The UN Human Rights Council issues a strongly worded call for an immediate cessation of all arms sales to “Israel”, citing grave concerns over potential genocide in the Gaza Strip.
The resolution, approved with 28 out of 47 member states of the council voting in favor, six against, and 13 abstentions, signifies the first instance of the United Nations’ primary human rights body taking a stance on the deadliest Israeli aggression on Gaza.
Meirav Eilon Shahar, Israeli ambassador to the UN in Geneva, denounced the resolution as “a stain for the Human Rights Council and for the UN as a whole.”
The strongly worded statement urged nations to “cease the sale, transfer, and diversion of arms, munitions, and other military equipment to Israel… to prevent further violations of international humanitarian law and violations and abuses of human rights.”
It emphasized that in January, the International Court of Justice determined “that there is a plausible risk of genocide.”
The resolution presented on Friday, initiated by Pakistan on behalf of all member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) except Albania, also demanded an “immediate ceasefire” and urged for urgent humanitarian access and aid.
‘Wake up and stop the genocide’
Before the vote, Palestinian Ambassador Ibrahim Mohammad Khraishi addressed the council saying, “We need you all to wake up and stop this genocide, a genocide televised around the world.”
Despite acknowledging the unbearable civilian death toll in Gaza, Washington, a key ally, voted against the resolution, along with Germany, Argentina, Bulgaria, Malawi, and Paraguay.
It is worth noting that US Ambassador Michele Taylor highlighted “Israel’s” insufficient efforts to minimize civilian casualties. However, she claimed that Washington couldn’t endorse the resolution due to its perceived flaws. The vote occurred after the UN Security Council in New York recently approved a ceasefire resolution, partly due to Washington abstaining from voting.
UNHRC resolution warns of Rafah invasion
The resolution from the rights council consistently referred to “Israel”, calling on the entity to cease its occupation of Palestinian territories entirely and to promptly remove its blockade on the Gaza Strip, as well as any other types of collective punishment.
The revised version of the text, updated late, on Thursday, to eliminate various mentions of genocide, still conveyed deep apprehension regarding statements from Israeli officials that could be construed as incitement to genocide.
Furthermore, it called on nations to intervene to halt the ongoing forced displacement of Palestinians from both within and outside Gaza. Specifically, it cautioned against extensive military actions in Rafah city, situated in the southern region of the densely populated Gaza Strip, where more than one million civilians are seeking refuge, emphasizing the potential dire humanitarian outcomes.
The resolution additionally denounced the tactic of using starvation against civilians as a form of warfare in Gaza, where the United Nations has issued warnings of an imminent famine.
It emphasized the urgent need for credible, prompt, and thorough accountability for all breaches of international law in Gaza. The resolution urged UN investigators of war crimes, who were assigned to examine the human rights situation in the occupied Palestinian territories prior to October 7, to investigate all direct and indirect transfers or sales of arms, ammunition, components, and dual-use items to “Israel”. Furthermore, it called for an analysis of the legal ramifications of such transfers.
Germany calls on NATO to oppose UN arms embargo on ‘Israel’: Exclusive
In a different yet related context, diplomatic sources informed Al Mayadeen, on Thursday, that German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock urged NATO allies to block a draft UN resolution calling for an immediate cessation of arms exports to “Israel”.
According to the sources, Baerbock reportedly told her counterparts during a meeting of NATO foreign ministers at its headquarters in Brussels to pressure their governments into voting against the arms embargo resolution, which was submitted to the Human Rights Council on Wednesday.
Pakistan proposed the draft resolution on behalf of 55 of the 56 UN member nations in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), except Albania, Bolivia, Cuba, and the Palestinian Mission in Geneva have all co-sponsored the document.
Germany’s move comes after information indicated that several European countries, including France, Belgium, and Spain, are planning to vote in favor of the resolution, while others may abstain from voting, which could potentially lead to the resolution being adopted by a comfortable majority.
It is worth noting that the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s (SIPRI) annual study issued in March revealed that sixty-nine percent of “Israel’s” arms acquisitions in 2023 came from US corporations, 30% came from Germany, and 0.9% from Italy.
‘No mountains can stop the surging flow of a mighty river.’ With the addition of six new members that add geostrategic clout and geographic depth to the once sputtering BRICS, the multilateral institution is now gathering the momentum needed to reset international relations.
In the end, History was made. Surpassing even the greatest of expectations, the BRICS nations performed a giant step for multipolarity by expanding the group to BRICS 11.
Starting on January 1, 2024, the five original BRICS members will be joined by Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
No, they won’t turn into an unpronounceable BRIICSSEEUA. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov confirmed the song remains the same, with the familiar BRICS acronym to the Global South or Global Majority or “Global Globe” multilateral organization that will shape the contours of a new system of international relations.
Here is the Johannesburg II Declaration of the 15th BRICS summit. BRICS 11 is just the start. There’s a long line eager to join; without referring to the dozens of nations (and counting) that have already “expressed their interest”, according to the South Africans, the official list, so far, includes Algeria, Bangladesh, Bahrain, Belarus, Bolivia, Venezuela, Vietnam, Guinea, Greece, Honduras, Indonesia, Cuba, Kuwait, Morocco, Mexico, Nigeria, Tajikistan, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkiye and Syria.
By next year, most of them will either become BRICS 11 partners or part of the second and third wave of fully-fledged members. The South Africans have stressed that BRICS “will not be limited to just one expansion phase.”
Russia-China leadership, in effect
The road leading to BRICS 11, during the two days of discussions in Johannesburg, was hard and bumpy, as admitted by Russian President Vladimir Putin himself. The final result turned out to be a prodigy of trans-continental inclusion. West Asia was aggregated in full force. The Arab world has three full members, as much as Africa. And Brazil strategically lobbied to incorporate troubled Argentina.
The global GDP-purchasing power parity (PPP) of BRICS 11, as it stands, is now 36 percent (already larger than the G7), and the institution now encompasses 47 percent of the world’s population.
BRICS+ Countries GDP, GDP (PPP) and Debt. (Photo Credit: The Cradle)G7 Countries GDP, GDP (PPP) and Debt. (Photo Credit: The Cradle)
Even more than a geopolitical and geoeconomic breakthrough, BRICS 11 really breaks the bank on the energy front. By signing up Tehran, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, BRICS 11 instantly becomes an oil and gas powerhouse, controlling 39 percent of global oil exports, 45.9 percent of proven reserves and 47.6 percent of all oil produced globally, according to InfoTEK.
A direct BRICS 11-OPEC+ symbiosis is inevitable (under Russia-Saudi Arabia leadership), not to mention OPEC itself.
Translation: The collective west may soon lose its power to control global oil prices, and subsequently, the means to enforce its unilateral sanctions.
A Saudi Arabia directly aligned with Russia-China-India-Iran offers a stunning counterpoint to the US-engineered oil crisis in the early 1970s, when Riyadh started wallowing in petrodollars. That represents the next stage of the Russian-initiated and Chinese-finalized rapprochement between Riyadh and Tehran, recently sealed in Beijing.
BRICS+ And G7 Proven Oil Reserves. (Photo Credit: The Cradle)
And that’s exactly what the Russia-China strategic leadership always had in mind. This particular diplomatic masterstroke is rife with meaningful details: BRICS 11 enters the fray on the exact same day, January 1, 2024, when Russia assumes the annual presidency of BRICS.
Putin announced that the BRICS 11 summit next year will take place in Kazan, the capital city of Russia’s Tatarstan, which will be yet another blow to the west’s irrational, isolation-and-sanctions policies. Next January, expect further integration of the Global South/Global Majority/Global Globe, including even more radical decisions, conducted by the sanctioned-to-oblivion Russian economy – now, incidentally, the 5th largest in the world by a PPP of over $5 trillion.
G7 in a coma
The G7, for all practical purposes, has now entered an Intensive Care Unit. The G20 may be next. The new “Global Globe” G20 may be the BRICS 11 – and later on the BRICS 20 or even BRICS 40. By then, the petrodollar will also be on life support in the ICU.
The BRICS 11 climax could not have been accomplished without a stellar performance by the Men of the Match: Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, supported by their respective teams. The Russia-China strategic partnership dominated in Johannesburg and set the major guidelines. We need to be bold and expand; we need to press for reform of the current institutional framework – from the UN Security Council to the IMF and the WTO; and we need to get rid of those institutions that are subjugated by the artificial “rules-based international order.”
No wonder Xi defined the moment, on the record, as “historic.” Putin went so far as to publicly call on all BRICS 11 to abandon the US dollar and expand trade settlements in national currencies – stressing that BRICS “oppose hegemonies of any kind” and “the exceptional status that some countries aspire to,” not to mention “a policy of continued neo-colonialism.”
Importantly, as much as the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is celebrating its 10th anniversary next month, Putin drove home the necessity to:
“…establish a permanent BRICS transport commission, which would deal not only with the North-South project [referring to the INTSC transportation corridor, whose key BRICS members are Russia, Iran and India], but also on a broader scale with the development of logistics and transport corridors, interregional and global.”
Pay attention. That’s Russia-China in synch on connectivity corridors, and they are preparing to further link their continental transportation projects.
On the financial front, the Central Banks of the current BRICS have been instructed to seriously investigate and increase trading in local currencies.
Putin made a point of being very realistic on de-dollarization: “The issue of the single settlement currency is a complex issue, but we will move toward solving these problems one way or another.” That complemented Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva’s remarks on how the BRICS has started a working group to study the viability of a reference currency.
In parallel, the BRICS’ New Development Bank (NDB) has welcomed three new members: Bangladesh, Egypt, and UAE. Yet their road to prominence from now will be even steeper.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa publicly praised NDB President Dilma Rousseff’s report on the nine-year-old institution; but Dilma herself stressed again that the bank aims to reach only 30 percent of total loans in currencies bypassing the US dollar.
That’s hardly enough. Why? It’s up to Sergey Glazyev, the Minister of Macroeconomics at the Eurasia Economic Commission, working under the Russia-led EAEU, to answer the key question:
“It is necessary to change the statutory documents of this bank. When it was created, I tried to explain to our financial authorities that the capital of the bank should be spread between the national currencies of founding countries. But American agents madly believed in the US dollar. As a result, this bank today is afraid of sanctions and is semi-paralyzed.”
No mountains can stop a mighty river
So yes, the challenges ahead are immense. But the drive to succeed is contagious, perhaps best epitomized by Xi’s remarkable speech at the closing ceremony of the BRICS Business Forum, read out by Chinese Minister of Commerce Wang Wentao.
It’s as if Xi had invoked a Mandarin version of the 1967 American pop classic “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” He quoted a Chinese proverb: “No mountains can stop the surging flow of a mighty river.” And he reminded his audience that the fight was both noble – and necessary:
“Whatever resistance there may be, BRICS, a positive and stable force for good, will continue to grow. We will forge stronger BRICS strategic partnership, expand the ‘BRICS Plus’ model, actively advance membership expansion, deepen solidarity and cooperation with other EMDCs [emerging market developing countries], promote global multipolarity and greater democracy in international relations, and help make the international order more just and equitable.”
Now add this profession of faith in humanity to the way the “Global Globe” perceives Russia. Even though the Russian economy’s purchasing power parity is by now ahead of the imperial European vassals that seek to crush it, theGlobal South’s perception of Moscow is as “one of our own.” What happened in South Africa made this even more clear, and Russia’s ascendency to the BRICS presidency in four months will crystallize it.
It’s no wonder that the collective west, dazed and confused, now trembles as it feels the earth – 85 percent of it, at least – moving under its feet.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.
The admission of new members into BRICS is the first stage of the group’s expansion process.
South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa listens, during a plenary session of the 2023 BRICS Summit, in Johannesburg, South Africa, Wednesday, Aug. 23, 2023 (Alet Pretorius/Pool Photo via AP)
“We have decided to invite the Argentine Republic, the Arab Republic of Egypt, the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates to become full members of BRICS. The membership will take effect from January 1, 2024,” Ramaphosa said at the BRICS summit in South Africa.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said on Thursday that the BRICS leadership has decided to invite Argentina, Egypt, Iran, Ethiopia, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia to join the organization.
He further said that the BRICS leadership established consensus on the guiding principles, standards, criteria, and procedures of the process for the group’s expansion.
The admission of new members into BRICS is the first stage of the group’s expansion process, he added.
“We have consensus on the first phase of this expansion process, and other phases will follow,” the president added.
On another note, the South African President said that the time has come to use local currencies and alternative payment systems in international transactions.
“There is global momentum to use of local currencies, alternative financial arrangements, and alternative payment systems. As BRICS we are ready to explore opportunities for improving the stability, reliability, and fairness of the global financial architecture,” Ramaphosa said.
Leaders from China, India, Brazil, and South Africa are in attendance at the summit, while Russia’s representation comes from Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
Notably, Russian President Vladimir Putin is participating in the summit through a videoconference.
The two BRICS partners strike a deal to ditch USD with the aim of easing financial transactions between the two countries and reducing trade costs.
Industry representatives from China and Brazil in a panel discussion at the Brazil-China Business Seminar (CCIIP)
China and Brazil struck a deal to ditch the US dollar in their bilateral transactions, which is expected to reduce investment costs and develop economic ties between the two countries, the Brazilian government stated on Wednesday.
The agreement between the Asian superpower and Latin America’s largest economy – the mutual top trading partners – is a new financial and political strike against the green banknotes as more countries, with the growing geopolitical and economical influence of the East, are paving the way to distance themselves from the US politically-oriented currency.
Earlier in January, both nations reached a preliminary deal on the matter that was finalized in a Brazil-China Business Seminar in China on Wednesday, which Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was scheduled to take part in but failed to attend due to emergency health issues.
“The expectation is that this will reduce costs… promote even greater bilateral trade and facilitate investment,” Brazil’s Trade and Investment Promotion Agency (ApexBrasil) said.
In 2022, trade volume between the economic giants hit a historic record of over $150.5 billion in bilateral trade.
China’s Bank of Communications BBM (one of the country’s top five banks) and industrial and Commercial Bank of China will oversee the execution of the deal, officials stated.
Earlier this month, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said if the US defaults on its debt, this would result in a massive loss of confidence in the US dollar, eventually leading to the loss of its status as the world’s global reserve currency – striking major market fears over the future of the world’s safe haven currency.
Ditching USD roadmap
China and Brazil are two of the five founders of the BRICS bloc, which accounts for around 30% of the global gross output.
Last January, South African Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor announced that the BRICS club of emerging economies seeks to discover a way of bypassing the dollar to create a fairer payment system that would not be skewed toward wealthy countries.
“We have always been concerned at the fact that there is a dominance of the dollar and that we do need to look at an alternative,” he said then.
Recently, a handful of medium-sized economies aimed to join the bloc: Argentina, Algeria, Iran, Indonesia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt.
The gigantic bloc announced a few days ago that it will establish a “geological platform” that aims to allow the BRICS member states to coordinate in regard to their mineral reserves and extraction methods in light of the increasing demand for natural resources.
History and the present show that an imperial republic like the United States needs vassals, not partners, especially in current times in which the empire is going through its irreversible decline.
Between March 28 and 30, the Second Summit on Democracy will take place in Washington DC. Wednesday, March 29, will be the day of the plenary meeting. The event is convened by the United States government through the State Department but, as usual, it will have some “associated governments” that will also summon the meeting and whose mission is to disguise that the Summit is entirely a Washington project. The goal is crystal clear: to recover ground in the dwindling international prestige of American democracy, heavily damaged by the increasing levels of popular dissatisfaction with the functioning of democracy (over fifty percent of the surveyed population), as revealed by a host of public opinion polls; and by the unprecedented incidents surrounding the storming of the Capitol, the seat of the U.S. Congress, in Washington on January 6, 2021.
As announced, the Summit for Democracy has ”five co-hosts: the United States, Costa Rica, Netherlands, Republic of Korea, and Zambia and representatives of their governments will officially kick off the Summit, with each co-host leader hosting a live, fully virtual, thematic.” The day before, the Department of State will host a panel session, chaired by Secretary Antony Blinken, about the need for a “Just and Lasting Peace in Ukraine” featuring President Volodymyr Zelensky as its main speaker. Supposedly, Zelensky and Secretary Blinken will discuss, alongside Foreign Ministers from a regionally diverse group of countries, the steps to be taken to reach a ceasefire and a “lasting peace” in Ukraine, although all the policies promoted by the Biden Administration run exactly in the opposite direction. Apparently, gone are the days when the European, and partly American, press characterized Ukraine as the most corrupt country in Europe and Zelensky himself as a despotic and equally corrupt leader. In 2015, the British newspaper The Guardian described it as such. Almost a year after the start of the war in Ukraine other press reports said that “the war with Russia hasn’t changed that.”
Unfortunately, at the time of writing these lines, the complete list of the countries invited to the Summit was unknown. However, an indication may be offered by the fact that the day after the plenary session, dedicated to digital technologies for the advancement of democracies and the dangers of digital authoritarianism, the keynote speaker will be no other than the Minister of Digital Affairs of Taiwan, Audrey Tang. This is a frontal attack on China because the guests at the Summit are supposed to be representatives of independent countries, and Taiwan certainly is not. It is not even recognized as such by the US government itself, but the intention is clear: to promote Taiwanese separatism, harass China, and provoke it into having a military response that would then justify US aggression.
We Latin Americans know very well that if there is a government in the world that cannot give lessons on democracy, it is precisely the government of the United States. Since the beginning of the American imperial expansion the U.S., has been renowned for its permanent attacks against the establishment of any democratic government in the region. When Cuba and Puerto Rico were leading a liberation struggle against Spanish oppression, during the so-called “Spanish-American” war, the United States captured Cuba in 1898 after the Treaty of Paris and spoiled the Cuban victory. If we make a list of coups sponsored or directly carried out by the United States in our countries, we would run the risk of turning this note into a voluminous essay. We are just going to mention a few cases.
In Argentina, the bloody military coups of 1966 and 1976 were sponsored and protected by Washington. In Chile, the brutal coup and subsequent assassination of Salvador Allende, perpetrated on September 11, 1973, was directly orchestrated from Washington by President Richard Nixon himself and his National Security adviser, and later Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. The coup d’état that took place in Brazil in 1964, and which lasted until 1985, had the enthusiastic support of Washington, as did the 1973 military coup in Uruguay, which also lasted until 1985 when Washington realized that its undisguised support for the ferocious Latin American dictatorships was damaging its international image and that the time had come to bet on democracy, but taking due precautions. We should not forget that Washington prepared an armed confrontation that lasted ten years (1979-1989) against the Sandinista government and used all the means at its disposal to destabilize the government of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front in El Salvador, in recent years
The worn-out democratic rhetoric of the United States is not enough to disguise the wicked intentions of its new strategy based on the possibilities opened by the use of “soft power” and the new devices to put pressure on progressive or left-wing governments: from the World Bank and IMF “conditionalities” to the oligopolistic control of the media and the indoctrination of judges and prosecutors to put into practice “lawfare” ploys to eliminate undesirable leaders for the empire from the field of the electoral politics, such as Lula in Brazil, Correa in Ecuador, Cristina in Argentina, Lugo in Paraguay, Zelaya in Honduras, Evo in Bolivia and just a few months ago Pedro Castillo in Peru.
History and the present show that an imperial republic like the United States needs vassals, not partners, especially in current times in which the empire is going through its irreversible decline. At times like these, democracies, as an expression of popular sovereignty and self-determination of nations, could not be more dysfunctional for the empire. That is why the Summit for Democracy will be one more farce, a propaganda montage whose real objective is to consolidate a “new cold war” divide between the friends and allies of the United States, who will be considered as democratic, and the adversaries of Washington, demonized as perverse autocracies that will be necessary to fight against by all available means.
The opinions mentioned in this article do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Al mayadeen, but rather express the opinion of its writer exclusively.
by Pepe Escobar, posted with the author’s permission and widely cross-posted
Bolsonaro reduced Brazil to resources-exporter status; now Lula should follow Argentina’s lead into Belt and Road
Ten days of full immersion in Brazil are not for the faint-hearted. Even restricted to the top two megalopolises, Sao Paulo and Rio, watching live the impact of interlocking economic, political, social and environmental crises exacerbated by the Jair Bolsonaro project leaves one stunned.
The return of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for what will be his third presidential term, starting January 1, 2023, is an extraordinary story trespassed by Sisyphean tasks. All at the same time he will have to
fight poverty;
reconnect with economic development while redistributing wealth;
re-industrialize the nation; and
tame environmental pillage.
That will force his new government to summon unforeseen creative powers of political and financial persuasion.
Even a mediocre, conservative politician such as Geraldo Alckmin, former governor of the wealthiest state of the union, Sao Paulo, and coordinator of the presidential transition, was simply astonished at how four years of the Bolsonaro project let loose a cornucopia of vanished documents, a black hole concerning all sorts of data and inexplicable financial losses.
It’s impossible to ascertain the extent of corruption across the spectrum because simply nothing is in the books: Governmental systems have not been fed since 2020.
Alckmin summed it all up: “The Bolsonaro government happened in the Stone Age, where there were no words and numbers.”
Now every single public policy will have to be created, or re-created from scratch, and serious mistakes will be inevitable because of lack of data.
And we’re not talking about a banana republic – even though the country concerned features plenty of (delicious) bananas.
By purchasing power parity (PPP), according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Brazil remains the eighth-ranked economic power in the world even after the Bolsonaro devastation years – behind China, the US, India, Japan, Germany, Russia and Indonesia, and ahead of the UK and France.
A concerted imperial campaign since 2010, duly denounced by WikiLeaks, and implemented by local comprador elites, targeted the Dilma Rousseff presidency – the Brazilian national entrepreneurial champions – and led to Rousseff’s (illegal) impeachment and the jailing of Lula for 580 days on spurious charges (all subsequently dropped), paved the way for Bolsonaro to win the presidency in 2018.
Were it not for this accumulation of disasters, Brazil – a natural leader of the Global South – by now might possibly be placed as the fifth-largest geo-economic power in the world.
What the investment gang wants
Paulo Nogueira Batista Jr, a former vice-president of the New Development Bank (NDB), or BRICS bank, goes straight to the point: Brazil’s dependence on Lula is immensely problematic.
Batista sees Lula facing at least three hostile blocs.
The extreme right supported by a significant, powerful faction of the armed forces – and this includes not only Bolsonarists, who are still in front of a few army barracks contesting the presidential election result;
The physiological right that dominates Congress – known in Brazil as “The Big Center”;
International financial capital – which, predictably, controls the bulk of mainstream media.
The third bloc, to a great extent, gleefully embraced Lula’s notion of a United Front capable of defeating the Bolsonaro project (which project, by the way, never ceased to be immensely profitable for the third bloc).
Now they want their cut. Mainstream media instantly turned to corralling Lula, operating a sort of “financial inquisition,” as described by crack economist Luiz Gonzaga Belluzzo.
By appointing longtime Workers’ Party loyalist Fernando Haddad as finance minister, Lula signaled that he, in fact, will be in charge of the economy. Haddad is a political-science professor and was a decent minister of education, but he’s no sharp economic guru. Acolytes of the Goddess of the Market, of course, dismiss him.
Once again, this is the trademark Lula swing in action: He chose to place more importance on what will be complex, protracted negotiations with a hostile Congress to advance his social agenda, confident that all the lineaments of economic policy are in his head.
A lunch party with some members of Sao Paulo’s financial elite, even before Haddad’s name was announced, offered a few fascinating clues. These people are known as the “Faria Limers” – after the high-toned Faria Lima Avenue, which houses quite a few post-mod investment banks’ offices as well as Google and Facebook HQs.
Faria Lima Avenue in San Paulo. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Lunch attendees included a smattering of rabid anti-Workers’ Party investors, the proverbial unreconstructed neoliberals, yet most were enthusiastic about opportunities ahead to make a killing, including an investor looking for deals involving Chinese companies.
The neoliberal mantra of those willing – perhaps – to place their bets on Lula (for a price) is “fiscal responsibility.” That frontally clashes with Lula’s focus on social justice.
That’s where Haddad comes up as a helpful, polite interlocutor because he does privilege nuance, pointing out that only looking at market indicators and forgetting about the 38% of Brazilians who only earn the minimum wage (1,212 Brazilian real or US$233 per month) is not exactly good for business.
The dark arts of non-government
Lula is already winning his first battle: approving a constitutional amendment that allows financing of more social spending.
That allows the government to keep the flagship Bolsa Família welfare program – of roughly $13 a month per poverty-level family – at least for the next two years.
A stroll across downtown Sao Paulo – which in the 1960s was as chic as mid-Manhattan – offers a sorrowful crash course on impoverishment, shut-down businesses, homelessness and raging unemployment. The notorious “Crack Land” – once limited to a street – now encompasses a whole neighborhood, much like junkie, post-pandemic Los Angeles.
Rio offers a completely different vibe if one goes for a walk in Ipanema on a sunny day, always a smashing experience. But Ipanema lives in a bubble. The real Rio of the Bolsonaro years – economically massacred, de-industrialized, occupied by militias – came up in a roundtable downtown where I interacted with, among others, a former energy minister and the man who discovered the immensely valuable pre-salt oil reserves.
In the Q&A, a black man from a very poor community advanced the key challenge for Lula’s third term: To be stable, and able to govern, he has to have the vast poorest sectors of the population backing him up.
This man voiced what seems not to be debated in Brazil at all: How did there come to be millions of poor Bolsonarists – street cleaners, delivery guys, the unemployed? Right-wing populism seduced them – and the established wings of the woke left had, and still have, nothing to offer them.
Addressing this problem is as serious as the destruction of Brazilian engineering giants by the Car Wash “corruption” racket. Brazil now has a huge number of well-qualified unemployed engineers. How come they have not amassed enough political organization to reclaim their jobs? Why should they resign themselves to becoming Uber drivers?
José Manuel Salazar-Xirinachs, the new head of the UN Economic Commission on Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), may carp about the region’s economic failure as even worse now than in the “lost decade” of the 1980s: Average annual economic growth in Latin America in the decade up to 2023 is set to be just 0.8%.
Yet what the UN is incapable of analyzing is how a plundering neoliberal regime such as Bolsonaro’s managed to “elevate” to unforeseen toxic levels the dark arts of little or no investment, low productivity and less than zero emphasis on education.
President Dilma in da house
Lula was quick to summarize Brazil’s new foreign policy – which will go totally multipolar, with emphasis on increasing Latin American integration, stronger ties across the Global South and a push to reform the UN Security Council (in sync with BRICS members Russia, China and India).
Mauro Vieira, an able diplomat, will be the new foreign minister. But the man fine-tuning Brazil on the world stage will be Celso Amorim, Lula’s former foreign minister from 2003 to 2010.
In a conference that reunited us in Sao Paulo, Amorim elaborated on the complexity of the world Lula is now inheriting, compared with 2003. Yet along with climate change the main priorities – achieving closer integration with South America, reviving Unasur (the Union of South American Nations) and re-approaching Africa – remain the same.
And then there’s the Holy Grail: “good relations with both the US and China.”
The Empire, predictably, will be on extreme close watch. US national security adviser Jake Sullivan dropped in to Brasilia, during the fist days of the World Cup soccer tournament, and was absolutely charmed by Lula, who’s a master of charisma. Yet the Monroe Doctrine always prevails. Lula getting closer and closer to BRICS – and the expanded BRICS+ – is considered virtual anathema in Washington.
Jake Sullivan and Lula in Brasilia on November 28. Photo: Ricardo Stuckert
So Lula will play most overtly in the environment arena. Covertly, it will be a sophisticated balancing act.
The combo behind US President Joe Biden called Lula to congratulate him soon after the election results. Sullivan was in Brasilia setting the stage for a Lula visit to Washington. Chinese President Xi Jinping for his part sent him an affectionate letter, emphasizing the “global strategic partnership” between Brazil and China. Russian President Vladimir Putin called Lula earlier this week – and emphasized their common strategic approach to BRICS.
China has been Brazil’s top trade partner since 2009, ahead of the US. Bilateral trade in 2021 hit $135 billion. The problem is lack of diversification and focus on low added value: iron ore, soybeans, raw crude and animal protein accounted for 87.4% of exports in 2021. China exports, on the other hand, are mostly high-tech manufactured products.
Brazil’s dependence on commodity exports has indeed contributed for years to its rising foreign reserves. But that implies high concentration of wealth, low taxes, low job creation and dependence on cyclical price oscillations.
There’s no question China is focused on Brazilian natural resources to fuel its new development push – or “peaceful modernization,” as established by the latest Party Congress.
But Lula will have to strive for a more equal trade balance in case he manages to restart the nation as a solid economy. In 2000, for instance, Brazil’s top export item was Embraer jets. Now, it’s iron ore and soybeans; yet another dire indicator of the ferocious de-industrialization operated by the Bolsonaro project.
China is already investing substantially in the Brazilian electric sector – mostly due to state companies being bought by Chinese companies. That was the case in 2017 of State Grid buying CPFL in Sao Paulo, for instance, which in turn bought a state company from southern Brazil in 2021.
From Lula’s point of view, that’s inadmissible: a classic case of privatization of strategic public assets.
A different scenario plays in neighboring Argentina. Buenos Aires in February became an official partner of the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative, with at least $23 billion in new projects on the pipeline. The Argentine railway system will be upgraded by – who else? – Chinese companies, to the tune of $4.6 billion.
The Chinese will also be investing in the largest solar energy plant in Latin America, a hydroelectric plant in Patagonia, and a nuclear energy plant – complete with transfer of Chinese technology to the Argentine state.
Lula, beaming with invaluable soft power not only personally when it comes to Xi but also appealing to Chinese public opinion, can get similar strategic partnership deals, with even more amplitude. Brasilia may follow the Iranian partnership model – offering oil and gas in exchange for building critical infrastructure.
Inevitably, the golden path ahead will be via joint ventures, not mergers and acquisitions. No wonder many in Rio are already dreaming of high-speed rail linking it to Sao Paulo in just over an hour, instead of the current, congested highway journey of six hours (if you’re lucky).
A key role will be played by former president Dilma Rousseff, who had a long, leisurely lunch with a few of us in Sao Paulo, taking her time to recount, in minutiae, everything from the day she was officially arrested by the military dictatorship (January 16, 1970) to her off-the-record conversations with then-German chancellor Angela Merkel, Putin, and Xi.
President Dilma Rousseff during a bilateral meeting with the president of the People’s Republic of China, Xi Jinping, at the G20 Saint Petersburg summit in 2013. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
It goes without saying that her political – and personal – capital with both Xi and Putin is stellar. Lula offered her any post she wanted in the new government. Although still a state secret, this will be part of a serious drive to polish Brazil’s global profile, especially across the Global South.
To recover from the previous, disastrous six years – which included a two-year no man’s land (2016-2018) after the impeachment of president Dilma – Brazil will need an unparalleled national drive of re-industrialization at virtually every level, complete with serious investment in research and development, training of specialized work forces and technology transfer.
There is a superpower that can play a crucial role in this process: China, Brazil’s close partner in the expanding BRICS+. Brazil is one of the natural leaders of the Global South, a role much prized by the Chinese leadership.
The key now is for both partners to establish a high-level strategic dialogue – all over again. Lula’s first high-profile foreign visit may be to Washington. But the destination that really matters, as we watch the river of history flow, will be Beijing.
Pepe Escobar is a Brazilian journalist who has written for Asia Times for many years, covering events throughout Asia and the Middle East. He has also been an analyst for RT and Sputnik News, and previously worked for Al Jazeera.
The Israeli occupation admits that Syria’s capabilities are what caused Eli Cohen’s demise rather than him sending plenty of messages.
Israeli spy Eli Cohen (L) and two other unidentified co-defendants, during their trial in Damascus, ten days before his execution (AFP)
Notorious Israeli spy Eli Cohen was captured in Syria in 1965 due to a successful counter-intelligence operation from the authorities in Damascus, the Israeli occupation announced on Monday.
Mossad director David Barnea revealed that Cohen, who had operated in Syria between 1961-1965 was not caught because he was sending a lot of messages to “Tel Aviv”, but rather because “his transmissions were intercepted by the enemy.”
The revelation dismissed theories saying Cohen had tipped off Damascus through the vast number of telegrams he was sending, instead highlighting that the spy was detected and detained because Syria, using its counterintelligence capabilities, intercepted and located Cohen through the signals he was sending.
Barnea unveiled a copy of the last telegram sent by Cohen to “Tel Aviv” during the inauguration of a museum in the spy’s memory in “Herzilya”, stressing that Cohen was “among our best agents.”
“MEETING AT GENERAL QUARTER YESTERDAY AT FIVE GMT WITH AMIN ELHAFEZ AND HIGH OFFICERS,” Cohen, otherwise known by his operative name Kamel Amin Thabet’s last telegram read in French.
Israeli spy Eli Cohen’s last telegram
Cohen, an Egyptian-born, got affiliated with the Zionist movement and became an illegal Israeli settler. He joined Mossad in the fifties before he was dispatched to Syria in 1961 pretending to be a Syrian immigrant and businessman in Argentina.
After his final telegram, the spy was tried and hanged for espionage later that same year in accordance with Syrian law.
The Israeli occupation has tried over and over again to have Cohen’s remains sent to occupied Palestine on “humanitarian” grounds. Still, as Syria has long had an unwavering stance on the Israeli occupation, never signing a peace treaty with it, it has not responded to “Tel Aviv’s” requests.
The Mossad, however, retrieved a watch belonging to Cohen and brought it to “Tel Aviv”, and it is likely that it will be displayed in the aforementioned museum.
Israeli occupation Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu said: “We are trying in all sorts of ways […] to reach Eli Cohen and bring him back.”
“The passage of time brings no comfort to us. There is no expiration date on our commitments to bring back our fighters and prisoners. This is an eternal commitment,” Netanyahu stressed.
With Syria unwavering and Damascus is still at war with the Israeli occupation, it is unlikely that the Israeli occupation will see the remains of his Arab Egyptian-born spy anytime soon.
Argentinian Judge Federico Vilena has ordered that only 12 of the 19 seized Venezuelan plane crew members can leave the country while the other seven have been ordered to remain there.
An Emtrasur Cargo Boeing 747
Washington asked Argentina, on Tuesday, to seize a Venezuelan cargo plane that has been parked since June on its soil and is linked to the US sanctions against Iran. The plane had 19 crew members at a Buenos Aires airport since it arrived on June 8 carrying a shipment of auto parts.
The Boeing 747 was sold to Emtrasur, a subsidiary of the Venezuelan company Conviasa, by an Iranian company, Mahan Air, in October 2021. The two countries have signed a 20-year cooperation plan as a way to overcome the sanctions imposed against them by the US.
Both the previous Iranian owner of the Boeing 747 as well as the Venezuelan owner of the plane have been sanctioned by the US for different reasons. The US Department of Justice used this pretext to justify its request from Argentina to confiscate the plane.
According to AFP, Argentinian Judge Federico Vilena has ordered that only 12 of the 19 crew members plane crew can leave, but seven others, including four Iranian and three Venezuelan citizens, were ordered to stay. One of the Iranians that are ordered to remain in Buenas Aires is Gholam-Reza Qasemi, which the US alleges is an ex-IRGC member.
“As alleged in the seizure warrant, in or around October 2021, Mahan Air violated the Temporary Denial Order and US export control laws when it transferred custody and control of the Boeing aircraft to EMTRASUR without US Government authorization,” the Justice Department claimed in a statement.
Furthermore, Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen said in a statement “The Department of Justice will not tolerate transactions that violate our sanctions and export laws.”
The crew was kept on board and Iranian diplomats were prevented from visiting the ship until Iran’s ambassador to Athens was allowed to check on the crew. This was only after Iran retaliated against the theft of its cargo, by the seizure of two Greek tankers in the Gulf.
Elena Panina, Director of the RUSSTRAT Institute – Machine Translated and cleaned up from the Russian original.
MOSCOW, June 29, 2022, RUSSTRAT Institute.
BRICS expansion has been discussed for a long time. It is significant that the last summit on June 24 in the BRICS Plus format was attended by such countries as Algeria, Argentina, Cambodia, Egypt, Fiji, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Senegal, Thailand and Uzbekistan.
At the same time, the fact that the first applications for membership were submitted by Argentina and Iran, which did not take part in the BRICS Plus meeting, does not seem accidental.
Initially, the BRICS group was created as an association of the largest developing economies in the world. However, in the modern world, it is political decisions that determine the nature of the development of economic ties. It is quite logical that the first countries with a pronounced geopolitical sovereignty and having their own geopolitical scores with the collective West are preparing to join the expanded BRICS.
Iran is already almost two and a half thousand years old, since the time of Cyrus the Great is a powerful historical power, and its geopolitical significance cannot be overestimated. The geography itself determines the potential of its influence on the countries of the Arab world up to the coast of the Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf, in the Transcaucasus, Central Asia, as well as on the Afpak region (Afghanistan and Pakistan). Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran’s state ideology has been anti-Western. Tehran is engaged in an intense struggle with the US-British coalition for influence in Iraq, and is helping Syria in the fight against terrorism.
From an economic point of view, Iran’s potential is also great. The Iranian economy is in the world’s top 20 in terms of purchasing power parity, the country is third in the world after Saudi Arabia and Venezuela in terms of proven oil resources, and has 16 percent of the world’s proven gas reserves.
Argentina, since the time of General Juan Domingo Peron, has also clearly felt its geopolitical role, being one of the regional leaders in Latin America. This role is recognized all over the world. Argentina, while not one of the world’s largest economies, is nevertheless a full member of the G20. Having survived the failed war with Great Britain over the Falkland Islands (Malvinas), as well as the collapse of liberal reforms according to the IMF recipes, the country has an obvious request to find an independent path of development. Today, Argentina is in a difficult economic situation, it has a huge external debt. However, the potential of Argentina as one of the global food exporters has significantly increased in recent years.
For various reasons, both Iran and Argentina are extremely interested in BRICS projects to create new international settlement systems that are alternative to the global hegemony of the dollar. Iran, which is under sanctions, life itself has forced to go to “de-dollarization”, the country practically does not use the US currency. For Argentina, the transition to a hypothetical new monetary and financial zone would mean an escape from the stranglehold of the IMF, from the pressure of American creditors, which today have an extremely destructive impact on the national economy.
In any case, against the background of aggressive pressure from the United States and its allies on potential new BRICS members, the desire of Iran and Argentina to join the community requires a certain amount of foreign policy courage. There is reason to assume that the process of their joining the BRICS will be successful, since both countries do not cause rejection even in India, which until recently was the main opponent of expansion. We can confidently predict that in the near future the process of adding new members to the BRICS will continue due to the entry of a number of Asian and African countries.
But even now, the BRICS expansion at the expense of Iran and Argentina is the final departure of the community from the idea of Goldman Sachs analyst Jim O’Neill, who coined this abbreviation twenty years ago, who decided to designate such a term as “emerging economies” that are “catching up” with the developed West.
We can say that BRICS is confidently turning into a “collective Non-West”, from a community of emerging markets it is finally transformed into a community of world powers with a pronounced geopolitical sovereignty.
After several years of being relegated to backstage of the BRICS agenda, in 2022 the BRICS+ format is back and is at the very center of the discussions surrounding China’s chairmanship in the grouping. With the return of the BRICS+ paradigm the BRICS is going from introvert to extrovert and its greater global ambition raises hopes across the wide expanses of the Global South of material changes in the global economic system. The main question now centers on what the main trajectories of the evolution of the BRICS+ framework will be – thus far China appears to have advanced a multi-track approach that targets maximum scope and diversity in the operation of the BRICS-plus paradigm.
One of the novelties of China’s BRICS chairmanship in 2022 has been the launching of the extended BRICS+ meeting at the level of Ministers of Foreign Affairs that apart from the core BRICS countries also included representatives from Egypt, Nigeria, Senegal in Africa, Argentina from Latin America, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Thailand. And while the inclusion of Saudi Arabia and Indonesia may reflect their role in the G20 and overall size of their economies in the developing world, the inclusion of countries such as Senegal (chairmanship in the African Union in 2022), United Arab Emirates (chairmanship in the Gulf Cooperation Council in 2022) and Argentina (chairmanship in CELAC in 2022) is suggestive of a regional approach to building the BRICS+ platform.
That regional approach was also evidenced in the Forum of political parties, think-tanks and NGOs that was held on May 19th in BRICS+ format – among the countries invited to participate were Cambodia (chairmanship in ASEAN in 2022) as well as Senegal and Argentina that represented Africa and Latin America respectively. In effect China thus presented an inclusive format for dialogue spanning all the main regions of the Global South via aggregating the regional integration platforms in Eurasia, Africa and Latin America. Going forward this format may be further expanded to include other regional integration blocks from Eurasia, such as the GCC, EAEU and others.
During the meeting of foreign ministers of BRICS countries China also announced plans to open up the possibility of developing countries joining the core BRICS grouping. This approach differed to some degree from the line pursued by BRICS in the preceding years, when any expansion outside of the BRICS core was deemed to be the purview of the BRICS+ format. It remains to be seen whether the expansion in the core BRICS grouping is going to be supported by other members, but at this stage it appears unlikely that a speedy accession of any single developing economy is likely in the near term.
One important consideration in the future evolution of the BRICS+ format is its evenhandedness and balance observed between the main regions of the Global South. In this respect the inclusion of several countries into the “core BRICS” group may be fraught with risks of imbalances and asymmetries in terms of the representation of the main regions of the developing world in the core BRICS grouping. There is also the risk of greater complexity in arriving at a consensus with a wider circle of core BRICS members. While the option of joining the core should be kept open, there need to be clear and transparent criteria for the “BRICS accession process”.
Another issue relevant to the evolution of the BRICS+ framework is whether there should be a prioritization of the accession to the BRICS core of those developing economies that are members of the G20 grouping. In my view the G20 track for BRICS is a problematic one – the priorities of the Global South could get weakened and diluted within the broader G20 framework. There is also the question about the efficacy of G20 in coordinating the joint efforts of developing and developed economies in the past several years in overcoming the effects of the pandemic and the economic downturn. Rather than the goal of bringing the largest heavyweights into the core BRICS bloc from the G20 a more promising venue is the greater inclusivity of BRICS via the BRICS+ framework that allows smaller economies that are the regional partners of BRICS to have a say in the new global governance framework.
The next stage in the BRICS+ sequel is to be presented by China in June during the summit of BRICS+ countries. The world will be closely gauging further developments in the evolution of the BRICS+ format, but the most important result of China’s chairmanship in BRICS this year is that BRICS+ is squarely back on the agenda of global governance. The vitality in BRICS development will depend to a major degree on the success of the BRICS+ enterprise – an inert, introvert BRICS has neither global capacity, nor global mission. A stronger, more inclusive and open BRICS has the potential to become the basis for a new system of global governance.
A Chinese Foreign Ministry official stated that BRICS countries agree to accept new countries into the bloc.
BRICS members agree on including new states.
The BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) countries agree that the bloc needs new members while retaining its original character, according to Li Kexin, Director-General of the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s Department of International Economic Affairs.
China wishes to keep the BRICS format open to new members’ participation. Despite the fact that there are no set dates for the expansion, all BRICS countries agree on this, according to Li Kexin.
“I believe there is a shared understanding that we need to enlarge, get ‘new faces,'” he said at a press conference dedicated to the results of the 14th BRICS summit in Beijing. The diplomat emphasized that the goal of the BRICS expansion is not to create a new bloc.
According to the director-general, BRICS leaders are working to reach an agreement on potential future members. “There are several countries currently ‘at the door,’ for example, Indonesia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Argentina,” he said.
As stated in the Beijing Declaration of the XIV BRICS Summit, BRICS leaders support the continuation of discussions on the expansion process, particularly through the Sherpas’ channel.
Two days ago, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi expressed Iran’s readiness to use its potential to help BRICS to reach its goals.
BRICS, a group of countries consisting of emerging economies – Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa – has been functioning on a working mechanism that runs against the tide of the economic and political isolation of Russia which is created by NATO.
At a virtual summit of the BRICS Business Forum, Raisi delivered a speech in which he spoke of Iran’s willingness to use its unique energy reserves, wealth, manpower, and transportation networks to help BRICS achieve its goals.
He started off by congratulating Xi Jinping, China’s president, on holding the summit and inviting Iran to the dialogue, then went on to address a few points in the conference, which went under the title “Participating in Global Development in the New Era”.
Earlier in May, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi stated that China would initiate the process of BRICS expansion. He stated that it will demonstrate BRICS openness and inclusiveness, meet the expectations of developing countries, increase their representation and voice in global governance, and contribute more to global peace and development.
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The coming of the new G8 points to the inevitable advent of BRICS +, one of the key themes to be discussed in the upcoming BRICS summit in China.
By Pepe Escobar, posted with the author’s permission and widely cross-posted
The speaker of the Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, may have created the defining acronym for the emerging multipolar world: “the new G8”.
As Volodin noted, “the United States has created conditions with its own hands so that countries wishing to build an equal dialogue and mutually beneficial relations will actually form a ‘new G8’ together with Russia.”
This non Russia-sanctioning G8, he added, is 24.4% ahead of the old one, which is in fact the G7, in terms of GDP in purchasing power parity (PPP), as G7 economies are on the verge of collapsing and the U.S. registers record inflation.
The power of the acronym was confirmed by one of the researchers on Europe at the Russian Academy of Sciences, Sergei Fedorov: three BRICS members (Brazil, China and India) alongside Russia, plus Indonesia, Iran, Turkey and Mexico, all non adherents to the all-out Western economic war against Russia, will soon dominate global markets.
Fedorov stressed the power of the new G8 in population as well as economically: “If the West, which restricted all international organizations, follows its own policies, and pressures everyone, then why are these organizations necessary? Russia does not follow these rules.”
The new G8, instead, “does not impose anything on anyone, but tries to find common solutions.”
The coming of the new G8 points to the inevitable advent of BRICS +, one of the key themes to be discussed in the upcoming BRICS summit in China. Argentina is very much interested in becoming part of the extended BRICS and those (informal) members of the new G8 – Indonesia, Iran, Turkey, Mexico – are all likely candidates.
The intersection of the new G8 and BRICS + will lead Beijing to turbo-charge what has already been conceptualized as the Three Rings strategy by Cheng Yawen, from the Institute of International Relations and Public Affairs at the Shanghai International Studies University.
Cheng argues that since the beginning of the 2018 U.S.-China trade war the Empire of Lies and its vassals have aimed to “decouple”; thus the Middle Kingdom should strategically downgrade its relations with the West and promote a new international system based on South-South cooperation.
Looks like if it walks and talks like the new G8, that’s because it’s the real deal.
The revolution reaches the “global countryside”
Cheng stresses how “the center-periphery hierarchy of the West has been perpetuated as an implicit rule” in international relations; and how China and Russia, “because of their strict capital controls, are the last two obstacles to further U.S. control of the global periphery”.
So how would the Three Rings – in fact a new global system – be deployed?
The first ring “is China’s neighboring countries in East Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East; the second ring is the vast number of developing countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America; and the third ring extends to the traditional industrialized countries, mainly Europe and the United States.”
The basis for building the Three Rings is deeper Global South integration. Cheng notes how “between 1980-2021, the economic volume of developing countries rose from 21 to 42.2 percent of the world’s total output.”
And yet “current trade flows and mutual investments of developing countries are still heavily dependent on the financial and monetary institutions/networks controlled by the West. In order to break their dependence on the West and further enhance economic and political autonomy, a broader financial and monetary cooperation, and new sets of instruments among developing countries should be constructed”.
This is a veiled reference to the current discussions inside the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), with Chinese participation, designing an alternative financial-monetary system not only for Eurasia but for the Global South – bypassing possible American attempts to enforce a sort of Bretton Woods 3.0.
Cheng uses a Maoist metaphor to illustrate his point – referring to ‘the revolutionary path of ‘encircling the cities from the countryside’”. What is needed now, he argues, is for China and the Global South to “overcome the West’s preventive measures and cooperate with the ‘global countryside’ – the peripheral countries – in the same way.”
So what seems to be in the horizon, as conceptualized by Chinese academia, is a “new G8/BRICS+” interaction as the revolutionary vanguard of the emerging multipolar world, designed to expand to the whole Global South.
That of course will mean a deepened internationalization of Chinese geopolitical and geoeconomic power, including its currency. Cheng qualifies the creation of a “three ring “ international system as essential to “break through the [American] siege”.
It’s more than evident that the Empire won’t take that lying down.
The siege will continue. Enter the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF), spun as yet another proverbial “effort” to – what else – contain China, but this time all the way from Northeast Asia to Southeast Asia, with Oceania thrown in as a bonus.
The American spin on IPEF is heavy on “economic engagement”: fog of (hybrid) war disguising the real intent to divert as much trade as possible from China – which produces virtually everything – to the U.S. – which produces very little.
The Americans give away the game by heavily focusing their strategy on 7 of the 10 ASEAN nations – as part of yet another desperate dash to control the American-denominated “Indo-Pacific”. Their logic: ASEAN after all needs a “stable partner”; the American economy is “comparatively stable”; thus ASEAN must subject itself to American geopolitical aims.
IPEF, under the cover of trade and economics, plays the same old tune, with the U.S. going after China from three different angles.
– The South China Sea, instrumentalizing ASEAN.
– The Yellow and East China Seas, instrumentalizing Japan and South Korea to prevent direct Chinese access to the Pacific.
– The larger “Indo-Pacific” (that’s were India as a member of the Quad comes in).
It’s all labeled as a sweet apple pie of “stronger and more resilient Indo-Pacific with diversified trade.”
BRI corridors are back
Beijing is hardly losing any sleep thinking about IPEF: after all most of its multiple trade connections across ASEAN are rock solid. Taiwan though is a completely different story.
At the annual Shangri-La dialogue this past weekend in Singapore, Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe went straight to the point, actually defining Beijing’s vision for an East Asia order (not “rules-based”, of course).
Taiwan independence is a “dead end”, said General Wei, as he asserted Beijing’s peaceful aims while vigorously slamming assorted U.S. “threats against China”. At any attempt at interference, “we will fight at all costs, and we will fight to the very end”. Wei also handily dismissed the U.S. drive to “hijack” Indo-Pacific nations, without even mentioning IPEF.
China at it stands is firmly concentrated on stabilizing its western borders – which will allow it to devote more time to the South China Sea and the “Indo-Pacific” further on down the road.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi went on a crucial trip to Kazakhstan – a full member of both BRI and the EAEU – where he met President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev and all his counterparts from the Central Asian “stans” in a summit in Nur-Sultan. The group – billed as C+C5 – discussed everything from security, energy and transportation to Afghanistan and vaccines.
In sum, this was all about developing much-needed corridors of BRI/ New Silk Roads – in sharp contrast to the proverbial Western lamentations about BRI reaching a dead end.
Two BRI-to-the-bone projects will go on overdrive: the China-Central Asia Gas Pipeline Line D, and the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway. Both have been years in the making, but now have become absolutely essential, and will be the flagship BRI projects in the Central Asian corridor.
The China-Central Asia Gas Pipeline Line D will link Turkmenistan’s gas fields to Xinjiang via Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. That was the main theme of the discussions when Turkmen President Berdimuhamedow visited Beijing for the Winter Olympics.
The 523 km China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway for its part will crucially link the two Central Asian “stans” to the China-Europe freight rail network, via the existing rail networks in Turkmenistan.
Considering the current incandescent geopolitical scenario in Ukraine, this is a bombshell in itself, because it will enable freight from China to travel via Iran or via Caspian ports, bypassing sanctioned Russia. No hard feelings, in terms of the Russia-China strategic partnership: just business.
The Kyrgyz, predictably, were ecstatic. Construction begins next year. According to Kyrgyz President Zhaparov, “there will be jobs. Our economy will boom.”
Talk about China acting decisively in its “first ring”, in Central Asia. Don’t expect anything of such geoeconomic breadth and scope being “offered” by IPEF anywhere in ASEAN.
The president of Argentina as a matter of urgency approached President Putin in the day before President Putin left for Beijing. They needed help with odious debt that the country entered into with the IMF. This is the sequence of events in the last few days:
Argentina is trapped in $44 billion of odious debt from the US-controlled IMF.
Seeking alternatives to US hegemony, Argentina's President Alberto Fernández traveled to Russia and China, forming an alliance with the Eurasian powers, joining the Belt & Roadhttps://t.co/rTbO1ZGsPE
— Geopolitical Economy Report (@GeopoliticaEcon) February 6, 2022
BREAKING: China and Argentina sign memorandum of understanding on cooperation under the Belt and Road Initiativehttps://t.co/kSCICjsyFO
And then, one of the most interesting points in the second tweet: China reaffirmed its support for Argentina’s demand to fully exercise sovereignty over the Malvinas.
Argentina reaffirmed its commitment to the One China principle and China reaffirmed its support for Argentina’s demand to fully exercise sovereignty over the Malvinas. More: https://t.co/kSCICjsyFOpic.twitter.com/iMhhV63Uzz
A surprising Supreme Court decision that, while not definitive, restores Lula’s political rights has hit Brazil like a semiotic bomb and plunged the nation into a reality show being played in a wilderness of shattered mirrors.
At first, it looked like three key variables would remain immutable.
The Brazilian military run the show – and that would not change. They maintain total veto power over whether Lula may run for president for a third term in 2022 – or be neutralized, again, via whatever juridical maneuver might be deemed necessary, at the time of their choosing.
President Bolsonaro – whose popularity was hovering around 44% – would now have free rein to mobilize all strands of the right against Lula, fully supported by the Brazilian ruling class.
Pinochetist Economics Minister Paulo Guedes would continue to have free rein to completely destroy the Brazilian state, industry and society on behalf of the 0.001%.
But then, 48 hours later, came the Lula tour de force: a speech and press conference combo lasting a Proustian three hours – starting with a long thank you list on which, significantly, the first two names were Argentina President Alberto Fernandez and Pope Francis, implying a future Brazil-Argentina strategic axis.
During those three hours, Lula operated a masterful pre-emptive strike. Fully aware he’s still not out of the legal woods, far from it, he could not possibly project himself as a revolutionary leader. In the complex Brazilian matrix, only the evolution of social movements will in the distant future create the political conditions for some possibility of radical revolution.
So Lula opted for the next-best play: he completely changed the narrative by drawing a sharp contrast to the dreadful wasteland presided over by Bolsonaro He emphasized the welfare of Brazilian society; the necessary role of the state, as social provider and development organizer; and the imperative of creating jobs and raising people’s incomes.
“I want the Armed Forces taking care of the nation’s sovereignty,” he stressed. The political message to the Brazilian military – who hold all the cards in the current political charade – was unmistakable.
On the autonomy of the Brazilian Central Bank, he remarked that the only ones who profited from it comprised “the financial system.” And he made it quite clear the main circumstance in which “they should be afraid of me” will be if choice chunks of productive Brazil – as in national energy giant Petrobras – are sold for nothing. So he firmly positioned himself against the ongoing neoliberal privatization drive.
Obama-Biden
Even knowing that Obama-Biden were the (silent) overseers of the slow motion lawfare coup against President Dilma Rousseff from 2013 to 2016, Lula could not afford to be confrontational with Washington.
Refraining from throwing a fragmentation bomb he didn’t mention that then-Vice President Biden spent three days in Brazil in May 2013 and met Dilma – discussing, among other key issues, the fabulous pre-salt oil reserves. One week later, the first installment of a rolling Brazilian color revolution hit the streets.
Lula skirted another potential fragmentation bomb when he said, “I had the intention to build a strong currency with China and Russia so not to be dependent on the U.S. dollar. Obama knew about it.”
That’s correct: but Lula could have stressed that this was arguably the fundamental motivation for the coup – and for the destruction of an emergent Brazil, then 6th largest economy in the world and accumulating vast political capital across the Global South.
Lula is far from secure enough to take the risk of indicting the whole, elaborate Obama-Biden/FBI/Justice Department operation that created the conditions for the Car Wash investigation racket – now totally unmasked. The US deep sate is watching. Watching everything. In real time. And they won’t let their tropical neo-colony slip away without a fight.
Still, the Lula Show was an incantatory, hypnotic invitation to tens of millions of people glued to their smartphones, a society terminally exhausted, appalled and infuriated by a multi-pronged tragedy presided over by Bolsonaro.
Hence the inevitable, subsequent vortex.
What is to be done?
If confirmed as the ultimate comeback kid, Lula faces a Sisyphean task. The unemployment rate is 21.6% nationally, over 30% in the poorer northeastern regions.
It reaches nearly 50% among 18-24-year-olds. The emergency government help in times of pandemic was initially set at a little over $100 – to loud opposition protests. Now that it’s been scaled down to a paltry $64, the opposition is clinging to the previous $100 it rejected.
For 60% of the Brazilian working class monthly wages are less than what was the minimum wage in 2018, at the time valued around $300.
In contrast to relentless impoverishment, a hefty chunk of Brazilian industrialists would like to see the Guedes hardcore neoliberal orchestra keep playing unencumbered. That implies serial super-exploitation of the work force and indiscriminate sell-off of state assets. A large proportion of the pre-salt deposits – in terms of reserves already discovered – is not Brazilian-owned anymore.
The military de facto handed over the nation’s economy to transnational finance. Brazil virtually depends on mercenary agro-business to pay its bills. As soon as China reaches food security, with Russia as a major supplier, this arrangement will vanish – and foreign reserves will dwindle.
To talk about “de-industrialization” in Brazil – as the liberal left does – makes no sense whatsoever, as rapacious industrialists themselves support neoliberalism and rentism.
Add to it a narco-trafficking boom as a direct consequence of the nation’s industrial collapse, coupled with what could be defined as the incremental US-style evangelicalization of social life expressing the predominant anomie, and we have the most graphic case of disaster capitalism ravaging a major Global South economy in the 21st century.
So what is to be done?
No smoking gun
Of course there’s no smoking gun. But all the shadowplay points toward a deal. Now seemingly rallying around him are, with the exception of the military, the same actors who tried to destroy Lula – what is dubbed the “juristocracy,” powerful media interests, the goddess of the market.
After all, Bolsonaro – the incarnation of a military project rolled out since at least 2014 – is not only bad for business: his psychotic inconsequence is downright dangerous.
For instance, if Brasilia cuts off Huawei from 5G in Brazil, sooner rather than later agro-business mercenaries will be eating their own soya beans, as Chinese retaliation will be devastating. China is Brazil’s top trade partner.
Key plot twists remain unanswered. For instance, whether the Supreme Court decision – which may be reverted – was taken only to protect the Car Wash investigation, actually racket, and its crypto Elliott Ness-style superstar, now discredited provincial judge Sergio Moro.
Or whether a new judicial via crucis for Lula may be unleashed if their handlers so decide. After all, the Supreme Court is a cartel. Virtually every one of the 11 justices is compromised to one degree or another.
The paramount variable is what the imperial masters really want. No one inside the Beltway has a conclusive answer. The Pentagon wants a neo-colony – with minimum Russia-China influence, that is, a fractured BRICS. Wall Street wants maximum plunder. As it stands, both the Pentagon and Wall Street never had it so good.
Obama-Biden 3.0 want some continuity: the sophisticated early-to-mid 2010s project of shattering Brazil via Hybrid War developed under their patronage. But now that must proceed under “acceptable” management; for the Dem leadership Bolsonaro, on every level, is irredeemably linked to Trump.
So this is the crucial deal to watch in the long run: Lula/Obama-Biden 3.0.
Brasilia insiders close to the military are spinning that if the deep state/Wall Street consortium gets its new basket of goodies – China out of 5G, increased weapons sales, the privatization of Eletrobras, new Petrobras price policies – the military may discard Lula again anytime.
Always in negotiation mode, Lula had been in action even before the Supreme Court decision. In late 2020, Kirill Dmitriev, head of the Russian Development Investment Fund which financed the Sputnik V vaccine, took a meeting with Lula, after he identified the former president as one of the signatories of a petition by Nobel Economics prize Muhammad Yunus calling for Covid-19 vaccines to be a common good. The meeting was firmly encouraged by Russian President Putin.
This eventually led to tens of millions of doses of Sputnik V being available for a group of Brazilian northeastern states. Lula played a key part in the negotiation. The federal government, initially bowing to heavy American pressure to demonize Sputnik V, but then confronted with a vaccine disaster, was forced to jump on the bandwagon and now is even trying to take the credit for it.
As it stands, this enthralling telenovela political frenzy may be exhibiting all the hallmarks of a psyops crossover between MMA and WWE – starring a few good guys and an abundance of heels.
The (military) house would like to give the impression it is controlling all the bets. But Lula – as the consummate political practitioner of “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” – should never be underestimated.
As soon as the taming of Covid-19 allows it – to a great extent thanks to Sputnik V – Lula’s best bet will be to hit the road. Unleash the battered working masses in the streets, energize them, talk to them, listen to them. Internationalize the Brazilian drama while trying to bridge the gap between Washington and the BRICS.
And act like the true leader of the Global South he never ceased to be.
I am not sure what you would call this. Attempting to take over a country via drug blackmail maybe. Part of the World Economic Forums Agenda is to take over land. I guess Pfizer wants into the land grab.
They really do not want the vaccine as it is dangerous anyway. As noted over the past two months.
February 27, 2021
Pharma giant Pfizer has been holding sovereign governments to ransom making bizarre demands asking for bank reserves, embassy buildings and military bases as collateral in return for COVID-19 vaccines.
The US-based company Pfizer is holding governments to ransom, interfering with their legislation, and even demanding military bases as guarantee.
Pfizer asked the Govt of Argentina to be compensated for the cost of any future civil lawsuits, reported WION.
If someone files a civil lawsuit against Pfizer in Argentina and wins that case, the government of Argentina and not Pfizer would pay the compensation.
So, Argentina’s parliament passed a new law in October 2020, but Pfizer was unhappy with its phrasing.
The law said Pfizer needs to at least pay for negligence, for its own mistakes if it happens to make any in the future.
Pfizer rejected this, after which Argentina offered to amend the law to define negligence more clearly – to include only vaccine distribution and delivery under negligence.
Pfizer was still not happy and demanded the law be amended through a new decree, which Argentina refused.
Pfizer then asked Argentina to buy an international insurance to pay for potential future cases against Pfizer, to which the country agreed.
But that was not enough, in December 2020, Pfizer again came back with more demands.
And this time Pfizer demanded Argentina’s sovereign assets as collateral. Pfizer demanded that Argentina put its bank reserves, military bases and embassy buildings at stake.
Argentina did not agree with Pfizer’s demands.
Another country Pfizer made such bizarre demands is with Brazil. Pfizer told the Govt of Brazil to create a guarantee fund, and deposit money in a foreign bank account.
On January 23, 2021 – Brazil’s Health Ministry put out a statement citing excerpts from Pfizer’s pre-contract clauses.
Here’s a list of Pfizer’s demands:
• Brazil waives the sovereignty of its assets abroad in favour of Pfizer, • that the rules of the land – be not applied on Pfizer, • that Brazil take into consideration a delay in delivery, • that Pfizer is not penalised for a delayed delivery, and • that in case of any side effects, Pfizer be exempted from all civil liability.
The government of Brazil calls these clauses abusive. The Pfizer deal with Brazil failed too.
In Israel it seems the more vaccines they give the more so Called Covid and deaths they are getting. This episode covers a lot. The World is FED UP with Covid19; Testing on Children Begins; Israel’s New Covid Pass; Owner of the Busiest No-Mask Store in FL; Cattle Rancher Exposes Our Fragile Food Supply
The 20th century’s greatest footballer, Diego Armando Maradona, died in San Andrés, Argentina, at the age of 60. The Argentine Football Association reported that the cause of death was cardiac arrest.
Maradona has been struggling with various health crises in recent years, the most recent of which was earlier this month when he reportedly suffered from a brain hemorrhage.
Maradona’s fans around the world expressed their shock and deep sadness for his passing. Palestinians were not an exception. However, for Palestinian football fans, Maradona represented more than a mere player, arguably the best in the world. He was something else entirely.
“In Palestine, you cannot hate Maradona. Your only option is to love him and you couldn’t have any negative opinion about him,” Palestinian journalist and editor of The Palestine Chronicle Ramzy Baroud said. “Maradona inspired something in us as a collective – a man of small built, from a terribly poor background, brown like us, fiery like us and passionate like us, making his way to the top of the world. For us, it was not about football or sports. It was about hope. It felt as if anything was possible.”
“You can only imagine our excitement when we learned that Maradona cared for Palestine, and made many gestures in support of our struggle. Our joy was complete. Indeed, until the very end, he took moral stances for Palestine, affirming, once more, in July 2018 that ‘In my heart, I am a Palestinian,” Baroud added.
Argentine football icon Diego Maradona dies aged 60 after suffering heart attack.
The football legend had a heart attack at his home just two weeks after leaving hospital.
The statement of solidarity was communicated then to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. However, this was not the only instance in which Maradona was vocal in his support of the Palestinian cause.
For example, in 2012, Maradona described himself as “the number one fan of the Palestinian people .. I respect them and sympathize with them.”
During the Israeli war on Gaza in the summer of 2014, Maradona expressed his outrage. “What Israel is doing to the Palestinians is shameful,” he said in a statement.
Also, in that same year, media reports spoke of negotiations between the Palestinian Football Association and the Argentinian football legend, who was rumored to be the next coach of the Palestinian national team during the 2015 AFC Asian Cup.
“Growing up in Gaza, we loved Maradona. In fact, personally, I loved and played football because of him. Whenever he played, whether for Argentina, Napoli or other teams, we would drop everything and gather in front of our small black and white television set to watch him play,” Baroud said.
“In Palestine, we share the struggles of all oppressed, working-class people everywhere, and, in turn, we say ‘In our collective Palestinian heart, we are Argentinians; we Are South Americans,” Baroud added.
“Thank you, Maradona. You will forever represent something beautiful in all of us.”
When U.S. President Donald Trump announced on December 2 the taxation of Brazilian and Argentine steel, restoring the immediate effect of the “tariffs on all steel and aluminum sent to the United States by these countries,” the amateur members of Bolsonaro´s government were unable to hide their disbelief in their faces of disappointment.
Even with reality falling on their heads, the blindness of the upper echelons of the government regarding the current geopolitical moment is so great that the only character who has perhaps given any hint of understanding was Vice President General Hamilton Mourão, by drawing a parallel between what happened and what, according to his words, he would say about a “characteristic of this geopolitical tension that we are experiencing, which generates protectionism (and) is an anti-cyclical movement in relation to globalization.
Even if his words make sense, what seems to escape the understanding of the vice-president of the Republic and the members of the current government as a whole is the deepest reality of the multipolar world that has been gradually unveiling itself since the beginning of the new century and that, according to the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro(UFRJ) professor José Luís Fiori, intensified between the years 2012 and 2013 with the election of Vladimir Putin and the arrival to power of Xi Jinping.
It should be noted, however, that this multipolar world misunderstood by the strategists of the current Brazilian government (if they exist…), is in no way accepted by the current hegemonic power.
The comfortable hegemony in a unipolar world, conquered by the United States since the collapse of the Soviet Union, is now challenged by new actors that, as a consequence, tension and intensify interstate competition.
Demonstrating the total mismatch of the current Brazilian government with the reality of the international system at the beginning of the 21st century, the reaction of members of the team of the Minister of Economy, Paulo Guedes, to Trump’s words is symptomatic.
In the words of one of Guedes’ assistants, “Trump has always been clear in saying that Brazil is very closed. You need something like: ‘Brazil has come up with a better plan for American companies, so I’m going to go back on the decision to raise the rates’”.
In the logic, at the very least, naive of Mr. Guedes’ team, it would therefore suffice to present the US authorities with a well-developed plan for trade opening, and then Trump would retreat.
The concrete fact is that the Brazilian government seems lost and without understanding the new configuration of the multipolar world order, not being aware of the depth of the fierce interstate competition between what, in the words of Professor Fiori, would be “the three great powers fighting for global power at the beginning of the 21st century.
The last meeting of Brics, held in Brasilia in November, was symptomatic of the unpreparedness of the Brazilian authorities in dealing with the current scenario of global dispute.
Symptomatic and worrying, because the events that permeated that summit and the reaction (or non-reaction) of guest presidents Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin to those events demonstrated the subtlety and care with which Russia and China sought to place themselves in this “minefield” that is South America today. A territory so complex and essential to their expansionist interests.
Just three days before the Brics meeting began on Nov. 10, a coup d’état took place in Bolivia, one of the few countries in the region that still had a strategic relationship with the Eurasian axis, and especially Russia, which had planned with former ousted president Evo Morales the construction of a sophisticated nuclear plant in the Bolivian altiplano, as well as plans for lithium exploration and the development of local agriculture. The documents relating to the ambitious projects had been signed in July when Morales made a diplomatic visit to Moscow.
This could be mere coincidence, if the release of former President Lula had not occurred just two days earlier, on November 8.
In addition to being the biggest opponent of Jair Bolsonaro’s far-right government, Lula is directly responsible for the creation and success of Brics and the strengthening of relations among South American nations.
In short, former President Lula, besides remaining very popular among the less favored classes in Brazil, which automatically turns him into a threat, was directly responsible for raising the country to the status of a global player beyond its region and at the same time for articulating, from Brics, a more consistent entry of the Eurasian powers in the South American scenario.
On 13 November, the official opening of the Brics summit took place in the presence of Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi and Cyril Ramaphosa, who were received at the Itamaraty Palace by President Bolsonaro.
On the morning of that same day, November 13, the Venezuelan embassy in Brasilia would be invaded by a group linked to self-proclaimed President Juan Guaidó. This would somehow overshadow the beginning of the Brics summit.
In Brazil, some more hasty analysts even suggested that that invasion would have the tentacles of fundamentalist sectors of Bolsonaro´s government installed in the Brazilian chancellery, headed by the unbelievable Minister Ernesto Araújo.
However, when connecting the dots, we could suppose that there would be some connection between the events that occurred during that hectic month of November, even if this connection does not necessarily follow a linear logic or if the absence of one of the events annulled the occurrence of another.
From the perspective of the dispute for global power between competing states – which often takes off from economic logic itself – the events of November would make sense if looked at in a systemic way.
The new national security strategy of the United States – announced on December 18, 2017 – would make official what had been happening in practice since the emerging Russia, China, India and even Lula’s Brazil began the expansionist onslaughts in Africa and Latin America, and intensified when Russia, in an unprecedented show of force, decided in 2015 to intervene in Syria, defining the course of the war. For the United States it was necessary to put a brake on that. Whatever the cost.
Therefore, both the “classic” and undisguised military coup in Bolivia, the invasion of the Venezuelan embassy and even Trump’s announcement of steel taxation would be a message and would have the same subliminal message: either you move away from our opponents and align yourselves with our strategy or you will suffer the consequences.
Brazil is now at a serious historical crossroads. One of the most delicate issues in the current scenario is the technological warfare (disguised as a trade war) involving the Chinese giant Huawei.
The most visible representation of the advancement of competition in what could be called the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the dispute over 5G technology has become one of the spearheads of the expansive forces that clash as power and influence disputes in the world system intensify.
After having already missed the opportunity to participate in important markets such as Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Taiwan, which closed their doors due to restrictions imposed by the Americans, the auction for the introduction of 5G technology in Brazil, originally scheduled for the year 2020, would be a golden opportunity for the Chinese to put into practice, and in a large and important market, all their know-how for the construction of a vast network of fifth generation mobile Internet.
As the Chinese Ambassador to Brazil, Yang Wanming, rightly said last November: “I am confident in the sense of cooperation between China and Brazil in 5G technology. Brazil will take into account the interest in the country’s development”.
The Chinese rationality expressed in Ambassador Wanming’s words would fit perfectly if we were living in a period of normality in international relations; but we are not, and the technological war that has the 5G prominence race as its backdrop hides the challenging moment of transition between long cycles of international politics. This is a moment in which the world power, no longer fully capable of exercising leadership in the world political system, finds itself challenged by one or more emerging powers.
This has been the case since when, around 1560, the hegemonic power of the time, Portugal, was challenged by Spain, who then took the lead in the newborn world system, to be challenged by the Netherlands and so on until the present day.
In the midst of the tug-of-war between the Chinese and Americans, Brazil will have no choice but to invent a good technical excuse and postpone the 5G auction until, probably, 2021. The National Agency of Telecommunications (Anatel) has already been rehearsing the postponement by claiming that the 5G network would interfere with the signal of open TV in rural areas, because the transmission is made by satellite dish.
In the end, the pressure that the brazilian government is probably suffering behind the scenes from the Trump administration makes us feel that the announcement of the taxing of brazilian steel via Twitter would have a retaliatory bias with regard specifically to the 5G issue. This possibility is even admitted by the unsuspected brazilian economist linked to the financial market André Perfeito.
The fact is that the Brics meeting revealed a much more docile and receptive Bolsonaro to the presence of Eurasian powers than one could have imagined. Facing a serious recession, the brazilian government had no choice but to take advantage of that moment to seek investments from Brics’ partners.
As old and experienced players on the global board, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping were able to position their pawns strategically from their arrival in Brasilia until the last minute on Brazilian soil.
Even with the not friendly invasion of the Venezuelan embassy (a strategic ally of Russia and China) on the day they would be received by Bolsonaro at the Itamaraty Palace, the not at all naive Eurasian heads of state skillfully did not comment on what had happened and tried to reconcile, throughout the summit, the convergent positions among all the partners.
The clear attempt to sabotage the meeting, in the end, only served to highlight the extreme care with which Xi and Putin sewed the treaties, trying to avoid displeasing Bolsonaro on delicate issues such as the Venezuelan issue – which he did until they accepted that the traditional parallel meeting with countries in the region would not occur.
This posture is in line with what Professor Alexander Zhebit of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) said about a fundamental characteristic of Brics since its creation. According to Zhebit, the elements of agreement would be essential for the maintenance of the internal harmony of the group. In this way, the differences would be smoothed out by the constant negotiation of common points.
Not by chance, in the final declaration of the meeting, besides the fact that the Venezuelan question was not touched, any mention of support for Iran (also a strategic Sino-Russian ally in the Eurasian context) was even avoided.
China and Russia are fully aware of the role of subservience to the United States that the Bolsonaro´s Government plays and, as good old players, have the wisdom to understand the relationship with Brazil as a long-term one.
Old countries know that diplomacy and patience live together, and in a way – as researcher Oliver Stuenkel rightly said – Xi and Putin, strategically, know that the more isolated Brazil is on the international scene, the more important they will be.
Fabio Reis Vianna, lives in Rio de Janeiro, is a bachelor of laws ( LL.B), writer and geopolitical analyst. He is currently a columnist in international politics for the printed version of the centennial brazilian newspaper Monitor Mercantil
I have to admit that I am absolutely heartbroken at the news coming out of Latin America. Brazil, Venezuela, Cuba, Colombia, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Bolivia – everywhere the people are struggling against what has been known as “Yankee imperialism” for decades. The pendulum of history has swung back and forth many times in Latin America. I remember the civil war in Argentina just before the coup of 1976, I was still a kid, but I remember it all. Then the coup, the vicious and ugly “dirty war”, the disaster of the (just!) war for the Malvinas, then the years of “democracy”. Rivers of blood, and still the new era of freedom and peace everybody kept hoping for did not come. Now, four or five decades later, the people of Latin America are still dying and suffering under the yoke of a CIA-installed and CIA-controlled comprador class which would gladly sell their mothers and daughters to Uncle Shmuel for a few bucks.
And yet.
And yet 40 or 50 years are short when seen from the point of view of history, other struggles in history have lasted much longer. So, as a poignant reminder that we will never lose hope, nor will we ever accept oppression, here is a song by Pedro Aznar whose beautiful lyrics will be understood by everyone from Patagonia to Mexico’s northern border (including my Brazilian friends) and which beautifully expresses the hope common to all of us!
On October 29th, the Cycle of Seminars on World Economy Analysis, organized by professors Monica Bruckmann and Franklin Trein, received in the Noble Hall of the IFCS-UFRJ, in Rio de Janeiro, the illustrious presence of the former vice-president of the BRICS Development Bank, Professor Paulo Nogueira Batista.
In the midst of the peculiar moment of social upheavals that are spreading throughout the world, the New Silk Road was discussed, a major Chinese project of geo-economic integration of Eurasia through vast road networks, high-speed trains, gas pipelines, fiber optic cables and ports, and that will benefit millions of people (including Western Europe, and incidentally, the African continent and Latin America itself).
To this end, three institutions created in the orbit of this project would play a key role: the Silk Road Fund, the AIIB (Asian Investment and Infrastructure Bank), and the NBD (BRICS Development Bank).
As the Brazilian State is a shareholder and founder of the NDB, many financing projects from this global institution could already have been approved and would be very welcome to the staggering Brazilian economy. However, despite the fact that in recent years, specifically from 2003 to June 2018, Chinese companies have invested almost 54 billion dollars in more than 100 projects, according to data from the Brazilian government itself, as of 2017, investments have fallen sharply.
According to a study by the Brazil-China Business Council (CBBC), Chinese investments in Brazil totaled 8.8 billion dollars in 2017 and no more than 3 billion dollars in 2018. A drop of 66%.
The deepening of the Brazilian framing of the US imperial orbit says a lot about this.
With the institutionalization of the New Defense Strategy of the United States, enacted on December 18, 2017, what had been happening in practice since mid-2012 was made official, with the acceleration of the interstate dispute and the escalation of global competition: the American repositioning in global geopolitical chess in an increasingly aggressive and unilateral manner.
Leaving aside the multilateralist rhetoric promoted over the last century, the Americans, faced with the strengthening of the “revisionist” powers Russia and China – questioners of the American centrality in the use of the rules and institutions created and managed unilaterally throughout the 20th century -, now seek to impose their will, without concessions, on the countries of the so-called Western Hemisphere. This is a region to which the United States rightfully attributes itself to the full exercise of sovereignty, for considering its zone of direct influence, thus inadmitting any contestation to its supremacy, not even any strategic alliance of countries that can create an alternative pole of power; much less in the Southern Cone of the continent.
Thus, the position of total alignment of the current Brazilian government with the interests of the Trump administration is very much related to this framing of the Western Hemisphere to the strategy of containing the expansionism of Eurasian actors.
If the deepening of the Eurasian project and the Sino-Russian strategic partnership – within Mackinder’s theory of heartland control – would already be inadmissible on its own, then the participation of a large Western Hemisphere country as a protagonist of an institution contesting old rules established and regulated by the hegemon would be too much: Brazil had to be separated from Russia and China at all costs, even if for this the country had to bear the price of seeing its institutions destroyed and involved in the labyrinth of a near military closure of the regime.
…
The last few months have been very hectic in many different parts of the world, particularly in South America.
Even if for not exactly similar reasons, especially in the specific cases of Peru and Bolivia, the popular protests that took place in Ecuador and Chile would have in common the characteristics of an almost natural reaction of self-protection of these societies to neoliberal restrictive policies.
As if it were an old irony of history, at the very moment when we are experiencing the shredding of interstate competition, there emerges a transmission belt spreading over several countries, as distant as they are disparate among themselves, the spark of social protests.
Curiously, this powerful and dangerous combination of social dissatisfaction and the escalation of conflicts between countries, in other periods of history, would end up being configured in that period of transition between the final cycles and of reconfiguration of the great board of the world system.
In view of this, it is important to highlight the risk of a characteristic in common that is gradually emerging in some South American countries: militarization.
With the escalation of global conflicts, the framing of South America to the North American strategy of containment of Eurasian adversaries and in the face of popular agitations to the deterioration of living standards, the lamentable option for the imposition of naked and crude order arises, bringing back to the political scenario of these countries the presence of the military as guarantors of institutional stability.
The region is moving towards a scenario in which elected governments, facing growing internal unrest, would depend on the military to survive.
The recent events in Peru, Ecuador and Chile do not allow us to lie. Apart from the fact that Brazil already lives under the shadow of a veiled military tutelage of its institutions.
The off-curve point of this story is Argentina and the impressive electoral victory of the Peronist opposition (at a time when the use of destabilizing tools has been frequent to interfere in electoral results, as in the case of the mass spread of fake news via Whatsapp in favor of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil).
Against all odds, in a region harassed by increasingly aggressive interference from the United States, Argentina is heading towards the resumption of a project of an autonomous and sovereign nation.
Faced with the successful destruction of the Brazil-Argentina strategic alliance, which had been strengthening since the re-democratization of the two nations in the mid-1980s, Argentina will face the complex challenge of seeking to expand its international insertion without its former Mercosur partner.
Something interesting said by Professor Paulo Nogueira Batista, in the Cycle of Seminars on Analysis of the World Economy, concerns the current Chinese position in the face of the aggressiveness and truculence of the Trump administration: paradoxically, such aggressiveness would be containing the Chinese expansionist impetus of recent years in South America, which, according to the professor, could open great opportunities for the countries of the region to bargain more favorable agreements for the Chinese. With the paralysis of Brazil and its blind alignment with the New Defense Strategy of the United States, Argentina has the opportunity not only to bargain for favorable trade agreements, but also to occupy the space left vacant by Brazil in the Eurasian integration project.
As Professor Paulo Nogueira Batista rightly said, the BRICS, and especially their development bank (NBD), would be heading toward a process of expansion of their participants.
In the new global geopolitical configuration, in which the intensification of the dispute increases the need of competing powers to guarantee their energy security, South America is already seen by many analysts as the new center of gravity of world oil production, replacing the Middle East. The Coup d’état in Bolivia is a very clear sign that the game will tend to be heavier from now on.
As Professor José Luís Fiori, Brazil’s leading expert on geopolitical issues, warned, “Oil is not the cause of all the conflicts in the international system. There is no doubt, however, that the great centralization of power that is underway in the interstate system is also transforming the permanent struggle for energy security of national states into a war between the great powers for the control of the new energy reserves that are being discovered in recent years. A war that is developing hand in hand, and in any corner of the world, be it in the tropical territory of Black Africa or in the icy lands of the Arctic Circle; be it in the turbulent waters of the mouth of the Amazon or in the inhospitable Kamchatka Peninsula”. https://jornalggn.com.br/geopolitica/geopolitica-e-fe-por-jose-luis-fiori/?fbclid=IwAR1IEPB6xbYL9BOpClmpyeUbonPPsIRPP-BQS7L_dqxZI0sr05jTHQ1Av64
Curiously, shortly before the violent classic coup d’état against President Evo Morales, the government of that country had announced plans to nationalize its production of Lithium.
Global demand for Lithium, essential in the production of cell phone batteries, laptops and electric cars, is expected to triple in the next 15 years.
Not coincidentally, Lithium’s world’s largest reserves are in Bolivia.
If this trend is confirmed, there is no other alternative for whale countries like Brazil and Argentina than to take over the South American strategic project at the risk of ending their days fragmented and swallowed up by the interests and disputes of powers outside the region.
For now, it is up to Argentina to walk alone and out of necessity, to expand economic and geopolitical ties with China and Russia because the tendency is for the country to become the target of the next destabilizing campaigns, “fourth generation” wars and economic suffocation caused by the hegemon.
Fabio Reis Vianna, lives in Rio de Janeiro, is a bachelor in law, writer and geopolitical analyst. He is currently a columnist in international politics for the printed version of the centennial Brazilian newspaper Monitor Mercantil.
The story of Jeffrey Epstein has lost its mystery as more and more commentators allow themselves to express the thought that it is a strong possibility that Epstein was connected to a crime syndicate affiliated with a Zionist political organisation or Israel and/or at least a few compromised intelligence agencies. Whitney Web and others have produced superb studies of possible scenarios, I would instead like to attack the topic from a cultural perspective. Epstein wasn’t the first Jewish sex trafficker. This seems like a good time to look back at Zwi Migdal, a Jewish global crime syndicate that operated a century ago and trafficked tens of thousands of Jewish women and under age girls as sex slaves. According to contemporary Jewish writer Giulia Morpurgo the Zwi Migdal had turned Argentina, “into a nightmare of prostitution and exploitation.”
During the first three decades of the 20th century Argentina was a rich country. It outgrew Canada and Australia in population, total income, and per capita income. Just before the first world war Argentina was the world’s 10th wealthiest state per capita. When Argentina was a rich country, large parts of its economy, culture and politics were controlled by crime syndicates and particularly a Jewish organised crime apparatus named ‘Zwi Migdal.’
In 2009 The International Jewish Coalition Against Sexual Abuse/Assault (JCACA) published a comprehensive article about the Zwi Migdal titled Understanding the Zwi Migdal Society which I am about to quote from extensively.
The Zwi Migdal, was an association of Jewish mobsters who were involved in the “sexual exploitation of Jewish women and children, which operated globally.” Apparently the Zwi Migdal originally picked a pretty innocent sounding name: “Warsaw Jewish Mutual Aid Society.” It does indeed sound almost as innocent, humane and charitable as ‘Anti Defamation League,’ ‘Jews against Breast Cancer,’ or even ‘Jewish Voice for Peace’ but the Warsaw Jewish Mutual Aid Society wasn’t innocent at all. It forced thousands of women and girls to become sex slaves and destroyed their lives.
On May 7, 1906, the Jewish syndicate had to change its title after the Polish ambassador to Argentina filed an official complaint to the Argentine authorities regarding the use of the name ‘Warsaw.’ Clearly, the Polish government did not want to be associated with a Jewish crime syndicate. In that line, it would be appropriate to ask how long is it going to take before the American government and its politicians insist that AIPAC drop its first ‘A’ or before The Neocon Project of the New American Century are ordered to drop American from their title.
“Zwi Migdal means ‘strong power’ in Yiddish and it also honoured Zvi Migdal, known as Luis Migdal, one of the founders of the crime organization.”
The Zwi Migdal organization operated from the 1860s to 1939. In its heyday, after the First World War, it had four hundred members in Argentina alone. Its annual turnover was fifty million dollars in the early 1900s.
Unlike Epstein and Maxwell who allegedly recruited non-Jewish underage women, the Zwi Migdal specialised in trafficking Jewish women. “Most of the Jewish women and children who were kidnapped were taken from impoverished shtetls (Jewish small towns) and brought to Buenos Aires.”
The recently released documents related to the Jeffrey Epstein affair suggest that Epstein and Maxwell were to be charged with child sex trafficking, and as the alleged procurer of underage girls. It seems none of that is really novel in the Jewish world: “The Zwi Migdal Society lured decent girls and young women from Europe in many inventive and deceitful ways. A very well-mannered and elegant-looking man would appear in a poor Jewish village in places such as Poland or Russia. He would advertise his search for young women to work in the homes of wealthy Jews in Argentina by posting an ad in the local synagogue. Fearful of pogroms and often in desperate economic circumstances, the trusting parents would send their naïve daughters away with these men, hoping to give them a fresh start.”
The last line recalls Virginia Giuffre’s account of her encounter with the elegant British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell who allegedly lured her victims to ‘escape’ their misery.
The JCACA continues “The girls, aged mostly 13 to 16, packed a small bag, bade their families farewell and boarded ships to Argentina, believing that they were on their way toward a better future. However, they soon learned the bitter truth. Their period of training as sex slaves, which began on the ship, was cruel and brutal. The young virgins were “broken in” ~ raped, beaten, starved and locked in cages.”
The Zwi Migdal Organization reached its peak in the 1920s when some 430 rufianos, or pimps, controlled 2,000 brothels trafficking around 30.000 Jewish women and girls in Argentina alone. “The largest brothels of Buenos Aires housed 60 to 80 female sex slaves. There were brothels all over Argentina, but most of them were in the big city, in the Jewish quarter, on Junin Street.”
Apparently “Prostitutes who failed to satisfy their clients were beaten, fined, or taken to work in provincial houses. Every business transaction was logged. The rufianos ‘held a meat market’ where newly arrived girls were paraded naked in front of traders in places such as Hotel Palestina or Cafe Parisienne.”
One may wonder how all of that fit with Judaic tradition and Talmudic law. “In one brothel,” the ACACA reports, “the Madam, an observant Jewish woman, would not let her women work on Fridays but instructed them herself in the art of lovemaking.”
Many commentators on the Epstein affair are amazed by the incapacity of America’s law enforcement, legal system and federal agencies to bring justice to Epstein’s victims and its failure to lock him away. Once again, that is not new. The JCACA writes of the Zwi Migdal criminality: “These activities went on undisturbed because they were frequented by government officials, judges, and reporters. City officials, politicians, and police officers were paid off. The pimps had powerful connections everywhere.”
The Jewish community didn’t rush to save their abused daughters. “The prostitutes, who were mostly illiterate, destitute and despised by the mainstream Jewish community, banded together to form their own mutual-aid societies.” However, rarely, some Jewish ethnic activists stood for the abused women and girls. “One night Nahum Sorkin, a well-known Zionist activist, stood outside the theatre and physically stopped the rufianos (Jewish pimps) from entering. Next, they were banned from the synagogues, and to top it all, they were refused burial in the Jewish cemetery.”
From Rachel (Raquel) Lieberman to Virginia Roberts Giuffre
We learn that the rufianos’ audacity eventually led to their demise. “It happened when they refused to forgo their income from the work of one woman, Rachel Lieberman from Lódž, Poland. She, like so many others, was tempted to travel to Buenos Aires answering a matrimonial ad, but was taken to Jonin Street where she was forced to prostitute.”
“After five years she had enough money to go into the antique furniture business to support herself and her sons but the rufianos made it impossible for her. They did not want her to set an example for their other slaves. But this woman had not been broken.”
As was the case for Virginia Giuffre, it needed brave Rachel to come forward.
In desperation, Rachel Lieberman “contacted Superintendent Julio Elsogray. She had heard his name mentioned on the street as one who would not take Zwi Migdal’s money and was actually looking for ways to destroy the organization. She slipped into his office one day and gave a detailed account of the connections among the various pimps in the organization management.
Her testimony led to an extensive investigation. The findings reached Dr. Rodriguez Ocampo, a judge who would not take Zwi Migdal bribes either.
The lengthy trial ended in September 1930, with 108 detainees. “The very existence of the Zwi Migdal Organization directly threatens our society,” the judge wrote in his verdict, handing down long prison terms.”
As with Epstein and his mobsters friends, things changed quickly and not in favour of justice let alone guided by ethical principles. The Zwi Migdal mobsters were at least as well connected as Epstein to politicians, judges and prosecutors. “While in prison, the pimps pulled some old strings, appealed their sentences in January 1931, and senior Justice Ministry officials left only three of the convicts in jail, discharging the rest.”
As was the case with The Miami Herald’s Julie Brown and many of us in the alternative media who didn’t allow the rottenEpstein and his pedophile ring’s crimes to be shoved under the carpet, the 1930s Argentinian media didn’t agree to turn a blind eye to the Jewish syndicate’s impunity.
When the media reported the release of the Zwi Migdal’s mobsters from jail, “the public was very upset and pressured the authorities to reverse the discharge decision. Thereafter, hundreds of pimps were deported to Uruguay. “Over the years, they slowly returned one by one, but the era of the huge brothels ended.”
The JCACA sums up the Zwi Migdal saga by stating that the Jewish crime syndicate was “an organization that traded in women while its members wore tefillin (a Jewish religious garment) and built themselves a synagogue.” I guess the same can be said about Epstein’s ring. They may not be religious, they may not wear Tefillin but they are self identified Jewish Zionists who donate to Israel and vocally support Israel’s criminal politics.
The JCACA proclaims that the Zwi Migdal’s “history is an embarrassment to all decent Jews. It involved loads of money, corrupt politicians, violent sex, international women trade, hard brutality, rape, and cheating, all lightly spiced with yiddishkeit and God-fearing traditions. Among those traditions, according to Jewish beliefs as expressed in the Torah,is that it is perfectly fine to keep slaves so long as they are not Jewish. Yet these Zwi Migdal also enslaved Jewish girls and a great many who ran the bordellos were Jewish women.”
I find myself admitting that except for Benjamin Netanyahu who denounced Ehud Barak for his ties with Epstein for political opportunist reasons, I have yet to see a single Jewish organisation express any embarrassment in regard to Epstein and his sex trafficking operation. On the contrary, Epstein’s lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, announced that he is actually a victim of the #metoo movement. He also occasionally insists that Jews should never apologise for using their strength. Maxwell has kept quiet. Wexner has yet to apologise. Like Dershowitz, he adopted the victim path announcing that Epstein ‘misappropriated’ a few shekels from his family and he regret being associated with the sex trafficker. JVP that cares so much for Palestinians must be slightly less bothered by Guiffre’s plight. I am left wondering, is it the fact that Zwi Migdal abused Jewish women and girls that provoked Jewish discomfiture? I guess that, at least for the time being, it seems as if Jews do not posses the cultural or psychological means to look refectively into Epstein and his ring. The only question left open is whether the FBI has the cojones to do its job.
My battle for truth and freedom involves some expensive legal and security services. I hope that you will consider committing to a monthly donation in whatever amount you can give. Regular contributions will enable me to avoid being pushed against a wall and to stay on top of the endless harassment by Zionist operators attempting to silence me and others.
UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 
