Icelanders Overthrow Government and Rewrite Constitution After Banking Fraud-No Word From US Media
Las Vegas Guardian Express
Rebecca Savastio December 2, 2013
Can you imagine participating in a protest outside the White House and forcing the entire U.S. government to resign? Can you imagine a group of randomly chosen private citizens rewriting the U.S. constitution to include measures banning corporate fraud? It seems incomprehensible in the U.S., but Icelanders did just that. Icelanders forced their entire government to resign after a banking fraud scandal, overthrowing the ruling party and creating a citizen’s group tasked with writing a new constitution that offered a solution to prevent corporate greed from destroying the country. The constitution of Iceland was scrapped and is being rewritten by private citizens; using a crowd-sourcing technique via social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter. These events have been going on since 2008, yet there’s been no word from the U.S. mainstream media about any of them. In fact, all of the events that unfolded were recorded by international journalists, overseas news bureaus, citizen journalists and bloggers. This has created current accusations of an intentional cover up of the story by mainstream U.S. news sources.
An “iReport” on CNN, written by a private citizen in May 2012, has questioned the reasons why this revolution has not been widely covered in the U.S., suggesting that perhaps the mainstream media is controlled by large corporate interests and thus has been unwilling to report on Iceland’s activities. That report is currently making its way around social media. CNN today placed a statement on its website saying: “We’ve noticed this iReport is being shared widely on Facebook and Twitter. Please note that this article was posted in May 2012. CNN has not yet verified the claims and we’re working to track down the original writer.” It is interesting to note that CNN’s European version, CNN Europe, already covered the story of the protests and the government’s resignation, leading many to question why CNN would now need to “look into” the claims.
Besides CNN Europe’s own coverage of the scandal, the events in Iceland were widely covered by international media and are easily verified by a simple search on Google which leads to a variety of reputable international news sources that ran numerous stories on the Icelandic revolution. A whole documentary has been made on the governmental overthrow called Pots, Pans and Other Solutions, and now, the conversation is focused on whether or not the citizens’ actions actually worked to make Iceland a more equitable nation.
To understand the enormity of what happened in Iceland, it’s best to draw parallels between the initial banking fraud that caused Iceland’s economy to collapse and the banking fraud in the U.S. that caused the mortgage crisis six years ago...>more
http://guardianlv.com/2013/12/icelanders-overthrow-government-and-rewrite-constitution-after-banking-fraud-no-word-from-us-media/
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When I returned to this country in the late 60's, after my stint overseas, I and many others took to the streets. Many times. When the shrub entered office and 9/11 happened, the Patriot Act made cowards out of americans. I know what active dissent is, Cointelpro happened in my day, but we DID NOT COWER! Occupy was infiltrated and spied upon, but it has not stopped the movement. NSA,FBI? Shitheads in suits. Yea they can hurt us, kill us, torture us, imprison us but not all people with an open mind, wide open eyes and a conscience can be denied. The civil rights movement proved that. 
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I tried. Please keep us posted when it's back up. It's a GREAT idea that people will get behind, what with Congress having the absolute lowest popularity polls in history.
types here. The spirit is SO pro-Democrat and so progressive. I've learned tons, and I've always considered myself a political junkie.
Have fun. But lurk a lot. Somewhere down each thread is inevitably someone who's laugh-out-loud funny and someone who really, really knows their shit and articulates a stunning analysis.
Enjoy!
In spite of clear popular support, Iceland's new crowd-sourced constitution was recently killed by politicians. An ex-member of the constitutional council sheds some light on what happened - and why there might still be some hope for this unique experiment.
Nevertheless, the referendum was delayed until October 2012. Voter turnout was 49 percent. No less than 67 percent of the electorate declared their support for the bill as well as for its key individual provisions such as national ownership of natural resources (83 percent said Yes) and equal voting rights, meaning one person, one vote (67 percent said Yes). By inviting the voters to accept or reject the bill in toto (specifically, the first question on the ballot was: “Do you want the proposals of the Constitutional Council to form the basis of a legislative bill for a new Constitution?"
as well as its key individual provisions, the parliamentary majority was able to say to the bill’s opponents: Look, the voters support both the bill as a whole and its key provisions. In view of the results, parliament decided to suggest only changes of wording where considered necessary and to abstain from substantive changes (except concerning the church where the voters did not accept the formulation in the bill). The people had spoken.
Further obstacles
The path forward, however, proved tricky. Three of the seven members of the constitutional committee which had been fairly unanimous in its work criticized the bill, unmoved by the result of the referendum, conducting themselves ex post like agents of the parliamentary opposition to the bill. The majority of four is known to support the bill and to respect the result of the referendum. A committee of lawyers asked by parliament to suggest only changes of wording went beyond its mandate by, among other things, suggesting substantive changes to the natural resource clause in a poorly disguised attempt to thwart the intent of the constitutional council and the will of the voters as expressed in the referendum. The council had made it clear in its proposed constitutional provision as well as in its supporting documents that the allocation of fishing quotas does not bestow on the recipients of such allocations any private property rights to the common-property resources. To its credit, the parliamentary committee in charge restored the council’s original formulation.
One day, most probably, the constitutional bill approved by the people of Iceland in the 2012 referendum or a similar one will become the law of the land. Stay tuned.
http://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/thorvaldur-gylfason/democracy-on-ice-post-mortem-of-icelandic-constitution
We don't talk about it on the net as we get our cues from the media stories that are easily transfered to texts and pixels. There are revolutions in states and cities now. It depends on who shows up, not how they are portrayed.
In my area, we have full social services, parks, new public schools, help for emigrants, we know what is going on, it's quite transparent. We literally vote on how the schools will function and how the utility will be run, and all of that. We have found out what ALEC was doing, what corporations were doing with elections, called those who took the money and were screwing us and put a stop to it.
We support unions, public transportation and alternative power and we pay for them. We vote repeatedly all year, and most of those are for tax increases to fund what we think makes for a good society and public workers. We have guns but don't threaten others in public.
We are against inserting religion in government and we voted for marriage equality and protect women's rights to choice and equal pay. We welcome emigrants and do all we can to integrate them into our society, providing them translators for all functions. Our elections are clean and there is no call to shut people out of the vote, in fact our government goes out of its way to guarantee the right to vote to everyone.
Go to another state and a city, and those who show up, and for the last decade it's been GOP corporate activists, and the Tea Party, who turn the schools creationist, charter, private, eliminate all social services, privatize to hand over land and infrastructure and let theology rule, run around like rootin' tootin' cowboys, and you have red state hell. They welcome the Koch brothers as their heroes, think ALEC is great and theocracy is their goal.
They think paying taxes is a sin. For them, public transportation is worthless as are the poor and emigrant, gays and others, and hate labor and public workers, take away equal pay and refuse women the right to choose, and punish emigrants for being in their borders and scream that they should be deported or learn to speak English. Their governments work to deny the vote to everyone they can, save the GOP Tea Party.
There is already a movement to rewrite the Constitution from the right. Paul Ryan wants to get enough states red to call within their state legislators for a Constitutional convention, and they can do it. That's why we see these stories lauding Iceland to encourage it here. Ryan has stated their intent is to eliminate the 14th amendment, but it won't stop there, once the rightwingers get their hands in the Constitutional toolbox.
Anyone who respects the 14th and what it has given us, which is more than the 4th, with Due Process, Birthright Citizenship and Equal Treatment Under the Law has grown up in a society that has protections seldome seen in the world. But it took a Civil War to get and then the 15th and 16th to perfect it; plus another to get women and 18 year olds the right to vote.
Anyone who comprehends how hard it was to get these rights, does not want these fascists to have access to the power to steal them, which they have proven they intend to do.
The Tenther Movement wants to eliminate everything after the 10th, and we have not lived under that system for centuries. It's the perfect divide and conquer and set up state wide fiefdoms. Others would return to the Articles of Confederation. We have to consider that they did not touch on slavery and many other crimes.
That is why these gleeful calls to the attack the Bastille leave me cold. The powers infringing on us now are the primary voices calling for a revolution. From the right. A regressive revolution, and some are in denial that would happen. We have seen it with the election of Nixon, Reagan and Bush. Just think what they would do, the party of the fabled quote of the 'Constitution is just a piece of paper' when called out for war, torture and rendition.
We have the best system if we will fill the offices and do the ground work and not expect chaos to suddenly not turn into a utopian vision. It won't, it has not done so historically. It will lead to strong man governance, it always does.
I've listened to Birchers my entire life call for the evil government to be taken down for some pure vision they have. They are not gone, they are the Tea Party and the Koch brothers and others are very serious about creating that. They want to restrict by birth the personal and economic mobility for those they don't consider to be worthy of those rights, and we see that in deep red states now.
Based on years of seeing these things in action, reading and realizing that what feels good at first, is touted widely at first, ends up tasting very bad.
JMHO.
BTW: It wasn't the misleading O.P. was it? Did you see the links about "Meet the new boss...same as the old boss" in Iceland, right?
Sid
- It's coming......
Then we know the HAAARP machine is at work.
What's the plan?
What, specifically, needs to be done? Investment in people, in education, in infrastructure? Nobody has a freakin' clue. They don't know enough. No one is seriously contemplating a country with no growth, because they can't even conceptualize it yet. We have never had to be that in our history, but all the places and things and people we used to exploit are no longer dependent on us. Where, then, do we find someone to screw over, except ourselves?
The consumers are 70% of this economy, and they have no money to spend that isn't borrowed. The job growth, as pitiful as it is, is very little more than an increase in people who serve hamburgers or make beds in motels which reflects the increase in our population from births and immigration.
We are doing relatively little to move ourselves into the future, while other countries are constantly investing in theirs. One example - we have people on one side jumping up and down about Mexicans flooding across the border illegally even though our experience is that they will help us become a stronger country as they get employed. On the other side are people jumping up and down to legalize immigration, even though the CBO says it is going to increase unemployment for a decade. In the meantime, however, Mexico and business people are investing in the education of people who live there, even paying people there to go to school so they can hire them. On this side we have taken schools, like Berkeley, for instance, where the tuition used to be free, and raised it to $14K a year, and in so doing have amassed nearly a trillion dollars in debt for students that will follow them to their graves, since only 50% are being hired in a job market where there are 3 people for every opening. Walmart opens the doors for 600 jobs and gets 26,000 applications, and we know massive numbers of their employees can only work there if the rest of us pay for their food, a subsidy to Walmart.
The job market is such that if one is 50 and unemployed, they are likely not going to see enough money to have any disposable income or savings, and will have to struggle until, and if, they can get to 62 where they have to take a smaller piece of their Social Security and will nothing else in the bank for retirement. And at that point they will live in poverty for the rest of their lives. And that is going to be the story for tens of millions of people.
Meanwhile we are paying criminals at the banks $85 billion a month, and they are letting that pile up at the Fed while we pay them interest on it, and they reported record earnings this year.
Wtf?
Both parties are destroying what was, and the most vociferous and radical cheerleaders for each side are driving the bus back and forth across the road like drunken sailors, over the top of everyone else.
Lets say some magic dust falls on everyone's heads and they get a clue - what is the plan for taking an economy which used to be based on growth and moving it forward based on no growth. None, relatively speaking. We are a net debtor to the rest of the world. We are spending time pawing at the shiny stuff like our national debt, when what we ought to be literally screaming about is the trade imbalance. To fix that is going to require at least 30-50 trillion dollars, just to get us back even with where we were 10 or 15 years ago. It would be a decade or more before we could even hope to make progress toward that, and that is if we started today. But it's not even on the table.
We are literally moving backwards for the first time in this country's history, with no foundation at all, and I think the majority of our 300+ million people simply refuse to acknowledge what is in front of their face. We have been floating this country on loans and borrowed money while the wealthy sell off our assets since roughly 1980, and when this little financial mirage that we have been running on debt comes apart, so will we.
I think it is already game over, and no one wants to realize that there may be nothing we can do to stop it. We are just waiting on the precipitating event, whatever that may be, and then...
But I may be too optimistic
... with much you have said. We ARE farther along the path to failure than most people realize or would admit if they did.
In my personal life, I have taken many steps to try to insulate myself against a "collapse". Just what a "collapse" entails is not easy to define, some think pandemonium in the streets and total anarchy, others (like me really) think the 30s depression on steroids, with soup lines and Hoovervilles everywhere.
But this is not a pre-ordained eventuality IMHO there is still the possibility of avoiding it. Or maybe I'm too optimistic 
being overreaching in it's imperialistic conquests. It might be too late, but to cower in the corner, well...........the precedent has, historically, been set many times. We might just be at a place where no amount of citizen outrage can right the ship of state. But I didn't give up in the 60's-70's, won't give up now.
and yeah, I AM in that car with you. 
It could have been a great country.
Time said so!
They're saving the world!
If only we could treat our crooks similarly!
