Reykjavík Grapevine - 07.10.2011, Síða 14

14
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 16 — 2011
Iceland in the international Eye | OctoberThe World | Is it changing?
Most of you will recall—possibly with
distaste or distain—how Michael Lewis
crushed little Iceland in his article, ‘Wall
Street on the Tundra,’ shortly after the
collapse, implying that a bunch of farm-
ers and fishermen near the arctic circle
had fallen foul of their plans for world
domination.
Now in his new book, ‘Boomerang,’
released October 3 and drawn from ar-
ticles he penned for Vanity Fair, Michael
Lewis once again encapsulates the lu-
nacy and abandon that ran rampant in
banks, institutions, governments, and
the common man, on both sides of the
Atlantic (and on an island in-between).
He dedicates a fair amount of the book
to the lending and spending madness
that was Iceland.
Lewis asserts that the governments
of Iceland, Ireland, Portugal and Greece
showed no common sense whatsoever;
he also suggests that little has yet been
learned, and that we still haven’t hit
rock bottom.
The New York Times says that Lew-
is’s book “could not be more timely giv-
en the worries about Europe’s deepen-
ing debt crisis and the recent warning
issued by Christine Lagarde, managing
director of the IMF, that ‘the current
economic situation is entering a dan-
gerous phase.’”
Michael writes: “European leaders
have done nothing but delay the inevi-
table reckoning, by scrambling every
few months to find cash to plug the
ever growing holes…and praying that
bigger and more alarming holes…do
not reveal themselves.”
And what does Michael have to say
about Icelanders? Stubborn isn’t even
in it.
“[Icelanders] have a feral streak in
them,” he says, “like a horse that's just
pretending to be broken.” Apparently
you can tell an Icelander what to do, but
they’ll never listen—not really. This is as
true with a horse as it is with a banker.
Over at Forbes, Kyle Smith gives
Lewis’s Boomerang a big thumbs up,
but does point out one weakness in
Lewis’s penmanship. “Everyone is ei-
ther a shark or a mark, a genius or a
fool. Within a few paragraphs of intro-
duction, this or that finance minister or
banker gets set up as either a clear-
eyed seer or wilfully blind. Possibly
this technique is an essential element
when you’re turning rows of financial
stats into an entertaining high-velocity
narrative; figuring out whom to root
for might slow things down.” In other
words, just like the characters in a Stieg
Larsson novel, they have to capture
enough of a uniqueness to make their
stories ring true.
Humanity, after all, is deeply flawed,
and somewhat horsey.
Michael Lewis is using the eco-
nomic depravity of Greece, Ireland
and Iceland to point fingers within the
US’s own borders. Fishing becomes a
metaphor for the banking industry in
Iceland, but also for Industry in gen-
eral. He proposes that the bankers’
overconfidence is like the fishermen’s,
which leads both of them—in the long
run—to impoverish not only themselves
but also their fishing grounds.
“The goal is to catch the maximum
number of fish with the minimum effort.
To attain it, you need government inter-
vention.”
Iceland, like the US, says Michael,
worked and thrived “within the perfect
bubble.”
And he points out that Icelandic
wanna-be bankers (such as the alleged
former fisherman-come-hedge-fund-
manager he interviewed for his Van-
ity Fair piece) learned far worse habits
than chewing tobacco from watching
Wall Street, namely: “the importance of
buying as many assets as possible with
[as much] borrowed money [as pos-
sible], as asset prices only rose.”
And how does Micahel Lewis per-
ceive Iceland’s possible future?
“When you borrow a lot of money to
create a false prosperity, you import the
future into the present.”
This remains as true now as it did
then. The only difference between then
and now is the lender’s name. “Lever-
age buys you a glimpse of a prosperity
you haven’t really earned.”
Interestingly the subject of how little
women were involved in the demise of
economies also plays a tasteful keynote
in ‘Boomerang.’ Comparing Iceland’s
tsunami to Ireland’s, he writes: “It was
created by the sort of men who ignore
their wives’ suggestions that maybe
they should stop and ask for directions,
for instance.”
Horses and fisherman? What can I
tell you? Ask the ladies. They seem to
be the only ones who know the way
home.
As an American, I have spent the
better part of the Obama adminis-
tration being secretly jealous of my
country’s fringe right wing. Though
not a particularly elegant or sophis-
ticated movement, they set out with
clear and concrete goals, shifted the
debate to the right, increased vis-
ibility and awareness of their ideol-
ogy, and got a lot of politicians into
office. For three years I’ve wondered
why the left couldn’t get up off the
couch and start a movement with
similar energy and thrust, and now
it’s arrived on my own doorstep.
The Occupy Wall Street movement
has already accomplished more
than any other left-oriented po-
litical movement of the past three
years. They’ve inspired Occupy
movements across the country and
across the world, and it’s still just
the very beginning.

At the start, I had my reservations. What
could a bunch of white kids with dread-
locks and Guy Fawkes masks accom-
plish anyway? But if you focus on the
aesthetics of the movement, you com-
pletely miss the point. Recently, some
of the most effective movements have
been some of the ugliest. When the Tea
Party had their rallies in DC, did people
write op-eds about 300 pound people
in lawn chairs reading ‘Rules For Radi-
cals’? When Icelandic people banged
on pots and pans and broke windows of
their Parliament to disrupt the meetings
going on inside, did people write articles
complaining that they were being too
noisy? Just because the protesters of
Occupy Wall Street are smelly doesn’t
mean that they’re pointless. Most of
the effective movements in recent his-
tory didn’t have specific goals when
they started, and they weren’t too much
to look at either. But often, movements
that get things done have some assem-
bly required. The Tea Partiers got their
candidates into office and shifted the
debate in the US firmly to the right. De-
spite a few arrests and some disorder,
the people of Iceland held small protests
with great regularity until the entire gov-
ernment resigned. A core small group of
people can be the backbone of a big-
ger, longer movement that will grow and
grow until it accomplishes its goals.
The point of OWS is not to be the
protest, but to foster an environment
out of which a new movement can grow.
They are remarkably well organised, to
the point that merely discussing how
their General Assemblies and gover-
nance work would double the length of
this article. Their inevitable goal is com-
plete self-sufficiency, and with the help
of their new union alliances, they’ll get
there. If you actually head down to the
protest site and talk to the people, I’m
sure you’ll meet some tired ideologues,
but more of the people you’ll meet are
proud Americans who are more than
eager to discuss their entirely valid criti-
cisms of the country they live in. There
was a moment I witnessed, that for me
crystallised the movement and its pur-
pose. A 64-year-old man wearing a polo
tucked into his khakis and a teenager
wearing a Metallica shirt and jeans were
discussing the finer points of social se-
curity and the level of power that corpo-
rations wield in this country. The boy ex-
plained that “we are not anti-corporate,
we are anti-corporatist,” and the man
seemed genuinely shocked to learn of
GE’s tax rate for the last fiscal year. Every
single time I’ve gone down to Zuccoti
park since the occupiers have moved
in, I’ve overheard and participated in
meaningful and political discussions
with people white, black, young, old,
liberal, libertarian and conservative, I’m
sure I miss many more every minute that
I’m not there. As of right now, the park
grounds are an athenaeum of sorts; a
modern salon with a bit of a gutter punk
edge (but not too much), a place in
America where a liberal viewpoint is not
made irrelevant by the sheer fact that it
is liberal. Neither side is happy with the
level of power that corporations have,
the difference is where they attribute
the blame. Even if you don’t agree with
the occupiers, I implore you to go down
to the site yourself and have some con-
versations. You may not be entirely con-
vinced, but I’d be surprised if you didn’t
walk away with a deeper respect than
when you first heard about them.
Occupy Wall Street may not be the
most ideologically perfect movement on
the block, but they’ve already gotten a
huge amount of press and attention for
the worldview they espouse, and they’ve
inspired many others. Frankly, they don’t
need to be complete from the get-go.
This is a work in progress, and with ev-
ery day, their convictions become more
firm and more defined, and more and
more people pitch in to help. This is the
birth of a new political movement, and
it’s not pretty.
Are Icelandic Bankers
Horses and Fishermen?
Occupying Image
Grapevine’s US correspondent Occupies Wall Street
MARC VINCENz
SIMON zACHARY CHETRIT
SIMON zACHARY CHETRIT
Simon Zachary Chetrit is a 22-year old New Yorker, and frequent visitor to Iceland.
“When Icelandic people banged on pots and pans and broke
windows of their Parliament to disrupt the meetings going on
inside, did people write articles complaining that they were
being too noisy”