Icelanders tell UK & Dutch Governments to Screw Themselves!

I was hoping to find a newspaper somewhere, anywhere declaring solidarity with the people of Iceland against the tyranny of the high-priests of high-finance.  But alas nary a headline could be found stating "We are all Icelanders Now!"

To review, in 2008 all three of Iceland's banks collapsed due to their inability to refinance short-term debt and a concomitant run on deposits by European clients who had sought the supposed advantages of high-interest accounts offered by these banks and their Internet subsidiaries (i.e. Icesave).  The commercial collapse crippled the Icelandic economy and precipitated a severe economic recession that devalued the nation's currency by 90%, contracted GDP by 5.5% within the first six-months of 2009, and has already been estimated to exceed 75% of Iceland's GDP in total cost.  

In what may have become the most obscene misuse of legal authority, the government of the UK used anti-terrorism rules to take control of assets held in Britain by Landsbanki Islands hf.  Stephen Timms, financial secretary to the Treasury, said in Britain's Parliament that "To protect U.K. economic interests the government has frozen the funds and financial assets held by Landbanksi."  When Landsbanki failed, the UK government bailed out its citizens deposits.  However, the UK made it clear that it wanted this money returned from the Icelandic government, despite the fact that it never guaranteed the deposits.

In December 2009, the President of Iceland vetoed a bill, pushed by the UK and Netherlands, that would have effectively placed a usurious burden upon the citizens of Iceland by their European counterparts, for what was effectively bad private investments made by Europeans looking for easy money.  According to the Economist magazine:

The Landsbanki debts alone amount to over €12,000 for each of the country’s 320,000 citizens; total debts are approaching 1,000% of GDP. Such sums would take many decades to repay, and would strangle the economy in the meantime.

In addition, the governments of the UK and Netherlands have made both public and private threats that they were willing to force Iceland off the cliff and into financial oblivion.  The threats have including denying Iceland the opportunity for future EU membership and freezing current IMF loans, unless the citizens of the sovereign nation accepted Treaty of Versailles-like repatriations.  For example, the deal would require each Icelander to pay approximately $135 USD a month for eight years; the equivalent of 25% of an average four-member family's salary.

A referendum at the beginning of this month (March 2010) on the specifics of the debt-repayment scheme was rejected by more than 93% of the Icelandic population.  As the Christian Science Monitor notes:

a large portion of voters viewed the deal as an unfair result of their own government's failure to curtail the recklessness of a handful of bank executives, including those who expanded operations to seduce British and Dutch customers with generous returns from online savings.

Furthermore, another perspective is that Icelanders are convinced that the UK/Dutch duo are acting in bad faith and demanding excessive requirements on a country that provided the chieftains of high-capital exactly what they wanted: banking deregulation, pro-business policies, trans-national mobility of capital, and favorable financial products for European clients.  

What the citizens of the West should be saying is that the blackmailing of the people of Iceland by the dunces who have shown themselves equally inept at running their own economies, is not acceptable.  None of these assholes should be telling anyone what to do with their money.  All these bankers and useless government charlatans who turned a blind eye when the priests of high-capital were doing their dirty deeds need to be hung from a tree for facilitating the greatest economic collapse in human-history.  Instead the media has dismissed the issue as a peripheral item about a small and relatively unimportant country that grew too fast and too big.