William Engdahl: Since the end of the Cold War some 18 years ago it has been the prime Washington goal to make Russia and the CIS countries vassal states of a global Dollar Imperium. This is the real significance of the IMF as the agency for Russian and CIS "reform" after 1990. To my mind it was and is a very foolish and very short-sighted policy even from a standpoint of USA best interest. It has backfired badly and at a huge cost in lives and health of hundreds of millions across the world, in Russia, East Europe and including in the United States. Sadly President Obam,a represents no change to this agenda. That can be seen in his choice of Defense and National Security and Intelligence cabinet as well as his economic team. It is all the old guard in new clothes. Given the US economic and financial crisis, the US "Emperor" has no clothes. It like Great Britain after 1914 is an empire in terminal decline, but American elites are in psychological "denial" state.

WE: The Global Crisis is in fact a crisis Made on Wall Street. It was created over a period of years, especially since 1999 when Alan Greenspan then Federal Reserve chief along with the five or six largest Wall Street banks including JP MorganChase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley--when they succeesed in getting the Government and Congress to remove any and all controls on what frauds the banks could undertake. Notable is the fact, forgotten today, that it was thenTreasury Secretary Larry Summers and his assistant, Assistant Secretary Tim Geithner who drafted the legislation in 1999 and 2000 to repeal the restrictions banks that opened the door to create banks "too big to fail" and at the same time allow trading in financial derivatives and other instrments to take place with NO government oversight. That opened the floodgates for fraud and for abuse of the financial system. It was called by Greenspan "The Revolution in finance" or the "securitization revolution." It was no revolution, merely a license to steal, given the growing political power of biggest Wall Street financial institutions. Today American taxpayers are being told by Geithner and Summers, who are now Obama Treasury Secretary and chief economic adviser respectively, that taxpayers must pay to clean up the mess that Geithner and Summers and their friends on Wall Street created! Little wonder citizens are a little angry when they realize.

I estimate that the present crisis in the USA will last at least a decade or more until the debt overhang is worked off. Tragically, this financial foolishness will put the United States into a new Great Depression which will be in scale worse than that of the 1930′s. The prospect for the EU, for Russia, for the nations of Eurasia especially China depend on whether they decide to support that Dollar System or not. If they continue to support the dollar system, they will simply sink with the dollar "Titanic."

WE: In today′s world of international capital flows, hot money and hedge funds, a 30% rise or fall in stock or commodity prices in a short time is rather a reflection of speculative betting. Because the US Government is desperately trying to convince investors there are "small green shoots" of recovery popping up, speciulators are looking to make a fast profit on stocks that are severely undervalued such as commodity stocks in Russia. The stock market in today′s world has ceased to be an indicator of national economic health if it ever was. It is more a reflection of what large hedge funds and big international banks think will make a fast buck in a short time before they sell and go to the next "hot thing." For western fund managers I am in contact with "emerging markets" and commodities are just now "hot" and that is reflected in the China stock market as well as others. It is irrelevant as an indicator of economic health.

WE: The Cheney meeting was reported in US press at the time but has been difficult to independently verify. What is the case, is that Khodorkovsky was in talks with both ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco, the oil firm of Condi Rice, and with the powerful Washington-based Carlyle Group of Geórge H.W. Bush at the time of his arrest. In my view had he succeeded in getting either of the two US oil giants as a major shareholder of the then new Yukos-Sibneft, it would have been a major step to making all Russia into Washington′s long-desired vassal state. I believe then-President Putin and the Russian authorities acted correctly in intervening at that moment.

Russia has been in a state of an "invisible war" with Washington and it seems clear that the Russian government is often unable to openly tell the population the full details of what it knows. That is the case with any government in certain situations. Control of its raw materials is a national economic security issue for Russia today and to give that up to the "free market" to US companies who rarely in their history (as I detail in my book, A Century of War) ((Russian title here please)) respected any "free market" would have been a national catastrophe. The western media had a field day attacking Russia and Mr Putin for the arrest. Had I been in the Kremlin then I would have probably done much the same as Russia has done however, given the options. It seems there is little doubt Mr Khodorkovsky violated certain laws in getting control of Yukos and it is the case that he had built very high level ties to powerful British and US poliltical circles including Lord Rothschild, whose family has been involved in oil geopolitics since before World War I.

WE: I am not competent to comment on that.

WE: In my most recent visit to Russia in April after a visit last December I was shocked to see the degree of import dependence in Russia on US and EU industrialized food products. As you know I was in St Petersburg to announce the Russian publication of my book, Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation. The book deals with the destruction of the quality of food over the past 40 or so years by a Harvard University project financed then by the Rockefeller Foundation called "Agribusiness." That has turned the production of the food we eat into a purely for profit business in which artificial tastes and colors and genetic manipulations to food are all used to maximize profit to ten or fifteen giant multinationals. Russia still has some of the best farmland along with Ukraine in the world. It has not been destroyed by agri-chemicals like the farmland in Kansas today. That natural or what Germans call "bio" agriculture could be turned into a national asset in Russia with but a little right kind of support, tax incentive to Russian farmers and such, even ultimately to export certified naturally grown food to Germany or the rest of the EU who are hungry and will pay more for such healthy food. Russian tomatoes unlike those here in the EU still taste like real tomatoes!

Today the Russian economy is clearly dependent on export of oil and gas and other commodities as well as certain high tech arms. So long as those exports are sold in dollars, Russia is tied to the dollar system. The US market per se is a small one for Russia. Russia′s economic future is its potential to build up Eurasia as the future world economic center of grtavity. China is a huge economy and is growing dynamically. However China needs what Russia can offer in terms of military security, energy security, scientific knowhow which is perhaps stil the finest in the world of science, the quality of science Germany was known for before the Second World War. Russia needs the cooperation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization states and China does as well. A true economic partnership here as was suggested in the recent Yekatrineberg summit is the geopolitical nightmare of people like Henry Kissinger, but I believe it is the future. At some point the EU will come along. Right now their elites are paralyzed with Eurosclerosis. They see the Atlantic bridge to America is crumbling but still fear buiilding new bridges to the east. That will come, but Russia need not wait. Russia in this context is one of the most exciting places to be in the world in my view. You straddle both east and west in terms of geography, culture and history.

WE: The possibility is growing by the day. I do not see it happening soon however. Rather, the US ability to issue endless public debt depends on the willingness of trade surplus countries like Japan or China to buy that Treasury debt. That willingness is coming under great pressure. China has said so openly in recent months. The likelihood is that to sell its new debt the US Treasury will be forced to offer far higher interest rates to compensate the growing risk of such default. Those high interest rates in turn will further kill domestic US economic growth. The United States is caught in a classic "debt trap" just as Bolovia or Poland in the 1980′s had been.

WE: I see no possibility of effective "reform" of the IMF. The institution was created at Bretton Woods in 1944 to aid the US agenda for reconstruction of Europe after the war as a US-dominated market. Russia, then the USSR, was wise to have stayed out then. In my view the best would be to bury the IMF as an instrument of US foreign economic domination along with the World Bank. The American Century and the Dollar Imperium built after 1944 is now in its death agony. In this case a decent funeral for the Bretton Woods institutions would be the only Christian thing to do. It may be shocking for Russian readers but believe me it is even more shocking what American citizens are being put through today with unemployment, collapsing home prices, and economic misery they could bnever imagined so long as they could live on borrowed money.

Thank you