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[personal profile] jason

My friend lilja sent me this link: Icelanders are NOT terrorists about the Icelandic financial collapse. I’d heard about it for a couple of weeks and that inflation could go over 30% and that all the banks there had collapsed. Iceland, in Financial Collapse, Is Likely to Need I.M.F. Help - NYTimes.com suggests that iceland may have to give up its currency and perhaps even join the EU.

Years ago, one of my students did a study of Newfoundland and Icelandic cod fisheries during the collapse, and I learned a lot from her about the age old fights between Iceland and England, so I wasn’t shocked that England seems to have taken such a drastic step. I can’t find any non-biased description of what’s gone on and why. Iceland bank collapse: The history of the Cod War - financial crisis - Telegraph has a good description of what went on in the past. Strangely enough, England, like Canada, destroyed their fishing industries locally, which was why Iceland protected their own. And Iceland still, last time I checked, had a profitable cod industry, unlike Canada or England.

What cracks me up about this whole economic crisis is that it shows that our capitalist economy is based on ignorance, fear and greed wrapped up in competition, economic theory and politics of growth. So, business people only care about ‘confidence in the market’, i.e. feeling. Why shouldn’t we use other feelings to run an economy? The system’s always been moribund. I remember thinking that back in the ’70s when I argued with my dad over the idiocy of using government money to prop up capitalist systems, saying it was a combination of socialism and theft. I’m an anti-institutionalist anyway, so capitalism and socialism are identical systems of abuse of people for the people who run the system, and who wrap us up in games over which we have no control.

Sure, people can say that we can’t change because we’re so wedded to the system. Fine. Have it your way and get taken to the cleaners over and over while actively supporting the system that’s fleecing you. Isn’t that battered voters syndrome?

Iceland’s situation is dire and tragic. England’s response seems to be mean-spirited panic. Both are the result of the failure of governments to protect people before a crisis, to have leadership, and to ensure that there are reserves for crises. What happens between them seems like what is happening within the US. So, is this what governments are about? They let mean-spirited and tragic things happen because they lacked the leadership to reign in global greed? To be honest, globalism is a process by which individuals and states give up control of their autonomy in the name of greed to the hands of those governed by whim and panic.

October 2013

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