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Posted byee ink.July 18, 2026Posted inUncategorizedTags:ambeon-capital-plc, capital-metals-plc, fifa, history, imperialism, India, marxism, politics

blog: https://eesrilanka.wordpress.com

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

e-Con e-News 12-18 July 2026

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The multibillion-dollar 2026 Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA)’s World Cup finals have been staged between an imperialist state (Spain) & a quasi-settler-colonial state (Argentina) – both Spanish-speaking & Catholic. Their semi-finals were staged between 2 imperialist states, one a secular republic ruled by French Catholics, and the other a monarchy ruled by English Protestants. All teams deployed indigenous & African mercenaries on leash and lease, as high-salaried ‘star’ players. Depriving the countries of the talent they nurtured, stolen & bought Africans played against stolen & bought Africans, all brightly displaying the logos of multinational corporations (MNCs) that pillage the world & their countries of origin. The imperialists cheered their national teams on.

     The finals were played out on soil stolen by the leading imperialist & English-speaking, Protestant-ruled settler-colonial state. This state (USA) has demanded the flouting of the rules of the game, while, off-field, is fighting undeclared wars around the world. A mainly working-class game, football,has now been hijacked, becoming unaffordable for most people to attend or even watch.

     Where, we wondered, would ee’s muse, SBD de Silva, place Argentina, a country with double the population of Sri Lanka, with about 20% being mestizo & indigenous, and a leader, proud of his white colonial forebears who brandishes a chain saw to symbolize the cutting away of social services to the people. A country that has also had to endure unadvertised ‘Dirty Little Wars’, that were more than ‘dirty’ & certainly, more than ‘little’.

     A reviewer of SBD de Silva’s classic text The Political Economy of Underdevelopment, which ee keeps serializing, once wrote that SB ‘provided invaluable source material for the analysis of Africa in contrast to the settler colonies established in temperate areas such as North America, the Cape, Australia & New Zealand’. Yet, she (Diana Tussie of the London School of Economics) wondered: ‘An open question is where to place, within this settler/non-settler dichotomy, the temperate zone of South America.’

     While Cuba & the Caribbean, British Guiana, Brazil & Suriname feature prominently in SBD’s book, Argentina only figures briefly, as when providing evidence, along with Canada, Australia & New Zealand, of having industries showing ‘high efficiency without having access to particularly large markets’. SBD was responding to ‘those who regard the size of markets to be a barrier to industrial growth’, saying they ‘may do well to ponder on the extremely small market in these countries with which the settler /investors started’.

     However, SBD also gives Argentina as an example where ‘the MNCs exercise their countervailing power in devious ways. For instance, when Argentina imposed price controls on pharmaceuticals in 1975, the European firms retaliated through their governments at the ‘Paris Club’ talks which were to decide on aid to Argentina.’ (enter: the unquiet ghost of Senaka Bibile!) Indeed, Argentina has also suffered the machinations of Wall Street fund managers, many of whom have featured in Sri Lanka’s own debt bondage as well.

     SBD also mentions Argentina as an example of a country lacking sovereignty over its investment decisions. He quotes LH Jenks’ Migration of British Capital to 1875 on ‘semi-economies’, where: ‘There is no Egyptian, Argentinean, almost no Indian, certainly no Cuban or Peruvian economic system. They form organic portions of the English or US economic system.’ However, SBD goes on to add (differing from ‘dependency’ & ‘drain’ theorists), that even if the capital was retained in Sri Lanka, no investment in industrialization would ensue, due to the dominance of merchants & moneylenders, who operate on behalf of absentee owners far away in New York, London & Berlin.

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The USA, a country so far far away from Sri Lanka, has become the ‘largest single-country market’ for Sri Lanka. So forget the daily eco-conferences (who pays for them?), whining about ‘green’ this & that, ‘sustainable’ this & that, ‘carbon footprints’, ‘near-shoring’ or ‘friend-shoring’: This ‘largest single-country market’ so far, far away – unless it is cruising on a nearby destroyer off a stolen base like Diego Garcia – is now telling us that they will only buy goods from us that are made with goods (& machinery too, we imagine!) approved by them; goods made with goods made in ways approved by them. And why not? They are our ‘largest single-country market’, and they have the ‘human’ right to choose what they will & will not buy.

     We cannot hold a gun or intercontinental ballistic missile to their heads, enact & enforce sanctions, and tell them what to buy or sell. And so that country, which still legalizes slavery (check its constitution’s 13th Amendment) tells us we cannot sell them goods made by forced labor. And how do we know which countries use forced labor to make the goods we use to make other goods. The USA (aka United Slaves/Settlers of Amnesia) will tell us. And they will continue to buy goods from those very same countries, goods they need so dearly like ‘rare earths’, and they will thereby be declared not made by forced labor.

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‘Around 90% of global trade is transported by sea,

supported by over 55,000 merchant vessels &

around 1.5 million seafarers, with around 60%

of global container traffic linked to Asia.’

– ee Business, Australia backs Sri Lanka

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From England ‘rules the waves’ to the USA ‘blocks the straits’, this ‘largest single-country market’ has decided they reserve the right to keep all of Asia’s seas under control, from the Red to the Yellow… And so, this country so far far away from us, also reserves the right to bomb ships of countries that have been much closer to us for thousands of years, countries that have shared and traded with us, and so this ‘largest single-country market’ will get to tell us who we can and cannot trade with, and whose ships can sail by or into our ports, unharmed.

     So, why do they feel they can tell us what to do, and why can we not tell them to stuff their demands up where their sun can’t tan? By making the country ‘export-dependent’ on their markets rather than our own home & regional markets. Such that, just before every IMF team appears (& thanks to our declamation – see ee 16 March 2025, IMF Managing Directors are All White, which was meant in a more politically pigmented sense – they are now fronted, manned & womaned by darkies & almost-darkies of Mediterranean hue), US military officials appear ahead of them, to lay down their demands before their dollared largesse – albeit limited – flows.

‘Why is it that the IMF, which insists that

the prices of fuel, electricity,

& water in Sri Lanka should reflect their

production costs, does not apply the same

principle to the price of paddy?…’

– Kekirawa Farmer Leader

(see ee Random Notes)

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‘I want to make it clear: CBSL does not promote

economic growth or productivity or FDI in the economy’

Central Bank (CBSL) Governor N Weerasinghe

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‘Central Bank will remain steadfast in fulfilling its mandate

to maintain price stability & safeguard financial system

stability, while setting the platform for sustainable

& inclusive economic growth.’

Central Bank (CBSL) Governor N Weerasinghe

Strange are the contortions their armed & suited officials have got our intellectual knickers twisted into. We are now told that we need a Central Bank that is independent of us & will not help grow the economy, but is still not independent of their Federal Reserve (that is controlled by & helps bail out the biggest banks on Wall Street). This Central Bank and allied economists & bankers tell us that Sri Lanka ‘macroeconomy’ is doing fine but people are being sent to hell via Welikada or Dubai…

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Colombo-based Ambeon Capital is accused of being a local front for a predatory English mining corporation, Capital Metals PLC. Their ‘Taprobane Minerals Project’ claiming a 60km stretch of the Eastern coast from Komari to Oluvil, is ‘built on extraction, not value addition’ declares Amali Wedagedera. Capital Metal claims credit for shifting the Geological Survey & Mining Bureau (GSMB), from the Ministry of Environment to the Ministry of Industries! Yet they scoff at harnessing the country’s mineral wealth for industrializing the country and upskilling workers in the most modern ways (see ee Focus).

     Ambeon Capital offers stock-broking through Ambeon Securities, and money-broking via Taprobane Investments. This week, Ambeon Securities’ recent ‘exclusive investor forum’ featured Baqar Zaidi, Director & Chief Economist for Sri Lanka & India at Citi Research, linked to Rockefeller’s Exxon empire (see ee Who’s Who?).

     Ambeon Holdings, a conglomerate holding company for Ambeon Capital, claims roots in the old English agency house Walkers (not Johhny!) which supplied agricultural machinery to the highland plantations. Walkers was linked to the Peninsular & Orient Corporation (P&O), the foremost shipping line engaged in the Indian Ocean trade, which had the contract to carry the imperial mails, and set up England’s monopoly over the Bombay-China opium trade from 1850s. P&O had set up the Ceylon Wharfage Company as a subsidiary to do the cargo handling for ships, for their imports and exports in the Colombo Port. The P&O also had another firm, Mackinnon Mackenzie, which did shipping agency work. Their engineering firm, Walkers, originally the Marine Engineering Co, serviced the ships.

     Wedagedera offers important political background about the grab for ‘our heavy mineral sands (HMS) from public beaches’ and spins a cautionary tale, though she worries too much for a parasitic tourist industry. She also rates India & China as ‘developed countries’, alongside the imperialist strongholds, repeating tropes about a ‘US trade war on China’.

     But this ‘war’ is not just about ‘trade’. It is also about industrial production and preserving monopoly over technology – indeed, it is a war to sustain & extend colonial control over the whole world. 

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‘China’s rapid technological advances offer hope for the Global South to break the dominance & dependence imposed by the West,’ declares Bappa Sinha in his incisive take on ‘Breaking the Stranglehold: How China is Shattering US Technological Hegemony’ (see ee Focus). He unveils a ‘confrontation between 2 fundamentally different logics of technological development: one rooted in monopoly & rent extraction, the other in production, scale, & diffusion. At stake is not only US primacy, but the viability of technological monopoly as the foundation of contemporary imperialism’ (see ee Focus). They begin with what the USA ‘believed to be its most secure stronghold: semiconductors’. He then describes ‘the silicon siege’ as representing ‘the most ambitious peacetime economic warfare apparatus in modern history’. Bappa’s tale unwinds like a scientific non-fiction detective novel.

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We turn to the next great ‘siege’: NATO’s war on Russia waged via the Ukraine, and the historic & unprecedented role Russia has played in Africa, as opposed to the horrors Europe has enacted there. We have rendered in poetic form, South Africa’s Gillian Schutte’s ‘Stand-up Sermon for the Geopolitically Confused…’ (See ee Focus). Schutte likens the barrage of misinformation & disinformation to a thief of all ages attempting to deliver a lecture ‘on ‘home security.’  Most hilarious are the antics of well-dollared NGOs:

They book a hotel. They print lanyards.

They give everyone a tote bag.

They say ‘capacity building’ 47 times before lunch.

A report is produced. A consultant is paid.

A dashboard is launched.

A young fellow is photographed near a banner.

Democracy has happened.

Then everyone goes home.

Nothing is built.

No power station.

No railway.

No laboratory…

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The countries at the forefront of a worldwide struggle for sovereignty are detailed in our latest excerpt of the Tricontinental Institute’s study: Hyper-Imperialism: a Dangerous Decadent New Stage, Part 9. This excerpt provides a quick glimpse of such vital details as the colonial powers that have attempted to maintain their centuries of subjugation, and their dates with independence, the USA’s attempts at military intervention, and their strivings to form larger alliances, from East to West Africa, and across West Asia. A snapshot of the world as it turns today, and how it may spin in the larger world’s interests (see ee Focus).

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     The colonial plantation system controlled workers, by restricting their movements – this required the English colonial government to actively intervene on behalf of the planters. ee therefore continues SBD de Silva’s survey of labour relations on plantations in Chapter 12 of his classic The Political Economy of Underdevelopment. SBD describes how the planters exaggerated the benefits provided to workers, and the ‘bald comparisons’ made between Chinese & Indian workers in Malaysia’s plantations to justify exploitation. The so-called ‘market mechanism’, much acclaimed, was regularly suspended when labor became scarce. The huge disparity between the wages paid to Chinese & ‘underpriced’ Indian workers offers insight into the plantation system as a ‘mode of labour organization & control’. The games played to justify the varying treatment of workers, women & men, using racialized justifications is also exposed by explaining the ‘modes of recruitment & their relative mobility.’ SB then provides the nonsensical classifications of ‘ethnic groups’. ‘The North Indians come out best, followed by the Chinese; the Malays are placed below the Chinese & the South Indians at the bottom.’ One of SBD de Silva’s most incisive analyses is how: Explanations of personality differences ‘rely on a limited chain of causation‘.

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Wage labour is not a spontaneous creation

but a very definite socio-economic process

involving the subjection of independent small

producers to a capitalist employer. The resort

to ethnic stereotypes fails to explain the objective

circumstances which gave different social groups

the option of alternative employment patterns

SBD also analyses the different roles played by the Chinese contractor vs the Indian kangany, based on their access to workers in the home country. Also, the ‘specific historical experiences’ of ‘personal humiliation, if not physical cruelty’ that had more influence than ‘ethnic prejudice’. Meanwhile quotas, civil war & travel fares led to a scarcity of labor and with buoyant rubber prices led to a more favorable treatment of Chinese workers in Malaysia…

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Contents:

England’s Capital Metals PLC & the Corporate Thieving of Mineral Sands off East Coast Beaches in Sri Lanka