Lula vs Merikkka

Of course, the moment re-inaugurated Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva "cozies up" (scare quotes if not obvious) to China, there's trouble!

And, while Responsible Statecraft links to the WaPost hating on Lula? At the NYT, Rossty Douthat sort of has the receipts showing the Post is way wrong about how the US is playing out right now in the non-NATO world. He more than sort of shoots himself in the foot, though, albeit not as bad as he sometimes does.

He tries to frame this as "developed democracies" vs others. Well, Brazil, and India, may not be as economically developed as the US, but last I checked, both of them, and especially Brazil (Modi continues to make me wonder in India) were democracies. So is the "S" of "BRICS" — South Africa.

All three of them are quite arguably more democratic than Ukraine. Brazil, at least, is quite arguably more transparent, too.

And, of course, Ross never talks about US Coca-colonialism, soft-power imperialism or whatever.

He does indicate that Merikkka will have to swallow some hypocrisy as BRICS-type countries become more powerful.

Daniel Larison at Responsible Statecraft, the first link, is far better. He pivots from Lula to the US duopoly's ongoing disaster in Venezuela and refusal to face reality, for starters.

Coronavirus Week 67: Shots still not being gotten in US; lambda variant here; Indian dead massively undercounted?

Let's start with the second half of the header, because it puts everything else into perspective. The government of India officially claims a little over 400,000 COVID deaths. Some Western think tanks are saying the real number might be FOUR MILLION. Not all of that is due to the virulence of the Delta virus variant. Some of it is on the incompetence of the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. And, some of it's on Indian poverty. 

That said, I question an item or two in the story. It may not be "officially official," but, going by state health departments and such, Worldometers has a US death toll of 625K, not the 500K mentioned in the piece as "official." THAT then said, many researchers estimate that a few hundred thousand early deaths may have been missed. So, the real number may be 900K, not 700. In any case, even allowing for population difference, that's still below India's 4 million, if true.

As for the why? Per NPR, some of it may be chaos. But, I don't think it stresses enough the efforts of state governors from Modi's BJP to directly undercount deaths. (Remember, this has been alleged about the early days of COVID in China.)

Remember all of this when you hear BRIC or BRICS nations being touted. That's especially when said touting is by left-socialists, or Marxists like Richard D. Wolff who "can't be bothered" to mention The Cultural Revolution or Great Leap Forward when discussing China's putative-to-him inexorable rise to economic power. (Since he's a Marxist, such things are of course "inexorable" per the pseudoscience of the prescriptive side of Marxism.)

Finally? WHO's director general is pushing China hard to be more lab-transparent.

OK, with that, next, the second third of the header.

Texas

Yep, there's ANOTHER variant, called lambda. Only about 700 documented cases, but at least one of them is here in Texas. It's a "variant of concern," but believed to be less transmissible than delta.

Also here in Texas, it's bad enough that Austin has put out new social distancing recommendations. Recommendations, not regulations, because per Strangeabbott, they're not enforceable.

Statewide, with vaccination still under 45 percent, the delta variant has driven the state's positive test rate up above 10 percent.

And, that also includes information that leads to the first third.

National

As Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy calls out Facebook (and a lesser degree, Twitter, which lacks no "fake news" tag in its verticals for why I'm reporting a Tweet) for its role in vaccine disinformation, Facebook, including through the About Facebook blog, continues to lie by silence.

Springfield, Missouri, hospital director tells denialists to "shut up" as adult and pediatric cases all surge. And, this surge started way back at the Fourth of July weekend.

 

The liars and hypocrites at Fox, after repeatedly attacking so-called "vaccine passports" got busted by a leaked email as having their own.

That's as the Delta variant shows more ability to break past vaccination than previously reported.

Oh, white wingnuts who helped contribute to the biggest one-year drop in US life expectancy since WWII? Especially if in your 50s and early 60s, thank you! You paid in plenty to Social Security but took little to none, making it a bit more solvent for me.

St. Anthony of Fauci lied again earlier this week, and unlike over masks, his lies about gain-of-function research aren't even Platonic Noble Lies; they're shabby phrase-spinning.

Woke White Warriors are claiming antivaxxers are inherently racist. I refudiated this claim, showing it can't even prove they're racist specific to issues on the ground, let alone inherently so.

 

World

 

Of course Xi Jinping told WHO to "go get stupid" about its request for on-site follow-up coronavirus investigations.

The reality of BRIC nations' futures

Seeing who the Chinese Communist Party elected to top state leadership positions for the next five years, I think we can say serious political reform isn’t happening there in the near future. That means state-owned enterprises will continue to be propped up, and corruption will continue to happen. Add in the “demographic cliff” of the longer term, and it’s an open question as to how great an economic power China will be 20 years from now.

Russia? It’s clear that it’s all Putin, all the way down, until he croaks or a revolution knocks him off. And, as Pussy Riot shows, he’s only going to tighten his reins the longer he stays in power. That level of control stifles the non-corrupted part of the Russian economy. And, as the Middle East, Alaska and Texas show us, oil money corrupts. Declining oil money will corrupt even more, in Russia’s future.

What about India? Actual working, or theoretically working, democracy. Well, I just got done reading “Behind the Beautiful Flowers.” Beyond the poverty of Mumbai slums, the corruption, on a far more endemic, bottom-up level and way than China, is staggering, if what happens with local police, small-level politicians, city inspectors, etc., in poorer areas of Mumbai comes close to translating to the country as a whole. Add in India’s “demographic bomb” rather than “cliff” — that is, a deliberate push to surpass China in population, along with even worse resource degradation, and India’s sadly, but realistically, not a long-term economic power either.

That leaves Brazil.

Its democracy is newer than India’s but long enough now to seem reasonably stable. It’s got the best overall natural resources of the four, if it doesn’t overexploit them. It may just be the one BRIC that actually breaks through to the next level in the relatively near future.

Hey Brazil, blame China on the currency crisis

Don't blame us. This is NOT an issue of U.S. economic imperialism.

Criticize China for not upvaluing the yuan; don't criticize the U.S. for depreciating the dollar. That said, here's where U.S. diplomacy needs to separate China from the other BRIC nations (and yet others, like Thailand, mentioned in the article).

Meanwhile, good luck to the G-20 in resolving this. Oh, and way to show "leadership," Brazil, by refusing to participate in key talks this weekend.

That said, the U.S. is still trying to peel Brazil away from China:

An anonymous U.S. official avoided criticizing Brazil, noting that Brazil had resisted political pressure to keep its currency, the real, from rising. “The Brazilians have really framed the debate that we need to have at the G-20,” the official said. Brazil and India, the official said, are “among these countries that have the greatest to gain” from the G-20 process because a surge of foreign capital has threatened the stability of their fast-growing economies.

The real issue is that the G-20 is even more toothless than the G-8. It's like the U.N. General Assembly vs. the U.N. Security Council.

Yay, we're No. 11 here in America

The United States, on a combination of five major metrics used by Newsweek, with consultation from people like Joe Stiglitz, ranks No. 11 out of 100 nations on the globe. And, it's probably not going to get better immediately.

That said, as on other, similar surveys, small, homogenous countries like Finland, Sweden, Switzerland and South Korea outrank us on many things. But, given where most EU member nations rank, taking the EU as a whole, it would quite possibly outrank the U.S., too.

At the same time, leave it to Newsweek to tell a mainstream media lie about how, really, no really, the United States isn't an empire:

America spends more on defense than the rest of the industrialized world combined, not because it is inherently militaristic, but because the United States is the enforcer of the international system.

And, as long as the MSM tells lies like this, America will be inherently militaristic, as Mark Twain knew more than a century ago.

However, Chinese autocratic "capitalism" (which is really no more "capitalistic" than the U.S.) isn't a model for the rest of the world, either. Rather, "old" Europe may not be so sclerotic:

To put it bluntly, European businesses are kicking America's ass, as well as Japan's and China's. And the rest of the BRIC nations besides China. And, the earlier core EU of Western Europe could actually pick up the pace more. Picture EU expansion as being, other than the Greek debt crisis, something like how NAFTA was really supposed to work here in the New World, but didn't, primarily due to American big business greed, callousness and more.

And, since French President Sarkozy hosts the G8 and G20 later this year, has been making noise about more financial reform, and the EU in general has done more than just make noise about other regulatory tightening in the last couple of years, Obama had better sit up and take notice.

Anyway, here's how we stack up against 99 other countries on five metrics.

Copenhagen headed down in flames

It looks like the "swing point" for the Copenhagen climate control round is what to do with the Kyoto treaty - junk it or build on it. That, in turn, is a metaphor for larger decisions, and the philosophy behind them.

Unfortunately, nobody in Denmark is discussing my "three track" idea: Developed nations, developing nations in the true sense, and folks like the BRIC countries on a middle track, with binding targets, but on a slower timetable.

Meanwhile, both in Denmark and at home, while trying to straddle some things, Obama needs to do more.

Shooting BRICs in Russia at the US

Bloomberg has the lowdown on how Brazil and India are teaming with China and Russia to do some economic muscle-flexing.

Highlights include continued discussion on non-dollar investments, already committing to a 2010 BRIC summit in Rio, and continuing to flex regional muscle, especially, Russia and China at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which also met in Russia.

IMF issue bonds instead of loans? Many implications

A VERY intriguing idea got pushed today at G20 financial ministers’ talks at International Monetary Fund headquarters in Washington, D.C.

And that’s for the IMF to issue bonds, not loans, to countries in need of international financial assistance. The four BRIC countries are the pushers, while the U.S. and Eurozone are fighting it. Indeed, it appears BRIC countries are balking at ponying up massive new monies for the IMF unless the West actually discusses this as an idea on the table.

The bonus is that bonds would probably reduce to some degree the power of the “austerity measures” stick that the IMF has used for decades against developing nations, which is precisely why the West is resisting.

Little Timmy Geithner at the U.S. Treasury may be the U.S. official on whom the repayment for all our years of Chinese borrowing starts falling due.

And, along that line, bonds instead of loans, I think, could be played with more, to go partway toward Beijing wanting a backup global reserve currency. That, too, is certainly why the US is cool to the idea for a second reason.

EU pushes ahead on carbon-control fight

The European Union will unveil plans later this week to ramp up investment in fighting global warming, including floating ideas of a global carbon tax.

The EU wants to get the U.S. and the BRIC top-tier developing countries — Brazil, Russia, India and China — on board with the plan, which would offer help to lower-level developing countries to control carbon emissions.