e-Con e-News

Posted byee ink.March 28, 2026Posted inUncategorizedTags:history, India, Iran, news, politics

blog: https://eesrilanka.wordpress.com

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

e-Con e-News 22-28 March 2026

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‘The [USA] wanted to bring 2 warplanes armed with 8 antiship missiles

from a base in Djibouti… We turned down the request to maintain

Sri Lanka’s neutrality’, he added to applause… Dissanayake said he had

received another request that same day, on Feb 26, from Iran to seek

permission for 3 naval vessels to make a goodwill visit to Sri Lanka:

‘With 2 requests before us, the decision was clear,’

– see ee Sovereignty, SL says it denied US request

to land 2 aircraft at Mattala airport

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‘It is unclear as to why the request made by one country

was made public earlier & the other 2 weeks later.

So far there has been no comment from the US side

on their request made to Sri Lanka.’

– Sunday Times (see ee Sovereignty,

QR code & West Asian war…)

Ceylon Today Deputy Editor Sulochana Ramiah Mohan had her notebooks seized by police officers while she was interviewing Iranian sailors being treated at the Karapitiya Hospital, Galle, after the US attack. She lodged a complaint with the Galle Police, but they say no such complaint has been received. Apparently, Mohan was not provided with a complaint reference number at the time of filing. Maybe she should ask the US Embassy (see ee Media).

     For it is the US embassy who has got Sri Lankan & Indian officials to prevent witnesses to the bombing of Iran ship IRIS Dena from speaking in public (especially about the hours & days preceding the attack, & what took place during & afterwards). There are also charges that Indian officials informed the USA of the ships’ movements, and Sri Lankan officials delayed the entry of the Dena to enable the USA to launch its attack, with both feigning ignorance about the bombing (see ee Focus).

     The US insists the attack was legal, yet cannot explain ‘why the USA left its premier submarine-hunting aircraft to fly drills [in India] alongside the Dena one week before a submarine killed her’. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi & Minister of External Affairs Subramanyan Jaishankar had already promiscuously sided with the US (& their catspaw Israel) against Iran just before the latest invasion on February 28.

     Both India and Sri Lanka are now attempting to proclaim neutrality as the US war is being fiercely resisted, and essential oil, gas & fertilizer on which economies depend are being shut off. Hence, the inflated claims that Iran & Russia are both willing to help Sri Lanka & India midst the genuflection before imperialist dictate. ‘Iran has released only token Indian oil & gas cargoes from the Persian Gulf.’ Meanwhile, Modi purportedly begged President Trump on March 24 to realize ‘that the Strait of Hormuz remains open, secure & accessible is essential for the whole world’.  EAM Jaishankar also has kept emphasizing Indian positions against Iran, while meeting this past week with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Undersecretary of Defense Elbridge Colby, and Arab foreign ministers. Vande Mataram! – I bow to thee, Mother India!

‘Our message to our neighbouring countries…

Please don’t be complicit in the crimes

of the US & Israel regime.’

– Iranian Ambassador Alireza Delkhosh

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• EurAsia Times analyst Sumit Ahlawat reported on March 26, under the headline Iranian Sailors Trapped in SL: Tehran Demands Return, US Pressure Mounts – Can Colombo Stay Neutral? that he interviewed Foreign Minister Vijitha Herath. Herath told him that 252 Iranian sailors remain in Colombo’s ‘custody’. In fact, they are also being held ‘incommunicado’. Herath says there is intense US government pressure not to allow the repatriation of the Iranian crews. The pressure includes threats to reverse the US trade tariff & other concessions.

     This explains the largely hurried & unheralded visit of US Special Envoy for South & Central Asia, Sergio Gor, who called on President AK Dissanayake at his Secretariat on Thursday, 19 March. During the special envoy’s stay in Colombo, the President ‘chose to drop a diplomatic bombshell in Parliament’, announcing that Sri Lanka had also turned down a request from the USA to land 2 armed military aircraft with ‘8 anti-ship missiles’ at the Mattala International Airport.

     Yet, the Sri Lanka President had told ‘a select group of journalists on March 5’, a day after the sinking of one Iranian ship, that he had only refused a request from Iran for 3 Iranian navy ships to visit Sri Lanka on March 9 and 13. He did not mention anything about armed US aircraft. Why did the President wait 2 weeks to tell the country that the USA had also made a request on the same day, previous to the Iranian request, and then turned both down to display the country’s neutrality? Why did he have to await the ingress of Mr Gor? The Indian media, and such US media as the New York Times, and much, but not all of the Sri Lankan media commentariat, then went into great paroxysms of ecstasy about how a ‘small’ country had dared exhibit such ‘neutrality’ & ‘independence’ (see ee Quotes, US & Indian Chorus Line). Other observers are not so sure.

     Responding to accusations that his undisclosed defence agreement with USA inevitably makes Sri Lanka party to the conflict, Dissanayake told Parliament there is no provision that obliges the government to take part in US warmongering. The President said the USA made the request for their aircraft to land at Mattala the same evening as Iran’s request for safe harbor. However, he had made no mention of this before, and apparently had to await Mr. Gor’s go ahead last week.

     This ee reproduces the Moscow correspondent John Helmer’s equally if not more explosive claim: the Indian government, which had invited the Iranian ships, had kept track of them after their departure, informing the US government of their movements (see ee Focus). Moscow-based Helmer & his website Dances with Bears have thus been banned from appearing on Gunners Shot, the strategic & military analysis website ‘widely read by the national security & military staffs around PM Narendra Modi’.

     Helmer also adds to the local media’s incendiary claim that the Sri Lankan navy (Vice Admiral Kanchana Banagoda) had verbally invited the ships to visit, but later the Sri Lankan government kept delaying permission to enter. This delay had given the US government enough time to dispatch the US Navy destroyer USS Pinckney from Singapore, to ambush the Iranian ship, mostly a navy band of saxophonists & violinists. Australia military officials also took part in the attack. The involvement of the USA, India & Australia suggest this was a ‘Quad’ operation. News of the sudden visit of the Australian High Commissioner to meet the SL environment minister this week to ‘boost green cooperation’ does not mention if Canberra will pay for the cleanup. Meanwhile, to perhaps reinforce the US claim about Mattala, there has been further speculation about the much-maligned Chinese-built airport being allowed ‘resurrection’. There has also been diversionary speculation about the need for a skewed and already compromised neutrality, inspired by English media, that Iran’s purported attack on Diego Garcia signals its ability to attack Sri Lanka & Europe as well!

`    On 16 March, Rear Admiral (retd) Sarath Weerasekara, former Sri Lankan navy chief of staff and presidential advisor, told a London newspaper, the Dena ‘was left waiting for more than 11 hours, a delay that would prove deadly by the morning of 4 March’.  It is unclear what course the Dena took after the Indian exercises ended. Indian media speculate there was a direct meeting between India’s PM N Modi and the Indian Navy chief Admiral Dinesh Tripathi, either just before the March 4 sinking, or just after. There has been no confirmation of this. Their last confirmed meetings, reported in May 2025, included such officials as National Security Advisor Ajit Doval, Defense Minister Rajnath Singh, & chief of the Defence Staff General Anil Chauhan. Modi, Doval, Jaishankar & the military & intelligence chiefs would ‘certainly have met’ immediately after the US-Israeli attack on February 28, states Helmer, when the Iranian squadron was seeking sanctuary. Modi met India’s Cabinet Committee on Security on March 1 & 2.

     The Iranian squadron departed Visakhapatnam port in Andhra Pradesh, in southeast India, on February 25 to take the most direct course south and then west for their return to Iran. Ordered to remain as close to the coastlines as possible, their most likely route through the Bay of Bengal to the Indian Ocean would have been through the Palk Strait, between India & Sri Lanka. If the squadron had avoided the Palk Strait and turned on to a southeast bearing to go around Sri Lanka’s eastern coast, the target destination would have been Trincomalee, entering there within 24 hours (Feb 26) when the request for sanctuary was first recorded by the Sri Lankan presidency. From there to Kochi, on India’s western coast, the estimated voyage time required at Dena’s cruise speed was 24 hours.

     Indian EAM Jaishankar has confirmed February 28 as the date the Iranian request for sanctuary. India record that only one vessel, the Lavan, had been granted access to Kochi, but is unclear when exactly the Lavan entered Kochi. The Indian press report claims that the Lavan did not enter Kochi until March 4 – after the Dena had been sunk. Jaishankar has not explained the delay nor why the Lavan was permitted, while the Dena & Bushwehr were not. There is no clarity in the Indian or Sri Lankan record – the public record which government officials have produced after the US attack – on where each of the Iranian trio was on Feb 28.  There is also no evidence on what happened in the almost 4 days at sea for the Iranian squadron between Feb 28 and the sinking of the Dena on March 4.

     Why the 4 days of delay? Helmer asserts that the Iranians understood that the Indians & Sri Lankans were under pressure from the USA to delay and refuse. Admiral Weekaseera has commented that the Sri Lankan Security Council’s delay was a betrayal. Tehran is likely to have suspected Indian betrayal after the support Modi had declared for the Israeli & US war. The Dena’s orders were not to attempt to head westwards to Bandar Abbas. It is therefore concluded that off Kochi, the Dena reversed course to sail eastward away from the war. It was then heading either to Tuticorin (Thoothukudi), India, or Galle. Refused entry again by Modi & Jaishankar for any Indian port, the Dena must have been hoping for safe harbor at Galle. The sea distance between Kochi & Tuticorin is 172.3 nm – that is half the distance for the Dena to have reached Galle; at 20 knots, 8 hours 39 minutes. The Indian Navy knew the vessel was sailing away from the war. The USA knew, yet decided to kill the Dena & its crew, before – minutes before – they reached safety.

     An anti-Tehran propaganda agency in London, Iran International claims the USS Charlotte had issued a warning to the Dena’s captain to abandon ship before the attack, and that he had refused. A Reuters report claims ‘a US official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters… the USA did ⁠not provide a warning before carrying out the strike’. Reuters (a private-public partnership!) also was allowed to access a ‘secret’ State Department cable from ‘Jayne Howell, the chargé d’affaires at the US embassy in Colombo, [who] had emphasized to Sri Lanka’s government that neither the Bushehr crew nor the 32 Dena survivors should be repatriated to Iran’, adding ‘Sri Lankan authorities should minimize Iranian attempts to use the detainees for propaganda… There is a press blackout on the negotiations between the Indians, the Sri Lankans, Iranians & US officials on what will happen to them’, says Helmer.

     Jaishankar & Modi have also been ‘applying pressure on Sri Lanka to stay in line’. According to a Modi tweet on March 24:

‘Spoke with President Dissanayake & discussed the evolving

situation in West Asia, with particular focus on disruptions

affecting global energy security. We reviewed progress on key

initiatives aimed at strengthening India-SL energy

cooperation & enhancing regional security. As close &

trusted partners, we reaffirmed our commitment to work

closely together in addressing shared challenges.’

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• The last line is being interpreted as an Indian threat to Sri Lanka ‘to do what it is told’. Meanwhile, Sri Lankan officials have appealed to Russia & China for their help. The Kremlin responded by sending Russian Deputy Energy Minister Roman Marshavin to Colombo on March 27, also expressing ‘a willingness to share know-how in the area of digitalization & cybersecurity in the fuel & energy sector’. A photograph of Sri Lankan officials at the meeting shows Central Bank chief Nandalal Weerasinghe (expecting an added pension in Washington?) reading a book during the meeting with the senior Russian minister. It is unclear if it’s the Bible, Koran or a Russian dictionary? Perhaps it was to display nonchalance or disapproval. He knows this government is trapped by his sponsors.

     Yet, will the CB governor take refuge in the US embassy or flee to a Washington suburb soon? He has been fending off demands to restrict Dollar outflows, while playing the role of chief local native optimist conjuror, offering palliatives astrologizing that the IMF is about to offer ‘significant’ balms to anesthetize us through the IMF prescriptions. How does he know? Perhaps it was in that book! However, whether he likes it or not, a war economy is on its way (as the Asia Progress Forum, in fact recommends, see ee Random Notes), and he should read up on what the English did here in fear of the Japanese blockade in their World War II. In the end, considering the CB governor’s rote announcements on the economy, he could easily be replaced by a robot, much as war has been outsourced to their algorithms…

     Blame for the US bombing of a girls’ school is being assigned to the US military’s Maven Smart System (MSS), built by data mining company Palantir (owned by Trump’s ventriloquists Alex Karp & Peter Thiel, who also supply him with soundbytes). ‘MSS generates ‘insights’ from vast amounts of classified data from satellites, surveillance and other intelligence, to provide real-time targeting and target prioritization for military operations. Embedded into the system is Anthropic’s AI tool Claude, that is in daily use across most parts of the military. Maven, powered by Claude, suggests 100s of targets, issuing precise location coordinates, and prioritizing targets according to importance. The pairing of Maven & Claude has created a tool that is speeding up the pace of the campaign, reduces a country’s ability to counterstrike and turning weeks-long battle planning into real-time operations. Yet current AI system, based on Large Language Models, are inherently unreliable. Their underlying algorithms guarantee that they produce errors. The percentage of errors increases with the size of the models. OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model hallucinates 16% of the time. Their newer o3 model? 33%. Their newest o4-mini? 48%! Nearly half of what their most recent model tells you could be fabricated. The ‘smarter’ models are actually getting worse at telling the truth.’  (ee Security, AI Targeting) And so is the Central Bank governor! His panaceas will take us nowhere, just like the used-hardware sold to us by the USA & Indians, that has been proven ineffective by the asymmetrical warfare of the Iranians,

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‘They are signalling to us. & to China [that] we [US]

have a global presence. Don’t mess with us anywhere.’

– Retired Indian Lt General Raj Shukla

(see ee Focus)

• The Strait of Hormuz is open. The USA is on its way to closing it. It is not Iran who has ‘effectively’ blocked it (see below Shiran Illanperuma’s otherwise excellent article claims – we again changed his title to ‘keeping energy in national hands’ from ‘public hands’, for the ‘public is the people’s worst enemy’). The main culprits, who are part of the US strategy, are the shipping insurance companies aka the International Group of Protection & Indemnity Clubs (see Insurers Make a Killing, ee 07 March 2026).

     So full of free this & free that, free market & free trade, the numerous US-funded thinktanks – the US Advocatas, the Verités, the Margas, the Groundviews, and the IPSs, do not seem to have factored in the possibility of their capitalist patrons setting the world on fire. Their tanks have clearly not thunk too deeply. The thought that now that their cars may run out of fuel, has set them afire. And they are running about listing the percentages of this & that their import-export quality economy is about to run out of. While Catholic Action’s Fernandos and the Borah’s Jafferjees have taken to pushing real-estate and wealth funds, the rest of the Hayekian crew have taken to lamenting the nightmare of rationing, warning about QR codes & ‘black’ markets etc. Yet it is not a matter of price controls (promoted by those who seek to manage capitalism’s crises more fairly, see ee Quotes, Not Only), or no price controls (which the English were happy to impose during WW2).

     The current round of chaos in West Asia, is not just the result of the US invasion, it is part of the US plan. In fact, it is part of the old English plan to block industrialization in our countries. Industrialization needs ‘an affordable & stable supply of energy’. And most importantly, socialism is not possible without industrialization. Many argue that the US wars on Iraq, Libya, Syria, Venezuela, Ukraine, etc, have been strategic blunders – but they have a single goal: total energy control to prevent any such modernization. They left Vietnam in shambles for this reason. Perhaps only China & DPRK have been able to thwart them.

     The Angry Ghost of Wimalasurendra – With threatened power cuts, there is growing pressure to further privatize the petroleum sector, writes Shiran Illanperuma in ‘The Case for Keeping the Petroleum Sector in National Hands’ (see ee Focus). The government has acceded to the US- & English-backed Ceylon Chamber of Commerce’s demand to allow 11 private companies to import fuel. This takes us back to the 1950s, when the import & distribution of fuel in Sri Lanka was an oligopoly of 3 private Euro-US companies – Standard Vacuum Oil Co, California Texas Oil Co or Caltex, and Royal Dutch Shell Group. Shell alone controlled 60% of the market, while Standard & Caltex controlled the remaining 40%.

     It is Shell & others who sabotaged Wimalasurendra’s early vision of energy self-sufficiency. These 3 private fuel suppliers, actually a price-fixing cartel, drained foreign currency, increasing the costs of industrial development, and refused to lower the price of fuel. Ilanperuma provides 4 reasons why the Government ‘must hold the line on public ownership’.  He concludes by stating, ‘The record of industrialising Asia shows that it is public ownership, not private enterprise, that gives the State the tools to manage energy supply in the national interest.’

     Ilanperuma’s next essay should track what happened to Sirimavo Bandaranaike and TB Illangaratne’s Petroleum Corporation Act No 28 of 1961. It led to US Hickenlooper Amendment sanctioning Ceylon, & the attempted coup d’etat of 1962 & the expulsion of the US Peace Corps who are back teaching us (yes, us!) English!! And PCA 1961 also led to… Cuba… & Venezuela… & back it all went to Shell! So, yes, it is an update on the Wimalasurendra tale. In fact, all these ghosts are so angry… (see ee, 20 April 2020).

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• This ee Focus continues with obliterating the myths about the supposed antipathy of the Sinhala worker to hard work. Why were the English (& the kalusuddhas who they created to rule on their behalf) opposed to the creation of a working class in Sri Lanka? Why couldn’t or didn’t they replicate those policies from England, using advanced technology, to wrench out the livelihoods of independent peasants by the competition of the factory and by land enclosures, etc? This ee ends Chapter 8 of SBD de Silva’s 1982 classic, The Political Economy of Underdevelopment, which throws out the prevailing myths about the so-called ‘non-availability’ of village labour in the plantations due to ‘attitudes, values & mores or the innate racial characteristics of people’. He details trade & monetization, showing the ‘prevalence of wage labour in Sri Lanka before and during the period which saw the establishment of plantations’. He then points to Japan, which mobilized rural labor within the rural economy, by getting them to make component parts for urban-based industries, enabling employment by accommodating the agricultural cycle of rice production. This excerpt, which also examines, ‘why the peasant economy in the underdeveloped countries failed to evolve on capitalist lines’, by shifting ‘labour outside the family workshop or farm’, has some classic lines about how the wage worker loses their ‘freedom to decide the pace & pattern of work’. Also, on why the ‘growth of capitalist relations in paddy production has been extremely tardy’, due to  the development of capitalism in agriculture being a ‘far more complex and slower process than in industry.’ While the stupid merchant media in Sri Lanka ignores Sinhala agriculture, SBD’s book offers incredible insights into the ‘specific sequential pattern governed by the natural crop cycle’, where the ‘paddy economy consequently requires a large labour force employed at various degrees of intensity during different times of the year’. He details Wet and Dry Zone agriculture, and examines the Eastern Province & Hambantota district.

     SBD de Silva suggested the absence of landless wage labour was also due to specific pressures on the peasant economy. The English invasion and the growth of the plantations undermined the infrastructure of the paddy economy, their destruction and subsequent decline of irrigation facilities and the loss of access of the peasants to forest land and pastures. He then compared all this to what happened in the settler countries in Africa…

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‘How the Great River Quartet of

Mahaweli, Kelani, Kalu, & Walawe,

& their attendant mid-level streams,

behaved before Ditwah masks the reality

 that they are not the loving & smiling

beauties, poets claim them to be…’

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• Irrigation is also the subject of Lokubanda Tillakaratne’s lyrical (though he claims not to like the ways poets romanticize nature) examination of the ancient Sinhala system. He discusses the Village Tank Cascades in relation to what he calls the ‘Great River Quartet’ and why Cyclone Ditwah was able to do what it did (see ee Focus). He compares the destruction to the relative resilience of the village tanks in the Dry Zone – Northern, North Central, Northeast & Eastern provinces, which ‘weathered that onslaught, sustaining only manageable damage’. He shows how tanks were the result of ‘1,000 years of experiment & experience,’ and how ‘ancient tank builders took advantage of the flat and undulating topography of the NCP to make chains of tanks in the valleys.’ He also points out how it was ‘founded on the feeling of solidarity among the villages along an ephemeral stream’.

     He makes no mention of the destruction of irrigation systems, as being basic to the English invasion of Sri Lanka, or how the imposition of tea plantations made erosion worse and turned the Mahaveli brown. Conversely, he offers no program for the reconstruction of irrigation systems, or that rural industry is also basic to a renaissance.

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• The fattest & heaviest & glossiest section of the weekly Sunday Times is its ‘Education’ supplement. But it is most educational in what it doesn’t say. Sri Lankans are rightly proud that we once hosted one of the oldest universities in the world, Abhayagiriya, but such grandeur is not what such supplements seek to resurrect. Instead, the pleasures of getting a chance to study in the white world, and possibly a visa to go with it, is driven along with images of ‘darkies’ mixing freely & gaily with mortar-board-wearing airbrushed white girls & boys, complete with images of gold-rimmed certificates, etc. ‘A Question of Integrity & Corporate Liability in Transnational Higher Education’ is the subject of Janadari Wijesinghe’s look into this ‘higher education’ game (see ee Focus). She laments how fake foreign degrees are granted & real jobs obtained, with the apparent connivance of imperialist (tho she doesn’t call them that) embassies, whose employees (diplomats included) front for them.

     While the appellation ‘doctor’ & ‘professor’ liberally prefixes the names of people offering prolix advice in the media, we actually do not give a damn about their qualifications unless they are operating on our body parts. SBD de Silva once refused to enter his office at the Hector Kobbekaduwa Agrarian Research & Training Institute (ARTI), when he found a painter inscribing on the glass door his name with ‘Doctor’ added on. His objection? He could be disturbed by patients seeking immediate relief for their agues & pains! Economics like ayurveda requires long-term application apparently.

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• The tremendous upsurging of fake news, especially by the so-called ‘legacy media’, the BBC, New York Times, Reuters, etc, as well as by so-called social media, which is dominated by the manipulations of the Magnificent 7 or 10, uses the latest technologies, to both misinform & disinform, tweaking new items about real events to insert & inject their biases. The use of familiarized tropes that do not make sense when examined – Western, Middle East, etc, also serve to mislead & confuse. Or the use of the passive voice: ‘Iranian Ship Sunk’, ‘The War Continues…’

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‘Authorities determined that the ship would not be kept at Colombo

Port because the harbor is the country’s main commercial maritime

hub, & the presence of a belligerent state’s naval vessel could

affect shipping activity & insurance costs.’

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Diverse ‘belligerents’, including India & Pakistan, USA & Japan, park their ships in our ports. The USA & Iran are both being called ‘belligerents.’ A belligerent is described as an English adjective, meaning ‘hostile & aggressive’, and a noun: ‘a nation or person engaged in war or conflict, as recognized by international law: ships & goods captured at sea by a belligerent’. Was Sri Lanka a belligerent when it resisted repeated attacks by Portugal, Holland & England for over 500 years?  Further, we repeat, that it is not an ‘Iran War’, no more than the English wars on Sri Lanka that are often called ‘Kandyan Wars’. It is not a US-Israeli invasion, either, but a US invasion. Nor is it just a Trump or Republican, Jewish or Epstein invasion. These wars have long been in the planning, tranversing administrations, political parties & their leaders.

     In order to maintain white supremacy, as their Secretary of State hysterically announced in Munich as an urgent necessity, the USA aims to monopolize energy sources, and not just oil. It has instructed its lip-services (aka foeda labiorum ministeria – ‘base services performed with the lips’) in Colombo (EconomyNext etc) to attack electric vehicles & renewable energies, but their aims go beyond mere electricity… (see ee Quotes, Attack Dogs)

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 • Sri Lankans who have either been prevented from knowing their own history, or do not care to know about it, can still catch a glimpse of our past from the images brought to us from Palestine & Iran. Hidden US history is also on display for those with their heads in the white snows, who take seriously what the USA says about themselves, or look upon the USA as a model of democracy. They apparently do not know or care to know how the ‘West’ was really won, or lost or destroyed. The story of the settler colonies is a story SBD de Silva has sought to tell by contrasting them to our own sorry tales as non-settler colonial states. What is happening now exposes clearly to us, history we either ignored or was deliberately hidden from us. We recall the sheer arrogance of our intellectuals who rushed to declare post-coloniality to become masters (minus slaves) & non-medical doctors. Meanwhile, we barely recognized what independence actually entailed. SBD de Silva noted it is the genocidal white settlers who remind us what independence actually entails. Israel is its latest manifestation in Asia, but it is not at all as independent as it claims to be.

     US-led white supremacism has decided to wage war on the world, to at least maintain or even better, advance colonialism. Their allies include the honorary whites, the house kneegrows, who are like the remora who live below the lips of the shark feeding off the excess droppings, or like the tapeworms live off the excesses undigested and unexecreted. These are the people who rule Sri Lanka…

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• Readers (see ee Comments) have many questions about our (really: SBD de Silva’s) take on the plantation system & the garment trade. Yes, there have been tea-plucking machines for a long time in the world (Russia, Japan, etc), and some estates supposedly use them, and one or 2 may ‘assemble’ them, but we are talking of 100,000s of workers, and after over 150 years of this plantation game, there is no mass adoption of mechanization. Also, a measure of an advanced (not only, agricultural) economy, is not a question of output per hectare, but output per worker?  Readers have challenged ee before about how the tea plantation owners used to make their engines, but it did not change the main relations of production, did they? And it did not lead to horizontal or vertical integration, or where one thing leads to another? As for the ‘rag trade’, again, there may be some fabric makers, but what percentage of output do they provide? ‘MAS Holdings, Sri Lanka’s largest apparel manufacturer, announced… Texco Ltd, a cotton fabric processing mill, and Noyon Lanka, a knitted lace manufacturer’. But where are machines & the cotton etc from? and look at why they are howling now about the lack of fabric materials from West Asia! Also, the measure of an economy, is not what is made, but how it is made! Have the plantations (Unilever just opened a new HQ, but are hiding their plantation game behind local oligarchs now, Brown’s, etc) or have rag traders made one machine that makes machines to make their products? A pin-making machine? Unilever appears to be the main researcher into & producer of plantation & FMCG chemistries and has been tampering with the ‘Ceylon Tea’ brand to dilute it with teas & chemicals from other locations? Sri Lanka appears to have no control over its ‘brands’, let alone its sovereignty….

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Contents:

US & India Pressure Sri Lanka to Abandon ‘Neutrality’