e-Con e-News

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

e-Con e-News 30 November – 06 December 2025

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‘In Sri Lanka, there was a loss of village pasture land,

& a denudation of forests which caused soil erosion

& the silting up of water courses & paddy fields.’

– SBD de Silva, The Political Economy of Underdevelopment (1982)

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The Mahaveli’s waters have been turned brown for almost 2 centuries now. The English genocides of the Sinhala people in 1818 & 1848 first turned those silvery waters crimson. Then the felling of the green trees to set up plantations in the highlands from the 1840s, sparked off incessant muddy erosion. The loss of green cover & the slaughter of animals, sent elephants barrelling down into the fields of the maritimes to do battle with cultivators. It was a matter of time before the mountains trembled and tumbled, in slow then the-more-rapid collapse, as we have wretchedly witnessed in the past weeks. The big tea exporters & tourist-importers, still unperturbed by deeper inquiry, shamelessly continue to depict the rolling green tea bushes shrouding the hills as the epitome of the pristine.

     A cacophony of voices of the usual experts & economists have followed to mute the screams accompanying this ‘freshwater tsunami’. Their dullard voices that have led the country and the merchant- & moneylender-run import-export plantation economy they uphold, into this deadly abyss, have now been appointed to ‘rebuild’ what they first destroyed, before nature decided to mimic them (see ee Who’s Who).

     These economists have long loved to promote city-state Singapore – parking lot & runway for imperialist multinational corporations (MNCs) stalking the Southeast Asian hinterland for human & other resources – as a model for Sri Lanka. Meanwhile, socialist Cuba, blockaded & besieged & impoverished for almost 70 years by the most powerful imperialist the world has ever had the misfortune to experience, was recently also struck by the worst hurricane (Melissa) in history, yet was able to evacuate & protect almost 1 million people, with no casualties!

     There is another irony about the media promoting Singapore as a model. What they have witnessed of Singapore are the lavish shopping malls, and what the yearn for, is its ‘rule of law’ aka authoritarianism (even while harboring fugitive former Central banker Arjuna ‘Royal College’ Mahendran). Yet Singapore is a modern industrialized state, which abhors subsistence-wage-paying sweatshops, which in English Sri Lanka cutely comprise ‘Free Trade Zones’. Trading what? Free for whom?

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‘Why does India repeatedly fail to industrialise?’

‘Your business elites do not want serious industrialisation…

They still have very strong links with financial capital which

doesn’t like industrialisation because, for them, the most

important thing is the rate of return… if you want to develop

a serious industrial base, you need to go through

a period when finance is repressed.’

– Ha-Joon Chang (see ee Focus)

This ee reproduces the Hindu Frontline magazine’s brilliant interview with Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang, based at London’s SOAS University. While he focuses on India, he could well be speaking of Sri Lanka as well (again, check our Who’s Who in ees past, for the links between merchants and moneylenders). Chang openly challenges all the sacred shibboleths of our pack of paid running-dog economists. He states boldly, ‘Developing countries cannot develop with free trade’. Even the arch imperialist US President Don Trump has openly declared so-called ‘free trade’ as undermining industrialization in his country. Chang recalls how US-colonized Korea banned Japanese cars, to enable infant industry protection. And while he declares there’s  been ‘no serious attempt to develop manufacturing in India’, Chang yet believes India (and Sri Lanka?) can still pursue industrialisation to ensure prosperity: ‘No country has obtained a high standard of living without a serious degree of industrialisation.’

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‘Around 2,000 non-fatal occupational accidents

occur in the country every year, with an additional

60-80 fatal accidents. However, these numbers

are a fraction of the reality.’

MNCs, and the states that guard them, have weaponized human rights, women’s & sexuality issues. In this week’s ee Focus, Shiran Illanperuma shows how Brandix (whose CEO was just appointed by the President to ‘rebuild’ Sri Lanka), oppresses and injures its mainly female workforce (while giving itself awards for ‘gender equity’ etc). Brandix, reporting almost $1billion in profits in 2021 and supposedly Sri Lanka’s single-largest apparel exporter, supplies sexy ‘Western brands such as Gap, Marks & Spencer, Next, Victoria’s Secret’. Brandix & other corporate employers refuse to acknowledge that addressing health issues would and should reduce the number of days lost. This would help their much-trumpeted yearning for productivity. But it turns out to be a question of class power. They would rather keep the workers down, divided & weak, even if it means they forego the profits of industrialisation and long-term modernization?

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• How did a relatively weak China & the USSR defeat 2 of the most powerful armies in the world – fascist Germany & Japan, even as the USA & Europe were aiding the fascists (as they still do)? When Japan conquered Malaya & the Dutch East Indies in early 1942, England lost its primary sources of many war materials. The English turned to slaughter-tapping rubber in Sri Lanka, headquartering their South East Asia Command (SEAC) in Kandy, basing 10,000s of troops here. ee Focus continues Roy Singham’s amazing account of how the English imperialists also turned to Africa, which supplied most of the allies’ industrial diamonds, cobalt, and gold. The little-known statistics he reveals to us are mind-boggling (& referenced in almost overwhelming detail). The English conscripted 100,000s of Africans as forced labor, and military recruits. They implemented their ‘colonial formula of maximum extraction with minimum concern for African lives’. Congo’s miners provided uranium for the atom bombs used on Hiroshima & Nagasaki, digging out the radioactive materials with their bare hands!

     After WW2 was ended, the Europeans broke their promise to unchain countries under colonial bondage. They even refused to pay many African veterans, murdering those who demanded their wages. Those colonized who had survived fascism upfront now ‘clearly recognized who their real enemy’ was. Liberation wars soon erupted throughout Africa, ‘led & influenced by socialist movements & leaders who had long experienced the West’s duplicity’. Socialism was key to the superior strategies & mass mobilization required to defeat fascism. In the largest organized migration in history, the USSR led by Joseph Stalin was able to evacuate 10 million industrial workers & families, and over 1,500 factories, out of the path of human history’s biggest invasion ever, by Germany. Meanwhile, China, ‘weak but vast, progressive, and with time on its side’ was able, with Mao Zedong & the Communist Party’s leadership, to smash a Japan that was ‘strong but small, isolated, & barbaric’. ‘Socialist leadership did not just mobilise the masses; it outthought & outfought its enemies’ who had ‘every material advantage’. How the USA & England then resurrected a zombie Japan & much of Asia as colonized footstools is a story crying to be told on another day.

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• Who controls the Congo, controls Africa, said Mao Zedong. Who control Africa controls the world. We are inspired to add: Who controls Sri Lanka, controls the Indian Ocean, and who controls the Indian Ocean controls the world! Sri Lanka also has many vital historical & modern links to Africa, which the English media suppresses; instead disparaging Africa as a negative model for Sri Lanka.

     Many of us grew up hearing the story of Patrice Lumumba, leader of the Congo, who was murdered by the USA & Europe (2 years after they murdered SWRD Bandaranaike). Indeed, Rohana Wijeweera, the founder of the JVP (People’s Liberation Front), the leading constituent party of the now ruling Jana Jathika Jana Balawegaya (JJB, aka National People’s Power, NPP), was a student at the Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University in the USSR (this too, another story crying to be told).

     The Congo, one of the resource-richest countries in the world, seems at first to contradict SBD de Silva’s division of the globe into settler & non-settler colonies. The Congo is mainly seen as a non-settler colony like Sri Lanka, dominated by a mining & plantation economy. Belgian corporate capital & expatriate groups controlled the Congo due to the large investments in those sectors, and thwarted fuller growth. The Congo had ‘to purchase more than half of its materials from Belgium and to employ Belgians to the extent of 60% of its European personnel’. Land, mining concessions, finance & the Congolese budget required the agreement of the Belgian Parliament. Yet – as this ee Focus continues Chapter 4 of SBD’s classic – we learn how Congo’s Katanga province resolves this riddle. The strong influence of Flemish settlers from Belgium in Katanga turns out to be the ‘hinge on which the Congo’s economy revolved’. The local staff of the companies had interests and an outlook similar to those of settlers, developing a local identity. Even as there was an ‘enormous outflow of profits & of payments for banking, transportation & insurance services’, there was a high level of reinvestment in the home market, which complemented the banking sector, with local agriculture feeding the entire country. We here read of how they created one of the world’s most advanced working classes, giving birth to one of the Congo’s greatest treasures, stolen & cut down in the prime of his life – Patrice Lumumba.

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‘ISB holders became the largest creditor group among foreign creditors.

(What happened to the Chinese debt trap?)… In negotiations with

the ISB holders both foreign & local, Sri Lankan authorities

signed a non-disclosure agreement.’ (see ee Random Notes)

Why has there been no righteous outcry about this non-disclosure agreement? It also turns out that jurisdiction over this debt was moved from New York (where a recent law claims to prevent shylocking), to London! There is no gnashing of teeth because most of the ISB holders are from the US, England, Europe, India & Japan. While those economists & media & politicians, who cry loudest about corruption being Sri Lanka’s greatest issue, are funded by these same imperialists.

     ee Focus continues Gustavus Myers’ 1917 History of Tammany Hall, which shows how the so-called exposers of corruption can be the most corrupt. The merchant media in Sri Lanka excels in making ‘corruption’ the greatest crime, rather than merchantry & usury. In this episode, Myers wonders how the Tammany organization ‘steeped in corruption and graft should so ostentatiously pretend to be the exposer and punisher of infractions in an official who had defied its power’ thus eliciting ‘mockery, resentment and indignation’. He shows how in the age of so-called ‘muckraking’, when corporations were ‘more and more rigorously scrutinized by official bodies’, some corporations received government contracts that included ‘exemption from supervision’. Non-disclosure?

     While lobbyists are legalized and are the real power in all capitalist legislatures, Myers’ recalls how the chief legislative lobbyist in New York state was the distributor of a ‘Yellow Dog Fund’, maintained to pay off politicians sitting on certain oversight committees (Hint! Hint!). The Tammany organization, which went after politicians they couldn’t control, impeached a New York state governor for ‘refusing to be its tool’. He had foolishly tried to ensure worker safety on trains… And ‘compel honest dealings on the New York Stock Exchange’ (a tool of monopoly, see ee Quotes, Marx), refusing ‘control of public schools to a religious denomination’, repealing a ‘notorious charter’ given to a private corporation to distribute water, and defied bosses – big & little, by refusing to be ‘a rubber stamp’ to promote corporation-friendly legislation & appointments to public office. Foolish indeed!

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• Photographs, Philanthropy, Warships, Drug Busts & Media – With all this blabber about AI, cyber security, digitalization, big data, this & that, how is it that all this so-called science never warned us about the oncoming disaster? Apparently, they did – it was just not translated into common sense practice, which turns out to be not that common. As least for a merchant media.

     Isn’t there something also corrupt about ensuring the media is available with flashing cameras to announce every donation and promise of philanthropy? And why send ‘warships’ to deliver aid? Nobody asks. We are instead treated to headlines like, the IMF is ‘considering’… the IMF is ‘pledging’. But how & when these promises even materialize, we are not told. Will we have to import their second-hand machines & then pay some more? Again, rather than us owing debt, shouldn’t AI tell them, that after 500 years of European invasions, it is they who owe us?

     Why does every embassy inform the media to be present, then bribe the media to report that they ‘promised’ such & such an amount? Why doesn’t the government simply publish a list every day of the donations made by whom, in alphabetical order or by descending order of donations? And then there are the publicized drug busts. Isn’t it suspicious that the customs or police officials have to have their photographs taken & published whenever they do their job? Again, why isn’t there a simple list of how much the customs or police busted per day or per week? Why publish their photos? Doesn’t this also risk criminals taking their revenge on such persons? Or, are they…?

     Then there are corporates & NGOs having photographs taken of themselves, as they hand over a cheque, which may bounce. Why do we have to have a large front-page headlined picture of a smiling white woman baring her white teeth, with her fashionista glasses over her head, announcing UNICEF’s approximate numerals (275,000) of children gravely affected by the cyclone? How did they count so fast, when roads & rivers are still impassable? Did Elon Musk’s satellites help? We know that NGOs have to compete for funds in such moments, or show how their philanthropy is in the picture. But our Buddhist culture dictates that claiming credit for merit negates. Or perhaps it’s for tax avoidance purposes?

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• AI & Labor – If Artificial Intelligence were really intelligent it would know that it is capitalists who are threatening labour and not the technology itself. AI, if it’s really smart, would protest! If, it’s truly intelligent it would make sure that no workers suffer such threats or consequences. It would explain how the capitalists could be replaced. However, we know that it is workers themselves who have to harness AI to do that. AI is not that smart by itself. Meanwhile, they are blaming industrialization for global warming. But what about global warring? How hot are these forever cold wars? And as for these US-funded thinktanks & NGOS like the ‘Centre for a Smart Future’ – well, we would just like a future! That would be really smart….

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Contents:

Sri Lanka and India’s Fake Industrialization Cannot Rebuild the Country