BRICS

The BRICS development bank would seem to be about dumping the dollar and creating an alternative to the IMF, European Union and Federal Reserve.  However, upon further examination BRICS is something far more interesting.

First let's look at the membership.  

Brazil has the seventh largest economy in the world and its economic reforms has the country on par with some of the fastest growing economies in the world.  Brazil has a huge supply of natural resources and contrary to what Juan Valdez would have you believe, is the world's largest producer of coffee.

Russia is the country with the largest land mass in the world.  The Russian economy is the ninth largest in the world.  Russia is one of the largest producers in the world of oil and natural gas.  Russia also has tremendous mineral and other natural resource reserves.

India is the tenth largest economy and like Brazil, has one of the fastest growing economies in the world.  Considered a newly industrialized country, much of India's wealth is based on hi-tech.  India has the second largest population in the world.

China is the second largest country (by land area) in the world.  China has the world's second largest economy both by gross domestic product (GDP) and purchasing power parity (PPP).  China's economy is primarily based on manufacturing and exporting goods but they are also a major importer.

South Africa is the smallest member of the BRICS.  South Africa is the 25th largest country by land area as well as the 25th largest by population.  Like India, South Africa is considered a newly industrialized country and has the world's 28th largest economy (but has the 2nd largest economy in Africa).  Most of South Africa's wealth comes from diamonds and gold but like Russia, it also has vast resources of other strategic minerals.

Given this first list, it would appear that BRICS is merely a collection of countries with fast growing economies.  Most has large land masses and large populations meaning a good supply of resources and large workforce.  But that's how things look through the eyes of an economist.  

The BRICS share one other thing in common, something that trumps even their economic power.  Russia has the second largest inventory of nuclear weapons.  China has the third.  India has the fourth.  While South Africa currently doesn't have any nuclear weapons, it is the only African nation to have successfully developed nuclear weapons.  Brazil is only BRICS member not to have nuclear weapons.  All of the nuclear weapons combined under BRICS outnumbers all of the nuclear weapons of the US, UK and France combined.

Conventional forces are not to be ignored either.  China has the world's largest standing army (funded by the second largest military budget).  Russia has the second largest combined military.  India has the fourth largest combined military.  According to Global Firepower.com, Brazil has the 14th largest military in the world.  South Africa has the 14th.

Granted the comparisons are not apples to apples since there are cast differences in technologies between countries.  But technology can only compensate so far over numerical advantages.  For example, regardless of the F-35 advantages in technology, there are only so many copies of it to go around.  The F-35 demonstrates an inherent weakness of advanced technology; when things break it takes longer to fix.  According to Defense-Aerospace.com, the F-35A experiences a critical failure after 4.5 flight hours requiring 12.1 hours to repair.  

Obama is determined to reduce the size of the US military.  He began with reducing the number of nuclear warheads and the followed by instituting sequestration.  The US military has been at war for 12 years without and opportunity to reset.  Readiness is diminishing and there is little in the way of budgets to update legacy systems.  The US is not alone.  The UK, France, Australia and New Zealand are also beginning to drawdown their militaries.

The conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine continue to make the US look unable and unwilling to back up political rhetoric.  BRICS then stands as an unspoken threat to the former might of Western economic and military power. 

The Fallacy of Blaming the Russians

After Malaysia Flight 17 was shot down, the world swung its finger of blame around and pointed it squarely at Russia and Vladmir Putin.  Led by the US, the blame game started with the notion that Flight 17 had been shotdown by a Russian SA-11.  Given the altitude and speed of the Boeing 777 at the time, the SA-11 made the most sense and is in the possession of the rebels in Ukraine.  The SA-11 is made in Russia and due the complexity of the guidance system, the rebels must've been trained by the Russians.  Ipso facto, it was Russia's fault.

But wait, has anyone actually seen pictures or videos of a SA-11 firing a missile?  Has a person, much less a location, been identified as the person responsible for launching the missile?  The Associated Press today released a story about the lack of evidence, so far, presented by the US in their case against Russia.

In countries like the US and UK, surveillance cameras are a constant part of our lives.  Therefore, we tend to think of the whole world as being constantly under surveillance.  Perceptions though can be misleading as was demonstrated yesterday when a US flag flying on the Brooklyn Bridge was taken down and replaced with a white flag by unknown person or persons.  Yes, in New York City on a major bridge and landmark an operation requiring specialized skill was executed without any a single image being captured.  The Brooklyn Bridge is under constant surveillance but apparently the unknown person or persons had already defeated the lens on the camera.  As I said, this required great skill and coordination.

My point in bringing up the white flag on the Brooklyn Bridge was to illustrate just how faulty our perception of constant surveillance can be.  The human minds looks to fit bits of divergent information into some type of coherent story.  Hence stage magicians are able to trick our eyes into believing they have somehow sawed a girl in half or made a skyscraper disappear.  Our minds have only certain pieces of information and as it races to make a conclusion, the trick works.

Perhaps as our pro-Western, anti-Russian mindset swings into action we are looking to blame Russia and are not looking for answers that contradict that mindset.  The SA-11 remains the most likely suspect, however we are basing that assumption without having actually seen the wreckage.  Another possibility is that instead of a SA-11 a fighter jet could have shot down Flight 17.  It seems unlikely that air defense radars would not have seen a fighter firing on a civilian airliner but that assumes they were looking.  We have already seen limitations in radar coverage with the still missing Malaysian Flight 370.

One nagging question remains unanswered, why shoot down a civilian airliner at all?  If the SA-11 was involved, it has a radar that is quite capable of identifying the flight path, altitude and transponder code (key components in aircraft identification by air defense units).  Flight 17 was flying at 33,000 feet which is well within the parameters of the SA-11 radars.  It is unlikely that Malaysian Flight 17 was mistaken for a military aircraft that had veered off course.

A fighter interceptor has the same ability to identify aircraft as an air defense unit with one noted addition.  Fighters can visually identify aircraft by flying close to the aircraft for a positive ID.  It is thus unlikely that Malaysian Flight 17 was shot down accident or even randomly.

If whoever shot down the airliner intended to hit that specific aircraft, the nagging question is why?  At any given time, there are dozens of airliners and smaller aircraft flying overhead.  If someone wanted to escalate war between Russian and the US or Europe, why fire on a Malaysian airliner?

An answer may lie in a bizarre story that keeps popping up.  The pro-Russian rebel commander was quoted by the press as saying "not all of the bodies were fresh".  He added that many of the bodies were drained of blood and reeked of decomposition.  Far-fetched and sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie but sometimes the most bizarre things cause people to do the unthinkable.  If the story is true, perhaps Malaysian Flight 17 was thought to be carrying some type of bio-weapon?  The Ukraine conflict serves as plausible deniability for the real group behind the shoot down.  Blame the Russians and get the US in a lather and no one looks for answers elsewhere.

Hilary Clinton (the as yet unannounced Presidential candidate for 2016) has jumped on the blame Russia bandwagon and encouraged the European Union to find alternatives to the dollar-dumping Russian natural gas firm Gazprom.  Her plea is supposedly based on the downing of Malaysian Flight 17 but the timing seems much more in line with the announcement by the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) of the creation of their own development bank based on the Chinese Yen.  The one-two punch of the creation of the BRICS development bank and the Russian-Chinese energy deal has pretty much nullified the effects of Western economic sanctions.

Winston Churchill once said, "I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest."  His quote may not just apply to Russia anymore.

Russia, BRICS and Disease

A Malaysian airliner carrying 295 people has crashed in east Ukraine on a flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, amid allegations it was shot down.--BBC News

Now comes the real question, if it was shot down then who did it? According to the BBC, the likely suspects are the pro-Russian separatists. However, it could just as easily have been the Ukrainians attempting to discredit Moscow.

While the US turned its myopic eyes to Iraq, the situation in Ukraine continued to escalate despite Mr. Obama's reliance on economic sanctions. Russia may no longer care about sanctions because of recent energy deal with China as well as the news about BRICS;

"The leaders of the Brics countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – have signed a treaty in the Brazilian city of Fortaleza to launch a Brics development bank.

The bank will rival the US- and European-led World Bank and its private lending affiliate, the International Finance Corporation, which have dominated development finance since the second world war. The Brics bank is positioned as a financial institution that will provide developing countries with alternative funding minus the punishing strings attached to World Bank lending, which strip recipient countries of the power to make their own policies. It also promises to make lending processes for developing countries faster, simpler and cheaper."--The Guardian

Russia has solidly partnered with China and though the other BRICS members may be small, Russia might be able to stem the effects of US imposed economic sanctions.  At least until a new US President gets elected.

News isn't looking much better elsewhere for Team Obama.  Reports are coming in that the US advisors in Iraq haven't really been able to do much and the violence there continues. Less we forget, the same thing is happening in Nigeria were many of the school girls that were kidnapped are still missing. US advisors have discovered that the Nigerians really don't have a system for receiving and disseminating intelligence that might help locate the missing girls.

And of course matters are really getting our of hand in the Gaza Strip. Many experts now see a ground war breaking out.

Finally there was the news that Assad was re-elected for another 7-year term even though there is much evidence that he used chemical weapons on his own troops.  So much for infamous "red-line".

But Mr. Obama may not have to worry too much about matters overseas as there is a major catastrophe brewing right here in the US.  Unlike the situations abroad, this one is silent yet has the potential of wiping out ten of thousands of Americans.

The illegal immigrants that have been flooding the southwest border from Central America and Mexico are all being housed tightly together, many on US military bases.  As fans of "The Walking Dead" already know, when you house a large group of strangers together (who are already suffering malnutrition, stress and undiagnosed illnesses) you run the risk of an epidemic.

The number of immigrants (mostly young kids) crossing the border is overwhelming the medical personnel's ability to screen the incoming.  Children are showing up and being housed before medical personnel get to see them, allowing the potential for communicable diseases to be introduced into the general population.  In turn, staff and visitors will also face exposure.  The diseases run the gamut antibiotic resistant TB to the more mundane (but equally deadly) flu.  As an example, the 1918 Flu Pandemic killed 3-5 percent of the world's population.

What makes the situation on the border so dangerous is the huge population.  Any outbreak would spread faster than medical personnel could diagnose and treat.  Anyone coming into contact with an infectious person, especially one that has not been diagnosed, could spread the disease beyond just the immigrant population.  We also need to think about all of the children that are being sent back.  What diseases had they been exposed to?  Will we create a pandemic back in their home country?

Events are overwhelming Team Obama and are happening faster than they can spin the story.  War is going to break out somewhere, be it Ukraine and Russia or Israel and Hamas and there is nothing this White House can do about it.  They may not even have any troops to send if a pandemic occurs.  Our military may be too sick to fight.

Update:  After I posted this the Twitter-verse was reporting that Israeli ground troops had been sent into Gaza.  And just for good measure, the White House was locked down due to a suspicious package.