Reykjavík Grapevine - 05.11.2011, Síða 12

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The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 17 — 2011 Do you remember a few years back, like in 2005, when there were absolutely no protests about anything at all, any-
where? What did we spend our time on? What did we write about? Did we all just really like everything, or were we
being indifferent? Are we trying to make a difference now, or do we just like to yell about stuff? letters@grapevine.is
Iceland | Politics
Wave Of Protest
Was the Icelandic pots and pans revolution really unique?
Words
Árni Daníel Júlíusson
Photo
Jose Ángel Hernández
At the time of writing, the Icelandic
‘pots and pans movement’, which
can also be labeled the Icelandic in-
dignados movement, has once again
confronted the government, the
IMF and the world financial system,
and the government has once again
promised to look “seriously” at its
demands.
The Icelandic pots and pans movement
is close to breaking the back of Icelandic
neo-liberalism. The government can no
longer hope to regain any kind of he-
gemony based on the idea that the free
market is to play the leading role in so-
ciety. This idea has so thoroughly been
discredited that it is a marvel that Ice-
land’s “left” neoliberal government has
touted it for so long. Of course the IMF
(Goldman Sachs, the US government –
basically the same entity) demanded it,
and the IMF is still the main force behind
Icelandic neo-liberalism. A basic prereq-
uisite for the “help” of IMF to Iceland that
the demands of the protest movement
for a general debt restructuring should
be ignored. This the “left” neo-liberal
government obeyed and it is now reap-
ing the rewards in a steadily deepening
distrust of the general public towards
the political establishment, the media
and the financial system.
But of course the IMF does not care
about political or social dimensions of
society, it is only hired to take care of the
economy—that is to say, ensure that the
rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
That is the real meaning of the neoliberal
hegemony.
THE ICElANDIC INDIGNADOS
When the Icelandic ‘pots and pans
movement’ appeared—it could now
be called the Icelandic division of the
‘indignados’ movement—it was alone
in Europe. The ‘pots and pans move-
ment’ appeared after the collapse of
the Icelandic financial system, in the so-
called ‘pots and pans revolution’, which
reached a high watermark in January of
2009, when the movement brought the
government down with its protests. To
be sure, it soon sought support from a
closely related European movement,
the alter-globalisation movement of At-
tac and the European Social Forum. The
alter-globalization movement welcomed
the Icelandic movement and a local
chapter of Attac was started in Iceland
with the help of the Norwegian Attac,
which is the strongest Attac chapter in
Scandinavia.
The movement against neo-liberal-
ism had its origins in the core capitalist
countries like France and the US in 1997-
1999. Attac was started by an article in
the radical French newspaper Le Monde
Diplomatique in 1997, which was written
on the occasion of the South-East Asian
crisis of 1997. The South-East Asian fi-
nancial crisis started in Thailand and
caused a collapse of stock prices across
the region. When the IMF stepped in to
“help” it made matters much worse by
ordering totally liberalised capital mar-
kets as a prerequisite for its assistance,
which in a short time led to a gigantic
capital flight from the region. The coun-
tries in the area suffered greatly, South
Korea and other countries still bearing
the scars of the crisis decades later.
THE AlTER-GlOBAlISATION
MOVEMENT
So radicals in the the capitalist core re-
acted by starting what has been called
an alter-globalisation movement, a
movement against neo-liberalism. The
French, Germans and other Europeans
active in this movement soon connected
with radicals in Brazil and elsewhere in
the place formerly called the third world
(this term seems to apply mostly only to
Africa now, the other parts of the third
world have become “emerging markets
with a growing middle class”). The an-
nual World Social Forum, of which the
first was held in Porto Alegre in 2001,
was the one of the results.
Iceland was the only Scandinavian
country which was left unaffected by
this movement. All the others were af-
fected, with Sweden being the scene
of one of the big battles between neo-
liberal state power and the activists, in
Gothenburg in June 2001. It seems that
Iceland’s present Finance Minister (and
Chairman of the Left-Green party), Ste-
ingrímur J. Sigfússon, was interested in
starting an Attac chapter in Iceland at
the time and was in touch with Susan
George, one of the leading lights of At-
tac in France, but nothing came of it.
THE NEO-lIBERAl TIGERS OF
NORTHERN EUROPE
Iceland seems perhaps in some respects
to have had more in common with coun-
tries like Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, or
Ireland, countries that whole-heartedly
embraced the opportunities opened by
neo-liberal financial globalization after
having been in the economic doldrums
for much of the 20th century, than
Scandinavia or the countries were the
anti-globalization movement developed.
Even so Iceland had a robust economic
development the whole 19th and 20th
centuries, leading to the situation that a
kind of rather "healthy" or benign mod-
ern capitalism that developed in Iceland
with a relatively strong welfare state up
to about 1980 (though not as strong or
well organised as in Scandinavia) was
shattered by neo-liberalism.
However, this was not evident until
October 2008. Until then neo-liberalism
with its unfettered capitalism and cre-
ative banking seemed to be creating
unheard of wealth in Iceland. A few dis-
sidents muttered in corners here and
there that the wealth created was not at
all evenly distributed and nobody out-
side the top echelons of the financial
sector had benefitted from it. But these
voices were few and far between.
A NEW KIND OF MOVEMENT
This all changed radically after the col-
lapse in Iceland in October 2008. Sud-
denly Iceland developed a protest move-
ment, which was however of a different
kind in some respects that the earlier
movements. They were protest move-
ments in the core capitalist countries
that protested against the unjust treat-
ment of other, peripheral countries in the
capitalist world system, even if some of
the destructive tendency of this system
was very evident in the US rust belt, with
many industries being moved to China
and elsewhere. Now a protest move-
ment exploded in a country close to the
core, a “wealthy Scandinavian democra-
cy with a good welfare system,” because
of the consequences it had suffered due
to the bubble economy.
This was a new development in the
protest movement against neo-liberal-
ism. Hitherto the core capitalist coun-
tries in the West had not been directly
affected by any crisis, but in the period
2008-2011 more and more countries in
this core were affected. And the pro-
test movement exploded, first in Ice-
land, then Greece, Spain, Portugal and
France, and finally it erupted with great
force in the core country of world capi-
talism itself, the US. In the fall of 2011
a movement called Occupy Wall Street
gathered strength and broke through to
world attention in October 2011, three
years after the collapse of the Lehman
brothers bank and the beginning of the
new world crisis.
ROOTS BACK TO 1999-2001
The movement in the US had roots back
to the anti-globalisation movement of
the period around 2000, but this move-
ment had been extinguished when the
Al Qaeda attacked New York and Wash-
ington. Now the movement comes back
in full force, now that the US has been
directly affected by a deep economic,
financial, social and political crisis, that
is affecting the whole of the West and
threatens to plunge the core countries of
Europe, like Germany, France and Great
Britain, into crisis as well.
So the Icelandic situation has brought
the country to the attention of the world
protest movements. The protest move-
ment in Iceland has done something that
no other movement has hitherto done, it
has toppled a neo-liberal government of
the country – albeit with the results that
another neo-liberal government, a so
called "left" government came to power
– and the protest movement has had to
deal with a situation were the election
of a new government has not resulted
in any changes. The situation is as dire
as before, the new "left" government
brought to power by the protest move-
ment is blind and deaf and unable to re-
spond to the cries from the streets. It is
seemingly in the clutches of the financial
oligarchy, and so some new democratic
strategy must be devised to deprive fi-
nancial capital of its authoritarian hold
over state power. The conventional
methods of democracy do not seem to
function.
So what can be done? October 15
saw protests against the power of the
financial markets and for more democ-
racy simultaneously in over 800 cities in
about 80 countries in the world. That is
surely a positive sign, even a source of
optimism.
Those who are yet to give up on
Icelandic media cannot have
avoided noticing one Kristján
Már Unnarsson, a news di-
rector and journalist at TV station Stöð 2.
Kristján, who in 2007 received the Icelandic
Press Awards for his coverage of “everyday
countryside life,” is a peculiar fan of man-
ful and mighty constructions, and loves to
tell good news to and about all the “good
heavy industry guys” that Iceland has to
offer.
To be more precise, Kristján has, for
at least a decade (and I say “at least” just
because my memory and research doesn't
take me further back), gone on a rampage
each and every time he gets the chance to
tell his audience about the newest of news
in Iceland's heavy industry and energy af-
fairs. He talks about gold-mills when re-
ferring to dams built to power aluminium
production; and when preparing an eve-
ning news item on, say, plans regarding
energy and aluminium production, he usu-
ally doesn't see a reason for talking to more
than one person—a person who, almost
without exception, is in favour of whatever
project is being discussed. After witness-
ing Kristján's latest contribution to the on-
going development of heavy industry and
large-scale energy production, i.e. his cov-
erage of Alcoa's recently announced deci-
sion not to continue with its plan of build-
ing a new aluminium smelter in Húsavík,
wherein he managed to blame just any-
thing but Alcoa itself for the company's de-
cisions, I couldn't resist asking (and, really,
not for the first time): What can really ex-
plain this way too obvious one-sidedness,
manifest not only in this particular journal-
ist's work, but seemingly the majority of
news coverage concerning heavy industry?
“Lack of professionalism,” someone
might say. Professionalism would thus im-
ply allowing more than one single voice to
be heard, letting one argument meet an-
other, allowing conflicts to take place and
thereby giving the audience a chance to
critically make up its mind. This lack of pro-
fessionalism actually applies to such a huge
quantity of all news material produced. In-
deed, the constant recycling of content—of
interviews, press-releases, photos, etc.—
and the manufacture of single-perspective
news content often seems to be the main-
stream media's predominant modus ope-
randi.
“Co-dependency,” could be another
suggestion. And a good one, as it often
seems that the bulk of journalists are seri-
ously co-dependent with the ruling political
and economical order. Take, for instance,
the mantra of the never-questioned impor-
tance of non-stop economic growth, or the
commonly heard phrase that during a pro-
test “the police needed to use teargas”—as
the decision to spray isn't fuelled by a pre-
cise political will, but rather a simple need.
These two are good answers, but defi-
nitely not good enough when standing on
their own. To get the full picture, let’s look
into the relationship between mainstream
journalism on the one hand, and public re-
lations on the other. How, for instance, are
the tops of the aluminium and energy com-
panies' PR departments staffed?
At Reykjavík Energy we have Eiríkur
Hjálmarsson, former journalist and pro-
gramme producer at state TV station
RÚV, whereas at Landsvirkjun we find one
Ragna Sara Jónsdóttir, former journalist at
RÚV and newspaper Morgunblaðið. Alcoa
prides itself of Erna Indriðadóttir, long-
time journalist at RÚV, while Rio Tinto Al-
can sports Ólafur Teitur Guðnason, former
journalist at RÚV, DV and business paper
Viðskiptablaðið (it is worth noting that
Ólafur is also known for his once-annual
books analysing and criticising the media,
not from the usual Chomsky-like left-wing,
but rather a right-wing perspective). At last
but not least, the only employee of Samál
(or The Icelandic Association of Aluminium
Producers) is Þorsteinn Víglundson who,
along with a few jobs in the financial sector,
used to write news for Morgunblaðið.
Quite an impressive list, isn't? And
where does it bring us? Possibly to the as-
sumption that the first-mentioned Kristján
Már Unnarsson must be undergoing his
entrance examination, or even on-the-job-
training. But that would be a bit too simplis-
tic because practically, Kristján Már might
well be preparing for a better paid PR job,
whereas theoretically it really doesn't mat-
ter if that is the case or not.
What matters is the ever-impenetrable
handshake between those two industries:
Public Relations and The Media. What, in
fact, is one medium's coverage of a com-
pany but a conversation between the two
parties? A pre-designed and post-edited
conversation, for sure, but a conversa-
tion nevertheless. And the conversation
element is crucial as a journalist's co-
dependency and lack of professionalism
(deliberate or not) are of no use if the Holy
Trinity's most important link is missing. And
vice versa: Without sympathetic journalists,
a PR stunt is likely to end up dead in the
water.
The stunt's key moment, as Spice Girls
realised and told us, is “when two become
one.”
Opinion | Snorri Páll Jónsson Úlfhildarson
When Two Become One
“So the Icelandic situation has brought the
country to the attention of the world protest
movements.”