Tornado Alley (PROG)

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The US-Turkey trade spat, explained

"Around the halls: Brookings experts react to the Trump-Putin meeting and NATO summit"

A battle over an American pastor is putting strain on Turkey’s economic troubles.

By Jen [e-mail] Aug 15, 2018, 3:20pm EDT


Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in July 2018. Getty Images

Turkey slapped hefty tariffs on US cars, alcohol, tobacco, and other products on Wednesday —
the latest blow in an escalating economic and diplomatic fight with the United States.

Ankara’s retaliatory trade measures come after US President Donald Trump said Friday he would impose additional tariffs
on Turkish aluminum and steel. And this trade spat with the US is exacerbating a brewing financial crisis in Turkey.

https://www.vox.com/world/2018/8/15/17687928/turkey-united-states-tariffs-lira-andrew-brunson

Relative chaos reigns as the wannabe strong man, bully-pulpit president plunges along. Phony-Christian,
Trump, and theocratic-Christian-to-the-core, Pence, make quite a disruptive, destructive and dangerous pair.

See also:

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How Putin Invented The New Authoritarianism
[...]
To begin with, he took the ramshackle crony-capitalism of Yeltsin and turned the oligarchic system into an instrument of state control. He reinvented the command economy or, rather, the pyramid economy where economic output flows upwards into the state's hands not through efficient taxes but through arteries of patronage. All business above a certain size must fall into line politically and pay into the corruption vortex. There's no room for an independent economy. We see the model thriving throughout the near abroad, in the Caucasus, and across Central Asia in the former Soviet Republics. We see it in Belarus. Increasingly in Hungary. In this, as in other Putinist governance techniques, nobody has learned lessons more effectively than Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey. Hence the huge construction projects farmed out to friends, family and loyalists. Hence the corruption investigations now pulling Turkey apart.
p-Putin was the first to move against free media ownership. He preferred to control television channels and allowed some laxity in newspapers. The former reached many more people while the latter furnished a dumbshow of opposition. Even then, journalists often got killed, jailed, beaten up or threatened. This model we now see popping up in various degrees everywhere outside the West, not least in Turkey. At one time, we all thought the multiplier technology of satellites, the proliferation of television channels, simply made information control impossible. Turned out you could get cronies to own all the channels. We thought the internet made authoritarian rule impossible. Turned out, that even social media could be muzzled or flooded with disinformation, as is happening in Turkey. The harrassment and closure of democracy NGO's as foreign agents started in Russia, and spread quickly to Egypt even in the Arab Spring period.
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Turkey condemns U.S. over ‘aggressive’ acts against Erdogan’s guards during D.C. visit
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