{"id":55948,"date":"2016-06-24T14:27:50","date_gmt":"2016-06-24T21:27:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=55948"},"modified":"2016-06-24T14:40:51","modified_gmt":"2016-06-24T21:40:51","slug":"ranil-in-cloud-cuckoo-land","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2016\/06\/24\/ranil-in-cloud-cuckoo-land\/","title":{"rendered":"\u00a0RANIL in CLOUD-CUCKOO LAND"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0Gamini Seneviratne<\/span><\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

This note takes a brief look at Ranil Wickremesinghe\u2019s notions of economic growth and how to get there. I doubt he much understands how\u00a0 \u00a0such growth\u201d is obtained or measured and, most certainly, no idea at all that typically it would have further negative impacts on the capacity of the people to merely survive from day to day.<\/p>\n

Ranil has bragged that the commandments he has received have come from such deities as Christine Lagarde, MD of the IM F, and from\u00a0 economists such as George Soros, Josepf Stiglitz and Ricardo Hausmann\u201d. He has listened to their advice\u201d.<\/p>\n

As I spelt out ten years ago in All in the Family\u201d, a demonstration of the symbiotic connection between corporate capitalism and the IMF and its side-kicks the IBRD, ADB et al, they have, necessarily, acted in concert with\u00a0 the \u2018leaders\u2019 of supposedly sovereign governments whose treason towards the people they supposedly represent could be depended on.<\/p>\n

Despite backing by Germany and EU states long practiced in exploiting countries and peoples, Lagarde\u2019s efforts to bring Greece to heel did not quite succeed thanks to the will of the Greek people and of their leadership. Soros, a 85 year old financier, continues to dream of imposing western corporate capitalism, a.k.a. Democracy, on Russia. Stiglitz, an old hand at the IBRD, has an extended record of serving as a key Advisor to US administrations. Hausmann performed yeoman service in Venezuela for Democracy before Hugo Chavez yanked him and his like out; he has since become a respected Economist at Harvard, naturally.<\/p>\n

They have met at Davos (which as has been surmised was where Ali Baba and his thieves had their cave). It has come under attack by placard-waving protestors – all \u2018misguided\u2019 of course in the lexicon Ranil\u2019s been furnished with. His recruitment to that gang, in whatever capacity, had been renewed.<\/p>\n

They had told him about the current global economic crisis\u201d. That crisis, obviously quite unbeknown to him, has to do with corporate capitalism and has many related features. Those include the trashing of this planet, the imposition of poverty everywhere including the USA (which has achieved the further distinction of depriving its people of education, health care, and every vestige of freedom), and the transfer of resources, as of the wealth created by other hands, to robbers who would be barons (and are \u2018elevated\u2019 to what is laughingly referred to as the \u2018peerage\u2019 by Tony Blair, David Cameron et al). The USA has kept moving on and now boasts a candidate for President who is a self-confessed cheat on taxes due to the State and another who has failed to conceal the huge bribes she has received from \u2018Wall Street\u2019and her lust for the wealth of Iraq. \u00a0In another, perhaps related strand of the man\u2019s thinking, Ranil would have been a welcome acolyte of Hitle\u2019rs minions.<\/p>\n

The global crisis has surfaced now in the client administrations controlled by the IMF and its corporate associates being challenged by internal forces. Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders have exposed the charade of Democracy as of Economic Imperatives in the UK and the USA. The \u2018Right to Information\u2019 being strictly for the \u2018Mainstream\u2019 corporate media we are witness to the convolutions it finds itself compelled to undertake in the face of this \u2018crisis\u2019.<\/p>\n

An early manifestation of his \u2018learning\u2019 is the imposition of a Value Added Tax \u2013 and of his justification for it. The separate levels of VAT, some 8% and 12% were inconvenient he said; So he \u2018rounded\u2019 them off (upwards!) to 15%. A further \u2018reason\u2019, he argued, was that direct taxes (such as Income tax and Company tax) did not yield as much as VAT. The reasons for that of course are the existence of tax exemptions for every element of looting and the failure of the government mechanisms for collecting even what is due. Can he assure us that the VAT rigorously collected from consumers is in fact remitted to the Treasury?<\/p>\n

Ranil and his advisors would do well to read \u2018The Political Economy of Underdevelopment\u2019 by Dr. S B D de Silva. It has been reprinted recently by Routledge & Kegan Paul in paperback as well. It would help them understand what \u2018economics\u2019 and human society are about.<\/p>\n

Over the last year Mr. Ranil Wickremesinghe has been saying and doing several things none of which this government has the people\u2019s mandate for. He has sought to back his actions up by threatening those who would oppose them.<\/p>\n

He has, as news reports put it, read the riot act\u201d to MPs demanding their support: he holds files\u201d documenting whatever criminal acts, financial or otherwise, they have been engaged in. Sound familiar? Rajapakse did that and stuffed his Cabinets with the provably corrupt in the UNP.<\/p>\n

What is most pertinent and\/or impertinent is his assumption that the gathering of charlatans by the Diyawanna represent the people. They are no more competent to commit the country to such agreements as Ranil seeks to make than they are to draft a Constitution. It is obvious that such proposals must seek and obtain the people\u2019s consent via a Referendum.<\/p>\n

Well, our people have become accustomed to the corruption, often truly criminal, in what are called law enforcement agencies. They have seen the distinctions possible in the application of what Ranil calls due process\u201d to drug dealers, terrorists, other murderers and the like.\u00a0 In whatever lexicon he employs, it does not apply to university students, monks, trade unionists, farmers or to groups of civil society at large. Water cannon, tear gas, batons and even the mechanisms of a corrupt judiciary provide the proper answer to whatever they have to say. In a recent book on the killing of Wijedasa Liyanarachchi, there is mention of the torture chambers in \u2018the Kelaniya police division\u2019. Is it now proposed to revive such judicial procedures or would there be a quantum leap to the American practice of \u2018water-boarding\u2019?<\/p>\n

Well he has reason to be grateful to his mentor: Mahinda Rajapakse had exerted himself to protect Ranil\u2019s status as Leaderof a UNP which he proceeded to emasculate. His gratitude was made evident in his assertion that any action against all that fraud and looting be subjected to due process\u201d in the paws of law enforcement agencies that had for many years been sort of pocketed by the administration which the people had voted out. He has even declared that he received the benediction of Mahinda Rajapakse, on his departure from Temple Trees to \u2018take over the government\u2019.<\/p>\n

There are other contenders of course but I doubt anybody would dispute that Ranil Wickremesinghe is the President, Prime Minister, Policy Maker and club-wielder of choice for those who would like to carve up this country and loot her resources not least of which is her culture with its unique Sinhala Buddhist heritage. The foundation of our systems of living has always been our agriculture, not the \u2018export\u2019 variety that continues to cripple the highlands and water-flow but that has to do with food production for our people.<\/p>\n

All his proposals are to be executed, if permitted, in the name of \u2018market efficiency\u2019.<\/p>\n

In his endeavour on that behalf Ranil has picked the right persons: R Paskaralingam, who, under President Premadasa, played a determining role in trashing our agricultural extension services, sabotaged the offer made by Dr. Kurien, the prime mover of the \u2018white revolution\u2019 across India, to help develop the dairy industry here. During\u00a0 Ranil\u2019s last spell Paskaralingam attempted to dismantle the infrastructure built around the Mahaweli project. He has been brought back as a key figure among Ranil\u2019s \u2018Senior Advisers\u2019. He has much experience in what it would take to carve up and sell off to \u2018the private sector\u2019, mostly Indian, our land and water.<\/p>\n

Another is Arjuna Mahendran who should be in jail without the option (he has, in New Delhi, offered access to our systems of micro-finance to \u2018foreign enterprise\u2019). Eran Wickremaratne, who salivates over the prospect of handing over State owned enterprises to private firms at give-away prices, Malik Samarawickrema, his handmaiden or whatever who represents nobody but Ranil, R. Paskaralingam, who, under President Premadasa, played a determining role in trashing our agricultural extension services and sabotaged the offer made by Dr. Kurien to help develop the dairy industry here. During\u00a0 Ranil\u2019s last spell the man attempted to dismantle the infrastructure built around the Mahaweli project \u2013 and has now been brought back as a key figure among Ranil\u2019s \u2018Senior Advisers\u2019. He has much experience in what it would take to carve up and sell off to \u2018the private sector\u2019, mostly Indian, our land and water.<\/p>\n

Ranil needs to return to basics.<\/strong><\/p>\n

At the Census of 1911, E. J. Denham reported that \u201dthere were 2000 natives of Ceylon who are unable to read and write their own language, but yet can read and write English\u201d. He noted further that 1700 of them are Low Country Sinhalese and belong to the wealthier classes\u201d.<\/p>\n

Ranil\u2019s paternal grandfather, C L Wickremasinghe, the first Ceylonese to be appointed a Government Agent under the colonial administration, would undoubtedly have been among the 2000 but he was not among those unable to read and write in Sinhala. As Government Agent in the North Central Province he obtained from the Village Headmen and Vel Vidanes accounts (in Sinhala) of traditional agricultural (a.k.a. farming) practices in the Nuvara Kalaviya. He placed those responses, founded in what may be termed \u2018oral history\u2019, in the Royal Asiatic Society, Ceylon Branch. Three of those five large volumes are yet in its custody and a selection of those accounts was made and put into English by D E Hettiarachchi, the Professor of Sinhala at our University. That book is now hard to come by. The RAS, which was a joint publisher of that work, no longer has a copy of that book but Gunadasa Amarasekera is said to have a copy that was presented to him by Ranil\u2019s uncle, the Rev. Lakshman Wickremasinghe. It would be fruitful for Ranil to obtain a copy \u2013 his father would have had one \u2013 and so to resume his education on this country and her people.<\/p>\n

His father, Esmond, acquired some notoriety over his role in \u2018defending Press Freedom\u2019 in 1964, but he possessed a sense of patriotism that also led him to realize the need for a national press agency. When he decided to launch \u2018Lanka Puvath\u2019 in 1978 and invited me to commence work on it he explained at some length his view of the need to free ourselves of the biased, one-track reporting that emanated from the self-styled \u2018main-stream media\u2019. He wished to have the country heard in her own voice.<\/p>\n

It is clear that his parent\u2019s culture, Buddhist and Anglican, have passed him by.<\/p>\n

I shall conclude this note with a thought from the Analects of Confucius: The Duke Ai asked, What should be done to secure the submission of the people?\u201d Confucius replied, Advance the upright and set aside the crooked, then the people will submit. Advance the crooked and set aside the upright, then the people will not submit.\u201d Ranil should learn from recent history = a lesson that, say, would put paid to Ranil\u2019s selectees beginning with Arjuna Mahendran\u00a0 and applies to Mahinda Rajapakse and his cronies who are yet thrashing around in their efforts not to learn.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0Gamini Seneviratne This note takes a brief look at Ranil Wickremesinghe\u2019s notions of economic growth and how to get there. I doubt he much understands how\u00a0 \u00a0such growth\u201d is obtained or measured and, most certainly, no idea at all that typically it would have further negative impacts on the capacity of the people to merely […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[102,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55948"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55948\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}