PUTTING BRICKS IN THE BRICSA BLOC
These two articles were both shared by Ms. M.W., and they are both important signals not only of the continuing breakdown of USA unipolarism, they also highlight the fact that the BRICSA bloc is cementing its bi-lateral relationships and planning for a very long-term game, one in which there are, apparently, no similar counterbalancing plans from the West, at least, not on a major public scale. Here are the two articles:
China to invest $50 bn in Brazil infrastructure projects
A BRICS University in the works: Russia
For the moment, let's concentrate on the first article, and these statements:
"On May 19, Li Keqiang is due to hold talks with Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. Over the past year, the Brazilian government has announced plans for a slew of infrastructure projects, including the extension of airports and ports, the building of 11,000 km of railway and 7,000 km of highway.
"Beijing is pushing to close China’s participation in building freight rail and high-speed rail in Brazil. Brazil is looking for investors for a $2.4 billion railway project that will link the center and western parts of the country.
"Amongst the deals inked in July last year between Rousseff and Chinese President Xi Jinping was, most significantly, a railway spanning the continent from Brazil’s Atlantic coast to Peru’s pacific ports, which woud significantly reduce the costs and time required for Brazil to ship raw commodities to China." (Emphasis added)
Brazil is, of course, the premier power in South America and, as its growing economy and military potential attest, an emerging world power. A transcontinental railway linking Rio de Janiero, Brasilia, and Sao Paolo to Cuzco and Peruvian ports would all but cement that position for quite some time, unless of course similar deals are being worked out with Buenes Aires for similar railroads to Chile. But in any case, the article makes clear why it is to China's and Brazil's benefit for such deals. Notably absent, of course, is the USA, whose foreign policy vis-a-vis Latin America is best summarized in the phrase "United Fruit Company" and "CIA." In other words, the USA's foreign policy for Latin America has been a long litany of simply replacing Madrid and Lisbon as the colonial hegemon, and sponsoring coups from Gautemala to Chile, dictators from Batista to Somosa, and all points in between. A transcontinental railroad in Brazilian hands together with a booming economy offers the other countries in the region something else besides American bases and CIA coups, so watch for growing Brazilian influence in Bogata and Caracas over the long term. What it means is that at least the B and the C in the BRICS are willing to put their money where their mouths are, and to take real, and huge, practical steps to create a multipolar world.
And that "multipolar world" brings us to the second, and in my opinion, much more significant story here, and that's the second article:
"Demographic changes in BRICS mean the appetite for higher education is expanding quickly and providing a source of international postgrad students that the US and UK are currently exploiting.
“'Over the course of the next month and a half we should agree on the fundamental structure of BRICS University so that in September, the BRICS Network University, endorsed by all members of the association, will be officially established,” Klimov said.
"Both the UK and US universities are heavily dependent on the BRICS, especially China and India, for their international numbers. India, by 2024, will be home to the largest tertiary-aged population, numbering over 119 million."
As the article indicates, the USA and UK currently exploit the huge demand for college, graduate, and post-graduate education in the BRICSA nations. But that, I think, is only half the story here, if even half. It's probably more like only 20% of the story. Here's why:
Russian President Vladimir Putin has made it abundantly clear, in speech after speech, that neither he nor Russia are wanting to see a continuation of the current "USA-unipolar" global system. But he's also made it abundantly clear that neither he nor Moscow want to see a return to the Washington-Moscow bi-polar system. Rather, he has been stressing a multi-polar world order of Moscow, Tokyo, Beijing, Berlin, Brasilia, and so on. And we should believe him, if for no other reason than no one nation - not even China and certainly not Russia or the USA - can afford a unipolar world.
But what does this have to do with universities, and the sudden "urge" for a "BRICSA" university?
I suggest the answer is rather simple. The university, particularly in the French, British, and American systems, has been "the training ground for empire," i.e., the elite universities of those nations have provided the bulk of the training for the administrators and bureaucrats to run the agencies of empire, and run them smoothly and effectively. One need only think of the importance of the Sorbonne and other Parisian ecoles to the French state bureaucracies, of the Oxbridge system in Great Britain to the ministries of government, or the Ivy league in the USA for the departments of government and the Wall Street investment and legal firms. Later, with the unifications of Italy and Germany in the 1870s, the old universities of those countries assumed a similar importance.
But by training their own future leaders in those western institutions, particularly in the USA, the BRICSA bloc is confronted with a problem, for those universities - particularly in the schools of international relations, economics, finance, business, and political science - reflect the American "unipolar sickness." Those universities, while giving great insight into the chief competitor to the BRICSA bloc and to its "culture" and geopolitical philosophy, are not really equipping people with the practical tools to implement the kind of vision that the BRICSA bloc is all about. The need for a BRICSA equivalent to the Sorbonne-Oxbridge-Ive League is thus apparent, and the fact that the BRICSA nations recognize this is a tribute to the fact that they understand the realities of "soft power," that simply building railroads from Sao Paolo to Cuzco or from Shanghai to St. Petersburg is not enough, for cultural and bureaucratic implications will result, and bureaucracies - effective and efficient ones - will be needed to put into place to run and maintain it.
So what might one look for? What might one predict?
For one thing, expect the BRICSA university system to consideably more competitive than the overpriced American equivalents, where administrators rake in huge salaries and adjunct professors starve to death. Expect the BRICSA university system to provide a quality education at a fraction of the cost of its American competitors, and, rather than being top-heavy with administrators, expect it to have a much more faculty-governed approach, as is the case with the British Oxbridge system. Having faculty administer the university cuts costs. Expect it, likewise, to make heavy use of internet content, and to avoid the "educational-theory claptrap" that now is seeping into American college, graduate, and post-graduate education. And expect the BRICSA univerisities to syphon off the best faculty talent from those overpriced American universities in short order. After all, why be an underpaid adjunct professor for an American university, working without any benefits and at a pittance, when the BRICSA universities will guarantee a salary, and respect your contribution, when the overpaid administrators and tenured professors in that system, who do scant teaching anyway, do not?
There's something else one might expect from this, and I'm bold to suggest that it might be the resurgence of the United Kingdom and the British Commonwealth in the long term. Here's why: recent geopolitical events have made it abundantly clear, if you're not sticking your head into the globaloney sand like Mr. Cameron, that Mrs. Thatcher was probably right: Europe might be a fine idea, but it is inimical to British institutions, culture, liberties, and economic and political sovereignty. On the other side of the Atlantic, things are not too rosy either, for American unipolarism ultimately could force Britain, and for that matter, the Commonwealth, into situations again not in the best interests of the country or Commonwealth. But Britain has singular advantages in this respect over the USA, advantages that would equip it well in the multipolar world emerging, and in particular, training people to run it, and that is that Oxbridge tradition. After all, that tradition had to train people to run the world's only global empire which was also a "multicultural" empire, to use that overused modern expression, and for whatever faults the British Empire had, and it had many, it at least was effectively run. That system has been considerably expanded to other excellent universities in Britain, and these could, conceivably, provide the only real counterweight in the Western World both to the culture of unipolarism in the American system, and the emerging competition from the BRICSA bloc. Additionally, while Great Britian certainly has its own bumper crop of Euro-fanaticists both within government and the university system, there's still enough pushback that this still does not approach the status of "Euro-dogma" one sees in French or German intellectual circles. In the long term, in other words, because of the British university cultural tradition and the United Kingdom's long geopolitical history, Britain could be poised to exploit the emerging multi-polar world of Europe, the BRICSA bloc, and the dwindling American empire, by standing in a middle ground - culturally, intellectually, and geopolitically, between them. It is uniquely positioned to do so, and has the technological infrastructure necessary to do so. Currently, the political will is lacking. But eventually, I suspect, reality will clarify even the vision of the Euro-dogmatists.
See you on the flip side...
27 Comments
Help the Community Grow
Please understand a donation is a gift and does not confer membership or license to audiobooks. To become a paid member, visit member registration.
Now the Anglosphere has weaponized football (i.e. soccer in the US) against Russia
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/fifa/11634953/fifa-crisis-arrests-sepp-blatter-live.html
Gambling is the driving force behind the popularity of sports.
Hall of Fame players are criminals, addicts and gamblers; owners care more about profit than winning; and championships aren’t won on the field by the basis of hard work or rising to the occasion, but because games are OUTRIGHT FIXED!
It’s just showbiz.
TV money actually fuels professional sports . Sports are show business. Each league, much like reality TV counterparts, scripts and manipulates the outcomes of their own games. A vicious circle, in which fans are led astray, while the corporate participants laugh all the way to the bank.
On average a stadium project costs about 40% more than official figures due to unreported costs like free land, property tax breaks, and public operations along with maintenance cists.. If you want to inject money into the community, it would be better to drip it from a helicopter.
And the Olympics?
Well, it’s really an Olympics of Globalized Corruption.
Where there’s a lot of Gold up for grabs.
Good points
Utter rubbish. Fifa is a corrupt house of cards waiting to fall. Do some research.
US case looking at events upto the bidding for 2010 World Cup btw.
Swiss case is a different matter.
Just watched a 27 minute video that addresses directly
what Dr. Farrell is discussing here.
When I went to copy and send…,
“this video not available”…
But if you google:
“Catherine Austin Fitts major turning point comes this fall”
you should get it.
She says the BRICSA are finding ways to build the pie[she specifically talks about “education”]; while the USA/West are finding ways to steal what’s left of the pie.
The bottom line she relates is whoever is running this circus needs to be replaced.
It’s either Change,
War and/or Collapse
By design the NWO wanted to divide & conquer.
Hence, the manufacturing was sent to china; while free labor[relative to U.S. union labor] was sent to the U.S. Certain military parts were put together at locations around the globe[think corporate control]. All this and much more was being “baked into the corporatized cake”.
The key to maintaining this increasing power of the corporate oligarchy is, was and will be education. One key aspect of education is information[information warfare]. A good place to begin with info is facts[granted, said facts are nearly always suspect].
Congress periodically considers legislation proposals allowing the owning of facts. A whole array of legally protected digital fences to enclose an author’s work. An enclosure movement of man’s work, the locking up of symbols and theses and facts and genes and ideas. The battles of intellectual property in the range wars of the information age. Where are the laws & organizations to protect the public domain? The public’s money has certainly been spent[and being spent]. Is the product of that public money being protected in the public domain? Or has it been transferred to the private domain? Thus, the line between the public domain and intellectual property is important in every culture, science, technology, and education[zero energy, etc., ?]. Patent law, copyrights, trademarks, are all legally created privileges. A kind of perpetual corporate welfare – restricting the next generation of creators instead of encouraging them[education] Intellectually inefficiency, locking up vast swaths of information in order to confer a benefit on a tiny minority.
This taking, this enclosure, this expropriating of the commons[for example what’s underneath the ground: gold, coal, oil, iron, what have you] is a process of war, foreign & domestic.
Privatization: a process of new enclosures.
Today the commons is in the fifth domain; cyberspace. The internet. The world’s public domain[we the people] of information/education.
We the people, the 99%, find ourselves being eaten by what is a moral fungus or cancer, being sponsored by the 1%. Their corruption & lies are resistant to optional functionality[an open-source community, where all costs are minimized and benefits optimized[including education]..
The combination of Open-Source Hardware, Free/Open-Source Software(F/OSS), Open-Source Data Access(ODA), Open-Source Intelligence(OSINT), and Open-Source Spectrum(unconstrained access to all frequencies, none sold or assigned for specific organizations or functions).
Having worked in US higher ed for nearly two decades (in the IT and distance ed sector), I have watched closely and carefully how it operates – or rather doesn’t.
Being involved in distance ed, I have watched as technology has created access to information that is simply staggering. Simple examples like the Kahn Academy, where really good math instruction is available for free, and Wildberger’s YouTube channel, where very advanced and radically brilliant math is also being taught for free, abound.
Granted, it takes more than a video to teach – it takes a good teacher and interaction. However, access to information is one vital ingredient.
I have also watched certain developments and have predicted the demise of the “University system” of degree programs as being hopelessly outdated. There are several (if not hundreds) of people and organizations working to create a better, cheaper method of educating people. Many fields are already heading to a certification and portfolio based reality.
Accreditation is the only thing that stands in the way of a radical shift in the “higher ed business,” and an improved system that is not locked into maintaining the monopoly of the outdated institutions will break out any day, and change everything.
Perhaps it just has.
I do have to disagree with you on one point – letting the faculty run the institution. While I agree that they are overburdened with useless administrators, that is true of every organization, governmental or business, in the US. That is based on a class-differentiation (heading towards Britain’s or India’s) which is driven by other hidden agendas.
I have watched what happens when faculty tries to run organizations, and it isn’t pretty (how many committees can you form on one topic?).
What is needed is an efficient structure answerable to it’s customers – the students and community in general. Remove the politics (as much as is possible), remove the sense of entitlement of faculty as a lazy upper class, and focus on real education – including more true history, more languages, deeper understanding, more actual life experience, and more truth.
Also, while I agree with some of your distaste for educational theory, there are experienced teachers who have developed a body of knowledge from actual practice, whose ideas and skills could certainly move higher education forward. I’ve known some high school teachers who could teach rings around any college prof.
After all, one does not need ANY knowledge of educational skills or teaching to be a university prof – only a terminal degree.
I’ve had some ideas about radically improving the educational experience (which were pretty much rejected – I don’t have any fancy degrees, just six decades of life experience and self-teaching) in higher ed – perhaps I should offer those ideas to the BRICSA block project?
This may well be the coup-de-gras for US higher ed, which is already in deep trouble.
Oh, and I have also seen how technology, poorly understood and badly used, has been a miserable failure.
Tools must be used properly to work well.
FYI: (sort of related to article)
I worked at the University of Virginia for 30 years. 30 years ago, I don’t remember seeing many Asian students at all (not that I was looking for such things).
In the last 10-15 years, Asians (mostly Chinese I guess) seem to be taking over UVA. Riding the bus to work, some bus loads of commuters are mostly Asians (but to be fair, some bus loads have few Asians, if any, just depends when you ride the bus). Bottom line: Chinese students are now an intrinsic part of the UVA campus.
Check out this list of graduate students in Physics at UVA:
http://www.phys.virginia.edu/People/people-list.asp?CLASS=Graduate+Student
I would guess that Chinese are about half of the students, Indians about a quarter, and Anglo-Saxon Americans maybe 5-10 percent. All others are Asians or Middle Easterners. Oddly enough I do not see any Blacks in this list . . . .
If this list is any indication, the people (not necessarily the institutions) of the USA will be contributing very little to Physics in the future.
I have always wondered why China sends so many students to UVA. Surely that is very expensive (as you point out) compared to training people in China. If this is happening all over the country (I repeat, “if”), China must be spending a massive amount of money on this. Perhaps this is just a way to spend all of their American dollars??
China has to find some way of recycling its surplus. The British did in the 19th century (growing an empire and building railways) as did the U.S. in the 20th (Marshall Plan). Today’s main offenders, the Germans are not.
You could argue that all the current Chinese foreign investment is a continuation of this economic policy, even leaving aside the geopolitical aspects of it.
Please keep in mind I am not making detailed AND ACCURATE statistical statements here: this is purely anecdotal. Who knows how exaggerated my view is (though the list of graduate Physics students is fairly impressive).
Compare to the UNDERgraduate Physics student list:
http://www.phys.virginia.edu/People/people-list.asp?CLASS=Undergraduate+Student
China seems to be focusing on grad school (at least, for Physics at UVA).
The problem is that the Western geographic outlook is still stuck in Hellenistic age it’s cosmology is Geocentric. The garrison troops the hold the Americas,Australia mentality is from the first crusade and the worse and most stupid ideas of the GrecoRoman period. We have a population from top to bottom encourage to drink ignorance is strength cool aid. Anyway the colonist that Europe used in it’s worldwide empires have always been expendable garbage to be dumped and thrown to the wolves when there overdue date come up.
Interesting comments re the UK and not a million miles from my own thoughts. Some early signs that the
UK is already taking that position. For example, Cameron’s response to questions about US concerns about the UK joining the BRICS investment bank could roughly be summed up as ‘tough, sometimes our interests are not the same as theirs’. I’ve also thought for a while that Cameron (and possibly the world) got lucky when he recalled Parliament a few years ago expecting a vote to join the U.S. in military action against Syria and was defeated.
Despite all the rhetoric against Russia, the push for further sanctions has been pretty weak and the Russian oligarchs continue to come to London in numbers, send their kids to school here and own the Premier League Championship football team. It’s long been my view that secretly the UK views Ukraine as an EU/US mess and let them sort it out.
Things could start to get interesting now in UK/EU relations after the recent election. Treaty renogtiation and a UK stay or leave referendum are on the horizon. The first target is the subservience of Scottish and English law to a European court in Strasbourg. Trouble is, if the UK were to vote to leave the EU, Scotland would very likely vote to leave the UK simply exchanging rule from London for rule from Brussels.
The AngloSphere has a lot of skeletons in it’s closet.. Where if the BRICSA+105 nation alliance wanted to give the Anglosphere a severe wedgie. They would release some forbidden antique technology. It could be OU H2 production, OU electrical production, let’s say on a small house sized < 10kW unit, complete with a BOM and drawings. With an announcement that these devices were decades old. And blame the sequester of these inventions on the Multinational Corps.. After a great deal of mis-disinfo from the MSM. There would be bedlam in the AngloSphere. The fact that the BRICSA nations have not done so, is proof of their tacit approval of controlling the Earth's population via the culture of scarcity..
What is “OU” and “BOM”? As your last sentence suggests, any such revelation would just highlight their complicity in the deceit.
If such technologies exist, expect them to be released/”discovered” as part of a choreographed global response to some major crisis or other.
OU – Over Unity. Silly me!
Excuse`, BOM = “Bill of Materials”. I do hope OU gets released, with or w/o a global catastrophy. IMO, keeping the world addicted to Petroleum is one of greatest control mechanisms, $USD being the other.. Whether that enforcement mechanism is the AngloSphere, a combination, or all World Governments is still in question. My guess is all.
Now, there is a caveat. There exist the possibility that OU power generation could have some deleterious side affects. I’ve sent that question to some of the more famous OU, ZPE types with no response.
Yep, the weaponisation question would be a worry.
You’re right about petroleum addiction being a control mechanism, as the machine is useless without the fuel. It’s highly possible that anti-grav or zero point machines would not need fuel as we know it, so even if the multinationals had an initial monopoly on the technology, the first time it was reverse engineered, their grip would be loosened for ever.
Marx got a lot wrong, but he was bang on with the materialist conception of history. Free energy production would change forever the relationship between production and exchange and as a result the world’s social and political structures.
For all the American hatred of the UK, which spills everywhere. The UK has had a far longer history. Especially in the East. And Hong Kong. No matter the garbage that Cameron might spew to please his USA partners, the UK has been moving East for some time now, including their Gold Reserves. It has been a quiet and silent move from West to East. And their associates there go back centuries. As well as in India.
In the long term , raping the British Empire in WW1 and WW2 was a really bad idea on the part of the USA. The British are much like the Chinese in this regard. Well mannered, something Americans know nothing about, and quiet spoken, also something Americans know nothing about even when they have a microphone in front of them. They still gotta shout.
I think the USA is about to be outplayed by “class” and the snake oil salesmen, because that is all they really are from Rockerfeller down, will realize that the rest of the world is rather tired of their parochial, hegemonic and need I add, Nazi KKK racist view on the world. It is rather backward and barbaric to say the least.
oh and as for education? The American system of dumbed down stupidity was, is and never will be the best that the British have had to offer the world. Americans cannot even identify other countries on a map. It is a standing joke world wide. Thanks for for export, but we would rather go back to the British system. Common Core is simply rediculous!
Couple of comments: the UK doesn’t appear to retain much in the way of official gold reserves.
Agree about the post WW2 situation. The US pretty much held an economic knife to Britain’s throat after the war as a condition of continued economic support, suddenly cutting off lend-lease and replacing it with a loan a condition of which was Sterling convertibility. That ended up in the loss of markets, technologies and exchange reserves. There was also the freezing out of nuclear technology sharing in 1946.
To quote British foreign secretary at the time, Ernest Bevin, re the Bomb: “That won’t do at all .. we’ve got to have this .. I don’t mind for myself, but I don’t want any other Foreign Secretary of this country to be talked to or at by a Secretary of State in the United States as I have just had in my discussions with Mr Byrnes. We’ve got to have this thing over here whatever it costs .. We’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it.”
So yes, there are and have been a lot of people in the UK who have a long memory about the U.S. role in the decline of the nation, while not forgetting the help received in keeping us in the fight over the first 2 or 3 years of the war.
Thanks Joseph for opening up a new topic of debate: education as a GLOBAL factor.
The European countries have always kept this in mind, with varying levels of success.
Now the oligarchs might indulge in money printing (and 3D printing)in the hope of guaranteeing the survival of their system, but there is no shortcut to the process of educating new generations. And I doubt very much whether the latter will resign themselves to being debt slaves, as the Anglosphere would have them be with the deleterious “student loan” policies.
“’On May 19, Li Keqiang is due to hold talks with Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. Over the past year, the Brazilian government has announced plans for a slew of infrastructure projects, including the extension of airports and ports, the building of 11,000 km of railway and 7,000 km of highway.’”
And the release of mass usable anti-grav tech would make almost all of those projects and jobs worthless. Then there’s the whole not cutting down forests and filling in valleys, or blasting new passes.
The thing about the major universities in the US and UK, not limited to Ivies and Oxbridge: All of those universities have major connections to other major universities the world over–nobody say in biology thinks that only what’s being researched at say Harvard or Oxford matters to the future of biological science.
Now true, when China builds a good road to mines in Africa, China does build the road with locals in mind and attempts to improve the whole a bit, not simply whatever the mine needs to export the ore.
Of course with serious anti-grav tech, a lot mining will also be unnecessary.
Good points. Anyway, there is a thin line between airports and spaceports.
DanaT:
Regarding ports:
A.G. technology doesn’t simply mean a means of transport to Mars.
It can mean a quick trip in a small vehicle, very small, from say Chicago to Minneapolis for the afternoon–only needing a small parking lot for landing. The comes more conventional ground transport.
This means that most of the roads between the two cities become unnecessary–smaller towns can exist–but forests regrow and there’s no need to level grades for roads, or cut passes.
Now some authorities may try to sell AG as only for space travel, with the idea that it must be controlled and exotic, and it’s so complex that the idea of a normal pilot flying a few hundred miles is out of the question–even with the help of GPS and computer navigation systems that keep these small craft out of the way of each other.
Whatever the many problems in the world, the major universities across the world are certainly talking to each other–even if that talk is limited to a limited world view like genetics or polymer chemistry.