{"id":156674,"date":"2026-06-07T16:27:20","date_gmt":"2026-06-07T23:27:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=156674"},"modified":"2026-06-07T16:27:20","modified_gmt":"2026-06-07T23:27:20","slug":"the-usa-evades-its-angry-ghosts-in-sri-lanka","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2026\/06\/07\/the-usa-evades-its-angry-ghosts-in-sri-lanka\/","title":{"rendered":"The USA Evades its Angry Ghosts in Sri\u00a0Lanka"},"content":{"rendered":"

e-Con e-News<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n

Posted byee ink.<\/a>Uncategorized<\/a>Tags:13th Amendment<\/a>, chattel-slavery<\/a>, history<\/a>, India<\/a>, politics<\/a>, travel<\/a>, US Constitution<\/a>, USA<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

blog: https:\/\/eesrilanka.wordpress.com<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Before you study the economics, study the economists!<\/em>\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

e-Con e-News 31 May \u2013 06 June 2026<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018We have in the Tamil coolie a perfect machine for the<\/em> cultivation of our tea, coffee, or other tropical produce.\u2019<\/em> Chief Justice of Sri Lanka, Lovell B Clarence, 1896<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The retired Chief Justice was celebrating the centenary of English rule in Sri Lanka. He had lived in the country for over 25 years, recalls SBD de Silva\u2019s classic The Political Economy of Underdevelopment <\/em>(see ee Focus<\/em><\/strong>). Justice Clarence was intimate with \u2018tropical produce\u2019. The plantation system, which derives from the system of chattel slavery, was first practised in the Americas, and ensured that children were also born enslaved, employing all members of the family for life. This system has informed the practices of wage slavery and the \u2018human resources\u2019 of Sri Lanka to this day, and SBD describes how the so-called \u2018training<\/em>\u2019 imparted to plantation workers was primarily:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018The\u00a0conditioning of the labourer<\/strong>\u00a0to adverse pay<\/em> & working conditions involving the relentless<\/em> routine of simple, repetitive tasks<\/em>.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SBD recalled that, in fact, no such other skills were imparted or required. The plantation system (neither modern, industrial nor capitalist) allows no use of technology to the majority of its workers (tea pluckers), whereas modern industrial organization has to entrust workers with expensive & complex machinery. On plantations, daily punishments were necessary, hence the reference to their routines as \u2018tasks\u2019:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018The word \u2018tasks<\/em>\u2018 was suggestive of a moralistic basis on<\/p>\n\n\n\n

which work was extracted. The expression originated<\/p>\n\n\n\n

in the plantations of the Americas where the enslaved had<\/p>\n\n\n\n

to be made obedient & industrious\u2026 The plantation kept<\/p>\n\n\n\n

careful count & punished those who did not fulfil the<\/p>\n\n\n\n

required amount of tasks just as Jesus Christ the<\/p>\n\n\n\n

omnipresent overseer<\/em> condemned them for neglecting<\/p>\n\n\n\n

their religious duty. The Indian Labour Code<\/em>, which<\/p>\n\n\n\n

applied to plantation workers in Sri Lanka, asserted that<\/p>\n\n\n\n

the eviction of the entire family of any worker who was<\/p>\n\n\n\n

dismissed \u2018preserved the sanctity of the family<\/strong>\u2018.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, while no use of machinery was to be allowed to the worker, the worker themselves were to be treated as machines. Hence the reference by the \u2018Chief Justice\u2019 (who, by the way, was an \u2018acting\u2019 CJ only for 1882). The recollections of the Chief Justices of Ceylon had also been a source of great insight to Karl Marx. In the last years of his life, Marx examined the 13th<\/sup> Chief Justice of colonial Ceylon 1877-79, John Budd Phear\u2019s book The Aryan Village in India & Ceylon<\/em> (1880), and the Colonial Council of India\u2019s Henry Maine\u2019s Ancient Law<\/em>: on which English law (if they have such) is based to this day. While Marx called Phear a donkey<\/em>, he (& Friedrich Engels) learned of Sri Lanka\u2019s insights into the origins of class division, state formation, communal & private property (see ee<\/em><\/strong> 11 July 2020, Cool Marx on SL<\/em>). Justice Phear, we should add, had an outr\u00e9 interest in linking the anthropological origins of the Sinhala to the marriage of China & Africa!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

     This ee Focus<\/em><\/strong> completes Chapter 10 of SBD\u2019s classic (see ee Focus<\/em><\/strong>), which explains how the \u2018largeness\u2019 of plantations were neither an agronomic or technical necessity, but was due to justifying heavy management costs as well as the recruitment & treatment of labor. This in turn was due to absentee ownership (in Colombo & London), as well as the employing of migrant labor and paying them low wages. This primitive and inefficient plantation system has survived due to the colonial disabilities imposed on smallholdings, which are more productive than plantations. Rice cultivation, which is a much more complex endeavor, has also been deprived of important technological inputs (cooperative organization, irrigation, fertilizer, cultivation & harvest) which are left to the depredations of the finance companies, financed by imperialist \u2018development\u2019 banks, who promote their second-hand industrial machineries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

except as a punishment for crime<\/strong> whereof the party<\/p>\n\n\n\n

shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within<\/p>\n\n\n\n

the USA, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013 US Constitution<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Slavery is still legal in the USA. It was never fully abolished. The 1865 13th<\/sup> Amendment to the US Constitution, which claimed to abolish slavery permits bondage in prison. Hence the hugely disproportionate incarceration of African & non-Anglo-American men & women in the USA to this day. That old world of always new ironies & contradictions made us recall that \u201813th<\/sup> loophole\u2019 for enslavers, since the US government this week has threatened an additional 12.5% tax on imports from Sri Lanka & 54 other countries. They claim we have failed to prevent the entry of goods produced through forced labour<\/em>. As usual the imperialists\u2019 own mouthpieces in Sri Lanka, the chamber of commerce, and the rag traders aka apparel businesses, immediately squawked in dismay. Many of them rely on the USA as their single largest export destination. However, these chambers and traders and their channels will not point out to the USA\u2019s own enslaved workers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

     In November 2025, a lawsuit was filed against colonized Korea\u2019s car companies Hyundai & Kia for using imprisoned labor in Alabama & Georgia violating some of the USA\u2019s own internal states\u2019 laws & public purchasing standards. The imprisoned workers are underpaid & mistreated, providing Hyundai & Kia an \u2018unfair competitive advantage in the automotive sales market\u2019; suppressing the wages and working conditions of the most oppressed affects all workers. In the USA most states require prisoners to work, and those who do, work for government agencies, even as most are forcibly kept idle. The lawsuit also points to children (many Mexican & Central American citizens) working in the Hyundai & KIA plants. Yet, child labor was purportedly abolished only in the 1940s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

     So, when the US-funded National Peace Council, Amnesty International & the US Trade Representative stick their heads out of their thorny nests and crow like hungry birds in shrill unison about \u2018forced labor\u2019, all we can do is titter in a studied revulsion. The \u2018coolie<\/em><\/strong>\u2019 in Sri Lanka, contrary to the exculpations of politicians & separatist nationalists, is a product of the English government and their colonial satraps and grey sahibs in Delhi, Colombo and Jaffna, no matter their lamentations of the fate of the now-renamed Malaiyaha Tamils who they seek to counterpose to the reparations due to the highland Sinhala. The USA, however, cares not a pretty penny for slaves in Sri Lanka, but only about blocking any modern economic relationship with China\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*<\/p>\n\n\n\n

England\u2019s Ceylon Tobacco Company<\/strong> (CTC<\/strong>), owned by the British American Tobacco Co (BAT), as well as Unilever PLC, has been the subject & object of much of ee<\/em><\/strong>\u2019s inquiries into the inordinate role they play, both in Sri Lanka\u2019s economy as well as our culture (marketing, media, arts), etc (see ee<\/em><\/strong> 01 March 2025). The US-funded think-tank Verit\u00e9, which is not known for their pugilistic style, per se, unless they are repeating the verities of the IMF, etc, should be congratulated for recently taking on Ceylon Tobacco Co & their massive avoidance of taxes (see ee Random Notes<\/em><\/strong>, English Smokes). Of course, Verit\u00e9 only mentions the company\u2019s name just once, nor is there reference to CTC being a monopoly<\/strong>, which would normally be abhorred by the whoremongers of selective free-trade, let alone by the USA\u2019s other yipping poodle Advocata<\/strong>. The CTC chairman Suresh Shah is also the head of the Catholic-Church-linked Hatton National Bank, and was responsible for privatizing national resources (SOERU) which would have given him & his sidekicks open access to state secrets, no?  Nevertheless, while it bravely alludes, without naming CTC, to its promotion of fake news, it doesn\u2019t mention CTC\u2019s sponsorships of politicians, including footnote fetishist Harsha de Silva. Let us see where this leads them, though we wonder whether they will stop at this multinational behemoth alone, and extend their inquiries into the banks such as Standard Chartered, Citibank, HSBC, and other MNCs, that enable this drainage, and more importantly prevent investment in modern industry\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

     Why do these traders, merchants, moneylenders, their chambers of commerce & related thinktanks submit to a clearly unfair economic & political system? We suggest it is due to their stashing away of the country\u2019s wealth in the banks & real-estates of the USA, England & Europe, and the knowing wink & a shrug by their related envoys who get to spend days in coats & ties and skirts in air-conditioned hotel halls, and issue nauseating, clearly hypocritical sermons on ecology & gender equality & the rule of law<\/em>, while arming & waging horrific wars on the world. A Centre for Wealth Analysis<\/em><\/strong> is truly a crying need in Sri Lanka, even as the German government is fixated on continuing their funding of \u2018poverty analysis\u2019, which only serves to fatten the offshore bank accounts of selected economists & NGO operators, who toe the import-export plantation line\u2026 and its rooms\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The recent tremendous hikes of oil prices in Sri Lanka, over & above world indices, have seen calls for closer auditing of the actual shipments of oil coming, and if they correspond to this huge expense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018They are close to 3 times the average monthly import bill on petroleum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These excessive imports could possibly be an incidence of over-invoicing<\/p>\n\n\n\n

of imports to shift capital & US$s out of the economy disguised as<\/p>\n\n\n\n

legitimate imports. With over 50% of the market being controlled by foreign<\/p>\n\n\n\n

suppliers the risk of capital flight through these channels increases rapidly.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013 Dhanusha Pathirana, FB<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

*<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This stashing away and related tax evasions also explain why our merchant media cannot get simple terminology exact. The current upsurge in turmoil is due to the latest US wars on Iran & West Asia, and yet the merchant media calls it an \u2018oil crisis\u2019. Even Muslim & Borah (who are Shia, and it\u2019s their spiritual leaders, the Ayatollahs, being murdered) are happy to play tribal games and blame Jews & Zionists. But Israel is just the latest white settler statelet of Europe, the subsidiary of their subsidiary, the United Settlers of the Americas<\/em><\/strong> (USA). These Zionists running Israel are actually Nazis who helped send their co-religionists into gas chambers. The UAE etc are hand in pocket with Israel in genociding East Africa, and belong to the same Arab strains that allied with the Nazis. Israel is the USA, spiritual white settler model for the fascists. The Ceylon Chamber of Commerce is the USA. So are the thinktanks \u2013 Advocata (whose Catholics & Borahs & Chettiar \u2013 Maharajas \u2013 have an eerie fixation on menstruation, real-estate & car importation), IPS, Verite, etc, & media. The Persian Gulf (now reduced to the Straits of Hormuz<\/strong>) was closed<\/strong> not by Iran<\/strong>, but by the USA <\/em><\/strong>(& their shipping insurance agencies) from the very beginning. The incessant arrivals in Colombo of warships from India, Pakistan, Europe & Japan don\u2019t intend to defend their countries from the greatest warlords the world has ever known, for whom peace is a provocation, whose actual \u2018overcapacity\u2019 is in weaponry for mass murder. Meanwhile, their NGOs have switched from attacking the Executive Presidency to attacking the Sangha. Perhaps it may also have to do with this season of Vesak & Poson, which acutely relates to the organization of agriculture (but this real \u2018national question\u2019 is neglected, instead the printed word is given over to ravings about saving exotic species of flamingos, leopards, snakes, ice caps, etc). There\u2019s always something rotting in England and the impending visit this coming week of their \u2018Lord Chamberlain\u2019 commanded by the gay Charles III to visit the London Vihara, portends some \u2018return\u2019 is suppurating and in the offing (see ee Random Notes<\/em><\/strong>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

     The Sangha like every other institution in this country \u2013 including University Professors, & bankers & CEOs \u2013 are a reflection of the constituencies they serve. The Sangha has an even greater history of serving the country \u2013 many are organically linked to the rural peasantry \u2013 and have given leadership to the resistance to colonial depredations, hence being recipients of both repression & inducements.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

*<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A pseudonymous article in the Wijeya Group\u2019s FT<\/em> on the X-press Pearl, <\/em>by the anonymous \u2018Lighthouse Guard\u2019, takes up the cause of the ship\u2019s captain who has been held without trial for several years. The Lighthouse Guard<\/em> alludes to mysterious ways by which so-called corruption<\/em> (tho in a merchant-run society it really should be termed \u2018rentier business as usual<\/strong>\u2019) and how the courts work. This week saw the President meet \u2018privately\u2019 with judges including those magistrates & judges pursuing high-profile cases against political opponents. We wonder if the Wijeya Group\u2019s FT<\/em>, if not the Seafarers\u2019 Union, let alone the numerous Rockefeller-related agencies promoting the education of seafarers, could take up the cause of the lonely unnamed Sri Lankan seafarer held hostage in the USA for over a year now after the crash of that ship Dali<\/em>, carrying curious containers headed for Sri Lanka, which crashed the Baltimore bridge. He is being held hostage along with a crew, of mostly Indian workers. If it helps to publicize his arrest, the FT <\/em>could add that he is Tamil, which may get the NGO-oids going, but this involves confronting their wet nurse, the USA\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018In the handful of media engagements I have participated in, I\u2019ve<\/p>\n\n\n\n

always found the line of questioning about the economy to be<\/p>\n\n\n\n

deeply limiting & shortsighted. \u2018What is the state of our reserves<\/strong>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Will the rupee<\/strong> go up or down against the dollar?\u2019 It is in the nature<\/p>\n\n\n\n

of a financial speculator<\/strong> to obsess over day-to-day market fluctuations,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

and we have all been taught to think like that. It is not the journalist<\/p>\n\n\n\n

but the institutionalisation of neoclassical economics<\/strong> that is to blame.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Neither JVP-NPP (in power, and yet having no power, other than to prepare for re-election to no-power) nor Opposition (nor merchant media) have a plan to stabilise the economy and spur growth. If they do, they are not telling. In this ee Focus<\/em><\/strong>, Shiran Illanperuma brilliantly explains how to analyse the media\u2019s take on the economy. The \u2018news\u2019 turns out to be all about how to maintain the casino. He dissects the obsession with the rupee-dollar dance, and \u2018money printing\u2019. He shows why the US government (via their Federal Reserve \u2013 actually a cosa nostra of commercial banks, US Treasury, IMF, World Bank, ADB etc) has been so single-minded in ensuring the government cannot finance modern industry, undermining the country\u2019s production structure. He also points out that the actual purpose of depreciation is to rob the wages of the worker.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Neoclassical economics has long abandoned<\/p>\n\n\n\n

the bigger questions that classical political<\/p>\n\n\n\n

economy & development economics sought<\/p>\n\n\n\n

to answer: Why do nations get rich (or stay<\/p>\n\n\n\n

poor)? How is society organised in the<\/p>\n\n\n\n

production of value? Who are the winners<\/p>\n\n\n\n

& losers in the distribution of that value?\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Europe\u2019s invasion of Lanka began in 1505, and while their invasion of the Americas began with the attack on the Caribbean in 1492, their actual militarized \u2018trajectory as a world hegemon\u2019 began in Africa, with the capture in 1415, funded by Genoese capital, of Ceuta in Morocco by Portugal, the first European colonial power. Genoan capital moved to Lisbon, after their defeat by Venice, who then monopolized Europe\u2019s access to the east. Thus:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the 1st<\/sup> time in over 600 years<\/strong>, there is now a credible economic<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

& political alternative<\/em><\/strong> to the domination of world affairs by the<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Europeans & their descendant white-settler colonial states<\/strong>. First,<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

is the socialist grouping led by China. Second, are the growing<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

aspirations for national sovereignty, economic modernisation,<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

& multilateralism, emerging from the Global South.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This explains the current rage and outrageousness, genocidal fury & advertised irrationality of the cacophonous concert of whiteness on naked display on the world stage, that seeks to take down the entire planet in a conflagration of fire. ee<\/em><\/strong> continues to detail the factors behind the daily news, through the Tricontinental Research Institute\u2019s amazing study of \u2018Hyper-Imperialism: a Dangerous Decadent New Stage\u2019 (see ee Focus<\/em><\/strong>). We begin \u2018Part II: Evolution of Imperialism \u2013 the New Stage of Imperialism\u2019 which dates the attempt at a unipolar world order, midst the USA\u2019s dollar monopoly and its switch from \u2018a creditor to debtor nation<\/strong>\u2019. Tricontinental examines the nature of the inter-imperialist rivalries, and the rapid advance of hybrid warfare (including sanctions), seizing other nations\u2019 reserves, as it seeks to rely on its military (rather than economic) power, while manipulating its dollar hegemony and soft-power over digital media.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

     Meanwhile, the rest of the world, outside of the USA\u2019s armed poodles, eg, Germany & Japan, are growing tired of its conceits. Tricontinental details the efforts to unite a fragmented underdeveloped world, who yet have a shared history. Sri Lanka sits & stands at the crux & crossroads of this earth-shaking endeavor and it is no wonder that the USA (United Snakes of Amnesia) are desperate, despite a seeming coyness (there is no US envoy in sight, even as they are gifting us secondhand & ineffective machineries, minus any attempt to promote modern manufacture of the parts these dilapidated buckets will soon need) to undermine our cultural fastnesses and prevent our alliance with both China & Africa, a historically anticipated, and burgeoning unity which will surely determine the path of the remaining 3-quarters of the 21st<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*<\/p>\n\n\n\n

________<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Contents:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The USA Evades its Angry Ghosts in Sri Lanka<\/a><\/blockquote>