Iceland, the IMF, Russia etc.
In a nutshell the Icelandic economic depression could be described thus: nouveau riche assholes trashed the currency playing stockmarket cowboys with immense amounts of borrowed money. The newly privatized banks enjoyed generous credit with foreign loan institutions and became mega-monsters that over-shadowed the government budgetwise. When the shit hit the fan (as tends to happen in capitalism) the banks investment policies turned out to be sour and the pouring in of borrowed money ceased, causing the banks to rupt.
Some people are trying to spin it so: These were bad capitalists, and that doesn’t mean that capitalism is bad. Which of course is a load of youknowwhat. Liberalist policies will inevitably lead to the “market correcting itself” – as it’s called – which causes mayhem for most people. The only way of resurrecting this dead flesh is through the sorcerism of more liberal capitalism – which begets fascism, the breaking down of the welfare system, the fundings for the arts etc.
Right now it seems Icelandic authorities are mostly interested in those types of short term solutions. I don’t know what it’s called in english, but in Iceland those methods are traditionally called “peeing in ones shoe to keep warm”.
The solutions – help.
Help from the IMF – which would turn Iceland into the first “first world country” to seek out the Friedmanist bribe, gotten only through serious social cutbacks. Iceland has long been on its way out of Scandinavia and towards a more liberal economy and this would be the fast-track to get there.
Help from the European Union – that is to say joining. I’m not totally against joining the EU – culturally it would be a strong move, and it would loosen up alot of Iceland’s conservationist & isolationist tendencies. But this is the worst time to do it. Joining the EU means incredible amounts of negotiating – there’s the fishing grounds to be taken care of, for one thing, and an unimaginable amount of stuff to be thought out. You don’t want to join the EU on a hysterical whim – you want to do it when you’re strong, when you don’t need to but want to.
Help from Russia – for some inexplicable reason Russia offered Iceland a loan to fix things. Now, first of all Russia has it’s own problems, so they must have plenty of political reasons for wanting to do this. The way Russia has been behaving towards the world and it self in the last years does not warrant trust and doing deals with the devil (and this goes for the IMF, with it’s history of backing fascists worldwide, in their struggle against working class people) is not the way to go. The conditions are probably never worth the risk.
Besides. I’m not sure what Iceland needs right now is more loans.
My own suggestion is to stay poor. Take care of the poor, the poorer and the poorest. Rebuild the economy slowly – think it through, tread carefully. I mean to say: Fixing the situation isn’t going to happen in three weeks and it shouldn’t. We need to unwind this boatload of nonsense.
Several friends abroad have written to ask how I am doing personally, if this is affecting the poetry scene, if everything is allright. As most of you’ll know I don’t live in Iceland at the moment, but in Finland. Which in effect means I get paid in Icelandic krónur (for translating and writing) and I spend all my money in euros. When I came to Helsinki in april 2007, my rent was 519 euros with a weekly sauna. That is to say, 44 thousand krónur. It’s still 519 euros, which currently bounces between being 75.000 ISK and 102.000 ISK. My wife just finished her studies, and is looking for a job. She spent the summer with me in Ísafjörður, Iceland, working to be able to spend the autumn seeking a good job. Her income was also in ISK. I had a stipendium that lasted through july. So now we’re getting by on my half-salary and eating into the pittance that her income has become.
Which doesn’t mean we’re not okay. It just means we can’t go out to eat, I drink less beer and we steal movies of the internet instead of paying for a cinema-ticket (can you say “steal” on the internet – will I get sued?). I won’t be buying any books in the next months (if anyone wants to support a poetry hungry poet with chapbooks and such – my finnish adress is in the right column) – sometimes I skip the ham on my karelian pirogs. Right now, the question of the Icelandic economic crisis strikes me more as a political one, than as a personally economical one. Most of my family didn’t have much loans, and luckily the only one that did, to my knowledge, also has a decent income.
Which doesn’t mean this isn’t hurting alot of people, that in no way deserved it (many people were persuaded by the banks to change their savings into “perfectly safe” alternatives, that went poof and vanished). One of the political problems right now is that it seems the authorities are more interested in resurrecting the system we had (with new faces on some of the billionaires) than they are in helping those that need it the most (for instance, lowering the credit-rates, giving out emergency funding for those that can’t eat or pay the rent, etc.).
But to my friends, I can luckily say, we’re OK and we’re gonna stay OK.
As for the poetry scene, the crisis poses a threat that has already started to affect us seriously. But poetry is resiliant, and Nýhil is resiliant, and eventually this won’t change much.