The Old School Tie?
By Emil van der Poorten –July 17, 2016
Emil van der Poorten
The recent kerfuffle at the Central Bank appeared to be a serious tug-of-war between, at least, the Prime Minister and the President of the Maithripala/Ranil (MR2) government in the matter of what an appropriate response should be to the affaire Mahendran and what flowed from it.
At the end of the day, we had a man whose opening statement expressed his intention to “divorce politics from economics,” utilizing rather hoary buzzwords like “economic stability.”
Most readers should be old enough to remember the Thatcher years when similar terminology was employed to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.
What is obscene about the Sri Lankan political scene is the fact that the common ground for all the major political entities appears to be their simple acceptance of neo-conservative political and economic thinking. Apart from any “pinko” considerations of social justice, it is this road that has led to the turmoil in international financial markets and the chaos that is flowing from all kinds of secessionist impulses. Brexit was the tip of that iceberg in case you didn’t notice.
The new head honcho of our most important financial institution was quoted in banner headlines saying clearly and without equivocation that politics and economics were like oil and water. They shouldn’t and couldn’t be mixed.
Would somebody please tell me how the political process and economic policy can be separated while still trying to maintain even the façade of a democratic system of government whose very foundation is built on the belief that the citizenry, not some ivory-tower theoreticians, will ultimately decide whether they have food to put on the table for themselves and their dependants?
That is what all of this high-falutin’ language really adds up to. The end result is, simply, an elite maintaining themselves “in the manner to which they have grown accustomed” while the rest of society sups at the nearest garbage dump in order to survive. Dramatic? Perhaps, but let’s stop beating about the bush, take off the blinkers that “those who know better“ want us to wear and face up to the harsh realities that are going to be the end result of all this economic jargon and double-speak.
That is what all of this high-falutin’ language really adds up to. The end result is, simply, an elite maintaining themselves “in the manner to which they have grown accustomed” while the rest of society sups at the nearest garbage dump in order to survive. Dramatic? Perhaps, but let’s stop beating about the bush, take off the blinkers that “those who know better“ want us to wear and face up to the harsh realities that are going to be the end result of all this economic jargon and double-speak.
