Thick as a BRICS?

Interesting news recently out of Moscow: evidently the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) are attempting to build a shared infrastructure for ease of payments that may end up including a new reserve currency as a rival to the dollar. This move comes as a response to Western financial sanctions on Russia which froze its foreign reserves in response to the escalation of the Ukrainian war.

It became clear very soon after this war heated up that the global financial system was even less of a level playing field than it originally appeared. As such, the BRICS nations all seem to be interested in finding ways to reduce reliance on Western institutions that enforce financial and economic dominance, such as the IMF. As a leftist, the only thing I can say is this: more power to them. To say that such a strong challenge to the financial hegemony of the Washington-London-Tôkyô Triad is welcome would be a strong understatement. And there are several aspects to this new reserve currency that sound particularly intriguing.

The first is that it would be based on a basket of the five BRICS nations’ currencies: the ruble, the renminbi, the rand, the rupee and the real. This seems like an interesting ‘middle way’ that avoids the pitfalls of the euro. Allowing each of the member nations to retain control over its own monetary (and thus also trade) policies in ways which the Eurozone didn’t seems a good way to avoid internal friction between the member countries.

Also, the money not being tied to a commodity (like gold) helps keep the supply flexible and reduces the possible exploitation of agricultural communities. America’s experiment in gold-backed reserve currency turned out to be a disaster for the working poor in this country, and it seems like the BRICS countries are not eager to repeat that mistake. However, this structure does seem to come with its own risks. It would be interesting to see how the banking-oversight mechanism for this currency would work.

The other big news this week is that Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court in the US. This is also welcome news to me, and I make no bones about it. The Mississippi law upheld in the court’s decision actually seems to be a fairly moderate law which places the same restrictions on abortion access after the first trimester that most modern Western European countries have. However, I have some strong reservations about the long-term results of the overturn.

First and foremost, we simply don’t have the same supports for new and expecting mothers that Western Europe does. Placing restrictions on abortion parallel to those that exist in, say, France and the UK, without enacting the parallel social safety net provisions, is going to have a wantonly and cruelly punitive effect on childbearing women. The Democrats (using the excuse provided them by Manchin and Synema) completely punted on the Build Back Better Act, which would have included provisions for an expanded child tax credit, paid family leave, medical care subsidies, universal pre-K, new affordable housing and school lunches: all of which would have directly benefitted new mothers. And of course not one single Republican supported the BBBA, which shows effectively that they’re not and never have been the pro-life party that they claim to be.

Second, the overturn hands the decision over whether (and how) to restrict abortion access entirely over to the individual states. We’ve seen this movie play out before under different circumstances. It didn’t end well. It’s very likely that we will start seeing nullification arguments and secession movements begin to take shape in the near future as the divides grow sharper. I have seen multiple pro-life women in my social media network refer to the Roe overturn as a ‘Pyrrhic victory’. I think they happen to be right about that.

However, one thing that the Roe overturn is going to clarify, and quickly, is the degree to which Americans who claim to care about human life actually do. I fully expect the vast majority of so-called ‘pro-life’ Republicans will continue to sit on their hams and oppose any sort of humane legislation that would make life for new mothers and children more possible and bearable, and I would unfortunately say the same about so-called ‘pro-life’ Democrats in the mould of Joe Manchin. The Solidarists are probably going to continue to mealy-mouth their way into conversations about how we should create pie-in-the-sky ‘decentralised’ legislative solutions which stand no chance of garnering popular support anywhere and which wouldn’t work even if they were passed. The necessity of socialist fixes to the American economy, I expect, will become a lot clearer to a lot more people in the coming months, and I hope that these fixes can attract the support of at least a handful of pro-life types who are uncomfortable with the cognitive dissonance their Republican allegiance has hitherto imposed on them.