Currency has risen 6.5% against the dollar since start of January as tighter monetary policy shores up sentiment
Archive for category: Turkey
Water at critically low levels across Turkey after lack of rainfall leads to most severe drought in a decade
Major cities across Turkey face running out of water in the next few months , with warnings Istanbul has less than 45 days of water left.
Poor rainfall has led to the country’s most severe drought in a decade and put the megacity of 17m people close to running out of water, according to Turkey’s chamber of chemical engineers. The Ankara mayor, Mansur Yavaş, said earlier this month the capital had another 110 days’ worth in dams and reservoirs.
According to the economy minister, Albayrak (Erdogan’s groom), “everything is fine” in the economy. He was not keeping the exchange rate on purpose! However, the Turkish Lira continues to lose value every time he speaks. The dollar is based on TL 9, and the Euro on TL 10! So we get poorer while he talks. […]
The post Turkey: Loot, Lies, Collapse appeared first on .
Peter Boyle reports that the Turkish military is stepping up its attack on Kurdistan Workers Party guerilla bases and self-governing Yazidi communities in Shengal.
Resignation of president’s son-in-law from government followed months of mounting challenges
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan dismissed the central bank governor as the country is beset by its second currency crisis in two years.
President appoints ex-finance minister to role after saying country being squeezed in ‘devil’s triangle of interest and exchange rates and inflation’
The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has removed the governor of the country’s central bank from his post after the lira currency hit record lows, having lost 30% of its value since the start of the year.
The decision to replace Murat Uysal as governor was made by presidential decree and announced in the country’s official gazette early on Saturday. It was not immediately clear why Uysal was removed.
Governor Murat Uysal says the bank has reacted strongly to currency’s weakness
Currency nears key 8 to the dollar level after policymakers resort to ‘stealth tightening’
Moreover, the coup of 2013, and the subsequent overt dominance of the military over the state apparatus and its direct control over the executive, judicial, and legislative branches, has not only allowed it to dramatically expand its economic activities, but most importantly, to dictate the process of capital accumulation. Hence, any attempts to reduce the power of the state over society, will necessarily entail a drastic change in the process of capital accumulation. Thus, the question of democratizing the Egyptian state does not only refer to political liberalization, but also involve a structural economic change, where the power of the state to appropriate public funds would be curtailed and alternative centre of economic power would emerge.
Hence, besides questions of political freedom, the question of the role of the state in Egypt, in its essence, revolves around wealth distribution and access to economic resources, from which the majority of Egyptians are excluded.
The state is able to preserve its position as the dominant social force, and manage class conflict, through a twin process of ideological domination, and outright repression. The Egyptian state, very similar to other modern states, serves to mystify social relations in a manner that submerges class-consciousness in favour of individual and national consciousness. In other words, the state serves to strip the exploited classes of their class identity, replacing it with an idea of “Egyptianess”, which is deeply connected to patriotism, as embodied in the state.
However, this has a local twist, deeply entrenched in the state’s ideology through Nasserism. Simply put, Nasserism saw the nation as an military-led organic whole, without classes, united in a patriotic struggle against an “other”. The nation, as embodied in the state, had become a mystical fetish, which needs to be served at the expense of the citizenry. Under president Abdel Fattah Al-Sissi, this narrative has been pushed to an extreme, with the propagation of conspiracy theories, as well as propaganda films and TV series produced by the military, and by the general political climate.
Of course, the Muslim Brotherhood, and members of the secular opposition are seen as outside the nation, hence the only way to deal with them is through repression. This pattern already started with the massacre of Muslim Brotherhood protesters at Raba’a, and has continued unabated, ever since.
Does this mean that the state is an impregnable fortress immune to the broader social struggle? On the contrary, one can argue that millions from the exploited classes are operating the state apparatus, either in administrative functions or even as members of its repressive arm. Hence, in cases of heightened social conflict, and greater level of class-consciousness, there is an increased possibility of carrying class conflict into the heart of the state itself. This would hamper the ability of the state to repress possible uprising.
This, however, does not mean that the state can be transformed from the inside, rather that in cases of revolutionary upheaval, the state apparatus can be dismantled to be replaced by other institutions that emerged from society, rather than superimposed on it. Hence, the key to achieve this, is breaking the ideological hold that the state has over the mass of the citizenry, and drastically changing the view of the state, as a source of social good, to a source of economic exploitation and political repression.