e-Con e-News

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

e-Con e-News 19-25 October 2025

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‘The Ceylon National Congress was so reactionary that it actually opposed the grant of adult franchise proposed by the Donoughmore Constitutional Reform Commission in 1929. This class, however, secured its political ascendency when the Donoughmore Constitution (1931)– while granting adult franchise – barred the election of anyone to the State Council who is unable to speak, read & write the English language. Also, the device of a Board of Ministers enabled the notables in this class to become ministers & run the machinery of internal ‘self-government‘ from 1931-47.’– Satchi Ponnambalam, 1980 (see ee Quotes)

‘Later in 1948, when Ceylon applied for United Nations membership, the Soviet Union vetoed the application. This was partly because Soviet Union believed that Ceylon was only nominally independent, & the English still exercised control over it because the white, educated elite had control of the government.’– Wikipedia (ee Sovereignty, English Dominion of Ceylon)

‘Our application for membership was vetoed by the then Soviet Union on the ground that we still had a defence agreement with England (& that Trincomalee was a naval base under the control of the English, despite our ‘independence’ in Feb 1948) … As part of a package deal, however, we gained admission in December 1955 in return for the US holding back its veto on Soviet allies such as Albania, Bulgaria, Hungary & Romania, who eventually made it to the UN the same day as we did.’– Thalif Deen (ee Sovereignty, The day SL was denied admission)

UN Security Council Resolution 109 was adopted on Dec 14, 1955. After being instructed by the General Assembly to consider the applications for membership of Albania, Austria, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Ceylon, Finland, Hungary, Ireland,Italy, Jordan, Laos, Libya, Nepal, Portugal, Romania, & Spain,the Security Council recommended all 16 countries for admission to the UN. The resolution was adopted by 8 votes (France, Soviet Union, England, Brazil, Iran, New Zealand,Peru, & Turkey). Belgium, Taiwan & the USA abstained.’– ee Sovereignty, UN Security Council Resolution 109

Is this version of the Soviet veto correct, by Thalif Deen, ‘Senior Editor at the UN Bureau of Inter Press Service (IPS) News Agency’? Or is it more deliberate, colonially induced, amnesia of what actually was happening at that time? The UN was formed in June 1945, by 51 countries, with the UN Security Council (UNSC) led by the USSR, US, England & China, determining its future course. England’s ‘Island of Ceylon & its Dependencies’ was turned into an English ‘Dominion of Ceylon’ in February 1948, with the Queen of England remaining as head of state. So it was, that in 1971, 23 years later, the JVP was charged with attempting to overthrow the English monarchy!

     In October 1949, the Communist Party of China (CPC), which had defeated the Japanese invasion of their country, established the People’s Republic (PRC). The previous rulers, the Guomindang (KMT), fled to Taiwan under the protection of the US military, ‘freezing’ the US war on China. The USA thus kept refusing to permit the PRC to take its proper place in the UN, let alone in the UN Security Council. Instead, the US continued to wage war on New China.

The Missing Background: In 1950, the US got the UN Security to Council to illegally vote in favour of a ‘police action’ in Korea. The USSR was absent for the vote in the Security Council, as they were boycotting the UNSC, since the US & England kept refusing to allow the People’s Republic of China to take the China seat, instead of the defeated KMT government (see ee Random Notes). The UN from its very inception to this day has been a tale of the European imperialists and their settler colonies manipulating the substance of its membership and resolutions to allow their continued invasion of the world. The USA kept using its veto to squash the writ of the UN General Assembly, and the demands of the vast majority of the world. It would be 24 years before China was allowed to enter the UN, in 1972, the same year Sri Lanka became a Republic and finally, or at least nominally, was able to get rid of the English monarchs as rulers. By then, imperialism had developed new methods to undermine our societies, under a seemingly coy US hegemon.

‘Imperialism now uses neocolonialism instead of direct colonial rule.There is an unholy trinity – the International Monetary Fund,the World Bank & World Trade Organization that directs neocolonial plunder of dependent nations. A rational struggle against imperialism should obviously oppose this unholy trinity.’– Jayatilleke de Silva (ee Economists, Anti-imperialism: Rhetoric & Reality)

• ‘The 21^st century – it’s all about the ocean,’ is a most-quotable quote in Lasanda Kurukulasuriya’s report on The Geopolitics of Hydrography & Lanka’s Dilemma (see ee Focus). ‘Hydrography has become a flashpoint in the ongoing geopolitical contest between big powers in the Indian Ocean. But, is it a contest, or the continuation of the invasion by Europe & its ‘quadrangular’ pirates of the seas about us? China does represent an ongoing security anxiety for us”, proclaims a politician from Australia, a country, still a colony, which was turned into a destination for ‘convicts’ sailed in, as England ‘ruled the waves’ from the 19^th century, while proclaiming ‘free trade’?

     The recent attempts by the imperialists, with India in tow, to prevent Chinese research ships from visiting Sri Lanka, claiming they’re ‘spying‘ on the seabed, can be easily resolved, declares Kurukulasuriya. The Seabed 2030 global project, ‘aims to produce ‘the definitive map’ of the world ocean floor by 2030 and make it available to all’. If, indeed, it ‘is made available to all’ in an ‘open source’ way, and competition is replaced by collaboration’, adds Kurukulasuriya, the attempt to turn Sri Lanka into another base for imperialism to covertly wage proxy wars, could be obverted. Besides, if this information is so freely available, then why would Chinese ships need to be accused of spying?

     Sri Lanka under Sirimavo Bandaranaike once led the movement to turn the Indian Ocean into a ‘Zone of Peace’. It is the US & its nuclear pitbulls &lesser poodles who have opposed such a truly ‘pacific’ (as in, ‘peaceable’) zone. Instead, England recently, illegally leased Diego Garcia in the Chagos Archipelago for the USA to commandeer as a nuclearized military base of operations, to be able to keep bombing Asia & Africa. The practices by imperialism to divide & rule, to barter & exchange countries still continues, albeit somewhat restricted by growing resistance, especially with China organizing solidarity initiatives like the BRI, BRICS, SCO…. 

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‘The consumer base in [SL’s] Western Province is

almost equal to the consumer base in Thailand

which is affluent & modern.’

– Carl Cruz, Chairman of Unilever, 2019

This accidental admission from the then-chairman of England’s Unilever is from Business Dialogue, the magazine of the National School of Business Management (2019). This enlightening statistic apparently became the subject of dissension in a national newspaper, as the media in Sri Lanka depend on the English multinational corporation’s (MNC’s) lavish advertising budget. Apparently, Unilever does not wish to remind us that they, along with other European (and imperialist) MNCs, have taken our home market hostage. Sri Lanka’s Western Province is a parasite on the rest of the country. Nonetheless, the market in Sri Lanka’s Western Province is ‘almost equal’ to Thailand, which has a population of at least 70 million people, is quite a revelation! Such statistics matter, because, even as our population is larger than 150 other countries, many being already industrialized, Sri Lanka’s market is declared as too small to enable industrialization.

     This supposed inadequacy is the subject of SBD de Silva’s classic The Political Economy of Underdevelopment, as this ee Focus continues excerpting Chapter 3. Innumerable & unending are the excuses for stalling or preventing the growth of modern industrialization in Sri Lanka – and one of the biggest pretexts is a lack of a local market. Here SBD challenged ‘certain perceptions which attribute the non-industrialization of these countries to market limitations‘. He pointed out that settler colonies still industrialized their societies, despite having smaller home markets than Sri Lanka. He then painstakingly demolished such arguments, along with other objections such as impoverishment, economy of scale, lack of entrepreneurial ability. Here it is important to note that he took on the limitations of the diverse entrepreneurial activities undertaken by Sri Lankan companies, despite persistent claims (including by ‘Leftists’) about the ‘repair & servicing of tea & rubber machinery’. Such efforts did not challenge the domination & monopoly of the MNCs, and were outside the main relations of production (tea pluckers, rubber tappers, etc), nor did they lead to other types of products (see ee Focus).

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‘Data concealment is assisted by the giant accounting firms

acting in alliance with corporate power.’

(See, ee 22 Feb 2025, The Secret Evasions of

England’s Ceylon Tobacco Company in SL)

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‘In place of direct thieving methods of getting rich,

indirect methods, surrounded with secrecy & every

possible precaution against detection, were developed.’

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‘His operations in amassing his wealth were entirely legitimate;

‘inside’ real estate speculations, connections with trust companies

& other corporations and stock transactions. Knowing him to be

the source of much legislation & administrative favors worth 10s,

if not 100s, of millions of dollars to corporations, his opponents

were by no means wholly satisfied with such an explanation,

but whatever their suspicions they could never prove that

he had personally profited from selling legislation.’

• While the daily media is full of the government’s grandiose exertions to combat ‘corruption‘, it is easily noted that not a single executive of a multinational bank or corporation, or chartered accountancy, is yet to be ‘perp-walked‘ in handcuffs across the tv screens, front pages or via viral social media posts. This distinction is only granted to petty opposition politicians & officials, mainly Sinhala, it seems, who served them. MNCs are of course the great untouchables. This ee Focus also continues Gustavus Myers’ 1917 History of Tammany Hall, as it provides a great example of the limitations of the focus on ‘corruption’ (which is a quite ‘normal’ practice in a merchant-dominated economy). Tammany, to remind, was the New York ‘charity’, aka NGO, a front for the political machinations of the USA’s foremost metropolis & municipality, neon lair for Wall Street. This excerpt notes the evolution of corruption midst the rise of financial capitalism.

     Myers describes how ‘the great life insurance companies’ came to classify bribery expenditures on their accounting books as ‘legal expenses’ (later also, ‘goodwill’), making it impossible to trace all of the directions of this ‘continuous great corruption’, the ‘enormous sums… expended in a surreptitious manner’.  Grand Juries proceeded ‘against a few of the figureheads’, while ‘the great magnates who had profited so enormously from the huge frauds, were… left untouched’. ‘Not a single one of those of great wealth implicated was ever sent to jail or even incommoded by the formality of a trial’. Of course, this was a peak period of the famous ‘muckrakers’, when, magazines, newspapers & books were filled with:

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‘The corruptions & colossal manipulations & spoliation

done by great corporations & other vested interests,

& the close connection between these & the ‘bosses’

& machines of both old political parties.’

• Indeed, the media focused public attention on nationwide scandals and ‘the great extortions of trusts and other industrial, transportation & financial corporations.’ Yet as we know, the great corporations such as US Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, and Morgan’s General Electric, AT&T, etc, were able to use these exposés to transmute themselves (despite being ‘broken up’ into the ‘7 Sisters’, ‘Baby Bells’), to make themselves leaner & more centralized, even as they hid behind ‘dummies’, setting up fake ‘trade unions’, and movements to murder & usurp genuine opposition, to destabilize real rivals. They would only be counteracted by the formation of modern, vanguard, cadre Communist Parties, led by the likes of a Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong, etc – which then faced the combined onslaught of imperialism, and that ‘socialism of fools’ – Fascism.

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• How will the nominally Marxist-Leninist JVP, the main constituent party of the ruling NPP coalition, wriggle obsequiously, or march head high, out of the lacerating traps set for truly national movements by a globetrotting capitalism? As observers of variable hues note (see ee Quotes, ‘Economic Rigor Mortis’), the IMF’s prognoses prevent any kind of attempt at rational transformation. All the NPP has been able to do, it seems, is postpone the reckoning (see ee Quotes, ‘Beheading Not Haircut’). One orchestral section in the soap opera that passes for criticism has taken to awaiting the decline & fall of the US & EU empires, though as some astute Marxist observers point out (see ee Random Notes, Creation’s Destruction) capitalism is crisis and they are quite happy to destroy, in order to resurrect themselves. Or blow us all up together… Unless & until the working class can unite to defeat, and promulgate plans to go beyond them.

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• One popular and vocal segment blames everything on the foibles of a Nietzschean (‘rationality & morality are for slaves’, ‘caprice is for masters’) US President. Though others point out such orange personalities are merely ventriloquist’s dummies, enacting the will of the capitalists who are seeking ways to get out of the mass grave they themselves have dug (see ee Quotes, USA’s Privatizing of Public Wars). The US President is regularly contradicted by his own officials, led by VP JD Vance, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John Ratcliffe, White House advisor Stephen Miller, Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff Daniel Caine, and Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby, etc, who themselves represent ‘pools’ of capitalists, and are the dummies for other larger ventriloquists. The days of kings are long gone, no matter what the US Democratic Party claims (see ee Politics, No Kings & the Lure of Spectacle).

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• VI Lenin’s 1917 classic Imperialism, the Latest Stage of Capitalism was written to explain the role played by capitalist monopolies (yes, Nobel Inc included) in igniting the mass slaughter of the 1^st ‘World War’. So, what breath-taking cataclysm, that would not also obliterate the arsonists, can they organize to divert the attention of the world? China is effectively countering US attempts to sabotage its industrial advance (see ee Quotes, Mother of All Machines). The US proxy war on Russia is being defeated in the Ukraine. Palestine has fought the Zionist praetorian proxy to a standstill. The US while igniting other proxy wars in our part of the world (Myanmar, East Africa, etc) may first wish to consolidate its hold over the Americas (first attacking Venezuela, Cuba, etc, and then grabbing Danish colony Greenland; Canada is already a colony!).

     October 25 is the 42^nd anniversary of the USA’s 1983 invasion of Grenada, a republic in the eastern Caribbean, approximately 21 miles long & 12 miles wide. This was undertaken to divert from the successful attack on the US Marine Corps headquarters in Beirut, Lebanon, which killed over 300 US and French personnel…

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• China this week announced its 15^th 5-Year Plan. 15th! It is farcical to see & hear the imperialist banks inside China praise (however superficial & opportunistic their honorifics may be) China’s planning process. Meanwhile, these same banks (Standard Chartered, HSBC, Citibank, etc) have opposed state planning in Sri Lanka, let alone have financed the sabotage and even assassination of those who advocated such plans. Meanwhile the idiotic merchant media in Sri Lanka seems not to have mentioned one word about such plans, in China, let alone dare call for such plans for ourselves. The oilmen’s media (Bloomberg, Reuters & their local lip-services, EconomyNext, News1^st, their economists & thinktanks) which are largely mouthpieces for imperialist demands, keep repeating (like the commands & spurs to horses, buffalos & elephants: Juk! Juk! Juk! Juk!) to demand the state keep to the racecourse set by the USA’s Treasury Department & its minions: IMF, World Bank, ADB, etc.

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‘The world trading system is in turmoil.

Since ‘liberation day’ tariffs were announced…

• So-called ‘South Asian Economists’ have put out a statement (see ee Random Notes) on what South Asian economies should do, diversify exports, etc. What strikes the reader immediately, is their use of the passive voice to describe what are essentially the commands of the USA. They (really, these economists are US- & EU-funded so-called ‘thought-leaders’) may argue there is no point poking the beast in the eye, but it seems they hope, by looking away from the perpetrator, they can get away with their mild anodynes.

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‘A highlight was Dr Weerasinghe receiving the prestigious

‘A Grade’ award from Global Finance magazine

for his monetary policy leadership.’

The Central Bank governor seems to be competing for his own post-retirement superannuation in dollars. His incessant ‘press release’ machinery is only excelled by the President and Prime Minister’s ‘Media Divisions’. They all offer fine verbal palliatives and promises, though the CB governor’s pronouncements are crowned with such endless infinitives as ‘expected to’, etc. – meaning the economy is ‘expected to’ do fine, after he is long gone. Meanwhile, both the Governor and the Commercial Bank of Ceylon (actually it should change its name to ComBank of Washington) have been awarded prizes by the same dubious organization (see ee Economists) that celebrated former Finance Ministers of similarly dubious vintage. How, and more aptly, why do they indulge in such vanity?

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Some sections of the national movement have taken up imperialism’s diversions, by taking sides with the binaries thrown out by the capitalist media: pro-human rights v. anti-Geneva inquisitions, pro-environment v. pro-industrialization, pro-homo vs anti-homo, pro-gender rights v. anti-feminist, etc. ee, meanwhile, forgot to note in our screed on diasporas, that, for instance, the Jews ruling Israel right now, are those who actively collaborated with the Nazi Germans. Their acts included convincing other Jews they should board trains that were supposedly going to Europe, and instead delivered them to the gas ovens. Schindler’s Lists indeed…Hollywood’s Stephen Schlepberg will make no movie on this other list, of those, who were navigated to power by England, the Nazis and their older brothers, the white settlers of the USA! The cultural school of explaining the world, ignores that within so-called cultures, there are dominant and wannabe classes…

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Contents:

Why Sri Lanka was Really Denied Admission to the United Nations