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Turkish Police Battle IMF Protesters in Istanbul
ISTANBUL - Turkish police used water cannon, tear gas and pepper spray today to disperse hundreds of demonstrators protesting against the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.
Police fire water cannon against IMF protesters. (Osman Orsal/Reuters)
Masked protesters shattered the windows of a McDonald's restaurant and banks
and damaged vehicles as they ran into the streets behind Istanbul's landmark
Taksim Square, which is less than half a mile from the complex where the
financiers are meeting.
Thousands of police wearing gas masks and protective gear erected barriers around the venue and detained dozens of protesters - mostly members of small leftwing parties or labour unions. CNN-Turk television said that some foreign protesters were also involved.
Clouds of tear gas filled the air above Taksim Square while firefighters battled a blaze apparently set by protesters. Passers-by and reporters were also affected by the tear gas. Police helicopters hovered above the crowds.
Along the famous tourist route of Istiklal Street, shop owners pulled down their shutters and customers hid inside, deserting a once-busy thoroughfare.
Security has been tight at the International Congress Centre since the meetings began last week with armed police and large groups of security guards highly visible, but the policing was stepped up dramatically today even before any trouble flared.
At the main entrance to Taksim Square, large contingents of blue-uniformed police carrying gas masks, riot shields and weapons gathered since early this morning. Many wore body armour.
Before the violence flared three female protesters had managed to get within a few yards of the main entrance, mingling with the thousands of bankers and officials entering the complex.
As soon as they began to chant in protest, they were surrounded by both uniformed and plain-clothed officers who grabbed them, clamped hands to their mouths and frogmarched them to a police van with blacked-out windows.
At the back entrance to the congress centre - a mass of new buildings and roadways spread over a wide hillside area and surrounded by high temporary fencing - four dozen uniformed police marched in, many wearing helmets and carrying riot shields. A helicopter hovered overhead.
Delegates walking into the conference have to pass through two airport-style metal detector doorways and have their bags checked. Similar arrangements are in place in the vestibules of the main hotels where delegates and bankers are staying.
Turkey and the International Monetary Fund are engaged in slow-moving talks about a new loan deal that could boost investor confidence, but Turkey has been reluctant to cut spending and implement austerity measures.
Last week, a student journalist hurled a shoe at Dominique Strauss-Kahn as the IMF director answered questions at a university in Istanbul. The shoe missed its target.
7 Comments so far
Show Allit appears we are not alone in fascist dictator behavior when it comes to dealing with legitimate protest! this world
has lost its mind. i often wonder when everyone is going
toget mad as hell and not take it any more. its the only
out of prison planet.
The wealth divide is a result of the status quo ethical breakdown among elites, and itself drives ethical breakdown and general criminal activity among the people, and subsequently creates the need for police to maintain law and order. In the absence of law and order, general criminal activity, which is almost always motivated by greed, feeds on itself in a vicious cycle and so the ultimate result of the elite status quo is instability that can lead to a complete societal collapse.
In societies free from this elite-induced wealth divide, criminal activity still exists but doesn't feed on itself in a vicious cycle and diverge into chaos at anywhere near the same rate, but stands a good chance of converging to a stable and tolerable rate, and is easily managed with a tiny fraction of law enforcement resources.
But there is even less need for law enforcement against leftist protest because potential disturbances among these protests are not motivated by greed and thus do not bring the rewards to the perpetrators that would feed a vicious cycle that grows unbounded. So it's doubly ludicrous for elites to deflect responsibility from themselves for any leftist protest disturbances. Besides, it's widely known that elites often plant agents provocateurs into the leftist protests.
While every person is responsible for their own actions, elites cannot escape responsibility for disturbances during leftist protests because elite actions almost completely determine the presence/absence of leftist rage. Law enforcement against these protesters is thereby largely unjust, and only builds further justification for the leftist movement.
It would have been nice if the article at least wrote specifically about what these people were protesting about. I guess that all news orgs have become violence-centered garbage.
The banks and the wto and the rich countries of the north will continue to rape and pillage the Global South, and every time they have one of their "meetings" they will need more and more heavy handed protection. soon they will call out the armed forces- not that his would be exactly a new thing.
But the anger of the poor will only grow and become more fierce as the brutal bankers continue their rapacious mayhem, until someday they will shut down the banks.
I didn't read this Times, UK, article yet, but seeing it's about protests against the "new world order", "one world government" (through banksters, ...) sort of operation called the IMF, the article, below, by Ellen Brown is definitely fitting. What it says is evidently very important, critically so, and I think it, what it tells us about the near future, very near, will definitely frigthen (and shock) plenty of people. Even the banksters' US Federal Reserve is evidently worried, very, and poor countries are definitely in serious danger; but the U.S. also appears to be in serious danger. The future of the U.S. dollar apparently is in serious danger. It apparently will be devalued by half and this seems to be rather certain, due to being definitely planned, and while this, for now anyway, is slated to be done in a gradual way, it's still bad news for USA'ns (and I guess any population where countries' currencies depend on the U.S. one).
"The IMF to Play Role of Global Central Bank?
The Dollar Needs to be Devalued by Half?",
by Ellen Brown, WebOfDebt.com, Oct 5 2009
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15531
EXCERPT:
The IMF may have catapulted to a more exalted status than that. According to Jim Rickards, director of market intelligence for scientific consulting firm Omnis, the unannounced purpose of the G20 Summit in Pittsburgh on September 24 was that “the IMF is being anointed as the global central bank.” Rickards said in a CNBC interview on September 25 that the plan is for the IMF to issue a global reserve currency that can replace the dollar.
“They’ve issued debt for the first time in history,” said Rickards. “They’re issuing SDRs. The last SDRs came out around 1980 or ’81, $30 billion. Now they’re issuing $300 billion. When I say issuing, it’s printing money; there’s nothing behind these SDRs.”
END OF EXCERPT
A copy of the video for the Sept. 25th interview on CNBC or a clip (6:34) from it seems to be the following.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-ZZFmKFk1s
And that was obtained from the following page.
"CNBC News video, Jim Rickards: "Federal Reserve needs to cut US Dollar in half over next 14 years"", Sep. 29, 2009
http://www.dailypaul.com/node/108994
CNBC also has the original copy of the video.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=1275511738
This reflects only a little for what Ellen Brown's article importantly says; or, importantly and what'll probably be frighteningly, for many Americans, and populations of poor countries.
Ellen Brown's article is scary.
And listening to the interview with Jim Rickards tells me that economics is CRAP, that we're just slaves; slaves to a way of living that truly intelligent beings would have nothing to do with. Primitive tribes or populations could use a little evolution in terms of understanding life, like not believing in animism, or not to a full extent, wherein it's believed that all objects have spirits, f.e. But they are more civilised in terms of economics. They're not slaves to monetary systems. They're victims of populations that are slaves to monetary systems, but aren't such slaves, themselves. And once we have economics, we're going to have racket economics, wars for profit, making and selling weapons of death for really no other reason than for profit, a lot of sociopathic and psychopathic crimes for profit. Get rid of economics and thereby solve or curb a lot of our world's problems and, especially, injustices. But our so-called civilised societies are enslaved under economics. It's so bad that we do things that are contrary to being economical; like wars that are unjustifiable, hence unnecessary, and destroying the planet and thereby ourselves. So we're slaves and dumb ones, at the same time.
Gerald Celente, founder and director of www.TrendsResearch.com, the Trends Research Institute, and who's apparently a very serious and successful trends forecaster, while being someone who speaks very soundly about the rogue U.S. government, Federal Reserve, Wall Street, etcetera, all of these white-collar mobsters, etcetera, what he says basically describes our society as being under slavery; because of these banker, ..., and political mobsters. There are plenty of videos for video and audio interviews with him posted at Youtube. I listened to a few tonight and the man speaks like a truly down-to-earth, common sense, ... individual. He doesn't literally say that we're slaves, but what he does say about the extreme corruption of the economic system in the U.S. basically does describe slavery (for most of us).
Trends is forecasting a greater depression than the Great Depression of the 20th century, the "greatest" depression in human history, and since he and possibly other members of the Trends team have apparently been right plenty of times before, this present prediction's scary. It includes that there'll be violence and more than during the last Great Depression; and won't be just Repub. Party supporters, "conservatives", right-wingers, but also Dem. Party supporters, etc. As he says, right-wingers have been getting a lot of the blame for protests against the Obama administration, but it's not only right-wingers; and he describes the Obama administration as being like the Bush administration, if not both of them, and the Clinton administration.
I wonder, however, what he'd say on what Jim Rickards says in the CNBC interview. I'd expect more information from Gerald Celente, based on what the videos and audios I listened to tonight say. Jim Rickards words strike me more like news reporting, as opposed to thorough analysis; but what he says seems to be important to know about. How to treat that, however, requires another analyst and Gerald Celente might have some good input for this.
Those are two people I can't vounch for, and Gerald Celente seems to usually claim to be a political atheist, but he also states in an interview with Judge Andrew Napolitano, that he's a Libertarian, a or the "progressive" kind, and that makes me nervous; for the Lib. Party supported the H-1B program which was for importing foreign hi-tech workers who really and for the most part were only imported to [replace], literally, outright and illegally, as well as unethically, replace U.S. professionals. Putting U.S. hi-tech professionals into bankruptcy, including total, was esteemed by the racketeers in the U.S. and the Lib. Party was among them. But he says he's a "progressive" libertarian and maybe is sane in terms of the wrong things the Lib. Party supported; and he's right about Wall Street, the banksters, the Federal Reserve, the Bush, Clinton and Obama administrations, and more.
In the interview provided on Judge Napolitano's show though, they eventually come to speak of the universal health care issue and Congress' constitutional role in this, and both say that the Constitution doesn't authorize the Congress to make any rulings for this issue. However, Gerald Celente does add that the Constitution doesn't say that the Congress can't rule on this issue, that it can't create legislation to guarantee UHC for everyone, and that he's for health or health care, a healthy environment, and some other things. So maybe he's not against the Congress making UHC law in the U.S. I'd need to hear him fully explain his position on this topic, though.
And a person can be very or even wholly right about a lot of things, without being right on every topic. He's definitely and clearly right about Wall Street, etc., and the U.S. presidential administrations. He's definitely right that the U.S. Constitution does not authorize the Congress to dispense with being the body to govern the U.S. monetary system or policies, that it's constitutionally the Congress' responsibility to see to these policies itself; no one else. And he's right that it was unconstitutionally put into the hands of international and, I guess, some national banksters in 1913, under the idiot President Woodrow Wilson government (and Wilson later expressed his regret, too).
Re. UHC, the Congress and the Constitution, I think it can be argued that the Congress can constitutionally rule for UHC, because the Constitution specifically says "prosperity", etcetera, for [everyone]. Etcetera.
Since he's clearly against Wall Street, etc., Gerald Celente can't possibly be for the present health care "system" in the U.S. It'd be very self-contradictory, very hypocritical.
"Too bad" about the shoe. It seems the thrower needs a little more practice.
I'm both surprised and not about heavy "security" to protect the IMF and WB banksters, MOBSTERS, racketeers, ...; the sons ..., clearly not of God anyway. And why are the windows in the police van or truck blacked out, so that the police inside can brutalise and rape citizens who are arrested, shove billy clubs up their rectums, ...? After all, if the police didn't commit brutal acts against the arrested individuals, then there should be no need to blacken out the windows so that people can't see inside. Turkey is a torture country or government, so ....
The IMF and WB should be eliminated, but they're instrumental bodies for the racket, mobster, ... "elites", so we're not likely to see the IMF and WB funerals anytime soon. And based on Ellen Brown's article about the IMF, now, it's back with vengence. It's sickening to see security provided for these hellish sort of "institutions" or operations.
They should be thrown into the Gehanna or incinerated by any other means. They're rotten as hell. No sane and just person can support these operations. The WB is headed by the U.S., but is unconstitutional and criminal as hell. The IMF is headed by Europeans and can be considered an enemy of the U.S., except when the elites on both sides of the aisle profit (of course), but that still leaves it as a threat for the general population of the U.S. and also some even very rich people or Americans.
The clouds of hell still hang over the world, and we're not, herein, considering the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, and ... plenty of other countries where the west is hell for the populations. We get sunny days, but they're deceptive, because hell rules here. Even plenty of Dem. Party voters admit to voting for so-called lesser [evils] while also claiming to supposedly be progressive. Hell's also progressive, but never in a good way. Letting hell progressively take over our societies is NOT a good idea! At all! But we did.