Yes, we’re taking the Gratis Basis camera and our selves to beautiful Iceland!
Why Iceland? Well, because the people of Iceland got fed up with fear, scarcity, competition, conflict and control, and have willed to co-create a world based on trust, abundance, cooperation, harmony and freedom in their country! They did exactly what Gratis Basis is saying needs to happen right now everywhere on planet Earth. There may be pockets of individuals and communities making the shift, but here’s a whole entire country where the people have begun living in a new paradigm.
It certainly didn’t happen overnight.
Iceland, the island nation with a population of just over 330,000 have certainly been through a lot in the last couple of years…
In 2008 Iceland had an epic economic collapse.
The people lost most of their savings and faced mortgages and debt they couldn’t pay off.
At one time, their debt to income ration was 240%.
There were protests. Lots of angry protests.
And the people won.
The people of Iceland demanded indictment of their prime minister for his role in the crisis.
The chief executives of the 3 biggest banks were arrested. There were over 200 criminal charges for the bankers.
They nationalized the banks.
They forgave home owners’ debt exceeding 110% of home values.
Debt was relieved for more that 25% of the population.
They rewrote their constitution.
The result…
Today Iceland is doing better economically than the EU and all other developed countries.
Once looked upon as the only solution to the collapse, now Iceland does not even want to join the EU.
They proved that if you help citizens and jail bankers, it helps the economy.
They proved that it is a lie when governments say they have to help the bankers to help the economy.
They proved that there is another way of doing it.
Fast froward to 2013…
Just last month, in an August 7 interview with Abbey Martin of RT News, Jacques Fresco was asked if there is anywhere in the world practicing a society such as the one being proposed by the Venus Project, right now. His response was that 90% of societies today are corrupted by scarcity. He said he couldn’t think of any country in which a Resource Based Economy could work right now, except maybe Iceland.
In the same interview, Jacques Fresco stated that he believes future energy capabilities of a Resource Based Economy would be based on geothermal energy…
Iceland would be perfect.
Here’s an excerpt from a great article: “Under the Icelandic Volcano – How a cold country lost its shirt in the global economic meltdown, but ultimately found its soul”, by Rebecca Solnit, which was written in early 2009, right at the peak of Iceland’s economic collapse. We’ve featured this excerpt because it sounds eerily like what’s happening right now, or rather, what is on the brink of exploding in the US, and globally. Read deeper into it, and the write-up is actually uplifting and empowering – it proves to all the skeptics and cynics, and all those who may still be in fear of the shifts and changes of our times that there is nothing to fear. We all simply need to be take back our power as citizens of our countries… of our planet, and things can be better… no, REALLY GOOD.
“As economic hard times have spread, so have a spate of protests and insurgencies across Europe–of which Iceland’s has only been the most effective so far–suggesting that a new era of popular power in the streets may be arriving. Iceland’s upheaval poses the question of what the collapse of capitalism will bring the rest of us. Last fall, major financial newspapers were already headlining “the end of American capitalism as we knew it,” “capitalism in convulsion,” “the collapse of finance” and “capitalism at bay.” The implication: that something as sweeping as the “collapse of communism” nineteen years earlier had taken place.
Going the way of Argentina… After the crash of 2001, Argentineans found their voice, found each other, found a new sense of power and possibility and began to engage in political experiments so new they required a new vocabulary. One of the most important of these experiments would be neighborhood assemblies throughout Buenos Aires, which provided for some of the practical needs of a now-cashless community, and also became lively forums where strangers became compañeros.
Argentina is big in land, resources, and population with a very different culture and history than Iceland. Where Iceland goes from here is hard to foresee. But as Icelandic writer Haukar Mar Helgason put it in the London Review of Books in November 2008:
There is an enormous sense of relief. After a claustrophobic decade, anger and resentment are possible again. It’s official: capitalism is monstrous. Try talking about the benefits of free markets and you will be treated like someone promoting the benefits of rape. Honest resentment opens a space for the hope that one day language might regain some of its critical capacity, that it could even begin to describe social realities again.The big question may be whether the rest of us, in our own potential Argentinas and Icelands, picking up the check for decades of recklessness by the captains of industry, will be resentful enough and hopeful enough to say that unfettered capitalism has been monstrous, not just when it failed but when it succeeded. Let’s hope that we’re imaginative enough to concoct real alternatives. Iceland has no choice but to lead the way.”
And it has… or so we’ve heard…
There’s not much in the media or the Internet about how Iceland and its people are doing today…
So, we’re going to find out for ourselves.
And we promise to report back to you on Gratis Basis, and let you all know.
Stay tuned!