Legalizing Freedom of Information

My speech from Kapittel Stavanger International Festival for Literature and Freedom of Speech

Norway 22nd of September 2011

First of all I want to express my gratitude to the USA Department of Justice for their attempts to have my personal backend information handed over to them from my Twitter account because of my volunteer work for WikiLeaks. It has raised my awareness about the lack of civic rights social media users have and thus given me reasons to fight for these rights.

Before my Twitter case I didn't think much about what rights I would be signing off when accepting user agreement with online companies. The text is usually lengthy in a legal language most people don't understand. I think it is save to say that very few people read the user agreements, and very few understand its legal implications if someone in the real world would try to use it against them. It is simply virtual until case is made in the real world.

Many of us who use the Internet, be it to write emails, work, browse its growing landscape, mining for information, connecting with others or use it to organize ourselves in various groups of likeminded, are not aware of that our behavior online is being monitored. Profiling has become a default with companies such as Google and Facebook. These companies have huge databases recording our every move within their landscape in order to groom advertisement to our interests. For them we are only consumers to push goods at, in order for them to sell ads in a clever business model. For them we are not regarded as citizens with civic rights in their world. This notion needs to change. To be fair, I guess no one really knew where we were heading when these companies were start ups. Neither us the users, nor the companies hogging and gathering our personal information for profit. Very few of us had the imagination that governments that claim to be democratic would invade our online privacy with no regard to rights we are supposed to have in the real world. We might look to China and other stereo type totalitarian states and expect them to violate the free flow of information and our digital privacy, but not our very own democratically elected governments.

What I have learned about my lack of rights in the last few months is of concern for everyone that uses the Internet and calls for actions to raise peoples awareness about their legal rights and ways to improve legal guidelines and framework online be it locally or globally.

I guess the problem and the dilemma we are facing is that there are no proper standards, no basic laws in place that deal with the fundamental question: are we to be treated as consumers or citizens online? There is no international charter that says we should have the same civic rights as in the offline world.

Our legal systems are slow compared to the speed of online development. With the social media explosion many people have put into databases very sensitive information about themselves and others without knowing that they have no rights to defend themselves against attempts by governments to obtain their personal data – be in locally or like in my case globally. According to the ruling of the judge in my Twitter case, we have fortified those rights when we agree to the terms and conditions by the company hosting our data even if it is not kept on servers in the USA, the company would only need to have a branch in the USA for authorities to be able to demand the information to be given to them. We have to rely on, for example, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Twitter to look out for our interests. It might not always be in their interest to look out for us.

I want to stress that Twitter did fight for the interests of their users in my case by going to court to unseal a document demanding them to hand over personal backend information about me and four other users connected to WikiLeaks. The document Twitter managed to unseal stated that they were to hand over our personal information without our knowledge within three days. If Twitter had not managed to unseal the document we would not know how far the DoJ is reaching to get their hands on our data and how difficult it is to guard our privacy in the borderless legal jungle. I am for example not a USA citizen and because of that I am not protected by the 1st and 4th amendment in the USA constitution. Users from the USA are protected in the same case by these fundamental rights.

The reason we humans make international treaties and declarations about human rights is because somewhere along the line we agreed that certain rights are sacred and universal. We need to make the same principles applicable to our human rights online as they are offline. These two worlds have fused together and there no way to define them separated anymore.

If is too easy to obtain the information stored online and thus it is too easy to abuse. If someone wants to go through all my regular mail they would have to obtain a search warrant in advance. No such thing happened in my case. I am according to the DoJ not under a criminal investigation yet they demanded Twitter to hand over my personal messages and IP numbers without my knowledge. If authorities want to tap your phone they need warrants, but not in order to get your IP number. If authorities want to search anything of personal nature or spy on someone in the real world they would have to get warrants. It has never been as easy for big brother to pry into all our most sacred information without us ever knowing.

I find it important to shed light on the fact that USA authorities have reached so far in their attempts to criminalize WikiLeaks that they are demanding backend information from a Member of Parliament from sovereign nation. This is a whole can of worms that I am not sure that the USA wants to open. What about the USA senators that want to apply themselves in the international field of human rights issues. Abuse of human rights in for example China, Tibet or North Korea. Can USA authorities protect their own Senators from demands of probing into the personal data from China? I don't think so.

Members of parliaments all over the world are encouraged to use social media to be in touch with their voters. Many people don't understand that sending a message on Facebook or via Twitter or gmail is not an official pathway. The voters might send sensitive information about themselves to their MP's online. With court ruling in favor of exposing this information to a foreign government – the line of privacy and sovereignty of individuals in cyberspace has taken a new dangerous direction.

Merging the Online with the Offline world

The reason why I felt so at home online when I discovered it 16 years ago was the fact that I am born on a small island at the edge of the world with only 315,000 people sharing it with me.  My island has natural borders, with roaring Atlantic Ocean making a shield against the rest of the world.  That shield can cause an intense sense of cultural and personal claustrophobia. Being a poet with such a small language zone writing political poetry when that was not so cool in Iceland, I felt prior to the times of internet isolated and alone at times. The internet allowed me to break out of that limitation. I was the first poet in Iceland to create a website and to publish my work and the poetry and art of others through various adventures online. Later I learned I was among the first in the world.

One of the prime influences in shaping a profound understanding that I don’t belong to one nation, that I belong to all of this planet was my participation in co-creating the landscape of the new online world.  In 1995, I started working with the shapers and pioneers in the internet landscape in Iceland and beyond.  One of my passions was to merge creative spaces. Music, poetry, and art all bleed well together in the multi-creative space of the internet.  But that was not enough.  After all, this was a new world, without borders and without limitations, other than the limitations of our imagination.  Likeminded people found each other, no matter where they happened to be located in the real world. We could work together — trans-border, trans-culture, transgender, trans-party, trans-race.  It was a world of transparency, almost beyond duality. Borders, just an optical illusion. It was as close to paradise as I could get in this human vessel.  It was almost spiritual; it was as if the collective consciousness had taken on tangible shape in a virtual world that was influencing the real world at an increased speed every day.  My dream was that this world we created with the free flow of ideas, information, and understanding could manifest itself outside the virtual.

The internet has given us the tools to empower ourselves in the real world, with knowledge beyond the cultural conditioning we acquire within our own culture.  The internet has given us the tools to work together beyond traditional borders, and it has allowed us to create real windows into the real world that reach far beyond our cultural beliefs about other countries.  However, this world beyond borders is now under serious threat, a threat that is growing at an alarming rate.  I have seen the development of the internet since its early visual stage.  I have seen how it can improve and enrich the quality of life.  I have also seen how those who hold the reigns of power in our world have discovered that the internet needs to be tamed, like the rest of the world, and brought under their control — to be industrialized in the same manner that other media have been brought under control by industry and the state.  My last hope of gathering momentum in stopping this development is through the free spirit within the wilderness of the internet — where the conditioning and the reigns of control have not been able to tame the free spirits who roam with the hackers’ manifesto singing in their hearts.

I have seen new stories and new myths emerge out of the language of the internet, where people speak together through Google and translate new languages; and I have seen the library of Alexandria materialize with free knowledge and torrents of information wash upon shores otherwise impossible to reach.  I have seen the alchemy of stories take on real shape in a collective online effort; and the truth seeped into the real world.  As the untouchables try to hide their secrets for the chosen few, those secrets keep spilling out in a whirlwind of letters in every digital corner of the world.  They sweep through the streets of Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Tunisia, Greece, China, Iceland, Spain, Iran, and the United States — confirming that the rumors are true: “corpocracy” is the new global empire, and it thrives in local corruption.

The internet has given people access to information that should remain in the public domain; yet it is a trending policy within the belly of the all embracing system to make everything secret by default. It is time to reverse this tendency a create a consensus about the process of keeping secrets.  Transparency and open access to information are the only real pressures on governments to remain true democracies.  If you don’t have freedom of information and expression, you are not living in a democracy; rather it is ruled by dictatorship with many heads. 

Many people don’t realize that if we won’t have freedom of information online, we won’t have it offline.

Media Morphing into Cyberspace

The media is in transition – morphing from the traditional format into the online media format. Most people want to be able to access news online and usage of traditional media is shrinking day by day. The mainstream media has not figured out how to make profit or how to survive online without cutting off many of the services we have learned to depend on and regarded as their main responsibility, such as investigative journalism and in depth analyzing of complex matters in simple easy to grasp terms for the general public.

In this fragile morphing stage the media is faced with increased challenges from international legal firms that specialize in gagging the media. More out of court settlements are occurring every day. Super injunctions, prior restraints, and attempts to alter our historical records online is on the rise. Criminalization of whistle blowing and filtering of online content is also of great concern.

People feel that mainstream media has failed them and thus they turn to alternative media online and the culture of cracking secrets is on the rise. I want to stress that i am shocked by the lack of courage by the USA media in relation to WikiLeaks. Shocked because WikiLeaks simply acted as the middle man. The save box in cyberspace that received the brown envelope from the source and handed it over to the media. Shocked by the ignorance from the media, for it's obvious to me that if WikiLeaks will be taken down or the people behind it, it will be harder for other media to stay on a firm ground when under attack for publishing leaked material from whistle-blowers and secret sources.

I feel there has been too much focus on the people behind WikiLeaks, not the content they have provided. This has taken the focus off the historical significance of the leaks and created something of a frenzy around sensationalism around cults of personalities. If we allow ourselves to step away from the persons and look into the achievements of WikiLeaks it is obvious that because of them we have the state of freedom of information on the agenda, all over the world, and of course the issue of whistle-blowing as a option when witnessing criminal behavior in the public, military and private sectors.

I left WikiLeaks about a year ago for various reasons. I might not agree with how it has developed but its significance remains the same. We need many more leak sites until we have real laws in place that protect content, whistle-blowers, sources and journalists.

The culture of free flow of information is still strong online, and every attempt to block, hinder, or erase information is met with increased creativity.  Yet those of us who care for freedom of information have to step-up our quest to remove the gags, tear down the firewalls, and dissolve the invisible filters. 

The telecom companies have gained incredible power and tend to cave-in under government pressure, as we saw happen in Egypt in early 2011. We also saw Amazon cave-in under political pressure and kick WikiLeaks off its cloud. Corporation and specialized law-firms have figured out the best countries to use as a medium to attack and gag journalists, writers, publishers, and the rest of the media because of weak laws to protect the media. They have become so good at it that important stories have vanished from the public domain.  Modern book-burnings occur every day in every library in the world by a click of a button. Libel tourism, prior restraints, gag orders, out-of-court settlements, and tampering with our online historical records are altering our current history in real time and robbing us of the possibility to be informed about the activities of the most influential corporations and politicians in our world.  We have to do everything in our power to stop this development — through lawmaking and creative resistance.  

The “Icelandic Modern Media Initiative” (IMMI) is an attempt to raise the standard and upgrade the current legal framework in order to strengthen freedom of information, speech, and expression in our modern world. The creation of a save haven for freedom of information has to start somewhere – Iceland is a good place because we learned the hard way, the destructive nature of lack of transparency and where culture of secrecy can lead us. People yearn for change and thus this crises can be used for something that will be beneficial for us and hopefully for the rest of the world. You can learn more about the project that is currently being written into law in Iceland at http://immi.is

I gave a speech at Nordic Tech Politics in Oslo earlier this month, I met many inspirational people from Norway and from speaking to them the idea of creating a Scandinavian shield inspired by IMMI was not only born, but a determination to making that vision into reality. We have been blessed in this part of the world for having strong foundation for freedom of information. Sweden has set the standard for the rest of us in many ways.

It is interesting to note that societies of transparency have more equality.

I have learned to embrace times of crises and make good use of it because times of crises are the only times we can push for real change in our societies.

The crisis in Iceland has helped us transform from secrecy to transparency and encouraged people to take on more responsibility when it comes to co-creating our society. Never before has it been easier for people in power to hand over the power of information to the rest of us and for us to reclaim our power.

This process of transformation takes work and dedication. By giving over our powers to religious or political leaders we can never expect to live in our dream world – only by applying our time and vision can we hope to co-create our dream into reality.

Constitutional dreaming together

One of the most positive results from our Iceland crisis is the re-writing of our constitution. The main reason i helped create a political movement in the wake of the meltdown was to create the tools for the general public to be able to influence law making, and also to inspire people to be part of decision making. Chief aim was to have our old copy paste Danish constitution re-written by the people of Iceland. That process has taken place and the parliament of Iceland has been handed over a bill by the people we elected to write it with us.

The constitutional committee encouraged the general public in various ways to be part of the process, such as encouraging people to comment on each new segment via the facebook comment system. More on that here: Icelands crowdsourced constitution

The new constitution includes some pretty awesome freedom of information laws plus net neutrality. The big task is to get the bill into national referendum before my co-workers at the parliament attempt to thin it out.

The parliament needs a strong mandate from the nation on what it wants to keep of the new bill and what not. I hope by 2013 we will have a constitution that is what the nation dreamed together into reality. An agreement on what sort of society we want to live in together. I think perhaps all nations should allow each generation to have a go at the constitution – for it is a brilliant platform for a healthy debate on what we envision as societies together. It is important to note that it has been foreseen that the 21st century will be the century of the common people.

Finally I want to leave you with the wisdom of Alan Moore who claims that writes are the modern day shamans, I agree with him. One word, one sentence can mean live or death, joy or grief. Lets treat the world of words with that knowledge of power.

Many thanks to the EFF and ACLU for offering me strong legal support in my Kafka nightmare through the USA legal system.

Council of Europe Condemns U.S. Treatment of PFC Bradley Manning

Draft Resolution Blasts “Abuse of State Secrecy”

STRASBOURG, France – The Council of Europe issued a draft resolution today condemning a “cult of secrecy” which the human rights organization says has allowed Western security and intelligence services to routinize the concealment of violent crimes and other rights abuses.  The Council’s Rapporteur, Dick Marty, stressed the “fundamental role” of whistleblowers like PFC Bradley Manning in holding governments accountable for their illegal and unjust behavior.

"Bradley Manning acted as a whistleblower and should be treated as such," the report concluded. "We therefore join Amnesty International in expressing our worries as to the treatment he receives.”

The Bradley Manning Support Network, which collects funds to cover PFC Manning’s legal defense costs and conducts public education and outreach on his behalf, welcomed today’s announcement.

Read the draft resolution here (PDF):

http://www.assembly.coe.int/CommitteeDocs/2011/State%20secrecy_MartyE.pdf

“We welcome the support of the Council of Europe in condemning the abuse of whistleblowers who seek nothing more than to right the wrongs that Western governments refuse to acknowledge,” said Jeff Paterson, co-founder of the Bradley Manning Support Network. “The Council’s report documents numerous incidents where revelations attributed to Bradley Manning have made a critical difference for those seeking justice.”

The draft report released today by the Council of Europe offered a number of recommendations for creating effective oversight mechanisms by representative bodies to hold security and intelligence services accountable to the public. It noted however that, given the current “deficit of transparency,” the public has no choice but to rely on whistleblowers to hold government agencies accountable for abusive behavior.

PFC Bradley Manning is a US Army intelligence analyst who is accused of revealing illegal and unjust foreign policies that have been concealed by the US government.  He has been held in confinement without trial for over 15 months.  His legal team expects pretrial hearings to begin as early as next month.

Bradley Manning Support Network

http://bradleymanning.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

September 7, 2011

Contact: Zack Pesavento,

919.418.1285, zack@beyondthechoir.org

Icelandic MP visits Gaza-bound US flotilla at Military Compound in Athens

Press Release 

Icelandic MP visits Gaza-bound US flotilla at Military Compound in Athens

Birgitta Jonsdottir, a member of the Icelandic Parliament and the Foreign Affairs Committee, visited the US boat "Audacity of Hope" bound for Gaza early Saturday, July 2. The boat was stopped at gunpoint by the Greek coast guard Friday, July 1, and forced to move to a Military Compound in Athens. Below is her statement.

It was truly inspirational for me to speak to the people at the Boat who had just been faced with death if they would not turn back to port as ordered by the Greek Military. I managed to speak to many of the people on board who were shaken by the events the night before. Despite the setback, all of them felt determined to carry on with the mission of aid and solidarity with the people suffering in Gaza.

This project is the embodiment of hope and it is a powerful attempt to expose the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. At the boat I met people of all ages, backgrounds and colors. All of them had in common a beautiful and strong urge to take selfless action for the greater good of humanity.

To be the first Member of Parliament to visit “The Audacity of Hope” ship and to feel the gratitude from the crew and passengers made me deeply thankful. I urge fellow MP´s from Europe, especially from Greece, to pay a visit like I did. I also call upon the foreign affairs minister in Greece to show some courage, to stand up against foreign powers—in this case Israel--like his ancestors did. There is no threat within the Flotilla, only peaceful people who wish to deliver aid and friendship to Gaza.

Last year when the Israel military killed and wounded people on the first Flotilla, I was outraged. I warned that if the international community accepted attacks of this kind in international waters, then who would know where the Israelis would go next? It is hard to imagine that the Israel government has managed to let the Greek government do their dirty work for them in Greek waters. If this is allowed to continue, I shudder to think what they will do next.

None of the people I met at the boat on Saturday could be classified as a threat, except that they threaten to expose the illusion that war is peace.

I pledge full support to the Freedom Flotilla 2011 and call upon other elected officials to do the same. I feel it is of utmost importance that we never forget the attacks on Gaza a few years back, and that we keep in mind who suffers the most because of the siege: the children of Gaza.

Lets send Manning Letters of Support

Rough translation from an interview today in Icelandic webzine run by the left green party in Iceland. I will follow the request up Monday - hope to get positive feedback.

Birgitta Jonsdottir encourages heads of state in Iceland to write a support letter to Manning

I hope that individual ministers, such as for example the Jóhanna, PM, Steingrímur, finance minister or Ögmundur, interior minister feel moved to send Bradley Manning a person letter of support, says Birgitta Jonsdottir MP for the Movement. Manning is the soldier that is in prison because of suspicion of having leaked a massive quantity of classified documents to WikiLeaks. He has been in solitary confinement for nearly a year. There has been a slight improvement in his conditions recently. He has been moved to another prison and is now allowed to receive mail and be among other inmates for up to three hours a day.

I would be deeply moved if many people would feel inspired to write this young man a letter of support, says Birgitta and makes a point that such support might be an important moral support for Manning. It is important for everyone to understand that the treatment of him it absolutely unacceptable. He has been barred from staying in physical form, has been kept in a tiny cell in isolation for nearly a year and been kept on suicide watch for a long time, that means the guards have to wake him up every few minutes to see if he is ok. David House is the only person apart from Manning's lawyer that has been allowed to pay visit to Manning. House has stated that he can see a steady decline with every visit in Manning's physical and mental health. Birgitta underlines that Manning is gradually having a physical and mental breakdown.

Birgitta also points out that newly leaked documents out of Guantánamo Bay prove how highly developed the torture techniques of the military have become and worries that the interrogation of Manning is conducted by similar methods as in Guantánamo Bay. Even if Manning has been moved into improved conditions that might be a more dangerous scenario for him because many of his fellow inmates might consider him the perfect traitor and lets not forget how gays have been treated in the military. His situations as an individual is difficult and that is why it is so critical that many people from all walks of life show him visible support and one of the best ways of showing it, is to send him support letters.

Those interested in supporting Manning can send letters to the following address:

Bradley Manning 89289
830 Sabalu Road
Fort Leavenworth, KS 66027
U.S.A

Why I said NO to Icesave

It is important to note the following relatively simple facts in relation to Iceland and Icesave

1. I was part of the leadership from all parties that put together guidelines for what had to be in the new contract between the three nations. One of our demands (the Movement) in order for us to be able to say yes was that the three nations would share the risk if the assets of old Landsbanki would not cover 90% - 100% of the so called debt created by the bank owners. Neither Holland nor the UK were willing to share the risk with us.

2. If issues related to the contract would arise and be taken to court the new contract states that it would be taken to court in Holland. It should have been in a court outside all three countries.

3. I have not met a single NO voter that wants the Icesave burden to be shouldered by taxpayers in any of the three countries. We want the people who stole the money to be held accountable. They still invest and have large companies in their names. We wanted the three countries to collaborate in order to reclaim the money from the white collar criminals.

4. It is high time to set an example for other taxpayers in other countries in order for them to follow suit: to say NO to the socialization of private debt. It is unacceptable that the untouchables rake in the profits without sharing with the rest of us and then expect us to pay for their reckless behavior.

5. The Icelandic people want this case to go to court, if the ESA court rules that the general public should be held accountable for banks that collapse, then we will pay. But to accept this debt without clear understanding on this big issue would be insane.

6. Taxpayers in the UK and Holland will not have to pay this, if all our governments will really put all their efforts to get the money from the people that took the money that was put in the Icesave accounts. The money in the Icesave accounts was real, depositors put it in the Icesave accounts but where is it? I know for a fact that Björgólfur Thor the main owner of Landsbanki the host of Icesave still has large shares in companies in Iceland that are doing really well, those companies with the shares are registered at offshore islands. Time for him to show us the money and pay it back. Let us not forget that spokespeople for the YES in all three countries claim that the assets will cover this.

7. If we would have said yes yesterday, it would have meant that we would have had to pay 29 billion Icelandic Kronas around the middle of this month only in interest. That is unrecoverable money in foreign currency we simply cant afford while it is not clear by legal standards of the EEA if taxpayers should bail out banks.

Michael Hudson on ICESAVE

Tomorrow the Icelandic nation will vote again on if private debt created by the Icelandic banksters should be theirs. Massive propaganda machine has been set in motion to scare the nation into saying yes lead by the Icelandic government and the unions. We need every help we can get to keep the debate balanced and fair. A big thank you to Michael Hudson and Eva Joly for allowing us to see the things in the large context. And a big thank you to the activists in Iceland who have tried to bring balance to the debate and have spent nights and days fighting against Goliath. Here is a thought provoking article by Michael Hudson I just got in my mailbox. Please share if you feel it matters.

Will Iceland Vote “No” on April 9, or commit financial suicide?

Michael Hudson

A year ago, in March 2010, Iceland’s economy was so small that it did not warrant much attention when 93% of its voters rejected the Social Democratic-Green government’s surrender to Gordon Brown and the Dutch, the European Union (EU) bureaucracy and IMF demands that it impose austerity as penance for believing the neoliberal fairy tales about how bank deregulation and “free markets” would make it the richest, happiest country in the world. Indeed it seemed to be, according to United Nations data. But the dream was dashed after the Icesave electronic Internet bank branches abroad were emptied out by their proprietors.

Britain and the Netherlands paid out more than $5 billion to some 340,000 of their own depositors whom their own bank oversight agencies had failed to warn the about looting going on. Iceland’s taxpayers were told to bear the cost, as virtual tribute.

The dream was the neoliberal promise that running to debt was the way to get rich. Nobody at the time anticipated that taking private (and indeed, fraudulent) bank losses onto the public balance sheet would become the theme dividing Europe over the coming year, dividing European politics and even threaten to break up the Eurozone.

A landmark in this fight is to occur this Saturday, April 9. Icelanders will vote on whether to subject their economy to decades of poverty, bankruptcy and emigration of their work force. At least, that is the program supported by the existing Social Democratic-Green coalition government in urging a “Yes” vote on the Icesave bailout. Their financial surrender policy endorses the European Central Bank’s lobbying for the neoliberal deregulation that led to the real estate bubble and debt leveraging as if it were a success story rather than the road to national debt peonage. The reality was an enormous banking fraud and insider dealing as bank managers lent the money to themselves, leaving an empty shell – and then saying that this was all how “free markets” operate. Running into debt was promised to be the way to get rich. But the price to Iceland was for housing prices to plunge 70% (in a country where mortgage debtors are personally liable for their negative equity), a falling GDP, rising unemployment, defaults and foreclosures.

To put Saturday’s vote in perspective, it is helpful to see what has occurred in the past year along remarkably similar lines throughout Europe. For starters, the year has seen a new acronym: PIIGS, for Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain.

The eruption started in Greece. One legacy of the colonels’ regime was tax evasion by the rich. This led to budget deficits, and Wall Street banks helped the government conceal its public debt in “free enterprise” junk accounting. German and French creditors then made a fortune jacking up the interest rate that Greece had to pay for its increasing credit risk.

Greece was told to make up the tax shortfall by taxing labor and charging more for public services. This increases the cost of living and doing business, making the economy less competitive. That is the textbook neoliberal response: to turn the economy into a giant set of tollbooths. The idea is to slash government employment, lowering public-sector salaries to lead private-sector wages downward, while sharply cutting back social services and raising the cost of living with tollbooth charges on highways and other basic infrastructure.

The Baltic Tigers had led the way, and should have stood as a warning to the rest of Europe. Latvia set a record in 2008-09 by obeying EU Economics and Currency Commissioner Joaquin Almunia’s dictate and slashing its GDP by over 25% and public-sector wages by 30%. Latvia will not recover even its 2007 pre-crisis GDP peak until 2016 – an entire lost decade spent in financial penance for believing neoliberal promises that its real estate bubble was a success story.

In autumn 2009, Socialist premier George Papandreou promised an EU summit that Greece would not default on its €298bn debt, but warned: “We did not come to power to tear down the social state. Salaried workers will not pay for this situation: we will not proceed with wage freezes or cuts.”¹ But that seems to be what socialist and social democratic parties are for these days: to tighten the screws to a degree that conservative parties cannot get away with. Wage deflation is to go hand in hand with debt deflation and tax increases to shrink the economy.

The EU and IMF program inspired the modern version of Latin America’s “IMF riots” familiar from the 1970s and ‘80s. Mr. Almunia, the butcher of Latvia’s economy, demanded reforms in the form of cutbacks in health care, pensions and public employment, coupled with a proliferation of taxes, fees and tolls from roads to other basic infrastructure.

The word “reform” has been turned into a euphemism for downsizing the public sector and privatization sell-offs to creditors at giveaway prices. In Greece this policy inspired an “I won’t pay” civil disobedience revolt that grew quickly into “a nationwide anti-austerity movement. The movement’s supporters refuse to pay highway tolls. In Athens they ride buses and the metro without tickets to protest against an ’unfair’ 40 per cent increase in fares.”² The police evidently are sympathetic enough to refrain from fining most protesters.

All this is changing traditional political alignments not only in Greece but throughout Europe. The guiding mentality of Tony Blair-style “New Labour” policy is economic loyalty to Europe’s financial centers as government spending is slashed, public infrastructure privatized and banks bailed out with “taxpayer” burdens that fall mainly on labor. “Both the conservative and communist leaders have refused to support the EU-IMF programme. ‘This programme is strangling the Greek economy … it needs renegotiation and radical change,’ said Antonis Samaras, the conservative leader.” (Ibid.)

A Le Monde article accused the EU-IMF plan of riding “roughshod over the most elementary rules of democracy. If this plan is implemented, it will result in a collapse of the economy and of peoples’ incomes without precedent in Europe since the 1930s. Equally glaring is the collusion of markets, central banks and governments to make the people pay the bill for the arbitrary caprice of the system.”³

Ireland is the hardest hit Eurozone economy. Its long-term ruling Fianna Fail party agreed to take bank losses onto the public balance sheet, imposing what looks like decades of austerity – and the largest forced emigration since the Potato Famine of the mid-19^th century. Voters responded by throwing the party out of office (it lost two-thirds of its seats in Parliament) when the opposition Fine Gael party promised to renegotiate last November’s $115-billion EU-IMF bailout loan and its accompanying austerity program.

A Financial Times editorial referred to the “rescue” package (a euphemism for financial destruction) as turning the nation into “Europe’s indentured slave.”⁴ EU bureaucrats “want Irish taxpayers to throw more money into holes dug by private banks. As part of the rescue, Dublin must run down a pension fund built up when Berlin and Paris were violating the Maastricht rules … so long as senior bondholders are seen as sacrosanct, fire sales of assets carry a risk of even greater losses to be billed to taxpayers.” EU promises to renegotiate the deal promise only token concessions that fail to rescue Ireland from making labor and industry pay for the nation’s reckless bank loans. Ireland’s choice is thus between rejection of or submission to EU demands to “make bankers whole” at the expense of labor and industry. It is reminiscent of when the economist William Nassau Senior (who took over Thomas Malthus’s position at the East India College) was told that a million people had died in Ireland’s potato famine. He remarked succinctly: “It is not enough.” So neoliberal junk economics has a long pedigree.

The result has radically reshaped the idea of national sovereignty and even the basic assumption underlying all political theory: the premise that governments act in the national interest. As Yves Smith’s Naked Capitalism website has pointed out:

The eurozone is up against Dani Rodrik’s trilemma: Democratic politics and the Nation State vs globalism based on the Bretton Woods system. You cannot have all three corners of the triangle at once. The creators of the European Union knew that the end game was the dissolution of nation states. …
But what they failed to anticipate is that the costs of these crises would be visited on the inhabitants of particular nation states, and that would lead them to rebel against the “inevitable” integration. As long as democratic mechanisms are intact in enough of the countries being pressed to wear the austerity hairshirt, revolt is indeed possible. Economists argue that the cost for any nation to exit the eurozone is prohibitive. But how does that stack up with a “rescue” program that virtually guarantees continued economic contraction and depopulation for Ireland? Faced with two unattractive alternatives, the desire for self-determination and for punishment of coercive European technocrats may make supposedly irrational moves seem compelling.⁵

The shape of Europe that is emerging is not the original view of mobilizing technology to raise living standards. The leaders who originally sponsored the EU viewed nation states as having plunged the continent into a millennium of warfare. But today, finance is the new mode of warfare. Its objective is the same as military conquest: to seize the land and basic infrastructure, and to levy tribute – euphemized as bailout repayments, as if the financial system were necessary to fuel industry and labor rather than siphoning off their surplus.

The Irish government’s €10 billion interest payments are projected to absorb 80% of the government’s 2010 income tax revenue. This is beyond the ability of any national government or economy to survive. It means that all growth must be paid as tribute to the EU for having bailed out reckless bankers in Germany and other countries that failed to realize the seemingly obvious fact that debts that can’t be paid won’t be. The problem is that during the interim it takes to realize this, economies will be destroyed, assets stripped, capital depleted and much labor obliged to emigrate. Latvia is the poster child for this, with a third of its population between 20 and 40 years old already having emigrated or reported to be planning to leave the country within the next few years.

The EU’s nightmare is that voters may wake up in the same way that Argentina finally did when it announced that the neoliberal advice it had taken from U.S. and IMF advisors had destroyed the economy so much that it could not pay. As matters turned out, it had little trouble in imposing a 70% write-down on foreign creditors. Its economy is now booming – because it became credit-worthy again, once it freed itself from its financial albatross!

Much the same occurred in Latin America and other Third World countries after Mexico announced that it could not pay its foreign debts in 1982. A wave of defaults spread – inspiring negotiated debt write-downs in the form of Brady Bonds. U.S. and other creditors calculated what debtors realistically could pay, and replaced the old irresponsible bank loans with new bonds. The United States and by IMF members applauded the write-downs as a success story.

But Ireland, Greece and Iceland are now being told horror stories about what might happen if governments do not commit financial suicide. The fear is that debtors may revolt, leading the Eurozone to break up over demands that financialized economies turn over their entire surplus to creditors for as many years as the eye of forecasters can see, acquiescing to bank demands that they subject themselves to a generation of austerity, shrinkage and emigration.

That is the issue in Iceland’s election this Saturday. It is the issue now facing European voters as a whole: Are today’s economies to be run for the banks, bailing them out of unpayably high reckless loans at public expense? Or, will the financial system be reined in to serve the economy and raise wage levels instead of imposing austerity.

It seems ironic that the Socialist parties (Spain and Greece), the British Labour Party and various Social Democratic parties have moved to the pro-banker right wing of the political spectrum, committed to imposing anti-labor austerity not only in Europe, but also in New Zealand (the 1990s poster child for Thatcherite privatization) and even Australia. Their policy of downsizing public social services and embrace of privatization is the opposite of their position a century ago. How did they become so decoupled from their original labor constituencies? It seems as if their function is to impose whatever right-wing agenda the Conservative parties cannot get away with – not unlike Obama neutering possible Democratic Party alternatives to Republican lobbying for more Rubinomics.

Is it simply gullibility? That may have been the case in Russia, whose leaders seemed to have little idea of how to fend off destructive advice from the Harvard Boys and Jeffrey Sachs. But something more deliberate plagues Britain’s own Labour Party in out-Thatchering the Conservatives in privatizing the railroads and other key economic infrastructure with their Public-Private Partnership. It is the attitude that led Gordon Brown to threaten to blackball Icelandic membership in the EU if its voters oppose bailing out the failure of Britain’s own neoliberal bank insurance agency to prevent banksters from emptying out Icesave.

What seems remarkable is that Icelandic voters may take seriously their prime minister’s threat that a “No” vote on the Icesave bailout would lead the UK and Holland to blackball Icelandic entry. The new Conservative Prime Minister has little love for Mr. Brown, and realizes that his own voters are not eager to support membership of a country that is willing to sacrifice the domestic economy to pay bankers for what looks like shady loans. And what of the rest of Europe? Is buckling under to unfair bank demands really the way to make friends with the indebted PIIGS countries? Do these countries want to admit another neoliberal advocate favoring banks over their domestic economies? Or would Iceland make more friends by voting “No”?

Last weekend half a million British citizens marched in London to protest the threatened cutbacks in social services, education and transportation, and tax increases to pay for Gordon Brown’s bailout of Northern Rock and the Royal Bank of Scotland. The burden is to fall on labor and industry, not Britain’s financial class. The Daily Express, a traditionally campaigning national paper, is now running a full throttle campaign for Britain to leave the EU, on much the same ground that Britain has long rejected joining the euro.

What is the rational of Iceland and other debtor countries paying, especially at this time? The proposed agreements would give Britain and Holland more than EU directives would. Iceland has a strong legal case. Social Democratic warnings about the EU seem so overblown that one wonders whether the Althing members are simply hoping to avoid an investigation as to what actually happened to Landsbanki’s Icesave deposits. Britain’s Serous Fraud Office recently became more serious in investigating what happened to the money, and has begun to arrest former directors. So this is a strange time indeed for Iceland’s government to agree to take bad bank debts onto its own balance sheet.

The EU has given Iceland bad advice: “Pay the Icesave debts, guarantee the bad bank loans, it really won’t cost too much. It will be fairly easy for your government to take it on.” One now can see that this is the same bad advice given to Ireland, Greece and other countries. “Fairly easy” is a euphemism for decades of economic shrinkage and emigration.

The problem is that the more Iceland’s economy shrinks, the more impossible it becomes to pay foreign debts. Iceland’s government is desperately begging to join Europe without asking just what the cost will be. It would plunge the krona’s exchange rate, shrink the economy, drive young workers to emigrate to find jobs and to avoid the bankruptcy foreclosures that would result from subjecting the nation to austerity.

Nobody really knows just how deep the hole is. Iceland’s government has not made a serious attempt to make a risk analysis. What is clear is that the EU and IMF have been irresponsibly optimistic. Each new statistical report is “surprising” and “unexpected.” On the basis of the IMF’s working assumption about the króna’s exchange rate at end-2009, for example, the IMF staff projected that gross external debt would be 160% of GDP. To be sure, they added that a further depreciation of the exchange rate of 30 percent would cause a precipitous rise in the debt ratio. This indeed has occurred. Back in November 2008, the IMF warned that the foreign debt it projected by yearend 2009 might reach 240% of GDP, a level it called “clearly unsustainable.” But today’s debt level has been estimated to stand at 260% of Icelandic GDP – even without including the government-sponsored Icesave debt and some other debt categories.

Creditors lose nothing by providing junk-economic advice. They have shown themselves quite willing to encourage economies to destroy themselves in the process of trying to pay – something like applauding nuclear power plant workers for walking into radiation to help put out a fire. For Ireland, the EU pressed the government to take responsibility for bank loans that turned out to be only about 30% (not a misprint!) of estimated market price. It said that this could “easily” be done. Ireland’s government agreed, at the cost of condemning the economy to two or more decades of poverty, emigration and bankruptcy.

What makes the problem worse is that foreign-currency debt is not paid out of GDP (whose transactions are in domestic currency), but out of net export earnings – plus whatever the government can be persuaded to sell off to private buyers. For Iceland, the question would become one of how many of its products and services – and natural resources and companies – Britain and the Netherlands would buy.

It is supposed to be the creditor’s responsibility to work with debtors and negotiate payment in exports. Instead of doing this, today’s creditors simply demand that governments sell off their land, mineral resources, basic infrastructure and natural monopolies to pay foreign creditors. These assets are forfeited in what is, in effect, a pre-bankruptcy proceeding. The new buyers then turn the economy into a set of tollbooths by raising access fees to transportation, phone service and other privatized sectors.

One would think that the normal response of a government in this kind of foreign debt negotiation would be to appoint a Group of Experts to lay out the economy’s position so as to evaluate the ability to pay foreign debts – and to structure the deal around the ability to pay. But there has been no risk assessment. The Althing has simply accepted the demands of the UK and Holland without any negotiation. It has not even protested the fact that Britain and Holland are still running up the interest clock on the charges they are demanding.
   Why doesn’t Iceland’s population behave like that of Ireland or Greece, not to mention Argentina or the United States, and say to Europe’s financial negotiators: “Nice try! But we’re not falling for it. Your creditor game is over! No nation can be expected to keep committing financial suicide Ireland-style, imposing economic depression and forcing a large portion of the labor force to emigrate, simply to pay bank depositors for the crimes or negligence of bankers.”

The credit rating agencies have tried to reinforce the Althing’s attempt to panic the population into a “Yes” vote. On February 23, Moody’s threatened: “If the agreement is rejected, we would likely downgrade Iceland’s ratings to Ba1 or below.” If voters approve the agreement, however, “we would likely change the outlook on the government’s current Baa3 ratings to stable from negative,”  in view of a likely “cut-off in the remaining US$1.1 billion committed by the other Nordic countries and probably also to delays in Iceland’s IMF program.”

Perhaps not many Icelanders realize that credit ratings agencies are, in effect, lobbyists for their clients, the financial sector. One would think that they had utterly lost their reputation for honesty – not to mention competence – by pasting AAA ratings on junk mortgages as prime enablers of the present global financial crash. The explanation is, they did it all for money. They are no more honest than was Arthur Andersen in approving Enron’s junk accounting.

My own view of ratings agencies is based in no small part on the story that Dennis Kucinich told me about the time when he was mayor of Cleveland, Ohio. The banks and some of their leading clients had set their eyes on privatizing the city’s publicly owned electric company. The privatizers wanted buy it on credit (with the tax-deductible interest charges depriving the government of collecting income tax on their takings), and sharply raise prices to pay for exorbitant executive salaries, outrageous underwriting fees to the banks, stock options for the big raiders, heavy interest charges to the banks and a nice free lunch to the ratings agencies. The banks asked Mayor Kucinich to sell them the bank, promising to help him be governor if he would sell out his constituency.

Mr. Kucinich said “No.” So the banks brought in their bullyboys, the ratings agencies. They threatened to downgrade Cleveland’s rating, so that it could not roll over the loan balances that it ran as a normal course with the banks. “Let us take your power company or we will wreck your city’s finances,” they said in effect.

Mr. Kucinich again said no. The banks carried out their threat – but the mayor had saved the city from having its incomes squeezed by predatory privatization charges. In due course its voters sent Mr. Kucinich to Congress, where he subsequently became an important presidential candidate.

So returning to the problem of the credit rating agencies, how can anyone believe that agreeing to pay an unpayably high debt would improve Iceland’s credit rating? Investors have learned to depend on their own common sense since losing hundreds of billions of dollars on the ratings agencies’ reckless ratings. The agencies managed to avoid criminal prosecution by noting that the small print of their contracts said that they were only providing an “opinion,” not a realistic analysis for which they could be expected to take any honest professional responsibility!

Argentina’s experience should provide the model for how writing off a significant portion of foreign debt makes the economy more creditworthy, not less. And as far as possible lawsuits are concerned, it is a central assumption of international law that no sovereign country should be forced to commit economic suicide by imposing financial austerity to the point of forcing emigration and demographic shrinkage. Nations are sovereign entities.
  It thus would be legally as well as morally wrong for Iceland’s citizens to spend the rest of their lives paying off debts owed for money that should rather be an issue between Britain’s Serious Fraud Office and the British bank insurance agencies.

Overarching the vote is how high a price Iceland is willing to pay to join the EU. In fact, as the Eurozone faces a crisis from the PIIGS debtors, what kind of EU is going to emerge from today’s conflict between creditors and debtors. Fears have been growing that the euro-zone may break up in any case. So Iceland’s Social Democratic government may be trying to join an illusion – one that now seems to be breaking up, at least as far as its neoliberal extremism is concerned. Just yesterday (Thursday, April 7) a Financial Times editorial commented on what it deemed to be Portugal’s premature cave-in to EU demands:

Another eurozone country has been humbled by its banks. Earlier this week, Portugal’s banks were threatening a bond-buyers’ go-slow unless the caretaker government sought financial help from other European Union countries. … Lisbon should have stuck to its position. … it should still resist doing what the banks demanded: seeking an immediate bridging loan. … By jumping the gun, the government risks having scared markets away entirely. That may prejudice the outcome of negotiations about the longer-term facility.
The caretaker government has neither the moral nor the political authority to determine Portugal’s future in this way. It should not precipitately abandon the markets. That may mean paying high yields on debt issues in coming months – higher than they might have been had the government not folded its hand too soon. … The right time to opt for an external rescue would have been at the end of a national debate.”⁶

The same should be true for Iceland. Looking over the past year, it seems that the island nation has been used as a target for a psychological and political experiment – a cruel one – to see how much a population will be willing to pay that it does not really owe for what bank insiders have stolen or lent to themselves.

This is not only an Icelandic problem. It remains a problem in Ireland, and in the United States for that matter, as well as in Britain itself.

The moral is that creditor foreclosure – or voluntary forfeiture to pay international bankers – has become today’s preferred mode of economic warfare. It is cheaper than military conquest, but its aim is similar: to gain control of foreign property and levy tribute – in a way that the tribute-payers accept voluntarily. Land is appropriated and foreclosed on – or, what turns out to be the same thing, its rental income is pledged to foreign bank branches extending mortgage credit that absorbs the net rent. The result is economic austerity and chronic depression, ending the upsweep in living standards promised a generation ago.

Iceland’s government seems to have become decoupled from what is good for voters and for the very survival of Iceland’s economy. It thus challenges the assumption that underlies all social science and economics: that nations will act in their own self-interest. This is the assumption that underlies democracy: that voters will realize their self-interest and elect representatives to apply such policies. For the political scientist this is an anomaly. How does one explain why a national parliament is acting on behalf of Britain and the Dutch as creditors, rather than in the interest of their own country accused of owing debts that voters in other countries have removed their governments for agreeing to?

1 Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, “Greece defies Europe as EMU crisis turns deadly serious,” The Telegraph (UK), December 18, 2009.

2 Kerin Hope, “Greeks adopt ‘won’t pay’ attitude,” Financial Times, March 10, 2011.

3 Olivier Besancenot and Pierre-François Grond, “The Greek People are the Victims of an Extortion Racket,”
Le Monde, May 14, 2010.

4 Ireland’s winter of discontent,” Financial Times editorial, March 1, 2011.

5 Yves Smith, “Will Ireland Threaten to Default?” Naked Capitalism, March 15, 2011.

6 “Banks 1, Portugal 0,” Financial Times editorial, April 7, 2011.

MY TWITTER CASE AND “THOUGHTCRIME”

All of who care for freedom of information, speech and expression should be thankful for the recent ruling in my Twitter case. Thankful because it exposes the reality in which we live, at least according to the U.S. Department of Justice and one U.S. judge. The judge’s ruling exposed the blatant truth: that as the U.S. DOJ sees it, and at least according to this first judge, users of the Internet and social media sites hosted in the USA do NOT have any rights as individuals to defend themselves against the tyranny of authorities wanting to use the often sensitive information about us collected by services like Twitter. This includes critical information about the location, timing and recipients of our emails, conversations, messaging and social networking that are now fair game for the “thought police.” It is good that we know that this is how the prosecutors and one judge in the court system in the land of the free views our rights, because now we can do something about regaining those rights!

We are at critical point when it comes to freedom of information and speech. If we don’t act now it might be too late in a years’ time. Everything happens so fast in the realm of the Internet -- our rights are eroding every day at an alarming speed. I urgently suggest and call upon everyone who cares for their rights to their lives online to join me in fighting for these rights.

I am calling for a joint action to demand that all social media sites that host our information in the USA publicly promise to notify their users when they receive government demands for information – and if necessary fight for their ability to do so as Twitter did here in the face of a gag order. They should include that promise in their Terms of Use so that it can be relied on by their users. If they can’t make that pledge, enforced by user terms like Twitter’s, we will leave them and we will demand that authorities recognize our rights to defend ourselves directly. I also challenge Facebook, Google and Twitter to battle for every one of us against unwarranted and sometimes secret demands to our information from the U.S. government.

Here are a few examples that I find unsettling:
Google hosts our entire history of searching and they create a profile of every one of us as consumers so that they can make us targeted costumers for individually directed ads. This is why Google can maintain their services for free.

If authorities get access to some or all of this profiling as the DOJ maintains that they can – do you feel comfortable that they do? Consider this scenario: You are doing research on terrorists or the drug culture for an article or essay – all of your searching is now part of your profile. It is easy to build a very damning and erroneous profile of you simply based on your innocent research. The government maintains that most, if not all of this information is “non-content” and so reachable by them in the same way that my Twitter information was.

Many users do not understand that they are giving away all control of their web usage statistics. Personal data can be used against you in secret! This is very dangerous to those, like me, who are activists, journalists and researchers. It equally endangers the merely curious.

In George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984, a “thoughtcrime” was an illegal type of thought. Are we approaching the sad state of affairs where our public written communications, indeed our very thoughts are seen by an increasingly surveillance-obsessed totalitarian state as “thoughtcrimes”? Is this the kind of world we would wish for our children?

In the next few weeks I will work to gather as many as supporters as possible to be part of this joint action for our rights as users of social media. It will be an effort to our privacy rights and the right to defend our personal information online. Drop me an email if you have ideas on how to take this further so we may make a shockwave of change.

A promo clip for the upcoming documentary about yours truly by Judith Ehrlich

Iceland: The Mouse that Roared (Birgitta Jonsdottir)

Press release from my lawyers because of twitter records

Court Rules Against Privacy in Battle Over Twitter Records

ACLU And EFF Plan To Appeal Ruling In Case Challenging Government
Attempt To Obtain Private Data in WikiLeaks Investigation

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 11, 2011

CONTACT:
Rachel Myers, ACLU, (212) 549-2689 or 2666; media@aclu.org
Rebecca Jeschke, EFF, (415) 436-9333 x 125; press@eff.org

ALEXANDRIA – A federal magistrate judge in Virginia ruled today that the
government can collect the private records of three Twitter users as
part of its investigation related to WikiLeaks, and that those users and
the public can be prevented from seeing some of the documents that the
government submitted to the court to justify obtaining their records.
The court denied the government’s request to conduct the hearing in
secret, however, and the court made public all of the documents related
to the users’ legal challenge. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
and the American Civil Liberties Union plan to appeal the decision on
behalf of their client Birgitta Jonsdottir, an Icelandic parliamentarian.

These secret government demands for information about the subscribers'
communications came to light only because Twitter took steps to ensure
their customers were notified and had the opportunity to respond.  The
ACLU and EFF also asked the court to make public any similar orders to
any other companies

"This ruling gives the government the ability to secretly amass private
information related to individuals’ Internet communications. Except in
extraordinary circumstances, the government should not be able to obtain
this information in secret.  That's not how our system works," said Aden
Fine, staff attorney with the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology
Project.  "If this ruling stands, our client may be prevented from
challenging the government’s requests to other companies because she
might never know if and how many other companies have been ordered to
turn over information about her."

"With so much of our digital private information being held by third
parties – whether in the cloud or on social networking sites like
Twitter – the government can track your every move and statement without
you ever having a chance to protect yourself," said EFF Legal Director
Cindy Cohn.  "We're disappointed that the court did not recognize that
people using digital tools deserve basic privacy and that the government
should be required to meet a high standard before it demands private
information about you from the online services you use, be they Twitter,
Facebook, Gmail or Skype."

EFF and the ACLU plan to appeal the ruling on behalf of their client.

Today’s ruling and other information about the case are available online
at: http://www.aclu.org/free-speech/twitter-wikileaks-court-order

Poem a day: from Wake Up II

Countries without Borders

The cities of the world

are merging,

borders falling.

cultures crossing.

Through the void

of cyberspace,

the earth is shrinking,

the sense for distance changing.

One race,

emerging.

Floating through space,

virtually real.

I feel home

in every corner of the world.

Expressions

through symbols,

we can all understand.

Art is the language,

the word still a virus

from outer space.

Colors, forms, sounds, shapes,

interwoven

in interspace.

Cities without borders.

Earth without borders.

Us without borders.

Poem a day: from Wake Up

Generations

Generation X

Generation Beat

Generation Beast

Generation 2000

Sub Cultures

Bums

Punks

Angels

Buddhas

Divas

Gods

Human Beings

It's the glory of the age of the consumer

Doomsday 

already occurred 

time and time again

Terror in the vacuum

What is this doomsday anyway?

Fear of fear itself?

Resurrection of the heart

ancient wisdom 

compact thought

streaming beyond time and space

Willingness to start a revolution

in our own hearts

Taste the bittersweet

brutal honesty 

The collective knowledge

of the transparency generation

spreading through the nerves of cyberspace

Aussie Males & Scandinavian Females...

Because my words have been taken out of context and remixed into something that doesnt really reflect how I think, i am going to set things straight in relation to this whole Australian Male chauvinist issue.

What i said to the journalist last summer, was along the following lines while trying to explain why that could have happened in Sweden: 

One has to bear in mind the cultural differences between people from Australia and Scandinavia. Australian men often experience Scandinavian females to be feminists in a negative way while Scandinavian females experience Australian men to be a bit of a male chauvinists. This can often lead to massive misunderstandings - the problem might also be caused by that deep cultural differences can not be detected on the surface but something people gradually discover after a while.

I have lived in both Australia and Sweden and experienced how these misunderstandings develop because of different cultural acceptance of roles and power. I did not mean to insult the entire male population in OZ. Just trying to explain cultural differences early on in the Swedish case. 

But of course as always happens when words are recycled through many paths, people and media  - they tend to loose the context and are no longer a part of a larger picture and dont reflect at all what one said to begin with.

I do think compared to Scandinavian males that Australian males often come across as a bit of a male chauvinist and I think compared to Australian females Scandinavian females often come across as a bit of a female chauvinists. 

Icelandic Foreign Affairs Minister responds to protests in Egypt

Tuesday 1^st of February 2011

Yesterday Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a member of the Icelandic Parliament for the Movement and the Foreign Affairs committee called for support from the Icelandic Government for the people protesting in Egypt and condemnation of the oppression they are facing. 

During a parliamentary Q&A yesterday when asked about his option about the situation in Egypt by, Birgitta Jónsdóttir, the Foreign Minister echoed her worries about the situation and call for support for the Egyptian people that are demanding change and calling for democratic reform in Egypt. The Minister said that the Government protested against all violations of human rights. He condemned that the Egyptian public did not enjoy freedom of expression and information as media outlets were banned in the wake of blackout on Al Jazeera, the Internet and mobile networks.

Össur Skarphedinsson, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Iceland, is deeply concerned by the situation in Egypt and condemns any use of violence against protesters. The UN High Commissioner on Human Rights has estimated that up to 300 people have been killed since the protests began. 



The Minister said that free elections, without any limitations to freedom of expression, were needed so that the people of Egypt were able to express their will.

The Movement is thankful for response from the Minister and has called for a meeting in the Foreign Affairs committee to address the situation and call for a parliamentary resolution to show solidarity with the demand for democratic reform in Egypt. 

Happy 2011

Cartoon by theHand aka Maurizio di Bona

Poem by Birgitta

Join the experiment on Facebook

Put Tibet Back on the Map:

Stand in Solidarity with Tibetans in Tibet!

When is the right time to offer political asylum for Assange in Iceland?

I would like to make a few points clear: I don´t think it is right that Julian Assange is held in custody in the UK because of the allegations in Sweden. I however think it is a to mistake to mix the allegation in Sweden with freedom of information. It is a personal case that has been mixed together with a non personal case, by supporters and adversaries of WikiLeaks alike.

Julian is in just as much danger to be transferred to the USA from the UK as from Sweden. That is why it is totally unacceptable that he is held in custody. That appears to me like an attempt to gag him and should be protested loud and clear. If Julian is charged in the USA I will call for Iceland to grant him political asylum if his own country fails to protect him.

I find it deeply troubling to attack anyone in the personal case pending in Sweden, none of them are guilty until charged. I have heard conspiracy theories spanning the entire scope: from Assange being the victim of CIA to Julian being a CIA agent. It is important to stop the speculations and wait for the facts.

I however call for Julians release on bail early next week - if not, it is obvious that this personal case in Sweden is being used as a political tool against freedom of information.

I fully support what WikiLeaks stands for and I am also fully behind OpenLeaks - may there be many more to come.