Icelandic Court Rules: Wikileaks Will Get Contributed Credit Card Money

New submitter mordur writes "An Icelandic District Court has ordered the payment processing company Valitor to immediately reopen the merchant account (Icelandic original) of DataCell and start processing credit card payments for the Wikileaks organization. Noncompliance on behalf of Valitor will result in daily fines of ISK 800.000 (approx. USD 60.000). Under pressure from the USA based international credit card companies, Valitor stopped all service to DataCell, and thus to Wikileaks, just hours after having started processing payment in July 2011. The court found that Valitor had failed to prove that the processing of payments for Wikileaks was contrary to the business policies of the international credit card companies, nor had the company proved that DataCell was in breach of the service agreement between the companies by serving Wikileaks."

Comments

Good decision by Icelandic court

[ACTA sucks]

European countries always seem to have the most common sense in their rulings. USA is out of reality and Asia keeps to their own stuff. EU shines.

I think we should let the US companies and government to know that they can't do shit like this to us Europeans by banning Visa, Mastercard and Google from operating in Europe. Remember, we do have our own credit card processing networks too - lets use them instead. That way your privacy is better too, as your data isn't handed to US companies and therefore US government has no access to them.

Re:Good decision by Icelandic court

[Maquis196]

Well it's not all milk and honey over here. Our airlines ARE supposed to give data to the US government if the airline has anything to do with America. I'm in the UK and were bow down to most US requests for people or information.

Iceland isn't EU (although they are attempting to join afaik), they just happen to be an awesome country that seems to care about such things. They must have been doing a good job, my goverment called them terrorists once for letting their banks fail (oh no, not the banks!).

This might have been feeding a troll but wanted to set a small record straight :)

Re:Good decision by Icelandic court

[dkleinsc]

Iceland isn't exactly European. I mean, it was settled by Vikings back in the day, and Norway has occasionally over the course of history tried to take charge of it, but generally speaking the Icelanders have done their own thing. They aren't part of the EU or the Euro, for instance.

But yeah, 3 cheers for the world's oldest democracy!

Re:Good decision by Icelandic court

[Anonymous Coward]

The Internet operates world-wide, as do banks and credit card companies - we consumers have choices. Companies which comply with the freedom killing orders of fascist governments should be boycotted. As the recent Barclay's bank disclosures prove, all of the major banks are run by crooks, who operate in collusion with each other. Perhaps Iceland is the only country who's government refuses to allow it's banks to collude with the rest of the world's banks. When will the countries in Europe demonstrate they are democracies, and stop the democracy killing abuse by their own banks?

Re:Good decision by Icelandic court

[CanHasDIY]

Forcing a company to do business with someone they don't want to. Yeah, wonderfully enlightened position EU

from the summary you clicked to get to this page:

Under pressure from the USA based international credit card companies, Valitor stopped all service to DataCell and, thus to Wikileaks, just hours after having started processing payment in July 2011.

In other words, Valitor did indeed want to do business with them, but were strongarmed by US credit card companies into violating their contract with DataCell.

Must be troll...

Re:Good decision by Icelandic court

[ACTA sucks]

Europe != EU

Re:Good decision by Icelandic court

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah the bank thing was hilarious.

"We demand the government reimburse us for the money held in failed Icelandic banks!"

"Why? the debt was not backed by the full faith and credence of the government; that's why the interest rates were so high"

"HERP DERP I DON'T CARE GIVE ME ALL YOUR MONEY!"

Re:Good decision by Icelandic court

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Iceland actually totally fucked up at banking not so long ago. However, that may have actually had a salubrious effect. In the US and EU, the fuckuppery of the banking sector has been massive; but small enough that shovelling bushels of money at the people responsible can be advanced as a 'reasonable' proposal. In the case of Iceland, the scale of the meltdown of the imaginary money economy was so enormous that even the most overtly delusional had difficulty advocating the 'just bail out the Experienced Experts who got us here' theory of repair...

Re:Good decision by Icelandic court

[SteveFoerster]

Don't get me wrong, I love Iceland, but I believe that the world's oldest democracy is San Marino, which has been a republic since its founding in A.D. 301.

Re:Good decision by Icelandic court

[dkleinsc]

Thank you for the correction, sir. You are a gentleman and a scholar. Or at least a scholar.

Re:Good decision by Icelandic court

[ceoyoyo]

A bunch of banks that happened to be in Iceland, but not backed by the government, made some promises they couldn't keep. A lot of people, mostly in the UK, fell for those promises, and when everything went belly up they demanded that the Icelanders make good on them, which would have essentially bankrupted the country. The Icelanders felt that wasn't fair, and had the wherewithal to tell the banks, the investors, and the countries that were backing them, to go to hell.

Re:Good decision by Icelandic court

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, it sucks when those damned socialist courts force you to honor your contracts, eh?

Re:Good decision by Icelandic court

[Anonymous Coward]

Scandinavian peninsula is in Europe, it consists of Sweden, most of Norway and some parts of Finland. Iceland is an island in the middle of Atlantic ocean which is halfway split between European and American plates.

Re:Good decision by Icelandic court

[CowTipperGore]

This might have been feeding a troll...

Let's see. Brand new account, other posts are pro-Microsoft, and he worked a slam on Google into a post about Iceland and Wikileaks. We have a winner!

Re:Good decision by Icelandic court

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Indeed. My point was just that(in terms of bank bad debts vs. GDP) Iceland experienced the largest bubble of financial chicanery of any economic region(and, to the best of my knowledge, any point in human history) which helped remove the "zOMG, we have to bail out the banks or Worse Things Will Happen!!!!" faction from serious consideration.

In the US, for instance, the government was only strictly on the hook for the (relatively small, and largely not advantageous to the bankers) FDIC-insured accounts. Minor matters like, oh, All of AIG were 'voluntary' decisions. By virtue of being totally and absolutely fucked, per capita, Iceland managed to make these sorts of 'responsible' responses look entirely insane, while the US, EU, and similar made the same basic mistakes(and, let's not forget, embraced moral hazard like it was going out of style); but managed to carry them through because their costs were simply excessive, rather than overtly ruinous, per capita.

Re:Good decision by Icelandic court

[shentino]

There's nothing wrong with backing banks as long as all we do is keep them from taking their depositors down with them.

The problem with the US system is that we prop up zombies that don't deserve to stay in business.

But protecting innocent depositors is a good thing.

Re:Good decision by Icelandic court

[Catbeller]

And so far, Iceland is doing just fine, while Ireland, for instance, did what it was told.

Ireland balanced its budget, and then had to bail out the banks and is now in a cost-cutting death spiral, while being told all that nasty social spending caused it all and has to stop. Milton Friedman for the win there. Thieves take all.

Iceland for the win. Doing what you are told is not, despite what vast numbers of human instinctively believe, the right thing to do.

Re:Good decision by Icelandic court

[Rei]

Lol, yeah. I like to simply view the British "losses" in the Icesave situation as a late payment for all the cod the British stole from Icelandic waters.

"Losses" is in quote because the banks actually are, in fact, paying off their minimum insured obligations, and are on track to finish paying them off within the next year or so (they're already half done). The Icelandic government took on huge amounts of debt, in no small part to help prop up the banks and get them back on their feet so they'd be worth enough to sell off enough asset value to do this. And the British and Dutch are still suing us in the EFTA. Gee, thanks. We appreciate the whole mackerel thing, too. How dare Iceland and the Faroes fish a non-negligable portion of a fish that does most of its growing in Icelandic and Faroese waters? Such insolence, I know. Best to pressure the EC to slap sanctions on us for "overfishing" (aka, taking a non-negligible portion of the catch) when you refuse to negotiate.

Remember all that electricity you're wanting to buy?...

Re:Good decision by Icelandic court

[KhabaLox]

The hillarious part is if you put all your money in a bank (and not just the couple hundred you got from working at mcdonalds but actual sizeable amounts of money) youd want your money back as well.

Well, sure. But the point is (based on my reading of his post - I'm not sure if it's 100% correct as far as the terms/agreements Icelandic banks had with their depositors) that the Icelandic banks were not insured by the Icelandic government, and therefore offered an above-market rate of interest. Depositors (I'm guessing other banks from the EU and US) put there money in to gain that high return, then when the bank failed looked to the Icelandic government to bail them out.

Bottom line, if you invest your money (and depositing money in a bank is an investment that nets you a certain, stated, return at a certain level of risk) you bear a certain risk of losing it.

Re:Good decision by Icelandic court

[Rei]

Like the people who had their money in Lehman Brothers? Sorry, but there's a difference between a regular bank account and an investment account. Icesave was a program predominantly for retirement funds and municipal investment funds. It wasn't a checking account program.

http://web.archive.org/web/20080225152959/http://icesave.co.uk/legal.html: "Deposits made with Icesave are protected under the Icelandic Deposit Guarantees and Investor-Compensation Scheme (details of this scheme may be obtained from www.landsbanki.com/legislation). Payments under this scheme are limited to the first €20,887 (or the sterling equivalent) of your total deposits held with us. You have further protection from the UK Financial Services Compensation Scheme (www.fscs.org.uk). Payments under this scheme are limited to 100% of the first £35,000 of all your deposits with us, less any payments made under the Icelandic scheme. This means that the maximum claim amount as at October 2007 is £35,000. The total financial protection given to you under both schemes is no less than you would receive if your deposit was only protected by the UK scheme. Further details about both schemes can be obtained from our web site or by post, on request."

Following the Icelandic side's link for the fund that backed the deposits: Hmm, nowhere in here do I see anything about government backing. Do you?

The fund went bankrupt. The British tried to force the government to pick up the bill. Which is frankly BS. The accounts were never guaranteed by the government, you can't make the government suddenly start guaranteeing them *after* a crash.

Re:Good decision by Icelandic court

[Rei]

Correct. Iceland is Nordic, not Scandinavian.

People here need to read more Scandinavia and the World (a webcomic that's both funny *and* educational!)

Re:Good decision by Icelandic court

[CanHasDIY]

That's not what Valitor says.

You must be a native Icelandic speaker; I tried sticking the page into Google Translate and it's damn near un-readable:

Representative Olafur Sigurdsson, owner of Data Cell, argues, however, that links the payment gateway has been submitted with the application so it could open it. Otherwise would not be possible to open it. Valitor would in turn mean that the company had simply hidden their partnership, but a little before closing the Danish credit card company Teller on all trade with Data Cell for their cooperation with Wikileaks. The reason they said at the time a fear of damaging their business with business cards.

Translate - Fail.

Re:Good decision by Icelandic court

[Rei]

Iceland is not doing "just fine", and Iceland largely did what it was told by the international community (including becoming the IMF's new poster child) - just not what the British and Dutch demanded it do. There's a lot of myths about Iceland going around (which Krugman gives a wink and a nudge to by posting grossly misleading stats). Trust me on this one, I live in Iceland. The country got slammed, and is far from a "happily ever after" story. The only reason we're growing faster than most of Europe is that we went a lot further down than most of Europe, earlier. It'd be practically impossible not to.

And I say this as someone who supports the Samfylkingin / Vinstri Grænn coalition. Which is probably going to get pummeled by Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn (the conservatives, who caused this mess) in the next election. :P

Re:Good decision by Icelandic court

[Anonymous Coward]

From the Wikipedia article you linked:
"In 1972, Iceland unilaterally declared an Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) extending beyond its territorial waters, before announcing plans to reduce overfishing."

From http://www.britains-smallwars.com/RRGP/CodWar.htm:
"The 200-mile economic exclusion zone was supported by various coastal states, including Great Britain, at UN conferences on the Law of the Sea, although it was not law yet."

So Iceland decides to declare that all that territory belongs to them, and somehow it is the British in the wrong? EEZ was not part of law yet so you had no right to do so, end of. You would have had had a right to do so after the EEZ law was passed, but you didn't wait. British ships were within their rights to fish there at the time, and you were the aggressor attempting to stop them. It's hardly surprising and completely understandable that we used our military to protect against your aggression.

Furthermore, even if we were somehow responsible for the Cod Wars, do you really think the cost would add up to the $5 billion you owe to Britain and the Netherlands? The Cod Wars were a minor spat, concerning a single industry that really isn't that important. I personally doubt the cost added up to $100 million, let alone $5 billion.

Past problems aside, if someone lends you money you owe it to them to pay it back. Especially if the countries lending it are currently hard up themselves. No amount of rationalizations will make not paying the money back the right thing to do.

Re:Good decision by Icelandic court

[Rei]

First off, there were *three* cod wars, in case you forgot. After overfishing your waters (and the waters of several other countries - I've found the Irish people I've met have a lot to complain about on this front, too), you sent trawlers to overfish other people's waters. Iceland's among them, but hardly alone. You started doing that not long after you *invaded* and occupied Iceland, a neutral country, with one of the most bungling invasions ever, in order to prevent a nonexistent Nazi plan which existed only in your leaders' minds. But I digress. You started fishing as little as *4 kilometers* from Iceland's shore, meaning that Icelanders could sit there and easily watch your trawlers overfishing Iceland's waters. The first Cod War pushed you back to 12, which is still easily in sight of the shore, overfishing Iceland's waters with even more ships involved. The second Cod War pushed you back to what was then the international limit of 50km. However, by the 1970s, many nations had already began asserting 200km exclusive economic zones - in fact, the first ones were claimed in the 1940s. By the 1970s, they had become standard. Heck, the groundwork for the concept of the EEZ began from work from UK in *1939* with the Panama declaration, and then in 1942 concerning the Gulf of Paria. The UK claimed exclusive economic access to a wide range of area outside their territorial waters in 1964. And even if all this wasn't the case, it's ridiculous that Britain felt that it had the god-given right to trawl up the lion's share of the fish in waters right next to Iceland - let alone ignoring how much you were overexploiting the stocks (something Iceland immediately reversed). Iceland's actions were upheld by the International Court of Justice in 1974 (United Kingdom vs. Iceland, 1974 ICJ Rep 3, 75).

You were saying?

do you really think the cost would add up to the $5 billion you owe to Britain and the Netherlands?

Well, let's see... Iceland's fisheries are worth about $1.5 billion a year, and you were exploiting them from the 1940s to the 1970s... so no, you still owe us a damn lot more. Perhaps *you* should vote on a repayment plan.

concerning a single industry that really isn't that important.

Once again, the world revolves around you. Yeah, not that important for you. It's only 40% of our entire economy. Which was the crux of the whole problem.

Past problems aside, if someone lends you money you owe it to them to pay it back.

Companies go bankrupt. Deal with it. Just ignoring that there was clearly no government guarantee, who in their right mind expects a government backing on a 6% interest rate? What's next, do you want us to ensure that anyone who buys junk bonds to get their money back if they loses value? Full reward, no risk, is that the plan?

Especially if the countries lending it are currently hard up themselves

Oh yeah, really hard up compared to Iceland, which had just had the per-capita equivalent of 300 Lehman Brothers fail at once.

Re:Sixty Bucks a Day?

[Talderas]

You forgot a zero, but it's a pretty light punishment. I mean... all they need to do is spend about $30 and get two PLEXes and sell those for about 800,000,000 ISK. That'll keep the fines going for 1,000 days so it works out to about $0.03 USD per day.

Iceland, for the win

[circletimessquare]

The 2008 crisis hacked them worse than the USA and Europe. Now, 4 years later, they are riding high, and Europe and the USA are still muddling through. How? Why?

For a country that four years ago plunged into a financial abyss so deep it all but shut down overnight, Iceland seems to be doing surprisingly well.

It has repaid, early, many of the international loans that kept it afloat. Unemployment is hovering around 6 percent, and falling. And while much of Europe is struggling to pull itself out of the recessionary swamp, Iceland’s economy is expected to grow by 2.8 percent this year. ...

But during the crisis, the country did many things different from its European counterparts. It let its three largest banks fail, instead of bailing them out. It ensured that domestic depositors got their money back and gave debt relief to struggling homeowners and to businesses facing bankruptcy.

“Taking down a company with positive cash flow but negative equity would in the given circumstances have a domino effect, causing otherwise sound companies to collapse,” said Thorolfur Matthiasson, an economics professor at the University of Iceland. “Forgiving debt under those circumstances can be profitable for the financial institutions and help the economy and reduce unemployment as well.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/world/europe/icelands-economy-is-mending-amid-europes-malaise.html?pagewanted=all

We, in Europe, and the USA, have much to learn from Iceland about how to survive a crippling financial crisis.

Re:Iceland, for the win

[BlueStrat]

We, in Europe, and the USA, have much to learn from Iceland about how to survive a crippling financial crisis.

Yeah, like NOT putting the very people responsible for the bank's failures in powerful government positions.

Obama Administration: Deputy Director, National Economic Council
Former Goldman Sachs Title: Financial Analyst

Obama Administration: Chairman, Presidentâ(TM)s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board
Former Goldman Sachs Title: Board Member (Chairman, 1990-94; Director, 2005-)

Obama Administration: Commissioner, Commodity Futures Trading Commission
Former Goldman Sachs Title: Partner and Co-head of Finance

Obama Administration: Undersecretary for Economic, Energy and Agricultural Affairs, State Department
Former Goldman Sachs Title: Vice Chairman, Goldman Sachs Group

Obama Administration: Ambassador to Germany
Former Goldman Sachs Title: Head of Goldman Sachs, Frankfurt

Obama Administration: Chief of Staff to Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geitner
Former Goldman Sachs Title: Lobbyist 2005-2008; Vice President for Government Relations

Obama Administration: Advisor to Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geitner
Former Goldman Sachs Title: President and Chief Operating Officer (1999-2003)

They should just change the name from the "White House" to "Goldman Sachs House". Yeah, I'm sure they'll do the right thing to protect regular US taxpayers.

Strat

Re:Iceland, for the win

[wierd_w]

As much as it sounds like a tinfoil hat conspiracy theory, the actions of BoA, Chase, and pals actively forclosing on people IN GOOD STANDING, and in some cases, WHO DIDN'T HAVE LOANS to begin with, are quite suspicious.

I understand that one shouldn't attribute to malic what can be explained by incompetence, but the "incompetence" defense doesn't mesh with the "leading experts" line of thought behind the bailouts.

What the banking industry and the US govt. Plan to gain by taking the foundation out from under the house of cards like that, I have no clue.

I suppose it is entirely possible that both the banking industry AND the US govt. Are completely incompetent in these matters, and this is the result of a trainwreck double-fail, but that seems highly unlikely when you examine how the bank and loan industry has managed to nearly dominte the world economy, and the US Govt does all manner of complex legal and economic wrangling.

So far though, it seems as if the banks and the world govts have been operating on this plan:

1) treat low quality debt like an asset.
2) sell debts as if they were assets, and amass too much debt.
3) cause a financial crisis.
4) get lots of interest free taxpayer money.
5) forclose on everyone, including people without debts
6) ???????
7) Profit!

From the bank and loan side, the one-time injecton of huge amounts of capitol allows them to make a boom-growth of high interest investments, at leas it does here in the US. (A bank can inflate its hard currency store 900% in loans and investments per the fractional reserve rules.) The banks can quickly return the hard injected cash, because they can treat their interest payments as the new hard currency reserve, and keep their inflation. For the banks, this is clearly candy on a plate, and returning the injected money is easy.

[Analogy: the fed gives the bank a 100$ bill. They pop it in the copier and make 9 copies of that note, which they then loan out to people. People make payments with real notes on the debts, and the bank uses those payments to replace the injected bill. It then returns the injected bill, and keeps the loan income.]

As such, arguments that the banks "paid the money back" are a red herring. The exact same outcome would have happened in terms of banking power increase and currency inflation if the fed had just printed trucks of money and dropped it into the economy. The value of the "loaned" money was inflated 900% before being returned, with the banks keeping the inflated portion.

This is one of the (many!) Reasons that the dollar tanked obscenely in the world currency market.

The banks are then left with inflated notes, and new debts that should be better quality ones to improve their revinue stream, but they need to consolodate assets, so they start forclosures. They need hard assets quickly, because the cash injection was just a temporary high in the face of the real problem, which was outstanding and un-collectable debts. The banks conveniently sell a lot of this bogus debt to the government, but also embark on a radical spree of foreclosure frenzy. I would hazard that this was not accidental, and that they looked for every opportunity to acquire hard assets, including cooking payment histories to make otherwise profitable debtors default on their properties. With the huge size of the cash injection propping them up, they can afford to deflate their holdings by doing so. By selling the forclosed properties, they can rapidly regrow their loan industries, bigger and stronger than before.

The problem is the collateral damage.

People are now disrupted from equitable banking relationships, now have bogus credit ratings, have outstanding bills to pay because of new bankruptcy laws, and are still getting a payrate proportioned for the old level of currency inflation. Essentially, the US govt (and any govts that followed our example

Re:Iceland, for the win

[Catbeller]

People in Iceland, like the USA, were in danger of losing their homes due to circumstances beyond their control.

The US yakked about "moral hazard" and let the banks take everyone's homes.

Iceland spent a tiny bit and let people keep their homes.

Now the US has millions of disillusioned, unhomed people whose collective demand has pumped rental costs to unaffordable heights, so they are screwed both ways.

In Iceland, people remained in their homes, found new jobs, and everyone is happy except the Friedmanites and Randites. The moral hazard was understood differently. In Iceland, you say, they believed the real moral hazard was the societal breakdown caused by people ruined through no fault of their own, but by the actions of foreign bankers - so they made sure it didn't happen.

In the USA, it is our firm economic religion that people's failures are their own, and them's the breaks. Except rich bankers of course, who made out fine, own everyone's abandoned homes, and are about to make an even bigger killing when the value goes up and they can unload. The moral hazard is never the rich man's, always the schmuck's. 19th century plantation capitalism; freedom is for the owners, not the serfs. You wanna be free, get rich, lazy parasites...

Re:Iceland, for the win

[Svartalf]

More like an Oligarchy...

Re:Iceland, for the win

[BlueStrat]

that's disgusting

so much for meritocracy. more like plutocracy

Then why is it that I get modded down for suggesting that OWS should be protesting in Washington D.C. instead of Wall St. NYC? If OWS wanted the Wall St. fat-cats to see their protest, they need to be where they're at. The WH.

And, why are you promoting an anti-TEA Party movie, when they've been pretty much the only ones in the US pointing stuff like this out and trying to hold them to account?

Puzzled it makes me, yes.

Strat

Re:Iceland, for the win

[Rei]

Figured this sort of tripe would run rampant in this article. Let's go down the list.

1) Surprisingly well? So that's what you call a housing bubble, money going half as far (in a country that imports most goods it consumes), 30% across-the-board austerity cuts, and currency restrictions which prevent you from buying foreign currencies in any sort of quantity so that you can't escape inflation.

2) "many of the international loans" - no, just the first set of payments. Most of the debt is still quite outstanding.

3) Unemployment rate: First, a quick introduction to Icelandic unemployment figures. This is a brief graph, but what you can see on it and what I'll describe extends before and after it: A) note that unemployment *always* drops in the summer. Farm work strongly peaks in summer here. Summer is the tourist season (tourism being one of the country's biggest industries. Summer is the travel season (all the biggest festivals are in the summer). Etc. So it's rather a "duh" thing that unemployment is dropping in the summer. B) Iceland has long had (much longer than in the graph) an *abnormally low* unemployment rate, typically between 1 and 3 percent, but sometimes even lower than 1%. So the current figures are *way* over what is normal here.

4) Iceland fell way further and earlier than most of Europe. It'd be practically a miracle to *not* grow faster.

5) Iceland didn't officially bail out the banks, but it did so indirectly, via using a lot of the money from the aforementioned loans to shore up the cost of restructuring the banks.

6) Paying off Icelandic depositors may lose us the EFTA Icesave case. :P Not saying it was a bad choice, but it could have serious negative consequences.

7) The "debt relief to struggling homeowners" (wow, can you make that sound any more like a poltical talking point?) was due to one of the screwed up things about the Icelandic banking system that almost no other developed country on Earth has: foreign-currency-indexed loans. Which means that when the króna fell to half its value, principals owed *doubled*. These types of loans were illegal to grant in the first place, and eventually a court ruled as such. The government responded by meeting the ruling wit the most pro-bank option possible, converting some of the loans to standard loans at higher rates, within limits.

BTW, homeowners with non-indexed loans here not only pay high rates, but also have to pay a (not cheap) insurance on their loan against currency spikes. FYI to all of you people out there who don't live here who keep talking about how Iceland needs to stay on the króna, it rather sucks having a weak currency.

I can go into the rest of the article, but I figured I'd just do the part you quoted.

And this isn't to say that I disagree with all the steps Iceland's taken. Actually, I agree with most of them. But it's not the rosy picture that the foreign press wants to paint, looking for some happy-populist-utopia to lead the way out of the crisis. Hell, Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn, the conservatives, the ones who caused this mess, are leading in the polls right now, having more support than *both* of the parties in the current coalition combined.

Re:Iceland, for the win

[Rei]

In Iceland, people remained in their homes, found new jobs, and everyone is happy except the Friedmanites and Randites.

Keep dreaming.

(I live in Iceland).

Re:Iceland, for the win

[Rei]

-1, Not At All Related To The Truth

People like that need to stop reading leftist blogs (full disclosure: I waver between calling myself "liberal" and "socialist") and even foreign reporting (which is sometimes almost as bad) and read the Icelandic press directly. Don't worry, there's English language sources.

Re:Iceland, for the win

[BlueStrat]

Do you think when OWS complains about the proverbial "1%", they're somehow saying they support this collusion?

The people in the WH *ARE* the "1%"!! There's no "collusion" here, because they're the _same people_, in many cases, the *exact same people* that created the mess! They just changed office location and job title.

It doesn't matter whether you believe it's the "evil corporations/1%" or "evil big government" that's the problem, the solution to either/both starts with reining in government power.

If you believe it's the "evil corporations/1%", well, how do you think they make us comply? The corporations and ultra-rich use the power of corrupt, over-reaching, intrusive, and abusive government to exercise their power. If you believe it's "evil big-government", then of course government power is their tool.

Can't we at least agree that handing the government more power is a bad idea? Because no matter which side you're on, that just gives more power to your (our) enemies.

You'll never succeed trying to fix things from the "1%/corporations" side using government to prosecute them. How can you use the system of a corrupt government to prosecute those they are co-defendants with? You get what we've seen repeated ad nauseum over the last number of decades; "The "Justice" Show" where show trials are held, TV pundits bloviate, stern-sounding soundbites played, a few scapegoats are sacrificed, and afterwards everybody goes back to pretty much the way it's been without much really changing.

Strat

no court order originally?

[gl4ss]

no court order originally?

I wasn't paying attention when they got banned, but was under the impression that there was at least one court somewhere that had banned them from receiving the money, because otherwise visa/amex/etc are targets to be sued ? sure, they're private organizations.. but they're let to move money only because governments let them and usually that includes that they don't discriminate randomly - which is why these participant organizations are under stress to be fined if they don't comply.

I guess that shows to Valitor & other regional processors that they'd better ask for the fucking permits and court orders first, like nz cops.

So. How to contribute and not suffer retribution?

[Catbeller]

It's a fact that the US has targeted anyone who contributes to Assange, Manning or Wikileaks. They mess with you at the borders, taking your stuff away and questioning you, making it damned clear that you are their bitch for the rest of your life.

So how do we help Assange, Wikileaks and Manning without effectively losing citizenship? I am not overstating this. They will fuck with you for the rest of your life, in countless ways, untraceable to them. And no court will stop them, given that they don't give a fuck what the courts think. Secret police don't have rules.

Re:Choices

[onyxruby]

Responding to AC, but I'm on lunch break and have a moment to swat a bug. My post isn't misleading at all, it's rather direct, the fact that you disagree with it doesn't make it misleading, it just means you have an different opinion. It's the Internet, it's okay to have different opinions. Heck, being the Internet you'll even find posts of mine that are negative of banks.

I am certainly no friend of wikileaks, your right about that. I have spent a fair part of my career doing things like safegaurding private data like medical records, financial data, private student data and all kinds of other data that you don't want leaked. Funny that, someone who has a career in keeping private things private doesn't support leaking private things into the public. But hey, who am I to say whether or not your /private/ data gets to be leaked onto the Internet for everyone to look at.

Re:fuckin love iceland

[Rei]

Not true, fair troll, not true! "The banks" were not involved in the decision making process. The British and Dutch governments bailed out their citizens, and then demanded Iceland compensate them. The three primary players involved have been Iceland, the UK, and the Netherlands. The next biggest players have been the EU (in particular, the EFTA court system, but the EU has filed an amicus curae-type filing) and the IMF.

FYI, I live in Iceland.

Tynwald: world’s oldest parliament, 1000+ ye

[Nivag064]

http://www.iomguide.com/tynwaldhill.php
[...]
In 1979, Tynwald celebrated its Millennium under the watchful eye of Her Majesty the Queen, Lord of Man. The Queen returned to preside over the ceremony in 2003, a year after her Golden Jubilee. The Isle of Man is not part of UK, but remains a Crown Dependency.
[...]


http://www.gov.im/mnh/heritage/story/tynwald.xml
[...]
The World’s Oldest Continuous Parliament.

The most enduring relic of Scandinavian culture in the Isle of Man is the Island’s parliament, Tynwald. After 1,000 years the world’s oldest continuous parliament normally sits in Douglas, but still meets once a year at midsummer on the Tynwald Hill at St. Johns. This was not the only meeting place for Tynwald, and like others it was given legitimacy by its closeness to a burial ground - in this case one of the oldest and most extensive on the Island - and allowed the living to be associated with land owned or administered by their forbears.

But Tynwald is more relevant to the living than the dead. It is a vital social institution, and, after all the past conquests and re-conquests, today it is consolidating the independence of the Isle of Man.
[...]