We're going to take a little bit of a break from Bárðarbunga and Hraun-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named tonight. Over on your side of the pond, you're all getting ready for the good fight in midterm battles. And in my volcano diaries, I've often gotten remarks along the lines of, "Oh, too bad our political environment isn't like yours."
Are you really sure you want that? If you're looking for a little bit of a break from US politics, join me below the fold for a look at what's been going on over our side of the pond.
We all know the story: Icelanders, furious with the country being robbed by evil banksters, rose up in revolt and overthrew the government, threw all the banksters in jail, rejected austerity, rejected the IMF, didn't bail out any banks, instead nationalized them, got a new constitution, and Iceland lived happily ever after as an anticapitalist paradise. All over the world people have been citing Iceland as an example of what they want to achieve
(Protest in Spain)
It is, of course, a complete myth, as I've covered before. Many of the people acting as the biggest opponents of the útrásarvíkingar ("outvasion vikings", aka, banksters) were their biggest friends before the crash; it was just an act. There was no "revolution" in the literal sense - there were protests, then an election, that put in power a left-center government for one term. Relatively few people served any jail time for the crash - many of the people widely viewed by many people++ as among the biggest culprits, such as Björgólfur Þór, are still living it up. Iceland did some of the most major austerity in the world per-capita; half of the staggering budget shortfall was made up with cuts. The government never declared bankruptcy. Iceland became the poster child of the IMF, who boasted about how well Iceland was following their repayment plan. Despite the fact that some private banks whose accounts weren't government-backed were allowed to fail (akin to the Lehmann Brothers and other similar failures in the US), Icelanders nonetheless paid a huge amount of money per-capita to bail out and recover banks in general. The government did acquire a stake in the banks for this (similar to the US bailout of the auto industry), but quickly sold it off at under market value to avoid the perception of nationalization. The right completely derailed the constitutional process.
And then they took power.
(Credit: RÚV)
It may sound crazy, re-electing the same people that caused the crash, but that's exactly what happened. Here we have a true multiparty system due to a party-list voting system (it's not unbiased by region - people in Vestfirðir for example have twice the voting power per person as those in Reykjavík - but it's not as unbalanced as the US electoral college). The left was heavily divided into many parties while the right was heavily dominated by just two. Many of the left parties didn't meet the threshold to get any parlimentarians, so their votes were thrown away.
But it's not just that, because the right really did win a small majority of the general vote as a whole.
(Credit: MBL)
Part of it was due to people being upset with the fact that we hadn't recovered that well from our financial crisis. It shouldn't be a shock that we hadn't, given it's scale, and the concept of putting the foxes back in charge of the henhouse sounds ridiculous, but you know how people are sometimes. And of course, Framsóknarflokkurinn (the Progress Party), in true form, pulled out their standard strategy of introducing a last minute "election gimmick".
It's really a brilliant strategy on their part, they've taken to doing it every election. They usually poll terribly, with people having been burned by their absurd policies time and time again. But they keep a low profile, letting everyone get mad at everyone else, and then at the last minute (a couple weeks before the election) they introduce some sort of massive policy proposal, generally some form of "We're going to give you tons of money and you won't ever have to pay for it, not EVERS!". They give it enough time for people to get familiar with what they propose to do, but not enough time for proper analysis to be done and thus for the public to get to realize, "If you try to do this, it either won't work at best, or it'll bankrupt the country at worst". And they present it with such gusto, with relentless optimisim, that they manage to sell the concept.
The previous election (pre-crash) the gimmick had been to have the government guarantee to loan anyone 90% of their home loan - in their plan, an individual would only need to find a private loans for 10% of the cost. Brilliant way to both get votes in a growing economy, and of course, to later ensure a housing loan crisis of unprecedented proportions. This last time, however, it was an amazingly effective promise of "personal debt reduction". The government is going to pay off your debts! And you won't have to pay a single króna! Like, not EVERS! Banks will pay for it for you!
(crickets chiping)
So, they pulled off their standard perfectly-timed poll spike:
... and joined their traditional conservative partners Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn (the Independence Party) in taking control of the government.
The first thing that they did was to gut one of the best achievements of the left-center government: a large tax on the super-wealthy fishing barons ("veiðigjald"). This massive income had promised to not only pay for continuing our social safety net despite the economy, but even presented the possibility of expanding it. About 75% of the public polled support for it. But this was to be the first real taste of how much the new government gave a rat's arse about public opinion.
(Credit: DV)
With the loss of the income of the veiðigjald plus an already absurd debt-repayment concept (which, when you look at the details, basically amounts to a regressive wealth transfer, as those who took the largest, riskiest loans stand the most to gain), you'd think they'd back off on it. But of course, they didn't. Instead, they went full force on gutting the government to an amazing degree.
An election promise to increase funding for the national hospital "strax" (immediately)? Well, of course that was thrown out, with the brilliant line that "the word 'immediately' is a flexible concept" (you can thank Vigdís Hauksdóttir, the Icelandic version of Sarah Palin, for that one, along with other gems such as how Europe is in famine and Malta isn't a country). Instead of additional funding, we got major cutbacks in the healthcare system, to the point that doctors have now gone on strike, with 96% voting in favor of the strike. This is the first time in history they've ever gone on strike.
Going on strike, what a concept. Because to a degree never before seen, the government has imposed "lögbann" on all kinds of unions who've tried to go on strike to prevent them from doing so, on the grounds of national interest. Which of course completely eliminates all of their negotiating power.
The cuts have hit everywhere. The arts? Cut. Our national public radio service, RÚV? Serious cuts - and now they're talking about selling it outright. This led to a scheduler, Ólafur Páll Gunnarsson, to write:
I'm going to step right up and say it: It's morons like me who are to blame that these nutcases (I'd like to use another word...) are in power in Iceland today. I was promised that my mutant housing loan would be corrected and THEREORE I VOTED FRAMSÓKNARFLOKKURINN in the last election.
...
You may all make fun of me until the end of time. But I honestly believed that which my director and former colleagues at RÚV said. I really believed that this hocus-pocus with the loans and vulture fund and everything was possible. I, and everyone else who voted Framsóknarflokkurinn, didn't consider – at least I didn't consider – that these extremely dangerous people were included in the deal. Fuck me and other idiots like me!
(Credit: RÚV)
Privatization has become the name of the game. One by one they've been trying - and sometimes succeeding - at selling off national assets to industry. Medicine and education are their main targets now. If it sounds like they have a want to imitate America, that's probably a good description, but it's more than that, they're trying to outdo all of the worst aspects of American culture.
For example, let's look at policing and crime. Iceland is usually ranked as the most peaceful countries on earth (no military) and has one of the lowest murder rates per-capita on Earth. Some years there's not a single murder in the country. Rarely have there been more than a couple per year. In the country's entire history, only once - just last year - did the special police forces have to kill anyone. Regular police are unarmed. Totally - no guns, no tasers, no mace, nothing. They're authority figures, not threat figures, and it totally changes the interaction dynamic for the better. They've worked hard on cultivating public respect (they even announce speed traps ahead of time on their Facebook page) and have become one of the most trusted institutions in the country. Of the police, only the Víkingasveit ("Viking Squad") is armed. They're basically a sort of SWAT / anti-terrorist squad, a small number of very highly trained elite. It's an arrangement that has worked out very well to suit the needs of the country.
So of course, that's when the machine guns come in.
The details are still trickling in, but here's what's known so far: behind everyone's backs, the government has been doing their damnedst to turn our coast guard into a veritable navy and turn the police into a version of US police forces on steroids. The Coast Guard has been the agent of their doing this. Since they took power, they've had the Coast Guard secretly smuggle weapons into the country. When I say "smuggle", I don't just mean "hide it from the public", but even "hide it from other parts of the government". NATO secrecy was used to try to hide the acquisitions. The coast guard now has more submachine guns than it has people, as well as 10 shiny-new 1,2 meter long 1300 round-per-minute MG3 machine guns (a type normally fitted to tanks and other military vehicles) as part of a plan to try to arm up the coast guard ships to be able to better handle deployments to conflict zones in the Mediterranean.
(Credit: mac3000)
Part of the smuggle, however, was to be redirected to the police - hundreds of MP5 submachine guns (since they came from the Norwegian army, it's generally assumed that they are the version with the full-auto mode), with the goal of trying to get two guns, one of them a submachine gun, in every police car in the country. These are the same type of gun used in the Elian Gonzales raid.
(Credit: pudge94)
The rate of lies, distortions, and secrecy on this on has set new standards for duplicity. First, they were rightly criticized for spending money on guns while cutting back services and putting new taxes on things like food (ridiculously estimating that the average person only spends $2 per meal). But they responded by saying that the guns were free. FREE! A gift from our good friends in the Norwegian police. Of course, we had to turn to Norway for the truth, who informed us that, first, they're from the military, not the police (Norwegian police don't carry machine guns), and secondly, they're not a gift, they were purchased, for no trivial amount of money. Icelandic officials tried covering their arses, saying that it's normal interaction with Norway, for their accounting purposes, they mark it as a purchase, but they never send the bill. Again, Norway replied that, um, yes, it is a purchase, and the bill is being sent to you.
We didn't find out that the guns were here until they started giving them to the police to practice. And the main government response is to get mad at the media for reporting on it.
Right about now, the bald-faced election lie about how we'd get to vote on whether to hold forward with EU accession negotiations seems trivial by comparison to everything else that's going on. Same with bulldozing a bird nesting ground to make a road that nobody seems to understand the need for. Or Leakgate. I thought I was mad about that, when the ministry of the interior, headed by Hanna Birna, leaked private information about an asylum seeker's personal life as an attempt to discredit him to justify their decision to kick him out of the country. But by comparison, that was just an appetizer...
It's not all puffins and elves in Iceland.
Well, you know, it's at times like these where one turns to other branches of government for counterbalance, like the judicial system in general and Supreme Court in particular. Except that our Supreme Court is terrible. Utterly, utterly horrible.
(Credit: Gísli Svendsen)
Note earlier where I wrote "++"? I was very careful to point out that this was something many people have been saying, rather than something I'm saying, because libel claims to suppress dissent have been running rampant here. Praise be to Athe that we have the European Court of Human Rights to override their repeated and terrible rulings on this front.
Perhaps the most famous was the case of the strip club Strawberries. Strip clubs are illegal here, so of course they reclassified themselves as a "champaigne club", and assert that the girls are unconnected with them, as well as that no prostitution goes on there. An investigative reporter (Erla Hlynsdóttir), however, interviewed several girls who worked there, who she directly quoted as alleging that there was criminal activity there. But because she included quotes from someone else in an article which she couldn't personally prove, she was personally convicted of libel, and had to rely on the ECHR to get the judgment overturned. Journalists keep getting convicted, and it's having a serious effect on what they're willing to risk saying about powerful and wealthy individuals.
The case that made me the maddest was not related to journalists, but to the Gillz case. Egill "Gillz" "Gillzenegger" Einarsson is a TV / radio personality / author / actor / speaker / bodybuilder / musician / you name it, who has repeatedly come across as a serious offender in terms of rape apologism and misogyny. Then he was actually accused of rape. The case was handled horribly, and ultimately the prosecutor decided not to attempt a prosecution, but many people view it as him having gotten away with rape (not like it's diminished his popularity much). So when a woman mentioned offhand on the internet that he had gotten away with rape, without putting in an "I believe that..." caveat, he charged her. And won. And then she was forced to pay a large sum of money to a guy that she - and many other people - thinks got away with rape. A guy who has written referring to women sexually as ílát "containers" (yes, it's as crude of a reference as you think it is) and wrote laughingly about witnessing a guy get raped at a party (joking that he "walked like a penguin" afterwards), among many other disgusting things.
In rape cases, the courts have been generally terrible, and not just in the usual "oh, we don't have enough evidence" manner. The worst case, in my opinion, is where a woman was repeatedly vaginally and anally violated with a finger against her will as part of a multi-person attack on her. The court ruled that it wasn't rape because the purpose wasn't sexual gratification. I mean, SERIOUSLY here?
How bad has the political situation gotten here? I'll put it this way: about 2% of the country has joined a Facebook group insisting that Iceland be returned to Norway and become a Norwegian state.
(Credit: DV)
It's a serious proposal, not meant as a joke or as an attempt to draw attention to other issues. Picture how mad people in the US would have to be to start demanding that the US get returned to Britain because they've so completely given up on changing things from within.
So anyway... go out and vote tomorrow, and work hard to get yourself some good governance elected. But the next time you assume that the political situation must be so much better elsewhere... trust me, we've got issues of our own :)
Lastly, some pictures from the protest today:
Update: At times like these, I'm reminded of the lyrics of two songs (I'll post translations). The first, the more optimistic is traditional, with lyrics from the Icelandic nobel laureate Halldór Laxnes: Maístjarnan (The May Star):
O, how light are your footsteps
And how long I've I've waited for you
There's a spring storm out the window
A cold wind that whines
But I know one star
One star that shines
And now at last you're here
You've come to me
These are difficult times
There are worker struggles
I have nothing to offer
Not a spec which I can give
Except my hope and my life
Whether I wake or sleep
It is this that you gave me
It's all that I have
But this evening the storm dies down
For every working man
And tomorrow shines the May sun
It's their May sun
It's our May sun
Our uniting bond
For you I carry this flag
For the future of the country
The second, is modern - "
Hleyptu mér út úr þessu partýi" (Get Me Out Of This Party):
Get me out of this party
Everything's screwed up here
Get me out of this complicated pantomime
Which never goes anywhere, like "The Good Soldier Svejk"
Let me out with firework smoke
It's not easy to be stuck in this paranormal party
We're like a hotel and our guests are the ideas from everyone else
Some leave and others come later in the day
And new bad ideas always fill in the gaps
We struggle to loan money
For others
To keep up the consumption
And to buy new things
For others
To push forward the expansion
So this endless work
For others
To pay for the party
And you never come up to breathe.
Now someone stands up in the room and says, "But life is so complicated!"
I SAY NO!
Someone calls into the episode and says, "One has to be realistic."
I SAY NO!
"A person needs to take care to not make a mistake and come across poorly in the eyes of others."
NO!
I've had enough of this nonsense. Let's take up a different plan.
Is there anyone out there?
Is there anyone out there?
Is there anyone out there?
Is there anyone out there?
We struggle to loan money
For others
To keep up the consumption
And to buy new things
For others
To push forward the expansion
So this endless work
For others
To pay for the party
And you never come up to breathe.
Now someone'll ring the doorbell and say, "May I lecture you about the truth?"
I SAY NO!
Now I'm going to get attacks that say, "Aren't you going to grow out of this?"
I SAY NO!
"These words are just a bunch of nonsense, there's no sense in it!"
NO!
I've had enough of this nonsense which gets called "sense". Let's take up a different plan.
Is there anyone out there?
Is there anyone out there?
Is there anyone out there?
Is there anyone out there?
Update 2: Speaking of music, I nearly forgot to mention: I'm going to be disappearing for much of a week due to
Iceland Airwaves, probably my favorite event on the annual calender, wherein I'll be attending something like 80 concerts with perhaps 40 bands. Here's to hoping the air quality is somewhat better than it was
this morning (4 nóv) (here's the
warning map for today), because otherwise with my current state plus the level of exertion of nonstop running around town and partying I doubt I'd make it halfway through. #PollutedFirstWorldProblems #IHeartMyAlevoli #ChronicBronchitisSucks #WoooooAirwavesYeaaaaay #ImSuchADork