e-Con e-News

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

e-Con e-News 04-10 January 2026

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‘Trump even admitted to having informed ‘the oil companies’

of the secret operation in advance, which appears to imply they

took part in the planning of the whole affair from the get go –

or perhaps, were even the chief drivers of it all…:

‘Did you speak with (the oil companies) before the operation

took place?’ Trump: ‘Yes. Before & after. They want to go

in & they’re going to do a great job’.’ – see ee Sovereignty

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US President Don Trump met with oil company executives led by Exxon at the White House on Friday, to publicly discuss the renewed looting of Venezuela. The USA’s foreign policies and their Secretaries of State (Foreign Ministers) are always chosen, if not whetted, by their leading capitalists, especially Exxon aka Standard Oil of New Jersey, which seeks to monopolize international access to energy. Marco ‘Little Narco’ Rubio, Trump’s latest Secretary of State, is no exception…

     In 2017, Don Trump wanted Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson as his 1^st Secretary of State. But Exxon had some ‘issues’. Under Tillerson, Exxon had been using Washington’s Riggs Bank to funnel $100,000,000s to the head of Equatorial Guinea, to grab its enormous gas & oil reserves. Exxon also paid for the children of high-ranking government officials to study in the US. In 2010 Congress had approved new disclosure regulations attempting legislative reforms of banks, despite Exxon CEO Tillerson’s opposition. On 1 Feb 2017, Exxon lobbyists got Congress & Senate to rescind the rule. Exactly one hour later, Tillerson was confirmed as Trump’s US Secretary of State. (see ee 11 Nov 2018).

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• This week sees the much-promised final exit of the US Envoy in Colombo. She arrived in 2022 one day after the escalating of the US/EU war on the Ukraine, to apply the coup-de-grace to the kidnapping & killing of a popularly elected President in Sri Lanka. Having left the US Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs after overseeing the murder of Haitian President Jovenal Moise in 2021, plus various coups in Peru & Bolivia, the unfortunate lady had to settle for a mere juggling in the incumbent political firmament here.

     Sri Lanka is an exporter of illiterate accountants & innumerate literati, so there will be no computing of the numbers of people impoverished and stunted under this envoy’s posting: the continued prevention of investment in industry resulting in labor power & dollars being drained out, nor will there be any artistic recording of the howls of the sickened & the dying, which were force-multiplied under her watch. And so, one diseased mask is being torn off and another one slipped on. Gone with the lady are the windy lectures of rule-based order and free&open this&that. And in comes a gunboating overseer of diplomats in the US Bureau of South & Central Asian Affairs, Eric S. Meyer, who has escalated conflicts in Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, and Central Asia, aiming to sabotage China’s Belt & Road Initiative (BRI). He is now ready to do the will of his current White House bosses (see ee Who’s Who) who promote hemispheric exclusion in the Atlantic and yet wish to splash more centrally in this ocean called Indian, while he maybe gets a sun tan too (though not too crisp).

     We recall that the Japanese attack against the US on Pearl Harbor in Oahu, Hawaii, in 1941 was preceded by the US telling Japan that they could not operate in the Pacific Ocean. What could this new envoy accomplish in this ocean? The new envoy’s surname Meyer is curiouslt homonymous with the Sinhala word for rat ­– an animal with a pointed snout which it sticks into unwanted places; some being considered cosmopolitan yet transmitting diseases far and wide.

     The transvesting of masks from free-trader to protectionist, is not new. The US-led imperialist gang has always been divided between its 2 wings, which maybe compared to an old thief & a young thief: The old thief worries that any more robbery may push them all over the edge. The young thief whines that they have not been given their fair share yet, and that the US should wage more forever wars at least until they too are either allowed to grow old – peaceably – or eliminated. While media commentators divert with cries about morality, justice & universal (Martian?) law, and whether the US President can ‘legally’ wage wars whenever he desires (PS: he can), it is eminently apparent that Europe, the US, its settler satellites & colonial satrapies will wage wars until they are unable to do so.

     Russia’s impending rout of the US-led war machine in the Ukraine, has however led to the maddened escalations by imperialism in their New Year: the invasion, bombings & kidnappings in Venezuela, preceded by the attacks on Nigeria & attempted coup in Burkina Faso, and the continuing slaughter in Palestine and Sudan, was followed by attacks on Lebanon, Syria, hijacking of Russian ships, and renewed threats against Iran. (Apparently, terrorist cells in Iran have been equipped with US Starlink terminals to coordinate their attacks, while Russia has developed equipment to detect active Starlink terminals from the air, and has provided Iran with copies…).    

     The USA-led white world believes it has bloodily subjugated West Asia, which has not only allied with the white world (despite claims to being Muslim and Arab, etc.) in their decimation of Palestine, but is eagerly participating in their wars on East Africa. And now, with the US excluding navigation other than theirs in the Atlantic, it becomes more & more obvious that their real aim is to prevent the rise of China. And more importantly, their real aim is to grab China’s home market, which they are currently restrained from ravishing. We’ll leave our rap about who has hijacked our home market to another time….

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• Major US capitalists are acting coy about the current round of US military attacks, at least in front of the media. The broadcast media – TV, podcasts, etc – rarely challenge or get to openly confront multinational corporations (MNCs), that hide behind public relations spokespersons and heavily fortified penthouse offices & gated suburban villas. The permissible villains, paraded in perp-walks before cameras, are usually petty politicians & low-level officials.

     The USA’s massive investment in the recent kidnapping of a major leader of a country that used its wealth to help its own people & neighbours, is, however, still fraught with impending continent-wide ‘blowback!’

     After the US President met with such capitalists on Friday, we learned that Exxon & Shell are demanding ‘physical security, legal certainty & a competitive fiscal framework’, without which they are ‘not going to invest single-digit billions of dollars, much less tens of $billions’ in Venezuela, claims David Goldwyn, a former US state department special envoy for international energy affairs. He told BBC: ‘It’s not really welcome from an industry point of view… The conditions are just not right.’ Goldwyn, who runs his own energy consultancy (of course!), is also chairman of the Atlantic Council Global Energy Center’s Energy Advisory Group. The Atlantic Council, a Washington thinktank, is funded by military weapons contractors, and is a major promoter of the NATO expansion, which triggered the war in the Ukraine. Agnia Grigas, at Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, another expert on ‘energy & geopolitical economy’, also explains that the US need to grab Russian oil tankers, is to ‘signal a shift from symbolic sanctions toward more assertive enforcement against maritime sanctions evasion’. The attack on Venezuela is also meant to symbolize an escalation worldwide against the shipping fleets of China, Russia, & Iran, claiming they are breaking sanctions.

     ‘What you need is to give up state socialism & to enhance the rule of law’, adds Ariel Cohen, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, ‘That will take time’ (see ee Sovereignty, Trump’s Venezuela plan lures investors with oil, minerals – & risk). Exxon however is all gung ho to send in an exploratory team, diverting from the fact that their subsidiary Chevron has long been operating in Venezuela, accounting for about 20% of Venezuela’s output!

     The attacks on shipping are to soon escalate in this ocean called Indian too. Such US attacks are bound to set off a boom in oil prices, putting paid to all the rosy economic forecasts promoted by the same USA’s IMF & World Bank, etc. 

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• Sri Lanka is overrun by experts & thinktanks, officials & politicians, all funded in dollars & euros & pounds dished out by the usual suspects in the USA & Europe. These poohbahs repeat the same hype: about following the IMF, promoting exports, ending corruption, etc. All shamelessly seek to promote strategies anchored in the casinos (financial markets) of Wall Street and their English & European affiliates, rather than offer any plan to finesse productive investment. All their pronouncements are concealed in the latest financial jargon.

     This ee exposes the latest panaceas promoted by the US-funded thinktank Verité, which would expose the country even more to volatile capital markets, and spiral us into further debt commercialization. Even in the aftermath of disaster, these experts refuse to prioritize debt relief, temporary moratoria, and non-debt-creating financing mechanisms. Shiran Illanperuma, et al, point to Verité’s silence on the limited fiscal sovereignty imposed by the recent Central Bank Act. This Act, demanded by the USA’s IMF, seeks to prevent productive investment. Veritê instead offers another path to repackaged debt traps (see ee Focus). 

     The much-media-lauded Central Bank Governor Nandalal Weerasinghe has aired his criticisms on TV against the recent statement by over 120 foreign economists calling for debt suspension. He has been countered line by line, by the Institute for Political Economy (IPE), which organized the statement. The Central Bank Governor casts aspersions on the economists’ objectives: ‘their intentions are not to help the country’. While we’re not enamored by these economists, who seem to ignore that the main aim of the imperialists is to prevent investment in modern (machine-making) industrialization, the clearly fudged responses of this high official suggest he is not really ‘governing’ anything at all! (see ee Focus)

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• Blaming only oil companies, Jews, Republicans, Nazis, illuminati, lizard pedophiles, orange clowns, human nature & original sin, etc, for the habitual US, English & European penchant for wholesale slaughter across the globe – this is standard, corporate, ‘mass media’ fare. Media coverage has been no different for explaining the motivations behind the latest outrages in Venezuela. ‘The mask is off’ cry yet others. But did these mass murderers ever really use disguises? If they do it’s never lasted long, as did their flimsy pretext for invading Iraq etc, Gulf of Tonkin (for invading Vietnam), USS Maine (for invading Spain’s colonies), etc. 

     What such easy explanations betray is a wilful ignorance of history, and worse, a lack of understanding of the ruling capitalist classes of these countries. Sri Lankans are also kept ignorant of our own history, particularly, our own economic history, and the nature of our own merchant- & moneylender-dominated ruling class, who operate on behalf of the foreign MNCs.

     Multinationals such as Unilever control the media, and so-called social-media, through their ample advertising budgets. There is no other explanations, for the insistent repetition that Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro & his spouse Cilia Flores were ‘arrested’ & ‘captured’, instead of the more obvious verb: ‘Kidnapped!’ ‘Captured’ is an age-old trope in the white settler vocabulary, describing every encroachment on the original people’s lands. Ask the Apache Geronimo (aka Goyaalé), which 6 different US armies claimed to have ‘captured’ at different times.

     The English media revel in playing to the prejudices that they themselves have inculcated, and innumerable are the excuses or justifications for their horrors. Indeed, it’s over 100 years now since VI Lenin, the leader of the Russian Revolution, sought to explain in his classic Imperialism, the Latest Stage of Capitalism, how the monopolists of a few powerful banks & industries (including food, petroleum, coal, iron, steel, chemicals, minerals, transport, weapons), protected by the leading capitalist states, sent their armies to war against each other, and more numerously & significantly, against the rest of the world, maiming & killing tens of millions of people, so as to maximize their loot & power.  While they presently justify their invasions by blaming Russia & China, it is precisely Russia & China that have been invaded numerous times, and it is these countries who sacrificed the most to defeat their fascist wars

     The media in Sri Lanka are paid in dollars and yen to extol the ‘historic’ speech of JR Jayawardene ‘forgiving’ Japan at the San Francisco Treaty Conference in 1951. The Japanese government even erected a statue to JR in Japan! And now we learn more of how JR became known as ‘Yankee Dicky’.  It turns out that the US SF conference, which excluded China and the USSR, was a pretext for rearming Japan, less than 5 years after the US bombing of Hiroshima. It turns out their world wars have never ended. After their World War 2, the US would establish 902 foreign military bases across 98 countries & territories (see ee Focus).

     Last year, US War Secretary Peter Hegseth reminded Japan, that the USA had fought them as rival empires, not as ideological opponents: ‘Their shared enemy was always socialism.’ Japanese commemorations of the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima are now recast as warnings about Russia & China’s ‘potential’ use of nuclear weapons!

     This ee concludes Roy Singham’s incredibly comprehensive yet succinct assessment of the ‘80th Anniversary of the Victory in the World Anti-Fascist War (WAFW)’, and the need to ‘Understand Who Saved Humanity’. He calculates the sacrifice of the 2 main groups of silenced victims: The 40-45 million casualties in the USSR, the 35-50 million casualties (dead & wounded) in China, and the 11.2 million colonized peoples killed in Asia & Africa, with the numbers of victims of the anti-communist genocides that followed, being minimized or forgotten’… Singham also recalls how in 30 minutes in August 1945, 2 ignorant US colonels drew the 38^th parallel line dividing Korea, igniting war within a proud nation that had been promised independence.

     The recent invasion of Venezuela has cleared away mists about the real status of any hollow cultural claims to actual independence. Crying about how the white man has robbed and continues to rob our countries will come to nothing, unless we understand the actual economic mechanisms that can enable true independence. In our conclusion of Chapter 5 of his classic ThePolitical Economy of Underdevelopment, SBD de Silva examines how it was the internal focus (not exports!) of capital & enterprise that made settler colonies’ development: distinctive. Our dollared economists (& not just them) ‘overlook the structural changes in the economy which the settlers brought about’. De Silva also discusses the failures of the settlers in the French colonies versus those in the English domains. Meanwhile, England’s white supremacist system in South Africa, with fake divisions based on skilled & unskilled labor, resulted in an irrational society that could only result in an ‘explosion’ (see ee Focus). 

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Contents:

From Debt War to Ditwah: US Envoy Brought Disaster & Leaves Disaster in Sri Lanka