Tootin' me own horn.

Maybe it was my upbringing, maybe I have self-image issues, whatever. As a rule I'm more prone to make fun of myself than to brag, more likely to doubt myself than believe I can accomplish anything.

'Cept when I'm drunk of course.

Which kinda proves my point.

But despite the general malaise on the Lava Lump at the mo', I'm feeling surprisingly vindicated. I'm a trend-setter, practically a prophet.

For years now, I've been talking about the possibility of farmers converting their manure into a second cash crop, mainly methane.

For years now, I've been talking about major constitutional change being necessary, short of a complete revolution.

For years now, I've been one of the voices crying out in the new-liberal wilderness for the re-nationalization of fisheries.

Ditto crying out for the elimination of the parasitic state-sponsored middlemen in the food trade, instead advocating direct farm-to-customer sales.

I've told anyone who will listen how much more sensible employee-owned co-opts are.

I've pointed out time and again that nothing was going to change until people made their voices heard.

A few weeks after the Economic Collapse of DOOOMMMMM!!!!! my friend Jimmy and I founded La Brigada Negra Cacophonica, reasoning that if the powers that be won't listen, we need to pump up the volume. Admittedly, we were told to hush up at first, but people finally got the point after the ridiculous and downright embarrassing silent protests during the Xmas season, they finally pulled out the pots and pans and had themselves a revolution.

All these things have either come to be, or at least are on their way.

Now, unlike some, I stake no claim on having caused any of this. Hell, I doubt I even inspired or informed that much.

But its nice to know that I'm right almost as often as I'm wrong.

Jú sey jú vant a revólúsjón?

I’m getting weirded out folks.

Seriously.

I’m used to the news pissing me off, and even more used to the op-eds in the Icelandic papers making me foam at the mouth.

For years now my friends and I have been crying out in the proverbial wilderness, shouting “Sustainability!”, “Self-Organization!”, “Economic Equality!”, and occasionally “Rise the Fuck Up Already!”

To absolutely no avail.

Then everything went straight to shit, as most of us knew it would.

Now the op-eds are filling up with intelligent discourse about sustainable economics, about the cronyism and corruption amongst Iceland’s elite. People are calling for a sea-change in how Icelanders make their living, calling for diversification, self-organization, and economic equality. They’re shooting their well aimed barbs at the white knights of aluminum and fish and the E.U.*

They’re even flirting with the idea of rising the fuck up.

Which is encouraging, if a tad disconboobalating.

That’s my own word by the way.

I mean, what the hell am I going to blog about now?

But I thought about it for a bit, and decided that I’d indulge in some magical thinking. Seeing as so very many of the issues and ideas I’ve blogged about in the past have sudden appeared on television and in print, I’m going to throw a few of my wilder ideas out there and see if they make it into the collective consciousness.

For starters, this Saturday will see the third major protest downtown in as many weeks, which is downright shocking by Icelandic standards. Originally a call for Davið Oddson to step down as head of the Central Bank, they’ve now (better late than never) become a call for new elections ASAP, aka kicking the bastards out. All fine and dandy. I’ll be there, I’ll meet you half way.

But consider for a moment a couple of points. Right now the Icelandic State is in deep financial doodoo, and in order to pull themselves out, they’ll need to slash public spending. This will mean less money for students, children, the disabled, fewer social services, increased fees for supposedly “free” healthcare, and more than likely a package of tax hikes and the downsizing of many a public employee.

Public employees mind, not public officials.

So how about we save ourselves a lot of money, and simply dissolve parliament? We’d save on their over-inflated wages, their retirement scam, their “day-money” that would take me two weeks to earn, their gas-guzzling official cars, private jet vaca…I mean meetings abroad, and their teams of sycophantic yes-people hired at public expense to do their jobs for them.

We then declare the Icelandic public to be the legislative power, giving the average Jón and Anna the right to propose laws, gather support for them, and then vote on them in twice yearly democracy days.

Meanwhile, we vote on who gets the ministerial positions, for a four year term. Instead of being political cake for unqualified politicos, they’d become administrative positions for people who can make them work, instead of purposely running them into the ground so that they can be gobbled up by Mammon. So we get healthcare professionals in charge of the Ministry of Health, and maybe, just maybe, a FUCKING ECONOMIST IN CHARGE OF THE CENTRAL BANK!

Likewise, let’s save some more tax money by teaching the State to stop eating itself. Student loans are not, repeat not, income. It’s a fucking loan. You have to pay it back. Why the hell do you have to pay income tax on it? The same can be said for disability payments. The State taxes the public to pay disability payments to those who cannot work and then taxes those same payments??? The same is true of pensions. What the fuck? Not to mention taxing the interest people make off of individual savings accounts.

How ‘bout this? Just declare disability payments, student loans, and pensions to be tax free. Then lower the amount paid out by the amount of taxes levied. Everyone gets the same amount of money and the state saves on the costs of processing all those unnecessary taxes.

Individual savings deposits should be tax free. Period.

Not only will this encourage people to save instead of borrow, but any government that is already charging me taxes on the money I bring in should keep its filthy corrupt piggy fingers out of what I manage save of the money I have left.

After all, like most of us, I can’t just vote myself a raise.

I know, I know. I’ve ranted this before. Doesn’t make it any less of a good idea.

Another thing I’ve been happy to hear is people talking about CSA, or Community Supported Agriculture, whereby farmers sell directly to the public, hence cutting out the middlemen and getting a better price for themselves, while also providing the public with fresher, less processed, higher quality, and often cheaper food.

The problem with this is that when it comes to everything but vegetables, this is illegal in Iceland. You cannot, repeat cannot, legally sell dairy products, meat or fish direct from the producer. Instead you are required by law to sell (at an artificially low price) these products to State mandated middlemen who then sell them on to retailers who then sell it on to the consumers.

At an artificially high price.

Not to mention that because it has to go through the middlemen the food has to be shipped to the processing centers, often times located well away from the farms and communities it was produced in, processed, shipped to the retailers (through a series of warehouses), and finally comes back to the community either unripe and tasteless in the case of vegetables, or with all the fresh yummy goodness removed (in the case of many of the dairy products).

This is also why, up until the current foreign currency crunch, the cheapest fish you could buy in Iceland was frozen Peruvian cod sold under a Danish label.

From a supermarket located across the street from the fishing docks.

My solution for this is simple. BREAK THE DAMN LAW! If you are a producer, and you’re tired of selling your produce cheap, only to see it mixed in with other, possibly lower-quality produce, labeled with no information on where it came from, and then sold at a ridiculously high price to consumers who then blame you for their empty wallets, STOP!

Sell it direct to the public. Screw the law.

Just because something is legal doesn’t make it right

And just because something is illegal doesn’t make it wrong.

Witness the guys who have been out fishing without a kvóta to protest the privatization of a national resource. Fishermen have started it, farmers can join the parade.

Likewise, anyone who is currently paying full price for electricity to run their greenhouses or software companies should immediately subtract 95% from their electric bill, so they pay the same rate as Alcan and Alcoa.

Personally, I’d love it if I could get away with subtracting the percentage of my taxes that goes into the pockets and retirement funds of parliamentarians. Not to mention the percentage that goes to the State Church and a law enforcement and immigration authority run by a person who anywhere with actual free speech (where one can state an opinion without being dragged into court for libel) could be described as a paranoid fascist bootlicker with a uniform fetish.

But hey whatcha gonna do?

While we’re at it, let’s renationalize the kvóta system, and grant each and every community that has a harbor a percentage of the total catch, based on population and infrastructure (meaning that communities with limited economies would get a bigger share, not smaller). Said community can then split their percentage amongst those who wish to fish, charging a small percentage of the gross profit to fund public services. Sound good?

Let’s start up a few companies while we’re at it. And by “companies” I mean Sf., not Ehf. and definitely not Hf. Cooperative companies that recycle paper, aluminum, old tires, plastics, etc and sell their products back into the Icelandic market, helping to balance out our trade deficit. Cooperative companies producing food, clothing, building materials, energy, tools and hardware, electronics, software, electric vehicles (trains trains trains!), and tourist/recreational services.

Cooperative companies, wherein all employees are partial owners, and more importantly wherein all owners are required to be employees. Co-opts in which all decisions regarding capital and profits are handled democratically and hence are intrinsically more egalitarian, and thereby inherently more stable, than companies run from the top down, whereby people with no real talent for massive responsibility reward themselves with massive bonuses and take massive ill-considered risks to justify said unequal pay. Co-opts are also more egalitarian that State-run companies, where the ruling elite reward their loyal toadies by appointing them the head of a national bank or television or other such foolishness…

So that’s it. A bit of constructive civil disobedience, a bit of self-organization, and a bit of reform, whereby we reform the institutions responsible for fucking us over for years now right out of existence, and bingo! Revolúsjón bæbí!

Dónt jú nó its góíng tú bí all ræt?

*'And I looked, and behold, a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him...'

Ring ring ring

So apparently my joy over the previously unknown internets at my domicile in progress was a tad premature. Like boobs on a five year old.

There's internets, but its a dial-up connection of the squishy-screechy telephone sounds variety that can barely load hotmail, let alone my blog.

Poop.

But other than that, things are looking up. At least for me. I love being right.

If I'd been blogging regularly up til now, you'd have all read a massive rant championing the squatting of all of the 57 some odd "abandoned" (read: Left to fall apart/be vandalized/burnt down because "undesirables" are living in them so that the owners can a)collect insurance and b) get away with tearing them down despite iffy permission and protest from neighbors and residents in order to build ugly glass yuppy cages). Thankfully, the times they are a changin' and at least one group has already taken it upon themselves to announce that squatting is not a form of theft, which has always been the Icelandic take on it, but a form of repossession, as the slumlord owners have forfeited their already dubious property rights to the building in question by simple act of abandonment.

More power to 'em! I say take all of the abandoned places over. With 20 square meter unfurnished basement rooms in commercial buildings in BFE being rented out for 70+K a month, I say take 'em over! Downtown could see a resurgence of culture. Reading rooms, galleries (not art retailers) concert spaces, co-op daycares, Free Schools, you name it. The economy may be in tatters (not really but who am I to swim against the rising tide of hyperbole) but this opportunity is manna from motherfuckin' heaven for those of us who's economies were already in tatters. Like Dr. Gummi said "Velgengi var diskó, kreppan er pönk!"*

Then there's the on-going brouhaha (or maybe its a brou-hehe) over one of the mp's comments about chicken and pork farming not being "real farming" and hence that the tariffs placed on imported chicken and pork should be dropped.

Fine. Let 'em drop.

The thing is though, the other current shit-fan over here has been the nationwide protest by professional truckers (as well as spoiled yuppies with penis-extension monster trucks and their spoiled yuppie spawn with their brand new fermingavespar**) over high fuel prices.

Now I'll leave it be that these protests, which have been shutting down the major traffic arteries around the country, have resulted in a few fines but no arrests, and in fact have been carried out with the co-operation of the police, whilst last summer when Saving Iceland shut down Suðurlandsbraut on foot they were rounded and roughed up and thrown in the hoosegow.

I'll leave that point be.

But the one and only fuel (aside from electricity) that hasn't gone up in price since the Fall of the Almighty Króna has been methane, which RVK uses to power its garbage trucks. Methane made from waste, produced locally (saving both on costs both the the environment and the budget) and funneling money back into the local economy at a time when international debts and deficit trading are causing the local currency to fall. Converting diesel engines to run on methane involves little more than switching the glow-plugs for spark plugs, adjusting the carburetor a bit, and installing gas-canisters in place of fuel tank, at which point these same truckers would be able to gas up for roughly half the price they currently pay.

And what's the best source of methane, you ask? Pig and chicken shit mainly. The same pig and chicken shit that is currently causing all manner of health and pollution issues out in the countryside. If converted to methane, the unfarmers would have a second cash crop as well as a cleaner (and if the use a methane/ethanol digester, sterile) fertilizer in place of their harmful runoff.

Problem solved.

Tomorrow, stay tuned for Sam's Grand Punk Railroad scheme.

*"Prosperity was disco, recession is punk"

**Seemingly every sixteen year old (or even much younger) kid in my neighborhood seems to have forsaken their clean and healthy (and oft-times super expensive) mountain bike for a fucking gas-powered Vespa.