Five Ways The U.S. Can Have An Icelandic Revolution

[Left Coast2020]

The struggle in Iceland is ongoing, but the nation's people have achieved monumental results in a relatively short amount of time due to the nature of their movement building. They managed to arrest and jail the bankers who wrecked the economy. When the government privatized public banking institutions to their friends, essentially for free, and made the people pay for their bailouts, the people threw them out of office and refused to give the banks their money. And since Iceland only recently achieved independence from Denmark in 1944, their boilerplate constitution had never been updated. The movement in Iceland successfully used direct democracy to crowdsource a new constitution via Facebook and Twitter, and that crowdsourced constitution was widely supported by the people as the official model for a new constitution.


http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/17777-focus-five-ways-the-us-can-have-an-icelandic-revolution

[xchrom]

1. Du rec. Nt

[leftstreet]

2. 3..2..1 before someone says the US is 'too culturally diverse'

Which is code for...

"I don't want non-white people and icky poor people doing as well as I am because then how will I know I'm Middle Class and can therefore freely identify with the wealthy elites and not see myself in opposition to them? I don't wanna be working class, I don't wanna!!"

[Cirque du So-What]

3. I shudder to think what a crowdsourced constitution would look like in the good ol' US of A

Many would view a constitutional convention as a way of getting rid of annoyances like that pesky Bill of Rights.

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. You can tell that's not written by someone in Iceland

because there are just too many mistakes in it.

What is actually going on in Iceland

Because I’m tired of you people spreading untruths

Since people continue to spread the factually dubious statement that Iceland “told creditors & IMF to go jump, nationalised banks, arrested the fraudsters, gave debt relief and is now growing very strongly, thanks” I find I have to write this here thing.

(This specific example comes from twitter but is almost identical, word for word, to the standard ‘Iceland is an economic utopia’ mantra that is being repeated ad nauseam.)

Because, for some reason, people won’t believe Icelanders when they say that the above is not quite the reality as most Icelanders experience it.

http://studiotendra.com/2012/12/29/what-is-actually-going-on-in-iceland/

And, on the subject of the constitution:

Iceland’s ‘crowd-sourced’ constitution is dead

The true history of Iceland’s ‘innovative’ constitutional reform.

If you read what foreign language blogs and newspapers wrote about the constitution you’d believe that it was a daring experiment going from success to success and that we were now enjoying a completely new crowd-sourced constitution that had been passed into law with a referendum last autumn. Which is not true.
...
That council then decided to do what most bloggers do: post their ideas online; listen to feedback on twitter, facebook, and in comments; and make sure that changes, drafts, and edits were noted online as they went along.

This is what the news outlets labelled crowd-sourcing. It’s no more crowd-sourced than boing boing is. Open, sure. Transparent, absolutely. But, crowd-sourced?

No. Not by a long shot. If the draft constitution was crowd-sourced then this blog is crowd-sourced as well and the term is meaningless. The draft constitution was written by a committee using a transparent process. It was a good thing that didn’t need to be spun into something it wasn’t.
...
The Independence Party immediately declared that even though it was clear that voters wanted some kind of constitutional reform, it did not feel bound by the constitutional council’s draft since over two-thirds of voters had either rejected the draft or not shown up to vote. It was obvious from the debate in Icelandic news media that the referendum was going to be a completely ineffective tool for getting the Independence Party to support constitutional reform.

Which meant that the constitutional reform process was dead, because reform won’t get anywhere without the support of Iceland’s largest political party. The Independence Party is guaranteed to be one of the major parties in Iceland’s next government (most polls show a distinct swing to the right among Icelandic voters) and, remember, to change the constitution you need to pass the changes as a law in two separate parliaments with an election between. Even if the government had pulled its thumbs out of its ass, completed the process of turning the draft into a proper proposal and passed the law, the proposal would have died after the election at the hands of the Independence Party in the next government.

http://studiotendra.com/2013/03/29/icelands-crowd-sourced-constitution-is-dead/