EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR MONDAY JUNE 19, 2023

Help the BRICS Beat the Devil on Wall Street

June 18, 2023, 2022 (EIRNS)—New Development Bank (NDB) President Dilma Rousseff’s June 10 statement at a meeting with Honduran President Xiomara Castro, that “NDB’s strategic goal is to become the leading bank for emerging markets and developing countries,” was a sign that a battle is now joined on which the survival of mankind significantly depends: It is a race between the rapid emergence of a new credit and monetary architecture centered on the BRICS and its NDB; and financial and economic attempts to destroy the BRICS nations by Wall Street, the City of London and NATO.

A week after Rousseff’s statement, and two weeks after the crucial NDB Board meetings in Shanghai where new nation-members were discussed, the Wall Street Journal unloaded on the NDB (see report in this Briefing) and swore in the most lying of “commentaries” that the BRICS Bank is “struggling to survive” without the mighty U.S. dollar and would surely soon fail—fail at what, the writers feared even to mention. Hatred and fear of Rousseff’s new development strategy at the NDB drove that declaration of war from Wall Street.

China, already under partial trade embargo by the United States, is targeted in sanctions package No. 11 being prepared by the European Union—so are India, and Turkiye. Brazil and Argentina are threatened jointly for making trade agreements with China and making yuan payments and currency stabilization loans the center of them. Saudi Arabia, about to join and help capitalize the NDB, was lectured June 8 by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to stop joining economic relationships with China.

South Africa, host of the August 22-24 BRICS Summit, is being singled out for attack by NATO. President Cyril Ramaphosa joined a peace delegation to Ukraine and Russia of African presidents of Comoros (the current African Union president), Senegal, Zambia and South Africa, Egypt’s prime minister, and special representatives of the Presidents of the Republic of the Congo and Uganda; on the way, Polish authorities held the South African President on his plane for 10 hours and stripped his security detail before he entered Ukraine, and Italy had apparently denied the South African planes the right to fly over its airspace! There is a move in the U.S. Congress to decertify and expel South Africa from the African Growth and Opportunity Act, thus attacking one-eighth of its exports, 4% of its GDP and tens of thousands of jobs.

The so-called “de-dollarization” process is no longer one of nations taking precautions against an eventuality of crossing the United States, U.K. and NATO. Rather, it is a race; developing nations must make new monetary agreements based on new reserve currencies other than the dollar, fast, while they still can. The developing nations, led by the BRICS, must organize a new financial architecture, to overcome the rapidly intensifying financial warfare.

But if they do, they thereby offer the benefits of that new architecture to European and other nations pulled into “Global NATO,” that are sinking in quicksand. The EU nations’ war-economy budgets, and the budget of the EU itself, are admittedly out of money. The entire Eurozone 19-nation is officially in deepening recession, but the European Central Bank is still raising interest rates because inflation has resurged toward 8% (and 10% in the war-leader U.K.). Europe’s economies are being deindustrialized and looted during the war by its NATO “ally,” the United States. U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley has called the current Ukrainian counteroffensive “long, very violent, and very costly”—and that may be the most optimistic view.

Now U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, on June 13 in the House Financial Services Committee, has made the eyebrow-raising public statement that the U.S. dollar “will decline” in its share of foreign exchange reserves held by central banks internationally. Dominance of that share of central bank reserves is the fundamental measure of a global reserve currency, because so much of the conversion of currencies, and the creation of currency supplies for short-term trade credit, balance of payments lending, and investment among nations, is done within central banks using their foreign exchange reserves for those purposes.

But the immediate necessity is not to dethrone the reserve currency dollar, but to create credit for development projects in nations experiencing capital flight, a global food shortage, financial warfare, and the threat of a global “Hiroshima.”

If the developing nations can “beat the devil” on this, then the deepening European economic recession and deindustrialization will let the International Peace Coalition push popular majorities into actively opposing NATO’s war, beginning with Europe’s economically collapsing nations.

Lyndon’s and Helga LaRouche’s work of the past 35 years has put the spearpoint of this in the thinking of the major nations of the BRICS. Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s “Ten Principles for a New International Security and Development Architecture” are central to it now.