World Politics News   Articles for World Politics Course

One of the curious things about learning about why certain things happen in the world is that we rarely know all the relevant facts surrounding the incidents.  Such is the case with the Turkish protests.  I’ve read perhaps hundreds of newspaper and journal articles on the protests, and the references to the changes in Taksim Square that precipitated the protests have usually been described as a “shopping mall.”  In today’s New York Times, however, there is an article that outlines some other changes that Prime Minister Erdogan has proposed: a replica of an Ottoman Army barracks and a Grand Mosque.  Both are viewed with great suspicion by the secularists in Turkey; indeed, the plans for the mosque led to the arm’s coup d’etat in 1997 (when Erdogan was mayor of Istanbul).  The new information available to me makes me think that the religious question in the protests is significantly more complex than I had believed earlier.  I now have to find out more information about how these proposed changes are interpreted by the protesters.

Speaking of getting new information, The Irish Independent has just published some audio recordings between two top executives of the Anglo-Irish Bank in 2008 as the financial crisis overwhelmed the international financial system.  Anglo-Irish was a bank that was chartered in 1964 and was nationalized by the  government of Ireland in 2009.  The recordings are simply disgusting.  The executives laugh about how they made up statistics to get $7 billion from the government in order to bail out the bank.  The number had no basis in reality, the executives joke about the fact that they knew the money could never be repaid, and it is clear that they wanted to entrap the government into a situation in which further bailouts would be required.   The corruption within the world financial institutions at that time is simply breathtaking.

Military spending is increasing dramatically in Asia, and by 2020 the region will have the largest military spending in the world.  The US has been the dominant part of the global spending pattern for many years, but the budget deficits in the US and the drawdown of US efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan have reduced its role.  China, India, and Indonesia will account for the largest part of this shift.  US companies, however, will likely remain the dominant military sellers.