e-Con e-News

blog: https://eesrilanka.wordpress.com

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

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e-Con e-News 22-28 February 2026

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‘Seize assets, expel spies, expose lies, change the narrative’

– Simon Tisdall, Guardian (see ee Sovereignty,

‘Lunatic Voice of The Day’)

The arrest this week of former State Intelligence Service (SIS) chief Suresh Sallay preludes the possible arrest of former President Gotabaya Rajapakse, as demanded by the US, England & Europe – prescient analysts surmise. This follows recent revelations that the CIA was behind the popularly elected Rajapakse’s forcible expulsion in 2022 (see ee Sovereignty, Gotabaya says he was kicked out by a CIA game, played by those around him). Such controversial arrests are expected to lead to further turmoil, and are meant to divert from the economic paralysis in Sri Lanka engendered by the USA’s International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the continued obstructing of a modern industrial country. These arrests, aimed at demoralizing & dividing the Sinhala majority, are being linked to the recent pressures by English & US officials, and US, Israeli & Indian preparations for escalating wars in the Indian Ocean.

     The US/Israeli bombardment of Iran & the murder of their 87-year-old Ayatollah Ali Khamenei this weekend, has sent the ruling media in Sri Lanka into a blue funk, with news of unidentified foreign aircraft being reported overhead, as oil prices are being zoomed, as well as Sri Lanka’s access to West Asian fuel, commodity & labor markets, being constricted. What are friends for?

     The Anglo-US-led assassination of Sri Lanka’s 4^th Prime Minister SWRD Bandaranaike in 1959 was presaged by the Anglo-US overthrow, imprisonment & torture of Iran’s first elected leader Mohamed Mossadegh. That 1953 coup on behalf of USA’s Exxon and England’s British Petroleum, amidst the US-led genocidal wars to divide Korea & Vietnam, itself signaled a series of coups & assassinations to thwart the post-World-War-II anti-colonial movements around the world.

     The USA is escalating yet another (possibly nuclear) war (using Israel as their battering ram), to prevent Asia from slipping further from their colonial grip – to abort the birth of a better world. The US is trying to control Iran’s choices about their own forms of energy. The US claim that Iran is enriching uranium to make weapons is part of a long-term plan to attack and destroy Iran. The attack was made while negotiations were ongoing. England too sabotaged Sri Lanka’s attempt to achieve even hydroelectric self-sufficiency via the undermining of DJ Wimalasurendra’s vision over a 100 years ago. Their plan is to prevent our existence as modern nations.

     Much of Asia remain as colonial outposts, if not in name, with 10,000s of US troops stationed on bases in supposedly independent countries, as in West Asia, Japan, etc, with piratical US Navy and allied ships prowling the ocean. While media like to promote Israel as an autonomous plot by evil Jews, it is clear they are an extension of Europe’s white settler colonies. Last week’s ee noted the Black Agenda Report’s exposé of the attempt to set up an Israeli branch settler colony inside Kenya, which had echoes of the encroachments in Sri Lanka’s east in Arugam Bay.

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• Colombo Port simply exists to serve US interests, and the rest of Sri Lanka is a mere appendage of its harbours – so suggested the US Embassy’s Chargé d’Affaires Jayne Howell last week at their AmCham Elevate Sri Lanka CEO Forum 2026. The US embassy has also not provided the names of the ‘over 250 C-level executives, policymakers, development partners, & global thought leaders’, who they said would attend their ‘CEO Forum’. Howell repeated holy gospel that US foreign policy operates to make their own country, ‘safer, stronger, & more prosperous’. Is this new? Maybe she wishes to school our diplomats, that they too, should first look out for Sri Lanka’s safety, power & wealth. ‘Our’ foreign service have perhaps not learned this truism already from their worldwide travels. They could also learn that the USA supposedly only now recognizes that its riches are actually based, not only on its piracies, but also on its modern industrial power.

     Howell goes into their usual whine, blaming Sri Lanka’s ‘regulatory unpredictability, bureaucratic barriers, inconsistent standards, and opaque procurement processes.’ Unpredictability? Surely this fits US policy even better.  Colonial commentators use euphemisms of ‘global disruption’ & ‘turbulence’, rather than state it is US-led imperialism that seeks to further destabilize the world, through escalating another world war, in order to maintain its hegemony. The ease with which English media reported the kidnapping of the leader of a sovereign country (Venezuela) as ‘capture’ & ‘arrest’ only shows how sickeningly slavish these ‘free’ scribes are to their colonial masters.

     Howell added that her real bosses, US capitalists, ‘nevertheless see opportunity in Sri Lanka: The Port of Colombo is a powerful example of how our economic interests converge.’ As South Asia’s ‘leading container transshipment hub’, the Colombo Port’s ‘planned expansion to 15 million containers by 2027 is expected to improve supply chain efficiency for US manufacturers & consumers’. So there! We exist to satiate their whims & lubricate their wars. Last week saw the armed seizure of the Hong-Kong-corporate-run port terminals in the Panama Canal and the chasing away of Panamanian & Hong Kong staff. This followed threats from US President Trump that his country’s armed forces would invade Panama unless the area was rid of ‘Chinese soldiers!’ A pure fabrication unchallenged by their media. (see ee Random Notes)

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     As a prelude to engulfing the world’s oceans in their wars, the trail of US tools & puppets into Sri Lanka has continued in recent weeks, from the IMF chief, to the US Pacific Fleet Commander, and a host of other, lesser, Indian, English & other sermon-givers, all bearing trojan-horse gifts, of ships & bridges, and ‘tariff-free market access’ & ‘sourcing flexibilities’, etc.

     No media chooses to mention that such ‘gifts’ of hardware & software & market access, always come with hidden ‘backdoors’ & ‘kill-switches’ to enable these ‘philanthropists’ to infiltrate, access information & take control of their gifts at their majestic pleasure. The ability to disable such intrusions requires a modern industrial culture.

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• The Indian-owned MAS Group says, their controversial decision to close their Methliya Kreeda garment factory in Thulhiriya, and lay off over at least 2,000 workers, is ‘to ‘transition’ into a fabric manufacturing plant, clearly highlighting the company’s growing strategy to create an increasing base for fabrics.’ This decision curiously follows visits by the English High Commissioner to garment factories. So does this ‘High Commissioner’ make his high commissions from the materials (machines to tools to threads, etc) the English supply to the rag trade here – which they claim to have been involved in from the very beginning, at least from the 1980s? And it is a trade. It is not an industry. We make not a needle or a thread, let alone a machine. Why doesn’t the Japanese Juki Corp. transfer the ability to make parts for their ubiquitous and eponymous sewing machines? Why haven’t MAS and Brandix invested their enormous profits all these years in increasing productivity? Why have they not invested in making a needle or thread to reduce production costs? The media about the rag trade has only been to highlight the supposed munificence of the English providing tariff-free access to their markets. Why such generosity? We reproduce the Communist Party’s insights into the layoff and continued devastation of Sri Lanka’s ‘industrial base’ (see ee Random Notes). They importantly point to how this once state-owned textile plant was set up with the support of East Germany‘s socialist government, and was then devastated by the reckless privatization of the post-1977 JR ‘Yankee Dicky’ Jayawardene regime:

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‘In the context of global geopolitical competition

in the Indian Ocean region, Sri Lanka’s economic

vulnerability becomes even more dangerous…’

• In this week’s ee Focus, key moments in the 83-year-old trajectory of Sri Lanka’s Communist Party, from its founding in 1943 to its 23^rd Congress last week, is tracked by CPSL Chairman DEW Gunasekera. CPSL Congresses have always taken place at crucial moments, and Gunasekera recalls the role the CPSL has played in guiding Sri Lanka’s anti-imperialist leadership in the formation of the 1955 Bandung Conference & the Non-aligned Movement, which reached its peak in the 1970s. Capitalism counterattacked attempts at true ‘independence’, through further monopolization, escalating economic exploitation, unequal power & financialization of economies – the rise of rentierism, of making money from money, and calling it growth (see ee Random Notes, Ireland’s Paper Rich).

‘Sri Lanka’s crisis culminated on 12 April 2022, when the

government declared suspension of external debt payments’

Gunasekera also analyses ‘Sri Lanka’s Triple Crisis’ in the running out of rupees, dollars, and the inability to repay domestic & external borrowing, which has rendered us even more vulnerable to imperialist dictates. Gunasekera tracks the rising resistance to this aggression as witnessed in the structural economic shift internationally towards Asia, and deepening integration of Asia, Africa & the real Americas, which the colonizing regimes are trying to prevent at all cost.

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• One of SBD de Silva’s more incisive insights was the curious lack of an Economic History of Sri Lanka. Instead, we have been inundated with all manner of political and cultural narratives, ‘ethnic’ histories, bereft of economic underpinnings, funded by the Oxfords & Fords & other intellectual paymasters of this world.

The government intervened to force local labour on to

the plantations by raising the rent on peasant farms

‘progressively & systematically’ and by small grants

of land offered as a bait to land-hungry peasants

Many are the sheer fictions about our past, and one of the most enduring and much-bruited forgeries is the claim that the Sinhala being lazy, refused to work on the English plantations. ‘How was a low-wage economy created in the face of persistent labour shortages, & why did indigenous peasants not take up plantation employment?’ are the questions this excerpt of SBD de Silva’s classic, The Political Economy of Underdevelopment, seeks to answer.He responds to the many English myths about why their plantations resorted to unfree migrant labor from South India, and different times of ‘phenomenal’ demand for labor, and the battle between planters & ‘kanganies’ over controlling labor supply, and the role played by the English state. SBD also pointed to the ‘thriving’ involvement of Sinhala workers in graphite mining. Yet:

‘The insuperable aversion of the Sinhalese

to personal exertion renders it impractical

to procure labour for Public Service

other than by compulsion‘

SBD’s chapter also demolishes the myth that ‘the handling of money was a natural propensity of Europeans’. He also detailed a long list of published English insults about Sinhala people’s supposed laziness (repeated to this day by economists), when all they were objecting to was slave labor.

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• The supposed public interrogation of former US President Will Clinton & his spouse Hillary of their possible involvement in a child-sex-trafficking ring run by financier Jeffrey Epstein, is a diversionary charade from their more heinous crimes of waging wars on whole countries, Libya, Afghanistan, etc. Even when confessing to crime the imperialist media machine always want to show how much better and valued they are. The killing of a Black person (this includes so-called Latinos & Asians) in the USA may last one news cycle, while killing of a white lasts several more cycles. Mass killings of Blacks (in wars, accidents, etc.) elsewhere may not get even one full cycle. The point of the exercise is to pay the psychological wage to whites, that 20 or 100 Blacks equals just 1 white!

     US law used to treat a Black person has 2-3rds of a white person. Even after declaring Black people as persons, the USA has continued to pay Black people, 2-3rds of what they pay whites (and this contrast is even worse for what US Corporations pay people around the world). The USA claims to have abolished slavery, yet the 13^th amendment to their constitution has allowed slavery to continue in their prisons. Hence, most US prisoners (inside & outside the USA, including their secret prisons) are Black. The US 14^th amendment that declared Black people as ‘persons’, was passed to slip through that corporations were also persons! ‘Person’apparently is traced back to the Latin ‘persona’ for ‘mask’. And ‘hypocrite’ is from the Greek word for ‘actor’. Masks & Actors indeed! The English word ‘reason’ is from ‘ratio’. And English word ‘ratio’ is from the Latin ‘rat’: to reckon! Go reckon all this English, if you smell a rat!

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Contents:

USA Signals Seizure of Colombo Port