New Kids on the BLOC

How BRICS Became the Greatest Threat to the Anglo-American Establishment, and How the Move to Replace the U.S. Dollar is Closer Than You Think.

By the time the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, the United States had viciously established itself as one of history’s greatest hegemonic powers. Many commentators have since described the U.S. security state as "the world’s police," a description that doesn’t paint an entirely inaccurate picture.

Now, I love this country and what it’s supposed to represent and I intend to fight tooth and nail that it might once again live up to those lofty ideals, but I am not deluded enough to pretend that the United States hasn’t been the purveyor of countless atrocities the world over.

Of course, it wasn’t as if the American people came together and decided it would be in the nation’s best interest to spread military installations across the globe. Nor was it the will of the American people to engage in perpetual warfare to the benefit of a relatively small percentage of the population unencumbered by morality. This is a key point that many America-hating millennials can’t seem to reconcile: a nation should be defined by the will of its people, not the whims of a deeply embedded criminal political class.

The Western world as we refer to it is really an amalgamation of the United States and the British Empire. It is important that we remember, through Cecil Rhodes and the Milner group, that the British Empire continued to be spread via the U.S. and its military-industrial complex (See Carrol Quigley’s The Anglo-American Establishment.)

Perhaps it would be better to describe this monster I’m referring to with a more all-encompassing term like “Western hegemony,” which would expand the parameters to include the United Nations, NATO, the G7, etc.

I digress.

For many decades, it seemed as though the U.S. would never be dethroned; there were no other options for countries that were distrusting of the U.S., its security state, and its permanent political class.

That is, until the emergence of BRICS.

BRICS is a more than 20-year-old alliance between some of the United States’ most significant economic and military threats. The Acronym BRICS is derived from its primary member states' initials, those being: Brazil, Russia, China, India, and South Africa.

BRICS has been described as the “representatives of the Global South”, and they appear determined to offer an alternative to the G7. The G7 is an "informal forum" of heads of state of the world's most advanced economies, founded in 1975. Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, Japan, Canada, and the US are members, as is the EU.

BRICS is now providing a genuine alternative to the Western hegemony that has dominated the globe for centuries. Most notably, the BRICS Bank offers an alternative to the dynastic banking institutions that have long dominated global finance, I’m talking about the predatory class behind the World Bank, The Bank of International Settlements (BIS), and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

In 2014, with $50 billion (around €46 billion) in seed money, the BRICS nations launched the New Development Bank as an alternative to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. In addition, they created a liquidity mechanism called the Contingent Reserve Arrangement to support members struggling with payments.

These offers were not only attractive to the BRICS nations themselves, but also to many other developing and emerging economies that had had painful experiences with the IMF's structural adjustment programs and austerity measures. This is why many countries said they might be interested in joining the BRICS group. (#)

Most nations have had to silently stew in their hatred of the West for decades and are all too eager for this new alternative, and those nations that were previously on the fence are coming around to BRICS as a direct result of the proxy war in Ukraine.

In America, and most other Western countries, the masses see the war in Eastern Europe as some sort of Hollywoodesque battle between the feisty underdogs of Ukraine and the unquestionably evil and detestable Russians. The rest of the world, which has long been disillusioned with Western propaganda, sees it for what it really is: a proxy war between the BRICS and the Western Hegemon.

Of course, some will say that what is happening in Ukraine has nothing to do with the other member nations of BRICS, but that is not the case. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, the BRICS countries have only distanced themselves further from the West. Neither India, China, Brazil, or South Africa are taking part in the sanctions against Russia.

It is also worth noting that BRICS is looking to expand into geostrategic countries like Saudi Arabia, which is the primary anchor of Western power in the Middle East.

While the establishment goons in Washington are single-mindedly focused on dumping many tens of billions of dollars into Ukraine to fuel this war, China just waltzed into the Middle East and brokered a peace deal between two of the region’s most important countries: Iran and Saudi Arabia. (#)

This signals to the world that not only has China grown bold enough to do whatever it wants without fear of repercussion, but that U.S. influence is waning in the region.

The Middle East isn’t the only place where this trend is manifesting, we are also seeing anti-western sentiment throughout Africa as well. For example, Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces, or at least one of the factions within the RSF, appears to be in cahoots with Russia. See the breakdown below:

Even the Ukrainians themselves, despite currently being under attack by a BRICS member state. do not seem to trust the Western establishment very much.

A Ukrainian public opinion survey conducted via telephone interviews from July 25-27 sought to get a read on Ukrainian sentiment towards both Russia and the West.

…concerning NATO and the EU, a notable 71% of participants believe that these entities prioritize their own interests and instrumentalize Ukraine for their strategic objectives.

Impressively, 61% share the viewpoint that the support extended by NATO and the EU is driven by self-gain, and there are suspicions of clandestine negotiations with Russia. Only a modest 29% of those surveyed anticipate Ukraine’s accession to NATO within the coming year.

Although roughly half of the respondents anticipate the conclusion of the conflict with Russia by 2024, a majority harbor uncertainty regarding the aftermath. A substantial 56% fear that Ukraine might find itself indebted to Western nations due to the provision of weaponry and assistance during the war. (#)

The idea that NATO and the US are somehow the virtuous heroes of Ukrainians everywhere is a thought that can only be held in the vacant skulls of 1st-world normies. The lack of understanding required to believe that the CIA and the Military-Industrial Complex are suddenly concerned with doing the right thing and that they aren't acting purely in their own self-interest is really only possible with sufficient Western programming.

The rest of the world can’t afford to even entertain such a delusion, as the countless atrocities committed by the US security state are all too fresh and real in their minds. Many of these nations have had to endure predatory economic practices as well as unwanted regime changes staged by the CIA, and they are all too eager for a new alternative to Western dominance, and that alternative is BRICS.

DURBAN ACCORDS

 For this to make sense we need to establish a few things.

Since World War II, the U.S. dollar has enjoyed the role of global reserve currency. This means when companies or nations transacting with one another don’t share a common currency, they use U.S. dollars. When a Chilean copper mine sells tons of raw ore to a Canadian refiner, they invoice (and get paid) in U.S. dollars. 

Seems like a great deal for us, only it’s not really; our streets are obviously filled with homeless and the rest of the world hates us. It does, however, serve the Western hegemon’s ruling class.

So we get the world hooked on the USD, including loans that come with insane interest rates that’ll never be paid off, and we basically create vassal states. Any leaders who don’t want to play ball get iced and replaced with somebody who will, this has been thoroughly documented in John Perkins's “Confession of an Economic Hitman”. (I highly recommend this book, btw)

In 1971, President Nixon ended the convertibility of dollars to gold.

The rest of the world, to put it mildly, went nuts. The gold standard was supposed to prevent inflation – but it hadn’t (primarily because American citizens weren’t allowed to swap dollars for gold since 1933).

Absent a gold standard, how was the U.S. going to guarantee the value of the dollar? When challenged with this question by his counterparts at a G-10 meeting in Rome, U.S. Treasury Secretary John Connally astounded his audience by proclaiming:

“The dollar is our currency, but it’s your problem.”

With no restraint on money-printing, the U.S. went on to make a whole lot more dollars… Take a look at this chart. The blue line indicates total dollars (M2, a measure of money supply) and the red line indicates purchasing power, which has declined 86.6% over the decades:

So, along with dollars, the current system exports inflation, too. That’s what Connally meant when he said it was their problem.

Whether it’s marketed as a “peacekeeping operation” or a “police action,” going to war is ruinously expensive at best. Therefore, the U.S. historically uses financial sanctions as a “non-kinetic” method of dissuading behavior not in line with U.S. interests.

Simply because the world has to have dollars, whoever controls the dollar also has an outsized impact on the global economy. When the U.S. uses financial sanctions against another nation, we call that “weaponizing the dollar.”

Now, this has been going on for decades. Cuba, for example, has been sanctioned for over 60 years! Iran, for more than 40 years. In some sense, weaponizing the dollar is business as usual for the U.S. So it came as no surprise when, in 2022, the U.S. did it again.

In response to the invasion of Ukraine, the White House froze the Russian central bank’s $300 billion in U.S. dollar assets. A stroke of Joe Biden’s pen rendered them completely worthless. In addition, the Russian economy was shut out of SWIFT, the international money transfer system.

The results of this “shock and awe” economic warfare were underwhelming. The Russian economy failed to collapse – instead, they kept up business as usual, taking payment in yuan or rupees or gold instead of dollars.

And there are other consequences. As Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine wrote back in March of 2022:

But every time the U.S. and its allies kick a country off this system, it goes and finds other [methods] to use to trade. And other countries, countries that have not been kicked off the main network but who are not necessarily aligned with the U.S. in every way, think that the main network looks a bit less attractive… For another thing, the main system is visibly a tool of political power, and if you are not aligned with the U.S. you might worry about one day being kicked off the system yourself. So you get more interested in trying out alternative systems now, before you need them. And so kicking Russia out of the dollar-based international financial system makes it more likely that that system will be replaced, over time, by something else.

…the system is weakened each time it exercises its power. [emphasis added]

That’s what the Durban Accords on August 22nd are about – Levine’s “something else.”

As per Peter Regan at Birch Gold:

August 22nd may mark the beginning of the end of “business as usual”

You’ve seen that the BRICS nations cannot be ignored. Note that two of the five core members (Russia and China) are historically rivals of U.S. geopolitical dominance.

Both nations have been actively signing “bilateral trade agreements” with other nations – meaning they can buy and sell from one another in their own currencies, rather than using the dollar as an intermediary. But the whole reason a global reserve currency exists is to make international trade less cumbersome.

So the Durban Accords are an agreement, presumably to be announced on August 22nd, to launch a new, international currency backed by commodities. “Backed by commodities” is important – because it’s the easiest way for a new currency to gain credibility. Think about it – what currency in existence today derives its value from anything other than hope?

This new BRICS currency would allow participating nations to circumvent U.S. financial sanctions – and to avoid the problem of dollar inflation. (In other words, “our currency” is about to become “our problem”).

Initially, my sources indicate the BRICS currency could be backed by commodities produced and traded by BRICS nations – things like oil, industrial metals and grain – or, more likely, gold.

Backing their new currency with gold would be an obvious move for the BRICS. China and Russia are, respectively, the world’s #1 and #2 gold-mining nations (South Africa and Brazil are #13 and #14, respectively). Both China and Russia already have sizable official gold reserves (6th and 7th largest in the world).

That, in essence, is what the Durban Accords are all about:

• An alternative to U.S. global financial dominance

• A method of avoiding the weaponized U.S. dollar

• A way of avoiding inflation caused by excessive dollar-printing

• A means of simplifying and streamlining the bilateral trade agreements already in place

The Durban Accords may mean the first viable, useful alternative to the U.S. dollar.

And that’s why this is a very big deal.

P.S. On July 7, the Russian state-run media outlet RT confirmed the goal of the Durban Accords was to launch a “new trading currency backed by gold.”