MINNEAPOLIS — NATO, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank are all touted as global organizations, in which every member is deserving of dignity, progress and support.

Yet these organizations and others like them are dominated by economic and political heavyweights in Washington, Wall Street, London and Brussels, who are working to preserve the ideals of Empire that exploit, dominate or wholly ignore the Global South.

Despite efforts to promote only the interests of the Western elite, emerging economies are growing strong enough to fight modern-day economic imperialism and shrug off the chains of Western hegemony.

There’s the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Eurasian Economic Union, the Asian Infrastructure Bank, and China’s “One Belt, One Road” strategy to link much of the Eurasian landmass via trade and investment.

But nowhere is the focus on decentralizing power away from the West more apparent than in the bloc of emerging economic powers known as BRICS.

Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa have formed a multilateral political and economic bloc that champions efforts to wrestle power away from Western-dominated organs.

As Eric Draitser noted in the first of his exclusive series for MintPress News, “Empire Strikes Back,” the BRICS countries are home to over 3 billion people. It’s the “single largest bloc in terms of human capacity among global alliances.”

The growing muscle exerted by BRICS, he writes, “has undoubtedly ruffled a few feathers in Washington and elsewhere in the West.”

And thus, with feathers sufficiently ruffled by the threat of a potent rival to their power, various actors have stepped in over the past year or two to destabilize and undermine BRICS nations through both political and economic means.

And in each case, there’s a clear beneficiary: the U.S. and its allies.

Here to talk more about the Empire’s destabilizing tactics is geopolitical analyst Eric Draitser.

Watch the full episode of Behind The Headline to learn more about the attack on BRICS: