The veil of irrational policies: Austerity

Everything has been consumed. External resources are also at a stage of stagnation. A significant portion of the public is in a miserable state. Turkey has been deindustrialized. Agriculture has been destroyed; so much so that it has been reduced to importing cattle from Germany, an industrial country. What happened; are we at war or something? Yes, in a way, we are at war, and we have been defeated. We have to pay the price for our defeat with extraordinary efforts. This is the point to which a political cadre, for whom we have voted for years, has brought the society it dragged along with its incompetence, yet unfortunately still received votes from! I do not know, did the forces referred to as the deep state not act as a brake on this course, or were the vigorous forces asleep while Turkey was being robbed by imperialist powers and their domestic partners outside of its own will?

When does a state practice austerity? In extraordinary conditions such as war or natural disasters, when it cannot suddenly increase national resources as much as needed, or to cope with potential future difficulties, it cuts consumption in the sense of resource saving. The rationing criticism of the Second World War years, which the AKP gunslingers never let off their tongues, is, for some reason, being experienced today in the form of wage suppression, and even more violently than in the past. This must be fate! At least in the past, there was a very reasonable justification for the rationing practice. Well, what kind of justification is there for such a circular today? Now, if the AKP gunslingers have not run out of breath and still have the strength, they should come before the public and clearly explain the justifications for today's suppression policy. Yes, what the AKP is doing today is definitely not austerity; it is purely political suppression. The word austerity is an economy-flavored screen word used to mask the despotic image of an irrational suppression policy. Because the share that cannot be increased from production, which will be taken by pressing on the public's throat, will be used to pay off debts to imperialists or to carry out some necessary economic tasks in order to pay the financial war indemnity undertaken in return for works initiated with fancy expressions like build-operate-transfer or public-private partnership and put in the election showcase. Because we see that among the austerity items listed in the famous austerity circular, there is neither a reduction in the dollar-indexed payment commitments promised to domestic and foreign firms, nor in the pomp and splendor maintained under the guise of protection, which is almost enough to cast doubt on the faith of pious politicians!

Let us think, did Barack Obama or Mrs. Merkel ever feel the need for so much protection and pomp? I think we cannot get rid of the habit of linking the pomp of the tasteless politician, based on the Middle Eastern and Arab culture we are buried in, to the image of personality. Politicians and our people need to put this into their heads: the reputation of a country's leader or politician is not commensurate with the gold leaf on the chair they are buried in, but with the education and cultural level of the voters they represent and from whom they receive votes. Some African tribal leaders also sit in pompous-glamorous offices, but that is just it!

If it is said that based on this circular, tomorrow only permanent staff will be given space in our universities, and even staff restrictions will be made according to the number of students, can we think that our universities can be saved from their current miserable state? In the universities of advanced countries that we envy, every professor devotes at most two courses, six hours a week, three hours each, to teaching. An academic's other hours are not empty; they are full of reading and research activities. Because an academic's primary duty is research. Since this is the case, if we think we are saving by making our professors run from class to class, we have lost our minds. One can save from pomp and tasteless prestige, and it would be very effective! But one certainly cannot, and should not, save from very basic services that form the social infrastructure! Neither quantitatively nor qualitatively is it permissible to save from academic personnel, medical personnel, teaching staff, in short, very basic social infrastructure services such as health and education.

It is the spirit of the austerity circular, rather than its wording, that will hurt society and darken the future. If austerity means the quantitative and qualitative reduction of some services that are currently established at an optimal level, this means saving in the short term but creating a huge cost in the long term. According to a very basic rule of economics, allocating less than the necessary resources to a service is not austerity, but creating waste equal to all the allocated resources. Personnel salaries, the number of personnel, or the lack of necessary tools and equipment in the public sector is not austerity, but unnecessary spending that does not fully reach its target.

After setting these rules, let us think about this. Has there been waste within the framework and direction of the existing legislation until now, that we are now turning to austerity? If this thesis is valid, then why was such irresponsible behavior shown regarding the public's assets in budget implementation or Court of Accounts audits? If all expenditure transactions have been carried out in accordance with the budget and relevant expenditure laws until now, which expenditure item will be cut to try to achieve the resulting need for austerity?

If these questions cannot be answered, it must be admitted that very big mistakes have been made in the past. In this case, it means that the spirit of the budget and expenditure laws has been violated, the audit reports of the Court of Accounts have not been respected, and even the Court of Accounts has been implicitly brought under control from time to time. It must be admitted that the political authority of a political cadre that has turned to such dark politics is damaged, even if implicitly, and is riddled with distrust.

The austerity circular is a very important document that should be interpreted politically, not with tools such as which items will be saved and how, but by considering the spirit of the circular, examining it carefully with both the past performance and future intentions of the political power, and questioning how we got here. It is the MRI report of twenty-plus years of performance!