Turkey, once a promising country in a region dominated by corrupt dictators and theocratic despots, is going down the drain.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was the visionary who broke Turkey out of the doldrums, putting many reforms in place after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, rising from the ashes of World War I and making strides toward the West.
For example, though Turkey was a majority Muslim nation, Atatürk made it a secular and democratic republic. Atatürk replaced the Arabic script previously used for Turkish with Latin, which is far better suited to the language.
It wasn't all smooth sailing. Turkey's military staged regular coups whenever civil leaders strayed too far from Atatürk's vision.
That is, until Turkey's current president gained power. Recep Tayyip Erdogan has become an autocratic dictator with the popular support of the people in the name of "Islamization." The military attempted a coup against Erdogan in 2016 and failed to oust the dictator. He has since purged the government, schools and universities of anyone not loyal to him, jailed thousands of people (including some Americans), and consolidated more and more power in his own hands.
My wife and I visited Turkey in the 1990s, when it was in the grip of horrible inflation, ranging from 60-100% a year. In 1996 one dollar was worth 100,000 lira.
When we went to exchange money we learned that Turks didn't use banks: on payday they went to currency exchanges and converted their lira to dollars, then went to exchange them back when they needed cash. Converting to dollars prevented their wages from being drained into nothing by inflation.
People remember those awful times, and they credit Erdogan with ending the economic decline of the country in the 2000s. That's why they keep giving him greater dictatorial powers.
But it's not working anymore. Turkey is again in the grip of rampant inflation. At the start of this year the revalued lira was worth about 25 cents. Now it's worth 15 cents.
Erdogan is blaming the United States and other foreign countries for all his problems. In response to Trump's tariffs, Erdogan has called for Turks to boycott American products; in particular, electronics like Apple's iPhone.
If this sounds familiar, it should. Donald Trump is using the despot's playbook, just like Putin and Erdogan. Trump blames foreigners for all our problems. Trump clamors for the "Christianization" of the United States (though Trump is the least Christian of any president). Trump claims he is the only one who can fix things, and that he has the power to do whatever the hell he wants, be it levying tariffs on foreign steel, boycotting American companies like Harley Davidson, cutting secret deals with criminals like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un, or grabbing women's pussies.
The United States hasn't been hit by rampant inflation. Yet. But many Americans are already heading into bankruptcy because of Trump. American farmers are being hammered by his economic policies. He has effectively dismantled the consumer protection bureau, allowing predatory lenders to pillage American pocketbooks. His sabotage of the health insurance market is driving up rates and reducing coverage for many Americans, who will go broke and die when they can no longer get insurance. His promises to reign in drug prices were all lies.
Wage growth in the United States has been flat or negative for the last 18 years, and Trump's policies (such as the gigantic tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations) have seen workers' wages shrink even more as CEOs use Trump's tax giveaway to take for themselves and shareholders even bigger pieces of the pie, while drastically ballooning the US deficit.
At some point the huge national debt the Trump tax cuts is creating will blow up in our faces. At that point the Republicans will demand that we cut Social Security, Medicare and social services, crushing less-educated whites and the elderly. Ironically, the people most affected by Trump's disastrous policies will be his core voters. (Minorities are already screwed, so their lot will change little from here on out.)
More and more the United States seems to be going down the same path that Turkey, Russia, and South American banana republics have gone down.
The question is: why are Republicans and the voters who elected him letting this clown get away with it?
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