Goa, India.
A Brazilian leader’s faux pas spoke volumes about the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (BRICS) heads of state summit underway in Goa this weekend. The country’s foreign minister (and occasional presidential candidate) José Serra told an interviewer last month that the BRICS included Argentina. And as he stumbled while spelling out the acronym, Serra also had to be prompted to recall that South Africa is a member (because in English it is the “S” in BRICS, but in Portuguese the country is “Africa do Sul”).
Well-known journalist Luis Nassif disgustedly concluded that the coup-plotter politician – who has a doctorate in neoliberal economics from Cornell University and was implicated in various corruption scandals, including favours for western oil companies against Brazil’s own Petrobras – is “neurologically damaged.”
With men at the BRICS helm like Serra and his president Michel Temer (who is also corrupt and widely despised), so too has the bloc become damaged goods. Former Goldman Sachs investment strategist Jim O’Neill recently offered embarrassed faint praise: “some of the BRICS are kind of doing basically what I thought they would do” though he conceded that Brazil, Russia and South Africa suffer from “commodities curse.”
The country most responsible for that curse is China, which drove up minerals and petroleum prices in a speculative building orgy from 2002-11. But it then crashed prices by more than half, when its…