Friday, April 8, 2011

Iceland Wins Again!

You may recall that some time ago, I wrote of Iceland with some enthusiasm and approval. I believe it was shortly after they elected a professional comedian as mayor of their largest (only?) city, Reykjavik.

Iceland goes from strength to strength, however. When the Icelandic banking system began to smell like a bucket of bad hakarl, the Icelanders didn't permit a massive bullshit bailout. They did NOT authorize a huge transfer of taxpayers (public!) funds to prop up a bunch of (private!) corporations. Nope.

Like the sensible folk they are, they took it on the chin, and let the banks fend for themselves. (Amid considerable rancour. As should indeed have been the case.)

Now they've gone one shining step farther. Not only have they begun prosecuting the people who played fast and loose with the banking system -- they've actually found one of them guilty, and sentenced him to prison. To top it off, before the crash he was actually a permanent secretary in the Icelandic Ministry of Finance.

This is a good thing. Imagine how much better the USAnian situation could have been right now if the American government had shown some stones, and actually arrested the corporate megabastards who financially sodomized their entire nation!

But they didn't. Instead, they threw something like a trillion dollars of taxpayer monies into the hungry maw of the corporate finance beast - and at last check, Wall Street finance companies were once again paying multi-million dollar bonuses to their executives while the government teeters on the edge of shutdown, and ordinary Americans find themselves without simple things that most of the Western world takes for granted.

Now... if only Iceland would stop harpooning whales and start harpooning American bankers instead!

7 comments:

  1. But...but...that would mean accountability for those earning the mega bonuses by peddling crap finance and credit packages. Funny how a socialist approach to banking bailouts is seen as okay by these free market farnarklers. Cunts. Go Iceland!

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  2. ICELAND!

    ICELAND!!

    ICELAND!!!

    Please also note that Iceland is the only Scandinavian country that fell for the "get rich quick on other people's money" scam that ensnared nations from the USA to Greece.

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  3. ...possibly because unlike the other Scandinavian countries, Iceland has only about 240,000 voting-age people, no oil, very little arable land, and therefore no conceivable way to get rich quickly that DOESN'T involve other people's money?

    Unless the international community moves to a Puffin-backed currency, of course. The Icelanders could do well out of that.

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  4. Greenland's currency is nicknamed "the Puffin." I always presumed it referred some sort of pastry favored by those who live there. Wikipedia, however, describes puffins as birds similar to penguins, which in context makes more sense.

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  5. I loved visiting Iceland. They do however believe only in marrying Icelandics resulting in the only DNA listing in the world..which they sold to Denmark? They are now also exporting their hot water via pipelines. Blue Lagoon...oh, how i'd love to be soaking in there right now. The people are so beautiful I had to return home so I could feel "cute" again...although the inbreeding made some of the tiny wee ones look a bit "odd". the food, fabulous. the countryside, amazing. I would like to go again. Up north is said to be amazingly beautiful and I didn't make it there...

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  6. Hmmm. I didn't know about the deliberate inbreeding programme. That's going to come back and bite them on the arse in a big way.

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  7. Depends on the size of the population and how they manage their breeding programme. But if they are smart they will figure out a way to import new genetic material. No one wants to duplicate the horrors of the British Royal family.

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