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The Icelandic Volcano Erupts (regaining its soul?)
Rebecca Solnit, TomDispatch
Can a Hedge-Fund Island Lose Its Shirt and Gain Its Soul?
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… Iceland is now a country whose currency, the króna, has collapsed, whose debt incurred by banks deregulated in the mid-1990s is 10 times larger than the country’s gross domestic product, and whose people have lost most of their savings and face debts and mortgages that can’t be paid off. Meanwhile, inflation and unemployment are skyrocketing, and potential solutions to the crisis only pose new problems.
The present government may differ from the old, but not as much as the Icelandic people differ from their pre-October selves. They are now furious and engaged, where they were once acquiescent and uninvolved.
Before the crash, Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, the figurehead president of Iceland, liked to compare his tiny society — the island nation has 320,000 people — to Athens. One of my Icelandic friends jokes darkly that, yes, it’s Athens, but not in the age of Socrates and Sophicles; it’s Athens now in the age of anti-governmental insurrection. The Iceland of last summer — I was there for nearly three months — seemed socially poor but materially rich; the Iceland I read and hear about now seems to be socially rich at last, but terrifying poor materially.
Iceland is a harsh, beautiful rock dangling like a jewel on a pendant from the Arctic Circle. Bereft of mineral resources, too far north for much in the way of agriculture, it had some fish, some sheep, and of late some geothermal and hydropower energy and a few small industries, along with a highly literate human population whose fierceness was apparently only temporarily dormant during the brief era of borrowing to spend. The people I’ve talked to since are exultant to have reclaimed their country and a little terrified about the stark poverty facing them.
(8 February 2009)
¡Que se vayan todos! – that’s the global backlash talking
Naomi Klein, The Nation
It’s not just governing elites that the world is rising up against – it’s the entire model of deregulated capitalism
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Watching the crowds in Iceland banging pots and pans until their government fell reminded me of a chant popular in anti-capitalist circles in 2002: “You are Enron. We are Argentina.”
Its message was simple enough. You – politicians and CEOs huddled at some trade summit – are like the reckless scamming execs at Enron (of course, we didn’t know the half of it). We – the rabble outside – are like the people of Argentina, who, in the midst of an economic crisis eerily similar to our own, took to the street banging pots and pans. They shouted, “¡Que se vayan todos!” (“All of them must go!”) – and forced out a procession of four presidents in less than three weeks. What made Argentina’s 2001-02 uprising unique was that it wasn’t directed at a particular political party or even at corruption in the abstract. The target was the dominant economic model: this was the first national revolt against contemporary deregulated capitalism.
It has taken a while, but from Iceland to Latvia, South Korea to Greece, the rest of the world is finally having its ¡Que se vayan todos! moment.
… The pattern is clear: governments that respond to a crisis created by free-market ideology with an acceleration of that same discredited agenda will not survive to tell the tale. As Italy’s students have taken to shouting in the streets: “We won’t pay for your crisis!”
(5 February 2009)
Some questions that come to mind as economies continue to deteriorate. How widespread is this backlash that Naomi Klein describes? Will it accelerate? What could it lead to?
The Nation has a slightly different version of this piece. -BA
Climate Wars
John McGrath, Gristmill
Canada’s public broadcaster, CBC, has just finished airing the three-part series Climate Wars, based on the Gwynne Dyer book of the same name. I haven’t yet finished reading the book, but the thesis is easily summarized: If you thought that the effects of climate change only included withering droughts, torrential storms, and general freaky-deakiness, you’ve missed one of the big ones: anthropogenic mass death, or as the political scientists call it, “war.”
Yup, on top of all the other things we’ll have to worry about in a melting world, there’s the sad fact that we’ll have more and more reasons to kill each other over dwindling water and food supplies. When you consider that the 20th century was bloody enough as economic and industrial opportunities were expanding, the 21st century is looking mighty depressing if you believe that wars can start over resource scarcity.
You can download the podcasts of Parts I, II, and III of Climate Wars here, though I can’t testify as to how long they’ll stay up there. So give it a listen soon. And do check out the book — like I said, haven’t finished it, but it’s excellent so far.
(4 February 2009)
