Is Turkey As Corrupt As Wall Street? New Jersey?

Last night you may have heard me grousing about how Martin Scorsese left out the real life political corruption in the story of the Jordan Belfort scandal that shook Wall Street in the '90s. Belfort gave thousands of dollars to notorious Wall Street shill Senator Alfonse D'Amato (R-NY) and, at D'Amato's urging, a check for $100,000 to the RNC in a vain hope to get the FBI off his back. Scorsese left that out iof his 3-hour film, The Wolf Of Wall Street, which opened yesterday. Maybe Scorsese left that chapter of Belfort's corruption out of the movie because no one would even find it shocking. Too many of us have just come to expect politicians to be corrupt. It's not just not shocking; it's routine.

Yesterday Turkey's Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, under mounting pressure to resign over a cascading series of coruption scandals, replaced nearly half of his cabinet.

Police are investigating allegations of illicit money transfers to Iran and bribery for construction projects.

Mr Bayraktar, Economy Minister Zafer Caglayan and Interior Minister Muammer Guler quit after their sons were taken into custody.

All three [ministers who resigned] deny any wrongdoing

. ...[Environment Minister Erdogan] Bayraktar earlier urged the prime minister to resign too.

He insisted that "a great proportion" of construction projects that were under investigation were approved by the prime minister himself, adding: "I want to express my belief that the esteemed prime minister should also resign."

But Mr Erdogan has described the police investigation as a "dirty game."

In a further blow to Mr Erdogan, MP and former interior minister Idris Naim Sahin said he was resigning from the ruling AK Party.

As best I can tell, cabinet members, including the prime minister, were selling zoning changes to accommodate wealthy businessmen who have gained immense power uner Erdogan's government and in Turkey's go-go economy. The sons of the three cabinet ministers who resigned yesterday were all arrested last week on graft charges, along with the CEO of Halkbank, a Turkish version of Jordan Belfort, a several dozen businessmen accused of bribery. Erdogan's response to the arrest of the bankster and the cabinet ministers' sons was to sack and reassign police officers who were involved in the investigation. Journalists reporting the case were also fired by Erdogan's media baron allies.

According to testimony leaked to newspapers in Turkey, there is a recording that supposedly proves a senior minister received a bribe of $1.5 million from an Iranian businessman who also obtained Turkish citizenship for several foreign citizens. In the home of the bank’s CEO, police discovered $4.5 million hidden in shoe boxes. The affair, which is growing in scope, soon began taking a political toll.

Erdogan went into battle. The revelation of such an investigation three months before the local elections is the last thing he needs. As usual, he accused his political rivals, and mainly the head of the large Islamic social movement, Fethullah Gulen, who lives in Philadelphia, of leaking details of the investigation to the media.

For several months the two have been waging a public battle in light of the penetrating criticism leveled against Erdogan by Gulen, the prime minister’s former ally. Erdogan’s “associates” even hinted in the media that the U.S. administration also stands behind the exposure of the story, the purported objective being to undermine Erdogan politically. The Americans reacted harshly to the claim, hastening to explain that they have no connection to the affair. A senior administration official even told Turkey’s Hurriyet Daily News: “Don’t involve us in your family quarrels.”

But Erdogan, who has long suspected that the top echelons of the Turkish police and intelligence services are filled with Gulen’s “agents,” exploited the exposure of the affair to dismiss 18 senior officers, including the commander of the Istanbul police, who was ousted last Wednesday. The city’s deputy chief prosecutor general, who was in charge of the investigation, was also replaced. The case was transferred to the head prosecutor, who is close to Erdogan.

These steps enraged the prime minister’s critics. They suspect that the moves were designed to whitewash the findings and save Erdogan from even greater embarrassment. That is why there is an urgent need in Turkey to protect those who are disseminating the criticism and not allowing the story to fade away. As usual, these are the journalists, who in any case are considered traitors by Erdogan if they don’t write in praise of him and his government.

[Fired journalist Nazli] Ilicak, who on many issues actually expressed support for the government and its head, is not Erdogan’s first journalist victim. Her colleague at the newspaper and its former ombudsman, Yavuz Baydar, was dismissed last July after the paper refused to publish two of his articles criticizing the government’s crackdown of on the Gezi Park protests. Also dismissed were senior journalists with the newspaper Milliyet. Fortunately for those who were fired, they didn’t join the approximately 40 journalists who have been imprisoned for quite a while-- a number that places Turkey, for the second year in a row, in first place on the list of countries that send journalists to prison, ahead of Iran and China.

Erdogan doesn’t even have to ask the owner of the newspaper Sabah to fire the wayward journalists. Ahmet Calik owes part of his fortune to Erdogan, who intervened with the government-controlled banks so they would give Calik a $750-million loan to purchase the Sabah group. Also, the man in control of the conglomerate’s media company is Berat Albayrak, Erdogan’s son-in-law.

To eliminate any doubt, Deputy Prime Minister Bekir Bozdag announced his intention to file a lawsuit against all those who revealed details of the affair-- “whether they are officials, prosecutors or police,” he said. Bozdag added: “We’re a large family, and until today we have never whitewashed the mistakes of family members and we haven’t permitted anyone to whitewash them.”

In Turkey they’re saying that the expression “family” is actually quite appropriate. “It’s reminiscent of the behavior of the crime families that control not only the streets but also the police, the courts and politics. Erdogan’s life has become difficult, just at the moment when he estimated that his political future was assured,” wrote columnist Semih Idiz in Hurriyet.

Americans got a warning closer to home about this kind of self-entitled, above the law behavior, in the Chris Christie scandal currently rocking New Jersey. Same mentality exactly. I just want to end with a few lines I just read in the Stephen Kinzer book about the Dulles Brothers, The Brothers, in regard to the way anti-democratic forces use the mass media for their own ends. Believe me, Turkey isn't the only country doing this. In the early '50s, when Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers were about to launch a coup in Guatemala to depose the democratically elected government of Jocobo Arbenz, an extreme right American Cardinal, Francis Joseph Spellman of New York, helped the CIA plant lies in the form of a pastoral letter that was delivered from every pulpit in Guatemala. One U.S. journalist, was exposing the CIA lies about the country and Allen Dulles moved to shut him down as soon as he could.

When a New York Times reporter in Guatemala, Sydney Gruson, began filing stories about the benefits of land reform, Allen quietly protested, and the Times' publisher, Arthur Hayes Sulzberger, obligingly had Gruson recalled.