Geraci: the West views international relations as a tennis match
+ Jubilee 2025: our battle against odious debt
Today I am providing my English translation of 2 articles, both originally in Italian and from Movisol.org. (All emphasis mine in both articles).
The first one is a short article published on Saturday 4th January 2025.
Geraci: the West views international relations as a tennis match
Western countries conceive international relations as a tennis match, in which there is always a winner and a loser. The global South, on the other hand, has an approach that can be compared to the tango: both partners want the other to dance well, said Michele Geraci, former Undersecretary of State at the Ministry of Economic Development and lecturer at New York University Shanghai, speaking at the Schiller Institute's international conference on 7-8 December.
“In the field of international relations, the West adopts a zero-sum game approach, which means that if you win, I must lose and my victory means your loss”, Geraci said. “In contrast, the global South - the Belt and Road, the BRICS - tends to have a more win-win approach, meaning that your prosperity, your stability, your economic development also benefits my prosperity, my stability and my economic development. I use a metaphor to compare these two approaches: the zero-sum game, the US-led Western philosophy, is a bit like a tennis match. Of course, it can only end 6-4 or 4-6; if I win, you lose; if I lose, you win. Winning is a bit like dancing the tango, where both partners have to be good dancers in order to dance very well. And if one partner falls, so does the other. So you want them to be good and help each other to be good performers. So, the Western approach, zero-sum game = tennis match; the Global South, win-win = dancing the tango. I prefer dancing the tango; the approach benefits more people and is less confrontational in terms of competition; it is based more on cooperation than on competition”.
Geraci then contrasted “the vision that Lyndon LaRouche set out many years ago” with the geopolitical approach of the West. Why, paraphrasing LaRouche, is the Belt and Road Initiative, the BRI, a good thing? “It is a good thing because the sea routes - sure, they are important because they transport containers and goods from one port to another - do not create economic development in the sea, they create economic development in the terminals, at the beginning and at the end of a route, but not in the middle: water is and water remains”.
“In contrast, the other part of the Belt and Road, the land route, which China wants to develop and is developing through Kazakhstan, Central Asia, and then on to the Middle East, Africa, Eastern Europe, Europe and South-East Asia (let us not forget the North-South Corridor), is a route that creates economic benefits in the places it touches. A railway, a motorway generate economic development in those regions, perhaps increasing land values, or new production sites that want to be close to those routes.
“In Lyndon LaRouche's vision, the economic growth brought about by the very existence of these new routes would be such that the cost of transport would be zero, because the cost of an investment would be offset by the economic development that that investment would bring about, for the transport of goods on those routes would be completely free. And now you see that this visionary idea completely changes the way countries do business with each other, completely changes the way countries trade with each other - for the benefit of whom? For the benefit of those win-win companies that buy and sell from each other”.
Watch Geraci's speech at minute 1:20:00 here:
Interesting concepts and ideas. No wonder almost nobody talks about the BRI in the West and its mainstream media (MSM) and people who do are isolated and ignored!
The second article, by Dennis Small, was published on Friday 3rd January 2025.
Jubilee 2025: our battle against odious debt
The Schiller Institute issued the following statement calling for a true Jubilee in 2025.
On Christmas Eve 2024, Pope Francis officially launched the Jubilee Year 2025, calling for the coming year to be a “Jubilee of Hope”. The Jubilee is traditionally associated in various religions with the moment when slaves are emancipated and debts forgiven.
The Pope has raised the right issue at the right time, to urge action not only from Catholics, but from all men and women of goodwill.
As we enter 2025, the world is beset by rampant wars that threaten to degenerate into a nuclear confrontation between superpowers, which no one will survive. We are also witnessing the genocide in Gaza, which is killing not only hundreds of thousands of innocent Palestinians, but also our own humanity, as we watch seemingly unable to stop our governments from being passive and often complicit in crimes against humanity that we once swore would “never happen again”.
And we stand on the brink of a deadly explosion of the entire transatlantic financial system, with its $2 quadrillion-plus speculative bubble of illegitimate and odious debt and derivatives. It is the sole will of the Western establishment to maintain this bankrupt system, by any means, that is leading humanity towards nuclear war and genocide.
This financial system must undergo bankruptcy reorganisation in this jubilee year of 2025, wiping out all those portions of the $2 quadrillion speculative bubble that are illegitimate and hateful. These are moral and legal terms, based on international law, as the case of Ecuador in 2008 showed. The world must do now what little Ecuador did then.
In the Catholic Church, ordinary Jubilees are celebrated every 25 years. The last one was called in 2000 by Pope John Paul II. With his broad appeal for justice, civil society forces in many countries, including Ecuador, began to study and question the validity of the debt that had been imposed on developing nations. In July 2007, the Ecuadorian government convened a Commission for the Comprehensive Review of Public Credit (CAIC), which revealed, after an 18-month in-depth study, that Ecuador's foreign commercial debt was an illegitimate and illegal plundering mechanism between 1976 and 2006, rising from USD 16 million in 1976 to USD 4.2 billion in 2006, despite the net transfer to creditors of USD 7.1 billion in interest and principal over that 30-year period. Let's call it “bankers’ arithmetic”: $16-$7,100 = $4,200.
In 2008, based on that study, the Ecuadorian government announced a unilateral debt moratorium and imposed a 70-80% “cut” on its bondholders. Wall Street and the City of London yelled and screamed, but morality and legality were both on Ecuador's side.
“Odious debt” is a legal term originated in 1927 by the Russian-American jurist Alexander Nahun Sack, who based his opinion on two studies: the debt imposed on Mexico by the Hapsburg Emperor Maximilian's invasion and occupation of the country in the mid-19th century, a debt that was repudiated by Mexico's greatest president, Benito Juárez, with the help of Abraham Lincoln; and the case of Cuba in the early 20th century, which achieved independence from Spain and the debt the latter had imposed on its island colony. Sack wrote in his Les Effets des transformations des États sur leurs dettes publiques et autres obligations financières: Traité juridique et financier, Recueil Sirey, 1927:
“The reason why these odious debts cannot be left to be borne by the State is that such debts do not fulfil one of the conditions determining the legality of State debts, viz: The debts of the State must be contracted and the funds disbursed for the needs and in the interest of the State. Obnoxious debts, contracted and used for purposes that, to the knowledge of the creditors, are contrary to the interests of the nation, do not oblige the nation”.
International institutions such as UNCTAD have subsequently published studies that recognise the validity of Sack's argument, such as the July 2007 essay “The Concept of Odious Debt in Public International Law” by Prof. Robert Howse, Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School.
The famous American economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche (in the photo) traced this same concept - the requirement that debt serve the general welfare - back to the founders of the American economic system. In a speech in January 2011, LaRouche stated:
“An honest debt to the future can only be paid through the honest creation of equivalent physical wealth in the future, which includes the development of the creative capacities of every citizen, every child and every adolescent.
“Debts generated by a credit system are repaid by the prolifigacy of future production; the Winthrops and Mathers of the Massachusetts colony had already realised this. Such debts require the government to limit their accumulation to the efficient part of its commitment to promote production. Legally, they can only be incurred on the basis of increased physical wealth creation and growth in the nation's physical productivity. Any debt incurred as a result of financial speculation has no legitimacy in the eyes of a government.
“This is how one can describe in simple words Hamilton's great principle, which is implicit in the intent of the preamble of our Constitution.
“Debts are good when they are designed to be good, as in the case of a credit system that is based on a commitment to increase the net wealth creation per person and per square kilometre of a nation's territory”.
It is this approach - which also guided the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, including its provisions for a debt moratorium - that must now be applied globally in this Jubilee Year, to rid the world of the plague of usury once and for all, and with it the threat of war and genocide. This will pave the way for the organisation of a New Paradigm based on a new international architecture of security and development, enabling good credit to be issued for the just cause of global economic development.
Shouldn’t there be some more zeroes after $4,200??