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Iceland's president wins record fifth term
Iceland's president Olafur Ragnar Grimsson has won a fifth-straight term in office. Al Jazeera's Bhanu Bhatnagar reports. Grimsson's hugely popular with voters for refusing to compensate Britain and the Netherlands after the collapse of the online bank Icesave in 2008. In doing so, Grimsson, 69, emboldened a presidential office that had up until then played a mainly ceremonial role and put himself at loggerheads with the centre-left government as well as international creditors. Al Jazeera's Bhanu Bhatnagar reports.
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Last edited Sun Jul 1, 2012, 09:13 PM - Edit history (1)
...who have the guts to stand with the people, who will call a thief a thief to their face. And who will prosecute criminal banksters and put them in jail. I don't have much use for any of those who don't have these traits. Otherwise, we might as well let the banksters run everything.
- Which is about where things are here in America........
K&R
Abstract justice is, of course, impossible. Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation. As competition sharpens . . . religious ritual is supplanted by civil codes for the enforcement of contracts and the protection of the creditor class.
The more society consolidates, the more legislation is controlled by the wealthy, and at length the representatives of the moneyed class acquire that absolute power once wielded by the Roman proconsul, and now exercised by the modern magistrate. Thus the modern legal system is infinitely subtle, and its enforcing officers equally efficient, in punishing those forms of theft which are not practiced by the ruling class; but robbery in the market-place is governed by primitive controls which lag far behind the sophisticated mechanisms which company lawyers contrive to circumvent them. One measure of a society is the problems it chooses to solve.
Rome’s ruling class was unable to restrain its rapacity, even in its own ultimate interest. Adams saw what liberals are rarely willing to admit—namely, that a system based on corrupt practice cannot be saved merely by tinkering with it. The stronghold of usury lay in the fiscal system, which down to the fall of the Empire was an engine for working bankruptcy. Rome’s policy was to farm the taxes; that is to say, after assessment, to sell them to a publican, who collected what he could. The business was profitable in proportion as it was extortionate, and the country was subjected to a levy, unregulated by law, and conducted to enrich speculators.
MORE: The Economics of Human Energy in Brooks Adams, Ezra Pound, and Robert Theobald - by John Whiting, London University
The more society consolidates, the more legislation is controlled by the wealthy, and at length the representatives of the moneyed class acquire that absolute power once wielded by the Roman proconsul, and now exercised by the modern magistrate. Thus the modern legal system is infinitely subtle, and its enforcing officers equally efficient, in punishing those forms of theft which are not practiced by the ruling class; but robbery in the market-place is governed by primitive controls which lag far behind the sophisticated mechanisms which company lawyers contrive to circumvent them. One measure of a society is the problems it chooses to solve.
Rome’s ruling class was unable to restrain its rapacity, even in its own ultimate interest. Adams saw what liberals are rarely willing to admit—namely, that a system based on corrupt practice cannot be saved merely by tinkering with it. The stronghold of usury lay in the fiscal system, which down to the fall of the Empire was an engine for working bankruptcy. Rome’s policy was to farm the taxes; that is to say, after assessment, to sell them to a publican, who collected what he could. The business was profitable in proportion as it was extortionate, and the country was subjected to a levy, unregulated by law, and conducted to enrich speculators.
MORE: The Economics of Human Energy in Brooks Adams, Ezra Pound, and Robert Theobald - by John Whiting, London University
