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Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release  Tuesday, 21 July 2015

Craig Isherwood‚ National Secretary
PO Box 376‚ COBURG‚ VIC 3058
Phone: 1800 636 432
Email: cec@cecaust.com.au
Website: http://cec.cecaust.com.au
 

CEC’s Craig Isherwood addresses Civil BRICS Forum in Moscow, Russia

CEC National Secretary Craig Isherwood visited Moscow at the end of June, to take part in a preparatory event for the 2015 summit of the BRICS group of nations, held 8-9 July in Ufa, Russia. He attended the 29 June-1 July Civil BRICS Forum, an event organised for the first time ever under the Russian BRICS Presidency of 2015 as one of several consultative pre-meetings—this one involving non-governmental organisations, while others brought together parliamentarians, academics, and youth—to make recommendations to the leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, for their meeting in Ufa.

Isherwood was the only announced speaker from a non-BRICS country during the Civil BRICS Forum. He reported to the participants, who hailed from all BRICS member countries, on the organising by the CEC in Australia and the Schiller Institute internationally, for the United States, Europe, and Australia to stop pursuing deadly confrontation against Russia and China and to break with the failed financial policies of the City of London and Wall Street, and enter into cooperation with BRICS instead. Isherwood spoke at a 30 June panel discussion titled “Modern Global Challenges and the Role of the BRICS Union in Ensuring Peace and Security”, under the Peace and Security section of the Forum.

Professor Georgy Toloraya, the executive director of the Russian National Committee for BRICS Research who was the Russian coordinator of both the VII BRICS Think Tanks Forum (held in May) and the inaugural Civil BRICS Forum, had been a guest speaker of the 28-29 March conference of the CEC in Melbourne, where he presented the BRICS “outreach” process and called for overcoming “the notion that BRICS is anti-Western.” (Prof. Toloraya’s speech has been published online on the CEC’s dedicated website on the conference proceedings, and in the conference proceedings magazine.)

Introducing Isherwood to the Civil BRICS audience, Prof. Toloraya noted that the Australian guest had arrived in Moscow from Paris, where he had led a CEC delegation to the Schiller Institute’s 13-14 June international conference, “Rebuilding the World in the BRICS Era.”

“I am here to greet you on behalf of thousands of my fellow Australians,” Isherwood told the Moscow meeting, “who welcome BRICS as a crucial institution for overcoming the grave dangers now facing all mankind—above all, what this Working Group’s draft paper mentions as ‘the growing level of tensions in international relations’ and the prospect of ‘a “big war”, involving major powers’—and as a crucial institution for, instead, building a new, just world order.” He voiced support for another element of the draft recommendations, which had been published on the Civil BRICS website, namely a BRICS initiative for a Planetary Defence System against the potential comet and asteroid danger to Earth. Ultimately, neither of these points survived the Civil BRICS consensus process of drafting the recommendations.

In his speech, Isherwood also detailed the LaRouche movement’s 40-year worldwide drive for a new, just international economic order, and the great infrastructure projects of the European Land-Bridge and the World Land-Bridge, in particular. He quoted from the petition initiated by Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche, “The United States and Europe Must Have the Courage to Reject Geopolitics and Collaborate with the BRICS,” including its final section: “We therefore call upon the U.S. and Europe to abandon the suicidal geopolitical policies of the past, which led to the two previous World Wars and are leading to a third, and to build a future for all humanity…. As patriots of our own nations, and as citizens of the world, we call on our fellow citizens and the leaders of our nations to have the courage to break the current cycle of escalating bestiality, by accepting the generous offer to collaborate with BRICS.”

The full text of Craig Isherwood’s speech at the Civil BRICS forum, with illustrations, is posted in PDF form here.

Ufa summit inaugurates New International Order

The Ufa BRICS summit itself was a milestone in creating a new global financial and economic architecture, alternative to the bankrupt trans-Atlantic system. On 7 July, the Board of Governors of the New Development Bank (NDB), decided on last year at the Fortaleza BRICS summit, met for the first time. It was decided that the US$100 billion BRICS Contingency Reserve Arrangement, to protect against currency fluctuations and attacks, will become operational on 30 July, while the NDB, with initial authorised capital of $100 billion and initial subscribed capital of $50 billion, is expected to start lending early next year. On its agenda is an array of infrastructure projects of the kind needed to pull the world out of its economic decline. While the priority is to develop the infrastructure of the bank’s member states, the NDB will also invest in other countries’ economies.

Throughout the BRICS meeting and the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), held also in Ufa on 9-10 July, President Vladimir Putin of Russia, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and others spoke about linking together the Xi-initiated Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB) and the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), organised by Russia. On the sidelines of the summits, nuclear energy agreements between Russia and India, and Russia and South Africa, were among the many bilateral deals finalised. Another focus of discussions, reflecting the future-orientation of the leaders, was cooperation on space research and the frontiers of science.

India and Pakistan officially began the process of joining the SCO, whose current members are China, Russia and the four Central Asian countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. At the SCO summit, Xi presented the strategy behind the SREB, China’s New Silk Road. Putin said that cooperation among BRICS, the SCO, and the EAEU can launch “a powerful economic breakthrough”. Both Xi and Putin have said that they could become the core of a new international order.

Click here for a free copy of the CEC’s July-August 2015 New Citizen newspaper, on the proceedings of the CEC’s March international conference—The World Land-Bridge: Peace on Earth, Good Will towards All Men.

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