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[Descan]

Didn't the Great Depression get it's ball rolling because Austrian banks went belly up?*

*Could be completely wrong.

[Sheb]

Yup, you got shafted, but not by the Icelandic government or population. You got shafted by bankers, and you're lucky that the bankers that shafted you will at least go on trial, while those that shafted most of the rest of the world are now making huge bonuses again.

It's not mainstream news here either, but is quite well known in activists/political buff circles. I've heard that story or putting bankers on trial as well, but AFAIK, they've not done it yet. The ex-prime minister is also on trial for deregulating the banks and creating this huge mess.

[palsch]

Didn't something similar happen with the English getting screwed when some large bank in France collapsed a while ago? Like, maybe it was 6 or 7 years ago perhaps?

That was Iceland and back in 2008. The affair is known as the Icesave dispute and is sort of ongoing. There is more on the internal crisis here.

A lot of British councils, public bodies and charities had money in Icelandic banks, heavily built on the market that entirely vanished in the credit crisis. When the sector completely collapsed, the Icelandic government took over the banks but didn't guarantee any of the overseas investments. The British government could only afford to guarantee individual investments, leaving billions of pounds in corporate and public money to disappear overnight. Almost £1 billion was invested by 125 local authorities, a good chunk of which vanished. This threatened local tax (council tax) freezes have had to be abandoned, spiking living costs higher even as public services were under threat.

When the UK found out that Iceland was treating internal accounts differently to foreign ones, arguably in violation of the law, a freeze was put in place on assets of the collapsed bank (Landsbanki) in the UK. Because the law used for such assets freezes was the 2001 Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act, this was billed as the UK using anti-terror legislation against Iceland, causing a lot of pushback and outrage from the Icelandic government and public.

This caused some serious problems establishing a repayment plan, which the UK and Netherlands (the other nation with massive funds in Iceland) saw as a prerequisite to releasing IMF funds. Two proposals went to referendums and were both rejected.

The government effectively collapsed shortly after the banks, with the head of the coalition stepping down quickly and calling for early elections. Those returned a leftist government under Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir (IIRC, the first head of government in a same-sex marriage). I don't believe there has been a governmental collapse since then and the signs are pretty good. They have made steps towards joining the EU, which has actually been good for them securing external funds. And this story yesterday suggests that repayments to British councils has passed the halfway point.

It's not mainstream news here either, but is quite well known in activists/political buff circles. I've heard that story or putting bankers on trial as well, but AFAIK, they've not done it yet. The ex-prime minister is also on trial for deregulating the banks and creating this huge mess.

That ended last month.

Geir Haarde, the former prime minister of Iceland and the only politician in the world to face prosecution for his role in the 2008 financial crisis, has been found guilty of failing to hold emergency cabinet meetings in the runup to the crisis. But he was cleared of three more serious charges, which could have jailed him for two years.

There is also this Telegraph interview with lots of details of the crisis and aftermath.

There are a dearth of English language Icelandic sources, but this guy looks solid if people want to dig in more.

[Sheb]

Your article doesn't say where the money is coming from. The bank? The UK government? The Icelandic government?

[palsch]

Your article doesn't say where the money is coming from. The bank? The UK government? The Icelandic government?

If you mean in this story, that's money from the nationalised banks to UK groups who had invested with the banks that collapsed. These were debts the government took over from the banks when their assets and liabilities were nationalised, but IIRC they are all handled through the remaining structures of the nationalised bodies.

EDIT: Ah, not entirely accurate. I'm trying to find a clearer explanation of the actual structure. It doesn't look this this payoff was actually public money but instead recovered from the old banks assets. The nationalisation part was to do with immediate measures.

The UK government covered private investments which the Icelandic government were also liable for, but so far repayment of those debts isn't looking especially promising.

I think this post might be helpful.

[Nadaka]

Why must Bush wait till he is out of office to say something respectable?

http://news.yahoo.com/bush-touts-arab-spring-says-us-cant-fear-161018046.html

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Bush is a very strange person.

I hear about things like this involving him all the time. It makes me wonder about what being in politics did to him, because it certainly doesn't match up to how he acts when not in politics.

[Reelya]

Bush is a very strange person.

I hear about things like this involving him all the time. It makes me wonder about what being in politics did to him, because it certainly doesn't match up to how he acts when not in politics.

I'm calling bullshit on that "nice Bush" story since Lanny Davis states 'I hope it suggests a return to the "compassionate conservatism" I remember and that he practiced in his two terms as governor of Texas.'

Yeah total bullshit. His time as Texas governor was WORSE than his time as president, read this guardian article from 2000, pre-election win.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2000/nov/01/uselections2000.usa2

Here's some snippets:

Viewed from here, Texas is a harsh state of extreme inequality, which has become more unequal under Mr Bush's leadership. In a time of booming economy and record budget surpluses, the governor's corporate allies have made a killing at the lucrative intersection of state government and business. Meanwhile 45% of the population in the lower Rio Grande Valley live below the poverty line and pray that they never need medical help they cannot afford. It is an unforgiving place, unrecognisable from the progressive and tolerant state evoked in Mr Bush's stump speeches.

The governor's powers are strictly circumscribed by the state constitution, but with less than a week potentially separating Mr Bush from the White House, his priorities and policies as Texas governor give clear indications about how he might lead America.
[...]
When her son, Robert, fell ill with bronchitis she hesitated before taking him to see a doctor because she had no health insurance. When his condition became serious, she panicked and rushed him across the Rio Grande, to the Mexican border town of Reynosa. "The doctor there said if I had been just a few hours later, he would have been dead."

Lydia Camarillo's plight is not unusual. There are 1.4m uninsured children in Texas, a higher proportion than anywhere else in the country, be cause Texas, under Mr Bush's governorship, makes it harder than any other state to get affordable healthcare. Lydia and her husband, Belarmino, have no steady jobs. She bakes cakes and sells them from home, and the family migrates northwards in the summer to work as agricultural labourers.
[...]
This was an issue to which the governor gave unusually detailed attention. His administration blocked the adoption of a national child health insurance programme (Chip), which offers affordable care to families just above the absolute poverty level. Although the scheme is funded entirely by the federal government, Mr Bush argued that 20% of the applicants "will come in seeking Chip but will be enrolled in Medicaid instead", and that would have to be paid out of his state budget. In plain English, he was afraid poor Texan families would find out what free medical care they were entitled to. His administration fought an attempt to put it on the state legislative agenda in 1997. Instead, he spent much of the state's $6.4bn on tax-cuts, including a $1bn cut in property taxes. Under increasing duress last year, he suggested a more limited scheme which would have excluded 200,000 children, before giving in to political pressure.
[...]
In his standard presidential campaign appearances, Mr Bush now claims credit for the Chip scheme, which has evolved into an essential element of his bipartisan "compassionate conservative" image.

It is spin of Orwellian boldness. It is still tougher in Texas than in almost any other state to gain access to Medicaid. And in a region where the per capita income is $7,700, less than half the Texas average, the Bush administration in 1997 actually attempted in 1997 to lower the minimum wage of $3.25 an hour.
[...]
On the other end of the winner-loser scale are JR and Lupe Cordova. The couple live in Houston, which last year overtook Los Angeles as the most polluted city in the nation. As a focal point of the petro-chemical industry, it has always been a dirty town, but from where the Cordovas stand, it has got a loss worse.

Perched on the Houston Ship Channel, their neighbourhood, which goes by the ironic name of Woodland Acres, has been suffocated by the seemingly unregulated industrial sprawl around them. A steel firm called North Shore Supply Company built a galvanising plant across the road from them, despite zoning regulations defining the street as residential. Despite the family's complaints, those regulations have never been enforced, and the plant continues to add to the burden of chemicals and black dust in the air. By their own accounting, Houston industries pump nearly a million tonnes of pollutants into the air each year in "accidental" chemical releases. The condition of the air alone is estimated to cause nearly 1,000 deaths in Houston a year.

The Cordovas' son Stephen, 10, has chronic bronchitis and, like his father, a near-permanent rash which turns the skin on his arm red and tough. At elementary school, he would vomit after every meal. Their daughter Jessica, 15, had such severe asthma that she was unable to go outside for more than 20 minutes at a time. "My daughter tells her version of our life together. It's all seen from inside looking through the window at us outside," Mrs Cordova said.

Mr Cordova developed severe sinus and respiratory problems and had to leave his job as a docker on the channel, but he still wanted to stay in the blighted neighbourhood he had grown up in. But, the Cordovas were forced out of Woodland Acres anyway.

After Mrs Cordova, a schoolteacher, became prominent in a campaign by local mothers to force national environmental standards on the local industries, the couple began receiving death threats. In November 1999, someone blew the windows out of their car with a shotgun. That was too much, and the family moved to a suburb in north Houston earlier this year. They have yet to find jobs there and they are unable to sell their house in Woodland Acres. North Shore Supply offered $14,000, and Mr Cordova angrily turned them down.

And it just goes on and on.

[palsch]

Anyone still care about the NDAA stuff?

Because the best possible amendment so far (banning military detention for those captured on US soil) was rejected on a party line vote. In it's place is a weak ass amendment designed to do exactly the same thing as last year but looking like it cares about civil liberties instead of just looking tough on terrorists. If anything this amendment, supposedly addressing liberty concerns, creates two new legal problems; ambiguity around the status of illegal immigrant's habeas rights and an apparent 30 day period of detention where prisoners may be denied access to court and council.

At the same time it seems a new mandatory military detention provision has been passed. This was in the 2012 NDAA but removed after Obama's veto threat. I'd recommend reading the statement made alongside the amendment in that post just to get the blood boiling.

And yeah, the House passed the bill (including that amendment) last night. So it's probably a Senate fight and Obama veto threat to look forwards to.


In other NDAA news, a federal judge has suspended one of the detention provisions of the 2012 NDAA (the one every was worked up over) in an absurd looking case; Hedges v. Obama.

The case hinged on two points; did the people bringing it have standing to challenge the law (eg, reasonable belief that it could be used against them) and that the NDAA has power beyond the AUMF which it explicitly affirms.

On the second point, the judge ignored both the law's statement that it doesn't change such powers and didn't even address the caselaw on this point, simply stating that she had to view every statute as having individual and unique power. Which is a little odd, but OK. She had one of the cheekiest lines of reasoning that made me forgive this entirely; if the NDAA provision in question has no power beyond that of the AUMF the provision being enjoined won't make any difference and so it doesn't matter. That is, if your defence of a law's negative effects are that the law has no effects does it really matter if your defence fails?

On the first point, the government acted really weird. Despite stating in their briefs and in all law and policy that the people suing have no chance of being detained under the AUMF/NDAA, the lawyer refused to explicitly state this in court, essentially saying they didn't answer hypothetical questions. The government offered no additional defences. So it's hard to tell if they really cared.

All in all, weird case. I kinda agree with the judge that if the provision is bunk (which it is) it doesn't matter if it's struck down or not. But I wouldn't be surprised if this feeds back into the current NDAA 2013 debate.

[Loud Whispers]

Where to begin?  Well, how about the situation where the person in question is captured by an ally who will not turn him over to us unless we plan to use civilian prosecution? 

That's not something I expected to hear in the modern world :s

[Sheb]

Well, you're still allied with some European power that care about that kind of stuff. Lots of country have laws that prevent extradition if the suspect would risk torture and/or not get a fair trial.

[Leafsnail]

I guess that's another argument for severing our extradition agreement with the US as soon as possible.

[alway]

http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/19/11765588-cops-occupy-protesters-at-chicago-nato-sumnmit-held-over-molotov-cocktail-plot?lite

Three protesters at the NATO summit in Chicago have been charged with terrorism conspiracy stemming from allegations that they planned to make Molotov cocktails, police said.
Chicago police Lt. Kenneth Stoppa told The Associated Press early Saturday that the three were being held on charges of conspiracy to commit terrorism, possession of an explosive or incendiary device and providing material support.

...

But the group of protesters said what police thought was suspicious was actually a home beer-brewing operation.
“We were handcuffed to a bench and our legs were shackled together. We were not told what was happening,” one of those detained but later released, Darrin Ammussek, told the station.
“I believe very strongly in non-violence, and if I had seen anything that even resembled any plans or anything like that, we wouldn’t have been there," he added.
He claimed that during 18 hours in custody, police never told him why he was arrested, read him his rights or allowed him to make a phone call, The Associated Pres reported. He said he remained handcuffed to a bench, even after asking to use a restroom.
"There were guards walking by making statements into the door along the lines of 'hippie,' 'communist," 'pinko,'" a tired-looking Annussek told reporters just after his release.

“They came in with guns drawn and broke into a unit that was not housing protestors in order to get into another unit in the building that was housing protestors,” Kris Hermes, of the National Lawyers Guild, told NBCChicago.com.

[Scelly9]

'communist,"

Why are we not over this?

Anyway, cops can be asshats sometimes. I remember when I was dwn at occupy in St. Louis everything was great with the mayor, until the baseball season ended and the press went away. Then he basically said "fuck you, you had your fun. Now go home" Sigh.

[justinlee999]

In one of the related articles:
http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/18/11757222-nurses-yes-nurses-lead-charge-for-wall-street-sin-tax?lite

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

"We know the solution .. we are watching and seeing Wall Street throwing our money away as we see people suffer and die. It will not continue," she said. "We pay sales tax. It is time for Wall Street to start paying back what they owe the rest of the country and they need to pay sales tax."

Go nurses go!