e-Con e-News

blog: https://eesrilanka.wordpress.com

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

e-Con e-News 10-16 May 2026

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‘In Thailand, the Philippines, Bangladesh & Australia…

the first since the war to enter key sowing periods, farmers

are choosing to skip or reduce planting, or cut fertilizer use,

which will lower yield… In June, India & Brazil, two of the

world’s biggest agricultural producers, will ramp up orders

for urea. If, by then, vessels carrying urea are not sailing,

there will be ‘significant yield loss’ across many countries.’

– see ee Agriculture, US war is crushing Asia’s farmers

The USA extends its toxic tentacles far beyond South and East Asia, and is disrupting everybody else’s agricultural cycles. This is primarily due to the US war & blockade of West Asia & East Africa. They are hindering Sri Lanka’s access to fuels & related chemicals – which we curiously have to obtain via Singapore, which is far to the east of us! Sri Lanka is even prevented from buying fuel directly from Russia. ‘The Lanka Indian Oil Co (LIOC) should be renamed the Lanka Indian Russian Oil Co (LIROC)’, as one wag quips.

     Having long promoted the Ford & Rockefeller Foundations’ ‘Green Revolution’ from the 1960s, accentuating transnational import-export agriculture (to oppose ‘Red Revolution’ in the countryside), with crops & cultivators becoming addicted to chemicals, the USA is now blocking access to these fertilizers & pesticides from West Asia. Their recent moves here suggest they aim to turn SL agriculture & diets into an appendage of a bloated US agribusiness.

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 ‘On 28 April 2026, the commander of US Forces in Korea,

General Xavier Brunson told the Japan Times,

Washington is building a ‘kill web‘ – a networked

system fusing S. Korea, Japan & the Philippines into a

single architecture against China, Russia & North Korea.’

’ – Tings Chak, ee Random Notes, Hands off Asia

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The English media, however, are still busy cooing love songs to US President D Trump’s supposedly suave & rant-free visit to the People’s Republic of China. However, he did not get his bragged-about hug from President Xi, and his corporate escorts, at least 20 top CEOs, also returned home, empty-handed…. The media pointedly ignore how the visit began in the wake of the US war games south of China in the Philippines. The largest US military exercises in the Philippines, Balikatan 2026, hosted 17,000 foreign troops from 7 nations including Canada, Australia, France, New Zealand, & Japan. Japan has also now stationed anti-ship missiles there, and the USA has set up a new fuel depot. The Philippines, which the USA has brutally colonized for over 125 years, has also ‘granted’ 4,000 acres for a US-controlled high-tech zone – the Pax Silica Initiative – operating under US common law and granted diplomatic immunity, on a lease renewable for 99 years. Let us see… next week, Russian President V Putin goes to Beijing.

     Prolonging its brutal war (via Israel) on Lebanon, the USA is also having its ally England send a warship HMS Dragon, an aerial war destroyer, into the eastern Indian Ocean. It was sent from the eastern Mediterranean to join another US ally (supposedly coy) France’s deployment of its ‘carrier strike group’ to the southern Red Sea, to ‘restore confidence in the trade route’.

North and west of us, India is tight hugging onto the USA’s killer poodles, Israel & the UAE. The UAE, that sand-dusted English colony, recently disrupted both OPEC & BRICS, and is waging war on the Sudan. may also explain India’s urgent demand to build their Hanuman Bridge to link Tamilnadu with Sri Lanka (High Commissioner Jha: ‘but let me say clearly: the time for wavering is over.’)  The timing is no coincidence. This coming week will see 17 years since the end of a terrorist war funded & fanned by India, and they seek to dampen any triumphalism. Their promotion of the terrorist war was also claimed as being due to then-Indian-PM Indira Gandhi’s ire at then-Lankan-President JR Jayewardene offering Trincomalee to the US to pre-empt India grabbing hold of it. Perhaps the USA too plots to send a peacekeeping (or peace-killing) force into Sri Lanka…

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The main opposition party, SJB, frantically signaling Left (with the SJB leader wailing the IMF won’t speak to him, as if he’s offered us any clear alternative vision) is perhaps a prelude to their actual & eventual turning to the Right, to join up on their ancestral couch beside the now almost defunct UNP, whose policies are being tailed by the ruling NPP. The SJB & UNP united might make for a mighty reunion. The SJB leader’s father apparently drove the English envoy & Indian army out of Sri Lanka and paid the ultimate price for such hubris…

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Still, it is somewhat cute to see the NPP President & PM thrill at the purported entry of the white German-South-African & now US citizen Peter Thiel’s PayPal, an online payment system, into Sri Lanka, ‘after over a decade of discussions’. Thiel is the owner of the US War Department’s spinoff Palantir, which claims to monitor all internet traffic & helps physically (kinetically!) target their enemies. Thiel is also a big donor to the US President & Vice President’s electoral coffers. PayPal’s entry comes (serendipitously!) right after major cyber swindles at the Treasury & the privatized NDB (whose owners include the EPF, the workers’ pension fund, which has failed to invest in industrially upskilling workers). What can Palantir tell us about these recent swindles? If their god doesn’t know, the US War Department would. Palantir is also linked to France’s security agencies & Airbus! PayPal indeed!

Monkey, tails, tales & bridges, stretch out & over in different avatara…

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• Imperialism has long been seeking to also cut Sri Lanka off from China. Yet they are not just targeting Sri Lanka, but all of Asia, south, east, central, north & west, using not just warfare but also lawfare, sanctions & tariffs. This is not due to the lunacy of a single white man. Their aims have the backing of the largest corporations in the world – multinational corporations (MNCs), wealthier than most countries. Welcome to HyperImperialism!

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‘It is the imperialism of a drowning billionaire who firmly

believes he ought to be back on his yacht. It flexes the

muscles of power that are still strong – the military.’

– Tricontinental Institute, ee Focus

This ee Focus begins to serialize a profound study by the Tricontinental Research Institute, about the decline of traditional imperialist hegemony & the ‘kinetic’ perils arising from its decay. (Kinetic is the latest euphemism for direct military combat, first popularized by the US government during their wars on Iraq & Afghanistan).

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‘Hegemony is historically lost in 3 stages:

production, finance, & military’

– Tricontinental, ee Focus

Tricontinental’s research provides a detailed assessment of the decline of imperialist economies, the economic advances made by socialist countries, the resistance movements of the last decades, the consequent repression & what needs to be done. From the open military & economic subordination of Europe to extending US-led NATO war on Russia, to US funding & arming of the Israeli genocide in Palestine & Lebanon, the study surveys the plans & attempts to tame resistance, as well as the limitations of imperialist reaction.

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‘Socialism sounds good on paper, but it has never worked in practice…

If socialism is dismissed not because it is undesirable but because it

is supposedly impractical, then the question is no longer philosophical.

It becomes concrete. What does it mean for a system to work in practice?’

‘Socialism is dead.’ ‘Marx was an impractical dreamer…Engels was a capitalist…Lenin recanted on his deathbed, & became a Catholic…Stalin: an oriental despot… Mao: a peasant rube.’  Countries such as the USSR, China, DPRK, Cuba, Vietnam, who have openly declared they are socialist, ‘don’t really know about true socialism.’ Such are the hourly calumnies showered on the world by the English media. Real socialism exists only within the skulls of the fringiest sect or tenured scholar or glossy magazine with radical titling, in London or New York. Such are the perverse prevarications, the English media & their foghorns scream out, in their shrillest falsettos when daily conversations or choreographed discussions or academic lectures turn to ‘socialism’. Kapone (no relation to Chicago Al) challenges what has been fabricated into ‘common sense’. He guides us, through socialism as it has actually been practised in the 20^th century to this day, dispensing with the numerous euphemisms, charting its ups & downs, advances & retreats, is failures & achievements. (see ee Focus)

The plantation system produced the raw materials

– sugar, cotton, tobacco – that fed industrial

capitalism. Banks financed it. Insurance companies

secured it. States protected it. The market, we are told,

is neutral. But here the market is soaked in blood.

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Kapone starts with the economics of transformation, how socialist countries have challenged capitalist impoverishment and actually extended human life, advancing agriculture and innovating modern industry despite invasions, and world wars: the USSR turned into one of the fastest-growing economies of the 20^th century. China overturned warlordism & colonial domination into building the 2^nd-largest economy in the world. Cuba, from slavery & gangsterism, to a model of education & healthcare for all midst a crippling & tightening US siege & blockade. Vietnam defeated repeated invasions & endured destruction. Korea with mass resistance challenged genocidal wars that divided their country.

Kwame Nkrumah argued that political independence

without economic control produces neocolonialism, where

formal democracy exists but real power remains external.

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• Sri Lanka is being crashed headlong into an 18^th IMF program (some say it’s the 19^th loansharking, if we add the post-cyclone loans). After the failure to fulfil any electoral promises to resurrect the economy, the latest US war has ensured none of their severe demands (privatizing national resources & making workers even more insecure, their main demands) can be fulfilled without sending the economy truly over the edge. The Central Bank governor who went into hiding after the recent Treasury & NDB swindles, is back in the news headlines, all water pistols (to make us cry) & imported cylinders firing (to use up some fuel), making all kinds of contradictory pronouncements. We get the impression it is some kind of swansong before he is kicked upstairs & overseas, for his slavish devotion to imperial dictate, into some stipendiary retirement farm tended by the IMF, World Bank or ADB. His gems this week include:

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‘I want to make it very clear. CBSL would not promote

growth or productivity of the economy’ – CBSL

Governor Nandalal Weerasinghe (ee Quotes)

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‘Central Bank keeps market

guessing on next rate move’

– see ee Economists

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‘Sri Lanka has to compromise growth

if it chooses lower inflation target’

– CBSL Governor (see ee Economists)

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‘CBSL Chief Explains Slow but

Steady Economic Comeback’

– see ee Economists

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‘Lanka Rupee depreciation driven

by global trends, CBSL governor claims’

– see ee Economists

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‘As the ‘Banker to the Government,’ the CBSL’s Chief

Accounting Department merely executes orders.’

–CB Governor, ee Security, CBSL Not Responsible

for verifying debt payment instructions

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‘Gov Nandalal Weerasinghe says CBSL acts as

banker to Govt & executes payment instructions

as directed.’ – ee Security

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‘While the CBSL told CoPF that no unusual activity

had been detected during the period of the fraud, questions

have intensified after NDB’s audited 2025 accounts showed

a sharp rise in receivables linked to CEFT transactions to

Rs12.2bn from Rs3.1bn a year earlier, with analysts arguing

that the increase should have triggered scrutiny from

management, auditors, & regulators’ – ee Security, CBSL

distances supervisory role from Treasury & NDB scams

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‘Governments can & do change people’s

behaviour by changing the policy incentives.’

– see Srimal Abeyratne (ee Economists)

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• The rains have returned & people are being flooded out. Nothing new. Soon the media will be full of drought stories again. In between watery inundation & scorching depredations, the traders, corporations & the merchant media will be giving each other & themselves awards. Meanwhile, we are being slowly introduced to Weerasinghe’s up & coming replacement, a clone actually: Central Bank Deputy Governor Chandranath Amarasekara. This DG, just this week, lectured the Gamani Corea Foundation & the Economic Association (SLEA), parroting the US Treasury-IMF’s stale shibboleths, promoting his eminent suitability, and then declared, ‘We have lived beyond our means for decades’ (see ee Quotes).

     Really? Who exactly has lived beyond their means? Amarasekara’s pronouncements recalls the fast-going obsolescent Indrajith Coomaraswamy, another ex-CB governor (& now an imported cement company board director), who claims Sri Lanka has been ruled by ‘populism’. Was continuing the import-export plantation economy post-1948, due to populism? These officials & economists are trapped between lobbing severe threats at the people, and conjuring optimism for their financial overlords. As for this business of ‘growth’, which is measured by dubious indices such as GDP & average per-capita income, in countries where less than 10% of the population own over 80% of its assets, the Indian economist Prabhat Patnaik declares:

‘The average real income of the working people,

who constitute 80-90% of the population, would be

a better index than the average real income of the

entire population.’ (see ee Economists,

What is Real Economic Development?)

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• SBD de Silva provides the answers to exactly who has ‘lived beyond their means’ in Sri Lanka, and for more than a few ‘decades’. Also, last week saw a university professor & Sunday Times economist (who also monotonously repeats all the US Treasury tropes) lament the takeover of the ‘champagne’ of tea cultivation by ‘potato curry’ – that is, cultivators (& middlemen) are finding it more profitable to grow potatoes (which he blames on unfair protective tariffs) than ‘beautiful tea’ (both of which have caused immense erosion). SBD, however, succinctly eviscerated the inefficiency of the plantation oligarchy that still dominates us (see ee Focus). Absentee ownership, subordinated to merchant capital, & the rule of their local representatives in the agency houses, led to ‘heavy overhead expenses’ due to:

‘Inflated prices payable by the plantations for materials & inputs

supplied by the agency – fertilizer, agricultural implements, tea

chests etc – &… payments to persons in an ‘elaborate

hierarchy‘ drawing salaries, commissions & fees’

This wasteful overhead expenditure, and the privileges afforded only to European owners & officials, affected the scale & relations of production and demanded large-scale plantations, which have had no real advantage over small-holder agriculture. ee begins Chapter 10 of SBD’s classic The Political Economy of Underdevelopment, which exposes the inefficiency of such plantations. The much-advertized imagery about plantations is monopolized by rolling hills of undulating green, with happy hooded women plucking leaves by hand, disabused of mechanization for over 150 years. de Silva showed how plantations cannot be considered modern farming, tracing its origins to the use of enslaved labor on extremely intensive tobacco cultivation in the USA, as well as the high freight rates & trade monopolies due to the colonial relationship with England. He described the transfer of the plantation belt from the northern to the southern USA, and subsequent effects of their wars.

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• Last week ‘caught us napping’, when the US platform WordPress (WP) all of a sudden ‘suspended’ e-Con e-News, blocking our regular online presence, a few seconds after the latest stories were posted. WP is the platform ‘hosting’ ee, and in perhaps one keystroke, disrupted worldwide access to our work. Regular readers may have been confused, when they were greeted by WP’s abrupt declaration:

‘eesrilanka.wordpress.com is no longer available.

This blog has been archived or suspended in

accordance with our Terms of Service.’

     Today is ee’s 422^nd issue, in its almost 8^th year as an unfunded weekly blog. ee was launched to spread the ideas of our teacher, the economist SBD de Silva. He taught us, though not in any formal institution, what most are paid not to teach – about industrial literacy & practice, with examples from all around the world.

     So last week we certainly were indeed somewhat taken aback, perhaps grown too comfortable. Friends have always warned us that the invisible US owners of this ‘free’ service, could at any time deny access to our own work.

     Luckily, Lankaweb News & Forum (lankaweb.com) carried the entire issue. We appreciate Lankaweb’s support!

     Again, thanks to more tech-savvy friends, we did figure out how to ask the ‘support document’ WP offers with the ‘suspension’, why they did such a reprehensible thing? Their feedback algorithm was the only means they offered. We filled out the requisite letter of appeal. It sounded like shouting into an empty well, and hearing only your echo. Or dropping a stone & not hearing even it hit any surface.

     Then again, WordPress.com is a very large US corporation, with perhaps millions of users, and may not deign it necessary to respond individually to a relatively miniscule publication in a once-far-off ocean. Still, it seemed they felt sufficiently disaffected to cut us off pronto, minus any right to answer for their actions. WP is owned & operated by Automattic, ‘a for-profit company’ founded by Matt Mullenweg, a co-owner of the ‘open-source’ WordPress software. Automattic also owns other major web properties, including WooCommerce, Jetpack, Tumblr, Gravatar, WordPress VIP.

     Finally, 2 days later WordPress ‘reinstated’ ee. WP claimed that our site had been ‘flagged’ by their ‘automated anti-spam controls’. ‘We have reviewed your site & have removed the suspension notice… We apologize for this error & any inconvenience it may have caused.’ That’s it. No other reasons have been given & we have not pursued the matter further. ee is also seeking alternate platforms, so as to be less subject to the whimsies of any decadent & dying hand. 

     And yet, like readers, we did wonder what on earth might have ‘triggered’ their ‘controls’? While we will not change our ideas, we are left with many imaginings & the usual chill. ee has published over 400 entries over 8 years. The last ee issue, that perhaps triggered their ‘controls’, was about who exactly rules the USA, even as it seeks to further dominate Sri Lanka. Please check it out (ee 09 May 2026). It’s intriguing, what exactly might ‘trigger’ such sensitive powers. Perhaps, the USA wishes to tell us that its instruments already control Sri Lanka?

     We are fully aware that the USA seeks to keep control of the vast internet highways, just as it seeks to control the waterways that surround us. They claim to have originated the internet (not true, ask socialist Chile of pre-1974). They perhaps wish to treat this ‘electronic highway’ as their own, much like the English claimed the ‘Kandy Road’ as theirs. The ‘Kandy Road’ was actually built by enslaved & unfree labor to invade the highlands, and push the English import-export plantation-to-port swindle. Edward Barnes, the English colonial governor in Ceylon, said he had roads built to ‘destroy the confidence of the people’ from the protection afforded by natural terrain. Though of course the Kandy Road existed long before the English & other invaders arrived, and will continue long after them

     Like the Kandy Road, the internet too was built by the unpaid & underpaid labor of numerous hands & heads. The internet’s cables slither through & around us and under our seas, and ee has sought to use this road, to do something different from what the English & the USA have intended: We wish to build up our people’s own confidence and we have used the medium as a carriageway to promote a real economy, a modern industrial (machine-making-machine) society. Of course, such a machine-building economy will not be accomplished overnight. Yet, even this possibility has never been allowed us by imperialist powers, so it will only be possible if we focus on our own country’s needs at all times, and work towards such changes, with such specific goals in mind at every single step. This is essential to the country’s self-sufficiency & security, if it is to remain an independent polity.

     ee has sought to promote real literacy – economic & historical literacy, including an industrial knowhow – not the type of innumerate illiteracy that receives awards for disparaging a people or a nation best – a people & a nation who have been withstanding a siege of over 500 years. We have sought to spark a national conversation about industrialization, fully aware that a merchant & moneylender & multinational corporation-dominated media seeks to sabotage such endeavours, and maintain the colonial status-quo, which is now perpetuated by the USA, England, the EU, India, & their local ‘chamber’ orchestras & thinktanks, etc. As our ee masthead declares: ‘Before you study the economics, study the economists.’ Please keep supporting a media excavator & forensic news analyses that go beyond the news, looking at why certain (mostly fake or distorted) news is being reported, & what is mostly not narrated to us in this world….

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Contents:

US Wars on Asia Disrupt Agriculture & Food in Sri Lanka