Home  ⁄  Tag Archives: Champika Ranawaka

Sri Lanka’s Former Presidents and the Current President- by Rajan Philips Source:Island.lk There is no transfer of state powers in Britain following the death of Queen Elizabeth and her succession by old Prince Charles as new King Charles III. The powers of the British State reside not at Buckingham Palace but in the British Parliament, and are exercised by a cabinet government with a Prime Minister as its head, who by convention is only the first among otherwise equal ministers and MPs. There is no risk of the vast powers of the state being passed from proper hands to wrong hands, or from bad hands to worse hands. British Monarchy doesn’t even need any checks and balances to ensure good behaviour. All that the modern royals have to do beyond their routine roles, is to pay their share of taxes (may be times two) for the properties they have amassed ...

Sep 20, 2022 Posted by In Articles Tagged , ,
Read More →

The Peril of going to the IMF: Is there an alternative?-by Chandre Dharmawardana Source:Island The forex crisis had forced the government to jettison its initial set of economic managers of the Central bank who looked for home-grown solutions and opposed dealing with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The President re-instated a set of managers whose ideas were more orthodox and aligned with the neo-liberal bankers of the West. This “about turn” by Gotabaya Rajapaksa fitted perfectly with the views of his successor Mr. Wickremasinghe. JRJ’s “import and sell” consumer economy Gavin Karunaratne, a retired civil servant of the 1950-1970s era, has published a new booklet entitled “How the IMF’s structural adjustments destroyed Sri Lanka” (Godage Publishers) where he claims that today’s ills are a direct consequence of JR Jayawardena’s IMF-inspired policies. JRJ converted Sri Lanka’s “produce locally to consume and sell” economy of the Sirimavo era, to a post-1977 “import ...

Aug 5, 2022 Posted by In Articles Tagged , ,
Read More →

A critique of Jathika Chintanaya (Part II)-by Uditha Devapriya Source:Island “The middle-class of this country, a majority of them, appear to follow Jathika Chintanaya. But it’s very clear that they don’t know what Jathika Chintanaya means. Nor do they seem interested in knowing what it is. Gunadasa Amarasekara talks about Jathika Chintanaya. I talk about Chintanaye Jathikathwaya. Those not hailing from the middle-class know what Chintanaye Jathikathwaya is. But they don’t yet know how to articulate it.” — Nalin de Silva, “Jathika Chintanaya and Chintanaye Jathikathwaya” Despite what supporters and critics may say, from its inception Jathika Chintanaya was, as it still is, moulded by a Protestant ethic. Nalin de Silva’s famous critique of contemporary Buddhism – what he contemptuously derided as “Olcott Buddhism” – should not mislead one into thinking that followers of Chintanism questioned seriously the bourgeois Protestant ethic on which that variant of Buddhism was based. As scholars have ...

Apr 29, 2021 Posted by In Articles Tagged , ,
Read More →