- Note -- Birgitta Jonsdottir is the leader of The
Movement, a group within the Icelandic Parliament which has emerged from
the mass struggle of Icelanders against the financial blackmail brought
to bear against their country by the governments in London and The Hague,
with the backing of the IMF, in the wake of the insolvency of three large
Icelandic banks in the midst of the Lehman Brothers-AIG world financial
panic of September-October2008. Birgitta Jonsdottir is a courageous leader
in the fight for national sovereignty, independence, dignity, and the economic
well-being and future of her country.
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- January 5, 2010 is a historical day for Icelanders. The
Icelandic President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson had a tough decision to make,
and difficult choices to make. To listen to the 23% of the nation that
signed a petition calling on him to put the state guarantee for 5.4 billion
dollars to be paid to the British and Dutch governments to a national referendum.
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- Or to ignore the nation and sign the bill for the government,
after the bill had been passed through the parliament with a narrow vote
on December 30, 2009 after months of acrimonious debate, tainted with secrecy
and dishonesty on the part of the government. Every day throughout the
debate, new information would emerge and documents would leak to local
media or wikileaks.
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- Yesterday, the people of Iceland finally had a chance
to have something to say about their fate, because if the state guarantee
is accepted it will mean that Iceland will become like a third world country,
spending its GDP largely on paying interest on foreign debt. Last summer,
a bill for a state guarantee was passed that had a significant meaning
not only for Iceland, but also for other nations around the world facing
the same problems of private debt being forced on taxpayers.
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- The bill included a reasonable and fair way of handling
the interest and the debt: Icelanders would pay, but only a certain percentage
of their GDP, and if there were to be another financial black hole, they
would not pay during that time. Thus it comes as no surprise that the Dutch
and British governments reacted so swiftly with a condemnation of Iceland's
citizens for having the audacity to think they have the right to exercise
their democratic rights in deciding for themselves what is in the best
economic interests of their nation.
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- Let's also put this debt into perspective: 320.000 people
live in Iceland, each and every person on the island, including children
and the elderly, the disabled and the poor, would have to pay around $30,000
under the bill. The danger if Icelanders will accept this enormous burden
is that the entire welfare system would simply collapse with no money to
run it. On January 5th the Icelandic president had the courage, backed
up by his nation, to place the interest of the people before that of the
banks.
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- Of course there has been an incredible spin by the government
controlled media, attacking the nation and the president for this simple
and fair demand. The UK and Dutch media were also full of misleading news,
saying the nation had demanded not to pay, and that we would become isolated
and there were even suggestions that the British navy should flex its muscles
against this nation which has no military. As if the terrorist act they
imposed on us was not enough during the darkest hour of our crises to bring
us further down!
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- The spin is failing because people around the world are
finally starting to hear our side of the story, and other suppressed nations
have perhaps seen this as a sign that they can also rise up against the
corpocracy in our world where those with the money have as a rule always
won. Let's hope the nation will not been coaxed into fear of isolation
and let's hope the people of the world will join in this experiment of
letting the interest of the peoples rise above the interests of banks,
corporations, and international bullies such as the IMF. We need your support.
I will soon issue a comprehensive report on the entire Icesave saga.
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- Love and rage from Iceland
- Birgitta Jonsdottir
- Party group chairman for The Movement in the Icelandic
Parliament
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- Documentation: I append links to the files about Icesave
that were leaked to wikileaks, and which show how the EU member states
blackmailed Iceland into the same corner the government helped push into
by accepting the Icesave bill. This file also contains letters between
the main financial adviser to the Iceland Finance Minister and Mark Flanagan
of the IMF:
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- http://file.wikileaks.org/leak/icesave-eu7.pdf
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