They are doing these same things to Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and many countries in *América Latina.*
In bullying Africa, the traditional SA, US, European, Australian and Canadian corporations have been joined by major firms from China, India and Brazil. Their looting has mainly built upon colonial infrastructural foundations road, rail, pipeline and port expansion connected to mines, plantations, petroleum and gas. Introducing BRICS from above and BRICS-from-belowPatrick Bond2013-03-20, Issue 622 <http://www.pambazuka.org/en/issue/622> http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/86651<http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/86651> *cc P B* <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRIC>There seem to be three narratives about BRICS. The first is promotional and mainly comes from government and allied intellectuals; the second perspective is uncertainty, typical of fence-sitting scholars and NGOs; and the third is highly critical, from forces sometimes termed the independent left. In Durban, South Africa, five heads of state meet on March 26-27 to assure the rest of Africa that their countries corporations are better investors in infrastructure, mining, oil and agriculture than the traditional European and US multinationals. The Brazil-Russia-India-China-SA (BRICS) summit will also include 16 heads of state from Africa, including some notorious tyrants. A new $50 billion BRICS Bank will probably be launched. There will be more talk about monetary alternatives to the US dollar. There seem to be three narratives about BRICS. The first is promotional and mainly comes from government and allied intellectuals; the second perspective is uncertainty, typical of fence-sitting scholars and NGOs; and the third is highly critical, from forces sometimes termed the independent left. The first narrative is represented in this special issue of Pambazuka through the most intellectually-engaged speech about BRICS we have found by any local politician: Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, South Africas foreign minister. At a gathering of the 5th BRICS Academic Forum on March 10, she requested robust, critical engagement, and by reading the Recommendations of that groups meeting at the Durban University of Technology, you can assess whether she can be satisfied. We think not. Historians will judge whether, indeed, BRICS have given African nations the ability to start to escape the clutches of neo-colonial dependence on foreign aid, and the policies and advice of Western-controlled finance institutions as claimed by Pretorias minister of higher education Blade Nzimande at the same meeting. Historians may judge this line of argument to be Pretorian in thinking, with the term defined on one internet site this way: characteristic of or similar to the corruptible soldiers in the Praetorian Guard with respect to corruption or political venality; a large Praetorian bureaucracy filled with ambitious and often sycophantic people makes work and makes trouble Arthur M.Schlesinger Jr. >From Pretoria, the Human Sciences Research Council will host the temporary BRICS think tank, drawn from researchers at sites like the SA Institute for International Affairs at Jan Smuts House (long considered an Anglo American Corporation braintrust), and we worry that if the Academic Forums Recommendations are the basis for judgment so far, then Naomi Kleins definition of this sort of institution may apply here: people who are paid to think, by people who make tanks. So as you can already tell, the debate over BRICS is getting quite sharp, as witnessed both by Nkoana-Mashabanes use of Fanons Wretched of the Earth to attack those of us who question BRICS, and by the personal invective unveiled in a story by Peter Fabricius of the Star newspaper. He was reporting on a February 28 debate in Johannesburg involving the SA deputy foreign minister, ActionAid-South Africas director Fatima Shabodien (whose speech replete with pointed questions is reproduced below), and myself followed by my reply to Fabricius documenting the local ruling partys sell-out to international capital. Also at the critical end of the spectrum, Anna Ochkina of Moscows Institute for Globalisation and Social Movement Studies (not a think-tank by the Klein criterion) argues that there is merely a spectre of alliance. However, Vladimir Shubin provides a vigorous counter-argument. The critics note how badly divided the Brics bloc is at several crucial junctures, and indeed the one major unifying initiative in Durban aside from a Brics Bank announcement, is the highly dubious Africa gateway grab by South Africa. As I report (in From Nepad to Brics, South Africas toll at the gateway to Africa), this is not likely to end well, if the last decades experience is any guide. After all, as Tomaso Ferrando argues in great detail, the land grabbing underway by Brazil, India, China and South Africa is a shocking testimony of how the Berlin 1885 codification of colonial landgrabs is replaying now through Bilateral Investment Treaties and other legalistic attacks by Brics members and corporations. The victims are peasants and others reliant on land, water and related resources, as well as African food consumers. Moreover, if the strength of commitment to Africas basic survival is measured in part by the way the Brics have helped to cook the climate given an anticipated 200 million unnecessary African deaths this century due to floods, storms, droughts, famines and vastly increased disease burdens (carried especially by women) then the gateway metaphor is easily transformed into a rather hellish entryway, as I argue in another article. It doesnt have to be this way, according to University of California sociologist Chris Chase-Dunn, who believes Brics are not necessarily sub-imperialist; nor Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros who call for a Brics revivial of Non-Aligned strategies; nor University of Delhi political scientist Achin Vanaik. They see trajectories from the Brics semiperiphery that can move in counter-hegemonic directions, though Vanaik leans across the fenceline into Brics-sceptic territory. Another more mainstream voice who is doubtful that the Brics can overcome their useful idiot role is the prolific Sao Paolo geopolitical commentator Oliver Stuenkel. These searching essays require a final argument to help specify, well what exactly is this idea sub-imperialism, and can it travel across space and time from its early use in Brazil nearly a half-century ago? Or is Nkoana-Mashabane correct that this is simply outmoded, lazy intellectualism? You decide. *** But if you are thinking about these matters from below (or like me, within brics-from-the-middle), you will intrinsically understand that the debate is only beginning. Given how much is at stake, critical civil society must scrutinise the claims, the processes and the outcomes of the BRICS summit and its aftermath. Civil society critics point to four groups of problems in all the BRICS: socio-economic rights violations, including severe inequality, poverty, unemployment, disease, inadequate education and healthcare, costly basic services and housing, constraints on labour organising, and extreme levels of violence, especially against women (such as the high-profile rapes/murders of Delhi student Jyoti Singh Pandey last December 16, and in South Africa, of Anene Booysen on February 2 in Bredasdorp, Reeva Steenkamp on February 14 in Pretoria, and countless others); political and civil rights violations, such as widespread police brutality, increased securitisation of our societies, militarisation and arms trading, prohibitions on protest, rising media repression and official secrecy, activist jailings and torture, debilitating patriarchy and homophobia, and even state-sanctioned massacres (including in Durban where the notorious Cato Manor police hit squad executed more than 50 suspects in recent years); regional domination by BRICS economies, including extraction of hinterland raw materials, and promotion of Washington Consensus ideology which reduces poor countries policy space (for example, in the Brics 2012 donation of $75 billion to the International Monetary Fund with the mandate that the IMF be more nasty, according to South African Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan, or in the desire of China, Brazil and India to revitalise the World Trade Organisation to maximise their trading power against weaker neighbours); and maldevelopment based on elite-centric, consumerist, financialised, eco-destructive, climate-insensitive, nuclear-powered strategies which advance corporate and parastatal profits, but which create multiple crises within all the Brics (as witnessed during the Marikana Massacre carried out by police on behalf of Lonmin platinum corporation last August, and in South Durban where R225 billion ($25 bn) in white-elephant state infrastructure subsidies for chaotic port, freight and petrochemical industry expansion and more labour-broking exploitation are being vigorously resisted by victim communities). Confusingly to some, BRICS regimes carry out this agenda at the same time they offered radical, even occasionally anti-imperialist rhetoric, accompanied by mainly trivial diplomatic actions. Yet the BRICS alliance is incoherent, as shown in the elites debilitating disagreement over who would lead the IMF and World Bank in 2011-12. In the UN Security Council, BRICS countries seek greater power for themselves, not the collective: repeated bids for permanent membership by India, Brazil and South Africa are opposed by Russia and China. And recall the humiliation when Beijing told Pretorias Home Affairs Minister (now African Union chairperson) Nkozasana Dlamini-Zuma not to grant a visa to the Dalai Lama to attend Archbishop Tutus 80th birthday party in 2011, or attend a 2009 Tibet solidarity gathering. We seem to have lost foreign policy autonomy to Chinese whims. Meanwhile, the African continent has been overwhelmed by BRICS corporations. The rate of trade between Africa and the major emerging economies especially China rose from 5 to 20 percent of all commerce since 1994, when apartheid ended. Destructive though it often is, one of Pretorias leading objectives, according to deputy foreign minister Marius Fransman, is that South Africa presents a gateway for investment on the continent, and over the next 10 years the African continent will need $480 billion for infrastructure development. Resource Curse maldevelopment often follows such infrastructure. This is also true, geopolitically, when it comes to facilitating Brics investments. In January 2013, for example, Pretoria deployed 400 troops to the Central African Republic during a coup attempt because We have assets there that need protection, according to deputy foreign minister Ebrahim Ebrahim. Allegations by a former South African official are that these mineral interests include uranium arranged via corrupt heads-of-state collaboration, and has Ebrahim confirmed that Pretoria sent sophisticated arms to the brutal regime of François Bozizé. Other extreme cases are the Democratic Republic of the Congo where Johannesburg-based mining capital (AngloGold Ashanti) paid off warlords in a region where five million people were killed mainly to get access to minerals such as the coltan we use in our cellphones, and Zimbabwe where Chinese firms and a military junta along with SA businesses, Indian and Israeli traders, Dubai middlemen and other vultures prop up President Robert Mugabes rule, together looting the country of billions of dollars worth of diamonds. In 2010, 17 out of Africas top 20 companies were South African, even after extreme capital flight from Johannesburg a decade earlier, which saw Anglo American, De Beers, SA Breweries and Old Mutual relocate to London. Just as in Cecil John Rhodes day, the greed of South African business is backed by government officials, through the (failed) New Partnership for Africas Development praised as philosophically spot on by the Bush Administration and useless African Peer Review Mechanism. More recently, South Africas National Development Plan conceded that there is a perception of the country as a regional bully. In bullying Africa, the traditional SA, US, European, Australian and Canadian corporations have been joined by major firms from China, India and Brazil. Their looting has mainly built upon colonial infrastructural foundations road, rail, pipeline and port expansion connected to mines, plantations, petroleum and gas. There is similar collusion with Washington when it comes to global finance: in July 2012, the BRICS treasuries sent $75 billion in fresh capital to the IMF, which was seeking new funds for bailing out for banks exposed in Southern Europe. Like Africas experience since the early 1980s, the resulting austerity in Greece, Spain, Portugal, Cyprus, Ireland and other failing European states does far more harm than good to both local and global economies. As for voting power within the IMF, the result of this BRICS intervention was that China gained many more votes (for dollars rule at the IMF), while Africa actually lost a substantial fraction of its share. For these reasons, will Durban 2013 be known as the logical successor to Africas initial carve-up: Berlin 1885? Building a bottom-up civil society network to analyse, watchdog and represent silenced voices of dissent has never been more important. One part of this process involves an analysis of the pros and cons of BRICS. We hope you the reader can join the conversation because from Africa, too little has been said about BRICS, given how much is at stake. * Patrick Bond directs the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society. * BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS ------------------ The Unemployed Peoples Movement will not be Participating in the So-Called Peoples Space at the BRICS Meeting in DurbanSubmitted by Abahlali_3 on Mon, 2013-03-25 17:09. NGOs <http://abahlali.org/taxonomy/term/1845> | The Black Consciousness Movement <http://abahlali.org/taxonomy/term/3451> | The Fifth BRICS Summit (in Durban) <http://abahlali.org/taxonomy/term/3849> | Umlazi <http://abahlali.org/taxonomy/term/1581> | Unemployed People's Movement <http://abahlali.org/taxonomy/term/1830> Sunday, 24 March 2013 Unemployed Peoples Movement Press Statement *The Unemployed Peoples Movement will not be Participating in the So-Called Peoples Space at the BRICS Meeting in Durban* The Unemployed Peoples Movement will not be participating in the so-called Peoples Space at the BRICS meeting in Durban. Our Umlazi branch received a phone call recently informing us that buses were being provided for us to send our members to the so-called Peoples Space at the Centre for Civil Society at UKZN. We were instructed to mobilise to fill the buses. We made it clear that we will not be participating in this space. We were given no role in the process leading up to the BRICS meeting and we have been given no role in planning the so-called Peoples Space or in its management. The experience of grassroots movements at the so-called Peoples Space at the COP17 meeting in Durban, also hosted by the Centre for Civil Society, was terrible. We were not given any role in the planning of that space. We were just bussed in. We were given inferior accommodation and food. We found that our role was just to sit and listen to overseas experts talking to us. There was a protest by the movements against the organisers of that meeting. They responded by buying us fried chicken but did not take our concerns seriously and discuss a better way forward for the future. This was one more insult. This was not the first time that movements have been expressing their concerns about these NGO organised meetings. Movements have been raising concerns about these meetings for many years but we have either been ignored or criminalised by the NGOs and academics. We are highly aware that when grassroots movements walked out of the Social Movements Indaba meeting, also held by the Centre for Civil Society, at UKZN in 2006 they were called criminals in the media and have been attacked by the NGOs and academics ever since. We are prepared for the same treatment. In the days of the WSSD in Johannesburg grassroots movements had lots of supporters but were organisationally weak. All that the NGOs had to do to secure popular support was to provide buses and hand out T-shirts for movements like the Landless Peoples Movement. But Movements are much stronger now in organisational terms and those days are gone. These so-called Peoples Spaces are really NGO and academic spaces where the role of grassroots activists is just to be bussed in to listen to experts in exchange for a few crumbs for the movement leaders. The reason that we condemn this is that we subscribe to Black Consciousness. The Black Consciousness movement emerged in 1968 when black students walked out of a NUSAS meeting in Grahamstown because whites were doing all the thinking and talking while blacks were playing a passive role. Today the situation is just as bad or even worse in these so-called Peoples Spaces. Therefore today we continue to walk out of spaces where we are disrespected and are only being bussed in to legitimate other peoples agendas. Also, we experience these so called reality tours as if we are being treated as animals in a zoo. We have made it clear that we will not be collaborating with so-called reality tours in our communities. We insisted that a tour scheduled to take place in Umlazi today be cancelled. The NGOs and donors are trying to control and commercialise our struggles at these international meetings. If they want to work with us in the future they will need to do so on a respectful and fully democratic basis. We want partnership and not domination and exploitation. We discussed our position on this matter at the Democratic Left Front national steering committee meeting in Johannesburg last week. We remain committed to the struggle against imperialism but that struggle needs to be rooted in democratic practices. Bheki Buthelezi, Unemployed Peoples Movement (KwaZulu-Natal) 072 639 9898 Ayanda Kota, Unemployed Peoples Movement (Eastern Cape) 078 625 6462 [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:laamn-unsubscr...@egroups.com> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:laamn-subscr...@egroups.com> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:laamn-dig...@egroups.com> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:laamn-ow...@egroups.com?subject=laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:la...@egroups.com> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/laamn@egroups.com> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! 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