e-Con e-News

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

e-Con e-News 03-09 August 2025

The USA & England have escalated covert attacks on shipping: Russia-India-China routed vessels have mysteriously caught fire, most recently near Oman and Kerala, which affected Sri Lanka too). The merchant media is meanwhile gasping at the USA’s 50% tariffs on India’s exports, for buying Russian oil. The ruling classes in both Sri Lanka and India are too embedded in the USA and Europe (who know too much about their financial and personal shenanigans) to truly challenge such blatant interference in our policies. The media, for instance, is happily ignoring India’s ‘first-ever’ collusion in the 3-week-long US-led Talisman Sabre 2025 multilateral drills in the so-called ‘Indo-Pacific’ seascape. These ‘drills’ are exercises in provocation & espionage in countries’ backyards, and the US tariffs on trade are the opening shots in a new world war. You could call it World War 4, if you wish, though their world wars have begun for us a long long time ago, from at least 1492 or 1505, and never seem to cease unless actively thwarted. Undeterred, the whites hope another world war will not only sustain their imperialist domination, but also extend their dictat, and they wish to embroil us in their fun & games…

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We are being given 2^nd row seats (1^st row reserved) to witness the white slaughter in Palestine, with the whole history of white settler colonialism, from Africa to the Americas to Asia and the Pacific, being unreeled before us in the bloodiest, most barbarous technicolor. It is another lesson for the world, if we don’t know our own history… Watch how the English media in Sri Lanka indulges in a whitewash that also forgets duplicitous colonial practices in Sri Lanka, by faithfully reproducing their pale master’s voice, claiming that England & Canada & France & Australia have supposedly ‘broken’ with their US master on the horrors in Gaza, even as they keep providing the machineries of mass murder, etc. They wish at some later date (hoping any true Palestinian leadership is decimated by then) to recognize a ‘final’ ‘2-state solution’ in Palestine. This media claims the Europeans have supposedly displeased the giant threat-manufacturing machine in Washington, whose promotion of the myth of Christian Zionism – 40% of US military forces are ardent believers in an imminent Armageddon to herald & hasten the 2nd coming of a whiter Jesus Christ – lies at the roots of invading the former Ottoman Empire (now West Asia) – i.e., if they ever need divine justification for mass murder.

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When not whingeing about the US tariffs, despite the ‘spurious’ mathematics involved, and despite a lack of transparency on what concessions Sri Lanka has had to make to the USA, much of the merchant media in Sri Lanka this week also spent their excess electrons & pulp on the so-called ‘Education Reforms’. The media’s owners – the merchants & the moneylenders – all seek to undermine the last vestiges of ‘free education’. Look at the advertisements for private education both at home and abroad in the media. Meanwhile, this ‘free education’ policy – just like a hobbled independence bereft of economic sovereignty – was only ‘granted’ by the English when they were under siege by Japan & Germany, and a rising USSR. The media also studiously ignores that the universities in a supposedly independent Sri Lanka have failed to transform the country, let alone the educational system.

     One of the proposed ‘reforms’ is the almost-disappearancing (yes, this spelling is deliberate) of history from future curricula.

‘The last 200 years of world history has been

a major historical anomaly & all historical

anomalies come to a natural end. It is quite

natural for China & India to become number

1 & 2 again sometime in the 21^st Century.’

– Kishore Mahbubani (see ee Economists,

There is No Need to Reinvent the Wheel)

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Indeed, history is a major challenge as ee Focus concludes SBD de Silva’s ‘Introduction’ to his classic The Political Economy of Underdevelopment. Last week’s ee excerpt ended with SBD’s assertion that the challenges with which his book were concerned, spanned ‘an area almost too vast to be dealt with in a single study and too complex for final answers’. De Silva links underdevelopment in our world to development elsewhere: for ‘a study of underdevelopment unlike that of development is also beset by comparisons of ‘what is’ & ‘what might have been’…’ No intelligence, natural or artificial, has sought to extrapolate, what if Sri Lanka has not been successively invaded for 100s of years, and what if we had prevented the imposition of the colonial import-export plantation fraud that has de-industrialized us?

     Indeed, Colombo’s merchants invited the Singaporean eminence Kishore Madhubani (see above), at Rs50,000 a ticket, to hear him assert the world is due for a planetary correction, though he did briefly repeat the hoary nonsense that ‘Ceylon’ had been a model for Singapore’s founding leaders – they certainly did not extend an import-export plantation economy, but heavily industrialized, albeit under the English & US cannon.

     SBD de Silva’s ‘Introduction’ (see ee Focus) confronts such confusion by noting that a framework to examine the roots of our discontent ‘inevitably includes the process of colonial expansion & imperialism’. He was very well aware we are up against the hegemon of a daily mis-education by the school system and the media, and yet asserted,‘the burden of proof is on those who say that things are not what they seem to be’. He however pointed out the need for learning history to understand ‘how economic & non-economic facts are related to one another’, while emphasizing that history is not a matter of a chronological laying out of dates and personages. It requires going back & forth in time while traversing societies & world, and examining in particular the advances (including the horrific ones) made by the white settler states – understanding the monkey through ‘the man’:

The rudiments of more advanced forms of a social phenomenon

that are present in the less advanced forms, explained Marx,

can be understood only by studying the more advanced forms.

– SBD de Silva

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‘The rubber industry should manufacture

high-performance niche products such as

resistance bands for therapeutic use,

instead of shipping raw rubber.’

– Mangala Gunasekera, Elasto Group

(see ee Economists, Trade with US would fall

heavily due to tariff burden, simulation shows)

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So, what’s the deal? It is dismal that such ‘band-aids’ are proposed, without even mentioning where the machinery to make such ‘niche’ goods would come from. Still rarer is the media that exposes the export game as far cruder than a hunter’s bloody leg trap. Rather, the news continues to grovel & salivate at the supposed US ‘reduction’ of their inflated tariffs. And even rarer is the media that deconstructs the so-called exports that the US government is sniveling about.

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‘Over 25% of Sri Lanka’s exports

& nearly 60% of its apparel shipments

are destined for the US market… [involving]

the livelihoods of over 350,000 garment sector workers’

–  see ee Economists, No Final Tariff Deal Yet

between Sri Lanka & US, Says President

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While Indian media is highlighting that the US in reality gets a surplus of $30-35bn from India, it is curious that no nationalist or socialist economists (we cannot expect the media-economist mafia to do this) have calculated the inputs (from needles, pins, threads, textiles) imported for this sacred garment fraud imports, as well as the machines. Where is Japan’s Juki, and England’s Courtaulds, etc? How much of these garments involve paying IPR (intellectual property rights) royalties etc? Welcome to silence.

     We apparently haven’t learned any lessons: like a drug dealer/pimp who keeps beating up a junkie/prostitute and then gets them to buy more dope and offer more free sex, the oligarchs want us to keep going back for more, cos the USA has dirt on them, knows where they hide their money, is aware of their weird peccadilloes… This also accounts for the silence, after years of unrelenting propaganda, by the US- & EU-funded media economists & thinktanks (Advocata, Verite, etc), on the glories of free trade, and the perils of import substitution.

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• Carmen, the Silent Digital Soap-Opera – Meanwhile, EU Trade Commissioner Carmen Moreno is ‘unable to give details’ of the EU agreement on US tariffs which s/he claims ‘is quite strange because the EU is normally transparent’. Really? Apparently, the EU ambassador is being ‘vague’ because the trade deal allows new US attacks on EU tech rules. The US claims the EU will not go ahead with so-called network fees, demanding that the largest online platforms, mostly US-owned Netflix, YouTube, etc, should ‘chip in for the cost of Europe’s telecom infrastructure’.  In the 19^thC opera, Carmen is a fiery ‘gypsy’ floozy who is killed by her jealous lover, a Spanish soldier. The EU ambassador maybe afraid such a fate awaits any disclosure of the EU’s submissions. Meanwhile, the US has ordered their diplomats to launch a lobbying blitz against the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA). The EU says they haven’t agreed to change the law, and claims the law will make the online environment safer and fairer, while the US accuses them of censoring” US citizens and multinationals. US tech companies like Facebook and Instagram parent Meta, Twitter (X) and Google-owner Alphabet are also opposing the EU law. The US conveniently does not calculate such ‘services’ as their exports, which squeeze out local technology and content. Meanwhile we gain a glimpse into an unfolding tragi-comedy with Indonesia agreeing to support a global moratorium on digital customs duties, also forcing Intellectual Property Rights provisions to ‘traditional knowledge, genetic resources, and compulsory licences’ that will allow US and EU corporations to ‘exploit traditional knowledge without consent or compensation and avoid compulsory licensing measures.’

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‘Thorium in Sri Lanka is found mainly in alluvial deposits, beach sands,

& heavy mineral placers, with key sites in Galle, Balangoda,

Pulmoddai, Kondrugala, & gem-rich soils in Sabaragamuwa.

Monazite-rich stream sediments exist along the Bentota River;

Mannar deposits are less prominent. Further exploration could

reveal more viable sources. Although unextracted today, the

Geological Survey operated a pilot plant from the 1950-70s.’

Sri Lanka’s NPP government plans to phase out coal and embrace nuclear power in its 2025-44 energy strategy, notes Vinod Moonesinghe in his exploration of ‘A Thorium-based Path to Sri Lankan Energy’ (see ee Focus). Noting the risks, Moonesinghe also points out that ‘Sri Lanka lacks nuclear experience & faces a shortage of skilled personnel due to weak education infrastructure & high staff turnover’. Yet he believes Sri Lanka’s thorium reserves ‘offer a once-in-a-generation opportunity to leapfrog into clean, scalable nuclear energy’.

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Which brings us to an excellent though intricate tribute to SBD de Silva’s legacy by Dhanusha Gihan Pathirana, who sharpens de Silva’s insights into the tea plantation bamboozle in Sri Lanka. Pathirana examines how the plantation ‘elite’ led by the Planters’ Association of Ceylon (PAC) manipulates ‘tea pricing and productivity’ to suppress the wages of a largely female workforce (tho the merchant media loves to crow about gender equality, etc). Instead, brilliant London- & US-educated accountants help a ‘feudal landlord class’ to divert the surpluses into speculation and luxury consumption. Pathirana examines the history of wage demands and the basis of a workforce made insecure by various forces to submit to oppression, while being miscalled‘idle’ etc.

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Sri Lanka’s feudal elite, thinly disguised

in modern capitalist clothing, appears

unaware of this reality…

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The Planters’ Association claims workers are ‘unproductive’, yet they have failed to introduce mechanization, using all kinds of excuses and ‘false data’. The PAC maintains the colonial system of backward labor-intensive practices. Pathirana provides ample evidence that Japan, whose teas enjoys high prices, enables the use of machines. Interestingly, he also points to the inventions by the University of Moratuwa of mechanical harvesters that preserve quality. More importantly, Pathirana offers insight into a path by which workers, whose children exhibit high malnutrition, may pursue a political solution. He echoes SBD de Silva’s assertion that plantations, which occupy large acreages, offer no ‘scale’ advantages over the largely Sinhala smallholders, who are dominated by exports merchants who manipulate auctions.

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US Fed monetary policy has little effect on the economy:

what matters are profits & their effect on investment

– M Roberts (see ee Economists, Tariffs & the US Economy)

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‘Rent is not profit. Profits are part of value. That was what Marx contributed.

He said it is true that the industrialist makes more money than it costs

him to actually hire labor. But, this surplus value is the industrialist

contribution to production of organizing industry or creating markets

for it creating supply. And so profits are an element of value.

Rent is not an element of value.’ – Michael Hudson (ee Economists,

From Babylon to Wall St – How Bankers Make You Poor)

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We are awed by de Silva & Pathirana’s unparalleled & deft deployment of Marxist analysis, yet note Pathirana’s use of such anti-Marxist terms like ‘elite’ and the variable use & misuse of such concepts as ‘profit’, ‘rent’, ‘exploitation’ ‘feudal’, ‘aristocracy’, ‘bourgeoisie’ and ‘capitalist.’ Elite has been usually promoted by white academe as a replacement for ‘ruling class’; and while Pathirana casts doubt on these merchants as capitalists or modern bourgeoisie (Marx was precise in using the term as a machine-making class), Pathirana also calls them ‘feudal’ – which in Marxist terms refers to a phase in a capitalist trajectory, and a class pregnant with the possibility of modern machine-making capitalism. Also, while Pathirana invokes plantation and production practices in Japan and Kenya, he curiously does not mention Assam whose tea history also dates back to English colonialism, and is now being subject to the ‘unchecked expansion’ of such monocultures (see ee Agriculture, Assam).

     Pathirana’s essay was first published in India’s reputed Economic & Political Weekly (EPW), and it is a tragedy there exists no media in Sri Lanka who would highlight such piercing commentary by premiering its publication (The Social Scientists Association (SSA)’s Polity remains a careerist retirement home for London, & US-trained academics). While Indian commentators refer to the plantations in India’s ‘suppression of indigenous forest-based livelihoods’, Pathirana fails to mention that the plantations in Lanka were imposed after the invasion and genocidal repression of the Sinhala people of Kanda Uda Rata. Any solution to the criminal oppression of tea plantation workers must not escalate the divisions between the original owners of the land and those whose sweat & blood have enabled the flourishing of a criminal class of merchants & moneylenders that rule the whole country. Any solution also has to take into the account the ‘geopolitical’ games played by India’s ruling class, who were complicit in the English attacks of the socialist leadership of the estate workers in the 1930s etc, reinforcing their Indian as opposed to Lankan identity, while modern day NGO evangelicals choose to call them ‘Malaiyahagam – Upcountry Tamils’ to reinforce fissiparous separatist tendencies.

     While Pathirana notes the role played by the well-known tea companies in Sri Lanka, he fails to mention the huge English multinational Unilever in both Sri Lanka and India. Nawaz Dawood’s book Tea & Poverty, while not exhibiting the theoretical depth of an SBD de Silva, exposes the interlocking linkages between banks & agency houses & plantations & shipping interests, etc. The recent supposed withdrawal by Unilever from tea plantation management in Kenya, etc, and their sale to a US Citibank agency CVC Capital, as well as the sale of James Finlay’s plantations to the notorious Sri Lanka finance house LOLC, is also not mentioned. Still, ee will continue to reproduce this pathbreaking analysis of a backward largely alien merchant oligarchy.

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• Our history teachers claim there was a US ‘civil war’ (it was anything but civil) waged by an ‘enlightened’ US North to free the African ‘slaves’ in the US South. Few mention that the great Abraham Lincoln sought to deport all the enslaved back to Africa, and refused to free them or arm them until the very last moment. At that same time, the US was also waging a war on Chinese workers who had built the railroads, evicting them from 100 cities – (they went back to China and helped build a modern China). Indeed, in this ee Focus’ continuing excerpting of Gustavus Myers’ 1917 History of Tammany Hall we see how the rulers of the USA’s great ‘metropolis’, the ‘north’s’ New York, fully supported ‘the slave power’ in the USA’s plantation south.

     Myers refers to but provides no discussion at all of a brief US historical moment called ‘Reconstruction’, which was a very energetic attempt by a ‘free’ African people after the US ’Civil War’, to rule themselves after centuries of enslavement. New York’s rulers however supported the ‘political supremacy of the white race’ even while claiming the battle was one of ‘capital against labour’. The alliance between Wall Street and the defeated slave owner would fund the rise of the terroristic Ku Klux Klan, who took over after overthrowing ‘Reconstruction’, to retain the plantation system in another form.

     In this Tammany excerpt, which exposes the link between elections and the ‘spoils’ of office, we also see the first references to speculations in real-estate, in iron mines and railways, and the infamous US financier Jay Gould and the ‘great stock frauds… breeding a disastrous panic’. Gould inspired F Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby, Gould’s mansions and social scene on Long Island’s Gold Coast, where the Goulds later had a large estate built, provided the setting for Fitzgerald to contrast the lifestyles of old wealth and the nouveau riche…

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Branded for Life – This ee also reproduces a dubious list of Sri Lanka’s ‘top’ 100 brands, by a London company, which curiously omits (see ee Random Notes) such luminaries as England’s Unilever, CIC, P&O, Standard Chartered Bank, US Citibank, Proctor & Gamble, Anglo-US Ceylon Tobacco Company, Swiss Baur’s and Nestles, Maersk, Brandix, MAS, Akbar Bros, Jafferjee Bros, Hirdaramani, etc. Are they not ‘Sri Lankan’ by now? Is London being ‘racist’? – a label that has been hilariously turned on Sinhala Buddhists, who have never invaded or enslaved other peoples. The London company instead lists such multinational fronts and major importers as Keells, Cargills, Hayley’s, Singer, Hutch, Tokyo Cement, Lanka Indian Oil Corporation, etc.

     We not only lack or fail to highlight & honor modern researchers, but have ignored the crying need for an economic history of Sri Lanka, that would locate and expose such flim-flam. Such brand-recognition is supposed to incentivize a constantly award-winning & prize-giving oligarchy to greater mercantile & usurious heights, who don’t know or don’t care about the English word, ‘machine tool…’; instead they prefer to remain touts & tools themselves, to enable recolonization….

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Contents:

Covert US & English Attacks on Indian Ocean Shipping; & Exposing Sri Lanka’s Tea Plantation Hoax