They tried to hold on through the recession and my brother’s earnings fell by half over the last year, but finally the owners couldn’t do it anymore and called it quits.California law requires owners and employees to pay into the unemployment insurance fund, so everyone is covered. My brother was not too excited about receiving unemployment benefits, figuring that he would get only a fraction of his already low pay, but he had a pleasant surprise when he learned that the state bases the benefits on the highest earnings quarter in the past 18 months. In effect the state will pay him almost as much now as he was earning at half-pay, plus he will save the $300 he spent each month going into the city and back. And he doesn’t have to work.
Of course he likes to work and wants to work. My brother figures he’s applied for a hundred jobs so far and hasn’t heard a peep, says that you can’t trust the official unemployment figures because they don’t reflect the millions of people whose full-time jobs have turned into part-time jobs. He says that probably half of young people don’t have work.
That struck me, for a friend here in Turkey said the same thing this week. My friend visited his mother in Mersin and said everyone goes to the malls but they don’t do much shopping, that young people roam the streets and go home at night to watch soap operas with their mothers. Another friend from Adana corroborated this, said the best time to do anything is when “Kurtlar Vadisi” is showing on TV, since the streets are empty.
Both of these intellectuals condemn the soaps as the opiate of the masses, say that the government must be happy to have a dumb and docile population, this at the most crucial point in modern Turkish history, when each citizen has much to think about.
I don’t believe that the prime minister and his Cabinet want to lead a nation of zombies, but then they are busy playing parts in their own long-running soap opera, which runs under the title of, a real grabber, “Negotiations with the International Monetary Fund.” This week Turkish officials said they are no longer discussing a follow-up stand-by loan with the IMF, though they have invited a delegation from Washington to hold regular Article IV consultations in May. This isn’t quite as exciting as wondering whether Ahmet will leave his wife for that trashy girl from the radio station, but it’s the best you can do with loan talks. Be still, my beating heart.
Speak of shaking, seismologists say that several earthquakes striking Haiti, Chile and Turkey in quick succession do not mean anything unusual, that it is only by coincidence that the quakes struck populated areas, and therefore it only feels like the earth is splitting at the seams. We’re still waiting for the big one here, and the future remains very difficult to predict.
International credit rating agency Fitch took a stab at the future this week when they discounted the idea of upgrading Turkish sovereign debt to investment grade. “Even if things were to go reasonably well, it is unlikely we would get to investment grade this side of elections until we are relatively confident that constitutional reform that will be needed can pass through without serious political unrest,” Fitch senior director Edward Parker said at a conference. “We don’t expect things to get serious as they seemed to be in 2007 and 2008, but we can’t completely rule out any extreme events.”
By coincidence, Economy Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Ali Babacan this week attended a conference on the future of Turkey. The only official news to come out of that meeting was Babacan’s statement regarding talks with the IMF. And that’s too bad. If they had any solid information on the future of Turkey, they owe it to the country and the world to lay it on the line. You could bottle that and sell it, maybe advertise it on the soaps.
