e-Con e-News

blog: https://eesrilanka.wordpress.com

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

e-Con e-News 11-17 January 2026

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‘Sovereign countries don’t get sovereignty

if the US wants their resources.’

– Stephen Miller, US President Don Trump’s

Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy & Homeland

Security Adviser (see ee Industry)

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‘Other actions that we are witnessing in the international arena testify

not even to an attempt, but to the policy of our US colleagues to break

the entire system that has been created for many years with their direct

participation. I am referring not only to the UN agencies, but also to the

principles of the globalisation model, which the US introduced, appealing

to such slogans as freedom of market forces, fair competition, inviolability

of property & many other slogans, which have now gone down the drain,

as they say. Instead of globalization, we are witnessing the fragmentation

of the world economy.’ – Sergei Lavrov, Russian Foreign Minister

(see ee Sovereignty, Lavrov’s First Presser of 2026)

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‘Barbados probably has the biggest logistics hub for tourism.

So, you now begin to understand why I speak & why I have

been speaking in the terms that I have without necessarily

getting into matters that are too high for us.’ – Mia Mottley

(see ee Sovereignty, PM of Barbados, Jan 3)

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She surfs! The ‘Southern Coast’ is the ‘best’. Sri Lanka is ‘magic’ – such are the departing headlines the media in Sri Lanka has been bribed to pronounce about the retreating US envoy Julie Chung. Magic for what? Best for whom? Is it also ‘too high’ for the media to ask about what happened to all her gnawing sermons about ‘free & open’ oceans, ‘freedom of navigation’, ‘rule of law’? Why was a surfboard coyly hiding her lower loins & providing a free ad for a surfboard logo? Does she have a tail? Was the splashing about the ocean to announce the USA’s latest (actually, very old) policy of piracy on the high seas, so far from the Potomac (or the Thames). Was it to divert from the eastern Uva seas, where under this receding envoy’s watch, Zionist synagogues & settlements have oozed up on the sands, like a bleeding oil well in the Orinoco?

     Is it also ‘too high’ for the media to dare ask the envoy about the ‘gender rights’ or ‘human rights’ of the recently kidnapped Venezuelan1^st Companera Cilia Flores, now imprisoned in the wintry dungeons of Mr Exxon Rockefeller’s other New York hotel (a cell minus a view)? Maybe we should ask Rockfeller’s eminent representative in Sri Lanka, Milinda Moragoda, or his feminist wife? The media claims there is a dispute between Exxon & Trump, but Trump is a mere dummy for Exxon’s ventriloquism. And for all this US regime’s ‘anti-woke’ drivel, they had to promote an African-American soldier to escort the kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro in handcuffs into the carceral USA!

     All the nonsense about a US attack on Greenland (already a European colony) is a diversion from their escalating invasion of Venezuela & their possible Gaza-type bloodbath there? It maybe also too high for the media to ask such discomfiting questions from the new US envoy Eric Meyer, even if they (is this the appropriate pronoun?) appear in a bikini or a skirt, or tattoo the map of Sri Lanka or the entire Western Hemisphere on their wrinkling butt.

     And what on earth has happened to all the propaganda – from the US & other imperialist embassy mouthpieces, not just their blabbering lipstick like EconomyNext, but also their thinktanks, the Advocatas & the Verités – about ‘free trade, etc?  Is it too high for them too? Where in the heavens has all that vaporous blathering gone? Has it slurped through that gaping now-mythical hole in the ozone layer, perhaps? Gaza & Venezuela are lessons to be learned. Global warming is over & global warring is back in the headlines, not just heating up the planet, but also beating up on its more defenceless inhabitants! And how!

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So, how much money do the US & English German governments pay to bribe the slavish media in Sri Lanka? Is it paid in cold cash, under the table, off the books, in envelopes, by wire transfers or through the pre-capitalist peasant barter system, but now in visas, in junkets & jaunts abroad, in invitations to banquets & cocktails. Or is it paid in the ads placed by the numerous PR & ‘marketing’ agencies of their multinationals, for soaps & detergents (ahem!). A more appropriate question for ee, would be to ask, how much has been dished out to forestall any attempt at establishing a modern industrial economy? Is this too, too high to ask?  

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• This ee Focus reproduces a ‘Missing Pillar in Sri Lanka’s Recovery: a New Public Development Bank’, by Suhaina Razaq, which appeared in this week’s FT. Razaq provides a valuable yet truncated history of the fate of development banks in Sri Lanka. Razaq notes how development banks have enabled countries to navigate disasters like the pandemic, noting there are now over 500 development banks worldwide. But not in Sri Lanka. She notes that eponymous ‘development’ banks like the Development Finance Corporation of Ceylon (DFCC) and the National Development Bank (NDB) were ‘commercialized’ for short-term profits instead. We recall that an IMF official once told a local economist that the privatization of the DFCC & NDB were necessary, because they could not allow any investment in industry anymore! They had learned their lesson with the so-called NICs – Newly Industrialized Countries (Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan) of East & Southeast Asia!

Nevertheless, Razaq sees a development bank as offering a safeguard to the global market volatility that the country has been exposed to since ‘the late 1970s’, which has added to the erosion of our ‘productive base’. What exactly is that? The garment racket that does not make a pin or thread? ? And is the Western Province really more advanced ‘industrially’ than other provinces? It steals natural and ‘human’ resources and barters them to the ‘West’.

Razaq curiously proclaims an affiliation with Ahilan Kadirgamar in this FT essay. Well then, Kadirgamar is on the board of directors of the People’s Bank, and is in an eminent position to describe what has been preventing the Bank of Ceylon & the People’s Bank (from their very birth) from functioning as ‘development banks’ on behalf of the country, let alone on behalf of the ‘people’.

As with other economists, Razaq fails to explore the conscious & consistent sabotage of attempts to set up banks that would enable long-term investment in industrialization. Nor does she note that development banks already operate in Sri Lanka! It is just that they are foreign development banks hiding behind local finance companies, loansharking to sell their countries industrial products, as fronts for their exporters: the Belgian Investment Company for Developing Countries, the Netherlands’ Dutch Development Bank (FMO), and Switzerland’s Blue Orchard Microfinance Fund, to name a few, that operate through local finance companies, LOLC, Citizens Development Business Finance (CDB), Commercial Leasing & Finance (CLC), etc. Those who focus on how they rip off women, miss the imported bus (or tractor, or fridge or washing machine) completely. We should not forget to mention that the USA’s World Bank’s International Finance Corporation, and the USA’s & Japan’s Asian Development Bank, also operate through the private commercial banks to divert the country’s surpluses.  

Rather ironically, in an essay also published in the FT (& also in the new year, in 2021), the then Central Bank Governor WD Lakshman had declared (just before that orchestrated meltdown) that a ‘National Development Banking Corporation is ‘to be’ established by merging 3 state banks’ (see ee 09 Jan 2021). Exactly one year before that, the CB Governor, then newly appointed, called for a development bank: ‘The absence of dedicated development finance institutions is felt strongly’ (see ee 5-11 Jan 2020).One year later, it was given a name. But what exactly is a development bank? ee then asked why ‘development banks’ are so ‘strongly opposed by the import mafia & their monopoly media? And what does it have to do or not do with the scandal of microfinance? We know what happened to Lakshman (let alone SWRD Bandaranaike after his goverment proposed such a bank). Razaq & others (who depend on NGO largesse) better watch out.

ee then also noted: ‘The microfinance & SME scam as practiced on us, involves no such industrial investment. It ensures there’s no monetization & commercialization of the rural economy. They wish to retain their capture of the home market & prevent investment in rural industry!’

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• In the Conception or in the Cradle? – The whole concept of ‘minority rights’ has had to do with the protection of the minority white interests in those countries they colonized, and yet was a ‘holding action’ until they were able to decimate the larger populations of those countries. Even more, it turns out that one of the prime aims of colonization is to strangle ‘in the cradle or perhaps in the conception’, the development of an indigenous bourgeoisie, and more acurately, the emergence of an industrial proletariat. The current foofaraw over education reforms has been happily diverted into matters better left to the bedrooms rather than the classrooms of the nation.

     ee Focus therefore continues SBD de Silva’s The Political Economy of Underdevelopment, beginning Chapter 6 – ‘Settler Growth & the Repression of Indigenous Interests’. Here, de Silva compares countries who with ‘a critical mass of white settlers’ showed a greater internal dynamism than ‘the nonsettler colonies which were made into ‘producers of primary products for the metropolitan economy’.

     He compares the conditions of the Africans in Rhodesia or South Africa, which were the exact opposite of the so-called ‘independent’ nonsettler colonies like Sri Lanka. The size of their populations prevented their genocide, as occured in the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc. This ee Focus examines how ‘the structure of race relations’ was varied in different colonial situations, and linked to economic activity. De Silva also notes how the development of an industrial bourgeoisie in the non-settler colonies such as Sri Lanka was strangled ‘in the cradle or perhaps in the conception’.

     In this excerpt, de Silva also compares the nature of the native bourgeoisie that was developed in Nigeria under the English, and in the Philippines under the USA, which became ‘the most industrialized country in Southeast Asia’. Meanwhile, it is in the settler colonies, ‘that the domination of the Europeans found its sharpest expression’, denying all education to the natives, while in the non-settler colonies like Sri Lanka education was diverted into nonsense, as evident in recent debates on its reform. SBD de Silva also examines the different types of segregation practised on the Africans & migrant Indians in East Africa. Finally, he also examines the role played by white women, both in their absence as well as in their entry into the settler colonies, and how their ‘jealousies’ were manipulated to shape settler policy.

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•With a Li’l Help from Bots – A column in the Wijeya Group’s Financial Times this week ended with the author making a rare confession, honestly declaring at the end, in parentheses: ‘(The article was written with research & review by Chat GPT)’. While this FT columnist in particular usually writes well-argued expositions (see ‘SL must prepare & act before the next floods’, ee Agriculture), many columns these days, especially those signed with a presumably real name plus numerous academic degrees attached (so many doctors, yet so many agues!), appear almost unnaturally smooth & silken, even as they ooze vacuity, and pass through the reader’s eyes & entrails as does a super laxative, yet imparting nothing (merely adding to the impacted bull). Many of them can indeed be written by bots. Most items broadcast the imperialist imprimatur (Export! Export! Stick with the IMF! Pay the Debt! The Debt! etc). As for the news items, many are simply ‘cut&paste jobs’, photocopies of emailed press-releases, prepared by their Public Relations departments or the PR agencies set up by the large multinational corporations (MNCs) that dominate the media.

The most popular media word for 2025 turns out to be ‘resilient’. Add that to ‘steady’, ‘stable’ & ‘sustainable’ – and ask how many wars it is going to take to ensure such adjectival resonance for capitalism?

     Take these following news items, one issued by the so-called Ceylon Chamber of Commerce (see ee Industry), & the other by the UN Development Program (UNDP) (see ee Economists). Both news items are faithfully reproduced, actually ‘stenographed’ in all the ‘business’ media, with little variation in their verbiage:

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Industry bodies flag gaps, urge overhaul

of Draft National Electricity Policy…

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UNDP calls for inclusive access to recovery financing

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• The UNDP press release has some variation in its prioritization of what they feel has been damaged by the storms, but it is written in the most clog-footed prose. Each item of course repeats the name of the ‘UNDP Resident Representative Azusa Kubota’ lamenting MSMEs & the ‘informal economy’. Now why do they need to advertise their largesse? The overweening concern that the governments of US, England, the EU (a front for Nazi Germany) & Japan, have for ‘MSMEs’ & the ‘informal’ deserves its own detailed expose. We could argue that most of these ‘enterprises’ actually are either outsourced fronts for these imperialists’ MNCs, or purvey their goods.

     The  ‘photocopy’ of the Chamber of Commerce press release lists their ‘allies’ which includes the US Chamber (which perhaps makes the Ceylon Chamber, an English Chamber pot!), and all the other ‘exporters’ (who are really ‘importers’ in drag).

     Since this import-export merchant media salivate & froth so loudly about ‘corruption’, shouldn’t they state how much they are paid to reproduce these items verbatim? These ‘news’ items carry absolutely no critical comments by the media, and should qualify as advertisements, listed under paid commercials or infomercials. And pay taxes! What says the Internal Revenue Department? And how much did the envoy & her propagandists evade in the end?

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• Does our modern history begin in 1948 or 1977, 1505 or 1796? It’s a Rorschach test, where different people are taught to see & regurgitate processed ideologies, rather than learn to mould reality. From the very beginning our invaders have first attacked our granaries & industrial workshops. They have driven our most dedicated artisans to addictions & madness, suicide or flight. And yet it is they who still seem to hold our future in their hands. Our merchants & moneylenders only seek quick & easy money. Only a state led by the skilled class of peasants & workers can liberate us, arming us to deal with ‘matters too high for us’.

     While the media focuses on the programmed ranting of the US President, it is important to emphasize that the time of princes is long past, and political literacy & true sovereignty requires we understand that that what comes out of a leader’s mouth is mostly what goes into his (or her or their or our) ears. The Prince has long been a committee, either of the bourgeoisie or, more importantly, the politbureau of a rising proletariat.

     The latest attack on Iran has been defeated through the taking down of imperialist media infiltration (via illegal Starlink terminals smuggled in by the US, see ee Quotes). Yet it is also vital to teach our children how to decipher the onslaught of such media (see ee Random Notes). Many videos are AI fakes, and people can learn how a normal voice is very human. Most media commentators & analysts – themselves easily replaceable by bots because they cannot challenge the reigning orthodoxy – appear to take the characters on stage & screen at their word. Any US President’s words are not his own words; he’s a ventriloquist’s dummy, as much as all such leaders are, representing the interplay of the ruling forces & relations of production. It is time we learned, as the Iranians have, to not just learn to use & make the bots, but to spook the bots! 

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Contents:

The Miseducation & Strangling of an Industrial Class in Sri Lanka