on all sides of a conflict, I think.
Mr Glaziev doesn't strike me as an idiot, although I have to admit I don't know much about him. He is currently responsible for putting together the Eastern partnership / Custom union mentioned in the interview. He also ran for President in 2004 and came third, here are some remarks from that time about him by Michael Hudson I found interesting:
One rising light has been Sergei Glaziev, an early market reformer already before 1990 but opposed to Yeltsin’s coup d’êtat in 1993 and the "shock therapy" of "grabitization" that followed. He subsequently saw that a least distorted way for Russia to recover was by a tax on economic rent, that is, the value of land and natural resources that exists independently of labor and capital investment. The aim is to untax industry and labor, and make Russia’s natural resources monopolies finance the government. But these are precisely the assets that Yeltsin’s kleptocrats were the first to grab. So this intellectual policy fight has now been raging for a decade.
Glaziev has become the most prominent politician for a group that wants to encourage industrial investment as distinct from buy-outs of assets and property already in place. Industrial recovery and employment require that taxes be shifted from industry and labor onto raw-materials exports–the companies that the oligarchs have been so eager to grab, precisely because their revenue is passive an unearned, or what is called rentier income in the West.
SS: How many major figures support this policy?
MH: Their ranks include former Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, and now even Gorbachev, as well as Dmitri Lvov, a prominent economist from Russia’s Academy of Sciences, and Vladimir Litvinenko, rector of the St. Petersburg Mining Institute.
Glaziev is a student of Lvov, who has focused his theorizing on the role of rent in the economy. Lvov was a schoolmate of Primakov. Their closeness turned out to be a major reason why Yeltsin disposed of Primakov so hurriedly for a series of successors he felt would prove more reliable to his Family’s rent-grabbing interests. ...
http://www.counterpunch.org/2004/02/27/an-interview-with-michael-hudson/
= new reply since forum marked as read