New alliance poised to emerge from the rubble of America's collapsed empire … The alliance of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, also known as BRICS, has been watching the death throes of the American empire and is reacting by creating the groundwork for a post-American global construct. Following the recent BRICS summit on Hainan island in China, Brazilian Finance Minister Guido Mantega told the International Monetary Fund in Washington that the United States and other western countries were attempting to "export their way out of difficult economic situations" by printing money and driving down interest rates – which is the core principle of quantitative easing. It was clear that Mantega was speaking for the other BRICS nations in warning Washington that business as usual is approaching an end. – Strategic Culture Foundation Online Journal /Wayne Madsen
Dominant Social Theme: In the coming brave, new world, the US shall be diminished and a new order shall dawn.
Free-Market Analysis: The BRICS received a lot of attention for their recent summit on Hainan island and now famous alternative media reporter Wayne Madsen has penned an article that suggests the BRICS are going to take over as a new world power and give the United States a good deal of competition. Madsen refers to the group as the BRISCS to include South Africa, so we will too, though traditionally the acronym has been BRIC, for Brazil, Russia, India and China.
While Madsen is a courageous writer and a topnotch independent, "alternative media" analyst with a US intelligence background, we don't necessarily agree with his entire analysis and in this article we will try to explain why. The idea that the world is built of competing nation states and regions is increasingly a suspect one so far as we are concerned. In fact it is a kind of dominant social theme: that the West and especially the US are in decline and the larger countries of the developing world are in the ascension.
No … with the possible exception of China and a few Muslim countries, the Anglo-American power elite still runs the world in the 21st century as it did in the 20th in our view. It is a fact that the big banking families funded the Red Russians against the White to create the USSR. And there are various reports that we have read in the past that Western financial elites were favorably disposed to the Red Chinese.
Western elites, in their centuries' long campaign to tame, control and diminish Western middle classes have always needed to establish enemies. Without enemies there is no need for large governments and even larger armies. And without big governments, there are no legislative levers for elites to pull – giving them advantages that others cannot enjoy.
In our view, the latest countervailing force is also a manipulated one. In fact, this BRICS group of large countries was actually pulled together via an acronym created by a Goldman Sachs' banker. Madsen, nonetheless, finds the story convincing. He writes that while the American empire is faltering, the BRICS are becoming more solvent and formidable. America, Madsen suggests in his article, is trying to preserve its foundering empire through military means. It is engaged in "military adventurism" around the world, from Central America, to the Middle East and of course in Afghanistan.
But America is more like Rome in its last days, Madsen suggests like Rome, the US is engaged in a desperate attempt to secure its overseas borders, an effort that is ultimately doomed to failure. The US's aggressive program of monetary debasement in order to resuscitate its internal economy is also doomed to failure. The result has not benefitted the US economy very much but has increased unemployment and price inflation elsewhere, especially among the BRICS.
At the summit, Madsen reports, Brazilian Finance Minister Guido Mantega let U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Khan know that nations like Brazil would not be dictated to. "Such rhetoric will become more commonplace as the BRICS nations assert their power and peel other countries away from Washington's economic and political orbit," he writes.
And Madsen reports that the IMF itself came in for pointed criticism from South African Trade Minister Rod Davies who lambasted the agency for the way it went about "rescuing" economies on the brink, with privatizations, higher taxes and lower public spending that usually proves both ineffective and punitive. The results can be seen these days mostly in Europe where the IMF's so-called austerity has led to violent civil unrest in Europe's PIGS.
Madsen even forecasts that the sway of the IMF and Word Bank may be coming to an end as the sun sets on British and American hegemony. He believes that countries such as Brazil are about to step up and act as a "counterweight to the IMF-linked G-8 and G-20, which have operated under the virtual tutelage of the Western central bankers and the governments of the United States, Canada, France, Britain, Germany, and Japan."
The BRICS countries, Madsen reports, agreed to use their own currencies for trading purposes rather than the dollar, which has been increasingly diminished by Federal Reserve overprinting via its so-called quantitative stimuli. "The message … the era of an elite group of Western tycoons dictating international economic policy is going to soon be a thing of the past."
Madsen ends his article with some projections. He claims the BRICS nations, which, by 2015, will represent 43 per cent of the world's population and 23 per cent of the world's gross domestic product, are flexing their economic and political weight. The BRICS will eventually peel away from NATO he predicts, possibly taking Germany with them. "A neutralist Germany would see an alignment with the BRICS bloc as an advantageous step for Germany's economy, especially if the euro collapses and there is a return of the Deutsche mark." Turkey is another powerful state that might cast its lot with the BRICS.
Such a multi-polar world will greatly diminish the power of the current Anglo-American power elite axis and put an end to Western world hegemony. This is indeed a most persuasive case, but as indicated at the beginning of this article we are suspicious of it. We write regularly of the setbacks that Western money power is undergoing in the era of the Internet, but we have also speculated that some of it is for show. We are not so sure that the BRICS are going to provide legitimate competition to Western powers-that-be any time soon. We would tend to see it more or less as a controlled opposition.
When it comes to the BRICS, we see a series of countries that have either been dominated in the past by the Anglosphere or which currently have close ties to the West. Brazil is obviously within the sphere of influence of America and Russia is but a shadow of what she once was as the military-powerful USSR. India is a former protectorate of Britain as is China. The British also ran South Africa after several bloody wars.
All five BRICS, then, have had very close ties to the Western world. We would argue (hypothetically) that for public consumption a show of independence is necessary. But because of a long history of colonialism and other relationships, the ties between the BRICS leadership and Western leaders may yet run deep. In fact, the more independent role that the BRICS are now taking may suit the Anglo-America elites just fine, as would a new currency.
Even the US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has expressed the willingness of the US to support a more globalized currency that would diminish the importance of the dollar. Of course the currency that is being readied to take the place of the dollar is none other than the IMF's SDR, perhaps upgraded to "bancor" status.
The main way that Anglosphere elites are controlling the world these days is via military might. But who knows what the relationships are like right at the top? The combination of military power and money power is a potent one. We have a feeling that projecting a multi-polar world engaged in active pushback against the West is perhaps too neat a paradigm. We see it as leading inevitably to more globalization not less. It will seem inevitable, of course, and part of a multi-polar rivalry.
The BRICS will continually confront the US in particular with more and more international actions. The Anglo-American elites will not be seen as responsible for what is rising around them. But in the end the infrastructure will expand nonetheless. We can already see much of it: the UN, The Hague Courts, the WHO and NATO. These are the facilities that the BRICS will use to confront Western powers-that-be.
Those even within the West that are uncomfortable with a uni-polar world will support the BRICS aggressive use of the tools at hand to restrain the Western goliath. But ironically, the result will be ever-strengthened global institutions. The biggest uni-polar political power of all will be built under the pretense of confronting the West. Yet it is the West that has built the modern economic and political infrastructure and its significant strengthening will in no way inconvenience the Anglosphere.
Ultimately perhaps the BRICS will build the New World Order that the Anglosphere seeks. But once it is fully constructed, it will become clear who runs it. And it won't be the BRICS. One might surely believe in Madsen's perspective (a dedicated and even brilliant investigative reporter) but we would argue that it does no harm to observe international events from the point of view we have just offered. One needn't be wedded to any approach – just wait and see …
