Political economy of finance-capital

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Political economy of finance-capital

June 26, 2020, 5:56 pm

by Kumar David

The hypothesis of this essay is that the current global recession, and the depression which will follow in the middle of the 2020s, arise from the nature of actually existing capitalism in the US and the West; COVID-19 was merely a catalyst. This capitalism, called hegemonic global finance-capital, is not the textbook capitalism of Smith, Ricardo, John Stuart Mill or the amended versions of Keynes and 20th Century economists. All that is called classical economics. Marx’s critique in Kapital-I also relates to the classical version. In the writings of all great economic thinkers and particularly Marx you will find signposts pointing to finance-capital but not a full-blown theory.

The difference is simple and visible all around. One way to illustrate it is to name institutional actors, another is to say "Look at the variance between what the Chinese economy does and what America does". The mega actors in the US economy are banks, investment houses, institutions which buy and sell assets (stocks, bonds, mutual funds, financiers of commodity trade in oil, food and metals), real estate dealers, currency traders and dealers in funny things called hedges and derivatives. These are the giants; their universal tool the dollar. Ford, General Motors, manufacturers, Standard Oil and Mobil, they are not champs any more. The big shift in power is from production to finance. Power resides in Wall Street, not Detroit or the Appalachian coal fields.

The other way of making the point is to consider the differences between the economic activities of the US and China. The latter is all about production of goods – commodities as they were once called. Its banks and financial institutions are primitive compared to their American counterparts. China still cannot collate, finance and place a mega-billion-dollar transaction in global markets. The biggest investments were negotiated and signed-off, till recently, in Hong Kong (Shanghai and Shenzhen are getting a small slice now). But China is the supreme workshop of the world.

All this is empirical, not a definition of structure. Classical production-led capitalism is well understood. A few keywords will do: Borrow when necessary > invest in plant > procure materials > employ wage labour > MAKE > sell > appropriate a surplus (profit) > compete > do it all again (reproduction). In a healthy economy the cycle grows ever bigger, profits, plants and the economy expand and population swells. England was the great progenitor; then China in four recent decades drew 400 million people from the countryside into an industrial economy - in the process it all but banished poverty. The nitty-gritty of financing, banking, facilitating distribution, transport, insurance and marketing needs an activity structure. Classical capitalism is the totality of the interacting parts of this activity structure; it keeps the production and distribution processes alive.

Of course, from the beginning those who dealt in money only, had a place. Borrow money when necessary I said! But from whom? Investors would be syndicated by banks which managed and underwrote deals. Deposit the profit, accumulate and reinvest, I implied. Financial conglomerates and banks to the fore. Insure, issue letters of credit and so on. Well the East India Company started life as a body of investors did you know?

Finance-capital came into its own when the money part of the economy become dominant; when handlers of money grew more powerful than manufacturers, when bankers conquered industrialists. The theory goes back to Rudolf Hilferding’s Finance Capital published in Vienna in 1910 - he had been propagating it from earlier. The key concepts: a) A huge aggregation of capital had taken place over the decades and capitalism’s structure was no longer the same, b) capital had become monopolist and was no longer competitive, and (c) movements of capital to colonies was opening new vistas (tea plantations say). This last aspect attracted the word imperialism. I am not sure how valid Hilferding’s second point about monopoly is today (Apple vs. Samsung vs. Huawei vs. Sony?). And today the word imperialism is more about military than investment hegemony. His focus on amassed capital and its functioning as the force dominating the economy, however, remain central and cardinal.

The structure and complexity of modern finance-capital is deeper than any analyst before WW2 had foreseen. The nature of recent crisis, particularly the 2008-9 Great Recession and 2020 recession are unlike previous crises which were linked to overproduction, supply-demand imbalance and the ups and downs of the business-cycle. Nor are they similar to the supply-side shock and stagflation conundrum that followed oil price hikes. Instead, recent crises are located in the domain of finance and arise from instabilities in that system itself. In 2009 it started with mortgages, subprime loans and the unravelling of financial derivatives which in turn threatened the very existence of some of the biggest banks in the US and Europe. The world of finance, the structure of financial systems, started coming apart. This was the first ever major collapse of a financial system per se.

If a financial crisis does not originate in supply-demand imbalance, overproduction, loss of markets due to defeat in war, or supply-chain disruption, then what dynamic causes it? It arises from malfunctions of the financial sector itself. Say banks are overstretched by pursuit of excessive lending since as financial institutions they make money only by expanding their balance sheets (recall subprime mortgages); say hedge and investment funds are overstretched as creatures that live in a world of financial speculation and risk taking; say government runs deficit upon deficit and borrows into trillion-dollar indebtedness; say student and credit card debtors are defaulting; say inequity of wealth and income are so large that living standards of most people is falling. Then what?

Hyman Minsky’s answer was this. There will be a god-almighty psychological collapse (the Minsky Moment) because the very inmates of the financial universe will panic and lose confidence due to accumulation of risk. They will dump what they can making things worse. The central bank will panic and burn the midnight oil running its printing presses (they call it Quantitative Easing QE). It doesn’t get better after a few ups and downs; eventually recession turns into depression. The Great Depression of the 1930s devastated manufacturing, agriculture and mining but it too, psychologically, was sparked off by events in the financial sector – a wrong turn on interest rates in that case.

Nissan Motor Co may close down in USA; the biggest car rental Hertz has filed for bankruptcy - it also owns Thrifty and Dollar. The biggest Trucking company Comcar which has 4,000 trucks has filed for bankruptcy so has America’s oldest retailer JC Penny. The Biggest investor in the world Warren Buffet lost $50 billion in the last two months and the biggest investment company in the world Blackrock which manages $7 trillion is signalling disaster. The biggest mall, Mall of America, has stopped making mortgage payments. Emirates is laying off 30% of its workforce.

It is estimated by website https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/retailers-reel-commercial-landlords-issue-thousands-default-notices which I cannot vouch for that 12,000 to 15,000 businesses will close. These well-known retailers have announced closure: J. Crew, Gap, Victoria’s Secret, Bath & Body Works, Forever-21, Walgreens, Sears (can’t be!), Nordstrom, Macy’s (what!), Bose, Kmart and more. I find all this hard to believe but that’s what the web says. And to rub salt into these wounds, massive mortgage loan defaults, credit card defaults and auto loan defaults are expected. Unemployment claims reached an all-time high of 40 million out of a 160 million working population. When people are broke consumer demand falls and the economy goes into a conventional production-cycle type recession, then a depression. GDP will decline by 5.2% world-wide in 2020; US GDP will fall by over 6%. I don’t see much sign of an upturn in early 2021. There will be a see-saw in 2021-Q3/Q4, maybe into 2022/23, but the die is cast. There is no logic or reason why a money printing, money speculating system of finance-capital can recover health or hegemony.

The economic universes of the 1930s and the 2020s are vastly different from each other; their trajectories will diverge but I am reproducing graphs of 1930s economy in America to make a few points. The huge rise in unemployment and the collapse of the stock market (DOW) first in 1930-32 and then in 1937 is what is called the two W-shaped recessions which straddled the Great Depression. Unemployment in the US right now is not much below 20% and this is not far from the worst in late 1933. However, while in the 1930s stock prices were depressed right now all stock indices are going through the roof reaching record highs – asset price inflation. How different! This is a specific feature of how the Fed is responding differently to crises in the era of finance-capital; it is ‘going monetary’ like crazy. Collapse in the era of finance-capital invokes mad money printing and zero interest rates since central banks have no other tools to respond with.

However, the crucial difference between the Great Depression and the current crises of finance-capital is not economic contraction but debt. Yes, the economy contracted -8% (1930), -6% (1931) and a whopping -14% in 1932. The expected contraction in 2020 will be -6% to 6.5% and most likely 2021 will also be a bad year but the really significant difference is that from as early as 1932 debt declined from as high at 260% of GDP to below half this ratio by 1940. Conversely debt (US and global) is going through the roof now. Capitalism knows how to address crises in the era of finance-capital only by gigantic financializaton. In rough numbers US National (government) debt will stand at $24 trillion at the end of 2020 and the corresponding figures for Household (personal) debt is $16 trillion. Corporate debt is hard to pin down as it depends on what you include; it could be anything between $35 trillion and $70 trillion. Using $50 trillion as a compromise for Corporate debt, the total indebtedness of all sectors combined in the US is about 400% of GDP!

It is reasonable to keep an open mind about how the global economic pendulum will swing; inflation or deflation, inflationary or deflationary stagflation, and international spread or containment thanks, hopefully, to China’s economy holding firm. We are in uncharted waters and the responses of central banks is unpredictable and utterly unconventional because bank overlords themselves are muddled and jinxed. We also need to bear in mind that the world economy in this century is intricately interconnected – globalisation, global supply chains and finance. The worst of the Great Depression was confined to the Americas and Europe, the rest of the world was sheltered. Not so this time; it will hit the poor with the force of a Richter Scale 9.9 earthquake.

The 20-25 year itch in electoral politics

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The 20-25 year itch in electoral politics

June 26, 2020, 4:33 pm

by Rajan Philips

Finally, after such a long wait, Sri Lanka will have its 16th parliamentary election on Wednesday, August 5, 2020. This would be the fourth August election after parliamentary elections began in 1947, which was also the first August election and voting in that election went on for a month from 25 August to 20 September. The sinister purpose of extended voting was to give the outgoing Board of Ministers, who had jumped on to the new political wagon (the UNP) created on the fly by DS Senanayake, sufficient time to deploy state resources for political campaign from one part of the island to another. Multi-day elections continued in 1952 and 1956, and one-day only polls began in 1960 March. There have been two August elections since, all of them after 1977 and under the current constitution and the presidential system.

The first of them was on 16 August 1994, when Chandrika Kumaratunga spectacularly led the Peoples’ Alliance to throw out the UNP after being continuously in power for 17 years. The next one and the most recent of them was on 17 August 2015 when the common opposition forces led this time by the UNP brought down the SLFP parliamentary majority after 21 years. Is August the turnover month after long years of one-party dominance in the name of political stability? Is there anything special about the August moon?

Never mind, here we are still 37 days from the next August election, and 103 days after nominations closed on 18 March for what was to be a 25 April election. The coronavirus had other plans, and even though it has spared Sri Lanka to get away without serious symptoms, it scared the hell out of everyone to put the country under lockdown and have the elections postponed from 25 April, to 20 June, to finally 5 August.

The election timing as well as its eventual conducting are highly unusual. That unusualness is not going to change what political parties are going to try to get out of this election, and what the ultimate outcome or outcomes may turn out to be. However, the objectives of the current political leaders and their alliances and the constraints they have to deal with, are quite different from what had characterized earlier parliamentary elections under the presidential system. The outcomes are also going to be different. These differences have nothing to do with the coronavirus, but they will have a bearing on how equipped the country would be to deal with the challenges created by the coronavirus after the elections are over.

Elections Past

So far, there have been seven parliamentary elections under the presidential system. Three of them were during President Chandrika Kumaratunga’s second term, in October 2000, December 2001, and April 2004. She is the only Sri Lankan political leader to convincingly win a parliamentary election, in August 1994, and equally convincingly translate it into a presidential election victory, which she did within three months, in November 1994. JR Jayewardene too became president after winning a parliamentary election in 1977, but that was through a constitutional amendment which transubstantiated him from Prime Minister to President.

In a foretelling of the future, which no one saw through at that time, President Jayewardene governed the country for eleven years without holding a parliamentary election. But there was a parliament, unlike now, the one that was elected in 1977, and was kept going till 1988 through the contraption of a referendum in 1982. JRJ also used his massive and captive parliamentary majority to suspend the civic rights of his chief political opponent and former Prime Minister, Mrs. Sirimavo Bandaranaike.

The first parliamentary election under the presidential system eventually came in February 1988, President Jayewardene’s last year as President. The UNP won the election but against a far more competitive SLFP and ULF. Then Prime Minister Premadasa was the UNP candidate in the second presidential election in November 1988, which he won against a very competitive Mrs. Bandaranaike who by then had her civic rights restored. Premadasa succeeded JR Jayewardene in January 1989

President Premadasa, who was assassinated by the LTTE on May Day 1993, the first and the only Sri Lankan head of government to be assassinated after SWRD Bandaranaike in 1959, is also the only President who did not conduct either a presidential election or a parliamentary election while in office. His stopgap successor, President DB Wijetunga, managed to conduct both the parliamentary election and the presidential election in 1994. The UNP lost both and Mr. Wijetunga was not a candidate in the presidential election.

Like Mr. Premadasa in 1988-89, Mahinda Rajapaksa succeeded incumbent President Chandrika Kumaratunga in November 2005, after narrowly winning the presidential election as the SLFP candidate. Unlike President Premadasa, however, President Rajapaksa defeated the LTTE, and used the aura of the war winner to win the presidential and parliamentary elections, one after the other in 2010 January and April. His political fortunes abandoned him in January 2015 when he extra-constitutionally tried to win a third term in office, and lost the election to the common opposition dark horse, Maithripala Sirisena. Sirisena promised to be a one term president and end the executive presidency after him. He did nothing to end the presidency, but the country was too tired of him and ended his presidency after a single term.

Somewhat like DB Wijetunga, but not at all "Doing Bloody Well", Sirisena managed to hold a parliamentary election in August 2015 and a presidential election in November 2019. In between Sirisena and Ranil Wickremesinghe jointly presided over the disastrous yahapalanaya misadventure that created a clear path for Gotabaya Rajapaksa to abandon his US citizenship and become President of Sri Lanka in one meteoric rise, in the course of one year. This rather long recount, for a short article, of past elections hopefully provides a reflective backdrop to the upcoming 5 August election and the unfolding presidency of Gotabaya Rajapaksa.

Own Goals Election

The most important difference from the past is that for the first time since 1947, the country will go through a parliamentary election without either the UNP or the SLFP being the principal contender for power. Between 1952 and 2015, the two parties were the dominant political parties in every election, parliamentary and presidential, as they alternated between government and opposition. In the heady days of Maoism, N. Sanmugathasan the leader of the Communist Party (Peking), called this alternation the musical chair game of Sri Lankan politics. It really was until 1977 when the music stopped. Four decades on, the old parties are also disappearing. There was no SLFP in the 2019 Presidential election. And it is not going to be there in any substantial way in August parliamentary election.

For its part, the UNP is now going through what the SLFP has been going through for the last five years. In fact, it is worse for the UNP. In the August 2015 parliamentary election, the SLFP contested as a single party but under a split head (Rajapaksa and Sirisena). The UNP, on the other hand, is split through the torso and will be contesting the next election as two separate entities. The smaller legal UNP under Ranil Wickremesinghe, and the larger breakaway SJB (Samagi Jana Balawegaya) under Sajith Premadasa. They will be fighting each other to get more seats and to brag about it after the election.

The more consequential difference from the past is the emergence of the SLPP, that has never contested a parliamentary election before, as the most likely winner in the upcoming August election. The SLPP is not a new party representing any fundamental realignment of sociopolitical forces. It is not even a formal breakaway from the SLFP. Rather, it is the outcome of some clever hijacking of the SLFP base by Basil Rajapaksa facilitated by specific developments after January 2015: nationalist disillusionment with Ranil Wickremesinghe among the Sinhalese; disaffection with Maithripala Sirisena among the SLFPers; Mahinda Rajapaksa’s political charm that was constantly boosted by yahapalanaya blunders; and the fascination with Gotabaya Rajapaksa as a no-nonsense President among Sinhalese professional and new business classes.

It is easy to see that none of the factors that have shaped and catalysed the success of the SLPP are available to Sajith Premadasa’s SJB. Nor is there any evidence to suggest that Sajith Premadasa has it in him to build up a new political organization from the grassroots of the UNP. The prospects for the leftover UNP leadership are even worse. In any event, neither side can do much before the August elections. How they fare in the August polls will indicate how they will perform after the election – whether either of them will be able to re-mobilize the abandoned UNP base, or a new political force might emerge to carry out that task.

Where does all this leave the SLPP and President Gotabaya Rajapaksa? It is taken for granted that the SLPP will win the election, at least win the largest number of seats. The pedestrian question is whether it will get the constitutionally coveted two-thirds majority. A different and somewhat historical question is whether the SLPP today is at the same point as the UNP was in 1977, and the SLFP in 1994, when they began their long tenures in power.

History may not be on the SLPP’s side going by what has been called the "20-25 year itch" in Sri Lanka’s electoral politics. That is to say that unlike the more recurrent governmental changes at shorter intervals, a massive ‘tsunami-like’ wave sweeps up the electorate every 20 or 25 years, upending long-governing parties and replacing them with new ones. 1956, 1977, 1994 were tsunami elections. Although the SLPP is new and President Gotabaya Rajapaksa is newer, the Rajapaksa association with power is now fifteen years old, leaving aside the yahapalanaya interregnum (like the UNP interregnum of 1965-70). By that measure, the Rajapaksas are well past the midway point in the itchy time span, and not at the beginning of one.

More than historical cycles, the challenges facing the SLPP and President Rajapaksa are both current as well as unprecedented. The coronavirus threat is not abating anywhere with epicentres of caseloads and deaths inexorably shifting to the southern states in the US, South America, and South Asia, where Sri Lanka is still, by effort or good fortune, only minimally impacted. The government cannot expect the return of the pre-covid normalcy any time soon. The government’s weak spot and its biggest challenge are the economy. So far, its responses have been rightly criticized as being clueless and as panicking. More will be said after the election when the government runs out of excuses.

And more criticisms are likely to come from outside the parliament than from within. None of the contending opposition parties are able to capture the public’s attention either with their criticisms of the government, or with any alternative suggestions that they might have on offer. The election itself will be an election of political parties hitting more own goals, than scoring against one another. At the centre of it will be Rajapaksa v. Rajapaksa, sounding like Kramer v. Kramer of old, but in reality a proxy battle between the followers of the President and those of the Prime Minister. It would be interesting to see what the President and the Prime Minister, and their followers, will do if the SLPP were to win a two-thirds majority and they can proceed with constitutional changes. Whose powers will be increased, and whose will be trimmed? They both cannot both have their powers increased. What they have now is a fine balance. The alternatives are for the Prime Minister to become "a name board", or the President to follow the model of William Gopallawa.

My Mysteries

  My Mysteries

1. Origin of Zero

 

2. Origin of Dogs from the Wild

 

3. Sex differentiation in cells

 

4. Matter and antimatter

 

5. Levo-rotation of molecules

 

6. Superconductivity at absolute zero temperature

 

7. Left and right orientation of brain

 

8. Origin of language

 

9. Proton spin

 

10 Viral flu

Emancipation or Enlightenment or Purulent Dogma?

Reproduction little bit Edited.

Emancipation or Enlightenment or Purulent Dogma?

This piece is the result of a good night sleep without mosquito menace and optimum blood sugar level (hypoglycemia) in between.

Adequately compensated with feel good factors (hormones) from chocolates made of only chocolate butter (free of milk and extra sugar).

No tea or coffee for almost 24 hours.

Warning here, nobody with diabetes or low thyroxine with high TSH levels should try any of the schemes mentioned.

No rice for eleven years on the trot (except string hoppers and hoppers) was my single health discovery (worse grain on this planet).

With Coronavirus Lock-Down,Block-Down (Shutdown) not even hoppers and string hoppers.

No alcohol for little over three years.

I was a guinea pig on alcohol as a student experiment (talks eloquently after the correct amount and win billiards or snooker game by the smallest of a margin) and I did my own experiment on sleep deprivation.

Did not sleep for 48 hours to overcome a bet and slept three days afterward.

Worse experiment unlike the alcohol experiment.

I pity the astronauts in space.

Sleep deprivation is bad enough but overcoming one atmospheric pressure is a strain on every organ and the skeletal system.

Never think of becoming an astronaut for fun.

It is no fun at all, bordering one’s stupidity and pure subject of brain washing.

Regarding sleep, never drive on coffee after an overnight sleep deprivation.

Sure recipe for accidents.

If you are feeling sleepy, pull the car to a side and have a deserving snooze.

Alcohol affects your snooze and the need for it at the correct time.

One need 8 hours of sleep, in my case bit more than that, now.

Not necessarily in one go but ideally in two breaks.

The preamble has no relevance the what I am going to say.

I watched a few Youtube presentations (religion, rational thinking, science and cosmos) and come to few conclusions.

I admire a few (not many) but hate many who propagate illogical dogmas.

They use the Nazi Gobble method.

Repeat the same thing over and over again, thousand times with some variation.

Only a few of these predators focus on reasoning and logic.

Rest are all rigid dogmas, be that it may be, religion, agnosticism or communism or socialism or any political or social validity of those dogmas except perhaps moral validity (depending on the cultural set up).

This is why I say come out of the dogmatism.

It leads to emancipation of some sort.

But there is a trap in it.

One tries to fill the void with one’s own dogma.

That is a dangerous expression of freedom to think and express (terrorism and anti-terrorism polarity) ones own innate desires.

The way to handle is to keep the void as it is.

This is what the meditation teachers teach you but very difficult to practise.

Emancipation and renunciation are OK for me but what about the enlightenment?

That is a dicey question.

Nobody knows anything about it.

Perhaps self hallucination (drugs and alcohol are known to get one there) and I do not want that ill defined entity entrapping my mind.

I stop at healthy emancipation.

Both Revelation and Enlightenment are two "High Five" Biblical words without any meaning.

There is nothing revealed that we already know.

There is nobody who is really enlightened to know the real human predicament with the existing tensions in the world.
Is it Donald Trump, Putin, Rusputin, Ayatulla or Kim Jon un’s North Korea?

Perhaps I may go for “thinking to think freely” and “the beautiful mind (Somanassa state in Buddhist psychology)” of Professor De Bono strategy.

A closing remark on science.

We are one atmosphere, three dimensional thinkers in the material world of less than 5%.

The rest of the 95% or more is dark energy and dark matter we know nothing about except its accelerating expansion and we are heading for, in eons for nullity or void.

What we see in the sky is yesterday and never today due to speed of light's limitation.

Until we find a method faster than speed of light we will never see the event horizon, except dark bodies or dark matter.

What we have is "now, now” of the present limited to our own sphere of activity.

So make best of what is now.

 

Unfortunately Ceylonese politics and its headlong strategy for Totalitarian Mantra is the worse antidote to real emancipation in this world!

 

One has to kick the bucket to achieve it in another “World System” without Global Warming and Coronavirus!

An Extraordinary Gazette Notification

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An Extraordinary Gazette Notification

June 26, 2020, 12:00 pm

by Prof. Savitri Goonesekere

During the last few weeks, the media has paid a great deal of attention to fundamental rights cases filed in our Supreme Court. The electronic media, typically expressed half-truths or incorrect information on what these cases were about. Sadly, but perhaps not unexpectedly, opposition parties who should have been concerned with the matter, failed to contradict the toxic messages on the TV, regarding this litigation in the Supreme Court. Most people thought that the petitioners were just being nasty, trying to prevent a General Election, and challenging the President’s right to dissolve Parliament. Opinions expressed, in analyzing the legal provisions were either dismissed as irrelevant legal jargon, or another contribution to partisan politics.
When the Supreme Court dismissed all the petitions, on June 2, 2020, after long hearings, without giving reasons, there was closure on the debate. Their Lordships had expressed a unanimous opinion that all the petitions had no merit, and that was the end of the matter.   

Some of us, analyzing the issue of postponed elections and incapacity to summon a new Parliament, due to Covid 19, requested the President in public appeals to act under Article 70 (7) of the Constitution. This article empowered him to reconvene the dissolved Parliament, issuing a new proclamation of dissolution, with dates for a General Election and summoning of the new Parliament, when the public health crisis was over. He was empowered to take such action by the Constitution, in response to “an emergency.”  However, he refused to exercise this power. Government spokesmen told us all that the President had decided that there was no emergency or an issue of public security that demanded exercise of those powers. And yet on the very night of the Supreme Court judgment the President issued an extraordinary Gazette notification  of June 2, 2020, setting up a Presidential Task Force  on the rationale of ensuring “the security of the country”, i.e. to build “a secure country, and a disciplined virtuous and lawful society,” also implying an ongoing breakdown of law and order.

Understanding these events, the Constitution, our fundamental rights as citizens, and the exercise of Presidential power, are matters that should concern us. These happenings can at some point impact on all our lives. Especially when, for so many years we all agreed that this country’s governance had been destroyed because of the Executive Presidency. The recent litigation on fundamental rights, and the Extraordinary Gazette notification that followed, are matters that we should reflect on, even as we go to the polls to cast our votes at the next General election.

Fundamental Rights Litigation May- June 2020 on Postponement of General Elections 2020 and Summoning of New Parliament
This litigation was NOT based on the illegality of the President’s Proclamation of March 2, 2020 dissolving Parliament. This was VALID in law and NOT challenged by those who brought these cases to the Supreme Court. The fundamental rights petition was filed on three major grounds:

a)     That Article 70 (5) of the Constitution made it very clear that after the General Election was held on a date set by the original Proclamation of Dissolution,  the new Parliament had to  meet “on a date NOT LATER THAN THREE MONTHS AFTER THE DATE OF” the original proclamation. A variation by a subsequent Proclamation of the President had to conform to that date. The only exception was if the President exercised his powers under subsection 7 of that same Article 70, on the basis that there was an emergency that made “an earlier meeting of (the dissolved) Parliament necessary.” The President refused to exercise this power.  The three-month limit for summoning of Parliament in the original Proclamation was exceeded on June 2, 2020. The petitioners therefore argued that the legal period for summoning the new Parliament had lapsed, and the original Proclamation had therefore become void or lost its legality.

b)     The second key premise was that the Elections Act provisions (Section 24(1) (c) and Section 10), linked the Elections Commission’s notice on the date of the General Election to the Presidential Proclamation. Therefore, when the three-month period for summoning the new Parliament lapsed, the Commission could not vary the date of the General Elections by its own actions. This also required interpreting the provisions of the Elections Act on postponing the election in an electoral district due to an emergency or unforeseen circumstance, and whether this referred to the General Election in the whole island as defined in Article 170 of the Constitution.

c)    The third issue was the impact of postponement of elections and absence of a date set for summoning the new Parliament, on financial oversight.  This required an interpretation of Article 150 (3) on the President’s power to make withdrawals from the Consolidated Fund after a dissolution of Parliament.

There were other arguments, but these were the key issues that required a determination by court. It was these issues that created the context for an important Constitutional case that would also define the scope of Presidential powers in relation to Parliament. As important and defining in relation to governance of the nation, as the Dissolution of Parliament case of 2018. Except for his Lordship the Chief Justice, many if not all the judges in the five judge Bench also participated in the unanimous Full Bench decision of the HNJ Perera CJ Court in 2018. Those of us who study the jurisprudence of our apex court and teach it to law students, looked forward to a  Supreme Court decision worthy of the best of the jurisprudence that has emerged from our highest court. After ten days of argument before the Supreme Court, we all awaited a decision on what we considered an important Constitutional law case, on the powers of the two key organs of governance - Parliament and the Executive President. To our amazement, the Court unanimously dismissed all the petitions without giving any reasons.

It was disappointing to read and listen to media accounts of the advocacy in our highest court, in these cases. These reports may have been inaccurate. But summaries provided suggested that while the Petitioners’ lawyers were analyzing the law, on the above key issues of Constitutional interpretation, the respondents’ lawyers focused on the political dimensions and  did not respond with counter legal arguments. They constantly questioned the good faith of the petitioners in coming to court, attributing political bias.
The President of the Bar Association sometime ago issued a statement suggesting that decisions of the courts should not be commented on by lawyers. However, critical review of court decisions has been an important part of both judicial decision making and legal education in Sri Lankan and other legal systems, for decades.

The jurisprudence and advocacy associated with great justices of the appellate courts, and brilliant practitioners of the legal profession, focused on review and critique of case law. My late husband RKW Goonesekere delivered the Desmond Fernando PC Memorial Oration at the invitation of the Bar Association. His theme was a critique of the Supreme Court decision that held that there were no limits to the Presidential term of office, despite specific provisions in the Constitution of 1978. That decision was overturned by the 19th Amendment passed by a 2/3 majority in Parliament. I recall as a young lecturer commenting on a judgment of his Lordship late HW Tambiah QC on the Tesawalamai. His Lordship and I were at a seminar on the personal laws. His Lordship came up to me later, smiled and said “your comments were very interesting. But you know unfortunately judges don’t have a right of reply!”

It is in this spirit that some of us still believe that the serious study of case law is important for practitioners and judges, law teachers and students, and especially all those interested in issues of law and justice. It is respectfully submitted that the hearing of these important fundamental rights petitions over 10 days, and the Court’s refusal of leave to proceed without reasons, has left the interpretation of Article 70 of the Constitution, and the relevant provisions of the Elections Act shrouded in mystery. In discussing this case in classrooms and other fora we will not know what their Lordships thought was the meaning of the three-month limitation on the Dissolution Proclamation so clearly set out in the Constitution.  Nor will we know their views on the important matter of the link between the Election Commission’s Gazette notification on the date of a General Election, and a Presidential Proclamation dissolving Parliament.

There have also been some unfortunate outcomes. The date of the General Election will be decided by the Elections Commission on some future date they consider acceptable.  We do not have a Parliament and a President accountable to Parliament. The life of the new Parliament will begin on some uncertain date in the future. There is no provision in the Constitution for the President to summon a new Parliament by a Proclamation that does not conform to a Proclamation of Dissolution as specified in Article 70. The court has not indicated to us how such a new Parliament can or will be summoned.

Sadly, and most significantly there is now a perception among the Government and the People that the Constitution and laws are really irrelevant in governance. The manner in which the petitioners were vilified by many senior President’s Counsel for the respondents, and their motives questioned, has set new norms and standards that we also witnessed in the Court of Appeal in the well-known Gotabaya Rajapaksa Citizenship case. One can only hope that their Lordships of the Supreme Court will contribute to changing this negative trend, reiterating once again the views of his Lordship Chief Justice HNJ Perera and the Full Bench in the Dissolution of Parliament Case 2018. His Lordship Chief Justice Perera delivering the judgment of the Full court said  that the right to litigate violations of fundamental rights is an “inalienable right” of our people and the “grundnorm “ (basic norm) and “gives life and meaning to the “Sovereignty of the People” recognized by the Constitution.   
The Gazette Extraordinary of  June 2, 2020

The Presidential Proclamation that immediately followed the Supreme Court decision set up a Task Force of exclusively military personnel with a wide mandate  “to build a secure country” and “a disciplined and lawful society”.  The Task Force is headed by the Defence Secretary. Members of the Task Force are the Commanders of the three armed forces, the Acting IGP, and several other senior military officers holding office in these forces. Directors of State Intelligence and the Directors of Intelligence of the Navy and Air Force are also members. A few retired army military officers have also been appointed.

This Presidential initiative is said to have been taken in the exercise of powers given by Article 33 of the Constitution. Not a single article or sub article of this provision in the Constitution refers to such a power or powers.  Even a broad power stated in Article 33 (2) (h) refers to the President acting in conformity with international law. The issue of public security is dealt with specifically in Chapter 18 of the Constitution. When the President exercises powers under that Chapter and the Public Security Ordinance, he must also communicate with Parliament. But now we have no Parliament, and there is no indication when the new Parliament will be summoned. 
The President said there is no national emergency or reasons of public security to exercise powers under Article 70 (7) of the Constitution. It was argued for the respondents that there is no emergency due to Covid 19 or a public security rationale. Yet the Elections Act expects the Elections Commission to postpone elections in an electoral district in a situation of “emergency or unforeseen circumstances.” And the President appoints, on the very day the Supreme Court order was delivered, military men with a mandate on “public security” outside the provisions of the Constitution. This is almost a public statement that the Constitution and laws are token symbols and procedures.

The mandate and powers of the Task Force are very wide
They are tasked with ‘curbing the illegal activities of social groups who are violating the law, “which is harmful to free and peaceful existence of society.” Eliminating the “drug menace” is within the mandate of the Task Force. Given the current inclination of administrators to disregard legal provisions, and a failure to understand their scope and application, we do not know what will be recognized as “violating the law”. We also do not know what the phrase “social group” will be interpreted to mean. Will this include trade unions, all professional and civil society organizations, faith groups?
The Task Force has wide powers to investigate, obtain information and issue directives. A reference to “respecting the rule of law and justice” and equal protection of the law” appears in a disconnected manner in the text, not inspiring any confidence that these phrases will be interpreted with reference to the Constitution or specific and important legal norms and standards.
All public servants, and personnel in corporations and public institutions (a term that could include state universities) are subject to the authority of the Task Force and must co-operate with it, provide information and follow directives. Failure to do so, or a dereliction of duty will be reported to the President. The President has already announced that officers in State Banks who do not follow government instructions will be dismissed.

A culture of political decision making and abuse of power especially in the last 15 years has crippled many state institutions including universities.  Persons holding responsible public office are often silent spectators in decision making, fearing to speak truth to power.  A tongue lashing by the President of senior officials in the banking sector may please those who want the President to exercise dictatorial powers in governance.  Will these institutions too be crippled in the same way, at a time when the country desperately needs the economy to be managed with professionalism, personal integrity and commitment?
The status of the independent Commissions like the Elections Commission, Human Rights Commission, the Commission on Disappearances, the Public Services and Police Commissions, and the RTI Commission, in relation to the mandate of the Task Force has not been clarified. Can they too receive directives that must be complied with?
This Extraordinary Gazette notice is truly extraordinary for giving authority to the military as a significant agent of civil governance, outside the framework of the law and the Constitution. This Task Force may well fulfill the vision of all those fellow country men and women who think future national development and progress demand dictatorial and authoritarian governance. Dr U Pethiygoda writing in the Island newspapers (30th/31st May 2020), considered Parliamentary democracy and the franchise irrelevant in governance. His desire to reject worthless institutions and norms, and his request to the President to create a disciplined society with his Presidential “whip”, appear to have been realized. Dr. Pethiyagoda will consider himself very fortunate. What the future will hold for those of us who still believe in democracy and the limitation of State power in the public interest, is anyone’s guess.

Blessing of Coronavirus SHUTDOWN or LOCKDOWN

Blessing of Coronavirus SHUTDOWN or LOCKDOWN

The natural evolution of shutdown was to find solutions for few of my questions in evolution of life on earth, especially the pre-biotic era that made it conducive for life to evolve in very slow steps.

1.Why chirality or spin or left handedness in molecules?

2. Why sex differentiation instead of simple binary division?

3. Could there be half life half chemical scenario?

4. How the interaction went on and succeeded eventually?

The initial problem was that I limited myself to three forms of matter.

It should have been four or more.

1. Gas

2. Liquid

3. Solids

The answer came from my son’s inquiry into why there are lines going across the Television screen horizontally and why not vertically?

4. I delved into the liquid crystal world that easily bend light in many directions in a material as thin as 100 nanometers.

5. My friend the Coronavirus come to help me.

It has 10 to 20 and 100 to 120 particle sizes in the form of RNA.

6. I told my son the Coronavirus can enter the Television screen as he watches it and the Coronavirus size is just the size of the Liquid Crystal Screen and bit less.

In theoretical sense the light can energizes the chirality of the semi-liquid particles in million ways.

So seven of our visible light stream is minor matter for the man who makes the cheap television screens for third world consumption.

Few of the pixels breakdown would bring a big aberration in the picture we see.

A thick television screen like Cathode Ray Tube can withstand the pixel aberrations much better but it costs more to build it and it consumes more electricity.

In reference, I told him first television was black and white and turning it to colour was an enormous achievement in my time.

Even though, I do not watch TV now I had an assortment of black and colour TV sets I purchased with hard earned money.

By the way when, I was in New Zealand I rented the TV and decided never to invest on a TV but computers (even before Windows) run on Unix.

My entry into Linux was logical consequence and I was quite adept at it then even coding.

I wanted to write the code for few Linux games (only handicap Linux had) and I have the book but misplaced the coding CDs (Why type every line but copy from the CD).

Back to the liquid crystal scenario, the the primordial soup was steaming with particles that made liquid crystals at random.

RNA came first in my story of the evolution albeit it did not make liquid crystals readily.

Then came DNA and time was right for the RNA to dictate terms with DNA.

The pre-biotic soup had the right ingredient, in the form of Liquid Crystals.

The next step the biotic with binary division was inevitable.

The binary division and chirality worked hand in glove.The liquid crystal state was also conducive for formation of cell membrane. 
To me formation of cell membrane with polarity was enigmatic, to say the least.
It has bilayers, one which is water phobic (repelling) and the other hydrophillic (water loving).
Liquid crystals could have been of many layers to begin with, its one sided spin arrangement allowed the formation of tiny globules (hydrophobic inside and outer hydrophilic surface bathing in liquid or water) that coalesce to form bigger globules of the size of pre-biotic cell formation.

Addition of RNA and much later DNA gave the ability of binary reproduction.

That does not mean in another world system with another system the chirality is in opposite direction is impossible but probable.

Like matter takes precedent here by making one atom in excess of antimatter that annihilated the antimatter, it is physically possible for one antimatter in excess matter to make a world system of antimatter realm.

In other words given time anything can happen in the physical world and not the way the Bible had predicted.

 

Chaos and uncertainty principle are hard at work!

Reproduction

Last Puzzle is the Life Puzzle

I am intrigued by how life evolved on our planet.

I won't exclude the fact that life would have traveled from outer space in a tiny meteorite (mostly improbable).

Leave that argument aside for the time being.

How to approach the problem?

Top down approach?

Bottom up approach?

Either way I am going to get bogged down somewhere around one (1) billion years into the past.

The premises are many.

1. Origin of cellular life is incredible.

Almost impossible in a hostile environment.

2. It happened very very slowly.

3. In its progress toward self perpetuation, there were many obstructions including bombardment of meteorites.

4. It went through five mass extinctions.

Currently it is well into its sixth extinction.

5. There could have been half life half chemical scenario.

How the interaction went on we do not know.

6. Cellular life is so labile it does not leave tell tale stories or leave behind markers in stromatolites.

7. Earth is a living planet and it does not have its oldest rocks available for study.

Its oldest rock is only two and a half billion years old.

Earth life of four and a half billion is estimated from meteorites.

There is two billion years of missing history which we have to surmise.

8. In addition there were catastrophes.

9. I am comfortable with the last 500 million years of its evolution of that the last 3 to 5 million is matter of fact biology being unraveled.

10. How could I dissect the first 500 hundred of the last billion years.

11. In addition there are many other questions.

WHEN?

WHERE?

HOW?

Life originated?

12. What was the smallest living particle?

We seem to assume that we know a lot.

On the contrary we know very little.

We are stuck with the hereditary and survival of the fittest scenario that would suit only the last 5 million years, assuming mitochonridal mutations is rare.

In fact, major mitochondrial mutations are very very rare.

It is our energy store.

If it goes haywire life cannot exist in the current oxygen rich planet with cellular life.

This preamble is for further dissection by my friends far and near.

There are number of salient points that were not available to Darwin that cannot be ignored.

They did not come by chance.

My premise is that evolution brought order to the world (universe) without it.

There was economy in participation.

Assimilation of two carbon units, twenty amino acids coded by a few purines and pyrimidines, about 20,000 variants of structural proteins with only levo-rotation (no dextro-rotatoion of sugar molecules) are convincing evidence that it started at one point in modern evolution continued albeit slowly.

But nitty gritty of evolution and diversion of species were determined not by nucleus but by mitochondrial evolution.

Mitochondria were very resistant to mutation and they occur once in every 3 to 5 million year intervals.

When that happened drastic changes happened to the primates (erect posture, language acquisition and larger brain) in evolution.

How it happened in an ovum is a mystery by all accounts and we do not have mitochondrial data to evaluate.

For example we have giant mitochondria in salivary glands and in yeasts.

Yeast mitochondria can hijack nuclear DNA and that is one way of mitochondrial evolution.

Mitochondria evolved by endosymbiosis.

Mitochondria originated by a endosymbiotic event when a bacterium was captured by a eukaryotic cell. 

The organelles have far fewer genes than an independent bacterium, and have lost many of the gene functions that are necessary for independent life (such as metabolic pathways).

Duality, Chirality (Spin) and Order out of Disorder

Duality, Chirality (Spin) and Order out of Disorder

I have no intention of bringing in order (a chaotic system to begin with) into an already disorderly system but to see the fallacy of such an attempt.

Order is mainly seen, in the biological systems by necessity of Darwin’s theory of survival.

In the Universe the chaos is the natural way be that it may be black holes, dark energy and dark matter.

But the man made a big mistake (his mind is the most chaotic system of energy dispensation) in recent history by necessitating orderly organization in the name of Church with mega capital power.

The Church exists to give functionality to capitalism (by Carl Marx’s rendering of Western System of politics) and for its own monetary success in the name of its followers and subtly for global expansionism.

It will never empty its banks in the name of socialism.

Even the socialism in Russia survives on the corridors of Russian Orthodox Church.

Before Church was created it needed a mighty creator and creating order out of nothing (non existent universe before) to begin with.

 

A very big “Big Bang”!

Big Bang explains only 5% of the Universe and rest was negated by default.

When one makes a big falsification in the beginning of explanation, lots and lots of smaller lies had to be created in the name of mankind’s ready consumption.

The construction of a concept of a creator overseeing a disorderly universe was the biggest lie.

The rest is series of smaller lies and the mankind was never liberated or emancipated and a liberator has to be announced who comes in the future tense.

What is the role of mathematics?

Mathematic also tries to bring order by estimation or probability statistics.

Only an approximation but never absolutes in a chaotic background chatter of cosmic energy or background radiation.

We always see the past and never the present of the visible edge of the universe (delay in receiving the light energy by light years).

Even though, we can see the past we are unable to see the future, since the future would seem not to evolve in our understanding of the present moment which is moving relatively fast.

In philosophical sense this present moment has neither corresponding time in the past nor in the future.

So trying to freeze the mind in meditative trance may have tragic consequences to the master (the mind) and the slave (self image or the soul).

So let the mind stream flow like a river to a calm sea (if there is any such thing) till it finds randomness it richly deserves in its own accord.

In other words, let your mind be your slave rather than your master!

Then you are free to cerate your own religion or association but not be a part of a made up regime, be that it may be in politics, religion, science or philosophy.

You become your own creator or destructor and, then happiness or unhappiness will become relative consequences.