Comments to Spanish government-owned TV network blog "Desde Camelot", post "Porque tú lo vales", Dec 26, 2008:
hola, al respecto del comentario "Y los nombramientos no necesitan el visto bueno del Senado", implicando que es un favor inmerecido a la Secretaria y, además, se burlan los deseos del legislador, deseamos hacer algunos comentarios:
1 en realidad, tanto la cámara baja como el senado federales decidieron en una ley cuántos nombramientos para el centro Kennedy hace cada una de las cámaras o el Ejecutivo - esa ley está codificada en el capítulo 20 U.S.C. 76h, y apartado (b) dice, de los más de treinta miembros nombrados por el jefe del Ejecutivo, que "[p]ersons appointed to the Advisory Committee on the Arts, including officers or employees of the United States, shall be persons who are recognized for their knowledge of, or experience or interest in, one or more of the arts in the fields covered by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts" [1];
2 hay un ministro federal ya en ese consejo, Norman Mineta - quizá influye que no se le nombre tanto que es Demócrata...
3 dado que la ministro Condoleezza Rice ha presentado los últimos cuatro años la entrega de menciones honoríficas del Kennedy Center (ejemplo, la entrega de menciones a Barbra Streisand y Morgan Freeman, entre otros [2]) y dado su nivel como músico (suficiente para acompañar al piano al violonchelista Yo-yo Ma, abril de 2002 [3]), parece que se cumplen varios de los requisitos exigidos en "one or more of the arts in the fields covered by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts";
4 la Sra. Rice es tan buen músico o mejor que los siguientes miembros del Congreso también presentes en el Kennedy Center: Senator Harry Reid (D), Senator James Inhofe (R), Senator Dianne Feinstein (D), Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D) [hay más demócratas que republicanos porque son mayoría en ambas cámaras].
No ponemos en duda que, en el futuro, habrá injustas críticas contra el futuro presidente federal cuando haga lo mismo con su capacidad de nombramiento. Eso no hace justas las críticas al actual presidente federal.
Quedamos a su disposición para cualquier ampliación sobre cualquier asunto relacionado con los EE UU o los estados miembros.
Best Regards/Cordialement/Atentamente,
Jorge Mata
Press Office
Bipartisan Alliance,
a Society for the Study and Defense of the US Constitution
References
[1] There shall be an Advisory Committee on the Arts composed of such members as the President of the United States may designate, to serve at the pleasure of the President. Persons appointed to the Advisory Committee on the Arts, including officers or employees of the United States, shall be persons who are recognized for their knowledge of, or experience or interest in, one or more of the arts in the fields covered by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
[2] Secretary Condoleezza Rice: Remarks at the Kennedy Center Honors Dinner. Benjamin Franklin Room, Washington, DC. December 6, 2008. http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2008/12/112938.htm
[3] Cellist Yo-Yo Ma and then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice take their bow after performing a duet to a Brahms sonata at the presentation of awards by the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., USA, April 22, 2002. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Yoyoma_rice.jpg
UPDATE, Dec 27, 2008: they posted the text there, http://blogs.rtve.es/desdecamelot/2008/12/26/porque-tu-vales#c61506, and replied to it, http://blogs.rtve.es/desdecamelot/2008/12/26/porque-tu-vales#c61522:
"
Gabriel Herrero dijo
Hola Jorge. Es un placer y un honor tenerte en el blog. Los puntos que señalas son correctos y estoy de acuerdo con todos ellos. Todos. Sin embargo discrepo en la raiz, en tu interpretación de la frase "Y los nombramientos no necesitan el visto bueno del Senado". No implico que sea un favor inmerecido. Merecido, en términos genéricos, lo puede ser. Sin duda Condoleeza posee un magnífico cerebro y es un músico excelente. No lo pongo en duda. Tampoco doy a entender que el nombramiento de Bush sea ilegal. Hasta ahí podíamos llegar. Si lo fuera, el tono del post sería mucho más ácido.
Otra cuestión es el uso que ha hecho Bush de los nombramientos a dedo durante su administración. Desde la financiación de los grupos antiabortistas a los últimos regalos de Nochebuena. Es su privilegio como jefe del Ejecutivo. Pero no me gusta. En el contexto de su trayectoria, creo que es criticable. Con todo, no es lo que más me repatea de él. Por eso sólo merece un párrafo. En todo caso, lo dicho, es un placer tenerte como lector y aprecio tus comentarios.
27 Diciembre 2008, 06:07
"
Friday, December 26, 2008
Community health centers in medically underserved areas - review
In The NYT: Expansion of Clinics Shapes Bush Legacy. By Kevin Sack
December 26, 2008
NASHVILLE — Although the number of uninsured and the cost of coverage have ballooned under his watch, President Bush leaves office with a health care legacy in bricks and mortar: he has doubled federal financing for community health centers, enabling the creation or expansion of 1,297 clinics in medically underserved areas.
For those in poor urban neighborhoods and isolated rural areas, including Indian reservations, the clinics are often the only dependable providers of basic services like prenatal care, childhood immunizations, asthma treatments, cancer screenings and tests for sexually transmitted diseases.
As a crucial component of the health safety net, they are lauded as a cost-effective alternative to hospital emergency rooms, where the uninsured and underinsured often seek care.
Despite the clinics’ unprecedented growth, wide swaths of the country remain without access to affordable primary care. The recession has only magnified the need as hundreds of thousands of Americans have lost their employer-sponsored health insurance along with their jobs.
In response, Democrats on Capitol Hill are proposing even more significant increases, making the centers a likely feature of any health care deal struck by Congress and the Obama administration.
In Nashville, United Neighborhood Health Services, a 32-year-old community health center, has seen its federal financing rise to $4.2 million, from $1.8 million in 2001. That has allowed the organization to add eight clinics to its base of six, and to increase its pool of patients to nearly 25,000 from 10,000.
Still, says Mary Bufwack, the center’s chief executive, the clinics satisfy only a third of the demand in Nashville’s pockets of urban poverty and immigrant need.
One of the group’s recent grants helped open the Southside Family Clinic, which moved last year from a pair of public housing apartments to a gleaming new building on a once derelict corner.
As she completed a breathing treatment one recent afternoon, Willie Mai Ridley, a 68-year-old beautician, said she would have sought care for her bronchitis in a hospital emergency room were it not for the new clinic. Instead, she took a short drive, waited 15 minutes without an appointment and left without paying a dime; the clinic would bill her later for her Medicare co-payment of $18.88.
Ms. Ridley said she appreciated both the dignity and the affordability of her care. “This place is really very, very important to me,” she said, “because you can go and feel like you’re being treated like a person and get the same medical care you would get somewhere else and have to pay $200 to $300.”
As governor of Texas, Mr. Bush came to admire the missionary zeal and cost-efficiency of the not-for-profit community health centers, which qualify for federal operating grants by being located in designated underserved areas and treating patients regardless of their ability to pay. He pledged support for the program while campaigning for president in 2000 on a platform of “compassionate conservatism.”
In Mr. Bush’s first year in office, he proposed to open or expand 1,200 clinics over five years (mission accomplished) and to double the number of patients served (the increase has ended up closer to 60 percent). With the health centers now serving more than 16 million patients at 7,354 sites, the expansion has been the largest since the program’s origins in President Lyndon B. Johnson’s war on poverty, federal officials said.
“They’re an integral part of a health care system because they provide care for the low-income, for the newly arrived, and they take the pressure off of our hospital emergency rooms,” Mr. Bush said last year while touring a clinic in Omaha.
With federal encouragement, the centers have made a major push this decade to expand dental and mental health services, open on-site pharmacies, extend hours to nights and weekends and accommodate recent immigrants — legal and otherwise — by employing bilingual staff. More than a third of patients are now Hispanic, according to the National Association of Community Health Centers.
The centers now serve one of every three people who live in poverty and one of every eight without insurance. But a study released in August by the Government Accountability Office found that 43 percent of the country’s medically underserved areas lack a health center site. The National Association of Community Health Centers and the American Academy of Family Physicians estimated last year that 56 million people were “medically disenfranchised” because they lived in areas with inadequate primary care.
President-elect Barack Obama has said little about how the centers may fit into his plans to remake American health care. But he was a sponsor of a Senate bill in August that would quadruple federal spending on the program — to $8 billion from $2.1 billion — and increase incentives for medical students to choose primary care. His wife, Michelle, worked closely with health centers in Chicago as vice president for community and external relations at the University of Chicago Medical Center.
And Mr. Obama’s choice to become secretary of health and human services, former Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, argues in his recent book on health care that financing should be increased, describing the health centers as “a godsend.”
The federal program, which was first championed in Congress by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, has earned considerable bipartisan support. Leading advocates, like Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, and Representative James E. Clyburn, Democrat of South Carolina, the House majority whip, argue that any success Mr. Obama has in reducing the number of uninsured will be meaningless if the newly insured cannot find medical homes. In Massachusetts, health centers have seen increased demand since the state began mandating health coverage two years ago.
At $8 billion, the Senate measure may be considered a relative bargain compared with the more than $100 billion needed for Mr. Obama’s proposal to subsidize coverage for the uninsured. If his plan runs into fiscal obstacles, a vast expansion of community health centers may again serve as a stopgap while universal coverage waits for flusher times.
Recent job losses, meanwhile, are stoking demand for the clinics’ services, often from first-time users. The United Neighborhood Health Services clinics in Nashville have seen a 35 percent increase in patients this year, with much of the growth from the newly jobless.
“I’m seeing a lot of professionals that no longer have their insurance or they’re laid off from their jobs,” said Dr. Marshelya D. Wilson, a physician at the center’s Cayce clinic. “So they come here and get their health care.”
Studies have generally shown that the health centers — which must be governed by patient-dominated boards — are effective at reducing racial and ethnic disparities in medical treatment and save substantial sums by keeping patients out of hospitals. Their trade association estimates that they save the health care system $17.6 billion a year, and that an equivalent amount could be saved if avoidable emergency room visits were diverted to clinics. Some centers, including here in Nashville, have brokered agreements with hospitals to do exactly that.
Many centers are finding that federal support is not keeping pace with the growing cost of treating the uninsured. Government grants now account for 19 percent of community health center revenues, compared with 22 percent in 2001, according to the Health Resources and Services Administration, which oversees the program. The largest revenue sources are public insurance plans like Medicaid, Medicare and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, making the centers vulnerable to government belt-tightening.
The centers are known for their efficiency. Though United Neighborhood Health Services has more than doubled in size this decade, Ms. Bufwack, its chief executive, manages to run five neighborhood clinics, five school clinics, a homeless clinic, two mobile clinics and a rural clinic, with 24,391 patients, on a budget of $8.1 million. Starting pay for her doctors is $120,000. Patients are charged on an income-based sliding scale, and the uninsured are expected to pay at least $20 for an office visit. One clinic is housed in a double-wide trailer.
Because of a nationwide shortage of primary care physicians, the clinics rely on federal programs like the National Health Service Corps that entice medical students with grants and loan write-offs in exchange for agreements to practice as generalists in underserved areas. Of the 16 doctors working for United Neighborhood, seven are current or former participants.
Dr. LaTonya D. Knott, 37, who treated Ms. Ridley for her bronchitis, is among them. Born to a 15-year-old mother in south Nashville, she herself had been a regular childhood patient at one of the center’s clinics. After graduating as her high school’s valedictorian, she went to college on scholarships and then to medical school on government grants, with an obligation to serve for two years.
She said she now felt a responsibility to be a role model. “I do a whole lot of social work,” she said, noting that it was not uncommon for children to drop by the clinic for help with homework, or for a peanut butter sandwich. “It’s not just that we provide the medical care. I’m trying to provide you with a future.”
Despite such commitment, national staffing shortages have reinforced concerns about the quality of care at health centers, notably the management of chronic diseases. This year, the government started collecting data at the centers on performance measures like cervical cancer screening and diabetes control.
“The question is not just, ‘Are you going to have more community health centers?’ ” said Dr. H. Jack Geiger, founder of the health centers movement and a professor emeritus at the City University of New York. “It’s, ‘Are you going to have adequate services?’ ”
A deeper frustration for health centers concerns their difficulty in securing follow-up appointments with specialists for patients who are uninsured or have Medicaid. All too often, said Ms. Bufwack, medical care ends at the clinic door, reinforcing the need to expand both primary care and health insurance coverage.
“That’s when our doctors feel they’re practicing third world medicine,” she said. “You will die if you have cancer or a heart condition or bad asthma or horrible diabetes. If you need a specialist and specialty tests and specialty meds and specialty surgery, those things are totally out of your reach.”
December 26, 2008
NASHVILLE — Although the number of uninsured and the cost of coverage have ballooned under his watch, President Bush leaves office with a health care legacy in bricks and mortar: he has doubled federal financing for community health centers, enabling the creation or expansion of 1,297 clinics in medically underserved areas.
For those in poor urban neighborhoods and isolated rural areas, including Indian reservations, the clinics are often the only dependable providers of basic services like prenatal care, childhood immunizations, asthma treatments, cancer screenings and tests for sexually transmitted diseases.
As a crucial component of the health safety net, they are lauded as a cost-effective alternative to hospital emergency rooms, where the uninsured and underinsured often seek care.
Despite the clinics’ unprecedented growth, wide swaths of the country remain without access to affordable primary care. The recession has only magnified the need as hundreds of thousands of Americans have lost their employer-sponsored health insurance along with their jobs.
In response, Democrats on Capitol Hill are proposing even more significant increases, making the centers a likely feature of any health care deal struck by Congress and the Obama administration.
In Nashville, United Neighborhood Health Services, a 32-year-old community health center, has seen its federal financing rise to $4.2 million, from $1.8 million in 2001. That has allowed the organization to add eight clinics to its base of six, and to increase its pool of patients to nearly 25,000 from 10,000.
Still, says Mary Bufwack, the center’s chief executive, the clinics satisfy only a third of the demand in Nashville’s pockets of urban poverty and immigrant need.
One of the group’s recent grants helped open the Southside Family Clinic, which moved last year from a pair of public housing apartments to a gleaming new building on a once derelict corner.
As she completed a breathing treatment one recent afternoon, Willie Mai Ridley, a 68-year-old beautician, said she would have sought care for her bronchitis in a hospital emergency room were it not for the new clinic. Instead, she took a short drive, waited 15 minutes without an appointment and left without paying a dime; the clinic would bill her later for her Medicare co-payment of $18.88.
Ms. Ridley said she appreciated both the dignity and the affordability of her care. “This place is really very, very important to me,” she said, “because you can go and feel like you’re being treated like a person and get the same medical care you would get somewhere else and have to pay $200 to $300.”
As governor of Texas, Mr. Bush came to admire the missionary zeal and cost-efficiency of the not-for-profit community health centers, which qualify for federal operating grants by being located in designated underserved areas and treating patients regardless of their ability to pay. He pledged support for the program while campaigning for president in 2000 on a platform of “compassionate conservatism.”
In Mr. Bush’s first year in office, he proposed to open or expand 1,200 clinics over five years (mission accomplished) and to double the number of patients served (the increase has ended up closer to 60 percent). With the health centers now serving more than 16 million patients at 7,354 sites, the expansion has been the largest since the program’s origins in President Lyndon B. Johnson’s war on poverty, federal officials said.
“They’re an integral part of a health care system because they provide care for the low-income, for the newly arrived, and they take the pressure off of our hospital emergency rooms,” Mr. Bush said last year while touring a clinic in Omaha.
With federal encouragement, the centers have made a major push this decade to expand dental and mental health services, open on-site pharmacies, extend hours to nights and weekends and accommodate recent immigrants — legal and otherwise — by employing bilingual staff. More than a third of patients are now Hispanic, according to the National Association of Community Health Centers.
The centers now serve one of every three people who live in poverty and one of every eight without insurance. But a study released in August by the Government Accountability Office found that 43 percent of the country’s medically underserved areas lack a health center site. The National Association of Community Health Centers and the American Academy of Family Physicians estimated last year that 56 million people were “medically disenfranchised” because they lived in areas with inadequate primary care.
President-elect Barack Obama has said little about how the centers may fit into his plans to remake American health care. But he was a sponsor of a Senate bill in August that would quadruple federal spending on the program — to $8 billion from $2.1 billion — and increase incentives for medical students to choose primary care. His wife, Michelle, worked closely with health centers in Chicago as vice president for community and external relations at the University of Chicago Medical Center.
And Mr. Obama’s choice to become secretary of health and human services, former Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, argues in his recent book on health care that financing should be increased, describing the health centers as “a godsend.”
The federal program, which was first championed in Congress by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, has earned considerable bipartisan support. Leading advocates, like Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, and Representative James E. Clyburn, Democrat of South Carolina, the House majority whip, argue that any success Mr. Obama has in reducing the number of uninsured will be meaningless if the newly insured cannot find medical homes. In Massachusetts, health centers have seen increased demand since the state began mandating health coverage two years ago.
At $8 billion, the Senate measure may be considered a relative bargain compared with the more than $100 billion needed for Mr. Obama’s proposal to subsidize coverage for the uninsured. If his plan runs into fiscal obstacles, a vast expansion of community health centers may again serve as a stopgap while universal coverage waits for flusher times.
Recent job losses, meanwhile, are stoking demand for the clinics’ services, often from first-time users. The United Neighborhood Health Services clinics in Nashville have seen a 35 percent increase in patients this year, with much of the growth from the newly jobless.
“I’m seeing a lot of professionals that no longer have their insurance or they’re laid off from their jobs,” said Dr. Marshelya D. Wilson, a physician at the center’s Cayce clinic. “So they come here and get their health care.”
Studies have generally shown that the health centers — which must be governed by patient-dominated boards — are effective at reducing racial and ethnic disparities in medical treatment and save substantial sums by keeping patients out of hospitals. Their trade association estimates that they save the health care system $17.6 billion a year, and that an equivalent amount could be saved if avoidable emergency room visits were diverted to clinics. Some centers, including here in Nashville, have brokered agreements with hospitals to do exactly that.
Many centers are finding that federal support is not keeping pace with the growing cost of treating the uninsured. Government grants now account for 19 percent of community health center revenues, compared with 22 percent in 2001, according to the Health Resources and Services Administration, which oversees the program. The largest revenue sources are public insurance plans like Medicaid, Medicare and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, making the centers vulnerable to government belt-tightening.
The centers are known for their efficiency. Though United Neighborhood Health Services has more than doubled in size this decade, Ms. Bufwack, its chief executive, manages to run five neighborhood clinics, five school clinics, a homeless clinic, two mobile clinics and a rural clinic, with 24,391 patients, on a budget of $8.1 million. Starting pay for her doctors is $120,000. Patients are charged on an income-based sliding scale, and the uninsured are expected to pay at least $20 for an office visit. One clinic is housed in a double-wide trailer.
Because of a nationwide shortage of primary care physicians, the clinics rely on federal programs like the National Health Service Corps that entice medical students with grants and loan write-offs in exchange for agreements to practice as generalists in underserved areas. Of the 16 doctors working for United Neighborhood, seven are current or former participants.
Dr. LaTonya D. Knott, 37, who treated Ms. Ridley for her bronchitis, is among them. Born to a 15-year-old mother in south Nashville, she herself had been a regular childhood patient at one of the center’s clinics. After graduating as her high school’s valedictorian, she went to college on scholarships and then to medical school on government grants, with an obligation to serve for two years.
She said she now felt a responsibility to be a role model. “I do a whole lot of social work,” she said, noting that it was not uncommon for children to drop by the clinic for help with homework, or for a peanut butter sandwich. “It’s not just that we provide the medical care. I’m trying to provide you with a future.”
Despite such commitment, national staffing shortages have reinforced concerns about the quality of care at health centers, notably the management of chronic diseases. This year, the government started collecting data at the centers on performance measures like cervical cancer screening and diabetes control.
“The question is not just, ‘Are you going to have more community health centers?’ ” said Dr. H. Jack Geiger, founder of the health centers movement and a professor emeritus at the City University of New York. “It’s, ‘Are you going to have adequate services?’ ”
A deeper frustration for health centers concerns their difficulty in securing follow-up appointments with specialists for patients who are uninsured or have Medicaid. All too often, said Ms. Bufwack, medical care ends at the clinic door, reinforcing the need to expand both primary care and health insurance coverage.
“That’s when our doctors feel they’re practicing third world medicine,” she said. “You will die if you have cancer or a heart condition or bad asthma or horrible diabetes. If you need a specialist and specialty tests and specialty meds and specialty surgery, those things are totally out of your reach.”
Ignatius: A New Partner In Syria?
In the WaPo: A New Partner In Syria? By David Ignatius
Wednesday, December 24, 2008; A11
DAMASCUS, Syria -- President Bashar al-Assad says he doesn't want to send a message to Barack Obama, exactly, but to express a three-part hope for the incoming administration's Middle East policy:
First, he hopes Obama won't start "another war anywhere in the world, especially not in the Middle East." And he trusts that the doctrine of "preemptive war" will end when George W. Bush leaves office.
Second, Assad said, "We would like to see this new administration sincerely involved in the peace process." He hopes that Obama will back Syria's indirect negotiations with Israel, and he urges the new administration to pursue "the Lebanese track and the Palestinian track, as well."
Asked whether he would mind if the Syrian track went first (a sequence that has worried some Syrians who prefer the ideological purity of following the Palestinians), Assad answered: "Of course not. Each track will help the other."
Third, he says he wants Syria and the United States to work together to stabilize Iraq as American troops begin to leave. "We can't turn the clock back," Assad said. "The war happened. Now we have to talk about the future. We have to forge a process, a political vision and a timetable for withdrawal."
In all three "hopes," Assad seemed to be looking for a new start with Obama after years of chilly relations with Bush. Assad said he knew little about Obama or his policies but has heard that he is more in contact with ordinary people than Bush has been, which, Assad contended, would give Obama a better understanding of America.
Assad spoke in English during the 30-minute interview Monday. He was accompanied only by his political and media adviser Bouthaina Shaaban. This time, in contrast to my interview with him in 2003, when Assad was often stiff and doctrinaire, he was loose and informal, breaking several times into laughter.
Assad's easy demeanor suggested that he's more firmly in charge now. The Bush administration's attempt to isolate Syria has failed, even in the judgment of senior White House officials. That leaves Assad in the catbird seat, courted by European and Arab nations and conducting back-channel talks through Turkey with his erstwhile enemy Israel.
Asked, for example, about reports that Saudi Arabia is seeking to improve its relations with Damascus because it sees U.S. engagement with Syria ahead and fears that "the train may be leaving the station," Assad laughed.
"Maybe it has already left the station," he said. But he vows that he is ready to receive any emissaries. "I have no problem with the Saudis. We would like good relations with every country in this region."
Assad said that he is ready to move to direct talks with Israel as soon as he receives clarification on two points: One, he wants assurance that the Israelis will withdraw fully from the Golan Heights. To clarify that issue, he sent a "borders document" to the Israelis this month that highlights some points along the pre-1967 border. As of Monday, he said, he hadn't received an Israeli response. His second condition for direct talks is that the United States join as a sponsor.
On the crucial question of Syria's future relations with Iran, Assad was noncommittal. He said the relationship with Iran wasn't about the "kind of statehood" Syria has or its cultural affinities but about protecting Syrian interests against hostile neighbors. "It's about who plays a role in this region, who supports my rights," he said. "It's not that complicated."
Asked whether Syria was prepared to restrain Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shiite militia in Lebanon, Assad said this was a matter the Israelis should sort out in separate negotiations with the Lebanese. Indeed, he promoted the idea of the other negotiating tracks -- which would draw in, at least indirectly, Hezbollah and Hamas.
"The longer the border, the bigger the peace," Assad said. "Hezbollah is on the Lebanese border, not Syrian. Hamas is on the Palestinian border. . . . They should look at those other tracks. They should be comprehensive. If you want peace, you need three peace treaties, on three tracks."
A relaxed Assad clearly believes that Syria is emerging from its pariah status. An international tribunal is still scheduled to meet in The Hague to weigh Syria's alleged role in the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri. But in the meantime, Assad is receiving a stream of visiting diplomats. He looks like a ready partner for Obama's diplomacy, but a cautious one -- waiting to see what's on offer before he shows more of his hand.
The writer is co-host of PostGlobal, an online discussion of international issues.
Wednesday, December 24, 2008; A11
DAMASCUS, Syria -- President Bashar al-Assad says he doesn't want to send a message to Barack Obama, exactly, but to express a three-part hope for the incoming administration's Middle East policy:
First, he hopes Obama won't start "another war anywhere in the world, especially not in the Middle East." And he trusts that the doctrine of "preemptive war" will end when George W. Bush leaves office.
Second, Assad said, "We would like to see this new administration sincerely involved in the peace process." He hopes that Obama will back Syria's indirect negotiations with Israel, and he urges the new administration to pursue "the Lebanese track and the Palestinian track, as well."
Asked whether he would mind if the Syrian track went first (a sequence that has worried some Syrians who prefer the ideological purity of following the Palestinians), Assad answered: "Of course not. Each track will help the other."
Third, he says he wants Syria and the United States to work together to stabilize Iraq as American troops begin to leave. "We can't turn the clock back," Assad said. "The war happened. Now we have to talk about the future. We have to forge a process, a political vision and a timetable for withdrawal."
In all three "hopes," Assad seemed to be looking for a new start with Obama after years of chilly relations with Bush. Assad said he knew little about Obama or his policies but has heard that he is more in contact with ordinary people than Bush has been, which, Assad contended, would give Obama a better understanding of America.
Assad spoke in English during the 30-minute interview Monday. He was accompanied only by his political and media adviser Bouthaina Shaaban. This time, in contrast to my interview with him in 2003, when Assad was often stiff and doctrinaire, he was loose and informal, breaking several times into laughter.
Assad's easy demeanor suggested that he's more firmly in charge now. The Bush administration's attempt to isolate Syria has failed, even in the judgment of senior White House officials. That leaves Assad in the catbird seat, courted by European and Arab nations and conducting back-channel talks through Turkey with his erstwhile enemy Israel.
Asked, for example, about reports that Saudi Arabia is seeking to improve its relations with Damascus because it sees U.S. engagement with Syria ahead and fears that "the train may be leaving the station," Assad laughed.
"Maybe it has already left the station," he said. But he vows that he is ready to receive any emissaries. "I have no problem with the Saudis. We would like good relations with every country in this region."
Assad said that he is ready to move to direct talks with Israel as soon as he receives clarification on two points: One, he wants assurance that the Israelis will withdraw fully from the Golan Heights. To clarify that issue, he sent a "borders document" to the Israelis this month that highlights some points along the pre-1967 border. As of Monday, he said, he hadn't received an Israeli response. His second condition for direct talks is that the United States join as a sponsor.
On the crucial question of Syria's future relations with Iran, Assad was noncommittal. He said the relationship with Iran wasn't about the "kind of statehood" Syria has or its cultural affinities but about protecting Syrian interests against hostile neighbors. "It's about who plays a role in this region, who supports my rights," he said. "It's not that complicated."
Asked whether Syria was prepared to restrain Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shiite militia in Lebanon, Assad said this was a matter the Israelis should sort out in separate negotiations with the Lebanese. Indeed, he promoted the idea of the other negotiating tracks -- which would draw in, at least indirectly, Hezbollah and Hamas.
"The longer the border, the bigger the peace," Assad said. "Hezbollah is on the Lebanese border, not Syrian. Hamas is on the Palestinian border. . . . They should look at those other tracks. They should be comprehensive. If you want peace, you need three peace treaties, on three tracks."
A relaxed Assad clearly believes that Syria is emerging from its pariah status. An international tribunal is still scheduled to meet in The Hague to weigh Syria's alleged role in the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri. But in the meantime, Assad is receiving a stream of visiting diplomats. He looks like a ready partner for Obama's diplomacy, but a cautious one -- waiting to see what's on offer before he shows more of his hand.
The writer is co-host of PostGlobal, an online discussion of international issues.
Rich people should be forced to invest 2 pct of their wealth in government bonds paying a maximum interest of 2.5 pct
Der Spiegel: German Politician Wants Compulsory Bond for Rich People
Dec 22, 2008
A Social Democrat fighting an uphill campaign in the state of Hesse has an idea to raise €50 billion to help fight the looming recession. Rich people, he says, should be forced to invest two percent of their wealth in government bonds paying a maximum interest of 2.5 percent. Response has been muted.
Thomas Schäfer-Gümbel, a little-known Social Democrat candidate fighting to be governor of the western German state of Hesse in an election on January 18, has come up with an unconventional idea that is attracting the -- presumably desired -- attention of the media.
He says wealthy people with cash and real estate assets exceeding €750,000 ($1.04 million) should be forced to lend the state two percent of their assets for a period of 15 years, and at an interest rate no higher than 2.5 percent.
"A compulsory state bond would be a rapidly effective instrument to mobilize additional funds to overcome the economic crisis," Schäfer-Gümbel, 39, told Bild newspaper on Monday. "That would be very fair because only the very wealthy would be drawn on."
The projected proceeds of €50 billion would fund energy-saving buses and trains for public transport, new research projects and energy savings technologies, he added.
Schäfer-Gümbel was plucked from obscurity to fight the Hesse election next month. He was chosen after previous SPD candidate Andrea Ypsilanti stepped aside following her repeated failure to form an alliance with the Left Party to remove conservative Hesse governor Roland Koch from power in the wake of an inconclusive state election last January.
He is trailing Koch by 20 points, according to an opinion poll published last week.
A German government spokesman dismissed the idea on Monday. "Not every noise made in the Hesse campaign brings results in Berlin," said Thomas Steg on Monday.
Dec 22, 2008
A Social Democrat fighting an uphill campaign in the state of Hesse has an idea to raise €50 billion to help fight the looming recession. Rich people, he says, should be forced to invest two percent of their wealth in government bonds paying a maximum interest of 2.5 percent. Response has been muted.
Thomas Schäfer-Gümbel, a little-known Social Democrat candidate fighting to be governor of the western German state of Hesse in an election on January 18, has come up with an unconventional idea that is attracting the -- presumably desired -- attention of the media.
He says wealthy people with cash and real estate assets exceeding €750,000 ($1.04 million) should be forced to lend the state two percent of their assets for a period of 15 years, and at an interest rate no higher than 2.5 percent.
"A compulsory state bond would be a rapidly effective instrument to mobilize additional funds to overcome the economic crisis," Schäfer-Gümbel, 39, told Bild newspaper on Monday. "That would be very fair because only the very wealthy would be drawn on."
The projected proceeds of €50 billion would fund energy-saving buses and trains for public transport, new research projects and energy savings technologies, he added.
Schäfer-Gümbel was plucked from obscurity to fight the Hesse election next month. He was chosen after previous SPD candidate Andrea Ypsilanti stepped aside following her repeated failure to form an alliance with the Left Party to remove conservative Hesse governor Roland Koch from power in the wake of an inconclusive state election last January.
He is trailing Koch by 20 points, according to an opinion poll published last week.
A German government spokesman dismissed the idea on Monday. "Not every noise made in the Hesse campaign brings results in Berlin," said Thomas Steg on Monday.
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Chertoff: Post 9/11 policies and practices are working
Keeping America safe. By Michael Chertoff
Post 9/11 policies and practices are working
Washington Times. Friday, December 26, 2008
Why has our country remained safe since September 11? Because of concrete policies the president has pursued - policies that range from reorganizing the intelligence community to taking the fight to our enemies, from monitoring terrorist communications to creating the Department of Homeland Security.
We live in dangerous times and face numerous threats to our security. Managing this risk is daunting. On an average day, the men and women of my department will screen more than 2 million domestic air travelers, inspect more than 300,000 vehicles crossing our borders, check more than 70,000 shipping containers for dangerous materials, and secure thousands of pieces of critical infrastructure.
We recognize there is no perfect security. Moreover, we know it is impossible to eliminate all risk. Our goal - and President Bush's vision - has been to provide risk-based protection against the most significant threats, reduce our major vulnerabilities, and mitigate potential consequences, with minimal disruption and inconvenience.
I believe we have achieved these aims. Across land, sea, and air, our nation is better equipped to deal with the threats of the 21st century. In many cases, we have implemented programs and capabilities that did not exist prior to September 11.
Today, our aviation system benefits from more than 20 layers of security, including hardened cockpit doors, federal air marshals, 100 percent screening of passengers and their bags, and new air cargo security requirements.
At our borders, we have built hundreds of miles of pedestrian and vehicle fence, doubled the size of the U.S. Border Patrol, and added new technology to prevent the entry of terrorists, criminals, illegal aliens, and dangerous drugs and weapons.
In the interior, we have arrested record numbers of illegal aliens, including more than 11,000 gang members and 34,000 fugitives. We also have cracked down on employers that violate immigration laws, while giving businesses better tools, such as E-Verify, to maintain a legal workforce. The result has been a historic reversal in illegal immigration, with no net increase in the illegal immigrant population in our country for the first time in decades.
At our ports, we have deployed radiation scanning equipment to check virtually 100 percent of incoming cargo for weapons of mass destruction. Prior to September 11, no cargo was scanned for such threats. In addition, we have stationed our inspectors overseas to screen cargo before it leaves foreign ports.
We have strengthened the security of identification documents, requiring passports or other secure documents to enter the United States from within our own hemisphere. This closes a pre-September 11 loophole that left our nation vulnerable. Under US-VISIT, we now record fingerprints from foreign visitors and check them in real time against terrorist and criminal watch lists - all while maintaining rigorous privacy protections. Before September 11, we didn't have this capability. And to prevent the use of fraudulent identification, we have implemented new standards for secure driver's licenses.
To protect our nation's chemical plants, we require high risk facilities to develop security plans and harden their assets. We have implemented new regulations for chemicals traveling by rail. To guard against biological threats, we have deployed early warning systems to 30 major metropolitan areas under the BioWatch program. We have built new national facilities to characterize and respond to biological attacks. And to counter emerging threats in cyberspace, we have launched a major, multiagency initiative to protect cyber systems and infrastructure.
Finally, we have integrated lessons from Hurricane Katrina and other disasters to ensure the federal government is prepared to support our state and local partners and the American people during major disasters. We have strengthened the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA), built new capabilities for tracking commodities, improved emergency communications and developed stronger connections with our partners at all levels, including the Department of Defense and the private sector. FEMA responded to nearly 100 disasters this year, from the historic Midwest floods and unprecedented California wildfires, to damaging tornadoes and back-to-back hurricanes. In each instance, its response was able and effective.
On Jan. 20, we intend to turn over to our successors an integrated, well-functioning Department that has addressed or is on a path to addressing the most significant risks facing our nation. That's not to say there isn't more work ahead or additional room for improvement. But on the fundamental issues, we have acted with urgency and we have worked tirelessly to keep our nation safe.
Sadly, excluding Iraq and Afghanistan, terrorists have killed more than 20,000 innocent men and women and wounded more than 43,000 around the world since September 11. Yet not one of those horrific acts of violence occurred in the United States. That is a testament to the president's leadership and to the deliberate efforts of the 218,000 men and women of the Department of Homeland Security who serve our nation every day.
Michael Chertoff is secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
Post 9/11 policies and practices are working
Washington Times. Friday, December 26, 2008
Why has our country remained safe since September 11? Because of concrete policies the president has pursued - policies that range from reorganizing the intelligence community to taking the fight to our enemies, from monitoring terrorist communications to creating the Department of Homeland Security.
We live in dangerous times and face numerous threats to our security. Managing this risk is daunting. On an average day, the men and women of my department will screen more than 2 million domestic air travelers, inspect more than 300,000 vehicles crossing our borders, check more than 70,000 shipping containers for dangerous materials, and secure thousands of pieces of critical infrastructure.
We recognize there is no perfect security. Moreover, we know it is impossible to eliminate all risk. Our goal - and President Bush's vision - has been to provide risk-based protection against the most significant threats, reduce our major vulnerabilities, and mitigate potential consequences, with minimal disruption and inconvenience.
I believe we have achieved these aims. Across land, sea, and air, our nation is better equipped to deal with the threats of the 21st century. In many cases, we have implemented programs and capabilities that did not exist prior to September 11.
Today, our aviation system benefits from more than 20 layers of security, including hardened cockpit doors, federal air marshals, 100 percent screening of passengers and their bags, and new air cargo security requirements.
At our borders, we have built hundreds of miles of pedestrian and vehicle fence, doubled the size of the U.S. Border Patrol, and added new technology to prevent the entry of terrorists, criminals, illegal aliens, and dangerous drugs and weapons.
In the interior, we have arrested record numbers of illegal aliens, including more than 11,000 gang members and 34,000 fugitives. We also have cracked down on employers that violate immigration laws, while giving businesses better tools, such as E-Verify, to maintain a legal workforce. The result has been a historic reversal in illegal immigration, with no net increase in the illegal immigrant population in our country for the first time in decades.
At our ports, we have deployed radiation scanning equipment to check virtually 100 percent of incoming cargo for weapons of mass destruction. Prior to September 11, no cargo was scanned for such threats. In addition, we have stationed our inspectors overseas to screen cargo before it leaves foreign ports.
We have strengthened the security of identification documents, requiring passports or other secure documents to enter the United States from within our own hemisphere. This closes a pre-September 11 loophole that left our nation vulnerable. Under US-VISIT, we now record fingerprints from foreign visitors and check them in real time against terrorist and criminal watch lists - all while maintaining rigorous privacy protections. Before September 11, we didn't have this capability. And to prevent the use of fraudulent identification, we have implemented new standards for secure driver's licenses.
To protect our nation's chemical plants, we require high risk facilities to develop security plans and harden their assets. We have implemented new regulations for chemicals traveling by rail. To guard against biological threats, we have deployed early warning systems to 30 major metropolitan areas under the BioWatch program. We have built new national facilities to characterize and respond to biological attacks. And to counter emerging threats in cyberspace, we have launched a major, multiagency initiative to protect cyber systems and infrastructure.
Finally, we have integrated lessons from Hurricane Katrina and other disasters to ensure the federal government is prepared to support our state and local partners and the American people during major disasters. We have strengthened the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA), built new capabilities for tracking commodities, improved emergency communications and developed stronger connections with our partners at all levels, including the Department of Defense and the private sector. FEMA responded to nearly 100 disasters this year, from the historic Midwest floods and unprecedented California wildfires, to damaging tornadoes and back-to-back hurricanes. In each instance, its response was able and effective.
On Jan. 20, we intend to turn over to our successors an integrated, well-functioning Department that has addressed or is on a path to addressing the most significant risks facing our nation. That's not to say there isn't more work ahead or additional room for improvement. But on the fundamental issues, we have acted with urgency and we have worked tirelessly to keep our nation safe.
Sadly, excluding Iraq and Afghanistan, terrorists have killed more than 20,000 innocent men and women and wounded more than 43,000 around the world since September 11. Yet not one of those horrific acts of violence occurred in the United States. That is a testament to the president's leadership and to the deliberate efforts of the 218,000 men and women of the Department of Homeland Security who serve our nation every day.
Michael Chertoff is secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
WaPo: Somalia goes from bad to worse
Still Sinking
Somalia goes from bad to worse.
Washington Post. Friday, December 26, 2008; A22
THE BUSH administration is trying to head off another disaster in Somalia, a failed state that has confounded three successive U.S. administrations. The administration won't succeed. Somalia's Western-backed "transitional government" is crumbling, and Islamic militants allied with al-Qaeda are threatening to take over the small parts of the country they don't already control -- mainly the capital, its port and the town where the remains of the parliament sit. U.S. diplomats have attempted to stop this by trying to persuade the United Nations to sponsor a peacekeeping mission; they have also urged Ethiopia to postpone the withdrawal of its troops, which have been fighting the Islamists for the past two years.
Neither proposal has gained traction. As the United States painfully learned in the early 1990s, even a large and capable foreign military force with a U.N. mandate would be seriously challenged in Mogadishu, where it is easy to rally gunmen against a perceived invader. In any case, there is no prospect for assembling such an expedition. U.N.-mandated peacekeeping operations are already failing in Congo and Sudan because of inadequate resources and the peacekeeping troops' lack of professionalism. Unless President Bush chooses to end his term as his father did, by landing Marines in Mogadishu, no international force will rescue Somalia.
That means this strategically located country will continue to grow more miserable and more threatening to the rest of the world. The radical Islamists known as al-Shabab are comparable to the Taliban of Afghanistan in the extremism of their rule and in their willingness to harbor foreigners recruited by al-Qaeda. Some of the authors of the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa are believed to be sheltered by the movement, along with fresh recruits from other African countries. Somalia could become a base for terrorist operations around the region, even as pirates based along its northern coast continue to threaten international shipping lanes.
The Obama administration, which will inherit this mess, will have to hope that Somalis will react against harsh Islamic fundamentalism that has no precedent in the country. As veteran analyst John Prendergast of the Enough Project points out, there are moderate Islamic factions; one of them recently reached a power-sharing agreement with part of the transitional government at U.N.-sponsored talks. If African neighbors and Western governments continue to support the consolidation and expansion of that centrist alliance, the fundamentalists may eventually face serious opposition. U.S. forces in the region, meanwhile, will have to seize opportunities to strike at known al-Qaeda targets, and more determined naval action is needed to stop the pirates. Somalia requires a vast nation-building effort, sponsored, supported and funded -- if not carried out -- by outside powers. The sad truth is that neither the United Nations nor any other alliance is up to the job.
Somalia goes from bad to worse.
Washington Post. Friday, December 26, 2008; A22
THE BUSH administration is trying to head off another disaster in Somalia, a failed state that has confounded three successive U.S. administrations. The administration won't succeed. Somalia's Western-backed "transitional government" is crumbling, and Islamic militants allied with al-Qaeda are threatening to take over the small parts of the country they don't already control -- mainly the capital, its port and the town where the remains of the parliament sit. U.S. diplomats have attempted to stop this by trying to persuade the United Nations to sponsor a peacekeeping mission; they have also urged Ethiopia to postpone the withdrawal of its troops, which have been fighting the Islamists for the past two years.
Neither proposal has gained traction. As the United States painfully learned in the early 1990s, even a large and capable foreign military force with a U.N. mandate would be seriously challenged in Mogadishu, where it is easy to rally gunmen against a perceived invader. In any case, there is no prospect for assembling such an expedition. U.N.-mandated peacekeeping operations are already failing in Congo and Sudan because of inadequate resources and the peacekeeping troops' lack of professionalism. Unless President Bush chooses to end his term as his father did, by landing Marines in Mogadishu, no international force will rescue Somalia.
That means this strategically located country will continue to grow more miserable and more threatening to the rest of the world. The radical Islamists known as al-Shabab are comparable to the Taliban of Afghanistan in the extremism of their rule and in their willingness to harbor foreigners recruited by al-Qaeda. Some of the authors of the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa are believed to be sheltered by the movement, along with fresh recruits from other African countries. Somalia could become a base for terrorist operations around the region, even as pirates based along its northern coast continue to threaten international shipping lanes.
The Obama administration, which will inherit this mess, will have to hope that Somalis will react against harsh Islamic fundamentalism that has no precedent in the country. As veteran analyst John Prendergast of the Enough Project points out, there are moderate Islamic factions; one of them recently reached a power-sharing agreement with part of the transitional government at U.N.-sponsored talks. If African neighbors and Western governments continue to support the consolidation and expansion of that centrist alliance, the fundamentalists may eventually face serious opposition. U.S. forces in the region, meanwhile, will have to seize opportunities to strike at known al-Qaeda targets, and more determined naval action is needed to stop the pirates. Somalia requires a vast nation-building effort, sponsored, supported and funded -- if not carried out -- by outside powers. The sad truth is that neither the United Nations nor any other alliance is up to the job.
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Completion of nuclear weapons material security upgrades under the Bratislava Initiative
White House: Statement by Press Secretary Dana Perino.
December 23, 2008
Today, President Bush received a report from the Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman and the Director General of Russia's Rosatom State Nuclear Corporation Sergey Kiryenko announcing the completion of nuclear weapons material security upgrades under the Bratislava Initiative.
On February 24, 2005, President Bush and then Russian President Vladimir Putin announced from Bratislava a series of measures to prevent nuclear terrorism and proliferation. These included upgrading the physical security of nuclear material, accelerating the conversion of research reactors from highly enriched uranium fuel to low enriched uranium, enhancing the security culture of those responsible for guarding nuclear material, and improving emergency response capabilities. Most significantly, the Bratislava Initiative accelerated the pace and scope of efforts to secure nuclear weapons and material in Russia.
The completion of the Bratislava Initiative nuclear material security upgrades, and the ongoing work in related areas, significantly improve U.S., Russian, and international security. The President congratulates both our Russian partners and our fellow Americans for their hard and vital work in making this achievement possible.
December 23, 2008
Today, President Bush received a report from the Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman and the Director General of Russia's Rosatom State Nuclear Corporation Sergey Kiryenko announcing the completion of nuclear weapons material security upgrades under the Bratislava Initiative.
On February 24, 2005, President Bush and then Russian President Vladimir Putin announced from Bratislava a series of measures to prevent nuclear terrorism and proliferation. These included upgrading the physical security of nuclear material, accelerating the conversion of research reactors from highly enriched uranium fuel to low enriched uranium, enhancing the security culture of those responsible for guarding nuclear material, and improving emergency response capabilities. Most significantly, the Bratislava Initiative accelerated the pace and scope of efforts to secure nuclear weapons and material in Russia.
The completion of the Bratislava Initiative nuclear material security upgrades, and the ongoing work in related areas, significantly improve U.S., Russian, and international security. The President congratulates both our Russian partners and our fellow Americans for their hard and vital work in making this achievement possible.
Defense Spending Would Be Great Stimulus
In the WSJ: Defense Spending Would Be Great Stimulus, by Martin Feldstein
All three service branches are in need of upgrade and repair.
Dec 23, 2008, 10:04 P.M. ET
The Department of Defense is preparing budget cuts in response to the decline in national income. The DOD budgeteers and their counterparts in the White House Office of Management and Budget apparently reason that a smaller GDP requires belt-tightening by everyone.
That logic is exactly backwards. As President-elect Barack Obama and his economic advisers recognize, countering a deep economic recession requires an increase in government spending to offset the sharp decline in consumer outlays and business investment that is now under way. Without that rise in government spending, the economic downturn would be deeper and longer. Although tax cuts for individuals and businesses can help, government spending will have to do the heavy lifting. That's why the Obama team will propose a package of about $300 billion a year in additional federal government outlays and grants to states and local governments.
A temporary rise in DOD spending on supplies, equipment and manpower should be a significant part of that increase in overall government outlays. The same applies to the Department of Homeland Security, to the FBI, and to other parts of the national intelligence community.
The increase in government spending needs to be a short-term surge with greater outlays in 2009 and 2010 but then tailing off sharply in 2011 when the economy should be almost back to its prerecession level of activity. Buying military supplies and equipment, including a variety of off-the-shelf dual use items, can easily fit this surge pattern.
For the military, the increased spending will require an expanded supplemental budget for 2009 and an increased budget for 2010. A 10% increase in defense outlays for procurement and for research would contribute about $20 billion a year to the overall stimulus budget. A 5% rise in spending on operations and maintenance would add an additional $10 billion. That spending could create about 300,000 additional jobs. And raising the military's annual recruitment goal by 15% would provide jobs for an additional 30,000 young men and women in the first year.
An important challenge for those who are designing the overall stimulus package is to avoid wasteful spending. One way to achieve that is to do things during the period of the spending surge that must eventually be done anyway. It is better to do them now when there is excess capacity in the economy than to wait and do them later.
Replacing the supplies that have been depleted by the military activity in Iraq and Afghanistan is a good example of something that might be postponed but that should instead be done quickly. The same is true for replacing the military equipment that has been subject to excessive wear and tear. More generally, replacement schedules for vehicles and other equipment should be accelerated to do more during the next two years than would otherwise be economically efficient.
Industry experts and DOD officials confirm that military suppliers have substantial unused capacity with which to produce additional supplies and equipment. Even those production lines that are currently at full capacity can be greatly expanded by going from a single shift to a two-shift production schedule. With industrial production in the economy as a whole down sharply, there is no shortage of potential employees who can produce supplies and equipment.
Military procurement has the further advantage that almost all of the equipment and supplies that the military buys is made in the United States, creating demand and jobs here at home.
Increased military spending should involve more than just accelerated replacement schedules. Each of the military services can identify new equipment and additional quantities of existing equipment that can improve our fighting ability in Afghanistan and our ability to protect our military forces while they are in combat.
Military planners must also look ahead to the missions that each of the services may be called upon to do in the future. Additional funding would allow the Air Force to increase the production of fighter planes and transport aircraft without any delays. The Army could accelerate its combat modernization program. The Navy could build additional ships to deal with its increased responsibilities in protecting coastal shipping and in countering terrorism. And all three services have significant infrastructure needs.
Although some activities like ship building cannot be completed in the two year stimulus period, the major part of the expenditures can be brought forward in time by acquiring components and materials quickly and holding them in inventory until they are needed in the ship building process. Such a departure from just-in-time inventory management would be wasteful under normal conditions, but makes economic sense when there is temporary excess capacity.
Now is also a good time for the military to increase recruiting and training. Because of the current very high and rising unemployment rates among young men and women, it would make sense to depart from the military's traditional enlistment rules and bring in recruits for a short, two-year period of training followed by a return to the civilian economy. As a minimum this would provide education in a variety of technical skills -- electronics, equipment maintenance, computer programming, nuclear facility operations, etc. -- that would lead to better civilian careers for this group. It would also provide a larger reserve force that could be called upon if needed by the military in the future.
The budgets for homeland security, for intelligence activities, and for the FBI have increased substantially during the past decade. The greater terrorist threat fully justifies these additional funds. The current two-year stimulus period provides an opportunity for additional temporary spending increases with high payoffs.
Investments in port security would reduce a major homeland vulnerability. Expanding the government's language training programs for new intelligence community recruits would provide more translators who can monitor the terrorist communications that we are able to intercept. Additional infrastructure for the FBI would remove an important constraint on the number of new FBI agents.
The Obama team's goal of sending a stimulus package to Congress before the end of January may not leave enough time to work out the details of expanded military and intelligence budgets. If so, the stimulus plan should ask the Congress to provide a total of at least $30 billion a year of increased outlays in these budget categories. A substantial short-term rise in spending on defense and intelligence would both stimulate our economy and strengthen our nation's security.
Mr. Feldstein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Reagan, is a professor at Harvard and a member of The Wall Street Journal's board of contributors.
All three service branches are in need of upgrade and repair.
Dec 23, 2008, 10:04 P.M. ET
The Department of Defense is preparing budget cuts in response to the decline in national income. The DOD budgeteers and their counterparts in the White House Office of Management and Budget apparently reason that a smaller GDP requires belt-tightening by everyone.
That logic is exactly backwards. As President-elect Barack Obama and his economic advisers recognize, countering a deep economic recession requires an increase in government spending to offset the sharp decline in consumer outlays and business investment that is now under way. Without that rise in government spending, the economic downturn would be deeper and longer. Although tax cuts for individuals and businesses can help, government spending will have to do the heavy lifting. That's why the Obama team will propose a package of about $300 billion a year in additional federal government outlays and grants to states and local governments.
A temporary rise in DOD spending on supplies, equipment and manpower should be a significant part of that increase in overall government outlays. The same applies to the Department of Homeland Security, to the FBI, and to other parts of the national intelligence community.
The increase in government spending needs to be a short-term surge with greater outlays in 2009 and 2010 but then tailing off sharply in 2011 when the economy should be almost back to its prerecession level of activity. Buying military supplies and equipment, including a variety of off-the-shelf dual use items, can easily fit this surge pattern.
For the military, the increased spending will require an expanded supplemental budget for 2009 and an increased budget for 2010. A 10% increase in defense outlays for procurement and for research would contribute about $20 billion a year to the overall stimulus budget. A 5% rise in spending on operations and maintenance would add an additional $10 billion. That spending could create about 300,000 additional jobs. And raising the military's annual recruitment goal by 15% would provide jobs for an additional 30,000 young men and women in the first year.
An important challenge for those who are designing the overall stimulus package is to avoid wasteful spending. One way to achieve that is to do things during the period of the spending surge that must eventually be done anyway. It is better to do them now when there is excess capacity in the economy than to wait and do them later.
Replacing the supplies that have been depleted by the military activity in Iraq and Afghanistan is a good example of something that might be postponed but that should instead be done quickly. The same is true for replacing the military equipment that has been subject to excessive wear and tear. More generally, replacement schedules for vehicles and other equipment should be accelerated to do more during the next two years than would otherwise be economically efficient.
Industry experts and DOD officials confirm that military suppliers have substantial unused capacity with which to produce additional supplies and equipment. Even those production lines that are currently at full capacity can be greatly expanded by going from a single shift to a two-shift production schedule. With industrial production in the economy as a whole down sharply, there is no shortage of potential employees who can produce supplies and equipment.
Military procurement has the further advantage that almost all of the equipment and supplies that the military buys is made in the United States, creating demand and jobs here at home.
Increased military spending should involve more than just accelerated replacement schedules. Each of the military services can identify new equipment and additional quantities of existing equipment that can improve our fighting ability in Afghanistan and our ability to protect our military forces while they are in combat.
Military planners must also look ahead to the missions that each of the services may be called upon to do in the future. Additional funding would allow the Air Force to increase the production of fighter planes and transport aircraft without any delays. The Army could accelerate its combat modernization program. The Navy could build additional ships to deal with its increased responsibilities in protecting coastal shipping and in countering terrorism. And all three services have significant infrastructure needs.
Although some activities like ship building cannot be completed in the two year stimulus period, the major part of the expenditures can be brought forward in time by acquiring components and materials quickly and holding them in inventory until they are needed in the ship building process. Such a departure from just-in-time inventory management would be wasteful under normal conditions, but makes economic sense when there is temporary excess capacity.
Now is also a good time for the military to increase recruiting and training. Because of the current very high and rising unemployment rates among young men and women, it would make sense to depart from the military's traditional enlistment rules and bring in recruits for a short, two-year period of training followed by a return to the civilian economy. As a minimum this would provide education in a variety of technical skills -- electronics, equipment maintenance, computer programming, nuclear facility operations, etc. -- that would lead to better civilian careers for this group. It would also provide a larger reserve force that could be called upon if needed by the military in the future.
The budgets for homeland security, for intelligence activities, and for the FBI have increased substantially during the past decade. The greater terrorist threat fully justifies these additional funds. The current two-year stimulus period provides an opportunity for additional temporary spending increases with high payoffs.
Investments in port security would reduce a major homeland vulnerability. Expanding the government's language training programs for new intelligence community recruits would provide more translators who can monitor the terrorist communications that we are able to intercept. Additional infrastructure for the FBI would remove an important constraint on the number of new FBI agents.
The Obama team's goal of sending a stimulus package to Congress before the end of January may not leave enough time to work out the details of expanded military and intelligence budgets. If so, the stimulus plan should ask the Congress to provide a total of at least $30 billion a year of increased outlays in these budget categories. A substantial short-term rise in spending on defense and intelligence would both stimulate our economy and strengthen our nation's security.
Mr. Feldstein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Reagan, is a professor at Harvard and a member of The Wall Street Journal's board of contributors.
Applebaum: Venting in Athens
In the WaPo: Venting in Athens. By Anne Applebaum
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Fires burned in courtyards, shops were looted and Molotov cocktails whistled through clouds of tear gas. Hundreds of schools and campuses were occupied by students and, for more than two weeks, riots brought a major European capital to a halt. The police seemed powerless, the politicians helpless, the media confused.
No, I am not talking about Budapest in 1956 or Paris in 1968. I am talking about Athens over the past two weeks. Since Dec. 6, when Greek police shot and killed a 15-year-old boy, Athens, Thessaloniki and other Greek cities have been consumed by apparently unstoppable, violent demonstrations. Unlike the French riots of 2005, which were mostly led by disaffected immigrants, the participants in these Greek riots appear to be middle-class university students. They weren't smashing up shops in impoverished suburbs, either: These self-styled anarchists are based in a "bohemian" neighborhood of central Athens called Exarchia, and at a nearby university campus whose unused buildings cannot, according to a rather extraordinary Greek law, be entered by the police. So far, the rioters have done some $1.3 billion worth of damage.
Not, I'm guessing, that you've read all that much about the riots: Certainly their relative absence from European and North American front pages proves that, the rhetoric of European unity aside, not all European countries are taken equally seriously. Though Greece is a member of the European Union, its major contribution to European foreign policy is its stubborn insistence (for reasons truly too complex to explore here) on blocking international recognition of the Republic of Macedonia, unless it changes its name to FYROM--the "Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia"--an acronym that everybody else finds laughable. On the domestic front, the Greeks are best known for having faked the economic data they needed to join the euro currency.
If you don't have the political vocabulary to explain what's wrong with your country's economy, perhaps random violence seems a plausible response.
There may also be other, more local explanations as to why these riots feel as if they are taking place far away from mainstream events. One Greek political scientist, Stathis Kalyvas, argues brilliantly that they are facilitated by Greece's unique political culture: In the years since the overthrow of military rule, the Greek political class has come to treat civil disobedience, even violent and destructive civil disobedience, as "almost always justified, if not glorified." Rioting is a "fun and low-risk activity, almost a rite of passage"; the anarchist subculture that thrives in central Athens is "abetted, and in some instances endorsed" by Greece's left-wing parties and mainstream newspapers.
And yet--even if Greece is unserious, even if anarchist subculture has uniquely deep roots in Athens, even if Greek corruption and youth unemployment are unusually high--it's a mistake to dismiss these riots as peripheral. If nothing else, they show what can happen to a highly developed, post-ideological society whose organized politics no longer interest large groups of people. One sympathizer says the rioters can be divided into three groups: communists, anarchists and "younger people who like to think that they are anarchists but they don't know what they stand for. They are the ones who have been looting. . . . They feel the only way to make themselves heard is to do these things."
Another describes the anarchist world of Exarchia, approvingly, as "a parallel society with parallel values and parallel ideas." Yet another told a reporter that the tiny shops near the university deserved to be looted because they represent "the corporate machine." The thinking here isn't exactly sophisticated: This is a revolution, among other things, being conducted to the strains of Pink Floyd ("We don't need no education, we don't need no thought control").
Some are also blaming the weakness of Greece's mainstream social democrats, who, like social democrats elsewhere in Europe, have lately lost ground to the further left and are having trouble attracting young people. But I'm guessing the problem runs even deeper: The fact is that political parties in general are weak, everywhere, and democracy is therefore weak, too.
Which isn't that surprising: After all, we are heading for a global recession, the causes of which may lie far away from Athens--or Paris or Cincinnati--and the solutions to which may not lie in the hands of Greek, French or Ohio politicians. Nobody much admires powerless leaders, and nobody much sees the point in voting for people who can't do anything, anyway.
Hence the riots in Athens, and maybe elsewhere soon: If you aren't sure why you are unemployed, you don't have the political vocabulary to explain what's wrong with your country's economy, and you don't have leaders who seem able to fix it, perhaps random violence seems a plausible response.
Anne Applebaum is an adjunct fellow at AEI.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Fires burned in courtyards, shops were looted and Molotov cocktails whistled through clouds of tear gas. Hundreds of schools and campuses were occupied by students and, for more than two weeks, riots brought a major European capital to a halt. The police seemed powerless, the politicians helpless, the media confused.
No, I am not talking about Budapest in 1956 or Paris in 1968. I am talking about Athens over the past two weeks. Since Dec. 6, when Greek police shot and killed a 15-year-old boy, Athens, Thessaloniki and other Greek cities have been consumed by apparently unstoppable, violent demonstrations. Unlike the French riots of 2005, which were mostly led by disaffected immigrants, the participants in these Greek riots appear to be middle-class university students. They weren't smashing up shops in impoverished suburbs, either: These self-styled anarchists are based in a "bohemian" neighborhood of central Athens called Exarchia, and at a nearby university campus whose unused buildings cannot, according to a rather extraordinary Greek law, be entered by the police. So far, the rioters have done some $1.3 billion worth of damage.
Not, I'm guessing, that you've read all that much about the riots: Certainly their relative absence from European and North American front pages proves that, the rhetoric of European unity aside, not all European countries are taken equally seriously. Though Greece is a member of the European Union, its major contribution to European foreign policy is its stubborn insistence (for reasons truly too complex to explore here) on blocking international recognition of the Republic of Macedonia, unless it changes its name to FYROM--the "Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia"--an acronym that everybody else finds laughable. On the domestic front, the Greeks are best known for having faked the economic data they needed to join the euro currency.
If you don't have the political vocabulary to explain what's wrong with your country's economy, perhaps random violence seems a plausible response.
There may also be other, more local explanations as to why these riots feel as if they are taking place far away from mainstream events. One Greek political scientist, Stathis Kalyvas, argues brilliantly that they are facilitated by Greece's unique political culture: In the years since the overthrow of military rule, the Greek political class has come to treat civil disobedience, even violent and destructive civil disobedience, as "almost always justified, if not glorified." Rioting is a "fun and low-risk activity, almost a rite of passage"; the anarchist subculture that thrives in central Athens is "abetted, and in some instances endorsed" by Greece's left-wing parties and mainstream newspapers.
And yet--even if Greece is unserious, even if anarchist subculture has uniquely deep roots in Athens, even if Greek corruption and youth unemployment are unusually high--it's a mistake to dismiss these riots as peripheral. If nothing else, they show what can happen to a highly developed, post-ideological society whose organized politics no longer interest large groups of people. One sympathizer says the rioters can be divided into three groups: communists, anarchists and "younger people who like to think that they are anarchists but they don't know what they stand for. They are the ones who have been looting. . . . They feel the only way to make themselves heard is to do these things."
Another describes the anarchist world of Exarchia, approvingly, as "a parallel society with parallel values and parallel ideas." Yet another told a reporter that the tiny shops near the university deserved to be looted because they represent "the corporate machine." The thinking here isn't exactly sophisticated: This is a revolution, among other things, being conducted to the strains of Pink Floyd ("We don't need no education, we don't need no thought control").
Some are also blaming the weakness of Greece's mainstream social democrats, who, like social democrats elsewhere in Europe, have lately lost ground to the further left and are having trouble attracting young people. But I'm guessing the problem runs even deeper: The fact is that political parties in general are weak, everywhere, and democracy is therefore weak, too.
Which isn't that surprising: After all, we are heading for a global recession, the causes of which may lie far away from Athens--or Paris or Cincinnati--and the solutions to which may not lie in the hands of Greek, French or Ohio politicians. Nobody much admires powerless leaders, and nobody much sees the point in voting for people who can't do anything, anyway.
Hence the riots in Athens, and maybe elsewhere soon: If you aren't sure why you are unemployed, you don't have the political vocabulary to explain what's wrong with your country's economy, and you don't have leaders who seem able to fix it, perhaps random violence seems a plausible response.
Anne Applebaum is an adjunct fellow at AEI.
NY: Tax Millionaires, Not Sodas, Poll Concludes
NYTimes.com, City Room Blog: Tax Millionaires, Not Sodas, Poll Concludes
December 24, 2008, 9:17 am — Updated: 9:17 am
New York State voters oppose the so-called “obesity tax” on nondiet soft drinks by a resounding margin of 60 percent to 37 percent, but support, by an even more overwhelming margin of 84 percent to 13 percent, raising the state income tax on people who make more than $1 million per year, according to results of a Quinnipiac University poll released on Wednesday.
Even those who prefer diet sodas — which would be exempt from the proposed 18 percent sales tax — said they opposed the measure (58 percent to 39 percent), while drinkers of regular sodas opposed the idea by an even stronger margin (64 percent to 31 percent). Majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents surveyed all opposed the proposed tax, though by varying margins.
(In an amusing aside, the Quinnipiac poll noted, “Independent voters are the most weight conscious on the political spectrum as 37 percent prefer diet soft drinks, compared to 27 percent of Republicans and 30 percent of Democrats.”)
Meanwhile, support for the so-called “millionaires’ tax” extended even to Republicans, who favored the measure, by a margin of 72 percent to 27 percent. Gov. David A. Paterson has expressed opposition to raising taxes on wealthy voters, but has suggested that there might be no other option if the state budget crisis continues to fester.
The survey was conducted from Dec. 17 to 21 among 834 New York State registered voters. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 4 percentage points.
In other findings, New York State voters said they approved of the job Governor Paterson is doing, by a margin of 53 percent to 29 percent, but disapproved, by a margin of 46 percent to 40 percent, of the way he is handling the state budget. Still, voters agreed, 54 percent to 33 percent, that Mr. Paterson has the leadership ability to solve the state’s budget problems.
Voters agreed, 88 percent to 8 percent, that the state had a budget crisis, and 96 percent of voters agreed that the state’s budget problems were “somewhat serious” or “very serious, with only 3 percent saying the problems were “not too serious.”
Still, by a margin of 53 percent to 36 percent, voters said they would rather cut services than raise taxes. When asked to select from a list of choices, the most popular service to cut was economic development aid, and the most popular tax or fee to raise was auto registration fees. Those surveyed expressed strong preference for raising taxes on cigarettes and alcohol rather than soft drinks.
“Voters aren’t swallowing the proposal to tax nondiet soft drinks, the so-called fat tax,” said Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute and a former reporter for The Times. “But Governor David Paterson has won the bigger argument: Almost everyone agrees the state is in lousy shape. Overwhelmingly, they buy the governor’s characterization: We’re in a ‘crisis.’”
Mr. Carroll added: “Remember that verse: Don’t tax you; don’t tax me; tax the guy behind the tree? Particularly if the guy behind the tree has a lot of money, we say: Go for it.”
December 24, 2008, 9:17 am — Updated: 9:17 am
New York State voters oppose the so-called “obesity tax” on nondiet soft drinks by a resounding margin of 60 percent to 37 percent, but support, by an even more overwhelming margin of 84 percent to 13 percent, raising the state income tax on people who make more than $1 million per year, according to results of a Quinnipiac University poll released on Wednesday.
Even those who prefer diet sodas — which would be exempt from the proposed 18 percent sales tax — said they opposed the measure (58 percent to 39 percent), while drinkers of regular sodas opposed the idea by an even stronger margin (64 percent to 31 percent). Majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents surveyed all opposed the proposed tax, though by varying margins.
(In an amusing aside, the Quinnipiac poll noted, “Independent voters are the most weight conscious on the political spectrum as 37 percent prefer diet soft drinks, compared to 27 percent of Republicans and 30 percent of Democrats.”)
Meanwhile, support for the so-called “millionaires’ tax” extended even to Republicans, who favored the measure, by a margin of 72 percent to 27 percent. Gov. David A. Paterson has expressed opposition to raising taxes on wealthy voters, but has suggested that there might be no other option if the state budget crisis continues to fester.
The survey was conducted from Dec. 17 to 21 among 834 New York State registered voters. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 4 percentage points.
In other findings, New York State voters said they approved of the job Governor Paterson is doing, by a margin of 53 percent to 29 percent, but disapproved, by a margin of 46 percent to 40 percent, of the way he is handling the state budget. Still, voters agreed, 54 percent to 33 percent, that Mr. Paterson has the leadership ability to solve the state’s budget problems.
Voters agreed, 88 percent to 8 percent, that the state had a budget crisis, and 96 percent of voters agreed that the state’s budget problems were “somewhat serious” or “very serious, with only 3 percent saying the problems were “not too serious.”
Still, by a margin of 53 percent to 36 percent, voters said they would rather cut services than raise taxes. When asked to select from a list of choices, the most popular service to cut was economic development aid, and the most popular tax or fee to raise was auto registration fees. Those surveyed expressed strong preference for raising taxes on cigarettes and alcohol rather than soft drinks.
“Voters aren’t swallowing the proposal to tax nondiet soft drinks, the so-called fat tax,” said Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute and a former reporter for The Times. “But Governor David Paterson has won the bigger argument: Almost everyone agrees the state is in lousy shape. Overwhelmingly, they buy the governor’s characterization: We’re in a ‘crisis.’”
Mr. Carroll added: “Remember that verse: Don’t tax you; don’t tax me; tax the guy behind the tree? Particularly if the guy behind the tree has a lot of money, we say: Go for it.”
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Wind farm industry forced to admit environmental benefit of wind power in reducing carbon emissions is only half as stated
UK Telegraph: Promoters overstated the environmental benefit of wind farms, by Patrick Sawer
The wind farm industry has been forced to admit that the environmental benefit of wind power in reducing carbon emissions is only half as big as it had previously claimed.
Last Updated: 8:14AM GMT, Dec 21, 2008
The British Wind Energy Association (BWEA) has agreed to scale down its calculation for the amount of harmful carbon dioxide emission that can be eliminated by using wind turbines to generate electricity instead of burning fossil fuels such as coal or gas.
The move is a serious setback for the advocates of wind power, as it will be regarded as a concession that twice as many wind turbines as previously calculated will be needed to provide the same degree of reduction in Britain's carbon emissions.
A wind farm industry source admitted: "It's not ideal for us. It's the result of pressure by the anti-wind farm lobby."
For several years the BWEA – which lobbies on behalf of wind power firms – claimed that electricity from wind turbines 'displaces' 860 grams of carbon dioxide emission for every kilowatt hour of electricity generated.
However it has now halved that figure to 430 grams, following discussions with the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA).
Hundreds of wind farms are being planned across the country, adding to the 198 onshore and offshore farms - a total of 2,389 turbines - already in operation. Another 40 farms are currently under construction.
Experts have previously calculated that to help achieve the Government's aim of saving around 200 million tons of CO2 emissions by 2020 - through generating 15 per cent of the country's electricity from wind power - would require 50,000 wind turbines.
But the new figure for carbon displacement means that twice as many turbines would now be needed to save the same amount of CO2 emissions.
While their advocates regard wind farms as a key part of Britain's fight against climate change, opponents argue they blight the landscape at great financial cost while bringing little environmental benefit.
Dr Mike Hall, an anti-wind farm campaigner from the Friends of Eden, Lakeland and Lunesdale Scenery group in the Lake District, said: "Every wind farm application says it will lead to a big saving in the amount of carbon dioxide produced. This has been greatly exaggerated and the reduction in the carbon displacement figure is a significant admission of this.
"As we get cleaner power stations on line, the figure will get even lower. It further backs the argument that wind farms are one of the most inefficient and expensive ways of lowering carbon emissions."
Because wind farms burn no fuel, they emit no carbon dioxide during regular running. The revised calculation for the amount of carbon emission they save has come about because the BWEA's earlier figure did not take account of recent improvements to the technology used in conventional, fossil-fuel-burning power stations.
The figure of 860 grams dates back to the days of old-style coal-fired power stations. However, since the early 1990s, many of the dirty coal-fired stations have been replaced by cleaner-burning stations, with a consequent reduction in what the industry calls the "grid average mix" figure for carbon dioxide displacement.
As a result, a modern 100MW coal or gas power station is now calculated to produce half as many tonnes of carbon dioxide as its predecessor would have done.
The BWEA's move follows a number of rulings by the ASA against claims made by individual wind farm promoters about the benefits their schemes would have in reducing carbon emissions.
In one key adjudication, the ASA ruled that a claim by Npower Renewables that a wind farm planned for the southern edge of Exmoor National Park, in Devon, would help prevent the release of 33,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere was "inaccurate and likely to mislead". This claim was based on the 860-gram figure.
The watchdog concluded: "We told Npower to ensure that future carbon savings claims were based on a more representative and rigorous carbon emissions factor."
The ASA has now recommended that the BWEA and generating companies use the far lower figure of 430 grams.
In a letter to its members, the BWEA's head of onshore, Jan Matthiesen, said: "It was agreed to recommend to all BWEA members to use the single static figure of 430 g CO2/kWh for the time being. The advantage is that it is well accepted and presents little risk as it understates the true figure."
This is now the figure given on the BWEA's website. The organisation will also be forced to lower its claim for the total amount of carbon dioxide emission saved by the 2,389 wind turbines currently operating around Britain.
But the association denied the change weakened the case for wind farms.
Nick Medic, spokesman for the BWEA, said: "Wind farms are still eliminating emissions. The fact is that fossil fuel burning power stations belch out CO2 and wind farms don't. That has not changed.
"The fact is we need to reduce carbon emissions, however you account for them. But there are people who just don't like wind farms and will use any argument against them."
The wind farm industry has been forced to admit that the environmental benefit of wind power in reducing carbon emissions is only half as big as it had previously claimed.
Last Updated: 8:14AM GMT, Dec 21, 2008
The British Wind Energy Association (BWEA) has agreed to scale down its calculation for the amount of harmful carbon dioxide emission that can be eliminated by using wind turbines to generate electricity instead of burning fossil fuels such as coal or gas.
The move is a serious setback for the advocates of wind power, as it will be regarded as a concession that twice as many wind turbines as previously calculated will be needed to provide the same degree of reduction in Britain's carbon emissions.
A wind farm industry source admitted: "It's not ideal for us. It's the result of pressure by the anti-wind farm lobby."
For several years the BWEA – which lobbies on behalf of wind power firms – claimed that electricity from wind turbines 'displaces' 860 grams of carbon dioxide emission for every kilowatt hour of electricity generated.
However it has now halved that figure to 430 grams, following discussions with the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA).
Hundreds of wind farms are being planned across the country, adding to the 198 onshore and offshore farms - a total of 2,389 turbines - already in operation. Another 40 farms are currently under construction.
Experts have previously calculated that to help achieve the Government's aim of saving around 200 million tons of CO2 emissions by 2020 - through generating 15 per cent of the country's electricity from wind power - would require 50,000 wind turbines.
But the new figure for carbon displacement means that twice as many turbines would now be needed to save the same amount of CO2 emissions.
While their advocates regard wind farms as a key part of Britain's fight against climate change, opponents argue they blight the landscape at great financial cost while bringing little environmental benefit.
Dr Mike Hall, an anti-wind farm campaigner from the Friends of Eden, Lakeland and Lunesdale Scenery group in the Lake District, said: "Every wind farm application says it will lead to a big saving in the amount of carbon dioxide produced. This has been greatly exaggerated and the reduction in the carbon displacement figure is a significant admission of this.
"As we get cleaner power stations on line, the figure will get even lower. It further backs the argument that wind farms are one of the most inefficient and expensive ways of lowering carbon emissions."
Because wind farms burn no fuel, they emit no carbon dioxide during regular running. The revised calculation for the amount of carbon emission they save has come about because the BWEA's earlier figure did not take account of recent improvements to the technology used in conventional, fossil-fuel-burning power stations.
The figure of 860 grams dates back to the days of old-style coal-fired power stations. However, since the early 1990s, many of the dirty coal-fired stations have been replaced by cleaner-burning stations, with a consequent reduction in what the industry calls the "grid average mix" figure for carbon dioxide displacement.
As a result, a modern 100MW coal or gas power station is now calculated to produce half as many tonnes of carbon dioxide as its predecessor would have done.
The BWEA's move follows a number of rulings by the ASA against claims made by individual wind farm promoters about the benefits their schemes would have in reducing carbon emissions.
In one key adjudication, the ASA ruled that a claim by Npower Renewables that a wind farm planned for the southern edge of Exmoor National Park, in Devon, would help prevent the release of 33,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere was "inaccurate and likely to mislead". This claim was based on the 860-gram figure.
The watchdog concluded: "We told Npower to ensure that future carbon savings claims were based on a more representative and rigorous carbon emissions factor."
The ASA has now recommended that the BWEA and generating companies use the far lower figure of 430 grams.
In a letter to its members, the BWEA's head of onshore, Jan Matthiesen, said: "It was agreed to recommend to all BWEA members to use the single static figure of 430 g CO2/kWh for the time being. The advantage is that it is well accepted and presents little risk as it understates the true figure."
This is now the figure given on the BWEA's website. The organisation will also be forced to lower its claim for the total amount of carbon dioxide emission saved by the 2,389 wind turbines currently operating around Britain.
But the association denied the change weakened the case for wind farms.
Nick Medic, spokesman for the BWEA, said: "Wind farms are still eliminating emissions. The fact is that fossil fuel burning power stations belch out CO2 and wind farms don't. That has not changed.
"The fact is we need to reduce carbon emissions, however you account for them. But there are people who just don't like wind farms and will use any argument against them."
Claire Belinski's The Looming Crisis in Turkey
Excerpts of The Looming Crisis in Turkey. By Claire Berlinski
A country of massive economic and strategic significance could be headed for disaster
The American. Friday, December 19, 2008
ISTANBUL—In the wake of the First World War, Turkish General Mustafa Kemal Atatürk drove the occupying Allied Forces from the rump of the defeated Ottoman Empire. The liberated territory, he announced, would form the new Turkish Republic. Its paramount value would be nationalism, anchored in an exceptionally stringent brand of secularism. Islam would henceforth be banned from the public sphere and subordinated entirely to the state’s authority.
Atatürk’s victory over the Entente powers was complete and irreversible, but if contemporary critics of Turkey’s governing Justice and Development Party (known by its Turkish acronym, AKP) are correct, his victory over the retrograde forces of religion is not. Recently, the AKP’s attempt to lift a 1989 prohibition on headscarves in Turkish universities prompted a constitutional crisis. In March, Turkey’s chief prosecutor initiated a legal case to ban the party outright for plotting the Islamist subversion of the Republic. The challenge to the headscarf ban formed the gravamen of his brief. Months of ferment and feverish rumors ensued as the Constitutional Court weighed the evidence. Prominent critics of the party were arrested in pre-dawn raids and charged with plotting a coup. In August, the judges came down narrowly—by one vote less than the required majority—against the party’s closure. Ten of the eleven judges agreed, however, that the AKP had become a “focal point of activities against secularism.” The Court rebuked the party sharply and curtailed its state funding.
The verdict resolved the immediate crisis, but the conflict between Turkey’s arch-secularists and the AKP has hardly been settled. Indeed, a casual reader of the Turkish press could be forgiven for concluding that headscarves are Turkey’s most urgent concern.
They are not. Turkey’s most urgent concerns are the weakness of its political and legal institutions and the corruption that permeates its economy. Absent institutional reform, it does not much matter which palace faction emerges ascendant in the short term or how many girls wear headscarves to school, for the long-term outcome is apt to be the same: Turkey will not become a theocracy, but it will likely suffer severe economic turmoil, preceded or followed by more political instability.
It would be a stretch to say that Turkey is on the verge of becoming the next Iran. The percentage of Turks who believe political parties should be based on religion has dropped during the AKP’s time in power from 41 percent to 25 percent. The number who wish to see their country ruled by Islamic law has declined from 21 percent to 9 percent. Poll after poll has indicated that under the AKP, the number of Turks who pray five times daily and fast during Ramadan has diminished. Popular support for a theocracy is largely absent.
Also largely absent, however, are a coherent constitution, an effective legal system, a trusted judiciary, enforceable contract law, a disinterested civil service, modern bookkeeping, accurate property records, a rational system for tax collection, a successful education system, honest cops, incorruptible politicians, transparent campaign financing, a responsible press, a deep popular commitment to democracy, and a widespread sense of civic responsibility. Amid the (mostly manufactured) hysteria over Turkey’s imaginary future as an Islamic Republic, attempts to rectify these problems have been crowded out.
Turkey’s institutions are weak for historical reasons. In 1922, the new Republican assembly of Turkey overthrew the House of Osman, assuming its authority. Atatürk purged the bureaucracy of its Ottoman elements and radically Westernized the education system. Even the Ottoman script was replaced with a Latin one, cutting off every Turk born thereafter from 600 years of Ottoman culture and signaling the alignment of the Republic with Europe, not the Muslim East. Islamic courts were abolished and replaced with a secular legal apparatus modeled word-for-word on the Swiss, German, and Italian civil and penal codes.
The development of these institutions in Europe, however, was accompanied by centuries of coterminous social and cultural evolution; and while the later Ottoman sultans engaged, often vigorously, in Westernization, Turkish institutional reform came haltingly, if at all. Atatürk’s reforms were by no means a commensurate process; if so, he would not have famously declared them to be “for the people, despite the people.” The Turkish state—hypertrophied under Atatürk’s étatist rule—has since tended to suppress the growth of the non-state institutions, such as a free press, that work in tandem with parliaments, bureaucracies, and legal systems to ensure their efficacy.
Turkey thus remains under the sway of Byzantine and Ottoman social, economic, and legal habits that poorly serve a modern nation-state. This historical background, more than the rise of political Islam, is the greatest barrier to Turkey’s integration into Europe and the global economy; and because it has ensured a perpetual cycle of rising expectations followed by political and economic crises, it is a major cause of the rise of political Islam in Turkey.
It should surprise no one to learn that Turkish politics are colored by oriental clientelism, Byzantine nepotism, and widespread corruption. But these problems are more severe than commonly assumed; their ramifications are more profound than commonly appreciated; and the situation is not getting better under the AKP—or, if it is getting better, it is not getting better fast enough.
The AKP came to power promising reform. It has stayed in power because it is perceived, in Turkey, to be delivering reform, and it has received tremendous support from Europe, the United States, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, foreign investors, and the foreign press for the same reason. If the AKP is not, in reality, getting very far—if the reports of substantial reform are wrong, predicated on faulty data, and derived from faulty analysis—then it is only a matter of time before Turkey experiences its next major financial meltdown, much like the one that brought the AKP to power in the first place. When this happens, the AKP will be voted out of power, if it has not already been ousted by the courts or the military.
It is therefore less essential than people assume to know whether, in the small hours of the night, the leaders of the AKP dream of neutering the army, ending democracy, and destroying Turkish secularism: this is said to be their long-term plan, not their medium-term strategy, and chances are that they won’t survive long enough for anyone to know. But it is essential to grasp that without the reform of Turkey’s institutions, nothing much better—for Turkey or the world—is likely to replace them.
***
We must appreciate just why the AKP was elected. Rigorous research on this subject has been done by Konda, a Turkish consulting group known for its unusually prophetic opinion polls. (Prior to the June 2007 elections, Konda predicted that the AKP would take 47 percent of the vote. They took exactly 47 percent of the vote.) As Konda’s founder, Tarhan Erdem, told me, the AKP is “perceived above all as the party that can best manage the economy. That they are the party of Islamic values is secondary.”
Konda surveyed the electorate in August 2007. It found that 70.4 percent of Turks ranked poverty as the nation’s most pressing problem. “Acts against secularism” and “acts against democracy” ranked well below “insufficiency of social security system.” The electorate believed the AKP to be the party most able to address the problem of poverty. A plurality of respondents said no party could solve the problem, but 34.9 percent believed the AKP could do it. Only 10.5 percent said this of the CHP, Turkey’s oldest party and the only real rival to the AKP. The CHP calls itself “center-left,” but the correct description is really “statist-nationalist,” and whatever you call it, it is moribund. In the past two general elections, the CHP has been thrashed.
Konda’s founder, who directed this research, is no fan of the AKP. Erdem joined the CHP in 1953 and served briefly as the party’s general secretary. He is also a columnist for the left-leaning newspaper Radikal and makes no secret of his belief that the AKP leadership dreams of destroying Turkish secularism. Nonetheless, he trusts what his polls tell him: that the people who voted for the AKP do not share this dream.
Overwhelmingly, the poorer the voter, the more likely he or she was to vote AKP. When asked which issues were most important to them in casting their votes, 78.3 of respondents chose “economic situation and expectations.” “One can easily see,” concludes Konda’s analysis of these data, that “these elections progressed, not on the secular-anti-secular axis as generally claimed, but rather on an axis of aggravation.”
The leaders of the AKP are pious Anatolian businessmen who look and sound like ordinary rural Turks. They visit the poorer regions of Turkey and speak earnestly and respectfully to people for whom the CHP leadership can barely disguise its contempt. Given Turkey’s massive income inequality—87 percent of the population earn less than the average income—it is not surprising that the CHP, a party correctly associated with the wealthy urban elite, is in deep electoral trouble.
This is not to say that religion and the AKP have nothing to do with each other. From the 1950s through the 1980s, Turkey experienced slow but steady economic growth. In the 1990s, the economy stalled and then shrank. “During this period,” Erdem said, “people were forced to lean on each other. They met in cafes and mosques, and the things that helped them to stick together were, basically, Islamic qualities and principles…. During this time there was a search for new political values. During the preceding 30-year span, they had tried every single party and realized none of them were any good, so they were looking for another avenue.” The AKP was that avenue.
Last year, the AKP was returned to power with an increased share of the vote. Again, the reasons for this were chiefly economic: the party was perceived to have delivered the goods. Foreign observers have been rhapsodic about the AKP’s economic record. The Economist magazine expressed the consensus view: “They are more successful than any secular predecessor.” The words repeatedly invoked are “shrewd,” “sound,” “disciplined,” and “miracle.” This economic miracle is generally taken as axiomatic, even as domestic and foreign observers remain deeply divided about the party’s commitment to secularism and democracy, tending to argue either that Turkish secularism is, as the AKP claims, so strict that the rights of pious Turks are routinely violated, or so fragile, as its opponents claim, that the rights of impious Turks are in immediate jeopardy.
Both perspectives are easily understood. The 1982 Turkish constitution defines “secularism” in a particularly severe manner. The preamble, for example, states that there “shall be no interference whatsoever by sacred religious feelings in state affairs and politics.” In other words, no politician here may proclaim his faith in the manner that every mainstream American politician does, and must, to be elected. The constitution was clearly intended to function as an iron barrier against the encroachment of political Islam, but it has resulted, in practice, in the denial of education to roughly three-quarters of Turkish women. This cannot be reckoned a workable, durable separation between religion and the state. Further undermining the constitution’s utility is the issue of its legitimacy: it was ratified by referendum during a period of military rule; no public debate about its terms was permitted.
But if the AKP has a fair case against the Turkish constitution, the constitution’s defenders have a fair case against the AKP. The blood associated with political Islam—from Algeria through Iran to Afghanistan—is hardly calculated to reassure. Neither is the company the AKP used to keep: Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s political mentor was former Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan, who came to power promising to “rescue Turkey from the unbelievers of Europe,” wrest power from “imperialists and Zionists,” and launch a jihad to recapture Jerusalem. Weeks after taking office, Erbakan departed on a rapturous friendship tour of Iran. He was soon ousted by the Turkish military. The AKP’s critics have not forgotten this, nor should they.
Nonetheless, much of the handwringing about the AKP’s crypto-Islamism is political theater. The reality is that if the Turkish economy tanks, the AKP will lose popular support. Indeed, when the court case against the AKP spooked the markets, polls immediately showed a substantial drop in the party’s approval ratings. When the markets rallied in response to the court’s conciliatory verdict, the AKP’s ratings went right back up. Turkey is now beginning to feel the effects of the global financial crisis: the lira has plummeted; exports have fallen off; unemployment is soaring. Polls show that support for the AKP is sharply attenuated. This party cannot stay in power without the support of the electorate. The military is in the hands of the AKP’s enemies. No one doubts that if the AKP were to announce tomorrow that it no longer saw the need for elections, the military would immediately hang its leaders.
The most important question to ask, then, is not whether the AKP is committed to secularism and democracy—the military is devoutly committed to the former and more or less in favor of the latter—but whether it has really delivered the economic goods, and if not, what that means for Turkey.
***
According to the standard narrative about the AKP’s economic record, the nationalist-secularist establishment opposed foreign investment in Turkey, which it viewed as a form of imperialism. The elites were well served by the state-run economy and the patronage system to which it gave rise, even if the rest of the country was not. The AKP represents a free-market revolt: small businessmen from Anatolia had been cut out of the spoils system; they took power, deregulated, privatized, removed barriers to foreign investment, and reduced the state sector over the anguished screams of the secularist bureaucracy that had long controlled and profited from it. Lo, an economic miracle occurred.
Here are some commonly reported statistics: when the AKP took power, foreign direct investment (FDI) in Turkey was $1 billion; in 2007, FDI stood at $19.8 billion, an amount equal to the past 20 years combined. Under the AKP, Turkey’s average economic growth rate has been over 7 percent, compared with an average of 2.6 percent during the previous decade. Per capita income rose in their first term (2002-2007) from $2,598 to $5,477. In the 1990s, inflation reached highs of 100 percent; under the AKP it has been reduced to an average of 10 percent. Foreign debt has declined from nearly 80 percent of GDP in 2001 to less than half of GDP today. The budget deficit has dropped from 16 percent of GNP to 1 percent. Public sector debt has been reduced from 91 percent of GNP to 51 percent.
Looks good, doesn’t it? I thought so, too. Previously, I have accepted these statistics at face value and applauded the AKP’s economic record. But having looked more closely at the question, I am now recanting. These statistics might be right, but they might also be nonsense. The truth is, nobody knows.
I say this because Turkey has one of the largest underground economies in the world. By definition, data about the size of the underground economy do not exist. But economists in Turkey estimate it to be worth somewhere between one-third and two-thirds of Turkish GDP. Every major economic sector in Turkey—agriculture, construction, markets, textiles, tourism, shipping—is largely underground, off-the-record, and undeclared. No one knows how big these sectors really are. No one knows if they are growing or shrinking. No one knows how they are being financed. No one knows where the profits are going. Of the 23 million people working in Turkey, only 10 million are working on the record. The economic growth rates commonly cited in the press cannot be meaningful. They cannot even be approximate. They probably pertain to less than half of the Turkish economy.
Osman Altug, an economist at Marmara University who specializes in the study of Turkey’s underground economy, told me that he can think of only one country in modern history with an underground economy so large by comparison with the official one: Argentina under Carlos Mendez. “Not even Africa is this bad,” Altug said. Other economists may not go so far, but most agree that as underground economies go, Turkey is top-tier.
Altug has been campaigning since the 1970s to establish a system for collecting income tax modeled on America’s Internal Revenue Service. He has been an adviser to all of the major political parties. He told me that he has pleaded with all of them to make the institution of such a system a priority. So far, he has had no success. “We know from questionnaires,” he said, “and this is the only way we can get data, that only 3.5 million people in Turkey pay income tax. The other 60 million? Nothing. Only 7.5 percent of the Turkish budget comes from income tax.”
Without income taxes, you have no tax returns, and thus no data about who is earning what, or how. “The statistics used by foreign observers when they talk about the AKP are totally distorted by this situation,” said Altug. “They’re based on the overground economy. They bear no relationship to reality.” (It is important to note that none of Altug’s research has been translated into English. He has done some of the key work on the Turkish economy, and very few Westerners can read it.)
No recent Turkish government has made much effort to change this situation. A progressive income tax system would obviously be more sensible than regressive indirect taxation, but the parties do not want to inflame their benefactors, and they do not want to appear to be levying taxes. Instead, they borrow and borrow and raise indirect taxes, penalizing the poor far more than the rich. When the price of oil goes up, they blame U.S. policy in Iraq, even though two-thirds of the price of a liter of gasoline goes into government coffers. “They borrow money from the U.S. to stay in power, then blame them for Turkey’s financial problems,” said Altug.
For the same reasons, the AKP has been funding many of its popular subsidy and development projects with borrowed money, rather than with tax revenues. In particular, it has been raising a great deal of money through the issuance of bearer bonds—instruments that are, in effect, signed “To whom it may concern.” This means that the government does not know whom it is borrowing from, or if it does, there is no record of it. “Whoever has money,” said Altug, “they take it.” A number of the AKP’s critics have charged that the party is financing its activities with “green money”—money funneled through Islamist banks and holding companies, particularly those sponsored by the Saudis—but Altug suspects that this green money is, in fact, recycled Turkish money. “You make the money here, underground, you kick it out of the country to launder it, then bring it back.” Sounds plausible, but who knows? There is no way to track this.
The challenge of analyzing the Turkish economy is compounded by the almost complete absence of bookkeeping. Only 260,000 firms in Turkey hold balance sheets; what the rest of them are doing is unknown. The property deed system is similarly opaque. An acquaintance of mine—an American who works in commercial real estate—rolled his eyes when describing the pointlessness of looking for a deed at Tapu Dairesi, the property records bureau. If you’re lucky enough to find it at all, he said, you have no guarantee that it bears any relationship to reality.
It is not even clear what the population of Turkey really is. Last April, the head of the Election Commission noted in passing that 5 million voters seemed to be, curiously enough, missing. This week, 6 million of them were reported to have been found. Interestingly, they were found just ahead of upcoming local elections, and discovered in particularly large numbers in districts where the AKP could use a bit of extra support.
You might think it would still be possible to measure the inflation rate accurately. You go out to the stores and see if prices are rising, right? Not quite. The Consumer Price Index (CPI), according to the Turkish National Bureau of Statistics, is based on, among other things, rental prices. No one is telling the government the truth about those: landlords here tend to keep two rental contracts, one for the tenant, one for the tax authorities. I calculate the CPI every time I go shopping here in Istanbul. I buy roughly the same basket of commodities every week. According to my calculations (based on the cost of toothpaste, soap, milk, eggs, bread, kitty litter, and trash bags at the Cam mini-market on Susam Sokak, a block or so up from the big white mosque), inflation in Turkey is rising faster than the government claims. My CPI isn’t very meticulous, but neither is the government’s.
The paucity of meaningful statistics means that we have no idea whether there has been an economic miracle here, and neither does the AKP. On March 1, 2008, the government claimed that per capita GDP was $5,480. On March 15, it claimed it was $7,500. On March 27, it claimed it was $9,000. A bit of hand-waving accompanied the revision of these statistics: the new figures, supposedly, were based on a fancy formula for calculating the size of the underground economy. Given that economists’ estimates of the size of various sectors of the underground economy diverge by as much as 60 percent, it is amazing that anyone took these numbers seriously.
“Didn’t anyone notice this?” I asked Altug.
He raised an eyebrow. “Everybody knows, but nobody knows.”
***
The opacity of the economic system perverts the political system profoundly. “Whoever controls the money, controls politics,” said Altug, “but no one knows who controls the money. It’s all off the record. So the underground economy says, ‘I’m the boss. I decide.’”
Party finance laws? There are some on the books, but they are vague to begin with and anyway ignored. “Campaign financing is a total mystery. All the parties are exactly the same this way. In this sense, there is no true multiparty system. Turkey’s like a chocolate factory where the wrappers come in different colors—blue, red, green—but the chocolate is the same, because the people who finance the system stay the same.”
Each party, Altug believes, is financed by about 40 people. “They vary from party to party, but they’re the ones with all the power.” The financiers choose candidates they can control. “You want your party candidates to be uneducated and easily manipulated,” he said, “not educated and competent.” This system gives rise to staggering levels of corruption. “If there were a corruption Olympics,” said Altug, “Turkey would get the gold medal.”
Altug reckons that 94 percent of all construction in Istanbul is illegal. I’m not sure how he arrived at this estimate—it is probably too high; others to whom I’ve spoken believe the figure is closer to 60 percent—but 60 percent is still extraordinarily high. There is a lot of construction going on in my neighborhood, but it takes place only at night. Istanbul lies on a massive fault zone. Everyone knows this construction is shoddy; everyone knows what will happen when the big earthquake comes. “If the construction companies are fined, they just pay the penalties and keep on building,” said Altug. “It’s not enough to stop them. The government doesn’t really clamp down because they need those companies to support them financially.”
Is there any difference between the AKP and the other parties, I asked Altug?
“No difference at all. Absolutely no difference. Red money, green money, headscarves—that’s all a distraction until the economy is on the record. Otherwise you’re just doing business with Al Capone.”
***
Mustafa X is in one of the following industries (he does not want me to say which one or use his real name): construction, waste management, water management, garbage collection. He has been working since the 1980s with municipal governments throughout Turkey. A period of massive corruption, he told me, began under Turgut Özal, who came to power after the 1980 coup. Özal famously declared that his bureaucrats “knew how to take care of business.” The comment was widely understood to mean, “My bureaucrats don’t get paid enough, but they sure know how to make up for it.”
This was roughly when Mustafa X went into business. “I was very clearly aware of the change. Prior to this, Turkish governments tended to be ideological; from here on in, it was all business. Before, if you got caught with a suitcase of dollars on you, you went to jail. But our society wasn’t ready for freedom. It got corrupt.”
Has there been any improvement in this situation under the AKP, I asked? He shook his head emphatically. No. “There used to be checks and balances on the amount of corruption possible. But now that the municipal and national governments are in the hands of the same party, it’s out of control. It can’t get worse.”
The AKP had initially been better than its predecessors, he said: “When they came to power, they were new. The truly religious elements of the party were afraid of God, so they stayed clean. But when the party gained power, the opportunists flocked to it. If you’re in the ruling party, no one will have the courage to challenge you about this.”
Mustafa X acknowledged that at first the AKP had taken action against corrupt business alliances. “When the AKP came to power,” he said, “they caught and imprisoned a handful of toughs who were alleged to have ties to the Deep State.” (It is widely believed here that a shadowy coalition called the Deep State runs the country. It is supposedly comprised of high-level figures in the military, the intelligence services, the judiciary, and organized crime. There is some evidence that it really exists.) “But each party inevitably creates its own rich men,” Mustafa X said, “and now they give the tenders to Albayrak.”
The Albayrak Group, a massive holding company, is involved in construction, garbage collection, road construction, and public buildings. The son of CEO Mustafa Albayrak, Berat Albayrak, is married to Prime Minister Erdogan’s daughter. The media broadcast their marriage, live. “When Erdogan was mayor [of Istanbul], he made [Mustafa] Albayrak into a rich man,” Mustafa X said. “Now the party is linked to his media conglomerate, which owns [newspaper] Yeni Safak and [television channel] Kanal 7 .... Of course, there were conglomerates like this in the ’90s, too. Demirel had Çörtük, for example.” (Süleyman Demirel served seven times as prime minister; Kamuran Çörtük is chairman of the Bayindir group, another powerful Turkish conglomerate.) “But this level of consolidation is new.”
The AKP’s failure to transform Turkey’s culture of corruption and cronyism is massively significant. The AK Party’s name is a pun: the word ak means white—in other words, “clean.” The AKP leaders promised to stamp out corruption, and because they said they were God-fearing, people believed they might really mean it. According to Konda’s surveys, corruption is the electorate’s second-biggest concern after the economy, and the concerns are related, because a profoundly corrupt economy is an inherently uncompetitive one. Erdogan came to power promising to end the kind of cronyism that the Demirel-Çörtük alliance represented. That was the ostensible raison d’être of the AKP.
But if four legs are good, two legs are better. Last year, the Çalik Grup, another AKP yandas (the Turkish language is rich with synonyms for “crony”), purchased the ATV channel and Sabah newspaper. Erdogan’s son-in-law is Çalik’s top manager. Berat Albayrak’s brother, Serhat Albayrak, is the top manager of Çalik’s media subsidiary, Turkuvaz. The transaction was financed by the state banks Halkbank and Vakifbank.
How corrupt, I asked Mustafa X, is the AKP compared to the other parties? “The AKP isn’t the most corrupt,” he said. “The most corrupt was the DYP.” (Demirel founded the right-leaning DYP, or True Path Party, in 1983. There have been four DYP governments, one led by Demirel, the other three led by Turkey’s first woman prime minister, Tansu Çiller.) “Under their governance, during the Tansu Çiller years, control by the Deep State reached an apex. The next most corrupt is Anavatan.” Anavatan is the party founded by Turgut Özal.
The AKP’s corruption, which Mustafa X considered average by Turkish standards, does, however, come in a slightly different flavor. The other parties, for example, like flat-out bribes. “I was doing a deal in a town of about 60,000 people recently,” Mustafa X said. “The deputy mayor said to me, ‘My TV has bad reception.’ He named the brand he wanted, the size of the screen. A $2,000 TV. We got it for him, we got the contract. That’s how it normally goes.”
He sketched it out for me on a napkin. When you do business with the CHP, you generally have to pay off the following people: 10 percent to the mayor, 10 percent to the deputy mayor, 10 percent to the opener (who announces the tender), 5 percent to the controller, and possibly you need to sweeten the account manager, too. “Now,” Mustafa X said, “if you do business with AKP municipalities, the top people—the mayor and deputy mayor—will stay clean. They’re afraid of God. But if they can’t stack the government with their own people, they’ll use CHP and Anavatan deputies. They take the usual cut, and the mayor knows it, but he can’t replace them, so he tolerates it.”
If the AKP mayors and deputies don’t take bribes quite so brazenly, this doesn’t mean they’re not on the take. “Instead of asking for a television, they say, ‘I’ll give you the tender, but you need to sponsor the girls’ volleyball team.’ Their mentality is different. Their goal is less about personal enrichment, more about power: they want to gain support for the people who support them. So they get you to buy things for—or from—their supporters.”
In other words, the biggest problem with the AKP is not that it is so different from the other Turkish political parties, but that it is so similar to them: short-sighted, self-aggrandizing, autocratic, and crooked. The corrupt practices Mustafa X describes, which take place at every level of government, ensure massive waste, shoddy public services, and a business climate that is severely hostile to competition, innovation, and sustainable economic growth. Obviously, it isn’t possible to say what percentage of the economy is touched by this kind of corruption, but clearly we are talking about a significant percentage.
Recently, Mustafa X claimed, a $4 billion construction budget was handed out without a public announcement. “Four billion?” I said to him. “I can’t believe that. How is that possible? How many people knew about this?”
“Everybody knew,” he said. “But nobody knows.” His expression suggested that he found my question amusingly naive.
“The majority of tenders are just given away like that,” he added, “to relatives, friends, or a firm that supports them politically.”
I do not know if that particular story is true, but I am persuaded—based on the sheer number of stories like this I hear, from credible, first-hand witnesses with no reason to lie to me—that the story is plausible. Every sector connected to the state is affected by this kind of corruption, and the state sector in Turkey remains enormous, despite the AKP’s commitment to denationalization. Stories such as the one related by Mustafa X raise obvious questions about that commitment to denationalization. To whom has the government been selling state assets, and why? Last week, it was reported in the Turkish press that the government has devised an insanely complicated scheme to sell its own offices, including the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Defense, to private financial institutions. The government will henceforth be a rent-paying tenant in its own buildings. The rent, obviously, will be paid from the public purse. The financial institutions will then use these assets to back the sale of loan instruments to foreign investors. After a fixed time, the government will buy back the buildings, returning to the happy financial institutions all of their initial capital outlay. Unsurprisingly, many Turks find themselves wondering just who is going to profit from deals like these. It is quite hard to see the logic in this plan unless one imagines that quite a few cash-stuffed suitcases are involved.
Although anecdotes like the ones Mustafa X told me are ubiquitous in Turkey, they are still anecdotes. They are consistent, however, with wider research: a 2006 Transparency International survey of bribery among the top 30 exporting countries ranked Turkey among the worst offenders. “It’s very frightening,” Marie Wolkers, the senior research coordinator at Transparency, remarked to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, “and it is actually very consistent with the monitoring of Turkey by the OECD convention process, which produced a report on Turkey which is quite alarming, I mean it is very bad.”
The AKP prefers to give tenders to its own people. “You can do business up to a certain point with the AKP, after which you have to be one of them or have one as an intermediary,” Mustafa X said. “This isn’t true of the CHP, although it is true of the MHP. You have to be a nationalist to do business with them.” The extreme-nationalist MHP took 14.3 percent of the vote in the 2007 elections. Militias attached to this party shed a great deal of blood in the 1970s; now the MHP, like the AKP, claims to have embraced moderation.
Mustafa X appears to be successful, although he is not a member of the AKP. How did he get by in this climate, I asked? He shrugged. “I can do business with them,” he said, “because they know I’ll keep a secret.”
***
Ogün Altiparmak was born on the day Atatürk died, hence his name, o gün, which means “that day.” In his youth, he was a Turkish football hero; a street is named after him in Kadiköy, a neighborhood on the Asian side of Istanbul. In the 1980s, he was a founding member of Turgut Özal’s Anavatan Party. He has had a business career, a sports career, and a political career in Turkey. “Everything Professor Altug told you is true,” he said.
Altiparmak agreed with Mustafa X: the corruption in Turkey became substantially worse during the Anavatan years. “After Özal made the ‘my bureaucrats know how to do business’ comment, every last bureaucrat became a thief.”
“If you work honestly in Turkey you have no chance of getting rich,” he continued. “You can’t compete in a system like this.” Honesty also prevents one from becoming a politician. “Of 550 MPs, 400 come from the bureaucracy. You need 250,000 dollars to become an MP in Turkey. An average businessman can’t afford this. Even the highest-paid bureaucrats make only 8,000 lira a month. So where is this money coming from?
“Here’s how the bribery works,” Altiparmak said. “First, the whole system of property deeds is rotten. They find little old ladies who own property, haven’t given anyone power of attorney, don’t have any heirs; they transfer the deeds into their names, sell the property out from under them, then they bump them off.”
I wasn’t sure I had heard that right. “They do what? Like in ‘The Sopranos’?”
“Did that happen in ‘The Sopranos’?”
“Yeah, you know, with Paulie’s mother?”
“That’s probably where they got the idea.”
It later occurred to me that even the Sopranos hadn’t bumped the old women off. I don’t know if this story is true—although I have heard the same rumor elsewhere and read it in the Turkish press—but it is telling that a founding member of a major Turkish political party finds it perfectly credible. It suggests the extraordinary distrust that permeates the political system.
“There’s a property deed office,” Altiparmak said, “Tapu Dairesi, in each district. Each one takes in about 50,000 lira a day in bribes. The bribe you have to pay just to get a legal transaction completed in a timely fashion is 100 lira. If you multiply that by 500, you get 50,000. If you don’t pay it, you’ll wait weeks to get the documents you need to buy a home. If you need something illegal done, the price rockets in proportion to the illegality and how much work it will take to make it look legal. There are 1,000 Tapu offices in Turkey. Multiply 50,000 lira times 1,000 times 300 work days per year…. That’s just Tapu. The customs officials skim off $2.2 billion per year. What Professor Altug says is all true. I’m 70 years old. I’ve been in business, I’ve been in politics, I’ve been in sports—it’s all true.”
When Altiparmak helped to found Anavatan in 1983, he was responsible for bringing together the Kadiköy establishment. Kadiköy is a leftist stronghold; but because Altiparmak was a football hero, he was able to bring together people of all political orientations, people to whom everyone in Turkey could relate. “I agreed to do it because Anavatan was nationalist and conservative, but also in favor of free enterprise and social justice.”
When Anavatan took power, “one of the first items on the agenda was to build a municipal building. This guy came in and made an excellent bid, but they picked someone else. Why? Because the daughter of the prime minister was in partnership with the company. At Kalamis, in Kadiköy, they wanted to build a marina. Again, people close to the PM took the tender.”
These stories multiplied. “When I was doing business in the U.S. in the ’70s, I noticed, in Illinois, that every farmer had a silo,” said Altiparmak. “It occurred to me that if Turkey had quality storage like this, farmers could increase their profits by 15 percent.” After Anavatan won, Altiparmak contacted a U.S. company that made storage bins. “I told the company, ‘Come up with the highest quality product at the lowest price, and I promise you, you’ll get the tender. I’m one of the founders of the party, I can guarantee this.’ They made the best bid, a little less than $28 million dollars, and guaranteed this bid would have no surcharges. But they gave the contract to someone who wanted $34.5 million. They stuck on another $3 million in surcharges. The deal was financed with a loan from the World Bank. The project in the end cost about $54 million.” Altiparmak went to Özal and provided him with evidence of the corruption. “It turned out that Özal’s nephew—the minister of agriculture—had been in on this all along. Özal did nothing. He turned a blind eye.
“SoI started a war against them. The party entered a civil war. Özal held delegate elections, but then he had a heart attack. His wife was running the country behind the scenes. Özal’s right-hand man cancelled the elections.” When Altiparmak asked why, he was told that “Communists had invaded the party.”
“I have 115 employees,” said Altiparmak, bewildered. “How can I be a Communist?”
Demoralized, Altiparmak resigned. “From then on,” he said, “everyone started robbing the country blind.”
I have visited Altiparmak’s home. It is very modest. He is not a wealthy man.
Had there been any improvement under the AKP, I asked?
“The AKP is the same as everyone else,” Altiparmak said. “There are honest people among them, but they’re few and far between. It’s a little different, because they take smaller bribes—maybe 10 percent, as opposed to 50 percent—but don’t forget that the tenders are a lot bigger, too.”
Altiparmak believes that government officials created foundations to channel these bribes. “Like Yeditepe University. The former mayor of Istanbul is the president of that university, and all the departments of the university that do trade are run by his kids. All the contracts get kicked back to that family, and if you say anything about it, they say, ‘What are you talking about? This is a government foundation.’ This is true of Bilkent University and Kadir Has University, too. Tasyapi is in a secret partnership with Erdogan’s brother. The company controls $5 billion dollars worth of projects. In Izmir, in a CHP-controlled municipality, they put some land up for sale. One of my friends participated in the tender. To bid, you had to put up a financial guarantee. After taking everyone’s guarantee, they cancelled the tender and kept the guarantees. They did this five, six times. From Anatolia to Istanbul, you cannot build without a bribe. The former mayor of Besiktas owns a five-star hotel in Antalya. You can’t afford that on a mayor’s salary. Look at the assets of the heads of the labor unions. Your eyes will pop out. They’re feudal lords. Ankara has the highest per-capita wealth in the country, but why? There’s no industry or business there. But people there own more cars than in Istanbul. All the million-dollar villas in Ankara are owned by bureaucrats.”
I am reporting only about a quarter of what Altiparmak told me, and even if it’s only a quarter true—and I suspect a good amount of it is true, because many other Turks have told me stories like these—it still represents a massive amount of corruption. “You could put everyone in jail because of it,” Altiparmak said.
And the AKP? “If they’re so afraid of God,” Altiparmak asked, “why aren’t they paying taxes? Cheating like this isn’t in the interests of God, social justice, capitalism, ethics.”
Kuvayi Milliye, an ultra-right-wing organization named after a militia assembled by Atatürk, claims that $250 billion in siphoned money, laundered in the underground economy, is sitting in Swiss banks and offshore accounts. The group is determined to find it, bring it back, and use it to pay off the national debt. The whole Turkish budget is about $150 billion. In the wake of the 2001 financial meltdown, the International Monetary Fund arranged a $39.5 billion rescue package for Turkey. If Kuvayi Milliye is correct, that bailout represents only a fraction of the stolen money now sitting in those Swiss banks.
Members of Kuvayi Milliye are now in police custody, charged with plotting against the government. Perhaps they were. Turkey has a long history of plots and coups; indeed, there have been four military interventions in as many decades. But perhaps the Kuvayi Milliye members were telling the truth, which would also explain why they’re now sitting in jail cells. There is no way for me to know, obviously. But it is a measure of the pervasive atmosphere of distrust in Turkey that it is both plausible to imagine they are making this up—to legitimize efforts to overthrow a democratically-elected government—and equally plausible to imagine they have been arrested for attempting to expose widespread government corruption.
There is something particularly tragic about these stories, because ordinary Turks are honest. Countless times I have tried to tip a cab driver or a delivery person for good service. They have misunderstood, thinking I have accidentally overpaid, and they have tracked me down—even long after I have left the cab or long after they have left my apartment—to return my change.
***
Although many note the explosion of corruption during the Özal years, the mentality that led to this state of affairs can be traced back to the Ottoman Empire. Bribery was not, of course, a uniquely Ottoman tradition, and in fact the early Ottoman sultans were known for their intolerance of corruption. But the later ones were not. This is chronicled by Ottoman historian Halil Inalcik in An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire:
In his Relazione dated 1596, Venetian Bailo Malipiero concurs with the Ottoman memorialists that high offices were obtained only through huge sums of bribe money—for the grand vizierate 80,000, for the finance ministry 40-50,000 gold pieces. Once in office they redeemed these bribes by taking bribes for other major appointments so that all officials were involved in bribery. This practice became so routine that Evliya candidly gives two amounts for the income of a judge, one with the bribe and the second without. At the bottom of the system those officials in direct contact with the taxpayers used all kinds of devices to extort extra money in the name of a service fee or gilt.... As was the case with monarchies in the West, bribery and the sale of offices became part of public administration and a source of public revenue. In the Ottoman Empire, the sale of offices became a widespread practice in the seventeenth century and were given to those who bid the highest amount.... Those who had authority, including a ruler or his delegate, regarded the office as a source of material gain and therefore negotiable for compensation….
As the author of this passage observes, this was also the case in the monarchies of the West. But as Mustafa X remarked, “There was no Enlightenment in the Ottoman Empire. Modern thinking never entered into the equation.”
The Ottoman legacy is not a complete explanation for present-day corruption in Turkey. Corruption is endemic in the developing world—the Ottomans are hardly to blame for that—and corruption is not precisely unknown in the developed world, as any citizen of Illinois may attest. But the Ottoman legacy goes some way toward explaining the intractability of the problem in Turkey. It will not be easy to solve, particularly given the weakness of the institutions that might hold it in check.
It would be too optimistic to expect things to chug along in the corrupt but functional way they have for the past six years. The Turkish economy collapses—that’s what it does. It did so repeatedly before the AKP came to power. And since it has not been reformed root and branch, there is no reason to expect the pattern to change. The AKP’s fundamentalism may be difficult to discern, but an economic debacle might well give rise to a less ambiguous Islamist movement in Turkey. Radicalism, of all stripes, is often bred out of chaos.
From the 1980s to 1999, Turkey set low real interest rates and high exchange rates. Imports were expensive and exports were cheap. Since 1999, the opposite policy has been in place: the AKP has set low foreign exchange rates and high interest rates. Cheap foreign exchange has been the source of growth in an otherwise contractionary economy. High interest rates keep inflation down but discourage investment. Foreign investors come in for the quick returns, but they are not so stupid as to invest for the long term in a corrupt, indebted economy with shaky contract law and a long history of instability.
As a senior executive of a leading multinational firm put it to me, “I’m frustrated after three years [of working in Turkey] about the lack of progress on the necessary reforms—reforms that other countries are putting in place. This is not the kind of thing that inspires foreign managers here to run home to their head offices to argue for more investment. You’re more likely to caution your company to not get overextended in an environment where reforms are slow and the lack of transparency and efficiency in government poses threats to your existing businesses and investments.”
In recent years, foreign investment has been flowing in, but it can go right back out again, and quickly. It is already. The situation closely resembles earlier cycles of growth fueled by speculation, which have always been followed by a crash. Turkey’s budget is in the red. Its balance of payments is in the red. The position of its treasury is in the red. Its central bank is in the red. Its private sector is in the red. And this is just going on the official statistics. Debt is not inherently a bad thing, if your economy is creative and productive. But Turkey’s economy is not.
In countries with legitimately competitive economies, there is much to be said for denationalizing and selling off state assets: the private sector is almost always more efficient and productive than the state. But in a country where there is little genuine competition—where the honest, talented businessman has slender hope of providing a better product or service and thereby getting rich—privatization tends chiefly to reward the people who collect the bribes.
Turkey temporarily benefited from the IMF bailout package, from a massive infusion of aid from Europe, and from a strong global economy. But the AKP did not create an economy where hard work, innovation, efficiency, and productiveness are rewarded. That would be a real economic miracle. The AKP has thus far failed to achieve it.
***
The problems in Turkey go well beyond high-level corruption. Popular attitudes toward commerce and the law, generally, are another huge drag on the economy.
[...]
[I]n Turkey, contracts do not enjoy the same status that they do in America or Europe. The contract law, on the books, looks perfectly modern; indeed, it was copied from European contract law. But you cannot copy a mentality, and a contract is only valuable if it is viewed by all parties and the justice system as binding and enforceable.
Contract law is a basic prerequisite for a functioning free-market economy. If contracts are not viewed as binding, people will not rely on them. They will instead do business only with people they trust, such as family members and friends. The amount of time spent gaining trust, in such an economy, is time that is not spent on producing something that other people want to buy. The marketplace becomes profoundly inefficient.
Much like the economy, Turkish party politics suffer greatly from the disparity between the great-looking laws on the books and the collective willingness to abide by their spirit. Turkish political parties are structured, in principle, around district and provincial organizations. Party members elect the district delegates, the district president, the board members, the members of the inspection committee, and the members of the discipline committee. The district delegates go to the provincial convention, where they elect the provincial delegates, the provincial president, the provincial board members, members of the inspection committee, and members of the discipline committee. The provincial delegates go to the grand convention, where they pick the party leader, the general board members, members of the party inspection committee, and members of the party discipline committee.
So far, so good. All very democratic.
But there is a loophole in the system: Turkish party leaders have traditionally arrogated to themselves the power to fire everyone underneath them. Last year, the prime minister decided to dismiss half the MPs in his party. No one got to vote on this—not the members of parliament, and certainly not the people they claim to represent—nor did anyone object all that strenuously. If you kick up a fuss, you won’t get a cut of the action, and there’s a lot of action. Not many people, in a country that’s by no means wealthy, can resist the temptation to go along to get along.
Everyone knows the system is rotten, and no one trusts it. As a result, Turkish confidence in democracy is fragile. The only public institution most Turks really trust is the military.
You will read in the Western press, now and then, that this attitude is not such a bad thing: the Turkish military is like the U.S. Supreme Court, some Western pundits argue, part of a necessary system of checks and balances. It is true that military intervention in Turkey has at times been welcome in its immediate effects. (I, for one, am not mourning the fall of the Erbakan government.) But the U.S. Supreme Court has never hanged the American president. Supreme Court justices are appointed through transparent mechanisms by elected politicians. As Clarence Thomas will attest, you cannot become a Supreme Court justice without subjecting every aspect of your record to invasive scrutiny by Congress and the media. The Turkish military—like all militaries—is by nature secretive, authoritarian, and designed to solve problems with violence. That is their job. But it is immensely risky to repose ultimate political legitimacy in the institution that possesses a monopoly on force and is not elected or removable. The establishment of civilian control over the military is one of the supreme achievements of the Western liberal tradition. No country that counts on the military to save it from its elected politicians is on the fast track to the First World.
***
What about the press? Are they investigating these things? Raising public attention? Often, yes. The Turkish press is relatively free and feisty. I used to live in Laos, where there was truly no press freedom, and the situation in Turkey is not at all like that, although every newspaper here does have an editor charged with making sure the content of the paper violates no laws, and YouTube has been banned for months, supposedly because someone, somewhere, posted a video depicting Atatürk in a monkey suit.
The larger problem in Turkey—a problem that has grown worse, not better, under the AKP—is that too many media outlets are owned by friends of the government. This does not necessarily reflect a sinister Islamist plot; out-of-control cronyism is a perfectly serviceable explanation. A further problem is that many journalists here are wildly irresponsible. By “wildly irresponsible,” I don’t just mean that they slant a bit toward one party or the other; I mean that they peddle every stripe of insane, paranoid conspiracy theory and frequently provide incitement to murder.
Not long ago, I interviewed Sahin Filiz, a professor of Islamic history and philosophy. As we were talking, he mentioned, almost incidentally, that he was under 24-hour police protection. This was because the Islamist newspaper Memleket had effectively called for his murder, after accusing him of mocking his native city of Konya. (Filiz had merely argued that the Koran does not explicitly instruct women to cover their heads.)
Memleket is related to the Islamist newspaper Vakit, whose articles have been linked to several high-profile murders, including that of of Ali Güzelday, head of the Turkish Bar Association, who was killed on July 21, 1995; Ahmet Taner Kislali, the former minister of culture, who was killed on October 21, 1999; and Mustafa Yücel Özbilgin, a court deputy, who was killed on May 17, 2006. In one case, the murderer actually said, “I killed him because of what I read in Vakit.”
But it’s not just the Islamist papers. The nationalist press is equally reprehensible. An orgy of insane media vitriol preceded the murder of journalist Hrank Dink, an Armenian Turk who had called for Armenian-Turkish reconciliation. Dink had hinted (but never in fact said) that the word “genocide” might well describe the massacres of Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915. He was killed on January 19, 2007.
***
Underlying all of these institutional and cultural problems are profound deficiencies in the Turkish education system. Mehmet Y, an undergraduate in an Istanbul university, asked me not to use his name or say which university he attends. When I asked him why not, he said, “Article 301.” Article 301 is the infamous law that criminalizes “insulting Turkishness.” Dink was prosecuted under this law, and so was the Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk. The law was recently amended: now it is only criminal to “insult the Turkish nation.” This change was supposed to impress the European Union.
I asked Mehmet Y whether he had told me anything that could conceivably violate Article 301. “It doesn’t matter,” he replied. “If they want to prosecute you for something, they will. It’s the same with everything here, even the traffic laws. If a cop wants to pull you over and question you, they’ll find a reason. They can take you in and book you for three days for nothing.” He insisted it was the same way in the United States, and I could not persuade him otherwise. He had not heard of the First Amendment, and when I told him about it, he didn’t believe me.
The Turkish education system, to judge from what Mehmet Y said to me, does not give citizens the tools they need to understand what is going wrong in Turkey, imagine how it might be fixed, or evaluate what their politicians are telling them. This, Mehmet Y believes, is deliberate. The unrest in the 1970s that culminated in the 1980 military coup, he thinks, convinced the government that students posed a grave threat to state security. So the universities were emptied of anyone smart enough to cause trouble. “I figure out which professors were in the universities then, and I don’t take their classes, because they won’t know shit,” Mehmet Y said.
In his view, the national curriculum has been deliberately stripped of any content that might give students bad ideas. “You get discouraged from studying anything that might make you think about politics. All the emphasis is on mathematics, engineering. But it’s not even about the kind of mathematics that might lead you to think; it’s about memorizing multiplication tables. You don’t study anything that would lead you to being able to look critically at what’s going on here. You study no history except Turkish history, and that stops at Atatürk’s death. You never study European or American history. You learn nothing about the Second World War or the Cold War. You never study politics. You don’t even study literature, except for Turkish literature.”
This surprised me. “You don’t learn anything about modern history?”
“Nobody here knows shit about anything after 1923,” Mehmet Y said. “You know that in 1938, Atatürk died. There was nothing in between and nothing afterwards. You learn that there was a new constitution and the Fez was abolished. You study ‘national history’ and ‘national geography.’ National history is, ‘We conquered this, we conquered that, we conquered this, and then they backstabbed us; then we conquered something else, and then someone else backstabbed us.’ If we won a war, it was because we were so great; if we lost a war, it was always because someone backstabbed us. National geography is ‘learning about every lake in Turkey.’”
I checked, and this is pretty much the official curriculum. The Ministry of Education’s website reproduces Atatürk’s guidance: “Education must be free from all superstitions and foreign thoughts.” This statement, it should be noted, is severely uncharacteristic of Atatürk, who was otherwise greatly enamored of foreign thoughts.
Column inch upon column inch has been devoted to the AKP’s attempt to lift a 1997 law prohibiting the graduates of religious schools from continuing their education at secular universities. As with the headscarf controversy, this debate is trivial compared with the bigger issue: whether the schools are secular or religious, no one is getting educated in them. The AKP has done nothing to improve this situation, nor has any other party.
We should not be surprised, then, that so many Turks subscribe to insane conspiracy theories. Mehmet Y, for example, believes that the CHP is secretly collaborating with the AKP. Why? Because, he reasons, the leader of the CHP, Deniz Baykal, could not possibly be as stupid as he appears. “He’s over 70, he loses over and over and over—he has no solid ideas about anything.”
It is immensely sad to listen to Mehmet Y as he explains this, because part of his analysis is correct: it is suspicious that Baykal is still running that party, and he should be asking why this is. I asked Mehmet Y what motivation Baykal could possibly have to collaborate, secretly, with the AKP. “It must be the Israelis keeping him in power,” he said. “Israel and the Jews. They control the economic structure in Turkey. I mean, think about it: Alarko, Vakko, those are Jewish names.” (He is referring to two well-known Turkish companies.) “The Jews have a very strict, closed society. They control the stock market—they control how much it rises and falls. The Turkish economy is easily influenced. The U.S. loans money to us and then controls us economically.”
Mehmet Y is not a bad kid. Nor is he a stupid one—quite the contrary. But he is swimming in a sea of intellectual garbage. When governments and economies are rotten, the ambient culture tends to follow suit. In Turkey, as elsewhere, crooks and incompetents seeking to deflect attention from the consequences of their larceny find it very convenient to blame America and the Jews. Very few young Turks can read any language but Turkish. Only a miniscule portion have ever visited America or met a Jew in person. It is psychologically easier to believe these ludicrous stories than to confront the idea that the problem is closer to home.
[...]
***
The AKP has had some successes. Hyperinflation remains under control, for now. The currency has been stabilized. The banking sector is more transparent and better supervised. Certainly, there has been economic growth, even if it is impossible to say how much and doubtful that it is as much as the government claims. The ease of opening and operating a business has improved. The AKP has been trying strenuously to join the EU, and has implemented a number of important human rights reforms at the EU’s insistence.
It remains risible, however, to imagine that Turkey is institutionally prepared to enter a common market ruled by laws, lofty intellectual abstractions, and well-functioning bureaucracies. So long as Turkey’s institutions remain rotten, Turkey will be vulnerable to political Islam, anti-Western authoritarianism, and violent civil unrest of the kind seen in the 1970s.
It is critically important that Americans and Europeans grasp this. Turkey’s strategic and economic significance is massive. It has the second-largest army in NATO; it provides a crucial energy route to Europe; it is sitting on much of the water in the greater Middle East. For these reasons and more, the West is pinning its hopes on Turkish stability and prosperity: it is fondly imagining a Europe that extends to the southern Caucasus; pipelines overbrimming with oil and gas from the Caspian; and a friendly, Westernized Turkey that cooperates with plans to project democracy (or military force) into the Islamic world.
There is a good deal of wishful thinking and delusion in this vision. In part because the Turkish language is difficult, foreign observers tend to be unaware of a large body of work done by Turkish academics about the real state of the Turkish economy and its civil institutions. In part because Turkish politics are Byzantine—no surprise, that—few make much of an effort to understand them. In part out of desperate eagerness to see Turkey function as an example of a successful Muslim democracy, Westerners tend to ignore evidence to the contrary. In part because U.S. troops aren’t dying here, no one cares.
To quote The Economist magazine again: “A Turkey successfully integrated into the EU...would be a great achievement...setting an example for the Middle East beyond.” It would be evidence, former Italian Foreign Minister Gianfranco Fini has remarked, of the “compatibility of Islam with democracy.”
Well, yes, it would be. So would a stable, prosperous, peaceful, and democratic Iraq. The question is not whether it would be evidence of this, but whether it will be evidence of this. As in Iraq, wishful thinking will not make it so.
Claire Berlinski is a writer living in Istanbul. Her latest book is ‘There Is No Alternative’: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters (Basic Books, 2008).
A country of massive economic and strategic significance could be headed for disaster
The American. Friday, December 19, 2008
ISTANBUL—In the wake of the First World War, Turkish General Mustafa Kemal Atatürk drove the occupying Allied Forces from the rump of the defeated Ottoman Empire. The liberated territory, he announced, would form the new Turkish Republic. Its paramount value would be nationalism, anchored in an exceptionally stringent brand of secularism. Islam would henceforth be banned from the public sphere and subordinated entirely to the state’s authority.
Atatürk’s victory over the Entente powers was complete and irreversible, but if contemporary critics of Turkey’s governing Justice and Development Party (known by its Turkish acronym, AKP) are correct, his victory over the retrograde forces of religion is not. Recently, the AKP’s attempt to lift a 1989 prohibition on headscarves in Turkish universities prompted a constitutional crisis. In March, Turkey’s chief prosecutor initiated a legal case to ban the party outright for plotting the Islamist subversion of the Republic. The challenge to the headscarf ban formed the gravamen of his brief. Months of ferment and feverish rumors ensued as the Constitutional Court weighed the evidence. Prominent critics of the party were arrested in pre-dawn raids and charged with plotting a coup. In August, the judges came down narrowly—by one vote less than the required majority—against the party’s closure. Ten of the eleven judges agreed, however, that the AKP had become a “focal point of activities against secularism.” The Court rebuked the party sharply and curtailed its state funding.
The verdict resolved the immediate crisis, but the conflict between Turkey’s arch-secularists and the AKP has hardly been settled. Indeed, a casual reader of the Turkish press could be forgiven for concluding that headscarves are Turkey’s most urgent concern.
They are not. Turkey’s most urgent concerns are the weakness of its political and legal institutions and the corruption that permeates its economy. Absent institutional reform, it does not much matter which palace faction emerges ascendant in the short term or how many girls wear headscarves to school, for the long-term outcome is apt to be the same: Turkey will not become a theocracy, but it will likely suffer severe economic turmoil, preceded or followed by more political instability.
It would be a stretch to say that Turkey is on the verge of becoming the next Iran. The percentage of Turks who believe political parties should be based on religion has dropped during the AKP’s time in power from 41 percent to 25 percent. The number who wish to see their country ruled by Islamic law has declined from 21 percent to 9 percent. Poll after poll has indicated that under the AKP, the number of Turks who pray five times daily and fast during Ramadan has diminished. Popular support for a theocracy is largely absent.
Also largely absent, however, are a coherent constitution, an effective legal system, a trusted judiciary, enforceable contract law, a disinterested civil service, modern bookkeeping, accurate property records, a rational system for tax collection, a successful education system, honest cops, incorruptible politicians, transparent campaign financing, a responsible press, a deep popular commitment to democracy, and a widespread sense of civic responsibility. Amid the (mostly manufactured) hysteria over Turkey’s imaginary future as an Islamic Republic, attempts to rectify these problems have been crowded out.
Turkey’s institutions are weak for historical reasons. In 1922, the new Republican assembly of Turkey overthrew the House of Osman, assuming its authority. Atatürk purged the bureaucracy of its Ottoman elements and radically Westernized the education system. Even the Ottoman script was replaced with a Latin one, cutting off every Turk born thereafter from 600 years of Ottoman culture and signaling the alignment of the Republic with Europe, not the Muslim East. Islamic courts were abolished and replaced with a secular legal apparatus modeled word-for-word on the Swiss, German, and Italian civil and penal codes.
The development of these institutions in Europe, however, was accompanied by centuries of coterminous social and cultural evolution; and while the later Ottoman sultans engaged, often vigorously, in Westernization, Turkish institutional reform came haltingly, if at all. Atatürk’s reforms were by no means a commensurate process; if so, he would not have famously declared them to be “for the people, despite the people.” The Turkish state—hypertrophied under Atatürk’s étatist rule—has since tended to suppress the growth of the non-state institutions, such as a free press, that work in tandem with parliaments, bureaucracies, and legal systems to ensure their efficacy.
Turkey thus remains under the sway of Byzantine and Ottoman social, economic, and legal habits that poorly serve a modern nation-state. This historical background, more than the rise of political Islam, is the greatest barrier to Turkey’s integration into Europe and the global economy; and because it has ensured a perpetual cycle of rising expectations followed by political and economic crises, it is a major cause of the rise of political Islam in Turkey.
It should surprise no one to learn that Turkish politics are colored by oriental clientelism, Byzantine nepotism, and widespread corruption. But these problems are more severe than commonly assumed; their ramifications are more profound than commonly appreciated; and the situation is not getting better under the AKP—or, if it is getting better, it is not getting better fast enough.
The AKP came to power promising reform. It has stayed in power because it is perceived, in Turkey, to be delivering reform, and it has received tremendous support from Europe, the United States, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, foreign investors, and the foreign press for the same reason. If the AKP is not, in reality, getting very far—if the reports of substantial reform are wrong, predicated on faulty data, and derived from faulty analysis—then it is only a matter of time before Turkey experiences its next major financial meltdown, much like the one that brought the AKP to power in the first place. When this happens, the AKP will be voted out of power, if it has not already been ousted by the courts or the military.
It is therefore less essential than people assume to know whether, in the small hours of the night, the leaders of the AKP dream of neutering the army, ending democracy, and destroying Turkish secularism: this is said to be their long-term plan, not their medium-term strategy, and chances are that they won’t survive long enough for anyone to know. But it is essential to grasp that without the reform of Turkey’s institutions, nothing much better—for Turkey or the world—is likely to replace them.
***
We must appreciate just why the AKP was elected. Rigorous research on this subject has been done by Konda, a Turkish consulting group known for its unusually prophetic opinion polls. (Prior to the June 2007 elections, Konda predicted that the AKP would take 47 percent of the vote. They took exactly 47 percent of the vote.) As Konda’s founder, Tarhan Erdem, told me, the AKP is “perceived above all as the party that can best manage the economy. That they are the party of Islamic values is secondary.”
Konda surveyed the electorate in August 2007. It found that 70.4 percent of Turks ranked poverty as the nation’s most pressing problem. “Acts against secularism” and “acts against democracy” ranked well below “insufficiency of social security system.” The electorate believed the AKP to be the party most able to address the problem of poverty. A plurality of respondents said no party could solve the problem, but 34.9 percent believed the AKP could do it. Only 10.5 percent said this of the CHP, Turkey’s oldest party and the only real rival to the AKP. The CHP calls itself “center-left,” but the correct description is really “statist-nationalist,” and whatever you call it, it is moribund. In the past two general elections, the CHP has been thrashed.
Konda’s founder, who directed this research, is no fan of the AKP. Erdem joined the CHP in 1953 and served briefly as the party’s general secretary. He is also a columnist for the left-leaning newspaper Radikal and makes no secret of his belief that the AKP leadership dreams of destroying Turkish secularism. Nonetheless, he trusts what his polls tell him: that the people who voted for the AKP do not share this dream.
Overwhelmingly, the poorer the voter, the more likely he or she was to vote AKP. When asked which issues were most important to them in casting their votes, 78.3 of respondents chose “economic situation and expectations.” “One can easily see,” concludes Konda’s analysis of these data, that “these elections progressed, not on the secular-anti-secular axis as generally claimed, but rather on an axis of aggravation.”
The leaders of the AKP are pious Anatolian businessmen who look and sound like ordinary rural Turks. They visit the poorer regions of Turkey and speak earnestly and respectfully to people for whom the CHP leadership can barely disguise its contempt. Given Turkey’s massive income inequality—87 percent of the population earn less than the average income—it is not surprising that the CHP, a party correctly associated with the wealthy urban elite, is in deep electoral trouble.
This is not to say that religion and the AKP have nothing to do with each other. From the 1950s through the 1980s, Turkey experienced slow but steady economic growth. In the 1990s, the economy stalled and then shrank. “During this period,” Erdem said, “people were forced to lean on each other. They met in cafes and mosques, and the things that helped them to stick together were, basically, Islamic qualities and principles…. During this time there was a search for new political values. During the preceding 30-year span, they had tried every single party and realized none of them were any good, so they were looking for another avenue.” The AKP was that avenue.
Last year, the AKP was returned to power with an increased share of the vote. Again, the reasons for this were chiefly economic: the party was perceived to have delivered the goods. Foreign observers have been rhapsodic about the AKP’s economic record. The Economist magazine expressed the consensus view: “They are more successful than any secular predecessor.” The words repeatedly invoked are “shrewd,” “sound,” “disciplined,” and “miracle.” This economic miracle is generally taken as axiomatic, even as domestic and foreign observers remain deeply divided about the party’s commitment to secularism and democracy, tending to argue either that Turkish secularism is, as the AKP claims, so strict that the rights of pious Turks are routinely violated, or so fragile, as its opponents claim, that the rights of impious Turks are in immediate jeopardy.
Both perspectives are easily understood. The 1982 Turkish constitution defines “secularism” in a particularly severe manner. The preamble, for example, states that there “shall be no interference whatsoever by sacred religious feelings in state affairs and politics.” In other words, no politician here may proclaim his faith in the manner that every mainstream American politician does, and must, to be elected. The constitution was clearly intended to function as an iron barrier against the encroachment of political Islam, but it has resulted, in practice, in the denial of education to roughly three-quarters of Turkish women. This cannot be reckoned a workable, durable separation between religion and the state. Further undermining the constitution’s utility is the issue of its legitimacy: it was ratified by referendum during a period of military rule; no public debate about its terms was permitted.
But if the AKP has a fair case against the Turkish constitution, the constitution’s defenders have a fair case against the AKP. The blood associated with political Islam—from Algeria through Iran to Afghanistan—is hardly calculated to reassure. Neither is the company the AKP used to keep: Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s political mentor was former Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan, who came to power promising to “rescue Turkey from the unbelievers of Europe,” wrest power from “imperialists and Zionists,” and launch a jihad to recapture Jerusalem. Weeks after taking office, Erbakan departed on a rapturous friendship tour of Iran. He was soon ousted by the Turkish military. The AKP’s critics have not forgotten this, nor should they.
Nonetheless, much of the handwringing about the AKP’s crypto-Islamism is political theater. The reality is that if the Turkish economy tanks, the AKP will lose popular support. Indeed, when the court case against the AKP spooked the markets, polls immediately showed a substantial drop in the party’s approval ratings. When the markets rallied in response to the court’s conciliatory verdict, the AKP’s ratings went right back up. Turkey is now beginning to feel the effects of the global financial crisis: the lira has plummeted; exports have fallen off; unemployment is soaring. Polls show that support for the AKP is sharply attenuated. This party cannot stay in power without the support of the electorate. The military is in the hands of the AKP’s enemies. No one doubts that if the AKP were to announce tomorrow that it no longer saw the need for elections, the military would immediately hang its leaders.
The most important question to ask, then, is not whether the AKP is committed to secularism and democracy—the military is devoutly committed to the former and more or less in favor of the latter—but whether it has really delivered the economic goods, and if not, what that means for Turkey.
***
According to the standard narrative about the AKP’s economic record, the nationalist-secularist establishment opposed foreign investment in Turkey, which it viewed as a form of imperialism. The elites were well served by the state-run economy and the patronage system to which it gave rise, even if the rest of the country was not. The AKP represents a free-market revolt: small businessmen from Anatolia had been cut out of the spoils system; they took power, deregulated, privatized, removed barriers to foreign investment, and reduced the state sector over the anguished screams of the secularist bureaucracy that had long controlled and profited from it. Lo, an economic miracle occurred.
Here are some commonly reported statistics: when the AKP took power, foreign direct investment (FDI) in Turkey was $1 billion; in 2007, FDI stood at $19.8 billion, an amount equal to the past 20 years combined. Under the AKP, Turkey’s average economic growth rate has been over 7 percent, compared with an average of 2.6 percent during the previous decade. Per capita income rose in their first term (2002-2007) from $2,598 to $5,477. In the 1990s, inflation reached highs of 100 percent; under the AKP it has been reduced to an average of 10 percent. Foreign debt has declined from nearly 80 percent of GDP in 2001 to less than half of GDP today. The budget deficit has dropped from 16 percent of GNP to 1 percent. Public sector debt has been reduced from 91 percent of GNP to 51 percent.
Looks good, doesn’t it? I thought so, too. Previously, I have accepted these statistics at face value and applauded the AKP’s economic record. But having looked more closely at the question, I am now recanting. These statistics might be right, but they might also be nonsense. The truth is, nobody knows.
I say this because Turkey has one of the largest underground economies in the world. By definition, data about the size of the underground economy do not exist. But economists in Turkey estimate it to be worth somewhere between one-third and two-thirds of Turkish GDP. Every major economic sector in Turkey—agriculture, construction, markets, textiles, tourism, shipping—is largely underground, off-the-record, and undeclared. No one knows how big these sectors really are. No one knows if they are growing or shrinking. No one knows how they are being financed. No one knows where the profits are going. Of the 23 million people working in Turkey, only 10 million are working on the record. The economic growth rates commonly cited in the press cannot be meaningful. They cannot even be approximate. They probably pertain to less than half of the Turkish economy.
Osman Altug, an economist at Marmara University who specializes in the study of Turkey’s underground economy, told me that he can think of only one country in modern history with an underground economy so large by comparison with the official one: Argentina under Carlos Mendez. “Not even Africa is this bad,” Altug said. Other economists may not go so far, but most agree that as underground economies go, Turkey is top-tier.
Altug has been campaigning since the 1970s to establish a system for collecting income tax modeled on America’s Internal Revenue Service. He has been an adviser to all of the major political parties. He told me that he has pleaded with all of them to make the institution of such a system a priority. So far, he has had no success. “We know from questionnaires,” he said, “and this is the only way we can get data, that only 3.5 million people in Turkey pay income tax. The other 60 million? Nothing. Only 7.5 percent of the Turkish budget comes from income tax.”
Without income taxes, you have no tax returns, and thus no data about who is earning what, or how. “The statistics used by foreign observers when they talk about the AKP are totally distorted by this situation,” said Altug. “They’re based on the overground economy. They bear no relationship to reality.” (It is important to note that none of Altug’s research has been translated into English. He has done some of the key work on the Turkish economy, and very few Westerners can read it.)
No recent Turkish government has made much effort to change this situation. A progressive income tax system would obviously be more sensible than regressive indirect taxation, but the parties do not want to inflame their benefactors, and they do not want to appear to be levying taxes. Instead, they borrow and borrow and raise indirect taxes, penalizing the poor far more than the rich. When the price of oil goes up, they blame U.S. policy in Iraq, even though two-thirds of the price of a liter of gasoline goes into government coffers. “They borrow money from the U.S. to stay in power, then blame them for Turkey’s financial problems,” said Altug.
For the same reasons, the AKP has been funding many of its popular subsidy and development projects with borrowed money, rather than with tax revenues. In particular, it has been raising a great deal of money through the issuance of bearer bonds—instruments that are, in effect, signed “To whom it may concern.” This means that the government does not know whom it is borrowing from, or if it does, there is no record of it. “Whoever has money,” said Altug, “they take it.” A number of the AKP’s critics have charged that the party is financing its activities with “green money”—money funneled through Islamist banks and holding companies, particularly those sponsored by the Saudis—but Altug suspects that this green money is, in fact, recycled Turkish money. “You make the money here, underground, you kick it out of the country to launder it, then bring it back.” Sounds plausible, but who knows? There is no way to track this.
The challenge of analyzing the Turkish economy is compounded by the almost complete absence of bookkeeping. Only 260,000 firms in Turkey hold balance sheets; what the rest of them are doing is unknown. The property deed system is similarly opaque. An acquaintance of mine—an American who works in commercial real estate—rolled his eyes when describing the pointlessness of looking for a deed at Tapu Dairesi, the property records bureau. If you’re lucky enough to find it at all, he said, you have no guarantee that it bears any relationship to reality.
It is not even clear what the population of Turkey really is. Last April, the head of the Election Commission noted in passing that 5 million voters seemed to be, curiously enough, missing. This week, 6 million of them were reported to have been found. Interestingly, they were found just ahead of upcoming local elections, and discovered in particularly large numbers in districts where the AKP could use a bit of extra support.
You might think it would still be possible to measure the inflation rate accurately. You go out to the stores and see if prices are rising, right? Not quite. The Consumer Price Index (CPI), according to the Turkish National Bureau of Statistics, is based on, among other things, rental prices. No one is telling the government the truth about those: landlords here tend to keep two rental contracts, one for the tenant, one for the tax authorities. I calculate the CPI every time I go shopping here in Istanbul. I buy roughly the same basket of commodities every week. According to my calculations (based on the cost of toothpaste, soap, milk, eggs, bread, kitty litter, and trash bags at the Cam mini-market on Susam Sokak, a block or so up from the big white mosque), inflation in Turkey is rising faster than the government claims. My CPI isn’t very meticulous, but neither is the government’s.
The paucity of meaningful statistics means that we have no idea whether there has been an economic miracle here, and neither does the AKP. On March 1, 2008, the government claimed that per capita GDP was $5,480. On March 15, it claimed it was $7,500. On March 27, it claimed it was $9,000. A bit of hand-waving accompanied the revision of these statistics: the new figures, supposedly, were based on a fancy formula for calculating the size of the underground economy. Given that economists’ estimates of the size of various sectors of the underground economy diverge by as much as 60 percent, it is amazing that anyone took these numbers seriously.
“Didn’t anyone notice this?” I asked Altug.
He raised an eyebrow. “Everybody knows, but nobody knows.”
***
The opacity of the economic system perverts the political system profoundly. “Whoever controls the money, controls politics,” said Altug, “but no one knows who controls the money. It’s all off the record. So the underground economy says, ‘I’m the boss. I decide.’”
Party finance laws? There are some on the books, but they are vague to begin with and anyway ignored. “Campaign financing is a total mystery. All the parties are exactly the same this way. In this sense, there is no true multiparty system. Turkey’s like a chocolate factory where the wrappers come in different colors—blue, red, green—but the chocolate is the same, because the people who finance the system stay the same.”
Each party, Altug believes, is financed by about 40 people. “They vary from party to party, but they’re the ones with all the power.” The financiers choose candidates they can control. “You want your party candidates to be uneducated and easily manipulated,” he said, “not educated and competent.” This system gives rise to staggering levels of corruption. “If there were a corruption Olympics,” said Altug, “Turkey would get the gold medal.”
Altug reckons that 94 percent of all construction in Istanbul is illegal. I’m not sure how he arrived at this estimate—it is probably too high; others to whom I’ve spoken believe the figure is closer to 60 percent—but 60 percent is still extraordinarily high. There is a lot of construction going on in my neighborhood, but it takes place only at night. Istanbul lies on a massive fault zone. Everyone knows this construction is shoddy; everyone knows what will happen when the big earthquake comes. “If the construction companies are fined, they just pay the penalties and keep on building,” said Altug. “It’s not enough to stop them. The government doesn’t really clamp down because they need those companies to support them financially.”
Is there any difference between the AKP and the other parties, I asked Altug?
“No difference at all. Absolutely no difference. Red money, green money, headscarves—that’s all a distraction until the economy is on the record. Otherwise you’re just doing business with Al Capone.”
***
Mustafa X is in one of the following industries (he does not want me to say which one or use his real name): construction, waste management, water management, garbage collection. He has been working since the 1980s with municipal governments throughout Turkey. A period of massive corruption, he told me, began under Turgut Özal, who came to power after the 1980 coup. Özal famously declared that his bureaucrats “knew how to take care of business.” The comment was widely understood to mean, “My bureaucrats don’t get paid enough, but they sure know how to make up for it.”
This was roughly when Mustafa X went into business. “I was very clearly aware of the change. Prior to this, Turkish governments tended to be ideological; from here on in, it was all business. Before, if you got caught with a suitcase of dollars on you, you went to jail. But our society wasn’t ready for freedom. It got corrupt.”
Has there been any improvement in this situation under the AKP, I asked? He shook his head emphatically. No. “There used to be checks and balances on the amount of corruption possible. But now that the municipal and national governments are in the hands of the same party, it’s out of control. It can’t get worse.”
The AKP had initially been better than its predecessors, he said: “When they came to power, they were new. The truly religious elements of the party were afraid of God, so they stayed clean. But when the party gained power, the opportunists flocked to it. If you’re in the ruling party, no one will have the courage to challenge you about this.”
Mustafa X acknowledged that at first the AKP had taken action against corrupt business alliances. “When the AKP came to power,” he said, “they caught and imprisoned a handful of toughs who were alleged to have ties to the Deep State.” (It is widely believed here that a shadowy coalition called the Deep State runs the country. It is supposedly comprised of high-level figures in the military, the intelligence services, the judiciary, and organized crime. There is some evidence that it really exists.) “But each party inevitably creates its own rich men,” Mustafa X said, “and now they give the tenders to Albayrak.”
The Albayrak Group, a massive holding company, is involved in construction, garbage collection, road construction, and public buildings. The son of CEO Mustafa Albayrak, Berat Albayrak, is married to Prime Minister Erdogan’s daughter. The media broadcast their marriage, live. “When Erdogan was mayor [of Istanbul], he made [Mustafa] Albayrak into a rich man,” Mustafa X said. “Now the party is linked to his media conglomerate, which owns [newspaper] Yeni Safak and [television channel] Kanal 7 .... Of course, there were conglomerates like this in the ’90s, too. Demirel had Çörtük, for example.” (Süleyman Demirel served seven times as prime minister; Kamuran Çörtük is chairman of the Bayindir group, another powerful Turkish conglomerate.) “But this level of consolidation is new.”
The AKP’s failure to transform Turkey’s culture of corruption and cronyism is massively significant. The AK Party’s name is a pun: the word ak means white—in other words, “clean.” The AKP leaders promised to stamp out corruption, and because they said they were God-fearing, people believed they might really mean it. According to Konda’s surveys, corruption is the electorate’s second-biggest concern after the economy, and the concerns are related, because a profoundly corrupt economy is an inherently uncompetitive one. Erdogan came to power promising to end the kind of cronyism that the Demirel-Çörtük alliance represented. That was the ostensible raison d’être of the AKP.
But if four legs are good, two legs are better. Last year, the Çalik Grup, another AKP yandas (the Turkish language is rich with synonyms for “crony”), purchased the ATV channel and Sabah newspaper. Erdogan’s son-in-law is Çalik’s top manager. Berat Albayrak’s brother, Serhat Albayrak, is the top manager of Çalik’s media subsidiary, Turkuvaz. The transaction was financed by the state banks Halkbank and Vakifbank.
How corrupt, I asked Mustafa X, is the AKP compared to the other parties? “The AKP isn’t the most corrupt,” he said. “The most corrupt was the DYP.” (Demirel founded the right-leaning DYP, or True Path Party, in 1983. There have been four DYP governments, one led by Demirel, the other three led by Turkey’s first woman prime minister, Tansu Çiller.) “Under their governance, during the Tansu Çiller years, control by the Deep State reached an apex. The next most corrupt is Anavatan.” Anavatan is the party founded by Turgut Özal.
The AKP’s corruption, which Mustafa X considered average by Turkish standards, does, however, come in a slightly different flavor. The other parties, for example, like flat-out bribes. “I was doing a deal in a town of about 60,000 people recently,” Mustafa X said. “The deputy mayor said to me, ‘My TV has bad reception.’ He named the brand he wanted, the size of the screen. A $2,000 TV. We got it for him, we got the contract. That’s how it normally goes.”
He sketched it out for me on a napkin. When you do business with the CHP, you generally have to pay off the following people: 10 percent to the mayor, 10 percent to the deputy mayor, 10 percent to the opener (who announces the tender), 5 percent to the controller, and possibly you need to sweeten the account manager, too. “Now,” Mustafa X said, “if you do business with AKP municipalities, the top people—the mayor and deputy mayor—will stay clean. They’re afraid of God. But if they can’t stack the government with their own people, they’ll use CHP and Anavatan deputies. They take the usual cut, and the mayor knows it, but he can’t replace them, so he tolerates it.”
If the AKP mayors and deputies don’t take bribes quite so brazenly, this doesn’t mean they’re not on the take. “Instead of asking for a television, they say, ‘I’ll give you the tender, but you need to sponsor the girls’ volleyball team.’ Their mentality is different. Their goal is less about personal enrichment, more about power: they want to gain support for the people who support them. So they get you to buy things for—or from—their supporters.”
In other words, the biggest problem with the AKP is not that it is so different from the other Turkish political parties, but that it is so similar to them: short-sighted, self-aggrandizing, autocratic, and crooked. The corrupt practices Mustafa X describes, which take place at every level of government, ensure massive waste, shoddy public services, and a business climate that is severely hostile to competition, innovation, and sustainable economic growth. Obviously, it isn’t possible to say what percentage of the economy is touched by this kind of corruption, but clearly we are talking about a significant percentage.
Recently, Mustafa X claimed, a $4 billion construction budget was handed out without a public announcement. “Four billion?” I said to him. “I can’t believe that. How is that possible? How many people knew about this?”
“Everybody knew,” he said. “But nobody knows.” His expression suggested that he found my question amusingly naive.
“The majority of tenders are just given away like that,” he added, “to relatives, friends, or a firm that supports them politically.”
I do not know if that particular story is true, but I am persuaded—based on the sheer number of stories like this I hear, from credible, first-hand witnesses with no reason to lie to me—that the story is plausible. Every sector connected to the state is affected by this kind of corruption, and the state sector in Turkey remains enormous, despite the AKP’s commitment to denationalization. Stories such as the one related by Mustafa X raise obvious questions about that commitment to denationalization. To whom has the government been selling state assets, and why? Last week, it was reported in the Turkish press that the government has devised an insanely complicated scheme to sell its own offices, including the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Defense, to private financial institutions. The government will henceforth be a rent-paying tenant in its own buildings. The rent, obviously, will be paid from the public purse. The financial institutions will then use these assets to back the sale of loan instruments to foreign investors. After a fixed time, the government will buy back the buildings, returning to the happy financial institutions all of their initial capital outlay. Unsurprisingly, many Turks find themselves wondering just who is going to profit from deals like these. It is quite hard to see the logic in this plan unless one imagines that quite a few cash-stuffed suitcases are involved.
Although anecdotes like the ones Mustafa X told me are ubiquitous in Turkey, they are still anecdotes. They are consistent, however, with wider research: a 2006 Transparency International survey of bribery among the top 30 exporting countries ranked Turkey among the worst offenders. “It’s very frightening,” Marie Wolkers, the senior research coordinator at Transparency, remarked to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, “and it is actually very consistent with the monitoring of Turkey by the OECD convention process, which produced a report on Turkey which is quite alarming, I mean it is very bad.”
The AKP prefers to give tenders to its own people. “You can do business up to a certain point with the AKP, after which you have to be one of them or have one as an intermediary,” Mustafa X said. “This isn’t true of the CHP, although it is true of the MHP. You have to be a nationalist to do business with them.” The extreme-nationalist MHP took 14.3 percent of the vote in the 2007 elections. Militias attached to this party shed a great deal of blood in the 1970s; now the MHP, like the AKP, claims to have embraced moderation.
Mustafa X appears to be successful, although he is not a member of the AKP. How did he get by in this climate, I asked? He shrugged. “I can do business with them,” he said, “because they know I’ll keep a secret.”
***
Ogün Altiparmak was born on the day Atatürk died, hence his name, o gün, which means “that day.” In his youth, he was a Turkish football hero; a street is named after him in Kadiköy, a neighborhood on the Asian side of Istanbul. In the 1980s, he was a founding member of Turgut Özal’s Anavatan Party. He has had a business career, a sports career, and a political career in Turkey. “Everything Professor Altug told you is true,” he said.
Altiparmak agreed with Mustafa X: the corruption in Turkey became substantially worse during the Anavatan years. “After Özal made the ‘my bureaucrats know how to do business’ comment, every last bureaucrat became a thief.”
“If you work honestly in Turkey you have no chance of getting rich,” he continued. “You can’t compete in a system like this.” Honesty also prevents one from becoming a politician. “Of 550 MPs, 400 come from the bureaucracy. You need 250,000 dollars to become an MP in Turkey. An average businessman can’t afford this. Even the highest-paid bureaucrats make only 8,000 lira a month. So where is this money coming from?
“Here’s how the bribery works,” Altiparmak said. “First, the whole system of property deeds is rotten. They find little old ladies who own property, haven’t given anyone power of attorney, don’t have any heirs; they transfer the deeds into their names, sell the property out from under them, then they bump them off.”
I wasn’t sure I had heard that right. “They do what? Like in ‘The Sopranos’?”
“Did that happen in ‘The Sopranos’?”
“Yeah, you know, with Paulie’s mother?”
“That’s probably where they got the idea.”
It later occurred to me that even the Sopranos hadn’t bumped the old women off. I don’t know if this story is true—although I have heard the same rumor elsewhere and read it in the Turkish press—but it is telling that a founding member of a major Turkish political party finds it perfectly credible. It suggests the extraordinary distrust that permeates the political system.
“There’s a property deed office,” Altiparmak said, “Tapu Dairesi, in each district. Each one takes in about 50,000 lira a day in bribes. The bribe you have to pay just to get a legal transaction completed in a timely fashion is 100 lira. If you multiply that by 500, you get 50,000. If you don’t pay it, you’ll wait weeks to get the documents you need to buy a home. If you need something illegal done, the price rockets in proportion to the illegality and how much work it will take to make it look legal. There are 1,000 Tapu offices in Turkey. Multiply 50,000 lira times 1,000 times 300 work days per year…. That’s just Tapu. The customs officials skim off $2.2 billion per year. What Professor Altug says is all true. I’m 70 years old. I’ve been in business, I’ve been in politics, I’ve been in sports—it’s all true.”
When Altiparmak helped to found Anavatan in 1983, he was responsible for bringing together the Kadiköy establishment. Kadiköy is a leftist stronghold; but because Altiparmak was a football hero, he was able to bring together people of all political orientations, people to whom everyone in Turkey could relate. “I agreed to do it because Anavatan was nationalist and conservative, but also in favor of free enterprise and social justice.”
When Anavatan took power, “one of the first items on the agenda was to build a municipal building. This guy came in and made an excellent bid, but they picked someone else. Why? Because the daughter of the prime minister was in partnership with the company. At Kalamis, in Kadiköy, they wanted to build a marina. Again, people close to the PM took the tender.”
These stories multiplied. “When I was doing business in the U.S. in the ’70s, I noticed, in Illinois, that every farmer had a silo,” said Altiparmak. “It occurred to me that if Turkey had quality storage like this, farmers could increase their profits by 15 percent.” After Anavatan won, Altiparmak contacted a U.S. company that made storage bins. “I told the company, ‘Come up with the highest quality product at the lowest price, and I promise you, you’ll get the tender. I’m one of the founders of the party, I can guarantee this.’ They made the best bid, a little less than $28 million dollars, and guaranteed this bid would have no surcharges. But they gave the contract to someone who wanted $34.5 million. They stuck on another $3 million in surcharges. The deal was financed with a loan from the World Bank. The project in the end cost about $54 million.” Altiparmak went to Özal and provided him with evidence of the corruption. “It turned out that Özal’s nephew—the minister of agriculture—had been in on this all along. Özal did nothing. He turned a blind eye.
“SoI started a war against them. The party entered a civil war. Özal held delegate elections, but then he had a heart attack. His wife was running the country behind the scenes. Özal’s right-hand man cancelled the elections.” When Altiparmak asked why, he was told that “Communists had invaded the party.”
“I have 115 employees,” said Altiparmak, bewildered. “How can I be a Communist?”
Demoralized, Altiparmak resigned. “From then on,” he said, “everyone started robbing the country blind.”
I have visited Altiparmak’s home. It is very modest. He is not a wealthy man.
Had there been any improvement under the AKP, I asked?
“The AKP is the same as everyone else,” Altiparmak said. “There are honest people among them, but they’re few and far between. It’s a little different, because they take smaller bribes—maybe 10 percent, as opposed to 50 percent—but don’t forget that the tenders are a lot bigger, too.”
Altiparmak believes that government officials created foundations to channel these bribes. “Like Yeditepe University. The former mayor of Istanbul is the president of that university, and all the departments of the university that do trade are run by his kids. All the contracts get kicked back to that family, and if you say anything about it, they say, ‘What are you talking about? This is a government foundation.’ This is true of Bilkent University and Kadir Has University, too. Tasyapi is in a secret partnership with Erdogan’s brother. The company controls $5 billion dollars worth of projects. In Izmir, in a CHP-controlled municipality, they put some land up for sale. One of my friends participated in the tender. To bid, you had to put up a financial guarantee. After taking everyone’s guarantee, they cancelled the tender and kept the guarantees. They did this five, six times. From Anatolia to Istanbul, you cannot build without a bribe. The former mayor of Besiktas owns a five-star hotel in Antalya. You can’t afford that on a mayor’s salary. Look at the assets of the heads of the labor unions. Your eyes will pop out. They’re feudal lords. Ankara has the highest per-capita wealth in the country, but why? There’s no industry or business there. But people there own more cars than in Istanbul. All the million-dollar villas in Ankara are owned by bureaucrats.”
I am reporting only about a quarter of what Altiparmak told me, and even if it’s only a quarter true—and I suspect a good amount of it is true, because many other Turks have told me stories like these—it still represents a massive amount of corruption. “You could put everyone in jail because of it,” Altiparmak said.
And the AKP? “If they’re so afraid of God,” Altiparmak asked, “why aren’t they paying taxes? Cheating like this isn’t in the interests of God, social justice, capitalism, ethics.”
Kuvayi Milliye, an ultra-right-wing organization named after a militia assembled by Atatürk, claims that $250 billion in siphoned money, laundered in the underground economy, is sitting in Swiss banks and offshore accounts. The group is determined to find it, bring it back, and use it to pay off the national debt. The whole Turkish budget is about $150 billion. In the wake of the 2001 financial meltdown, the International Monetary Fund arranged a $39.5 billion rescue package for Turkey. If Kuvayi Milliye is correct, that bailout represents only a fraction of the stolen money now sitting in those Swiss banks.
Members of Kuvayi Milliye are now in police custody, charged with plotting against the government. Perhaps they were. Turkey has a long history of plots and coups; indeed, there have been four military interventions in as many decades. But perhaps the Kuvayi Milliye members were telling the truth, which would also explain why they’re now sitting in jail cells. There is no way for me to know, obviously. But it is a measure of the pervasive atmosphere of distrust in Turkey that it is both plausible to imagine they are making this up—to legitimize efforts to overthrow a democratically-elected government—and equally plausible to imagine they have been arrested for attempting to expose widespread government corruption.
There is something particularly tragic about these stories, because ordinary Turks are honest. Countless times I have tried to tip a cab driver or a delivery person for good service. They have misunderstood, thinking I have accidentally overpaid, and they have tracked me down—even long after I have left the cab or long after they have left my apartment—to return my change.
***
Although many note the explosion of corruption during the Özal years, the mentality that led to this state of affairs can be traced back to the Ottoman Empire. Bribery was not, of course, a uniquely Ottoman tradition, and in fact the early Ottoman sultans were known for their intolerance of corruption. But the later ones were not. This is chronicled by Ottoman historian Halil Inalcik in An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire:
In his Relazione dated 1596, Venetian Bailo Malipiero concurs with the Ottoman memorialists that high offices were obtained only through huge sums of bribe money—for the grand vizierate 80,000, for the finance ministry 40-50,000 gold pieces. Once in office they redeemed these bribes by taking bribes for other major appointments so that all officials were involved in bribery. This practice became so routine that Evliya candidly gives two amounts for the income of a judge, one with the bribe and the second without. At the bottom of the system those officials in direct contact with the taxpayers used all kinds of devices to extort extra money in the name of a service fee or gilt.... As was the case with monarchies in the West, bribery and the sale of offices became part of public administration and a source of public revenue. In the Ottoman Empire, the sale of offices became a widespread practice in the seventeenth century and were given to those who bid the highest amount.... Those who had authority, including a ruler or his delegate, regarded the office as a source of material gain and therefore negotiable for compensation….
As the author of this passage observes, this was also the case in the monarchies of the West. But as Mustafa X remarked, “There was no Enlightenment in the Ottoman Empire. Modern thinking never entered into the equation.”
The Ottoman legacy is not a complete explanation for present-day corruption in Turkey. Corruption is endemic in the developing world—the Ottomans are hardly to blame for that—and corruption is not precisely unknown in the developed world, as any citizen of Illinois may attest. But the Ottoman legacy goes some way toward explaining the intractability of the problem in Turkey. It will not be easy to solve, particularly given the weakness of the institutions that might hold it in check.
It would be too optimistic to expect things to chug along in the corrupt but functional way they have for the past six years. The Turkish economy collapses—that’s what it does. It did so repeatedly before the AKP came to power. And since it has not been reformed root and branch, there is no reason to expect the pattern to change. The AKP’s fundamentalism may be difficult to discern, but an economic debacle might well give rise to a less ambiguous Islamist movement in Turkey. Radicalism, of all stripes, is often bred out of chaos.
From the 1980s to 1999, Turkey set low real interest rates and high exchange rates. Imports were expensive and exports were cheap. Since 1999, the opposite policy has been in place: the AKP has set low foreign exchange rates and high interest rates. Cheap foreign exchange has been the source of growth in an otherwise contractionary economy. High interest rates keep inflation down but discourage investment. Foreign investors come in for the quick returns, but they are not so stupid as to invest for the long term in a corrupt, indebted economy with shaky contract law and a long history of instability.
As a senior executive of a leading multinational firm put it to me, “I’m frustrated after three years [of working in Turkey] about the lack of progress on the necessary reforms—reforms that other countries are putting in place. This is not the kind of thing that inspires foreign managers here to run home to their head offices to argue for more investment. You’re more likely to caution your company to not get overextended in an environment where reforms are slow and the lack of transparency and efficiency in government poses threats to your existing businesses and investments.”
In recent years, foreign investment has been flowing in, but it can go right back out again, and quickly. It is already. The situation closely resembles earlier cycles of growth fueled by speculation, which have always been followed by a crash. Turkey’s budget is in the red. Its balance of payments is in the red. The position of its treasury is in the red. Its central bank is in the red. Its private sector is in the red. And this is just going on the official statistics. Debt is not inherently a bad thing, if your economy is creative and productive. But Turkey’s economy is not.
In countries with legitimately competitive economies, there is much to be said for denationalizing and selling off state assets: the private sector is almost always more efficient and productive than the state. But in a country where there is little genuine competition—where the honest, talented businessman has slender hope of providing a better product or service and thereby getting rich—privatization tends chiefly to reward the people who collect the bribes.
Turkey temporarily benefited from the IMF bailout package, from a massive infusion of aid from Europe, and from a strong global economy. But the AKP did not create an economy where hard work, innovation, efficiency, and productiveness are rewarded. That would be a real economic miracle. The AKP has thus far failed to achieve it.
***
The problems in Turkey go well beyond high-level corruption. Popular attitudes toward commerce and the law, generally, are another huge drag on the economy.
[...]
[I]n Turkey, contracts do not enjoy the same status that they do in America or Europe. The contract law, on the books, looks perfectly modern; indeed, it was copied from European contract law. But you cannot copy a mentality, and a contract is only valuable if it is viewed by all parties and the justice system as binding and enforceable.
Contract law is a basic prerequisite for a functioning free-market economy. If contracts are not viewed as binding, people will not rely on them. They will instead do business only with people they trust, such as family members and friends. The amount of time spent gaining trust, in such an economy, is time that is not spent on producing something that other people want to buy. The marketplace becomes profoundly inefficient.
Much like the economy, Turkish party politics suffer greatly from the disparity between the great-looking laws on the books and the collective willingness to abide by their spirit. Turkish political parties are structured, in principle, around district and provincial organizations. Party members elect the district delegates, the district president, the board members, the members of the inspection committee, and the members of the discipline committee. The district delegates go to the provincial convention, where they elect the provincial delegates, the provincial president, the provincial board members, members of the inspection committee, and members of the discipline committee. The provincial delegates go to the grand convention, where they pick the party leader, the general board members, members of the party inspection committee, and members of the party discipline committee.
So far, so good. All very democratic.
But there is a loophole in the system: Turkish party leaders have traditionally arrogated to themselves the power to fire everyone underneath them. Last year, the prime minister decided to dismiss half the MPs in his party. No one got to vote on this—not the members of parliament, and certainly not the people they claim to represent—nor did anyone object all that strenuously. If you kick up a fuss, you won’t get a cut of the action, and there’s a lot of action. Not many people, in a country that’s by no means wealthy, can resist the temptation to go along to get along.
Everyone knows the system is rotten, and no one trusts it. As a result, Turkish confidence in democracy is fragile. The only public institution most Turks really trust is the military.
You will read in the Western press, now and then, that this attitude is not such a bad thing: the Turkish military is like the U.S. Supreme Court, some Western pundits argue, part of a necessary system of checks and balances. It is true that military intervention in Turkey has at times been welcome in its immediate effects. (I, for one, am not mourning the fall of the Erbakan government.) But the U.S. Supreme Court has never hanged the American president. Supreme Court justices are appointed through transparent mechanisms by elected politicians. As Clarence Thomas will attest, you cannot become a Supreme Court justice without subjecting every aspect of your record to invasive scrutiny by Congress and the media. The Turkish military—like all militaries—is by nature secretive, authoritarian, and designed to solve problems with violence. That is their job. But it is immensely risky to repose ultimate political legitimacy in the institution that possesses a monopoly on force and is not elected or removable. The establishment of civilian control over the military is one of the supreme achievements of the Western liberal tradition. No country that counts on the military to save it from its elected politicians is on the fast track to the First World.
***
What about the press? Are they investigating these things? Raising public attention? Often, yes. The Turkish press is relatively free and feisty. I used to live in Laos, where there was truly no press freedom, and the situation in Turkey is not at all like that, although every newspaper here does have an editor charged with making sure the content of the paper violates no laws, and YouTube has been banned for months, supposedly because someone, somewhere, posted a video depicting Atatürk in a monkey suit.
The larger problem in Turkey—a problem that has grown worse, not better, under the AKP—is that too many media outlets are owned by friends of the government. This does not necessarily reflect a sinister Islamist plot; out-of-control cronyism is a perfectly serviceable explanation. A further problem is that many journalists here are wildly irresponsible. By “wildly irresponsible,” I don’t just mean that they slant a bit toward one party or the other; I mean that they peddle every stripe of insane, paranoid conspiracy theory and frequently provide incitement to murder.
Not long ago, I interviewed Sahin Filiz, a professor of Islamic history and philosophy. As we were talking, he mentioned, almost incidentally, that he was under 24-hour police protection. This was because the Islamist newspaper Memleket had effectively called for his murder, after accusing him of mocking his native city of Konya. (Filiz had merely argued that the Koran does not explicitly instruct women to cover their heads.)
Memleket is related to the Islamist newspaper Vakit, whose articles have been linked to several high-profile murders, including that of of Ali Güzelday, head of the Turkish Bar Association, who was killed on July 21, 1995; Ahmet Taner Kislali, the former minister of culture, who was killed on October 21, 1999; and Mustafa Yücel Özbilgin, a court deputy, who was killed on May 17, 2006. In one case, the murderer actually said, “I killed him because of what I read in Vakit.”
But it’s not just the Islamist papers. The nationalist press is equally reprehensible. An orgy of insane media vitriol preceded the murder of journalist Hrank Dink, an Armenian Turk who had called for Armenian-Turkish reconciliation. Dink had hinted (but never in fact said) that the word “genocide” might well describe the massacres of Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915. He was killed on January 19, 2007.
***
Underlying all of these institutional and cultural problems are profound deficiencies in the Turkish education system. Mehmet Y, an undergraduate in an Istanbul university, asked me not to use his name or say which university he attends. When I asked him why not, he said, “Article 301.” Article 301 is the infamous law that criminalizes “insulting Turkishness.” Dink was prosecuted under this law, and so was the Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk. The law was recently amended: now it is only criminal to “insult the Turkish nation.” This change was supposed to impress the European Union.
I asked Mehmet Y whether he had told me anything that could conceivably violate Article 301. “It doesn’t matter,” he replied. “If they want to prosecute you for something, they will. It’s the same with everything here, even the traffic laws. If a cop wants to pull you over and question you, they’ll find a reason. They can take you in and book you for three days for nothing.” He insisted it was the same way in the United States, and I could not persuade him otherwise. He had not heard of the First Amendment, and when I told him about it, he didn’t believe me.
The Turkish education system, to judge from what Mehmet Y said to me, does not give citizens the tools they need to understand what is going wrong in Turkey, imagine how it might be fixed, or evaluate what their politicians are telling them. This, Mehmet Y believes, is deliberate. The unrest in the 1970s that culminated in the 1980 military coup, he thinks, convinced the government that students posed a grave threat to state security. So the universities were emptied of anyone smart enough to cause trouble. “I figure out which professors were in the universities then, and I don’t take their classes, because they won’t know shit,” Mehmet Y said.
In his view, the national curriculum has been deliberately stripped of any content that might give students bad ideas. “You get discouraged from studying anything that might make you think about politics. All the emphasis is on mathematics, engineering. But it’s not even about the kind of mathematics that might lead you to think; it’s about memorizing multiplication tables. You don’t study anything that would lead you to being able to look critically at what’s going on here. You study no history except Turkish history, and that stops at Atatürk’s death. You never study European or American history. You learn nothing about the Second World War or the Cold War. You never study politics. You don’t even study literature, except for Turkish literature.”
This surprised me. “You don’t learn anything about modern history?”
“Nobody here knows shit about anything after 1923,” Mehmet Y said. “You know that in 1938, Atatürk died. There was nothing in between and nothing afterwards. You learn that there was a new constitution and the Fez was abolished. You study ‘national history’ and ‘national geography.’ National history is, ‘We conquered this, we conquered that, we conquered this, and then they backstabbed us; then we conquered something else, and then someone else backstabbed us.’ If we won a war, it was because we were so great; if we lost a war, it was always because someone backstabbed us. National geography is ‘learning about every lake in Turkey.’”
I checked, and this is pretty much the official curriculum. The Ministry of Education’s website reproduces Atatürk’s guidance: “Education must be free from all superstitions and foreign thoughts.” This statement, it should be noted, is severely uncharacteristic of Atatürk, who was otherwise greatly enamored of foreign thoughts.
Column inch upon column inch has been devoted to the AKP’s attempt to lift a 1997 law prohibiting the graduates of religious schools from continuing their education at secular universities. As with the headscarf controversy, this debate is trivial compared with the bigger issue: whether the schools are secular or religious, no one is getting educated in them. The AKP has done nothing to improve this situation, nor has any other party.
We should not be surprised, then, that so many Turks subscribe to insane conspiracy theories. Mehmet Y, for example, believes that the CHP is secretly collaborating with the AKP. Why? Because, he reasons, the leader of the CHP, Deniz Baykal, could not possibly be as stupid as he appears. “He’s over 70, he loses over and over and over—he has no solid ideas about anything.”
It is immensely sad to listen to Mehmet Y as he explains this, because part of his analysis is correct: it is suspicious that Baykal is still running that party, and he should be asking why this is. I asked Mehmet Y what motivation Baykal could possibly have to collaborate, secretly, with the AKP. “It must be the Israelis keeping him in power,” he said. “Israel and the Jews. They control the economic structure in Turkey. I mean, think about it: Alarko, Vakko, those are Jewish names.” (He is referring to two well-known Turkish companies.) “The Jews have a very strict, closed society. They control the stock market—they control how much it rises and falls. The Turkish economy is easily influenced. The U.S. loans money to us and then controls us economically.”
Mehmet Y is not a bad kid. Nor is he a stupid one—quite the contrary. But he is swimming in a sea of intellectual garbage. When governments and economies are rotten, the ambient culture tends to follow suit. In Turkey, as elsewhere, crooks and incompetents seeking to deflect attention from the consequences of their larceny find it very convenient to blame America and the Jews. Very few young Turks can read any language but Turkish. Only a miniscule portion have ever visited America or met a Jew in person. It is psychologically easier to believe these ludicrous stories than to confront the idea that the problem is closer to home.
[...]
***
The AKP has had some successes. Hyperinflation remains under control, for now. The currency has been stabilized. The banking sector is more transparent and better supervised. Certainly, there has been economic growth, even if it is impossible to say how much and doubtful that it is as much as the government claims. The ease of opening and operating a business has improved. The AKP has been trying strenuously to join the EU, and has implemented a number of important human rights reforms at the EU’s insistence.
It remains risible, however, to imagine that Turkey is institutionally prepared to enter a common market ruled by laws, lofty intellectual abstractions, and well-functioning bureaucracies. So long as Turkey’s institutions remain rotten, Turkey will be vulnerable to political Islam, anti-Western authoritarianism, and violent civil unrest of the kind seen in the 1970s.
It is critically important that Americans and Europeans grasp this. Turkey’s strategic and economic significance is massive. It has the second-largest army in NATO; it provides a crucial energy route to Europe; it is sitting on much of the water in the greater Middle East. For these reasons and more, the West is pinning its hopes on Turkish stability and prosperity: it is fondly imagining a Europe that extends to the southern Caucasus; pipelines overbrimming with oil and gas from the Caspian; and a friendly, Westernized Turkey that cooperates with plans to project democracy (or military force) into the Islamic world.
There is a good deal of wishful thinking and delusion in this vision. In part because the Turkish language is difficult, foreign observers tend to be unaware of a large body of work done by Turkish academics about the real state of the Turkish economy and its civil institutions. In part because Turkish politics are Byzantine—no surprise, that—few make much of an effort to understand them. In part out of desperate eagerness to see Turkey function as an example of a successful Muslim democracy, Westerners tend to ignore evidence to the contrary. In part because U.S. troops aren’t dying here, no one cares.
To quote The Economist magazine again: “A Turkey successfully integrated into the EU...would be a great achievement...setting an example for the Middle East beyond.” It would be evidence, former Italian Foreign Minister Gianfranco Fini has remarked, of the “compatibility of Islam with democracy.”
Well, yes, it would be. So would a stable, prosperous, peaceful, and democratic Iraq. The question is not whether it would be evidence of this, but whether it will be evidence of this. As in Iraq, wishful thinking will not make it so.
Claire Berlinski is a writer living in Istanbul. Her latest book is ‘There Is No Alternative’: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters (Basic Books, 2008).
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