WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY News Journal Update - (en) Italy, UCADI #176: Assault on the dollar (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 The 15th Brics summit (an acronym formed from the initials of the

founding countries of the organization Brazil, India, Russia, China and
South Africa) was held in Johannesburg from 22 to 24 August. The leaders
of 67 countries and representatives of the main international
organizations, as well as representatives of the world of international
economics, were invited to the meeting. 23 requests for new memberships,
6 "full members" admitted from 1 January 2024: Argentina, Egypt,
Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. With the
entry of the new members, the Brics countries "will represent 36% of the
world's GDP and 47% of the population of the entire planet". A
heterogeneous group of nations that are committed to establishing an
equal partnership between countries that have different points of view,
but a shared vision for a better, multipolar world, and share a declared
goal: the de-dollarization of trade at on a global level, proof of this
is that in trade between the five Brics countries during 2022 the use of
the American currency amounted to only 28.7% of the total.
During the meeting, the five members of the Brics reached an agreement
on the guiding principles, standards, criteria and procedures of the
expansion process of the group of emerging economies. "We have reached a
consensus on the first phase of this expansion process," underlined the
South African President, who chaired the summit, adding that the leaders
of the various countries have instructed their finance ministers and
central bank governors to consider the issue of the use of local
currencies as payment instruments and of commercial exchange platforms
as instruments of de-dollarisation, instructing them to report to the
Brics leaders themselves at the next summit on the possibility of
adopting a common trading currency.
Reiterating the need to move in this direction, the President of Brazil
proposed to strengthen the Bank of the BRICS countries to make it
"stronger than the International Monetary Fund (IMF), enabling it to
guarantee loans for the development and creation of a common currency ,
finding the support - obvious - of his dolphin and former Brazilian
president Dilma Rousseff, who arrived in Johannesburg in the role of
head of the New Development Bank of the BRICS, the international banking
fund based in Shanghai created by the BRICS on 14 July 2014 in the
Fortaleza meeting (and chaired by her).
The Bank plans to start lending in South African and Brazilian
currencies as part of a plan to reduce dependence on the dollar and
promote a more multipolar international financial system. The Brics bank
has also sought to distinguish itself from the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund by not establishing lists of policy
conditions on loans. This is one of the conditions with which to make
its services attractive. However, in the official agenda of the summit
in recent days there was no mention of the construction of a common
anti-dollar currency, but the issue is being studied by the various
partners. Of course, Saudi Arabia's membership of the organization,
which has opened negotiations to become a new member of the Multilateral
Bank, introduces the presence of a country that has immense capital
reserves,

Strength and weakness of the BRICS

The current enlargement of the BRICS, born in 2001 as a group of
countries that share a developing economic situation and have abundant
strategic natural resources, are characterized by strong GDP growth and
hold a significant share of world trade, has a precedent in the entry of
South Africa in 2010 and now knows a further development which it
inserts into the group. Countries such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab
Emirates and Iran which are among the largest producers of fossil fuels;
this inclusion allows the group to
control a large part of the world's production of crude oil and natural
gas. It should also be remembered that among the candidate countries
there is Venezuela whose entry into the organization is considered
imminent. Thus most countries oil and gas producers would be part of the
organization which would thus have the possibility of directing the
production and marketing of this important raw material.
The rapid entry of Argentina into the organization was explicitly
desired by the President of Brazil Lula, who in this way wanted to send
a signal to all of Latin America, taking charge of a country that finds
itself experiencing an economic contingency difficult, with very high
inflation, and this despite the fact that it has immense resources and
wealth, evidently poorly used and poorly managed.
The less we understand the reasons that led the organization to admit to
its membership countries such as Ethiopia and Egypt which do not seem to
present characteristics that would arouse the interest of the Brics at
first sight, unless it is concluded for the choice to give a signal of
attention to African countries and to frame the admission within the
framework of the good neighborly policy with the poor part of the world.
There are those who wanted to see the BRICS as an alternative to the G7
and an instrument of opposition to the West. If this is true for Russia
and China, it is certainly not so for India which strives at every
opportunity to remember that the spirit with which the Brics operate is
to collaborate for a more harmonious functioning of the world economy
and to give trade and exchanges between different economies a greater
balance. The same goes for other countries that operate within the
organization, but the fact is that the BRICS model today represents an
alternative to an economy dominated by the dollar and the terms of trade
set by the most advanced economies of the West.
Certainly the growth of this aggregation can only enhance the
transformation of international balances, making them evolve in the
direction of a multipolar world within which countries such as
China, Russia and India play a certainly new role.
In particular, the expansion of the organization demonstrates Russia's
ever decreasing isolation at an international level, especially since at
the meeting in Johannesburg it assured that it will provide 50,000
tonnes of wheat free of charge to six African countries, including the
Burkina Faso, Mali, Eritrea and other African countries, presumably in
the Sahel area, where Russia's strategic interests in Africa are
concentrated. Furthermore, the Russian government stated: "This year we
expect to export around 55 million tons according to our harvest plans.
This figure can be adjusted upwards during the harvest. If we see that
our harvest forecasts in terms of grain volume are growing, we will also
adjust the figure in terms of export volumes.
process 34,000 tons of fertilizer condensate, supplied free of charge by
Russia in May. According to local media, this condensate will be used to
produce 100,000 tons of finished products, which will be allocated as
subsidized inputs to farmers, gaining support for the donor.

Prospects and development

In China's intentions, the BRICS countries "should be companions on the
path of development and revitalization and oppose decoupling and the
breakdown of supply chains and economic coercion." It should be
remembered that after Johannesburg, Algeria, Bangladesh, Bahrain, Belarus,
Bolivia, Cuba, Honduras, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Palestine,
Nigeria, Senegal, Thailand, Venezuela, Vietnam, while further requests
for membership cannot be ruled out to the extent that the policies
practiced by the organization prove effective in guaranteeing funding
for development through the Bank that they themselves founded and
through the cooperation policies established. It should also be noted
that in many of these countries China is present with massive
investments, especially in infrastructures that facilitate the
development of these countries, but at the same time link them to the
Chinese economy.
The consequence is that the multipolar world is now a reality and the
West and the United States in particular have no choice but to take note
of it, waiting to see the role of the dollar as the cornerstone of the
world monetary system increasingly undermined. If this were to happen we
would find ourselves faced with the end of a positional income for the
US economy that dates back at least to the end of the Second World War
and which will pose many problems by upsetting the operating rules of
both monetary and global trade.

What is happening can only have adverse effects on the European Union
and its economy which will be called upon to choose a side. The role of
vassalage towards the American economy, as well as that of privileged
partnership towards the US economy, is destined to wane and the new
balances will be difficult to draw because it will be necessary to deal
with a completely new and currently unpredictable. German industry knows
something about this and has to decide how to behave with its exports to
China and how to deal with the growth in competitiveness of goods
produced in the BRICS countries.
Mario Draghi, former president of the ECB and former Italian prime
minister, warned in a recent statement released to the Economistin
relation to Europe's future problems: " The strategies that ensured
Europe's prosperity and security in the past - dependence on America for
security, on China for exports and on Russia for energy - have become
insufficient, uncertain or unacceptable. In this new world, paralysis is
clearly unsustainable for citizens, while the radical option of leaving
the EU has produced decidedly mixed results. Creating a closer union
will ultimately prove to be the only way to ensure the security and
prosperity that European citizens crave."

The new scenarios

When we hypothesize impossible scenarios of the evolution of economic
and commercial relations at a global level, we do not want to formulate
a value judgement, but we limit ourselves exclusively to ascertaining
which are the trend lines on the basis of which the new major players in
economic policy move. international, intended for become actors of a new
power politics that are neither worse nor better than the Western
capitalist powers that initiated them, nor than the groups of states and
powers that survive in the European and North American scenario and that
will continue to operate to perpetuate the exploitation of the weak in
the world, at all latitudes. Indeed, upon closer inspection, the new
BRICS group includes countries governed by regimes that certainly do not
shine for their openness to civil liberties, just think of Saudi Arabia,
Iran, the United Arab Emirates and, why not, China , to Russia, to India.
The atrocities of the Saudi Arabian government are all too well known:
it is enough to recall the murder of the journalist Cassogi and the
repression of civil liberties in the country, while its role in
supporting the politics of the Wahhabi movements in the world and of the
jihadist movements is well known; what can we say about Iran where for
more than a year there has been a ferocious repression of women and
their most basic freedoms, while there is class exploitation carried out
by a clerical society managed by a retrograde and obtuse clergy. Even
the United Arab Emirates certainly do not shine for civil liberties, nor
for that of women, nor for the rights of workers, exploited to the point
of causing their death, in a total absence of the most basic guarantees
of safety at work and protection of workers' rights.
As for China, the country's civil liberties have been sacrificed on the
altar of the achieved well-being of the population which, moreover,
experiences growing inequalities and an ever-increasing concentration of
wealth in the hands of a bourgeois elite which now constitutes the
backbone of the country . The famous phrase in its Constitution which
describes the Chinese state as an entity governed by an alliance between
peasant workers and the national bourgeoisie is, certainly, today
unbalanced in favor of the power exercised by the latter class component.
What can we say about Russia, where the Putin dictatorship is leading
the country to disaster and where the pan-Russian vision of power
supported by the Russian Orthodox Church and based on the close alliance
between State and Church is increasingly imposing itself, where the
Church provides the ideological cover for politics of expansion and
power of the State, with the total sacrifice of civil liberties and the
imposition of traditional and regressive values which destroy the most
basic rights of citizenship.
Among the members of the Brics, India stands out for its role and
presence, governed by the policy of Hindutva, the nationalist ideology
on which Prime Minister Modi's political vision is based, based on the
motto "Hindu, Hindi, Hindustan".: a religion, Hinduism, a language,
Hindi, for a land consecrated to a homogeneous national community and
whose domination must belong to a well-defined lineage: the Hindu one.
The analysis, albeit brief, of the member countries ends with Ethiopia
governed by a government that has made its own the "theology of
prosperity" of the evangelical Churches, perverting the tradition and
nature of the country as well as Egypt whose dictatorial and criminal
tendencies government are well known.
An exception seems to be represented by South Africa which, after
difficult choices, is moving towards a development policy which is
however not without shadows and above all by Brazil which under Lula's
management seems to have rediscovered that impetus towards open social
policies and towards environmental protection and which is trying to
lead Argentina in crisis along this path.
In these countries, regardless of how the various governments are
classified, the subordinate classes are exploited to pursue a policy of
concentrating wealth in the hands of a few, to perpetuate the slavery of
wage labor, which is also characterized by wages that are often below
subsistence thresholds. Just think about the conditions
of work practiced in India to shudder in comparison with similar
situations but perhaps of more attenuated and refined exploitation in
Western countries.
In fact, we would not like our analysis which notes the evolution of the
economic and political situation to give the impression of satisfaction
with what is happening, for a second-hand Third Worldism, exhaustive of
class reasons, which enjoys the end of Western hegemony in the economic
and political fields. Unfortunately,
the evolution and development of the forms of State and government
remains strongly punitive to the interests of the exploited classes and
tends to perpetrate class domination and capitalist exploitation with
forms that only see the configuration of the main actors who hold the
levers of power change but they keep class exploitation intact.
The solution must be sought in a new and strong internationalism, based
on class solidarity and on the construction of institutional legal
systems that guarantee a fair distribution of resources, access for all
workers to the goods produced and the beautiful things of life, the way
that everyone is allowed to access resources to satisfy their needs.
This function is becoming increasingly possible today on the basis of
the evolution of production capabilities, new technologies, a more
careful vision of the resources offered by the planet, the need to
respect nature for a rational use of resources in order to fairly
satisfy needs. of all.

https://www.ucadi.org/2023/09/21/assalto-al-dollaro/
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