UMD Libertarians

REYKJAVIK - Thousands of Icelanders demonstrated in Reykjavik on Saturday demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Geir Haarde and Central Bank Governor David Oddsson for failing to stop a financial meltdown in the country.

It was the latest in a series of protests in the capital since the financial meltdown that crippled the island’s economy.

Hordur Torfason, a well-known troubadour in Iceland and the main organiser of the protests, said the protests would continue until the government stepped down.

"They don’t have our trust and they are no longer legitimate," Torfason said as the crowds gathered in the drizzle before the Althing, the Icelandic parliament.

A separate group of 200-300 people gathered in front of the city’s main police station demanding the release of a young protester being held there, Icelandic media reported.

Police in riot gear used pepper spray to drive back an attempt to free the protester during which several windows at the police station were shattered. The protester was later released after a fine he had been sentenced to pay was paid.

Iceland’s three biggest banks — Kaupthing, Landsbanki and Glitnir — collapsed under the weight of billions of dollars of debts accumulated in an aggressive overseas expansion, shattering the currency and forcing Iceland to seek aid from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

This week, the North Atlantic island nation of 320,000 secured a package of more than $10 billion in loans from the IMF and several European countries to help it rebuild its shattered financial system.

Despite the loans, Iceland faces a sharp economic contraction and surging unemployment while many Icelanders also risk losing their homes and life savings.

A young man climbed onto the balcony of the Althing building, where the president appears upon inauguration and on Iceland’s national day, and hung a banner reading: "Iceland for Sale - $2.100.000.000", the amount of the loan Iceland is getting from the IMF.

The rally lasted less than one hour and as daylight began to wane, demonstrators drifted away into the nearby coffee shops where the price of a cup of coffee has shot up to 300 kronas in the last few weeks, up by about one third from before the crisis struck, as the currency has tumbled.

Opposition parties tabled a no-confidence motion in the government on Friday over its handling of the crisis, but the motion carries little chance of toppling the ruling coalition which has a solid parliamentary majority.

"I’ve just had enough of this whole thing," said Gudrun Jonsdottir, a 36-year-old office worker.

"I don’t trust the government, I don’t trust the banks, I don’t trust the political parties, and I don’t trust the IMF. We had a good country here and they’ve ruined it."

Video..

How is that even a country? There are more people living in Rhode Island.
The country was a free market capitalists wet dream relative to the rest of the countries in the world and now look at them….

Coincidence?

You are fucking stupid.

Calm down son! Is your boyfriend from Iceland or something?

Nah, your mother used to work in an Alaskan brothel. You know, servicing the rig workers. But ever since they told her New York City has a bigger population then the entire state of Alaska she moved to NYC, you know, better business.

What?

Oh I am sorry, did you hit a little "snag" in your logic processing?

:rofl ::rof l::ro fl:

Are you communist?
this will happen, but protesters will be called terrorists.
Protesters storm Bangkok airport

Hundreds of anti-government protesters have stormed the Thai capital’s international airport in their drive to oust the country’s elected administration.
Flights were suspended after demonstrators broke through police lines at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi international airport on Tuesday.
"Our goal is to shut down Suvaranbhumi airport until Somchai quits," Parnthep Pourpongpan, a spokesman for the People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD) said.
The airport protests, part of the PAD’s campaign aimed at unseating Somchai Wongsawat, Thailand’s prime minister, come a day before the prime minister is due to return from an Asia-Pacific summit in Peru.
Elsewhere at least 11 people were injured when demonstrators opened fire on government supporters in the capital.
Television footage showed two security guards from PAD firing handguns at opponents on a major road in north Bangkok.
‘Final battle’
The PAD has staged a six-month long protest to get the Thai government to resign.
The clashes broke out after government supporters threw rocks at a truck carrying members of the anti-government PAD along a busy road, the AFP news agency reported.
"The protests have been contained to just two parts of the Thai capital," Selina Downes, Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Bangkok, said, refering to the Suvaranbhumi airport protest and demonstrations at Bangkok’s old on Mueang international airport where Somchai is temporarily based.

"They certainly haven’t spread across the country … But some people are now saying the military needs to step in because the government is losing control." Riot police have largely refused to tackle protesters amid fears of a repeat of clashes between protesters and police on October 7 that left two people dead and 500 injured, the worst political violence in Thailand for 16 years.
PAD leaders have called the latest protests the "final battle" in their six-month campaign to unseat the People Power Party (PPP), which has close ties to Shinawatra.

The PAD – a loose alliance of royalists, academics and businessmen - accuses the government elected in December last year of being tainted by corruption and of being a puppet of Thaksin Shinawatra, the exiled former prime minister who was ousted from power in a 2006 coup.
Somchai, who is Thaksin’s brother-in-law, has rejected calls to step downas prime minister.
Airport disrupted
Thousands of PAD supporters earlier rolled out razor wire across a four-lane access road to Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi airport and waved plastic hand-clappers, flags and portraits of King Bhumibol Adulyadej, Thailand’s monarch.
The airport siege has been one of the PAD’s most disruptive acts in its six-month campaign against the government.
Analysts say the move could undermine public support for a movement that appears to be going to ever greater extremes to provoke a violent government backlash.
"It is time to make a clear-cut choice between good and evil, between those who are loyal and traitors," Somsak Kosaisuk, a PAD leader, told supporters at a rally earlier in the day.
Growing tensions
The protest came a day after PAD supporters surrounded the Thai parliament building, forcing MPs to postpone a joint session.

Tensions soared last week after a demonstrator was killed and several others were injured in a grenade attack on a PAD protest camp in the grounds of Government House. Unions had said they would call a nationwide strike on Tuesday if the government did not quit, but the threatened walkout did not materialise.
Norm Hermant, a journalist in Bangkok, told Al Jazeera: "The PAD protestors … have not been able to create enough pressure to force the government to resign or force the army to step in. Meanwhile their numbers have been continually declining.
"So they have been trying to push for what they call this final showdown.
"But numbers yesterday showed that it wasn’t a final showdown. They didn’t get anyway near the one hundred thousand people they were promoting that they would get."
The ongoing political crisis has stymied government decision-making and undermined confidence in Thailand’s export-driven economy, which has also been hit by the global financial crisis.
According to the latest government data the Thai economy will grow at 4.5 per cent this year, its slowest rate in seven years – due both to slumping investment and a slide in exports.

was it iceland or ireland? i just realized those two countries are only one letter apart…

iceland

lew

You are fucking stupid.

George W. Bush is fucking stupid.

Coincidence?

You clearly do not understand what I was saying there.

Or more likely ….. you’re mildly retarded and don’t grasp how idiotic you sound jacking off to some idealist and unacheivable "FWEE MARKITZ!"
If you have a central bank, you have what is called central planning

what are you trying to say?

Ron Paul is the answer to life, the universe, and everything, basically.

Free markets have been achieved numerous times. Moran.
I dream of a day when america demands as much from its gov’t

Yeah…. because in your posts, you’re jacking off about the idea of some pre-medieval shitholes, and not that unachievable vision of
"what THIS country could be! "
that you love to spew about.

Yeah… OK.

^

Go suck Lenin’s embalmed cock you commie retard.
What do China, Cuba, Korea, Laos, and Vietnam all have in common? They’re all third world commie shitholes!

Try to name a single important contribution they’ve made in the past 25 years.

Pussyhurt much?

protip: People who aren’t suckered by some retarded notion of "FWEE MARKITZ!" …. yeah that doesn’t make them communists, retard. In other words,

^^

Good job avoiding my question. Try to name a single important contribution they’ve made in the past 25 years.

Because that would prove something … ANYTHING relevant to any of the comments posted in this thread so far, right? Right?!

Gotta love your bumbling attempt to employ logic.
Here… I’ll toss you a bone. Try not to be an idiot in the future.

I’m actually pretty impressed with such a protest. People who actually care about what their government does to them. How strange?

What the fuck does that have to do with anything I asked?

Communist countries have never been leaders in medicine, research, science, writing, journalism, education, innovation…or anything, for that matter. Communism is a worthless political philosophy for stupid, lazy pieces of shit like yourself who want the more productive members of society to make up for your mediocrities through government.
As long as oil is transacted in US dollars, things will be bearable. There’s going to be a deep recession, but there’s still a lot of it left to sell if America is going to keep running up big deficits.

Oh… I don’t know. Maybe BY GIVING YOU ENOUGH INFORMATION TO ANSWER TO THE RETARDED QUESTION YOU ASKED.

Do you see anyone in this thread extolling communism, moron?
But, everyone who isn’t some free market nutjob must be a communist!1!!!!

Wow you’re an idiot

You might wanna put some ice on that hurt pussy.

Iceland is trade-dependent. As soon as the Eurotrash Trotskyist nations started boarding the failboat, Iceland started to struggle.

Coincidence?

Didn’t read this. I’m assuming it relates to the thread title.

Iceland is trade-dependent. The United States is not trade-dependent. We trade with other countries, yes, but we are not dependent on that trade in order to function as a nation. We can get by with severe reductions in trade.

So no. We will not wind up like Iceland.
yes, an ideal free market economy is controlled by a central bank

Just taking a cue from one of the free market loons. Feel free to ask your buddy lew why he was masturbating to thoughts of Iceland.

I’ve only read these boards a few weeks, but I’m starting to think that his account is one giant level.

And yet Iceland is now begging the Trotskyists for money to save them…….
Funny how that worked out.

how is it a cue from one of the free market loons? this current situation in iceland was a result of the government and central bank, not the market. much like the bullshit our country is in right now.

Read the thread, perhaps.

too much work bro…

Your logic is so flawed, but as long as you yearn for the power of government you say we should not discuss a more idealistic practice of government, as it is "idiotic." Instead, you think we should rationalize the market in the way things are, since we are powerless to change it.

I’m happy that I have not bounded myself to the shackles that you have placed on your mind.

No …. we can assume that the heroin keeps your mind pretty free.

you’re an intellectual midget. I’m done wasting my time responding to you. Have a great Thanksgiving with your family.

Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever listed any place that was pre-medieval as an example of a free market.

Moran.

I’ve talked about Iceland maybe twice ever.

isn’t Ireland the big captalistic nation anyways ?

Funny, I thought it was free markets failing.

Same basic cause but because of the excess govt regulation on the money supply, they can’t get recover as quickly.

And yet, they’re still not BANKRUPT.

Because it’s not a absolutely horrible downturn like the great depression.
Everyone knows that being tied to one monetary policy set by the EU will result in a harder time for individual countries work themselves out of an economic downturn. However, the benefits of a common monetary system and market far outweights the negatives of the EU.

i dunno….loss of sovereignty to me is a pretty significant negative

they’re losing their sovereignty anyway.

The question is: do you want to have a say or not?

As am I, people are trying to wake up some to what’s going on around them. The problem is we still have a majority of idiots that watch the evening news and take it as truth, or watch wrestling and think that it’s real. If you find yourself feeling down, try turning off the national media for a week. Or the local network news, you’ll be amazed at how much your spirits pick up.

I know this much, keep spending like a drunken sailor and handing out peanuts to the idiots and we’ll be right behind Iceland soon enough. And if that happens, they can pry my gun out of my dead hands. I’ll be down at the farm with plenty of ammo and food..

And yet Iceland was not struggling at all until its government decided to nationalize its banks to save it……..
Funny how that worked out.

No related posts.