From collective development to collective poverty…
Don't be fooled by the words "pensioners are our crown jewels,"
In an effort to cover up the fund fraud and push it off the agenda,
The government has finally remembered the pensioners they have condemned to live below the hunger threshold for years.
Those who created this system, which spawned the fund fraudsters who transferred the nation's money into their own pockets,
With talk of flat-rate raises or additional welfare shares on top of inflation adjustments,
Are thinking of giving hush money to the pensioners and the Nation.
*
Let's leave this game of the government aside,
And come to the real issue that needs to be discussed.
In our country, where the hunger threshold is 38 thousand 24 TL and the poverty threshold is 121,786 TL,
17 million 124 thousand 786 pensioners, including those receiving widow, orphan, and disability pensions,
Approximately 11.2 million workers earning the minimum wage or less,
More than 70 percent of our population along with their families,
Here is the answer to the question of why they are living below the hunger and poverty thresholds.
*
As Emin Çapa, my guest on the ADD TV YouTube channel, also emphasized,
What is happening in the economy is not a crisis,
It is a political choice of the RTE-AKP government, it is an income transfer.
It is the taking of money from the masses, from the people, and transferring it to a small number of people.
While a small group of cronies close to the government gets rich,
Pensioners, workers, farmers, tradesmen, and small businesses in the industry, who make up the vast majority of the people, are becoming impoverished.
In short, as a Nation, we are collectively becoming impoverished.
*
60 percent of taxes, which make up 97.5 percent of the state's budget revenues,
Are paid by pensioners and workers through taxes deducted from their salaries,
They are paid by all citizens who pay taxes for all the goods and services they purchase, that is, the Nation.
The solution to the problem lies here as well.
When the Nation demands an account of how and where the taxes it pays are spent,
And whether the taxes paid are spent fairly and justly for the development and progress of the Nation and the Country,
We will be saved from living as hungry and poor as a Nation.
*
In fact, while we were living under much harsher conditions 100 years ago,
We are a country that has solved a similar problem.
In a country where 88 percent of us were in villages, in the darkness of poverty and ignorance, helpless against epidemics,
Deprived of transportation and communication facilities, occupied by imperialists,
In the words of Korkut Boratav,
While living as subjects of the Sultan with "a semi-colonized social structure"...
Under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal, a young Ottoman pasha who did not accept these conditions,
We first ended the imperialist occupation and became the owners of our homeland.
On the day we won our liberation (September 9, 1922), with the goal shown by Gazi Mustafa Kemal,
"Gentlemen, now the real war begins;
the war against ignorance, poverty, and backwardness!"
We entered the wars of enlightenment, development, and modernization.
• Against ignorance, a Collective Education Mobilization
• Against misery, a Collective Development Move
The main idea of the collective development move in the fight against poverty, which is our subject,
Is in the words written at the Domestic Goods Exhibition at the Ankara Exhibition House,
"Industry is the backbone of economic future.
What we used to buy from outside, we are now making ourselves."

*
Without seeking borrowed money from abroad,
By also paying off the debts remaining from the Ottoman Empire,
With the Republic's "mixed economy policy" based on production relying on our own resources,
With factories rising in every corner of our country...
100 years ago, we defeated poverty and backwardness.
*
In short,
Today, with a mindset that is at odds with the Republic,
We are experiencing the consequences of a management approach that ignores production and the producer in the field and in industry,
And is devoid of law and justice.
Our solution and way out are clear.
By producing raw materials in the fields and mines,
Technology in universities, and the goods we consume and use in factories...
We can defeat unemployment, poverty, and hopelessness again with the Republic.
As long as we all stand together to protect it.