Seeing the future through the lens of economic history (2)

FIRST PART OF THE ARTICLE

The Second World War was the completion of the unfinished division from the First World War and the bringing to heel of Germany, which had not fulfilled the requirements of the Treaty of Versailles.

We can summarize the other reasons as follows.

In 1929, the second major crisis of capitalism erupted. The effects of the 1929 Great Depression in Europe, especially the massive unemployment it caused, weakened democracies and governments. When Germany could not pay its war reparations, France occupied Germany's industrial region, the Ruhr Basin. This occupation was influential in the emergence of Hitler.

During the First World War and the following years, half of the world's gold stock had gone to America. The leaders of the victorious states of the First World War borrowed from the US to finance the war. By 1931, the British Government announced that there was no longer gold behind the pound sterling and abandoned the gold standard. The world's economic leadership was passing from England to the US, but the Dollar empire had not yet been declared. A reserve currency shortage arose in the world.

As a result of all this, the Second World War broke out. Let us briefly recall what has happened since the Second World War.

The world was now bipolar, led by the US and the Soviet Union. The capitalist system applied until the end of the Second World War was a period dominated by the classical economic understanding where state intervention was minimized, and workers and farmers were under heavy exploitation.

It is appropriate to define this period as savage capitalism. After the Second World War, Keynes's proposed social state policies and state interventions were accepted in the bipolar world due to the influence of the Soviet System.

In the communist bloc, housing, nutrition, education, health, employment, retirement, and access to art were free basic rights.

In the capitalist system after the Second World War, the state provided social rights due to competition with the Soviet Bloc. As a result, the share of budgets in national income, which was 10-15 percent before the war, reached 40 percent in the US and 45-50 percent in Europe by the 1980s. This meant that capitalists paid more taxes, but as a result of rapidly growing economies and increasing profits (until 1975), capital did not have much to complain about.

In fact, this period is characterized as the golden age of capitalism. In later years, labor unions grew stronger. After the Second World War, the transition was made from savage capitalism to a capitalism that valued the social state and included state initiatives.

The US declared itself the gendarme of the capitalist system and the world. From then on, the world would be shaped and managed by the rules set by America and by international institutions that appeared independent but were under the influence of the US to oversee these rules.

First, with the Bretton Woods Agreement, the dollar was declared the world's reserve currency. The value of the dollar was pegged to gold. One ounce of gold was 35 dollars. The US Government guaranteed that it would give 1 ounce of gold to anyone who brought 35 dollars. Other countries' currencies were also pegged to the US dollar.

The date was July 1944. To consolidate this decision, it was decided to establish the IMF and the World Bank on the same date. For the IMF and the World Bank to function, the UN needed to be established. The UN was established on October 24, 1945. Countries that were members of the UN were naturally members of the IMF. (Except for six countries). With the establishment of the UN, the IMF and the World Bank became operational in 1947.

For these organizations to work on behalf of the US, a stick was also needed. A powerful American navy and NATO... NATO was also established on April 4, 1949.

After a while, the US financed its foreign trade deficit by printing dollars. The currencies of the defeated countries of the Second World War, Germany's Mark and Japan's Yen, began to gain value against the dollar. In 1971, France sent the dollars it held to the US and demanded the gold in return. While the plane was in the air, US President Nixon announced that he was abandoning the Gold Standard. There was no longer gold behind the dollar. But the dominance of the dollar continued. The reasons for this are the subject of a separate article. If we go into that, this already long article would become even longer.

This decision was the US changing the rules it had set itself. The US does not even have tolerance for the rules it sets itself. From now on, the US began to set whatever rules it wanted whenever it wanted, according to its own situation. The Greater Middle East Project (BOP), its unprovoked attacks on Iraq and Libya, its provocation of former Warsaw Pact member countries against Russia, and the fact that while it defends free trade and Neoliberal approaches, the US has resorted to trade restrictions in the face of China's offensive, whereas China, governed by the Communist Party, defends Neoliberal policies in world trade, are just a few examples that can be cited.

Could a rule change that concerns Turkey be on the horizon? That a NATO country should not attack another NATO country...

The US aims to reshape Turkey within the scope of the Greater Middle East Project and to establish a Kurdish State on Iraqi, Syrian, and Turkish lands. This is an open threat and attack on Turkey's territorial integrity... The US has not yet attacked Turkey, a NATO member, on Turkish soil, but in the first days of October, it shot down a SİHA (UCAV) belonging to the Turkish Army in Syria.

It did not stop there; on October 13, US President Biden, in a message published on the White House website, declared that Turkey's presence in Syria was a threat to the national security and foreign policy of the US.

Until today, the US and NATO have not attacked Turkey because it is a NATO member. However, by cooperating with political Islam as a counter-revolution project, the structure of the Turkish Army was changed through conspiracy cases, the institutions of the Republic of Turkey, especially the judiciary, were rendered dysfunctional, the borders were turned into a sieve, and Turkey's demographic structure was ruined with over 10 million refugees, including Afghan soldiers who fought on behalf of the US and ISIS militants.

The Turkish economy is already unable to stand on its own feet with its foreign debt-addicted structure like a drug addict, its collapsed agriculture, its foreign trade deficits, budget deficits, high inflation, and its gradually disappearing competitiveness.

TO BE CONTINUED