In the 2008 economic meltdown, Iceland nearly collapsed. Its three banks failed, it's currency lost 50 per cent of its value and in an unprecedented display of anger, usually peaceful Icelanders took to the streets to protest.
But Iceland defied the orthodox economic wisdom of the time—bailouts and slashing government services—and now is on the road to a recovery that the rest of Europe envies.
The hero of the hour and the man almost solely responsible for this remarkable turnaround is the country's president Olafur Grimmson.
By refusing to go along with conventional thinking and by asking the people themselves what they wanted, he set a course for Iceland's remarkable economic recovery.
The “big story” of the U.S. economy is that we have substituted expansion of debt for meaningful increases in productivity.
For the past 30 years, the U.S. economy has become increasingly dependent on explosive debt expansion for its “growth” rather than on meaningful rises in meaningful productivity. Growth is in quotes because growth based on secular increases in productivity–that is, the same investment of labor and capital produces goods and services of greater value–is qualitatively different from “growth” based on a pyramiding of debt.
The most surprising thing about the recent downgrading of nine Eurozone countries by S&P is that anyone is surprised to hear that the government debt of any of these countries is risky!
The eurozone debt crisis returned with a vengeance on Friday as Standard & Poor’s, the credit rating agency, downgraded France and Austria – two of the currency zone’s six triple A rated countries – as well as seven nations not in that top tier, among them Italy and Spain.
S&P, under political fire since it announced a review or eurozone debt in December, gave 14 of 16 countries – including France, Italy and Spain – a negative outlook, which it said meant a one-in-three chance for each country of a further downgrade this year or next.
It seems as though it is only a matter of time before they each fall to bankruptcy, no matter how many bailouts they can muster. It's almost enough to make us change our logo. But, we've always said the euro would fall before the US dollar. The dollar will be the last in what will be a crescendo of currency collapse.
What the students of the Austrian School (aka real economics) have understood since the turn of the 20th century was that this was the inevitable result of the pursuit of the socialist utopia where humans would not have a worry in the world, cared for from cradle to grave by the all knowing state.
The modern Welfare/Warfare state was born in the in late nineteenth-century Imperial Germany under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck – his intention was clear from the outset:
“My idea was to bribe the working classes, or shall I say, to win them over, to regard the state as a social institution existing for their sake and interested in their welfare”
Bet you never saw that quote in your government run schoolbooks. Frideric Howe, an admirer of the german systeml wrote that under that system, “The individual exists for the state, not the state for the individual.”
We are now witnessing the end result of the institutions of bribery and theft that swept the rest of the world in the first half of the 20th century.
Phi Beta Iota: Where the libertarians and the advanced cybernetics, collective intelligence, and systems theory people come together is in the recognition that “management” or “command and control” do not scale. Bottom up agility that can only be achived by having the greatest intelligence “on the edges” is the only means of achieving resilience in complex systems. Those of us who saw the death of the state in 1970's (Richard Falk a leading light) made the cardinal mistake of thinking that something BIGGER was needed–world government. Now we recognize that we must reverse a century of increasingly corrupt centralization of power; that the preconditions of revolution are created by the overconcentration of power, wealth, corruption, and evil.
National Science Board Report: US Losing R&D Jobs To Asia The United States is losing ever more jobs and becoming ever less competitive as our universities are cut back and companies move R&D jobs to Asia. We lost 687,000 high-tech manufacturing jobs lost since 2000. Universities cut back 20% on public research. 85% of growth in R&D employment by American companies occurred abroad.
Is this statistic a watershed mark of our decline into socialism, a totally reasonable outcome from the Great Recession, or, somehow, both things at the same time?
A record-high 49% of the population lived in a household receiving some type of government benefit in the second quarter of 2010, according to Census data reported by the Wall Street Journal. Most of this group received so-called “means tested” benefits like food stamps, subsidized housing or Medicaid. Many are also benefiting from unemployment insurance spending, which has quadrupled since the downturn.
Steven Colbert announced he will form “an exploratory committee for president of the United States of South Carolina”.
New York, NY –The New York Times, in its wisdom, remains irony-challenged and doesn't know what to think about satirist and Comedy Channel host Stephen Colbert's decision to run – for something.
The newspaper of record asks, “Is it a run or [a] comedy riff?”
I guess in Timesland, it can't be both.
It is as if an entertainer running for president or becoming a politician is beyond the pale.
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Ronald Reagan anyone? And what about Arnie Schwarzenegger? Remember him?
In Israel, a popular TV commentator has organised his own party. In Senegal, singer Youssou N'dour has announced his candidacy for the presidency. Years ago in Nigeria, the late Afro-beat king Fela Kuti was being touted as the next black president – until the military cracked down on his ambitions.
So what about Colbert?
. . . . . . .
A political freak show
This has become a spectacle of candidates bouncing back and forth on their principles, and singing patriotic songs when they run out of ideas. You can't even compare with to a circus without demeaning circuses.
Politics has become a joke that someone should tell the New York Times about – with only seven per cent of people having any confidence in Congress, and most politicians lacking respect even if they do draw support in the absence of any credible alternative.
At the same time, there is resentment among some, who feel Colbert is most interested in promoting himself and his show. When I asked well-known South Carolina black activist Kevin Gray about his “campaign”, he sneered and called on him to donate to grassroots organising.
The rest of the world is laughing not only at the politicians, but at a US electorate that seems to be taking the farce seriously.
We don't make this stuff up. The good news first — if Stephen Colberg decides to run for President, he will win if he has We the People Reform Coalition as a foundation.
If Stephen Colbert decided to run for president as a third-party candidate, his performance might not be too shabby: He’d pull in 13% of the vote, Public Policy Polling finds.
Top constitutional law expert Jon Turley notes in a must-read Washington Post article called “We are no longer the land of the free” (I have edited slightly to remove parentheses in several places):
