Economic Warfare the Main Western
Weapon
TAKIS
FOTOPOULOS
(06.12.2014)
Abstract: The aim
of this article is to show why, in the
globalization era, economic warfare is the main
weapon used by the Transnational Elite to
integrate into the New World Order of neoliberal
globalization any country resisting the loss of
economic and national sovereignty that joining
it implies. Its conclusion is that only the
building of an economic and political union of
sovereign nations, like the original conception
of the Eurasian Union was, which would embrace
the nations all over the world still fighting
the NWO of neoliberal globalization, from Europe
and Asia up to Latin America and the Arab world,
could possibly create conditions of
self-reliance and "self determination" and, at
the same time, an alternative pole to the
present criminal unipolar world.
In the last few days it became
clear that economic warfare is the main weapon used
by the Transnational Elite, (TE ― i.e. the network
of the elites based mainly in the G7 countries which
run the New World Order of neoliberal
globalization), to subordinate Russia and integrate
every other country still resisting the process,
e.g. Iran and Venezuela. This includes not just the
usual economic sanctions, or the blocking of
new projects to facilitate distribution, like the
South Stream project but, also,
as the dramatic decline in the price of oil has
shown in the last few months, the induced fall in
its price. This was the case of the last OPEC
meeting when Saudi Arabia was the main organ for the
implementation of this plan.
As it is well known, Saudi Arabia
is the biggest producer and exporter of oil and its
actions in the last OPEC meeting were decisive in
bringing about the present dramatic decline in its
price. As the associate editor and chief economics
commentator at the Financial Times put it,
celebrating the fact that Russia, Iran and Venezuela
might be particularly affected (“Two cheers for the
sharp falls in oil prices” was the eloquent title of
his article), it was Saudi Arabia that “triggered”
this dramatic event:
“Particularly
important might be the impact on net
oil-exporting countries. Among vulnerable
producers are regimes that one would dearly like
to see weakened, Vladimir Putin’s Russia
foremost among them. (…) To sustain oil prices,
Opec needed to cut output by about 1mbd. But it
― or, more precisely, Saudi Arabia ― has refused
to do so. This has triggered the recent fall in
prices.”
However, Saudi Arabia is not just
a very important player in the oil market. It is
also one of the most absolutist, politically and
ideologically, regimes on Earth.
Politically, the regime is
controlled, as an absolute monarchy, by one family,
where the king, who is also the prime
minister, combines legislative, executive, and
judicial functions, with royal decrees forming the
basis of the country’s legislation, while the
numerous members of the royal family (which includes
at least 7,000 princes) dominate the entire
political system. This fact does not prevent of
course the Transnational Elite (well known for its
fight for “democracy” all over the world!) to fully
support this regime and to accuse, instead, Russia
for absolutism!
Ideologically, almost a quarter of its population is
Salafis and most of the rest are Wahhabis, although
the differences between them seem similar to the
nonsensical differences between Christian
theologians in the Middle Ages. The essence is that
they both represent the most puritanical (i.e.
conservative) approaches to Islam.
As an analyst put
it, “most Salafists fill the ranks of groups
called ‘pietist’ or ‘quietist’, who preach obedience
to any government, however corrupt or autocratic, as
long as it calls itself Muslim. The aim is to avoid
that worst of states: fitna or calling into
question the unity of the community of the
faithful.”
It is therefore
hardly surprising that Saudi Arabia and its ideology
was enthusiastically embraced by the West, in the
pre-globalization era, as a useful tool to fight
Soviet influence as well as pan-Arabic socialism,
and by the Transnational Elite in the globalization
era, as a useful tool to fight any nations resisting
their abolition of sovereignty within the New World
Order (NWO) of neoliberal globalization. This was
clearly shown for instance when Saudi Arabia
supported in every possible way the Salafi jihadi,
who butchered the peoples of Libya and Syria and
only recently stopped supporting their offspring,
ISIS, when they become targeted by the Transnational
Elite for attempting to follow their own line in
building an Islamic State.
Unsurprisingly,
the methods used by ISIS, like
beheading which were repeated ad nauseam by
the TE media in order to terrorize Western middle
classes and justify its “war on terrorism”, have in
fact been practiced for years by its client Saudi
regime, with nobody in the “civilized” West
bothering much about it, as long as they were able
to keep expanding their highly profitable business
of arms selling to the regime. As another analyst
described the Saudi regime in a highly substantiated
analysis:
“To this day,
Saudi Arabia carries out barbaric executions
against both criminals and political enemies,
including victims accused of ‘sorcery and
witchcraft’ in the aptly named, ‘Chop-Chop
Square’ located in the capital of Riyadh where
heads are literally chopped off by hooded
swordsmen. (…) Saudi Arabia’s brutally
repressive internal security apparatus is a
creation of US advisors and operators. Its
military, both covert and conventional, is also
armed through astronomically large weapons sales
(including a recent sale considered the largest
in US history) by its Wall Street and London
allies. The atrocities committed by the despotic
Saud regime are directly facilitated by US
advisers, operators, and arms. Saudi Arabia also
hosts the US military, a sizable force until it
was spread out amongst the orbiting despotic
regimes of Qatar (note: see Aljazeera), Bahrain,
Oman, and the United Arab Emirates.”
Of course, it was not just
systemic economists who celebrated the dramatic fall
in the price of oil, as even the upper echelons of
the transnational economic elite, like the head of
the IMF, found also difficult to disguise their joy
in describing the impact of this event. Thus, as
Christine Lagarde explained, a 30 percept drop in
oil prices translates into a 0.8 percent boost in
growth for “most advanced economies,” and “probably
0.6 percent for the US,” and then she went on to
elaborate as follows the implications for US and
Russia:
“For the
United States, low energy prices could help to
stimulate growth to 3.5 percent next year from
the October forecast of 3.1 per cent. (…) For
Russia, exports of oil and gas equate to 68 per
cent of Russia’s total exports, and 50 per cent
of its federal revenues. Russia has already
spent almost $90 billion from its currency
reserves in 2014, or 4.5 per cent of its economy
to support plunging rubble that has lost more
than 40 per cent from the start of the year.”
No wonder the TE
media celebrate the projected fall in real incomes,
as described by Alexei Vedev, the Russian deputy
economy minister. Thus, Vedev, assuming that the
sanctions will remain in place throughout 2015,
something that implies that capital markets for the
majority of Russian banks and companies will remain
closed, predicted that the country, by the end of
the year would be in recession, the first one since
2009. The size of this recession will be greater the
lower the price will be next year, but even if it
stays at around $80 (a rather optimistic assumption
because of inflation which is already rather high as
a result of the devaluation of the rouble), real
incomes are expected to fall by around 3%. Also,
given that capital markets are still open, capital
flight from Russia will continue and capital
outflows of $125bn are expected for this year, which
could rise to $90bn in 2015.
The Financial Times is (as usually) more
frank than Western liberal “Left” papers in
expressing their deeper wishes for a “velvet
revolution” in Russia as a result of the
intensifying crisis and openly raises the question
whether “Putin’s popularity can weather a perfect
economic storm and “a fall in real incomes which
will hit hard working class families in regions
supportive of the president.”
It is therefore
clear that Saudi Arabia’s action in precipitating
the dramatic fall in the price of oil was far from
accidental. Furthermore, it was hardly motivated by
a Saudi attempt to keep its dominant share in the
oil market, supposedly threatened by the US shale
oil production. This explanation, given by the
“globalist” faction within the Russian elite and the
liberal “Left” in the West, was in fact an alibi
used by the TE itself and the Saudis in order to
disguise the real aim of this action. That is, the
use of the price of oil as a highly effective weapon
of economic warfare in order to force Russia and
associate resisting regimes (like Iran and
Venezuela) either to submit to the TE rule, or face
a possibly severe economic recession (depending on
how long the price of oil will be kept at very low
levels) which could well lead to “velvet
revolutions” in all these countries and, possibly,
to regime changes. The alternative “explanation” in
terms of a supposed “war” between S.A. and US not
only “forgets” the client nature of the former to
the latter but also the simple fact that such an
action could only have a temporary effect. Clearly,
at the moment the price of oil starts rising again
for political or economic reasons ― this has nothing
to do with any “laws” or “tendencies” like the “peak
oil” disaster theory and the likes
― shale oil production will of course resume with
revenge.
In fact, the present dramatic
fall in the price of oil is part of a long-term plan
to force the “nationalist” part of the Russian elite
to submit to the Transnational Elite’s (TE) rule,
despite the aspirations of the overwhelming majority
of the Russian people that follows it. This was
clearly shown when this majority enthusiastically
welcomed the only real counter-attack so far against
the continuing and intensifying attack by the TE
against Russia, i.e. the re-integration of Crimea.
The long-term
plan to hit Russia at the economic front is shown by
the systematic TE effort to undermine the only
effective export of the country since the
catastrophic destruction of Russian industry,
following the collapse of USSR and the growing
reliance of Russia since then on imports to cover
even the basic needs of its people. This was a
collapse not in the sense that the Soviet regime
failed to cover (at least) the basic needs of its
people. In fact, the opposite could be shown even by
reliable Western research at the time.
Yet, it still failed to cover effectively non-basic
needs and, even more so, to create conditions of
real workers’ democracy. This, combined with an
economic campaign against USSR, using (yet again!)
the dramatic fall in the price of oil but also (as
the fall in oil price was not enough at the time,
given the self-reliance of USSR) the arms race, led
initially to the taking over of power by the
globalist faction within the Russian elite under
Gorbachev (who effectively wanted a post-Mao Chinese
kind of a hybrid capitalism cum “communism”) and,
eventually, to the TE- favourite, Boris Yeltsin. As
Engdahl put it, “we now see as evidence that clearly
indicates there was a CIA coup d’état backing Boris
Yeltsin to be the man of Washington, so as to
dismantle the Russian economy entirely after 1990.”
It was in this sense that one may talk of a collapse
of the USSR, given that the natural supporters of
the regime, the working class, did not mobilize to
stop these plans which led to the destruction not
only of the socialist revolution but of the Russian
economy itself.
Thus, it was not just the present
TE cancellation of the Russian attempt to bypass
Ukraine (which, for the time being is, to all
intents and purposes, a formal protectorate of it),
through the South Stream pipeline ― thanks to the
successful “pressure” of the EU on its informal
protectorate, Bulgaria. In fact, a similar story
happened a few years ago with another informal
protectorate of the EU, Greece,
when the
Burgas-Alexandroupoli pipeline was cancelled,
following heavy pressure by the TE, through its EU
component. That was an oil project for
transportation of Russian oil from the Bulgarian
Black seaport of Burgas to the Greek Aegean port of
Alexandroupoli, which was an important alternative
route for Russian oil, bypassing the
Turkish-Straits. Although the project was described
as one of the shortest pipelines through a plain
terrain and therefore one of the cheapest and cost
effective,
and the agreement was signed in Athens in 2007 by
President Putin and PM Karamanlis, the TE, having
already planned (well before the Ukraine crisis!)
the drastic reduction of EU’s dependence on Russian
oil, went as far as, effectively, replacing
Karamanlis by its much more obedient organ George
Papandreou ― in reality, a product of the US-Zionist
elites. Papandreou not only torpedoed this very
fruitful for the Greek people agreement that could
have reduced the absolute dependence of Greece on
the TE and open the door for a possible future entry
into the Eurasian Union but, also, played a leading
role in bringing forward the Greek economic
catastrophe. Thus, it was Papandreou himself who
invited the IMF (as Dominique Strauss-Kahn, then IMF
director himself revealed, to “help” Greece), even
though the Greek solvency problem was not publicly
known at the time and according to several experts
the bailout was still avoidable, without the
catastrophic “help” of the TE and its troika.
Clearly Papandreou, as well as his successor
Papadimos, who, was also a “man of the TE”, played a
very dirty role in precipitating the Greek economic
catastrophe ― although of course, the underlying
causes were systemic and had to do with Greece’s
integration into the EU.
The conclusion is
that, although the present agreements with China and
Turkey aiming to create new outlets for Russia’s
energy exports are useful defending acts, they
cannot be taken in any way as solutions to the
problem which underlies all the above symptoms: the
fact that Russia, although it still possesses a much
higher degree of economic and national sovereignty
than China (let alone Turkey, whose army is
completely dependent on its US patron!), it is still
characterized by a high degree of economic
dependence on the NWO. The merry liberal “Left” in
the West, which, together with the globalist faction
in Russia, celebrate as “victories” the deals with
China and Turkey, simply cannot understand the
crucial difference between an ally and a business
partner.
As
Aleksey Maslov, Head of the Russian-Chinese Expert
Council aptly put it, “China
is not an ally”
and the same applies to BRICS or countries like
Turkey, which has also geopolitical interests of
their own in the Middle East, very different from
those of Russia. So, although the globalist faction
inside Russia, as well as the fellow travellers in
the “Left” abroad try to confuse the issue, allies
have to be clearly distinguished from business
partners. The BRICS countries could perfectly be
good business partners to Russia (as long of course
as their economic interests coincide, or at least
are parallel) but whether they would be allies to
Russia in an intensifying conflict with the TE,
which could well put their economic interests in
jeopardy, is a completely different matter.
Therefore, only the building of
an economic and political union of sovereign nations
like the original conception of the Eurasian Union
was, which would embrace the nations all over the
world still fighting the NWO of neoliberal
globalization, from Europe and Asia up to Latin
America and the Arab world, could possibly create
conditions of self-reliance and “self determination”
and, at the same time, an alternative pole to the
present criminal unipolar world. This is the only
way to effectively disable the West’s economic
weapon, which successfully led to the collapse of
USSR and threatens a similar fate today to the
aspirations of the Russian people for a sovereign
Russia.