Israel's Genocide in Gaza is like Hitler's Holocaust | President of Brazil

Speaking at an African Union summit in Ethiopia on Sunday, February 18, Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva delivered a scathing condemnation of Israel's genocide in Gaza that compares only to the Holocaust.

 

» What’s happening in the Gaza Strip with the Palestinian people hasn’t happened at any other moment in history. Actually, it has happened: when Hitler decided to kill the Jews. It’s not a war of soldiers against soldiers. It’s a war between a highly prepared army, and women and children. «

 

By that day Israel’s assault on Gaza had killed at least 28,858 people, mostly women and children, according to Palestinian authorities. Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu predictably dismissed Lula’s Holocaust parallel as “antisemitic, disgraceful and grave,” while Foreign Minister Israel Katz announced that Jerusalem “will not forget nor forgive” the alleged “serious anti-Semitic attack” and that Lula is “a persona non grata in Israel” until he takes back his comments. But Lula refused to bow down. On Monday, Brazil expelled the Israeli ambassador and recalled its ambassador from Tel Aviv, thus ending all diplomatic relations with Israel.

 

The irony is that Lula da Silva’s statement only confirms what Israeli politicians have been saying out loud over the past four months, and whose genocidal statements were cited as damning evidence at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) genocide hearing last month. Israeli officials and top generals themselves have openly called for genocide in Gaza, pledging to turn the besieged strip into Auschwitz and Dresden, and even celebrating such atrocities.

 

Reference:

Aljazeera (Feb 18, 2024) - Brazil’s Lula compares Israel’s war on Gaza with the Holocaust.

The BRICS+ Currency | James G. Rickards

A new BRICS+ currency will be announced in Durban, South Africa, at the annual BRICS Leaders’ Summit Conference on August 22–24, 2023 [...] In all likelihood, the new BRICS+ currency would not be available in the form of paper notes for use in everyday transactions. It would be a digital currency on a permissioned ledger maintained by a new BRICS+ financial institution with encrypted message traffic to record payments due or owing by participating parties. (This is not a cryptocurrency because it is not decentralized, not maintained on a blockchain and not open to all parties without approval.)

BRICS stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, representing about 27% of the world's land
surface, 41% of the global population, and 32% of global GDP PPP.
The most important development in the BRICS system concerns the expansion of BRICS membership.
This has led to the informal adoption of the name BRICS+ for the expanded organization.
Currently 10 additional nations formally applied for membership:
Algeria, Argentina, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
24 countries have expressed interest in joining the BRICS:
Afghanistan, Angola, Belarus, Comoros, Cuba, D.R. Congo, Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Honduras, Kazakhstan, Mexico,
Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Senegal, Sudan, Syria, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, Uganda, Uruguay, Venezuela
and Zimbabwe.
By every measure — population, landmass, energy output, GDP, food output and nuclear weapons — BRICS is not
just another multilateral debating society. They are a substantial and credible alternative to Western hegemony.
The BRICS are developing an optical fiber submarine telecommunications system that would connect its members.
It is being developed under the name BRICS Cable. Part of the motivation for BRICS Cable is to foil spying by
the U.S. National Security Agency on message traffic carried through existing cable networks.

[...] It appears likely that the new BRICS+ currency will be linked to a weight of gold. This plays to the strengths of BRICS members Russia and China, who are the two largest gold producers in the world and are ranked sixth and seventh respectively among the 100 nations with gold reserves.

 

[...] Reserve currencies are essentially the savings accounts of sovereign nations that have earned them through trade surpluses. These balances are not held in currency form but in the form of securities. When analysts say the dollar is the leading reserve currency, what they actually mean is that countries hold their reserves in securities denominated in a specific currency. For 60% of global reserves, those holdings are U.S. Treasury securities denominated in dollars. The reserves are not actually in dollars; they’re in securities. As a result, you cannot be a reserve currency without a large, well-developed sovereign bond market. No country in the world comes close to the U.S. Treasury market in terms of size, variety of maturities, liquidity, settlement, derivatives and other necessary features.

[June 29, 2023]
Jail break acceleration:
Ethiopia, one of Africa's fastest-growing economies, is
aiming to become the latest brick in the firewall against U.S.-imperialism.

[...] The BRICS+ currency offers the opportunity to leapfrog the Treasury market and create a deep, liquid bond market that could challenge Treasuries on the world stage almost from thin air. The key is to create a BRICS+ currency bond market in 20 or more countries at once, relying on retail investors in each country to buy the bonds. The BRICS+ bonds would be offered through banks and postal offices and other retail outlets. They would be denominated in BRICS+ currency but investors could purchase them in local currency at market-based exchange rates. Since the currency is gold backed it would offer an attractive store of value compared with inflation- or default-prone local instruments in countries like Brazil or Argentina. The Chinese in particular would find such investments attractive since they are largely banned from foreign markets and are overinvested in real estate and domestic stocks. [...] The sheer volume of retail investing in BRICS+-denominated instruments in India, China, Brazil and Russia and other countries at the same time could absorb surpluses generated through world trade in the BRICS+ currency. In short, the way to create an instant reserve currency is to create an instant bond market using your own citizens as willing buyers.

 

The United States exploits the world's wealth with the help of "seigniorage."
It costs only about 17 cents to produce a 100 dollar bill, but other countries
had to pony up 100 dollar of actual goods in order to obtain one (HERE)

 

[...] This entire turn of events — introduction of a new gold-backed currency, rapid adoption as a payment currency and gradual use as a reserve asset currency — will begin on August 22, 2023, after years of development. Except for direct participants, the world has mostly ignored this prospect. The result will be an upheaval of the international monetary system coming in a matter of weeks.

Quoted from:
James G. Rickards (June 06, 2023) - The BRICS+ Currency.

 

See also:

James G. Rickards (2012) - Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis.  

TPR (2014) - March 18, 2014  - Pivot of History: The Ascent of a Multi-Polar World System.

TPR (2016) - The End of Cheap China: 16 Emerging Low Wage Economies.

TPR (2022) - Bankster's Paradise.

Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China (2023) - US Hegemony and Its Perils.

Emerging Markets Business Cycle | Approaching Gradual Recovery

Source: Morgan Stanley Research

Morgan Stanley Research (Jul 21, 2016) - There are five phases of the emerging markets cycle:

1. Productive growth, a stage of moderate to high productivity-driven growth;
2. Misallocation, in which there is moderate growth driven by bad macro policies;
3. Adjustment;
4. Restoring Macro Stability, and finally
5. Gradual Recovery.

A large number of emerging markets have moved into the “restoring macro stability” recently — which means that growth is still weak, but the economy is stabilizing. Russia, Brazil, Turkey, and Thailand are in this category Global GDP growth might get a boost next year, as some economies approach the end of the “emerging markets business cycle” and begin a gradual recovery.

These economies are not necessarily strong yet, but do show signs of increasing stable growth — except for Turkey, whose economy could be negatively impacted after the failed coup attempt. Thailand, for example, still has weak domestic demand and exports, but its economy is growing, partly due to robust growth in tourism, and Russian oil has managed to prosper even with today’s low prices. Brazil is still dealing with an economic crisis, which is exacerbated by its political one — but financial markets reacted favorably to news of the possibility of the president’s impeachment, and a Brazilian economist said that “the expected changes in the government and its economic policies could represent the beginning of a gradual return of investor confidence in Brazil,” and that the economy should return to growth by 2017.

If these countries move into the recovery stage in the next year, it would drive an acceleration in emerging market growth for the first time in four years. Morgan Stanley expects the GDP growth of emerging markets, excluding China, to accelerate from 2.7% to 3.8% in 2017. Those markets together make up 37% of global GDP. Countries that are already in this “recovery” phase include Mexico, which has the 11th-high GDP in the world but is still considered a developing country, and India, which has been called the “biggest turnaround story” in emerging markets because of its slow, gradual growth over the past few years. Meanwhile, China is still in the “misallocation” stage — the one with moderate growth but bad macroeconomic policies. Also in this category is Korea, whose low growth has been largely caused by declining trade with China.