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.
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.
I don’t see/hear much MSM info about the major demonstrations in the Ukraine by people who want more ties with EU rather than Russia. I also have not heard any mention about the horrific Qingdao pipeline explosion in China, 2 weeks ago that has killed at least 62 people. This may be the reason for the sudden flap over the expanded airfligh military zone that China declared the same day their leader went to Qingdao to pacify the public. Now the people are angry at Japan for overflights, rather than for their own government neglect and mismanagement.
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.