e-Con e-News

Posted byee ink.June 6, 2026Posted inUncategorizedTags:13th Amendment, chattel-slavery, history, India, politics, travel, US Constitution, USA

blog: https://eesrilanka.wordpress.com

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

e-Con e-News 31 May – 06 June 2026

‘We have in the Tamil coolie a perfect machine for the cultivation of our tea, coffee, or other tropical produce.’ Chief Justice of Sri Lanka, Lovell B Clarence, 1896

The retired Chief Justice was celebrating the centenary of English rule in Sri Lanka. He had lived in the country for over 25 years, recalls SBD de Silva’s classic The Political Economy of Underdevelopment (see ee Focus). Justice Clarence was intimate with ‘tropical produce’. The plantation system, which derives from the system of chattel slavery, was first practised in the Americas, and ensured that children were also born enslaved, employing all members of the family for life. This system has informed the practices of wage slavery and the ‘human resources’ of Sri Lanka to this day, and SBD describes how the so-called ‘training’ imparted to plantation workers was primarily:

‘The conditioning of the labourer to adverse pay & working conditions involving the relentless routine of simple, repetitive tasks.’

SBD recalled that, in fact, no such other skills were imparted or required. The plantation system (neither modern, industrial nor capitalist) allows no use of technology to the majority of its workers (tea pluckers), whereas modern industrial organization has to entrust workers with expensive & complex machinery. On plantations, daily punishments were necessary, hence the reference to their routines as ‘tasks’:

‘The word ‘tasks‘ was suggestive of a moralistic basis on

which work was extracted. The expression originated

in the plantations of the Americas where the enslaved had

to be made obedient & industrious… The plantation kept

careful count & punished those who did not fulfil the

required amount of tasks just as Jesus Christ the

omnipresent overseer condemned them for neglecting

their religious duty. The Indian Labour Code, which

applied to plantation workers in Sri Lanka, asserted that

the eviction of the entire family of any worker who was

dismissed ‘preserved the sanctity of the family‘.’

So, while no use of machinery was to be allowed to the worker, the worker themselves were to be treated as machines. Hence the reference by the ‘Chief Justice’ (who, by the way, was an ‘acting’ CJ only for 1882). The recollections of the Chief Justices of Ceylon had also been a source of great insight to Karl Marx. In the last years of his life, Marx examined the 13^th Chief Justice of colonial Ceylon 1877-79, John Budd Phear’s book The Aryan Village in India & Ceylon (1880), and the Colonial Council of India’s Henry Maine’s Ancient Law: on which English law (if they have such) is based to this day. While Marx called Phear a donkey, he (& Friedrich Engels) learned of Sri Lanka’s insights into the origins of class division, state formation, communal & private property (see ee 11 July 2020, Cool Marx on SL). Justice Phear, we should add, had an outré interest in linking the anthropological origins of the Sinhala to the marriage of China & Africa!

     This ee Focus completes Chapter 10 of SBD’s classic (see ee Focus), which explains how the ‘largeness’ of plantations were neither an agronomic or technical necessity, but was due to justifying heavy management costs as well as the recruitment & treatment of labor. This in turn was due to absentee ownership (in Colombo & London), as well as the employing of migrant labor and paying them low wages. This primitive and inefficient plantation system has survived due to the colonial disabilities imposed on smallholdings, which are more productive than plantations. Rice cultivation, which is a much more complex endeavor, has also been deprived of important technological inputs (cooperative organization, irrigation, fertilizer, cultivation & harvest) which are left to the depredations of the finance companies, financed by imperialist ‘development’ banks, who promote their second-hand industrial machineries.

*

‘Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude,

except as a punishment for crime whereof the party

shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within

the USA, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.’

– US Constitution

Slavery is still legal in the USA. It was never fully abolished. The 1865 13^th Amendment to the US Constitution, which claimed to abolish slavery permits bondage in prison. Hence the hugely disproportionate incarceration of African & non-Anglo-American men & women in the USA to this day. That old world of always new ironies & contradictions made us recall that ‘13^th loophole’ for enslavers, since the US government this week has threatened an additional 12.5% tax on imports from Sri Lanka & 54 other countries. They claim we have failed to prevent the entry of goods produced through forced labour. As usual the imperialists’ own mouthpieces in Sri Lanka, the chamber of commerce, and the rag traders aka apparel businesses, immediately squawked in dismay. Many of them rely on the USA as their single largest export destination. However, these chambers and traders and their channels will not point out to the USA’s own enslaved workers.

     In November 2025, a lawsuit was filed against colonized Korea’s car companies Hyundai & Kia for using imprisoned labor in Alabama & Georgia violating some of the USA’s own internal states’ laws & public purchasing standards. The imprisoned workers are underpaid & mistreated, providing Hyundai & Kia an ‘unfair competitive advantage in the automotive sales market’; suppressing the wages and working conditions of the most oppressed affects all workers. In the USA most states require prisoners to work, and those who do, work for government agencies, even as most are forcibly kept idle. The lawsuit also points to children (many Mexican & Central American citizens) working in the Hyundai & KIA plants. Yet, child labor was purportedly abolished only in the 1940s.

     So, when the US-funded National Peace Council, Amnesty International & the US Trade Representative stick their heads out of their thorny nests and crow like hungry birds in shrill unison about ‘forced labor’, all we can do is titter in a studied revulsion. The ‘coolie’ in Sri Lanka, contrary to the exculpations of politicians & separatist nationalists, is a product of the English government and their colonial satraps and grey sahibs in Delhi, Colombo and Jaffna, no matter their lamentations of the fate of the now-renamed Malaiyaha Tamils who they seek to counterpose to the reparations due to the highland Sinhala. The USA, however, cares not a pretty penny for slaves in Sri Lanka, but only about blocking any modern economic relationship with China…

*

England’s Ceylon Tobacco Company (CTC), owned by the British American Tobacco Co (BAT), as well as Unilever PLC, has been the subject & object of much of ee’s inquiries into the inordinate role they play, both in Sri Lanka’s economy as well as our culture (marketing, media, arts), etc (see ee 01 March 2025). The US-funded think-tank Verité, which is not known for their pugilistic style, per se, unless they are repeating the verities of the IMF, etc, should be congratulated for recently taking on Ceylon Tobacco Co & their massive avoidance of taxes (see ee Random Notes, English Smokes). Of course, Verité only mentions the company’s name just once, nor is there reference to CTC being a monopoly, which would normally be abhorred by the whoremongers of selective free-trade, let alone by the USA’s other yipping poodle Advocata. The CTC chairman Suresh Shah is also the head of the Catholic-Church-linked Hatton National Bank, and was responsible for privatizing national resources (SOERU) which would have given him & his sidekicks open access to state secrets, no?  Nevertheless, while it bravely alludes, without naming CTC, to its promotion of fake news, it doesn’t mention CTC’s sponsorships of politicians, including footnote fetishist Harsha de Silva. Let us see where this leads them, though we wonder whether they will stop at this multinational behemoth alone, and extend their inquiries into the banks such as Standard Chartered, Citibank, HSBC, and other MNCs, that enable this drainage, and more importantly prevent investment in modern industry…

     Why do these traders, merchants, moneylenders, their chambers of commerce & related thinktanks submit to a clearly unfair economic & political system? We suggest it is due to their stashing away of the country’s wealth in the banks & real-estates of the USA, England & Europe, and the knowing wink & a shrug by their related envoys who get to spend days in coats & ties and skirts in air-conditioned hotel halls, and issue nauseating, clearly hypocritical sermons on ecology & gender equality & the rule of law, while arming & waging horrific wars on the world. A Centre for Wealth Analysis is truly a crying need in Sri Lanka, even as the German government is fixated on continuing their funding of ‘poverty analysis’, which only serves to fatten the offshore bank accounts of selected economists & NGO operators, who toe the import-export plantation line… and its rooms…

The recent tremendous hikes of oil prices in Sri Lanka, over & above world indices, have seen calls for closer auditing of the actual shipments of oil coming, and if they correspond to this huge expense.

*

‘They are close to 3 times the average monthly import bill on petroleum.

These excessive imports could possibly be an incidence of over-invoicing

of imports to shift capital & US$s out of the economy disguised as

legitimate imports. With over 50% of the market being controlled by foreign

suppliers the risk of capital flight through these channels increases rapidly.’

– Dhanusha Pathirana, FB

*

This stashing away and related tax evasions also explain why our merchant media cannot get simple terminology exact. The current upsurge in turmoil is due to the latest US wars on Iran & West Asia, and yet the merchant media calls it an ‘oil crisis’. Even Muslim & Borah (who are Shia, and it’s their spiritual leaders, the Ayatollahs, being murdered) are happy to play tribal games and blame Jews & Zionists. But Israel is just the latest white settler statelet of Europe, the subsidiary of their subsidiary, the United Settlers of the Americas (USA). These Zionists running Israel are actually Nazis who helped send their co-religionists into gas chambers. The UAE etc are hand in pocket with Israel in genociding East Africa, and belong to the same Arab strains that allied with the Nazis. Israel is the USA, spiritual white settler model for the fascists. The Ceylon Chamber of Commerce is the USA. So are the thinktanks – Advocata (whose Catholics & Borahs & Chettiar – Maharajas – have an eerie fixation on menstruation, real-estate & car importation), IPS, Verite, etc, & media. The Persian Gulf (now reduced to the Straits of Hormuz) was closed not by Iran, but by the USA (& their shipping insurance agencies) from the very beginning. The incessant arrivals in Colombo of warships from India, Pakistan, Europe & Japan don’t intend to defend their countries from the greatest warlords the world has ever known, for whom peace is a provocation, whose actual ‘overcapacity’ is in weaponry for mass murder. Meanwhile, their NGOs have switched from attacking the Executive Presidency to attacking the Sangha. Perhaps it may also have to do with this season of Vesak & Poson, which acutely relates to the organization of agriculture (but this real ‘national question’ is neglected, instead the printed word is given over to ravings about saving exotic species of flamingos, leopards, snakes, ice caps, etc). There’s always something rotting in England and the impending visit this coming week of their ‘Lord Chamberlain’ commanded by the gay Charles III to visit the London Vihara, portends some ‘return’ is suppurating and in the offing (see ee Random Notes).

     The Sangha like every other institution in this country – including University Professors, & bankers & CEOs – are a reflection of the constituencies they serve. The Sangha has an even greater history of serving the country – many are organically linked to the rural peasantry – and have given leadership to the resistance to colonial depredations, hence being recipients of both repression & inducements.  

*

A pseudonymous article in the Wijeya Group’s FT on the X-press Pearl, by the anonymous ‘Lighthouse Guard’, takes up the cause of the ship’s captain who has been held without trial for several years. The Lighthouse Guard alludes to mysterious ways by which so-called corruption (tho in a merchant-run society it really should be termed ‘rentier business as usual’) and how the courts work. This week saw the President meet ‘privately’ with judges including those magistrates & judges pursuing high-profile cases against political opponents. We wonder if the Wijeya Group’s FT, if not the Seafarers’ Union, let alone the numerous Rockefeller-related agencies promoting the education of seafarers, could take up the cause of the lonely unnamed Sri Lankan seafarer held hostage in the USA for over a year now after the crash of that ship Dali, carrying curious containers headed for Sri Lanka, which crashed the Baltimore bridge. He is being held hostage along with a crew, of mostly Indian workers. If it helps to publicize his arrest, the FT could add that he is Tamil, which may get the NGO-oids going, but this involves confronting their wet nurse, the USA…

*

‘In the handful of media engagements I have participated in, I’ve

always found the line of questioning about the economy to be

deeply limiting & shortsighted. ‘What is the state of our reserves?

Will the rupee go up or down against the dollar?’ It is in the nature

of a financial speculator to obsess over day-to-day market fluctuations,

and we have all been taught to think like that. It is not the journalist

but the institutionalisation of neoclassical economics that is to blame.’

Neither JVP-NPP (in power, and yet having no power, other than to prepare for re-election to no-power) nor Opposition (nor merchant media) have a plan to stabilise the economy and spur growth. If they do, they are not telling. In this ee Focus, Shiran Illanperuma brilliantly explains how to analyse the media’s take on the economy. The ‘news’ turns out to be all about how to maintain the casino. He dissects the obsession with the rupee-dollar dance, and ‘money printing’. He shows why the US government (via their Federal Reserve – actually a cosa nostra of commercial banks, US Treasury, IMF, World Bank, ADB etc) has been so single-minded in ensuring the government cannot finance modern industry, undermining the country’s production structure. He also points out that the actual purpose of depreciation is to rob the wages of the worker.

‘Neoclassical economics has long abandoned

the bigger questions that classical political

economy & development economics sought

to answer: Why do nations get rich (or stay

poor)? How is society organised in the

production of value? Who are the winners

& losers in the distribution of that value?’

*

Europe’s invasion of Lanka began in 1505, and while their invasion of the Americas began with the attack on the Caribbean in 1492, their actual militarized ‘trajectory as a world hegemon’ began in Africa, with the capture in 1415, funded by Genoese capital, of Ceuta in Morocco by Portugal, the first European colonial power. Genoan capital moved to Lisbon, after their defeat by Venice, who then monopolized Europe’s access to the east. Thus:

For the 1^st time in over 600 years, there is now a credible economic

& political alternative to the domination of world affairs by the

Europeans & their descendant white-settler colonial states. First,

is the socialist grouping led by China. Second, are the growing

aspirations for national sovereignty, economic modernisation,

& multilateralism, emerging from the Global South.

This explains the current rage and outrageousness, genocidal fury & advertised irrationality of the cacophonous concert of whiteness on naked display on the world stage, that seeks to take down the entire planet in a conflagration of fire. ee continues to detail the factors behind the daily news, through the Tricontinental Research Institute’s amazing study of ‘Hyper-Imperialism: a Dangerous Decadent New Stage’ (see ee Focus). We begin ‘Part II: Evolution of Imperialism – the New Stage of Imperialism’ which dates the attempt at a unipolar world order, midst the USA’s dollar monopoly and its switch from ‘a creditor to debtor nation’. Tricontinental examines the nature of the inter-imperialist rivalries, and the rapid advance of hybrid warfare (including sanctions), seizing other nations’ reserves, as it seeks to rely on its military (rather than economic) power, while manipulating its dollar hegemony and soft-power over digital media.

     Meanwhile, the rest of the world, outside of the USA’s armed poodles, eg, Germany & Japan, are growing tired of its conceits. Tricontinental details the efforts to unite a fragmented underdeveloped world, who yet have a shared history. Sri Lanka sits & stands at the crux & crossroads of this earth-shaking endeavor and it is no wonder that the USA (United Snakes of Amnesia) are desperate, despite a seeming coyness (there is no US envoy in sight, even as they are gifting us secondhand & ineffective machineries, minus any attempt to promote modern manufacture of the parts these dilapidated buckets will soon need) to undermine our cultural fastnesses and prevent our alliance with both China & Africa, a historically anticipated, and burgeoning unity which will surely determine the path of the remaining 3-quarters of the 21^st century.

*

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Contents:

The USA Evades its Angry Ghosts in Sri Lanka