Posted on 12/11/2013 9:01:11 PM PST by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
Consider a country where banking interests balloon debt by lending to people who cannot possibly pay back their loans. These toxic assets then threaten to destroy the national economy. Banking interests plead with the civil government to rescue them for the sake of the economy. The civil government bails them out with taxpayer money. Sound familiar? Well, that’s where the similarities end between the banking crisis in Iceland which began in 2008, and the banking crisis that occurred in the States a year earlier.
Taxpayers in Iceland didn’t just sit back and allow the bail out. They thronged the streets banging on pots and pans, surrounded their capitol building, and forced all the members of their civil government to resign. You read that right. All of them. To resign. They were not going to pay for bank fraud.
They then crowd-sourced the Constitution of Iceland for a rewrite. No word yet on exactly how this has panned out. But what is of interest is that no major news agency in the U.S. has reported on this:
The pots and pans revolution in Iceland was not covered by mainstream U.S. media. In fact, any information about this revolution is found only on international newspapers, blogs and online documentaries, not on mainstream front-page articles as would be expected from news organizations covering a story of this magnitude. The New York Times published a small handful of piecemeal stories, blogs and opinion pieces, but mostly glossed over the main narrative by saying the 2008 financial collapse in Iceland caused “mayhem far beyond the country’s borders” rather than pointing out that Icelanders took to the streets with pots and pans and forced their entire government to resign.
I don’t know about you, but I find that bizarre. We’re talking about a bloodless revolution over a corrupt and incompetent government. That’s huge news. Why haven’t we heard about this? Are the puppet masters of media in the States afraid we might get similar ideas?
I read a lot of international press....from Cyprus to Iceland, from Thailand to South Korea. Generally, US news sources rarely use anything from the rest of the world. It has to be a earthquake, or some strange arrest story to make into most US papers.
Now, I will point out the obvious three reasons: 1. There’s only X amount of space anyway, so they run mostly US stories. 2. There’s zero interest in Alabama on what is going on in Iceland or Finland. 3. Most of your journalists have never traveled beyond the US, except to Aruba or Mexico.
On Iceland, US journalists were all peppy, especially CNN, back in 2005 when discussing the economic miracle growth of Iceland. They talked up the big success story, interviewed three different banking executives there, and really showed a glowing capital city.
Times passed, and reality after 2008 came to Iceland. The banks were screwed up. After the big collapse....unemployment soared to around thirty percent. McDonalds in the capital city shut down completely....no one was spending any money there on things like that. They had to cut hotel costs by a quarter....to attract tourists back into the country. The bankers got personally named (via the internet) and everyone in Iceland knew them, and the political figures in the capital. It was fairly easy to roll that entire government over, have an election to vote down saving the banks, and just move on from the mess.
This type of democracy though....only works when you have a country of 350,000-odd residents.
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Iceland handled their debt issue correctly-they defaulted on it!
I remember when Iceland diid this. We don’t seem to be that tough
The banks weren't forced to commit fraud. They were forced to make bad loans that they would not have traditionally made or face the power of government for their resistance. They were given a method to package and sell said bad loans with other loans in a way that would not have been permitted under prior regulations so that the banks could profit from those bad loans. Our (then, but not now) quasi-government institutions Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were enablers in this process, and shortly before the bottom fell out Barney Frank and others testified in hearings that there was nothing at all wrong.
As I understand it, that is exactly what they did. They have a cultural dependency on fishing, everyone participates and is competent, so they just expanded on that. I don’t think they have an established welfare state, either, at least not the kind where half the population can vote themselves benefits off the back of the other half.
Also, when this was happening, there was an explosion of Icelandic wool and knit items for sale around the web and on every craft site, such as Etsy. Top quality and top prices. Again, this is an established competency in Iceland and while it has always been exported, the quantity and availability just exploded.
Americans as a whole have no such accepted proficiencies and many of those who do find a lot of their social network uninterested in such activities and also uninterested in such hand production. Icelanders also had the established goodwill for their branded wool and knitwear, which has long been considered a luxury good by the rest of the world.
We lack this. Our wool industry has been decimated and only a few dedicated shepherds produce quality bred wool, while even fewer produce spun fiber for the knitting public. Most of the knitters prefer synthetics, for its stretch, washability and because they will say they are allergic to wool, when really, they are experiencing the itchy quality of reconstituted wool yarn with many short fibers. I gifted some Icelandic wool to a friend who considers herself allergic and she was amazed at how soft it felt running through her fingers and that she didn’t react to it.
Then, there is the question of size and of demographic homogeneity. As I understand it, much of the Icelandic population is interrelated. This likely makes a huge difference in their ability to pull together.
None of that approach will work here, IMO.
As I predicted. Bankster fans are in a in the same group as those women who fail in love with serial ax murders.
You’re on to something there.
In a single culture, it’s harder for the elites to pit groups against each other instead of letting them unite against the elites.
This very well could be one of the major reasons the left pushes “multiculturalism”. Of course, there’s that reason, and their visceral hatred for Christianity. But I digress.
That may have been true over here (Community Re-investment Act, outreach to “disenfranchised” minorities), but I don’t know if that was the situation over in Iceland.
Really only 350K? I thought it was half a million. But that certainly doesn’t negate your point.
I think the reason Congress can ignore us, on the other hand, is that we don’t really show up in proportionate numbers to shut down DC. Even the 800,000 people that showed up on 9/12/09 is not enough. We need at least 10 times that many to make a difference.
If we have such a number of people making DC inaccessible to anyone else for an extended period, then maybe we’d see some real action.
Or we might get our own Tiananmen Square, but that’s the risk we would have to take.
And those that use the term "banksters" are in the same group as those that post on DU.
Nope. It's use is tri-partisan at least.
You can “tri” anything you want to justify your irrational hate of an industry that is so tremendously regulated that they can’t blink without checking various rules. No, I am not in bankinhttp://freerepublic.com/perl/post#helpg, but I understand how it works. Do yourself a favor and go over to the FINRA site and peruse through the regulations for a better understanding.
You can “tri” anything you want to justify your irrational hate of an industry that is so tremendously regulated that they can’t blink without checking various rules. No, I am not in banking, but I understand how it works. Do yourself a favor and go over to the FINRA site and peruse through the regulations for a better understanding.
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