Sergei Glaziev—Putin's economic brain

Since the EU seems determined to push Russia outside of the neoliberal world, she has the possibility to try something more enlightened.  The opportunity is certainly there.  Russia has a highly educated populace and an embarrassment of natural resource riches.  So in theory, there is not much that stands in the way of historical levels of prosperity.  In practice...

In this Youtube, we hear from Sergei Glaziev who is advertised as Putin's primary economic advisor.  And he most certainly has an interesting POV.  He is not, however, without his analytic weaknesses—the most obvious of which is that he understands capitalism from a Marxist perspective.  He starts off with analysis of cycles and structural overlaps. Then he asserts that technology transformations have typically come from war, but this time, we have humanitarian technologies in the wings so we can avoid the war stage.  He proposes a trade zone from Lisbon to Vladivostok and reminds us that the state can provide demand.

Moving on to a more specific historical analysis, Glaziev claims that WW II and Cold War were good for USA, and that what is different now is we are moving from American cycle of capital accumulation to an Asian cycle.  To combat this, USA is fomenting war in Europe to maintain their hegemony in battle against China (Asia) by getting cheap assets in the resulting chaos.  Russia is the victim of this policy while Ukraine is weapon of choice.  Brzezinski is the theoretician behind this geopolitical madness.

Ukraine and Russia share their scientific and industrial complex, but Ukraine's association agreement with EU has ceded economic control to Brussels of everything important.  So it is now a colony.  Effectively the Kiev government is now Nazi whose sole goal is to inflict as much damage as possible on east Ukraine.

The current economic warfare will cause the EU to lose a trillion Euros from sanctions scheme demanded by USA.  Cold War anti-USSR turned Russophobia is making European leaders act against its own self-interests—Germany to the tune of 200 billion Euros.  Glaziev hopes new young leaders will be more pragmatic.

Suddenly the interview gets very interesting.  He claims the Russia must stop external dependencies.  He points out that while Russia has grown to depend on foreign investment, rich Russian investors are taking capital out of the country—losing $100 Billion each year.

And shades of the Non-Partisan League, Glaziev then claims:

• We must take control of our financial and monetary systems.
• We must restore our capacity for strategic planning and long-term programs.  
• We must build new technological systems.
• We must build our own sovereign macro-economic policy.

So is this the man who can advise Putin on a quest towards full economic potential?  Who knows.  But I am reasonably certain that his advice is significantly better than anything any USA President had heard since at least Jimmy Carter.