ThirstyFish

Photographed at a taxi stop in Izmir. A friend of mine told me O.Ç. stands for "S.O.B." [I should have known]. Anyway, as I get older, I see profanity to be useless. That said, what is the greater insult, looting a nation's wealth and ordering police to crush protestors, or calling someone S.O.B.

The Turkish protests which started as Occupy Gezi are ongoing, and escalating with every new revelation. A few weeks ago, Turkish authorities further tightened the government control of the Internet. Much like the Occupy Wall Street movement here in the U.S., Indignados in Spain, various movements of the Arab Spring, and most recently EuroMaidan protest in Ukraine, activists in Turkey also "organize" through Social Media on the Internet. The Internet is becoming a threat to governments. Even here in the U.S., an Internet Kill Switch is in place to be used during "national crises". Hmmmmm.

What triggered the posting of this photograph is what's going on in Turkey with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Erdogan was elected into power with the aid of an influential U.S. backed and U.S. based cleric named Fethullah Gulen and his movement. Recently, Erdogan fell out of favor with Gulen, and in turn the United States. The Boiling Frogs Post has a great background analysis on the events leading up to the current situation. After a public shunning of Erdogan by Fethullah Gulen, the power dynamics in Turkey suddenly changed. Most recently a series of tapes implicating Erdogan in corruption and meddling with the judiciary appeared all over the Internet. So much for encrypted phones! The authenticity of the recordings has not been established as of yet, but growing amount of evidence points to their authenticity.

These days, all governments really serve the global elite; special interests, international banks, and multinational corporations. National leaders are nothing but puppets of these supranational forces. Erdogan will go down, as did the Ukrainian leader Yanukovych. He will be replaced by another puppet that will implement the same policies used to rape people of their resources. The ongoing East-West contest in Ukraine is actually not about the people of Ukraine, or Russia, or the European Union. It is a resource struggle between the Russian elite, the European elite and the American elite. The people come after the elite, or in many cases, they don't matter at all; Nor does the environment or democracy...