PRESS RELEASE

Brit Imperial Mouthpiece: Regime Change in Russia by Economic Warfare

Nov 24, 2014 (EIRNS)—This week’s cover of The Economist, mouthpiece the City of London, depicts a bear bleeding in the snow, headlined “Russia’s Wounded Economy.” Backed up by three page of in-depth profiling of Russian economic weak points, the lead editorial serves to confirm Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s charge, that the purpose of the West’s economic sanctions again Russia is “regime change.” Speaking for a trans-Atlantic financial sector that is itself bankrupt, The Economist declare that Russia “is closer to crisis than the West or Vladimir Put realize.”

The list of vulnerabilities includes dependence on oil exports, when oil prices are now 10 to 20 dollars/barrel below what Moscow had counted on; a 23% collapse in the ruble, bringi potential consumer price inflation despite efforts to substitut domestically produced goods for imports; and the Russian corporate foreign debt, of both state-owned and private companies, which is now over $500 billion, with $130 billion du before the end of 2015. The Economist suggests ways for “international finance” to exploit each of these, to breach “Russia’s defenses.” Continuing its propaganda campaign of recent weeks about vulnerabilities within the BRICS, The Economist suggests that if Russian companies default, then Braz will be the next to suffer. “When economies are on an unsustainable course,” the editorial intones, “international finance often acts as a fast-forward button, pushing countries over the edge more quickly than politicians or investors expect...”

One of the back-up articles purports to find a Russian “weakness” in the fact that $170 billion of its reserves and “rainy day” assets are in the National Welfare Fund (NWF) and the Reserve Fund, and the NWF has been partially committed to infrastructure investment, so it won’t be available for bailout

The Economist’s international editor, Ed Lucas, is a notorious Putin-basher and author of books on the need to bring down Putin, also famous for the utterance in 2008, “I hate the Westphalian system” of sovereign nation-states. Lucas personal used his Twitter feed last December to fan the Maidan coup process in Ukraine, by putting out a false report that Presiden Victor Yanukovych had pledged to join the Eurasian Customs Unio as a full member.

Today economic issues were debated in the Russian Federati Council, as one of a series of top-level economic policy meetings, in advance of Putin’s Message to the Federal Assembly on Dec. 4. There are rumors of government and/or policy changes One of the speakers was Academician Sergei Glazyev, adviser to Putin on Eurasian integration, who said that Russia is losing 1 trillion rubles (around $250 billion) this year through capital flight and currency speculation. He blasted the Central Bank fo starving the Russian real economy of credit, and called for increased funding of development institutions (like the Development Bank, the Russian Direct Investment Fund, and others), a heavy tax on "dubious" cross-border capital movement and the implementation of serious deoffshoreization at last. Russia has $500 billion parked in offshore tax havens, Glazyev said, adding, “These offshores are in British jurisdictions, s at any moment they can be cut off from our financial system by sanctions."