The BRICS summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, Aug. 22-24, moves center stage in the world, and in history. Some 22 nations have applied to join the original five, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The issue is reformulating the world economic relations and ensuring secure relations amongst nations.
The recent address to the summit from the Schiller Institute’s founder, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, is that the U.S.A. and Western Europe join in with the joyous mission of wiping out poverty from the world—and in the process, save themselves from financial and moral bankruptcy. To that end, she explains, the irony needs to be recognized, that the “tectonic change” afoot amongst the “Global Majority” was caused by the “huge strategic miscalculation by forces primarily in the U.S.A. and Great Britain, which, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, mistakenly saw themselves as the victors of the Cold War, and derived from this the license to impose their neoliberal economic model on a unipolar world, and to bring the various methods of ‘regime change’ to bear upon all governments who do not want to conform to this ‘rules-based order.’ ” There is a limit to a tyrant’s power—the high and mighty have overplayed their hand, and now need to recognize the friendly hand being extended for them to rejoin humanity.
Russia’s representative to the summit, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, delivered a similar message today, writing that the efforts of the “collective West” to preserve its hegemony have had the opposite of its intended effect, encouraging the real “World Majority” to dismiss and reject the exploitation of their resources by foreign states. “The international community is tired of the blackmail and pressure from the Western elites and their colonial and racist manners.” He continued: “Tectonic shifts are taking place in the world today…. We are witnessing the emergence of a more just multipolar world order.” Further, the BRICS serves as a “positive force that can strengthen the solidarity of the Global South and Global East and become one of the pillars of a new, more just polycentric world order….” Hence, the summit will focus on such “unconditional priorities” as strengthening the BRICS bank, improving payment mechanisms, and increasing the role of national currencies in mutual settlements.
Brazil has made clear that it is time to get out from underneath the imperial shenanigans of the present dollar system, and they mean to have the BRICS address the matter of a non-dollar means of facilitating trade and development amongst nations. An important outline as to how to proceed was published by Brazilian economist Paulo Nogueira Batista, Jr., a former VP of the BRICS New Development Bank.
Importantly, he goes beyond the pedestrian, technical matters of such as an accounting mechanism or a streamlined payment system, to address currency in terms of credit issuance and actual value. The BRICS, as five nations with the united political will for long-term infrastructure development, are to stand behind the issuance of bonds, freely convertible with the new BRICS currency.
This is the world of Alexander Hamilton’s First National Bank, of Abraham Lincoln’s Greenback policy, of Franklin Roosevelt’s TVA-vectored approach—the world of physical economy brought back alive by Lyndon LaRouche, Jr., no later than his 1975 “How the International Development Bank Will Work.”
The thing about a momentous 72 hours is that individuals can act for all humanity and have a much-improved chance of enjoying the fruits of their work: “Appeal to the Citizens of the Global North: We Must Support the Construction of a New Just World Economic Order!”
