The USA Teaches Sri Lanka’s Navy to Hijack Ships & Handle Snakes
Posted on August 4th, 2026
e-Con e-News
Posted byee ink.Posted inUncategorizedTags:China, economy, India, news, politics
blog: https://eesrilanka.wordpress.com
‘Before you study the economics, study the economists!’
e-Con e-News 26 July – 01 August 2026
• The USA says it has been training the Sri Lankan armed forces to hijack ships & handle snakes! (see ee Quotes, Carat’s Sticks). This was all part of the USA’s war games in Sri Lanka’s seas off Trincomalee this week to tutor Sri Lanka’s forces in such niceties as ‘Visit, Board, Search & Seizure (VBSS)’ as well. Centuries of handling marauding TamilNadu seafood thieves have amounted to no finetuning of such techniques. As for handling snakes, the taming of cobras is an ever-present motif in our nation’s spiritual iconography. What other serpents (or dragons?) does the USA perceive in the groves of their nightmares, beyond Trincomalee’s China Bay?
The USA’s Army Pacific (USARPAC) and the US Army’s 18th Theater Medical Command were also stalking Colombo’s streets this week to teach us to combat hexapods (see ee Quotes, Bloodsuckers), because our official bipeds are physically unable or too lazy to get off their asses to overcome dengue, and instead require imported experts from the mosquito-infested swamps of Florida!
And yet the USA & its mouths organs & lip services are congratulating the government, and the government is congratulating itself, on the wonderful job it is doing on the economy (see ee Economists, We’re the World 4th Most Developed Country? – Why is the Government Fooling People?). So, what’s going on? Once the USA entraps the Sri Lankan ruling party further; then if the NPP even slightly objects to taking off all its clothes and bending over more completely, only then will all the dirt start to overflow & the real economy divulge its stark brutality.
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‘Compliance clock ticks for EU-bound exporters’
‘GSP+ clock starts ticking as SL underuses EU trade concessions’
How long will the USA & EU block Sri Lanka’s economic sovereignty? & how long will Sri Lanka’s merchants & moneylenders make us submit to foreign whimsy and dictat? The USA & EU’s constant sermons and threats of sanctions are dedicated to keeping the country off-balance.
Sri Lanka’s always departing Ambassador to the US, Mahinda Samarasinghe, presented a coffee-table book titled Enduring Friendship, to Allison Hooker, US Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs. The book apparently ‘chronicles over 2 centuries of human encounters between the people of the US & Sri Lanka, extending beyond the years of diplomatic ties established on Oct 29, 1948’. This description suggests there have been unchronicled ‘inhuman’ encounters. However, the title takes the cake, and shows us the subtle though uncelebrated genius of our suited representatives in Washington: Enduring Friendship indeed!
According to the dictionary:
‘endure – verb: 1. [with object] suffer (something painful or difficult) patiently:
it seemed impossible that anyone could endure such pain…
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An unsourced, anonymous article appeared in the Sunday Times of 05 July 2026, which quoted an unnamed ‘government source’ and referred to a ‘discussion’ held on the Friday before (03 July) between (again, unnamed) ‘Finance Ministry officials & representatives of the Customs Department to explore ways on how best to handle this situation’. The Sunday Time story went on to quote another unnamed ‘official’ who said: ‘We take our international trade obligations seriously, but we have to ensure that the fiscal requirements of the country too are addressed.’
So, what exactly was the ‘situation’? And what was all this unattributed hush-hush about? What are these serious ‘international trade obligations’? And what are our ‘fiscal requirements’? Well, what else is new? The news item was headlined – Govt to revise tax on used-vehicle-imports after US complaint to WTO.
The media is awash with hilarious stories claiming that the import of cars is an IMF demand, and even more that such imports increase our GDP (Gross Domestic Product!) and meet ‘fiscal requirements’. Such fantastic claims on how such unproductive imports actually ‘produce’ anything is now a commonplace, as the various ‘lip services’ of imperialism seek to murunga-atthafy the present government.
‘JB Securities said registrations… included a Rolls-Royce
Phantom EWB, a Bentley Bentayga, and a Ferrari 296 GTB.’
(see ee Quotes, Rolls Royce Revenue)
‘Official vehicle registration statistics are presenting
a deceptive picture of auto-financing activity in Sri Lanka.
Motor dealers are increasingly pre-registering unsold vehicles
under their own names to avoid inventory penalties.’
(see ee Quotes, Vehicle Import Frauds)
‘Sri Lanka’s fiscal position has improved
significantly since 2022… particularly strong
due to the lifting of all vehicle import restrictions
(see ee Quotes, S&P Happy)
An investigation by Gomi Senadheera in the Island questions the veracity of the above-mentioned anonymous Sunday Times ‘newstory’ claiming that the USA filed a formal WTO complaint against Sri Lanka over used-vehicle tariffs. No such dispute appears in official WTO databases or Goods Council records (see ee Focus). The issue likely stems from routine discussions on customs valuation – a minor infraction, rather than a major WTO violation, that Sri Lanka has managed discreetly since 2003, primarily with Japan (the main exporter of defunct vehicles to SL). The USA exports left-hand drive vehicles, which though illegal, are being seen more frequently on the road. The author suggests the Sunday Times story is a pretext to revise tax structures, for Sri Lanka’s major problem is trade mis-invoicing & under-invoicing, which drains at least $1billion annually (see ee Who’s Who?).
More importantly, Senadhira highlights recent formal complaints by China, Brazil & the EU against the USA’s ‘reciprocal tariffs’. These tariffs breach core GATT Articles I (Most-Favored-Nation or B) & II (bound tariff rates). The EU see these measures as contradicting foundational WTO rules. China bluntly labels these ‘economic coercion & bullying’ that prioritize US interests. Senadhira concludes that, if the US were to officially pursue a complaint against Sri Lanka over a negligible technicality, it would epitomize the same hypocritical and coercive behavior it is accused of by its major trading partners, as it seeks to undermine multilateral trade norms.
Meanwhile, the Sunday Times‘ Sunimalee Dias, this week, refers to US authorities accusing China’s Xinjiang region of manufacturing goods using forced labour. Dias then misleadingly adds ‘the UN has warned that this amounts to enslavement of the Uyghur people’. Dias presents the US-funded fabricated allegations as established facts, which they are not. Also, only so-called ‘Independent UN experts’ made this warning, not the UN as an official body! (see ee Industry, US exports on 10% tariff for Sri Lanka).
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By the way: The USA banned the trading of enslaved Africans from Africa to protect their own ‘slave breeding’ businesses inside the USA, to ensure high prices when selling enslaved women & men & children across the Americas!
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The USA & its mouth organs & lip services are earnestly hyping the ‘successes’ of the government’s economic endeavours. The government too, is hyping itself, rather than implementing any innovative industrial policies. The current spate of hype follows USAID’s Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA)’s supposed survey that claims, ‘75.5% of respondents are satisfied with President Dissanayake’s performance.’ How these NGO surveys are conducted is the subject of endless mirth. After this privatized ‘poll’, the USA’s World Bank & IMF, to the US ratings agencies (S&P, Fitch), to obscure outfits such as the USA’s Institute of International Finance (IIF), all began praising the government’s ‘improvements’. The Exporters’ Associations & the Chambers of Commerce are also ecstatic that the USA has reduced their ‘threatened’ tariffs from 12.5% to 10%! What is all the murungafying about?
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With the USA entering into its expensive midterm election cycle, they have taken to blaming Russia and China for the Iranian attacks on their bases and clandestine operatives. US corpses remain uncountable in military and electoral mathematics. The USA meanwhile has expanded its attacks in Central Asia, by having its killer poodle Ukraine attack an Iranian ship in the Caspian Lake. The USA has also stepped-up attempts to further entangle Sri Lanka (see ee Quotes, CPSL) in its wars, overt & covert, to subvert Asia’s rising economies. This partly explains the murunga-fying….
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• Over the last few weeks, the USA, and allied media, corporate and (anti)social, has stepped up its attacks on India, both internally as well as externally, unleashing cockroaches and more worrisome bipeds. India’s Congress Party meanwhile sent such an empty eloquence as Sashi Tharoor to grace an Indian-funded publishers’ breakaway (The Colombo Literary Festival). Tharoor arrived to feel out the NPP government’s attitude to an impending return of the Gandhis to the USA’s good books.
The Indian government is under economic siege, but Indian Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal has dismissed reports on potential 100% US tariffs against Russian oil importers like India as ‘speculation’. This studied nonchalance appears increasingly untenable, observes MK Bhadrakumar (see ee Focus) as the bipartisan Lindsey O Graham Sanctioning Russia & Iran Act of 2026 is rapidly advancing through the USA’s Congress with overwhelming support. The weapons-seller US Senator Graham passed away recently, allegedly due to a suspected missile attack in the Ukraine, while promoting more war. The bill, which passed its second procedural vote 84-12, explicitly includes secondary sanctions & tariff provisions targeting major buyers of Russian energy, with President Trump already signaling support.
The legislation effectively restores and expands Trump’s authority to impose punitive tariffs above 15%, building on previous executive orders that already subjected India to 25% additional duties in 2025. Analysts view the bill as a strategic tool to pressure Russia over Ukraine, though Russian officials acknowledge it may have limited practical effect on Moscow’s hardened stance, which now favors a prolonged military solution over diplomatic concessions.
India faces additional competitive disadvantages beyond the Russia sanctions issue, as the USA’s new permanent Section 301 duties of 10-12.5% took effect July 24, targeting over 60 trading partners including India. Unlike Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Malaysia, India received no textile tariff-rate quota exemption for using US-origin cotton, leaving its apparel exports at a significant price disadvantage compared to competitors who secured preferential access.
Furthermore, the bill’s true objective appears to be derailing India’s strategic partnership with Russia, with co-author Senator Dick Blumenthal explicitly naming India and China as the ‘main culprits’ financing Russia’s war machine. This pressure test of India’s strategic autonomy comes as Delhi’s recent alignment with USA-led statements on the South China Sea has strained relations with Beijing, leaving India potentially isolated without natural allies to counter US economic coercion.
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• August 12 will see the 73rd anniversary of the 1953 Hartal, which has been unfairly compared to the 2022 regime change operation. Whereas the hartal led to the 1956 ‘revolution’ and the attempts to set up industries & the Paddy Lands Act, the 2022 operation has so far led to the further consolidation of imperialism in the country, with the US embassy (minus envoy) more overtly running the country from Kollupitiya Junction.
The media has wasted much electricity and pulp on polemics over extending the tenure of greying judges. Little attention has been paid to the relationship between judges & multinational banks and corporations (MNCs), and their local agents, the merchants & moneylenders. Many are the judges who end their sunset years in the cozy embrace of the moneylenders and merchantry. Also, many if not most prisoners are in jail for not paying fines. ‘There are over 1,134,000 pending cases by June 2025, reflects structural shortages & administrative failures. Extending retirement ages will not substitute for expanding judicial capacity or modernising court administration,’ reports the Communist Party (CPSL, see ee Random Notes). Since these delays remain a goldmine for lawyers and judges, why reform such a system?
The sentencing of a former IGP & Defense Secretary to death has occupied the media, an act which appears to signal the undermining of a truly ‘national’ security at the behest of imperialism. Yet what of the forces that have thwarted the independence of the country, or promoted assassination of leaders, coups d’etat, undermining national legislation, stoking insurgencies & terrors, let alone the funding and organization of a long terrorist war. Those promoters included churches & other religious establishments, as well as governments led by India, England, USA & EU All this also explains the sunny economic appraisals of supine dispensations. Wait until a few multinational bankers or MNC directors are hauled up before the courts, then shall be truly lifted the curtains on the real-life comedy of corruption…
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• Bogala Graphite Lanka Reveals US Owners – Germany’s Graphit Kropfmühl GmbH (GKG), a subsidiary of Holland’s Asbury Advanced Materials Group (formerly Asbury Carbons Inc) remains Bogala Graphite Lanka’s controlling shareholder. The Government of Sri Lanka was the 2nd-largest shareholder with a 0.54% stake, while public shareholders held 13.54%. AMG Critical Materials NV this week transferred all of its shares in GKG to a wholly owned subsidiary of Asbury Advanced Materials Group. AMG Critical Materials NV’s largest shareholders include BlackRock, Vanguard Group, Morgan Stanley, Vanguard Portfolio Management, Vanguard Capital Management, Ariel Investments, EAASX – Eaton Vance Atlanta Capital SMID-Cap Fund Class A, Boston Partners, IJH – iShares Core S&P Mid-Cap ETF, and State Street Corp! (see ee Industry, Indirect change of control at Bogala Graphite after parent share transfer)
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In April 2025 BYD announced a stunning price cut.
The Seagull electric vehicle, offering up to 252 miles
of range, would sell for just $7,800, roughly
one–6th the price of comparable Western electric cars.
• China’s BYD breakthrough came a few months after DeepSeek also ‘stunned’ the world, shaking US private AI corporates, most of all. Bappa Sinha details the socialist path by which DeepSeek & BYD have achieved such startling advances & prices as ee Focus concludes his essay ‘Breaking the Stranglehold: How China is Shattering US Technological Hegemony’. Sinha also explains how, by breaking technological chokeholds and turning advanced goods into affordable commodities, China is showing the Global South an economic pathway out of dependence & unequal exchange.
Yes, the imperialist core retains military & financial might and will not yield peacefully, but its monopoly is eroding, observes Sinha, making a multipolar world an existing reality rather than a distant aspiration. For the first time in 500 years, liberation from the white-dominated order appears materially possible.
Yet, the US-led white world keeps seeking to choke off China’s access to energy, and to undermine its industrial architecture. Will they succeed? China’s technological & industrial ascent rests on complete, vertically integrated supply chains that are geographically clustered & systemically optimized – allowing firms like BYD to produce advanced EVs profitably at a fraction of the USA’s costs.
China’s innovational flair extends across batteries (80% of global cells), solar (97% of wafers), pharmaceuticals (80% of generic APIs), shipbuilding (70% of global tonnage), and precision tools. This gives China a material advantage that white financialized capitalism cannot replicate through tariffs or sanctions. The US & EU, having hollowed out their supplier ecosystems and skilled workforces over decades of financialization, find themselves unable to compete on cost, scale, or speed, exposing the erosion of the very industrial foundation that once underpinned their hegemony.
China’s industrial depth directly translates into military-strategic power, as China’s shipbuilding capacity exceeds the US by 232 times and its drone & munitions production costs are a fraction of the USA’s equivalents. The USA’s war industry would exhaust key munitions in weeks, and remains dependent on Chinese components for 41% of its weapons systems. This creates a perilous ‘closing window’ psychology in Washington, heightening the risk of conflict even as decoupling fails. Most importantly, at a systemic level, the rupture is between socialist logic – investing in productive abundance to meet social needs – and capitalist logic, which requires monopoly rents & scarcity for profit.
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• 5 countries – India, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Turkey, and Mexico – represent a new form of non-alignment that is fundamentally economic rather than political. Our latest excerpt of the Tricontinental Institute’s ‘Hyper-Imperialism: A Dangerous Decadent New Stage’ (see ee Focus) offers more clarity. These 5 are not reviving the old Non-Aligned Movement but are instead leveraging their substantial economic weight (all ranking among the top 20 global GDPs in 2022) to pursue increasingly independent economic policies.
This attempt at ‘independence’ is driven partly by a shared recognition that US-led sanctions and the weaponization of the US Dollar threaten a large portion of the global population and the economy. However, politically & militarily, their stances are deeply ambivalent: several maintain close military ties with Washington (eg, Turkey in NATO, Saudi Arabia as a major US arms buyer, Indonesia’s upgraded strategic partnership), and their actions on the world stage are often contradictory, mixing gradual economic decoupling with continued security dependencies.
These contradictions play out vividly as in the USA’s move this week to target India’s economy. India has been refusing to implement US sanctions on Russia and has publicly rejected the NATO-centric worldview. India, however, remains aligned with Washington through the one-sided QUAD, and displays utterly reactionary positions on Palestine. Saudi Arabia pursues independent oil pricing with Russia and deepens China investment, while simultaneously blocking anti-US measures by Arab League summits and cooperating closely with the US Department of War. Indonesia has experienced rapid growth & resource nationalism (eg, nickel export bans), yet it has withdrawn from BRICS and upgraded its partnership with the US, despite their historical horrors under colonialism. Mexico has pursued ‘Leftist’ reforms and agrarian sovereignty but is constrained by the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) trade agreement, which Washington uses to block Mexico’s GM corn ban. These 5 nations display varying degrees of intimacy to the Global North, but their growing national bourgeoisies are gradually asserting self-interested economic alternatives and occasional political divergences – a trend that remains in flux, ultimately, driven more by pragmatic self-preservation than by a unified ideological break…
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‘Colonizers, by making out that subjugated people were
like children, immature, could take harsh measures,
demand obedience, & exact labour from them.’
‘The Klang Indian Association in February 1941…
demanded, besides freedom of speech & assembly,
that Europeans & ‘black’ Europeans should stop
molesting the labourers’ womenfolk, and that
the labourers should not have to dismount
from a bicycle when a European was present.’
‘The enslaved African was not supposed
to overtake a white man even when driving
a motorcar, or to contradict him or to use
correct ‘college’ English when talking to him.’
Plantation paternalism was a deliberate system that masked deep exploitation under the guise of benevolent guardianship, records SBD de Silva in this latest excerpt of Chapter 12 of his classic The Political Economy of Underdevelopment (see ee Focus). Managers provided crude welfare – medical care, creches, maternity aid, and festival donations – not out of altruism, but to secure a healthy, locally bred workforce, reduce costly turnover, and ensure a future labor supply, with children viewed as ideal future workers.
European managers maintained distant authority as ‘father figures’, while Asian supervisors (kangany & clerks) enforced brutal discipline, physical coercion, petty regulations (like curfews & housing uniformity), and captured ‘bolters’, effectively controlling every facet of workers’ lives. This created semi-feudal relations where workers were juridically free but functionally half-serfs, bound by deference rituals (removing shawls, dismounting for Europeans) and barred from collective action; managers resented strikes and insisted grievances be presented as humble petitions, reinforcing their absolute, discretionary power over housing, work assignments, and community life.
The plantation’s totalitarian system (not theorized by Hannah Arendt!) – with employment, housing & social life confined to the estate – left workers with virtually no escape or advancement. Education was deliberately neglected; Tamil-medium estate schools were rudimentary and vocationally useless, as planters saw literacy as a threat to the labor supply, while children were treated as income-earning assets and often employed illegally.
Such an oppressive environment fostered cultural stagnation, political passivity, and social ills like alcoholism, apathy, and drug abuse. Crucially, SBD contrasted this with non-plantation migrants (including Chinese & urban Indians), who, by operating outside this closed system, achieved economic mobility through trade and diverse occupations – proving conclusively that the plantation workers’ backwardness was not due to their ‘ethnicity’ or ‘natural disposition’, but was an inherent, institutional failing of the plantation system itself.
How many ‘coolies’ from American, Asian and African plantations have made it into the much-celebrated portals of USA & England inner sanctums we wonder? You guessed it! None!
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• This week saw at least 100 people killed by drowning as Spain hurriedly closed its border, after Europe ‘erupted’ as countries suspended their Schengen treaties with Madrid. The salaried media does not say who actually killed the migrants. The media claims trafficking mafias were behind people overcoming the border post in Ceuta, while trying to rush into Spain.
So where is this Ceuta? In North Africa!
Europe ‘commenced its trajectory as a world hegemon through its militarised maritime powers, beginning as early as 1415 with Portugal’s invasion & capture of Ceuta, a fortified Moroccan port’, launching over 600 years of white imperialism. ‘The first European colonial power, Portugal, used Genovese capital to fund its expeditions, and the rest of Europe followed suit in the 1400s’ (see ee Sovereignty, HyperImperialism).
In 1415, Portugal’s king, John I, and his 3 sons personally led Portugal’s first foray into Africa: capturing Ceuta. Armed naval expeditions soon ‘explored’ the Western coast of Africa and deep into the Atlantic Ocean, enslaving people, and plundering loot, invading archipelagos, including Madeira (1419-20) & the mid-Atlantic Azores (1427). By 1488, Portuguese raiding/trading flotillas had reached the coast of West Africa and crept around the southern Cape of Good Hope. The Spanish sent out Christopher Columbus, who captured Hispaniola in the Caribbean in 1492. In 1494, the Pope divided the world between Portugal & Spain. Portugal John’s successor, Manuel, in 1497 sent out Vasco da Gama, via East Africa’s Malindi (Kenya), with navigational advice from 2 Muslim pilots, to Calicut in southwestern India. In 1505, the Portuguese began their invasion of Sri Lanka for the next 150 years. In 1509, the Portuguese invaded Malacca (Malaysia), and in 1557 invaded the South China Sea… (see ee Sovereignty, Portugal & the origins of ‘the West’). 469 years later… here we all are…. And yet who knows? In a few years, Europe may well revert to being part of far North Africa, or far West Asia!
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