthiest fascist’, has a Nippon Foundation, which still operates openly in Sri Lanka. While the zaibatsu corporations – Mitsubishi, Mitsui, Nissan, Sumitomo – which ‘exploited 40,000 Chinese prisoners & 100,000s of Koreans’, are now ‘respectable’ multinationals also operating in Asia and elsewhere (see ee Focus).

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‘The difficulties of taking over metropolitan investments,

without action that is revolutionary in its character &

comprehensive in scope, are seen in the backtracking of

the Sri Lanka government (1970-7) on its program to

nationalize foreign banks, plantations & agency houses,

for fear of retaliation by the foreign interests. Within a

few days of his appointment the (Trotskyist) Minister of

Plantation Industries expressed the likelihood of action

being taken against the foreign interests. He declaimed to

newsmen: ‘The international monopolies will not retreat

without dealing counter-blows.’ 3 months later the Chairman

of British Exchange Banks Association in Sri Lanka cleared

the air when after a meeting with the (Trotskyist) Finance Minister,

he announced, ‘We shall go on banking’!’

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• The reasons for the failure of Sri Lanka & other non-settler colonies to truly break free of colonialism and develop modern (industrial) societies is examined in great detail, as ee Focus continues Chapter 5 of SBD de Silva’s classic The Political Economy of Underdevelopment (1982). Particularly fascinating is his description of the role played by India’s merchants & workers in Myanmar (Burma), as well as his comparisons of countries in North Africa.

     Whereas the settler colonies were able to make decisive economic breaks with the imperialist powers, the non-settler countries failed to do so. This is because the imperialists now operate through compradore elements, and were able to even expand their economic interests. Operating ‘impersonally from abroad through large corporate enterprises’, they have deployed public-relations machineries to polish their public image, indigenizing business management, using national languages to a certain extent. The unreported corruption by foreign multinational corporations (MNCs), of politicians & bureaucrats,has enabled their ownership & control of the import-export game. The MNCs’ control extended ‘over the whole of the colonial export economy including the financing, marketing & sale of plantation or mining products, and its roots are not easy to unravel let alone exterminate’.

     ‘Remote control’ has given foreign capital an immunity from interference by national governments – an advantage which settler investors lacked. The removal of the ‘strong complementarity between export economies, heavily dependent on metropolitan markets, & the metropolis’, requires a ‘bold political program’. MNC-based industrial capital now invests directly without the mediation of the merchant firms which had managed & controlled the plantation interests, with a considerable share of foreign involvement being in the service sector, comprising banks, insurance & shipping companies and trading-cum-managing agency firms’… (see ee Focus)

     There is a clear misunderstanding of the political measures and economic mechanisms needed to rebuild countries. This misunderstanding extends to those who claim to be ‘radical’, ‘Leftist’, ‘Socialist’ and ‘Marxist’, and yes, ‘independent.’ The widespread propaganda and demonization against USSR leader Joseph Stalin and China’s Mao Zedong, have left the world bereft of the real policies needed to modernize countries. Meanwhile the genocidal policies of the settler colonies in the Americas, Americas, Asia and the Pacific, have been whitewashed and transformed into ‘dream’ destinations, where the nightmares emerge only under the covers of a pliant media.  

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Contents:

The UnMasking of the English Media in US Wars