e-Con e-News

Posted byee ink.May 30, 2026Posted inUncategorizedTags:China, history, India, news, politics

blog: https://eesrilanka.wordpress.com

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

e-Con e-News 24-30 May 2026

Let the philosophy of plunder disappear, & the philosophy of war will have disappeared! – Cuba’s Commander-in-Chief Fidel Castro Ruz 26 September 1960, at the UN General Assembly,– ee Sovereignty, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno

Rodríguez at Security Council debate

The USA has 171 military bases in Germany, 98 military bases in Japan, 45 military bases in Italy, and 25 military bases in England. They have many more such aggressive fortifications in other parts of the world. This ee Focus continues the exhaustive exposé, Hyper-Imperialism: A Dangerous Decadent New Stage, by the Tricontinental Institute (TI). TI examines the knowns & the unknowns in calculating all such fortresses: Around the world, the USA has altogether 902 known military bases & England has 145 known military bases, many surrounding China & Russia. Yet these are the least of their intrusions.

     Sri Lanka passed from Portuguese, Dutch & English and then to US control in 1948. This was primarily economic at first, and is not subject to much question. Their early political threats to obtain military bases in Sri Lanka are also rarely discussed (see ee 12 October 2019, SWRD). Then again, the extents of the numerous US bases around the world rarely rate repetitive media chatter. This has enabled the USA to claim it is not a colonial oppressor but a bastion of freedom. They too have now grown tired of this make-believe, and that masque is now off. Most of their bases are to ensure that Asia, Africa & the Americas do not escape colonial control. Several exist as telecommunication hubs. TI says their calculations also do not include the USA’s & England’s regular movements of personnel, as well as their privatized militaries. Militias, death squads & ‘schools’, which train US & NATO allies and ‘native’ operatives in terrorism & torture are also not included – these are described in, eg, Edward S Herman & Noam Chomsky’s The Washington Connection & Third World Fascism). In the year 2022 alone, US-led imperialist forces ‘deployed 317 military operations in Global South countries & 137 in Global North allied nations.’ The Military Intervention Project (MIP) contends, ‘between 1776 & 2019, the USA carried out over 392 military interventions worldwide’. (see ee Focus)

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The world is now facing renewed US-led or funded military aggression & pseudo-political manoeuvres (‘Gen-Z color revolutions’) as the USA drives a barely disguised final push to sustain its hegemony into the 2^nd quarter of the 21^st century. Yet there is also a growing worldwide resistance to US economic & political tactics. Venezuela, herald of the Bolivarian Revolution, has had its leaders kidnapped, and is now being variously described as being under ‘military occupation’, ‘coercive tutelage’ & ‘neocolonial administration’. In Cuba, the USA is said to be exerting a ‘maximum pressure campaign’ as part of its ‘submission diplomacy’, denying that nation access to oil. The USA insists they aim to just secure their ‘Western Hemisphere’, though it is unclear where this sphere begins & ends – from the Arctic to the rest of the Americas & Western Africa, to the Antarctic – they aim to ‘zip it, lock it & put it in their pocket’…

     Sri Lanka exists on an international continuum somewhere between the USA’s leading colonies in Europe; including their settler colonies, nominally ‘independent’ countries such as Ghana – where at its capital city Accra’s airport, ‘US soldiers do not need passports or visas to enter (only their US military ID) & US military aircrafts are ‘free from boarding & inspection’ – and actually independent countries like China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and Cuba.

     In Sri Lanka, security accessions to the USA & India are being kept secret. Both the USA & India are all but blockading famed & ancient Gokanna (Trincomalee), preventing it from becoming a regional industrial hub opening out to a vibrant east. It is part of the old colonial strategy of not allowing a nail (& as exemplified by the ‘rag trade’, a pin or a needle) to be made. The much-yapped-about ‘green’ strategy is actually to prevent the country from becoming self-sufficient in any type of energy, fossil, solar or wind – energy security being a must for any industrial advance.

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The US government claims to have changed its mind, yet again. After centuries of opposing & sabotaging industrialization in our countries, their post-1945 Treasury twins (World Bank, IMF), or triplets (plus ADB) or quadruplets (plus WTO) have decided that industrial policy is just what always-developing always-emerging countries need. Really? In 2019, an IMF paper decided to pronounce on ‘the Policy That Shall Not Be Named’. (PS: We like to think that ee inaugurated in 2018, inspired them! Ha! Ha!) In March 2026, a World Bank paper discussed ‘Approaches’ to industrial policy. Wow! – as a thirsty traveler in a desert might expectorate. Shiran Illanperuma, however, has his doubts. So, what exactly do they mean (see ee Focus)?

     Illanperuma points out there are 2 major drawbacks. They ignore how the US Treasury Twins have forced our countries into rampant rentierization (importing non-essential goods, selling resources, property speculation, etc). He then lists the revenge wrought on countries that have attempted real industrialization: sabotage, coups, assassinations, terrorism & wars, from Iran to Ghana to Chile, etc. He notes how they have forced countries to remove monetary policy from elected governments, enforcing so-called ‘Central Bank Independence’, preventing their responsibility to direct investment into modern industrialization.

     Illanperuma also declares that any industrial policy will require the overcoming of those entrenched landed and mercantile interests promoted by the Treasury Twins. Indeed, we wonder if this concern for limited industrialization in our countries (will they harness Mannar’s abundant energy resource, revive the steel corporation, encourage iron mining?) havs anything to do with China’s own industrial power.

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The USA’s economic domination of Sri Lanka begins with its setting up and control of the Central Bank of Ceylon in 1949-50. The US governor encouraged rampant consumerism, and this has continued with regular interventions by the World Bank & IMF to this day. The IMF this week reiterated their demand that the government allow all imports into the country – a condition for their limited largess to supposedly rescue the economy, even as there are loud intimations of a return to an 18^th, 19^th and possibly 20^th panacea. These weeks’ economic dramas were preceded by so-called cyber frauds enacted in a hijacked. development-turned commercial bank, and the country’s finance ministry, ending with the US War Department-linked Paypal, being linked to local banks, so as to ‘enable global payments’ and ‘facilitate participation in the global digital economy.’ Ha!

     While the US government is imposing tariffs and raising barriers to trade, blockading ports, straits & canals around the world, the US Treasury’s triplets (IMF, World Bank, ADB), and their other IFIs (International Financial Institutions) keep unashamedly insisting on ‘free trade’. Their outrageous demands, which have led to Japan & India dumping their used-cars & gas-guzzling vehicles into the country, to obvert any rational public transportation policy as well, also saw a severe loss of foreign exchange and the rapid depreciation of the Rupee. There were then even louder protestations that this ‘crisis’ was not to be compared to the previous 2022 ‘crisis’, that this was not internally induced but largely external due to that ‘Middle East Conflict’ (more properly known as yet another US war).

     The US Treasury’s triplets & their media mouthpieces then demanded the government abstain from ‘pegging the value of the rupee and introducing direct controls over foreign exchange use (including capital controls on financial outflows). Such policies aim to ensure the country remains a Wall-Street-allied casino for laundering money and speculation, while exporters & importers accuse each other and themselves for the depreciation.

     Just before this week’s announcement of the IMF’s release of funds under its ‘Extended Fund Facility (EFF)’, the country saw the rather hushed entry of the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of the US State Department for South & Central Asia, Nicole Chulick. Sri Lanka is apparently ‘under investigation’ by the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) for ‘unfair trade practices.’ In March this year the USTR, under the US Trade Act of 1974, alleged that Sri Lanka has failed to ban the export of ‘goods made with forced labour’. Just after the US secretary’s visit this week, Amnesty International alleged ‘serious’ forced labor abuses of ‘Malaiyaha Tamil workers’ on private tea estates. Meanwhile, rather than Sri Lanka demanding that the USA, England, Holland & Portugal, admit to injustices of over 500 year and pay reparations, this week saw the continuation of a BBC channel-4-muddied drama demanding the resolution of the terrorist attacks in 2019. ‘Channel 4’s central allegation of high-level complicity in the Easter Sunday attacks rests overwhelmingly on the testimony of a single individual’, noted one analyst. England (& its avatara, the USA) are still playing a Sri Lanka, after having tied our hands, or the colonially massaged merchant oligarchy tying it themselves.

     After the Amnesty International & BBC-inspired allegations, a stock of US crude oil (West Texas Intermediate – WTI) was offloaded in Colombo, to show good faith in the tariff negotiations with the USA. The Managing Director of the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation, Mayura Nettikumara then put off questions about less-expensive Russian oil purchases, saying such a ‘need would not arise in the short run’. Meanwhile there were varying reports on how long remaining oil reserves would last.

     Such pronouncements remind that under the present colonial charade, everyone, from President to Prime Minister to Central Bank Governor, and further down, can be replaced by US-programmed AI robots and algorithms conjuring optimism for Wall Street speculators, spluttering outrage, uttering truisms (‘water is wet’), issuing righteous sermons, signalling virtue as scripted in Washington & lesser imperialist capitals, translated & choreographed in marketing agencies and then enacted in Colombo.

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‘In Sri Lanka an alien workforce was foisted

amidst a wholly Sinhala population – yet

removed from the latter & living aloof.’

This ee Focus continues SBD de Silva’s chapter 10 of his classicThe Political Economy of Underdevelopment, where he explains why large tea plantations were created, when smallholdings could do the job just as well. He records how a system of ‘badly paid wage slaves’ were made to confront ‘a land-owning or rice-growing peasantry, Sinhalese Buddhist, enjoying a comparatively fair standard of living.’ The workers were economically boxed into an enclave, and kept separate, with the road system also serving to cut them off from the rest of the country. It turns out that large estates and a migrant workforce were needed due to the nature and exorbitant needs ‘of absentee ownership.

     None of this was essential for growing tea, and de Silva compares its cultivation to Kenya, where smallholdings predominated, as well as examining the cultivation of other staple crops in the Americas. ‘The residential basis of the plantation labour force’ was determined by ‘the profile of labour inputs’, to ensure ‘a continuity of work through the year’. A plantation had to provide regular employment, promoting monoculture, whereas smallholders & cereal growers had to resort to multicropping or engage in several production activities… to fill in the slack periods in any one crop or activity and to derive an income throughout the year’. de Silva also compares the labor needs related to the cultivation of sugar, coffee and rice, and the role played by the emancipation of slaves and subsequently the heavy capital investment in the sugar mills.

     Factory-owners and middlemen paid very low prices for green leaf and rubber latex. This was due to cultivation and processing being monopolized by estates, even though there was no scientific reason to do so. This undermined the competitiveness of smallholders and resulted in colonial ‘barriers to indigenous enterprise’. Tea & rubber thus came to be dominated by foreign capital. In coconut, cultivation was separate from milling, and smallholdings predominated.

     Thus a plantation system in Sri Lanka was created within the framework of the ‘extraterritoriality’ of the investors, living in England. This resulted in heavy management expenses, due to large payments to agency houses and major investments in labor. ‘The use of resident labour tied to the plantation by duress or by social mechanisms was the keystone of its labour system’, explains SBD de Silva. (see ee Focus)

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May 21^st was our 54^th Republic Day, our merchant & moneylender media let it pass largely unheralded and uncelebrated. The English Queen who ruled us for so long now wears drag as an English King. And those against an executive presidency remain still nostalgic for the good old days of English overlordship.

     Where & in which world do our policymakers live? They have long known the USA-led war machine intends to target Asia & Africa. Didn’t they add that to the variables modelling their scenarios and weighting their algorithms that inform their forecasts. The CB governor’s varying excuses also blame ‘global instability’. Is that what they call unrelenting white wars now? Haven’t they been tracking the actions and pronouncements of their white gods? What mistranslation app prevents them from acknoweldging the rantings of the scum of the earth, about Europe being a garden & the rest of the world an encroaching jungle, calling nations, shitholes, etc      

     It’s hard not to recall the novelist (& ‘white socialist’) Jack London, who in 1910 penned the futuristic tale, ‘The Unparalleled Invasion’, set in the 1970s-80s, where white nations respond to China’s rise, with biological warfare, bombarding China with the most infectious diseases. The increased terrorist attacks on countries having friendly relations with China, and the spread of Ebola, follow China declaration of tariff-free access to African goods

     It’s also hard not to link the supposed ‘peace walk’ by monks from Texas, that went to Washington but then avoided Washington’s wars on Gaza, Ukraine, Iran & Lebanon, and instead arrived in Sri Lanka to much media adulation, leaving in their wake, increasing attacks on the local Sangha. It is important to recall that it is the Sangha that led the resistance to colonial rule, prevailing through the repression….

     We wish our readers, on this full moon, a serene Vesak, through the many moons & suns to come…

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Contents:

Sri Lanka in the USA’s Wars on the World