Moved to Opinion because it was published as an opinion piece.
Some refer to him as "the Middle East's new sultan in a neo-Ottoman empire" -- yet the truth about Erdogan's kingdom is utterly different. We are not facing an economic power, but rather, a state whose credit bubble will be bursting any moment now and bringing down its economy.
The budget deficit of the collapsing Greece compared to its GDP stands at some 10%, and the world is alarmed. At the same time, Turkey's deficit is at 9.5%, yet some members of the financial media describe the Turkish economy as a success story (for comparison's sake, Israel's deficit stands at some 3% and is expected to decline to 2% this year.)
While Turkey's economy grew by some 10% this year, this was merely the result of financial manipulation.
Erdogan did train as an economist...
So how does the system work? The banks in Erdogan's Turkey handed out loans and mortgages to any seeker in recent years, offering very low interest rates; this was in fact a gift. As the interest rate was so low, Turkish citizens used more and more credit, mostly for consumption.
And how did Turkey's Central Bank finance this credit party? Via loans: Erdogan's bank borrowed money in the world and handed it out to its citizens. However, Turkey's deficit kept growing because of it, until it reached a scary 8% of GDP; by the end of the year the figure is expected to reach 10%.
Turkey's external debt doubled itself in the past 18 months, which were election campaign months. Only a small part of the deficit (15%) was financed by foreign investment. The rest constitutes immense external debts.
...Turkey's unemployment rate is 13% and the local currency continues to plummet vis-à-vis the dollar -- it reached its lowest levels since the 2009 global crisis. With a weak currency and with a stock exchange that lost some 40% of its value in dollars in the last six months, Erdogan wants to be the Middle East's ruler?
#2
this stuff is quite complicated but the article conflates several different issues; the intra economy and the inter economy
Intra economy- Turkey's budget deficit has been very significant since 2009. The govt reduced taxes to stimulate the economy and this resulted in some huge deficits. They then raised taxes back and got some heat and lowered them again. They did not have a huge expenditure stimulus like the US but they did indirectly subsidize some products (although its hard to tell how much).
The inter economy is harder to understand because the sum of the transactions aren't really transparent. What is certain is that in current accounts, Turkey's deficit is increasing at an unsustainable rate. This is partly because (like the US), Turkey is a net importer of energy and energy is expensive and partly because Turkey's energy use is increasing (in the US energy use is slightly declining). What is not known (to me) is who is loaning Turkey the funds to cover their imports and how much of this is just being covered by debasing the currency.
Posted by: Lord Garth ||
09/19/2011 11:57 Comments ||
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Tea party types and other conservatives talk about how they'd like their country back. I'd like my version of the Constitution back.
The rise of these self-proclaimed constitutional conservatives is an ominous development that has received too little notice - and too little push-back.
Until now. Under the banner of "Constitutional Progressives," a coalition of liberal groups has begun making an important two-part argument: First, that a progressive government agenda is consistent with constitutional values. Second, that the constitutional conservative approach represents a dangerous retrenchment of the government's role.
This bid to "rebut the constitutional fairy tales being peddled by the tea party," as Douglas Kendall of the Constitutional Accountability Center put it, could not be more timely, with the dizzying rise of Texas Gov. Rick Perry.
The constitutional conservative critique, goes far beyond the familiar laments about activist judges. It is, at bottom, an argument against the 20th century - specifically against the notion that the Constitution envisions and empowers a muscular federal government able to ensure that its citizens have clean air, healthy food and safe workplaces.
To grasp the radical nature of the constitutional conservative approach, consider the record of every Republican president since the New Deal.
Richard Nixon, for example, ran on the pledge of appointing "strict constructionist" judges, but he created the Environmental Protection Agency.
Likewise, George W. Bush inveighed against judges "legislating from the bench." Yet he presided over the largest expansion of Medicare in the history of the program and oversaw a sweeping new role for the federal government in assuring quality education by local schools.
The constitutional conservative vision as I and many others are afraid of is dramatically different. It sees a hobbled federal government limited to a few basic activities, such as national defense and immigration. The 10th Amendment, reserving to states the powers not specifically granted the federal government, would be put on steroids. The steep and slippery slope argument!
The Commerce Clause, giving the federal government the authority to regulate commerce among the states, would be drastically diminished.
Certainly, there's a legitimate debate about the proper role of the federal government and the scope of federal versus state power. But that is a different argument than the one long thought settled during the New Deal: that the Constitution grants the federal government power to regulate a broad array of activities in the national interest. More settled science?
A white paper by the liberal Center for American Progress spells out the potential consequences of the constitutional conservative vision. Programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid would be deemed to exceed the federal government's enumerated powers. And all be eliminated by executive fiat!
The federal government would cease any role in education and in combating poverty, ending food stamps and unemployment insurance. Laws on everything from child labor to food safety would be overturned. Steady, Ruthie!
None of this is likely to happen, of course, for the simple reason that most Americans don't want it to. So why are you wasting all these photons? Paid by the word, are you?
But the emergence of the constitutional conservative argument has real-world consequences - even without a constitutional conservative in the White House. It shifts the legal debate significantly rightward, and it changes the nature of the political debate as well by narrowing the turf on which the federal government is deemed authorized to operate. And you conclude this is a bad thing. I do not. But I will let you rant; your side seeks to make me illegal. Welcome to America!
"This is a way to weaponize the Constitution to prevent a real debate about how the government can solve national problems," Kendall told me. Looks like it is encouraging debate, just not whether the debt ceiling should be limited to $20 trillion, or not.
Strong words, but the constitutional conservative vision is too extreme to continue to ignore in the hope that it will fade on its own. Too strong; you mean too strong.
Posted by: Bobby ||
09/19/2011 13:31 ||
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#1
The idea of a "living" Constitution is fundamentally inconsistent with the idea of having a *written* Constitution. Pick one, but don't pretend they can be the same thing.
#3
The Commerce Clause, giving the federal government the authority to regulate commerce among the states, would be drastically diminished.
Particularly since judges and the bureaucracy have extended it to include intrastate commerce that doesn't go beyond state lines. See how they interpret things that existed in the 19th Century into new things in the 20th Century vis a vis water flow and air flow across state borders. How does a commerce clause force me to buy health care insurance if I never leave my state?
It's just not the 10th Amendment but Article V which describes the amending process. The 'progressives' know they can't make it happen. All the interpretation is because they know they don't have the numbers necessary to alter the written constitution.
The danger for the progressives is that they have reduced the paper down to a simple relic that who ever has it can declare their power legitimate. That's why they go apes**t when the other side gets the power they created. It's also one of the principles they destroyed in their process - don't consolidate power that you wouldn't want your opponent to ever have over you.
[Dawn] During MQM chief Altaf Hussain's animated presser on September 9, he talked at length about what he claimed was Bloody Karachi's first cut-thoat outfit. Hussain was talking about the enigmatic Thunder Squad (TS) -- an armed extension of the Islami Jamiat Taleba (IJT) which, in turn, is the student-wing of the Jamat-i-Islami (JI).
Many of us who've been part of student politics in Pakistain's state-owned universities and colleges are well aware of such a squad. It is also true that long before any major political party constituted armed wings within their respective student units, the TS was the first true manifestation of armed action that not only included student gun-hung tough guys but common criminals as well.
How clever of the students to insist on being taught by experts in their field.
The TS has never been officially acknowledged by the JI. Yet it has played a huge role in aggressively maintaining the IJT's hegemony
What an interesting way to describe the terrorizing of meek academics by Brownshirts and hoodlums.
in various educational institutions in Bloody Karachi and Lahore in particular. According to the late Dr Muhammad Sarwar (founding member of the left-wing DSF), the TS began being formulated by the JI in the late 1950s.
Meraj Muhammad Khan (a famous former Marxist student leader of the NSF), suggests the TS began evolving when the IJT failed to break the NSF's electoral hold in the country's student unions in the 1960s. Nasir J Razvi, a former NSF activist at Dow Medical College, Bloody Karachi, claims that during much of the 1960s, the Thunder Squad was mostly involved in countering leftist sentiments on Pak campuses. He says that when the JI was denouncing the PPP/Z A Bhutto and socialism as being anti-Islam, it let lose the IJT goons to disrupt PPP rallies: 'Most of these goons belonged to the Thunder Squad,' according to Razvi.
In his book, PPP: Rise to Power, Philip Jones also mentions how the JI used its student wing, the IJT, to attack PPP rallies shortly before the 1970 elections. Various prominent leftist student leaders of the 1970s quoted in the book, Revisiting Student Politics in Pakistain, (by Iqbal H Butt) maintain that the Thunder Squad's final turn towards violence came when the JI was used by the Pak military establishment to help it form cut-thoat groups to tackle Bengali nationalist outfits in the former East Pakistain (between 1969-71).
'Many IJT members joined these groups (Al Badar and Al-Shams)', said Kashif Durrani, an ex-IJT member at the DJ Science College. 'A lot of those who managed to return from East Pakistain were soon recruited into the Thunder Squad.'
Naushad Ashraf a former PSF member in Bloody Karachi agrees: 'The Thunder Squad really came into its own in the 1970s. It was constantly brawling with progressive student groups and many Squad members were the first to begin carrying pistols'. He adds that in whichever college or university the IJT managed to win student union elections, it used the TS members as a 'moral police'. 'Students, who according to the IJT, were indulging in so-called anti-Islam activities, were beaten up by the Squad members,' claims Ashraf.
He goes on to say that students in those days did not submit easily to the ways of the TS: 'Leftist and progressive student groups became aggressive as well. The TS was given a tough time and most campuses largely remained liberal.'
Most commentators on the subject believe that it was the TS that became the first student outfit to introduce sophisticated weapons in campus politics.
For a specific definition of politics as a private war.
By the time Z A Bhutto was hanged in 1979 and General Ziaul Haq intensified his repression of progressive student outfits, the TS had come into contact with certain Afghan jihad groups that had begun to gather in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa ... formerly NWFP, still Terrorism Central... areas.
According to a former progressive student leader, A. Kaimkhani, the IJT was the first student organization to use the AK-47 at the Bloody Karachi University. Talking to the French author, Laurent Gayer (in 2009), Kaimkhani said that by 1979 the TS was packed with criminal elements that not only brutalised opposing student groups, it also helped Zia's police to curb left-wing and anti-Zia student activity on campuses. Kaimkhani himself was beaten and handed over to the police by the TS members (for protesting against the Zia regime).
Aqueel Parvez a former PSF man at Bloody Karachi University agrees: 'It was the Thunder Squad who managed to get AK-47s from Afghan jihad groups and then introduce them at the KU and Punjab University (PU)'. After anti-IJT student outfits also managed to get their hands on sophisticated weapons at KU, the TS was let lose (by the IJT) on the emerging All Pakistain Mohajir Students Organisation (APMSO) in 1981.
Throughout the 1980s the TS was involved in brutal violence against progressive student outfits and ethnic student organizations like the APMSO. And since the JI was pro-US in those days (due to US funding for Afghan jihad), I personally know of a number of TS members who migrated to various European and American cities. Thus, today it is quite ironic to see the IJT/TS members burning American flags.
With the rise of the APMSO in Bloody Karachi in the 1990s, the TS was said to have moved its operations away from the city's state-owned colleges. However, you can observe a lot just by watching... it can still be found at PU. 'Thunder Squad's hold has weakened in Bloody Karachi', says a KU professor. 'The TS has now become an entirely clandestine cut-thoat arm of the JI. However in the various colleges and universities of Lahore, the TS is still a direct part of the IJT. In Bloody Karachi, its sole purpose is to maintain a cut-thoat presence around the JI leadership'.
The KU professor who claims to have been attacked by the TS in the early 1980s also suggests that though the TS is very well armed, it has been struggling (in Bloody Karachi) to keep pace with the ways of the cut-thoat wings of the MQM, PPP and the ANP.
'These parties have finally beaten the Thunder Squad at its own game', says the professor, with a smug smile.
And they wonder why the Land of the Pure is a failed state..
#1
Well, Besoeker, here in America leftist politicians and their NPR-listening pseudointellectual toadies have taken it to the next level. "Underestimate" is superseded by "outright bigotry".
Posted by: no mo uro ||
09/19/2011 17:10 Comments ||
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#2
"no mo uro", there in America, I've still not seen a single presidential candidate that has dared proclaim themselves atheist or agnostic. Not even a *leftist* presidential candidate. I've not seen a single presidential candidate, left-wing or right-wing, that hasn't *emphasized* their religious (and Christian) faith instead.
So where is this sense of persecution that you have coming from? From the fact that evolution is taught at public schools, is that the kind of "bigotry" we're talking about? That Christians are not allowed to destroy the teaching of science by teaching kids in public schools that the world was created 4000 BC? Is that the outright bigotry?
On the other hand, you have people Bush Sr saying that atheists perhaps shouldn't be recognized as citizens. That's not bigotry for some reasons. You probably consider that just good sense.
So, no, the American political system (leftist or right-wing) isn't bigoted against Christians -- it's bigoted against atheists. And if you want to prove me wrong, just show me a self-proclaimed atheist presidential candidate.
Chicago, Illinois, on August 27, 1987
"No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God."
#5
that's not a real cite. Find a major media citation
Posted by: Frank G ||
09/19/2011 21:32 Comments ||
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#6
as far as an atheist pity party, count me out. If you want to "believe" in that, fine. Why do atheists then do their best to make sure everyone "deluded" enough to follow a deist religion can't? Intolerance is the atheist way
Posted by: Frank G ||
09/19/2011 21:36 Comments ||
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#7
bye Aris.
Posted by: Frank G ||
09/19/2011 21:37 Comments ||
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#8
Aris, I'm glad to see y'all have fixed all the troubles in Greece, so you have plenty of time to troll here.
Posted by: Barbara ||
09/19/2011 22:44 Comments ||
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Back when I was a kid, I desperately wanted to be cool. I endlessly played my Miles Davis Birth of the Cool LP and devoured Norman Mailer, Alan Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti not to mention Kerouac whom I saw when I was fifteen reading from The Subterraneans at Hunter College auditorium while swigging from a bottle of Scotch he had brought with him. (I thought that was cool.)
Being cool was everything to me then. And to most of my friends. We started as boy beatniks and morphed into hippies (of sorts) as the times rolled and then turned into yuppies, going upscale, but the values were the same. Many of us pretended to be Marxists, but at heart we knew we were liberals, just like mom and dad. Or most of our moms and dads.
But whatever our politics, play or otherwise, we were big time cultural rebels. Thought we were anyway. Sex, drugs and rock and roll.
All of that is so over. Just as it reached its apogee, with Stevie Wonder boogieing in the White House and the values of the Sixties spread through the upper echelons of our government, filled with more czars than the Hermitage ever dreamed of with a president who palled around with Bill Ayers, for crissakes, cool is now dead.
Maybe not officially dead (how could that be?) but dead enough. In fact, not only is it dead, its decomposed.
Love the way he went ahead of the protesters and gave their target warning that they were coming.
The protesters then passed a trio of breakdancers performing for spare change; in the ultimate humiliation, the breakancers managed to outdraw the revolution by at least a 2-to-1 margin. Ouch!
#4
It's a little hard to sell anti-capitalism to the 'poor' who have wide screen tvs and cell phones. The problem is that the poor covet what other have, but already have that given to them by the government without the hassle and mess of a revolution. The acolytes of that failed redistributionist religion must fume because too many poor are in fact too lazy and comfortable to 'put it on the line'.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Punjab
