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From Patrick Bond.
(Great to have Lula on record!
To me, with my broken-record biases, these bullets below, in
*bold, *are what might be the most important woulda-coulda-shoulda
takeaway revelations. They deserve a great deal more introspection than
leading Third Worldist strategist Pepe Escobar had time for below... but
hopefully he follows up soon:
* /"A huge pact giving the Chinese part of what they wanted, which was
Brazil’s capacity to produce food and energy and also the capacity
to have access to technological knowledge. Brazil needed a lot of
infrastructure. We needed high-speed rail, many things. //*But in
the end that did not happen.”*/
* Lula defined his top priorities as he supported the creation of
BRICS: *economic autonomy,* and uniting a group of nations capable
of *helping what the Washington consensus describes as LDCs – least
developed countries*. He emphasized: /“BRICS was not created to be
an instrument of defense, but to be an instrument of attack. So we
could //*create our own currency*//to become independent from the US
dollar in our trade relations; to create a development bank, which
we did – but //*it is still too timid*//– to create something strong
capable of helping the development of the poorest parts of the
world.” /Lula made an explicit reference to the United States’ fears
about a new currency: /*“This was the logic behind BRICS, to do
something different*//and not copy anybody. The US was very much
afraid when I discussed a new currency and Obama called me, telling
me, ‘Are you trying to create a new currency, a new euro?’ I said,
‘No, //*I’m just trying to get rid of the US dollar. I’m just trying
not to be dependent.’”*/
* the leadership of the Workers’ Party was caught totally unprepared
by a conjunction of sophisticated hybrid-war techniques. One of the
largest economies in the world was *taken over by hardcore
neoliberals, practically without any struggle.* Lula confirmed it in
the interview, saying: /“We should look at where we got it wrong.”/
* Lula also hit a note of personal disappointment. *He expected much
more from BRICS. /“I imagined a more aggressive BRICS, more
proactive and more creative./*/‘The Soviet empire has already
fallen; let’s create a democratic empire.’ I think we made some
advances, but we advanced slowly. BRICS should be much stronger by
now.”/
* /“I want the Chinese at the negotiating table, //*not outside.*//Is
there any discord? Put them //*inside the WTO, let’s legalize
everything.’*//I know that [Chinese President] Hu Jintao was much
pleased."/
* on climate change, at Copenhagen,/"who is going to//*pay for the
historical pollution you perpetrated before China polluted? *//Where
is the history commission to analyze English industrialization? ...
they are going to blame Brazil, China, India, Russia. We need to
find a solution. Then I proposed that Celso call the Chinese and set
up a parallel meeting. That was between Brazil, China, India and
perhaps South Africa. Russia, I think, was not there... in this
meeting we amassed a great deal of credibility, because we refused
to blame the Chinese...”/
Ah, but from that appalling moment in December 2009 - the devil's deal
with Obama, Hillary Clinton and Todd Stern, a deal that is still, via
Durban in 2011 and Paris in 2015, amplifying the climate catastrophe -
it all went downhill very fast indeed... for discussion next time.
But what an excellent opportunity Escobar offers us all, to review
the three big pre-Trump analytical frameworks and strategic choices of
the last decade: 1) those advocating a "/centripetal"/ world economy
based on win-win globalisation, as articulated repeatedly from Beijing;
2) "/multipolar/" promoters like Lula and Escobar, seeking to break
dependency on the West - but with gradualism and cooperation; and 3)
those arguing that the "/centrifugal
<https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/57260497/Garcia_Bond_final.pdf?response-content-disposition=attachment%3B%20filename%3DAMPLIFYING_THE_CONTRADICTIONS_THE_CENTRI.pdf&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A%2F20190902%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20190902T042534Z&X-Amz-Expires=3600&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Signature=c93cf0c8cbcff033ec4b13dec6ee5b66c5f7eea944bfa5785acfd5e6c90e772f>/"
reality of crisis-prone neoliberal globalisation now means the centre
cannot hold, and everything starts spinning/apart/. The late Immanuel
Wallerstein offered that kind of analysis, way below, worth recalling,
as is so much of his work.)
https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/08/article/brics-was-created-as-a-tool-of-attack-lula/*
*
*Lula Jail interview*
Geopolitics
August 29, 2019
BRICS was created as a tool of attack: Lula
Former Brazilian leader wishes emerging economies were closer, recalls
Obama ‘crashing’ Copenhagen climate meet
ByPepe Escobar, Curitiba, Brazil
In a wide-ranging, two-hour-plus, exclusive interview from a prison room
in Curitiba in southern Brazil, former Brazilian president Luis Inacio
Lula da Silva re-emerged for the first time, after more than 500 days in
jail, and sent a clear message to the world.
Amid the 24/7 media frenzy of scripted sound bites and “fake news”, it’s
virtually impossible to find a present or former head of state anywhere,
in a conversation with journalists, willing to speak deep from his soul,
to comment on all current political developments and relish telling
stories about the corridors of power. And all that while still in prison.
The first part
<https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/08/article/lula-from-jail-tells-world-hes-back-in-the-game/>
of this mini-series focused on the Amazon. Here, we will focus on
Brazil’s relationship with BRICS and Beijing. BRICS
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRICS> is the grouping of major emerging
economies – Brazil, Russia, India and China – that formed in 2006 and
then included South Africa in their annual meetings from 2010.
My first question to Lula was about BRICS and the current geopolitical
chessboard, with the US facing a Russia-China strategic partnership. As
president, from 2003 to 2010, Lula was instrumental in formatting and
expanding the influence of BRICS – in sharp contrast with Brazil’s
current President, Jair Bolsonaro, who appears to be convinced that
China is a threat.
Lula stressed that Brazil should have been getting closer to China in a
mirror process of what occurred between Russia and China: “When there
was a BRICS summit here in Ceará state in Brazil, I told comrade Dilma
[Rousseff, the former president] that we should organize a pact like the
Russia-China pact. A huge pact giving the Chinese part of what they
wanted, which was Brazil’s capacity to produce food and energy and also
the capacity to have access to technological knowledge. Brazil needed a
lot of infrastructure. We needed high-speed rail, many things. But in
the end that did not happen.”
Lula defined his top priorities as he supported the creation of BRICS:
economic autonomy, and uniting a group of nations capable of helping
what the Washington consensus describes as LDCs – least developed countries.
He emphasized: “BRICS was not created to be an instrument of defense,
but to be an instrument of attack. So we could create our own currency
to become independent from the US dollar in our trade relations; to
create a development bank, which we did – but it is still too timid – to
create something strong capable of helping the development of the
poorest parts of the world.”
Lula made an explicit reference to the United States’ fears about a new
currency: “This was the logic behind BRICS, to do something different
and not copy anybody. The US was very much afraid when I discussed a new
currency and Obama called me, telling me, ‘Are you trying to create a
new currency, a new euro?’ I said, ‘No, I’m just trying to get rid of
the US dollar. I’m just trying not to be dependent.’”
One can imagine how this went down in Washington.
Obama may have been trying to warn Lula that the US ‘Deep State’ would
never allow BRICS to invest in a currency or basket of currencies to
bypass the US dollar. Later on, Vladimir Putin and Erdogan would warn
President Dilma – before she was impeached – that Brazil would be
mercilessly targeted. In the end, the leadership of the Workers’ Party
was caught totally unprepared by a conjunction of sophisticated
hybrid-war techniques.
One of the largest economies in the world was taken over by hardcore
neoliberals, practically without any struggle. Lula confirmed it in the
interview, saying: “We should look at where we got it wrong.”
Lula also hit a note of personal disappointment. He expected much more
from BRICS. “I imagined a more aggressive BRICS, more proactive and more
creative. ‘The Soviet empire has already fallen; let’s create a
democratic empire.’ I think we made some advances, but we advanced
slowly. BRICS should be much stronger by now.”
Lula, Obama and China
It’s easy to imagine how what has followed went down in Beijing. That
explains to a great extent the immense respect Lula enjoys among the
Chinese leadership. And it’s also relevant to the current global debate
about what’s happening in the Amazon. Let just Lula tell the story in
his own, inimitable, Garcia Marquez-tinged way.
“One thing that the Chinese must remember, a lot of people were angry in
Brazil when I recognized China as a market economy. Many of my friends
were against it. But I said, ‘No, I want the Chinese at the negotiating
table, not outside. Is there any discord? Put them inside the WTO, let’s
legalize everything.’ I know that [Chinese President] Hu Jintao was much
pleased.
“Another thing we did with China was at the COP-15 [Conference of
Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change] in Copenhagen
in 2009. Let me tell you something: I arrived at COP-15 and there was a
list of people requesting audiences with me – Angela Markel, Sarkozy,
Gordon Brown; Obama had already called twice – and I didn’t know why I
was important. What did they all want? They all wanted us to agree, at
COP-15, that China was the prime polluting evil on earth. Sarkozy came
to talk to me with a cinematographic assembly line, there were 30
cameras, a real show: Lula accusing China. Then I had a series of
meetings and I told them all, ‘Look, I know China is polluting. But who
is going to pay for the historical pollution you perpetrated before
China polluted? Where is the history commission to analyze English
industrialization?’’
“Then something fantastic happened. An agreement was not in sight, I
wanted Sarkozy to talk to Ahmadinejad – later I’ll tell you this thing
about Iran [he did, later in the interview]. Ahmadinejad did not go to
our dinner, so there was no meeting. But then, we were discussing,
discussing, and I told Celso [Amorim, Brazil’s Foreign Minister],
‘Look, Celso, there’s a problem, this meeting will end without an
agreement, and they are going to blame Brazil, China, India, Russia. We
need to find a solution.’ Then I proposed that Celso call the Chinese
and set up a parallel meeting. That was between Brazil, China, India and
perhaps South Africa. Russia, I think, was not there. And in this
meeting, imagine our surprise when Hillary Clinton finds out about it
and tries to get inside the meeting. The Chinese didn’t let her. All
these Chinese, so nervous behind the door, and then comes Obama. Obama
wanted to get in and the Chinese didn’t let him. China was being
represented by Jiabao [Wen Jiabao, the prime minister].
Lula and US President Barack Obama, on left, attend a meeting with
Chinese and other leaders in Copenhagen in December 2009 at the COP15 UN
Climate Change Conference. AFP / Jewel Samad
“Then we let Obama in, Obama said, ‘I’m gonna sit down beside my friend
Lula so I won’t be attacked here.’ So he sat by my side and started to
talk about the agreement, and we said there is no agreement. And then
there was this Chinese, a negotiator, he was so angry at Obama, he was
standing up, speaking in Mandarin, nobody understood anything, we asked
for a translation, Jiabao did not allow it, but the impression, by his
gesticulation, was that the Chinese was hurling all sorts of names at
Obama, he talked aggressively, pointing his finger, and Obama said, ‘He
is angry.’ The Brazilian ambassador, who said she understood a little
bit of Mandarin – she said he used some pretty heavy words.
“The concrete fact is that in this meeting we amassed a great deal of
credibility, because we refused to blame the Chinese. I remember a
plenary session where Sarkozy, Obama and myself were scheduled to speak.
I was the last speaker. When I arrived at the plenary there was nothing,
not a thing written on a piece of paper. I told one of my aides, please
go out, prepare a few talking points for me, and when he left the room
they called me to speak; they had inverted the schedule. I was very
nervous. But that day I made a good speech. It got a standing ovation. I
don’t know what kind of nonsense I said [laughs]. Then Obama started
speaking. He didn’t have anything to say. So there was this mounting
rumor in the plenary: He ended up making a speech that no one noticed.
And then with Sarkozy, the same thing.
“What I had spoken about was the role of Brazil in the environmental
question. I’ll get someone from the Workers’ Party to find this speech
for you. The new trend in Brazil is to try to compare policies between
myself and Bolsonaro. You cannot accept his line that NGOs are setting
fire to the Amazon. Those burning the Amazon are his voters,
businessmen, people with very bad blood, people who want to kill
indigenous tribes, people who want to kill the poor.”
***
*In a chaotic world, whose interests are served by the BRICS?*
Immanuel Wallerstein
(excerpt from his Commentary series, republished in /BRICS: An
anti-capitalist critique
<https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745336411/brics/> /in 2015)
The world-system is in serious trouble and it is causing pain to the
vast majority of the world’s population. Pundits and politicians grasp
at straws. They magnify every momentary, and usually transitory,
occurrence of slight improvements in the various measures we are
accustomed to using...
The world system is self-destructing. It is in what the scientists of
complexity call a bifurcation. This means that the present system cannot
survive, and that the real question is what will replace it. While we
cannot predict what kind of new system will emerge, we can affect the
choice between the substantive alternatives available. But we can only
hope to do this by a realistic analysis of existing chaotic swings and
not hide our political efforts behind delusions about reforming the
existing system or by deliberate attempts to obfuscate our understanding.
In this context, what role do the BRICS play?
In 2001, Jim O’Neill, then chair of Goldman Sachs Assets Management,
wrote an article for their subscribers entitled ‘The World Needs Better
Economic BRICs’. O’Neill invented the acronym to describe the so-called
emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India, and China, and to recommend
them to investors as the economic ‘future’ of the world-economy.
The term caught on, and the BRICs became an actual group that met
together regularly and later added South Africa to membership, changing
the small ‘s’ to a capital ‘S’. Since 2001, the BRICS have flourished
economically, at least relative to other states in the world system.
They have also become a very controversial subject. There are those who
think of the BRICS as the avant-garde of anti-imperialist struggle.
There are those who, quite to the contrary, think of the BRICS as
sub-imperialist agents of the true North (North America, western Europe
and Japan). And there are those who argue that they are both.
In the wake of the post-hegemonic decline of US power, prestige, and
authority, the world seems to have settled into a multipolar
geopolitical structure. In this current situation, the BRICS are
definitely part of the new picture. By their efforts to forge new
structures on the world scene, such as the interbank structure they are
seeking to create, to sit alongside and substitute for the International
Monetary Fund, they are certainly weakening still further the power of
the United States and other segments of the old North in favour of the
South, or at least of the BRICS themselves. If one’s definition of
anti-imperialism is reducing the power of the United States, then the
BRICS certainly represent an anti-imperialist force.
However, geopolitics is not the only thing that matters. We will also
want to know something about the internal class struggles within BRICS
countries, the relations of BRICS countries to each other, and the
relation of BRICS countries to the non-BRICS countries in the South. On
all three issues, the record of the BRICS is murky, to say the least.
How can we assess the internal class struggles within the BRICS
countries? One standard way is to look at the degree of polarisation, as
indicated by Gini measures of inequality. Another way is to see how much
state money is being utilised to reduce the degree of poverty among the
poorest strata. Of the five BRICS countries, only Brazil has
significantly improved its scores on such measures. In some cases,
despite an increase in the GDP, the measures are worse than, say, 20
years ago.
If we look at the economic relations of the BRICS countries to each
other, China outshines the others in rise in GDP and in accumulated
assets. India and Russia seem to feel the need to protect themselves
against Chinese strength. Brazil and South Africa seem to be suffering
from present and potential Chinese investing in key arenas.
If we look at the relations of BRICS countries to other countries in the
South, we hear increasing complaints that the way each of these
countries relates to its immediate (and not so immediate) neighbours
resembles too much the ways in which the United States and the old North
related to them. They are sometimes accused of not being ‘sub-imperial’
but of being simply ‘imperial’.
What makes the BRICS seem so important today has been their high rates
of growth since, say, 2000; rates of growth that have been significantly
higher than those of the old North. But will this continue? Their rates
of growth have already begun to slip. Some other countries in the South
– Mexico, Indonesia, (south) Korea, Turkey – seem to be matching them.
However, given the world depression in which we continue to exist, and
the low likelihood of significant recovery in the next decade or so, the
possibility that, in a decade, a future Goldman Sachs analyst will
continue to project the BRICS as the (economic) future is rather
dubious. Indeed, the likelihood that the BRICS will continue to be a
regularly meeting group with presumably common policies seems remote.
The world system’s structural crisis is moving too fast, and in too many
uncertain ways, to assume sufficient relative stability to allow the
BRICS as such to continue to play a special role, either geopolitically
or economically. Like globalisation itself as a concept, the BRICS may
turn out to be a passing phenomenon.
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