BRICS Vs. the G7 - The Globalist

 BRICS Vs. the G7

How do the BRICS stack up against the G7 group of nations?

October 23, 2024

By The Globalist

[PRA: Muito simplista essa comparação, sem muito sentido prático, pois faz apenas uma agregação de dados não comparáveis.]

    

Author

The Globalist

BRICseconomyG7Just the Factspopulation

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BRICS member states now represent 45% of the world's population, while the G7 (United States, Germany, Canada, France, Great Britain, Italy and Japan) only account for 10%.

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The BRICS countries account for 35% of global GDP, while the G7 only represents 30%.

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BRICS member states are responsible for approximately 50% of global CO2 emissions, compared to approximately 21% produced by the G7.

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Membership of the BRICS has expanded well beyond the initial five members — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

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The term BRICS+ is now mostly used, as Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) officially joined in 2024.

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More than 40 countries have expressed an interest in membership — including NATO member Turkey and Indonesia.

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However, the interests of major players such as China, India and Brazil are becoming increasingly difficult to align into a common strategy. Brazil and India want to portray themselves as "non-aligned."

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In contrast, Russia, China and Iran are keen to compete with the dollar as a reserve currency, to circumvent sanctions and to present a counter-model to the West, which is perceived as too dominant.

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Meanwhile, countries such as South Africa and Egypt, on the other hand, attach importance to economic diversification and strengthening the voice of the global South without burning all other bridges.

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For its part, China is attempting to dominate the BRICS alliance politically. However, India is growing into another major regional power that is competing with China's ambitions — especially as India is acting in an ambivalent strategic manner.

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For India, BRICS membership is increasingly becoming a balancing act. It is the only country in the group to find itself in open conflict with heavyweight China.

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India clearly rejects the anti-Western course that China, Russia and Iran would like to see for the BRICS. Delhi is also skeptical about the attempt to push for a move away from the dollar.

Sources: Financial Times, Handelsblatt, Destatis, Reuters, Statista, Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy

Trump: um narcisista incurável - Michael J. Brenner (The Globalist)

 É absolutamente surpreendente como o velho Partido Republicano e milhões de americanos “normais”, cidadãos eleitores, se deixaram capturar por um debiloide total. PRA

https://theglobalist.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=fe900a29e67b9f5bd30ac3091&id=32f5c83882&e=23ed0dfe5f 

Narcissism and Trump: The Long Story

Dear reader, The U.S. presidential TV debate last week underscored two points about Donald Trump that increasingly stun even many Republican politicians in the United States.    The first one is his deep-seated narcissism. The second one is his exhibiting a level of ADHD (attention deficit disorder) that makes it so hard to connect any of the dots of what he may be saying.   In our weekend feature "Narcissism and Trump: The Long Story,” Michael J. Brenner explores the clinical psychology of narcissism epitomized by Trump and how U.S. political culture is becoming progressively more related to conduct associated with narcissism.    Cheers, Stephan Richter Publisher and Editor-in-Chief

A Sordid Centennial: Hitler’s Trial in 1924 and Trump’s Trials Today - Peter Ross Range (The Globalist)

 

Global Pairings

A Sordid Centennial: Hitler’s Trial in 1924 and Trump’s Trials Today

The 100th anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s 1924 trial for treason summons direct parallels to Donald Trump’s upcoming trial for insurrection.

The Globalist, February 22, 2024

https://www.theglobalist.com/adolf-hitler-donald-trump-germany-united-states-fascism-1924-beer-hall-putsch-trial-democracy/

By Peter Ross Range

This month marks a sordid centennial. February 26 is the 100th anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s 1924 trial for trying to overthrow a democratically elected government.

From 1924 to 2024, it almost seems as if little has changed.

While there are many reasons to wake up to the threat of Donald Trump’s authoritarian politics, the memory of Hitler’s crimes and trial should be yet another.

The Beer Hall Putsch

Hitler’s trial was for the infamous Beer Hall Putsch in Munich that left 20 men dead. It resonates so loudly today because Trump faces trial for essentially the same thing: Trying to derail a democratically elected government by inciting an insurrection that led to five deaths and countless injuries.

Trump may not be Hitler, but the parallels between the two men and their legal entanglements have become too glaring — and too alarming — to ignore.

Political soapbox

For starters, Trump, like Hitler, instinctively uses the courtroom as a political soapbox. Each man casts himself as a victim, and responds to charges by attacking his accusers.

Both men recklessly predicted mayhem if convicted, and each portrayed himself as a political savior — Hitler as a millennial “great personality,” Trump as “your retribution” along with he megalomaniac claim that “only I” can save the nation.

Strategy: Delegitimize the opponent

Finally, there is delegitimization. With his incessant denial of the 2020 election results — a classic Hitlerian Big Lie — the former U.S. President brazenly seeks to delegitimize not just his trial, but the very government that is trying him.

He even threatens future criminal charges against President Joe Biden, whom Trump has labeled “the destroyer of American democracy.”

Grisly threats

Hitler used the same nullification tactic. He denied the authority of Germany’s first democracy known as the Weimar Republic, which he called “a joke.”

The men who founded and led Germany’s nascent republic would “hang from lampposts,” Hitler raged — or, as he put it another time, their “heads would roll in the sand” once the Nazis took over.

Trump does not shy from such grisly intimations. His assertion that, if re-elected, he will be “a dictator on day one” precisely echoes a threat Hitler made while contemplating his ascent to power: “Oh, I will take merciless and frightful revenge on the first day that I can.”

In the same spirit, Trump once suggested the execution of former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair, Gen. Mark Milley, and reportedly endorsed January 6 rioters who chanted, “Hang Mike Pence!”

Creating a national profile

For Hitler, such tactics worked in 1924. With lengthy courtroom perorations — his Munich trial lasted a month — the Nazi leader garnered national headlines that gave him, for the first time, a national profile.

The publicity won him new adherents, like a young man in the Rhineland, 400 miles away, named Joseph Goebbels, who pronounced himself “inspired” by Hitler’s courtroom antics.

Hitler was found guilty

During the trial, Hitler mounted ferocious attacks on his attackers that threw the proceedings into disarray and nearly won him acquittal.

Yet, in the end, Hitler was found guilty of treason, for which he received a laughable five-year sentence with the possibility of parole in six months. For treason, the Nazi could have received life in prison with no parole.

From the fascist’s mouth

His months behind bars became a boon to Hitler. He hardened his radical views, especially towards Jews, solidified his messianic self-image and wrote “Mein Kampf,” the venomous memoir that jumpstarted his final march to dictatorship.

Trump has said that he never read “Mein Kampf.” It is unknown if he has ever read Hitler’s speeches. But it is clear that Trump blithely takes words right out of Hitler’s mouth. These include Trump’s scurrilous recent claims that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

Slurs and smears

This smear comes from Hitler’s very first speech after leaving prison. Before a packed crowd in the same beer hall where his coup d’état had failed, Hitler ranted that the greatest danger facing Germany was the “foreign racial poison in our bodies.”

Conjuring scenes of German girls strolling the streets of Berlin on the arms of Jewish boys, the beer hall rabble rouser accused Jews who slept with German women of “destroy[ing] our blood for eternity in a single instant.” (Hitler regarded Jews as a separate race and foreigners even though their families had often been in Germany for generations, even centuries).

Copycatting Hitler

Trump’s adoption of another vile slur — “vermin” — also comes directly from Hitler. Invoking diseased rodents and noxious parasites in political life is as low as it gets. Yet, that is where Trump went last November, calling his political opponents “thugs that live like vermin.”

To Hitler, “Jewish vermin” had wrought Germany’s defeat in World War I.

Dehumanizing the other

Sadly, the effrontery of these words is not the worst of it. It is their impact on behavior that raises them from disgusting to dangerous —and dehumanizing. As Hitler knew and Trump has learned, dehumanization couched in grievance is the enabling precondition for violence.

One hundred years ago, Hitler used the courtroom for self-promotion and his prison time for a reset, enabling his successful climb to power.

Preconditions for authoritarianism

Trump is already trying the first tactic, and has vowed to use the second — possible jail time for political advantage. His ominous predictions of chaos echo his “Will be wild!” tweets in 2020 that became self-fulfilling prophecies of violence, the classic preliminary of authoritarian rule.

In 1930s Germany, Hitler’s Brown Shirts assured the turmoil. In today’s United States, Trump’s followers — some of them — carry weapons, threaten force and murmur civil war.

Conclusion

On this squalid anniversary of Hitler’s trial, U.S. voters should take on board the chilling parallels and not shy from sharing the disturbing resemblance of today’s politics to yesterday’s horrors.

There is no law that history cannot repeat itself.

The Globalist: O fim do papel na civilização que o inventou - Branko Milanovic and the Paperless country, China

Global Diary

Paperless China?

January 7, 2024

Dear reader, The abolition of paper is in full swing in the country that invented it – China. As our contributor Branko Milanovic discovered, what is striking in today’s China is the complete disappearance of paper as a means to convey information. And while similar developments are observable elsewhere, China is ahead. This begs the question: Is placing all of modern knowledge in the electronic format a good idea? After all, it has already revealed its weaknesses – many websites, links and blogs where information was stored are already by now broken, deleted or have been moved elsewhere. Viewed in a global context, does this mean that when our civilization vanishes, the new researchers, perhaps thousands of years away, will eventually be faced by the conundrum: Did literacy simply disappear? Enjoy this fascinating read. Cheers, Stephan Richter Publisher and Editor-in Chief Global Diary January 7, 2024 Paperless China?  By Branko Milanovic  The abolition of paper is in full swing in the country that invented it.  https://www.theglobalist.com/paperless-china/  China is considered to have been the first country (civilization) to have created the modern version of paper. Paper is listed as one among the four big Chinese inventions (the other three are the compass, gun powder and printing). Perhaps it will be the first country to “dis-invent” paper, too. Coming full circle? What is striking in today’s China, compared to even as recently as five years ago, is the complete disappearance of paper. I mean paper as a means to convey information – not paper as in paper napkins in cafés. Some of this disappearance is perhaps justifiably celebrated. Instead of metro cards that can be easily displaced, there are electronic tickets on cell phones. Instead of plastic credit cards, there are Alipay and similar systems available on your phone. Instead of crumpled banknotes, there are touchless screens to use for payments. Slightly ahead of the rest of the world It would be wrong to take this as an ideological feature linked to the current system of electronic surveillance in China. Very similar developments are observable elsewhere, in all modern societies. China is just slightly ahead of the rest of the world. But, even the very ideological dimension of political propaganda is affected by this. In the past, Chinese museums linked with various CPC events had on display a variety of officially-approved publications – speeches, resolutions and biographies. Almost nothing of that remains. In the excellent Shanghai museum dedicated to the founding congress of the Chinese Communist Party, there is just one book that can be bought in the museum store. The store sells pens, badges, umbrellas, toys, bags and pandas – but no written documents. One would search in vain for such elementary publications as the Founding Act of the CPC, its first resolutions etc. Moreover, looking at the rich exhibits that deal with the New Culture movement of the 1920s and numerous publications that are displayed in the museum, one wonders what could in the future be shown from similar cultural movements of today? Copies of emails? Laptops where the texts are stored? The dematerialization of information Such dematerialization of information can be celebrated, perhaps at times excessively given the relatively modest gains in efficiency that are achieved compared to the older system. But the paeans disregard one important feature. People’s interactions are not solely based on the present. Our interactions and opinions are so many “bottles thrown into the sea” in the hope of explaining our current thinking and conveying to the future what we feel and what we have learned. This is the advantage of a written system compared to the oral. The oral system could neither transmit information over time, nor do it accurately. We have Homer’s verses today because somebody eventually was able to write them down. Things would not have come to us had they not been preserved on scripts made of papyrus. Or, even better, as the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans did, preservation of certain facts was entrusted to the stone. It was more durable than paper – but it was hard to carve and carry longer and more complex messages. Goodbye newspapers In the three weeks I spent in China, I saw two desultory copies of a Chinese-language newspaper in a Beijing hotel and “China Daily” displayed in a bar not touched by anyone, one person reading what appeared to be a newspaper in a Shanghai museum and a father reading a comic book to his child on a train. I saw no other piece of information recorded on paper. Surely, I went to a big bookstore in Shanghai with six floors of books, or have seen a beautiful new library at the Zhejiang University. There are plenty of books there. So paper as a means of conveyance or storage of information has not completely disappeared. But its function to convey today’s information into the future has apparently ceased. This is not a trivial issue. Whether information about a subway trip is encrusted on a piece of paper or stored within your cell phone does not matter to future generations. But placing the entire modern knowledge in the electronic format is dangerous. The danger We can already see the first effects of it. The electronic system of storage is old enough for us to have noticed that many websites, links and blogs where information was stored are already by now broken, deleted or have been moved elsewhere. Information on household income or people’s characteristics that was collected in the past is in many cases lost because the software systems used to read and process such information have changed. Ironically, but not at all surprisingly, all the information that we can get regarding some past surveys of population (and I am not talking here about ancient data, but information that is twenty years old) comes from the printed summaries of such sources. I have seen this very clearly with Soviet household surveys whose data have all been irretrievably lost because already by the early 1990s the technology had entirely changed, and short of enormous and expensive effort, the Soviet-made computer cards could no longer be read. But the problem is the same everywhere. U.S. micro data from the 1950s and early 1960s are impossible to access any more. Conclusion With full transfer to electronic-only information, we are moving to an ever-ruling “presentism.” Information can be seemingly efficiently and costlessly transmitted today or over a very short time period, but is afterwards lost forever. When our civilization vanishes, the new researchers, perhaps thousands of years away, will be faced by the conundrum: Did literacy disappear? How to explain that a civilization from which there are millions of written records (that would be saved the way that the Dead Sea Scrolls were saved) had suddenly abandoned literacy and gone back to oral communication and barbarism? In fact this very post, for whatever it is worth, will be forever gone as soon as the website you read it on folds and another format of dissemination takes over. Until then, try to carve it in stone…