Today's Stories

April 29, 2009

Joann Wypijewski
Death at Work in America

Patrick Cockburn
The Taliban's Roads to Kabul

Andy Worthington
Cheney's Twisted World

Dave Lindorff
No More Excuses: a Specter is Haunting the Democrats

Jeremy Scahill
The Nuremberg Truth and Reconciliation Commission?

Doug Henwood
Zionist Lobby Targets Another Tenured Professor: an Interview with William Robinson

Eric Toussaint
Ecuador at the Crossroads

April 28, 2009

Uri Avnery
A Little Red Light: On Israeli Fascism

Jeremy Scahill
Obama's Iraq: the Picture of Dorian Gray

Dean Baker
The Perfect Gift for Wall Street: a Financial Transactions Tax

Michael D. Yates
At the Factory Gate

Conn Hallinan
Georgian Plots? Saakavili's "Order No. 2"

John Stauber
Beyond MoveOn

Tom Barry
The Failed Border Security Initiative

Harvey Wasserman
Who Pays for America's Chernobyl Roulette?

Jeff Nygaard
Pirates, Profits and Propaganda

Frederico Fuentes
Why the U.S. Still Hates Cuba

Website of the Day
The Man Behind the Hood

April 27, 2009

Pam Martens
The Far Right's Plot to Capture New Hampshire

Patrick Cockburn
Torture? It Probably Killed More Americans Than 9/11

Andrew J. Bacevich Guardian of the Status Quo: Obama's Sins of Omission

Mitu Sengupta
The Bloodbath in Sri Lanka

Franklin Lamb
Hillary Does Beirut: The 165-Minute Swoop-In

Firmin DeBrabander
Crimes of Economic Madness

Dave Lindorff
Wide Open to Pandemic?

Russell Mokhiber
How Corrupt is That?

Mike Whitney
Pinter's Message to Obama

Mark Weisbrot
Overhauling the IMF

Rev. José M. Tirado
Iceland's New Dawn: How the Right Got Trounced

Website of the Day
American Casino

April 24-26, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Putting the Bush Years on Trial

Marjorie Cohn
Torture Used to Try to Link Saddam with 9/11

Andy Worthington
Who Ordered the Torture of Abu Zubaydah?

Jeremy Scahill
Are Leading Democrats Afraid of a Special Prosecutor to Investigate Torture?

Chris Floyd
Top of the Heap: the Democrats' Teachable Moment on Torture

Mike Whitney
A Housing Crash Update

Anthony DiMaggio
Obama and the Housing Crisis

Chris Kromm
Democratic Lobbyists Key to Fight Against Employee Free Choice Act

Saul Landau
Seventeen Months in "the Hole:" an Interview with the Leader of the Cuban Five

Dave Lindorff
Free John Walker Lindh

Greg Moses
The Debt Looters

Joshua Frank
Calling for a Coal Moratorium: an Interview with Ted Nace

Fred Gardner
Collective Farming and the Lynch Case

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Homework, Testing and Stealth Apartheid in Education

David Michael Green
Of Tea Parties and Teleprompters

Ramzy Baroud
Middle East Spies: a New Front in Gaza's Conflict

Rannie Amiri
Mubarak's Expanding Enemies List

Laura Carlsen
Mr. President, Calderon is Not Mexico

Richard Morse
The Haitian People Need a Lobbyist

Nikolas Kozloff
Protecting the Bald Eagle: a Task Now Falling to ... Hugo Chavez?

Kent Peterson
The Fight to Save Mexico's Mangroves

Robert Bryce
The Ethanol Scammers Rent a General

Niranjan Ramakrishnan The Financial Experts

Ron Jacobs
Torture is More Than Just "Harsh Tactics"

Richard Rhames
Roman Legends, Book Burning and History's Hunt

Stephen Martin
Wherefore Art Thou American Dream?

David Yearsley
Rodgers, Hammerstein, Michener and Nostalgia's Clammy Embrace

Poets' Basement
Khalil and Mankh

Website of the Weekend
Doug and Andrea Peacock on Grizzlies and Edward Abbey

April 23, 2009

Eamonn Fingleton
How the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times Buried the Madoff Scandal for at Least Four Years

Ray McGovern
Obama Plays Hamlet on Torture

Michael Ratner
The Torture Commission Trap

Alan Farago
The Quicksand Economy

Rob Larson
Business Gets Carded

Nadia Hijab
The Real Heroes of Durban

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Deconstructing the Taliban

Dave Lindorff
Are Members of Congress Being Blackmailed?

Helen Redmond
Selling Out Single-Payer: the "Public Option" Con

Adam Federman
The Battle Over New York's Marcellus Shale

Website of the Day
An Interactive Map of Vanishing Employment Across the Country

April 22, 2009

Chris Floyd
The Fatal Thread: Torture, War and the Imperial Project

Joanne Mariner
Torture Evidence and Terror Blacklists

Vijay Prashad
Obama's Afghan Plan: Fracturing the Antiwar Movement

Gareth Porter
U.S. Lacks Capacity to Win Over Afghans

Dean Baker
The Tyranny of Bad Economics

Peter Morici
Housing Sales and Fixing the Economy

Winslow T. Wheeler
Eliminating Bad Pentagon Habits

Barucha Calamity Peller
The Battle to Take Back the New School

Harvey Wasserman
Chernobyl Could Happen Here

Aisha Brown /
Dedrick Muhammad
White Privilege in the Americas

Teo Ballvé
Obama's Feel Good Meeting with Colombia's Uribe

Website of the Day
Ahmedinejad's Durban Speech: What He Actually Said

April 21, 2009

Randy Rowland
Lindy Blake's Great Escape

Dave Lindorff
Jay Bybee's Conspiracy to Torture

Fidel Castro
The Secret Summit

George McGovern
Pull Out of Iraq This Year

Greg Moses
The Unemployment Channel

Benjamin Dangl
Argentina Remembers

Sonia Nettnin
Saving Lives in Gaza

Frank Barat
The Death of Bassem: a Shooting at the Wall in Bil'n

Binoy Kampmark
Legal Purgatory and John Demjanjuk

John V. Walsh
Code Red for Single Payer

David Macaray
SAG Should be Praised, Not Assailed

Website of the Day
Bonus Man: For Executive Assholes Everywhere

April 20, 2009

Mike Whitney
Housing Bust Comes Roaring Back, Worse Than Ever

Andrea Peacock
Histrionics and Legalisms in Missoula

Henry A. Giroux
Ten Years After Columbine: the Tragedy of Youth Deepens

Liaquat Ali Khan
Drone Attacks on Pakistan's Indigenous Tribes

Fred Gardner
Obama's DoJ Backs Prosecution of Medical Marijuana Providers

Stephen Soldz
Obama, Blair, Panetta and the Torture Memos: Praising Moral Cowards, Ignoring Real Heroes

Nadia Hijab
Obama's Multi-Polar Middle East

Dave Lindorff
The Meeting in Trinidad

P. Sainath
India's Press Nixes "R" Word

Nelson P Valdés
A Modest (Transition) Proposal to Obama

Mark Engler
American Empire Foreclosed?

Belén Fernández
The FARC Can't Dance

Website of the Day
Dear Mr. Buffett...

April 17-19, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Thin Ice From Here to the Horizon

Saul Landau
Infiltrating Alpha 66: a Conversation with Gerardo Hernandez, Leader of the Cuba Five

Franklin Lamb
Persia Rising

Ralph Nader
The Greedsters Are Back!

Fred Gardner
Obama's Chimerical Marijuana Policy: a Guide for the Perplexed

Dean Baker
A Win-Win Solution: Tax the Rich!

Rannie Amiri
The Curious Case of Benjamin Netanyahu

George Wuerthner
The War on Predators

Dave Lindorff
No Amnesty for Torturers

David Swanson
Personal Torture Laws

Jim Goodman
The Control of Food

Kathy Sanborn
Economic Fallout Hits Families Hard

Don Monkerud
Economic Recovery for Whom?

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The People's Money

David Michael Green
Home of the Barricaded, Land of the 'Fraid

Nelson P Valdés
The OAS Charter, Cuba and the United States

Manuel Gomez
From the Bay of Pigs to Trinadad and Tobago

Dr. Susan Block
On Sex Addiction: the Deadliest Sin?

Ramzy Baroud
Non-Violence in Palestine?

Christopher Brauchli
Banning Barbie

Stephen Martin
Statelessness: the Final Frontier

Ron Jacobs
Tearing the Whole Building Down: the Dead in Greensboro

David Yearsley
Monkey Music

Lorenzo Wolff
A Song for the End of the World

Poets' Basement
Moser, McTeer and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
New England Journal of Medicine Report on Civilian Deaths in Iraq

April 16, 2009

Mike Whitney
A Bulletin From the Captain of the Titantic

Russell Mokhiber
The Top 10 Enemies of Single-Payer

Ronald Teska
From Iraq to Appalachia

Gareth Porter
Predator Blowback

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
Thinking Like an Afghan

Benjamin Dangl
Latin America Changes

Kevin Pina
Haiti: Obama's First Foreign Policy Disaster?

Robert Bryce
Another Ethanol Producer Goes Bust

George Wuerthner
See the Forest: the Value of Dead Trees

Paul Garon, David Roediger and Kate Khatib The Surreal Life of Franklin Rosemont

Website of the Day
Socialism and the Facebook Generation

April 15, 2009

Kathleen and Bill Christison
Solving Palestine While Israel Destroys It

Ray McGovern
W, the Torture Decider

Robert Sandels
Is There a Latin American Policy?

Heather Williams /
Paul Baker
Carbon Cap and Trade: How Wall Street will Game the Regs and Trash the Planet

Jack Willoughby
The Lessons of the S & L Crisis

David Swanson
Habeas at Bagram?

Paul Craig Roberts
94 Years of Serfdom

Sara Mann
Norman Rockwell and the Perils of Nostalgia

Kenneth Couesbouc
John Maynard's Martingale: How Keynes Got Rich

Binoy Kampmark
Tax Haven Hypocrisies

Kekuni Blaisdell, Lynette Hi'llani Cruz, George Kahumoku Flores, et al.: An Urgent Letter to Obama on the Rights of Native Hawaiians

Website of the Day
Taxa: the Paintings of Isabella Kirkland

April 14, 2009

Conn Hallinan
The Afghan Rubik's Cube

Mike Whitney
Why is Goldman Sachs So Scared of Mike Morgan?

Peter Morici
Taxing Grandma to Subsidize Goldman Sachs

Greg Moses
Economic Curveballs: the Laffer Posse

Fidel Castro
Obama's Cuba Policy: Not a Word About the Blockade

Robert Weissman
No Blank Check for the IMF

Rebecca Macaux /
Philip Primeau
Somali Piracy and American Foreign Policy

Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero
The Dubious Revoution: Biofuels, the Next Generation

Dave Lindorff
Snatch-and-Jail Justice: the Ugly War on Immigrants

Walter Brasch
The Resurrection of Intolerance

Benjamin Day
Why Has the Press Failed Us in Reporting on Health Care Reform?

Website of the Day
The Appraisal Bubble

April 13, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
Iraqi Militia Fear Reprisals After US Exit

Uri Avnery
Our Dissonance

Jeremy Scahill
A Test Case for Habeas Corpus: Will Obama Prosecute the Somali Pirate in a US Court?

Martha Rosenberg
Suicide Syndrome: Are VA Protocols Behind Iraq Vet Suicides?

Karl Grossman
A Radioactive Extension for Aging Nuclear Plants

Nadia Hijab
Still Waiting: Obama and American Muslims

Sam Smith
America's Cultural Bear Market

James McEnteer
Peru's Shining Example

Sean McMahon
Globalizing Politicide: Israel's Strikes on Sudan

Namihei Odaira
Makota's "Campaign Against Poverty"

John V. Walsh
Bossnapping

Website of the Day
Declining IRS Audits for Big Financial Houses

April 10 / 12, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Resurrection and Revenge

Chris Floyd
Hope Abandoned: Obama Protects CIA Torture Memos

Mike Whitney
"Liquidate the Banks; Fire the Executives!" Warren's Devastating Report to Congress

Saul Landau
How the Media Bought the Surge

M. Reza Pirbhai
Obama's Afghanistan Plan and India-Pakistan Relations

Franklin Spinney
The Art of the Scam: Wall Street and the Pentagon

Rannie Amiri
Iran's Elections: Why Arab Leaders Want Ahmadinejad to Win

William Blum
The Ideology of Barack Obama

Matt Vidal
Why Card Check Would Help the Economy

Jeff Howison
Death of the Square Deal

Jeff Leys
Resisting the Af-Pak War: the Creech Air Base Arrests

Dave Lindorff
America's Imperial Wars: Why We Need to See the Horrors

Ramzy Baroud
Israel Investigated: But Will It Repent?

Missy Beattie
The Grateful Dead, Wounded and Displaced

Fred Gardner
Fakes Left, Goes Right: Obama's Crossover Dribble on Marijuana Policy

Harvey Wasserman Another $50 Billion for Rust Bucket Nukes?

Suzan Mazur
A Revolution in Biology: an Interview with Nobel Laureate Paul Nurse

Bernard Umbrecht
German Capitalists Take Fire

David Macaray
A Word Clooney, Hanks and Baldwin Should Learn: Solidarity

Janet Kauffman
How to Starve (or Feed) a River

Ron Jacobs
Daring to Struggle, Failing to Win

Norman Solomon
Getting a Death Grip on Memory

Michael Winship
Let the Railsplitter Awake!

Richard Rhames
Empire, Ennui and Extra Cheese

Wanda Fucha
Brother, Can You Spare a Million Bucks?

David Yearsley
My Journey to the Heart of Rahman

Lorenzo Wolff
Getting Beyond the Black-and-White: Jason Isbell's Challenging New Album

Ben Sonnenberg
Rossellini's Louis XIV: "Neither the Sun Nor Death Can be Gazed Upon Fixedly"

Jeffrey St. Clair
Savage Incongruities: the Photographic Life of Lee Miller

Poets' Basement
Corseri and Corzett

Website of the Weekend
The Palestine Chronicle Needs Your Help!

April 9, 2009

Mike Whitney
The Decade of Darkness

Patrick Cockburn
What It Would Take to Mend Fences with Islam

Stephen Soldz
Caught on Tape: Diagnostic Abuse of Veterans

P. Sainath
The Rise of the Shoe-cide Bomber

Ellen Cantarow
Israel's Master Plan for Transfer

Gareth Porter /
Jim Lobe
Obama and Israel's Threat to Strike Iran

Jeremy Scahill
How Many Democrats Will Stand Up Against Obama's Bloated Military Budget?

Jerry Kroth
Saving GM From Bankruptcy--With the Stroke of a Pen

Binoy Kampmark
Fujimori Convicted: A Measure of Justice in Latin America

Fidel Castro
My Meeting with the Black Caucus

Website of the Day
Bird Song Radio

April 8, 2009

John Prados
The Af-Pak Paradox

Bill Moyers /
Michael Winship
Changing the Rules of the Blame Game

Winslow T. Wheeler
The Tooth Fairy and the Defense Budget

Russell Mokhiber
PBS Lashes Back

Kathy Sanborn
Depression Fury

Rev. William E. Alberts
If the Shoe Fits: Bush and Al-Zaidi

James McEnteer Rashomon and the Binghamton Shooter: the Rush to Interpret Jiverly Wong's "Statement"

Nadia Hijab
Olmert's Nightmare

Adam Turl
Card Check on the Ropes

Kevin Zeese
Escaping the Drug War Quagmire

Website of the Day
Walk Score Your Neighborhood

April 7, 2009

David Price
Counterinsurgency's Free Ride

Uri Avnery
Who's the Boss?

Chris Floyd
Talking Peace in Prague, Dropping Bombs in Pakistan

Winslow T. Wheeler Defense Cuts: Gates and the System

Marjorie Cohn
Prosecuting the Bush Torture Team: Spain Leads the Way

Dean Baker
Hands Off Social Security

Diana Johnstone
NATO, Strasbourg and the Black Block

Dave Lindorff
Politicizing Accounting

Martha Rosenberg
Life on HBO's Factory Hog Farm

Evelyn Pringle
Motherhood and the Psycho-Pharmaceutical Complex

Website of the Day
Gaza: Closed Zone

April 6, 2009

Michael Hudson
The IMF Rules the World

Andy Worthington Bagram: Guantánamo's Dark Mirror

Ray McGovern
Profiles in Cowardice: Eric Holder and Colin Powell

Deepak Tripathi
The Pakistan Enigma

Mike Whitney
Bernanke's Financial Rescue Plan: a Glide-Path to Destitution

Norman Solomon
Meet the New Escalators: the Democrats and the Afghan War

Jonathan Cook
Israel Railways Accused of Racism in Firing of Arab Workers

Judith Bello
Justice for the Developmentally Disabled

Deena Metzger Blackwater in Liberia

Dr. M. Kamiar
"There's No 'Eye' in Iran:" Obama's Pronunciation Problem

Website of the Day
Prison Talk

April 3-5, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
From Twin Towers to Twin Camelots

Kathy Kelly /
Brian Terrall
Getting a Closer Look at the Killer Drones

Sue Sturgis
Fooling with Disaster? Startling Revelations About Three Mile Island Raise New Doubts Over Nuclear Plant Safety

Peter Morici
Girding for a Depression

Kathy Sanborn
Homeless in Tent City, USA

Andy Worthington
Britain's Guantánamo: Fact or Fiction?

Rob Larson
Subprime Supreme Court: The Roberts Court Has Become a Powerful New Tool for Business

Saul Landau
Biden and Nixon: a Tale of Two Latin American Experiences

Steve Early
An Evening with Andy Stern

John Goekler
Was Gaza Israel's Waterloo?

Rannie Amiri
Arab League Reconciliation Summit a Bust

Dave Lindorff
Hooray for Juries! A Courtroom Victory for Ward Churchill and Academic Free Speech

Lee Ballinger
Sound Garden: Tom Morello at the Grammy Museum

Ron Jacobs
Artifacts for Survival

David Macaray
AIG Plays the Sympathy Card

John Wight
G20: Capital's New World Symphony

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Race in the Obama Era

Mychal Bell
Surviving Jena Six

Missy Beattie
Hoop Hopes, War and Peace

Reza Fiyouzat
The Iran/US Rapproachment Dance

Michael Boldin
The War on Drugs is a War on You

Christopher Brauchli
The Pope's Batting 50-50

Charles R. Larson
Too Much Stuff

Susie Day
Bernie Breakout Shocker!!

Stephen Martin
Gordon Brown's Chicken Run at the G20

Kim Nicolini
"Last House on the Left:" Vigilantes of the Bourgeoisie

David Yearsley
Homage to Moog and Mallards

Phyllis Pollack
An Interview with Legendary Rock Producer Chris Kimsey on Working with the Stones, Ronnie Wood, Jimmy Cliff, Peter Tosh and Saint Jude

Poets' Basement
Foley, Valentine and Kozak

Website of the Day
The Corner Store

April 2, 2009

Robert Weissman
What If Obama Had Treated Detroit Like Wall Street?

Eric Toussaint /
Damien Millet
A G20 Meeting for Naught

George Bisharat
Israel's Impunity Must End

Russell Mokhiber
Something is Rotten at PBS

Franklin Lamb
Has Washington Lost Lebanon?

Gareth Porter
Settling Scores in Iraq: Maliki Draws US Troops into Crackdown on Sunni Rivals

David Macaray
Obama and the Ruling Class: "Only the Little People Pay Taxes"

Chris Genovali
B.C.'s Bloody Grizzly Hunt

Sam Smith
The Politics of Adulation

Suzan Mazur
Is Neo-Darwinism Dead?

Website of the Day
Fighting for Change in St. Louis

April 1, 2009

Chris Floyd
Surging Further Into the Afghan Abyss

Stanley Heller
Israeli War Crimes: Thank God, It Was Only Rumors

Mark Brenner, Mischa Gaus and Jane Slaughter Obama's Perilous Plan for Detroit: Restructure the Big 3, But Not With Bankruptcy

Jonathan Cook
The Slow Demise of Ehud Olmert

Eric Walberg
EU in Tatters: Only the Protesters Have Any Vision

Richard Morse
Why Haiti Can't Forget Its Past

Don Fitz
Guess Who Came to Dinner with a Match? Green Mayoral Candidate's Van Firebombed in St. Louis

Laray Polk
Texas and Evolution

Belén Fernández
12 Años de Soledad?

Harvey Wasserman
Cracking the Media Silence on Three Mile Island

Website of the Day
Pentagon Fraud Investigations Fell, While Contracts Soared

March 31, 2009

Uri Avnery
The Deception Tango

Peter Lee
Ghosts in the Machine: the World's Hottest Cyberwar Battlefield

Nicholas Dearden
A New Global Debt Crisis

Dave Lindorff
The Obama Betrayal

Joanne Mariner
"We'll Make You See Death"

Ron Jacobs
Obama's Pakistan Gambit

Wiliam S. Lind
Another Lost War

David Michael Green
Who Says the GOP Doesn't Have a Plan?

Benjamin Dangl
Beyond Elections in the Americas

Johnny Barber
Meditation in Orange

Dedrick Muhammad
Economic Inequality: the Foundation of the Racial Divide

Website of the Day
How the Obama Dems Took Over the Peace Movement

March 30, 2009

Michael Hudson
Financing the Empire: Do US Face G20 Mutiny?

Patrick Cockburn
What Next in Afghanistan?

Henry A. Giroux
Hard Lessons

Mike Whitney
Where's Eliot Spitzer Now That We Need Him?

Ralph Nader
Where's All the Money Coming From?

Paul Craig Roberts
Obama's War on the (Upper) Middle Class

Jeremy Scahill
The Logistical Nightmare in Iraq

Robert Bryce
The Cellulosic Ethanol Delusion

Jonathan Cook
Remembering Land Day in Palestine

Ray McGovern
Obama Bombs

Website of the Day
Hersh: Syria Calling

April 29, 2009

The Real Issue is Iceland's Economic Independence

Will Iceland be Handed Over to a New Gang of Kleptocrats?

By MICHAEL HUDSON

For Iceland’s voters in the election last Saturday  the issues were more pragmatic than a supposed unseating of the right by the left, the trend most emphasized in news coverage. The country’s main problem is reckless neoliberal bank privatization and  the proposed responses are not inherently left or right as such. At issue is whether voters have become so desperate in the wake of crooks wrecking the financial system that they will seek a more stable currency (the euro) by joining Europe on terms that forfeit control over Iceland’s North Atlantic fishing waters and burden taxpayers with unprecedented public debt, to compensate British, Dutch and other European bank depositors and speculators for their losses?

Europe would not dare make such a demand on the United States for the bad packages of junk mortgages it bought and for its losses when Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. But Iceland is a small country and may be easier and riper for plucking. For many voters the idea of joining the European Union is an attractive fantasy – adopting the euro to solve Iceland’s financial problems. The alternative is for the country simply to change its destructive bank rules and reverse the giveaways made in times past to politically connected insiders. The victorious Social Democrats favor joining Europe, the Left-Green and formerly dominant Independence Party do not, while the centrist and largely rural Progressive Party (for many decades the second leading party) is wary but at least is willing to discuss the terms on which EU membership might benefit Iceland.

Everyone is against the oligarchy’s insiders who ran up the debts. That is why their major sponsor, the Independence Party, lost one-third of its electoral support (down to just 20 per cent from its usual 33-35 per cent), the lowest percentage of votes and seats in the parliament (Althing) in the 80 years since it was founded in 1930. The days of the kleptocracy are over – and there is scarcely more sympathy for the foreign lenders and savers who were the enablers of these insiders. But voters are wary of the financial stance England and the rest of Europe have taken against Iceland, and of arrangements with the International Monetary Fund. Former Independence Prime Minister (and later head of the central bank) David Oddsson is adamant that Iceland’s government and people not take responsibility for these bad debts, and shares the view I found to be unanimous among Icelanders: These crooks betrayed the country. The myth of deregulated “free” enterprise has been broken, and privatization is seen to have been a euphemism for kleptocracy.

I recently returned from a week in Iceland – a week in which I met with politicians and former prime ministers, financial officials, university professors and students, film makers, TV hosts and “just plain people.” The terms “left” and “right” did not arise in a single conversation. The focus was on Iceland’s pro-creditor practice of indexing consumer mortgages and other debts – a 17 per cent “inflation” premium for creditors based on the consumer price index (in effect, the Icelandic krónur’s exchange rate, as most consumer goods are imported), on top of the normal nearly 6 per cent mortgage interest, leading a number of Icelanders to tell me they had lost their home to foreclosing bankers. Nobody can pay 23 per cent interest rates on mortgages for long while house prices are plunging, along with the economy at large. Most families are now paying by running down their savings, trying to carry debts that are practically unpayable.

This explains the population’s desire for a stable currency. It would remove the onerous interest rate add-on. Originally, wages as well as debts were indexed, Brazilian style. But one day the wage index was dropped, keeping the financial index on the spurious rationalization that it was a “contractual” payment for property, and agreements with labor were less legally grounded. In other words, big fish eat little fish. No creditor class, regardless of how greedy and aggressive, has ever achieved anything like this law. Yet Iceland let it happen – despite the country’s heavy homeownership-on-credit. Joining the euro is widely viewed as easier than changing the law to get rid of this debt fee, unique to Iceland among all countries of the world. I find this legalistic inertia incredible, but it seems to be a testament to Iceland’s faith in law, however crazy that may be.

The currency collapse was caused by the bankruptcy and nationalization of Iceland’s three major banks (Glitnir, Kaupthing and Landsbanki), which engaged in a wave of hubristic incompetence and outright fraud after being privatized in a series of insider dealings in 2002-03. These banks went under owing nearly $100 billion, but nobody knows just how much, or even who really is on the other end of many of the transactions involved. A special prosecutor has been retained to discover the details, which are still opaque.

n fact, Iceland is in many ways like the post-Soviet kleptocracies. But instead of emerging out of Komsomol, Red Directors and other vestiges of the Communist Party’s bureaucracy, Iceland’s kleptocrats emerged from the great landowners and politically powerful families that have dominated the nation for centuries, long before it achieved independence from Denmark in 1944, at a time when Denmark was overrun by the Nazis and independence represented a pro-Allied position.

Privatization of Iceland’s fishing grounds and their licenses

When the North Atlantic became free of German U-boats after the war, British trawlers competed with Icelandic fishing boats for the rich cod and other fish. After a series of showdowns extending into the 1970s, Iceland became the leader in establishing the 200-mile limit to define international sea rights – thanks largely to U.S. support, which Iceland has reciprocated politically ever since.

The Law of the Sea treaty deals with the issue of to whom the natural resources of the seas belong. To maintain the fish population (at least, that is the stated logic), Iceland issued licenses representing a specified proportion of the annual permitted catch, whose magnitude was set each year based on the estimated fish population. In contrast to classical economic practice, these licenses were not auctioned off each year by the government so as to recover fair value for the nation’s natural resource in the sea. Rather, the licenses were issued much like taxicab licenses in New York City: once issued, they became permanent, and naturally have risen in market price over time. The initial holders – the leading political insiders a century ago – have bequeathed them to their heirs, to be rented out to the actual fishermen or simply kept them in the family. Iceland’s Treasury receives no benefit from harvest the seas. Licenses simply have become a rent-extraction fee, a payment to the former insiders and their successors.

Under competitive bidding, the potential licensee would calculate the market value of whatever resources they reckon can be extracted, calculate their costs of extraction and their targeted profit margin. The sea legally belongs to the Icelandic people, and the government would receive the proceeds. But today, the heirs or others who obtained the quota licenses from the original insiders from the 1980s receive this money. So it is no surprise that many Icelanders are so disgusted at the privatization of fishing licenses that they may not care if Iceland loses its fishing rights. After all, under the current rent-extracting system, the losers would be the owners of these artificially designed licenses, not the Icelandic people.

But this attitude loses sight of a highly desirable alternative – one that should appeal on free market grounds to the two traditional centrist parties as well as to the “left” because it is so economically fair: Auction off the fishing quotas each year, with the benefit going to the Icelandic people as part of the public budget, as should be the case with natural resources including the land itself. It is not necessary to join Europe, give its insiders fishing rights and its bankers the rights to create credit (which should be viewed as a public utility) to achieve fiscal efficiency.

The Icesave tangle with Britain

The other conflict with Britain concerns the Landsbanki’s Icesave branches, which paid high enough interest rates to convince the Labour government to direct its local neighborhood councils to show “fiduciary responsibility” by placing their savings where rates were highest. It was as if high interest premiums were not a compensation for risk. And because Icesave took the form of local branches of Icelandic banks, Britain took no role in regulation or oversight of its own. I find this typical British economic incompetence, but it is in the character of incompetent governments to try to blame whomever else they can. So they reimbursed their depositors in full, and demanded that Iceland’s government tax its own people as if these deposits were public loans!

To force the issue, Britain froze the accounts of all its Icelandic bank branches, including those of Kaupthing on the Isle of Man. This prevented them from remitting funds out of the country, forcing the head offices back in Iceland into insolvency. The only law at hand for this financial grab was emergency anti-terrorist legislation, presumably against Irish and Arab groups. Britain branded Iceland as a terrorist country, while acting in a financially violent way itself. Icelanders naturally found it unreasonable that after having taken high interest charges, Britain should insist that its depositors not suffer any capital loss at all – in contrast to the huge losses they suffered in the U.S. and other foreign markets (not to mention Northern Rock and other reckless domestic mortgage lenders). But with some Icelanders thinking of bank debts as “our” debts, why not make as large demands as possible, despite the double standard obviously at work? (Imagine what the response would be if, say, Germany would accuse America of being a terrorist economy in order to seize U.S. assets to compensate for the losses that banks in Düsseldorf and Saxony suffered on U.S. subprime mortgages.)

Many U.S. newspaper reporters played along by calling Iceland “Vikings” and preferring to “Viking finance” to the more politically sensitive “oligarchy.” But the implication of a rough-and-tumble Nordic Wild West is silly. Iceland has no standing army, and America’s former NATO base has become Reykjavik’s international airport (and a long drive it is into the city proper – but pleasantly scenic through the volcanic island and the almost perpetual rainbows resulting from the fact that it always seems to be raining somewhere in the sea-laden air). Iceland’s hard-working and closely-knit population is as middle-class as one could imagine, with the world’s highest home ownership rates, high educational standards, and typically Nordic social welfare system and communalist values. It is a Scandinavian-type social democracy, but much more local in scale. And that may be part of the problem. Many Icelanders are so middle-class that they believe that paying bad bank gambles is a matter of honor, as if these were personal debts among neighbors. But the big banks were not like most neighbors, and engaged in deep financial fraud. This required complicity of the foreigners now demanding to be recompensed.

The IMF typically acts as a collection agent for global creditors, but in Iceland’s case its local mission seems to feel uncomfortable in this role. No IMF funds have yet been drawn down from the $10 billion line of credit recently negotiated. I was impressed that the finance ministry was not going to draw down IMF funds to pay foreigners. Finance Minister Steingrimur Sigfusson heads the Green Party and is dubious about how much such borrowing – or joining the EU – can help matters by the government borrowing to stabilize today’s inherently unstable situation.

This leaves the question of Iceland’s krónur relative to the euro. As long as the creditor-oriented 17 per cent foreign-exchange index is added onto mortgages, Icelandic homeowners (about 90 per cent of the population) understandably will want to see price stability. But the euro will not necessarily provide this. It would merely impose austerity, shrinking the economy to cut back imports. The way to revive the currency is for the economy to grow, and this means getting rid of debt indexing, a free lunch that no other nation on earth has given the financial sector.

There is much confusion as to what “joining Europe” means in practice. For Central and Eastern European members of the former Soviet Union, beauty was in the eye of the beholder. They voted to join the EU in the early 1990s under the impression that the EU would take them under its protective wing to help them install a modernized Western-style industrial capitalism with rising living standards. Instead, the EU leadership looked at these post- economies simply as markets for their own farm and industrial exports, and for its banks to make a killing by entering into a virtual partnership with the Soviet-style kleptocrats who dominated these economies. The EU looked the other way when it saw crooks taking over and indeed, actively supporting them as long as these crooks sold to the Europeans much as a burglar sells to a fence, privatizing the public domain in insider dealings, selling off property and stock to European investors, and borrowing in foreign currency to fuel the world’s most extreme (and unstable) real estate bubble. Collapse of this false start is tearing the euro apart.

The case of Latvia and its Baltic neighbors is instructive. Much like Iceland, they were burdened with a debt overhead far beyond their ability to pay – mortgage debts denominated in foreign currency, so that they cannot avail themselves of the time-honored policy of inflating their way out of debt. Nor will it help for the government to borrow from the IMF and EU to pay the debts of its insolvent real estate to Swedish and other foreign banks. Public-sector borrowing to bail out bad private-sector debts involves squeezing the money out of the domestic population by even higher taxes on labor, pricing it (and hence, domestic industry) out of world markets. In this condition the economy is unable to earn enough to cover its import dependency and the debt service with which it has been burdened.

This is the problem that Iceland must avoid. Unfortunately, the EU’s treatment of the post-Soviet economies has shown how predatory and defensive of narrow national interests it can be. Joaqim Almunia of the European Commission made this clear in a letter of January 26, 2009, to Latvia’s Prime Minister spelling out the terms on which Europe would bail out the foreign banks operating in Latvia – at Latvia’s own expense. He was explicit that Latvia not use EU loans to develop its economy or to lighten the tax burden blocking new employment, but only to pay off debts to its creditors in the West (mainly Scandinavian banks) and to buy imports from them.

Extended assistance is to be used to avoid a balance of payments crisis, which requires … restoring confidence in the banking sector [now entirely foreign owned], and bolstering the foreign reserves of the Bank of Latvia. … financial assistance is not meant to be used to originate new loans to businesses and households. … it is important not to raise ungrounded expectations among the general public and the social partners, and, equally, to counter misunderstandings that may arise in this respect. Worryingly, we have witnessed some recent evidence in Latvian public debate of calls for part of the financial assistance to be used inter alia for promoting export industries or to stimulate the economy through increased spending at large. It is important actively to stem these misperceptions.

This leaves Latvia in much the position of a nation defeated in war and having to pay reparations. Riots broke out, and protesters stormed the Treasury. It was a scene that has been repeated in Hungary, Ukraine and other countries recently, akin to Latin America’s “IMF riots” of the 1960s and’70s. It does not give much hope that joining Europe would, in itself, help Iceland solve its own similar economic clean-up needs. Instead of helping the post-Soviet nations develop self-reliant economies, the West viewed them as economic oysters to be broken open, sucked dry to extract interest charges and capital gains, and left as  empty shells. After the domestic kleptocrats, foreign banks and investors have removed their funds from the economy, the Latvian lat will be permitted to depreciate. Foreign buyers then can come in and pick up local assets on the cheap once again.

This sounds remarkably like what Iceland has been going through. The danger is that it might surrender to European interests seeking to appropriate its fishing rights, obtain a monopoly on private bank credit, and lend to the government to bail out European investors who speculated and lost with the now-defunct Icelandic banks. One would hope that the Greens and Progressive Party would review the possible terms of entry into the EU and adoption of the euro, but not replace a domestic kleptocracy with foreign economic occupiers just because they are European. This would merely replace one group of politically well-connected insiders with others, largely to the benefit of Britain.

If we apply the traditional left/right dichotomies to the results of Saturday’s election, the pro-Europe approach seems right wing in promoting financial interests (economic austerity to subordinate debtor to creditor interests, and debt deflation to dismantle public welfare spending). Social Democratic parties throughout the world have been the most ideologically extreme privatizers, from Tony Blair’s New Labour to Roger Douglas’s New Zealand Labour Party and the Australian Labour Party.

Iceland’s Social Democrats are threatening to “fast-track” Europe, and to hold a take-it-or-leave-it referendum on whether to join on the terms her party negotiates, without bringing the citizenry into the process. Prime-minister elect Johanna Sigurdardottir hopes to start negotiations to join the EU within two months, and to hold a referendum on joining it by the end of next year. As far as parliamentary democracy is concerned, this plan is similar to the Independence and Progressive party leaders agreeing to join the Coalition of the Willing in Iraq, ignoring proper procedures by not consulting the Althing.

Meanwhile, the EU and euro are in danger of breaking up as the post-Soviet economies devalue, imposing austerity without having developed their economies outside of real estate. Yet I found little recognition of how the euro and indeed the expanded EU is being torn apart by the unstable post-Soviet economies that have no visible means of financing their structural trade deficits, now that the real estate bubble has burst and there is no more foreign-currency mortgage lending into these unfortunate countries. Europe’s monetary management is looking nearly as irresponsible as Iceland’s did.

The failure of EU tutelage in the Baltics and Central Europe suggests that Iceland would do best to set about solving its own problems, pursuing its national interest while cleaning up the residue from its disastrous neoliberal experiment. A true market reform would replace the remnants of feudal power with auctioned fishing rent rights so as to keep them as the tax base, and to restore a viable public banking system. Ultimately at issue is Iceland’s economic independence itself.

Michael Hudson is a former Wall Street economist. A Distinguished Research Professor at University of Missouri, Kansas City (UMKC), he is the author of many books, including Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (new ed., Pluto Press, 2002) He can be reached at mh@michael-hudson.com

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