About 75% of Iceland’s voters turned out on Saturday to reject the Social Democratic-Green government’s proposal to pay $5.2 billion to the British and Dutch bank insurance agencies for the Landsbanki-Icesave collapse. Every one of Iceland’s six electoral districts voted in the “No” column – by a national margin of 60% (down from 93% in January 2010).

I don't know if I can stomach much more of the posturing in Washington. We know it is all about politics. And Congressman Ryan has yet again said that budget cutting is about "morality", not economics. The possibility that a sovereign government might be shut-down this weekend because its elected representatives will not extend a self-imposed debt limit just boggles the mind. I'm so fed up I really cannot write about that nonsense any more.

The phrase consent of the governed has been turned into a cruel joke. There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs. Civil Disobedience is the only tool we have left.

It all seems so long ago! On October 23, 2008, Alan Greenspan choked up a mea culpa for his deregulatory policy as Federal Reserve Chairman. “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief,” he told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. “The whole intellectual edifice, however, collapsed in the summer of last year.”

I recently fired a stray shot at Paul Krugman over his joke paper “The Theory of Interstellar Trade” (Krugman 2010), for which I have duly apologized. However in that apology I noted that Krugman has also recently published a draft academic paper presenting a New Keynesian model of debt deflation, “Debt, Deleveraging, and the Liquidity Trap: A Fisher-Minsky-Koo approach” (Eggertsson and Krugman 2010), and I observed that I wish this paper was in fact a joke.

The SEC and the CFTC's budgets are not provided by the federal budget. The agencies, as with the federal banking regulatory agencies, are funded by user fees. None of these agencies' budgets contribute to the deficit. When these agencies fail to stop epidemics of “control fraud” the result can be a Great Recession and trillions of dollars in increased deficits. The asymmetry is so stark that anyone serious about deficits would make ensuring the effectiveness of the SEC, CFTC, and the banking regulatory agencies among their greatest priorities.

Readers, That Papadimitriou is associated with the Levy Institute seems very confusing, until I remembered that the Levy Institute is not only about promoting Hyman Minsky's work and those of his students, it is also about promoting itself. This often is expressed by inviting in speakers who have little or no understanding about the content or implications of the work of Hyman Minsky and others of similar perspective. Why? you might ask.

Readers, I consider this article to be generally very well written. It is though a bit limited in its critique to the econo-ideologies posing as economics. Primarily, it lacks an understanding of post-Keynesian economics and of specifically how fiscal policy actually operates and what the actual capacities of a sovereign, publically controlled currency that is, not issued on a debt basis.

Noam Chomsky on Wisconsin’s Resistance to Assault on Public Sector, the Obama-Sanctioned Crackdown on Activists, and the Distorted Legacy of Ronald Reagan.

AMY GOODMAN: This month is the 15th anniversary of Democracy Now! on the air, and it’s a real privilege to have MIT professor, analyst, world-renowned political dissident, linguist, Noam Chomsky with us. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan Gonzalez, and we’ve been together for this whole 15 years, Juan. It’s really been quite an amazing journey.

Readers, this is way HUGE and will set in motion the effective invalidation of most of the mortgages securitized in the last 8 to 10 years. There is close to nothing that the legislatures can do about this except to nullify every one of these mortgages. The cost of re-validating these mortgages will be large even if it is possible. The banks won't want to bear these costs. The next leg of this process will be for this decision to invalidate falsified documentation all accross the US.