Scott Ritter hosted Mikhail Khazin, Dec. 14 on his Scott Ritter Show video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQSaKUM2h_k). Ritter described him as, “a famous Russian economist, researcher, and publicist. One of the developers of the theory of modern economic crisis. Retired Class III State Counselor. Public figure, a permanent member of the ‘Izborsky Club.’ He worked in the Russian government and the Presidential administration of the Russian Federation. Author of books and numerous publications.” Khazin made statesman economist Lyndon LaRouche a key feature of his remarks on Ritter’s 45-minute broadcast.
Khazin headed the credit department of Russia’s Ministry of Economics, 1995-97, and was deputy chief of economics in Yeltsin’s presidential administration, 1997-98. He warned Russian leaders in July 2000, that they could not chart an economic future for Russia without taking into account the dangerous fantasies of the “New Economy” financial bubbles. (Russia had already been destabilized by the so-called 1997 Asia Crisis that ripped through Russia in the summer of 1998.) Khazin proposed that Russia link up with Germany in a long-term, 30- to 50-year development of Russian resources, as a way of not becoming crushed by bursting bubbles. (https://larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2000/eirv27n33-20000825/eirv27n33-20000825_012-russian_economists_forecast_worl.pdf )
Aside from Khazin’s description to Ritter of his discussions with LaRouche in 2000, he also conducted an extensive TV interview with LaRouche on his “A+ in Economics” broadcast in 2007. (https://larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2007/eirv34n22-20070601/16-19_722-lar.pdf) EIR described the Khazin’s TV program as having a “following among policymaking circles in Moscow, since it is the only weekly show dedicated to economic analysis, appearing on Russian television.” When Khazin brought up the possibility of a way out, with a Russia-Germany link, LaRouche argued that the dollar system had to be reorganized along FDR methods, and that European countries didn’t have the sovereignty to properly respond to Putin’s 2007 offer to Germany.
On Ritter’s show yesterday, Khazin first had two shorter references to LaRouche, before he ended with a longer development of LaRouche’s targeting of the British Empire as the controller of America’s downfall. Khazin’s theme is that Americans are currently being played by the British in the AUKUS (Australis/U.K./U.S.) geopolitics.
First, after explaining that financial speculation has squeezed out manufacturing in the West, he says “that was discussed and voiced by famous American thinker Lyndon LaRouche, who passed away at the age of 96,” and who stressed physical economics. But the American establishment didn’t listen.
Later, he references his discussions with LaRouche in 2000, about the problem of the “financial economy” that dominated the U.S. for decades. “I faced this situation a lot” when in the government in the 1990s. “And then someone in the United States understands that…. I talked about that in 2000 with Lyndon LaRouche, who explained to me that, starting the line of Nixon in the 1970s, the bankers took under their control the economic ... [translator broke off] and most officials and economists did not understand that the economic development” was being undercut. In this section, Khazin explains why the current sanctions are not really hurting Russia, because after 2008, Russia was “not a financial economy, not a ‘liberal’ economy anymore. Today’s economy is turning [into] more of a real sector economy. The reason the sanctions have not impacted so much, that is what my idea is.” That is, the same blindness to real economics in the 1971 dumping of the Bretton Woods system is also behind the mis-design of the sanctions war against Russia.
Finally, Khazin concludes by warning his American audience of London’s duplicity in the AUKUS operation. “But we need to consider one more thing. Lyndon LaRouche, who is a prominent American thinker, kept on saying that the U.S. is mostly ruled by the British Empire. I’m not going to discuss this statement of his, we don’t have much time for that, but I would like to remind you that the main economic mechanism which was used to manage and rule the world of the recent decade is the mechanism of interest rate. This is control over printing money, and control over credit, which is control over the interest rate.
“But in the British Empire in the 18th and 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, the control was effected through fixed prices, like in the U.S.S.R. But the War for Independence at the end of the 18th century was associated with the fact that Great Britain prohibited the colonists any manufacturing at all. The colonists were to buy agricultural tools from Great Britain at a fixed price by the British Empire. That is what caused the War for Independence.
“Today’s action conducted by the United States, in [the] case of China, against Russia the oil price cap, this has shifted from the credit management to the price management. And in this particular sense, I do note throughout, the logic of LaRouche, that the people who created that are not in Washington at all, but in London. And that may be a right logic behind [it]—you know, being an American patriot, I would be very concerned who will dominate in AUKUS, Great Britain or the United States. The Commander-in-Chief of the Australian armies is the British monarch. I do not know the system quite well, how it is, really. I’m just voicing some hypothesis that we shouldn’t throw out that the role of London will be too much, too much for the interests of the U.S.”
