A pledge for voting a different way.

Why did you support Obama’s economic team in December 2008, and what has caused you to change your mind?

President Obama will propose BP fund an independently administered “escrow account” to make sure BP pays all damage claims for which it should be held financially accountable. Good principle. Shouldn’t we apply it more broadly?

Until today’s column, the Washington Post’s Steven Pearlstein had been largely immune from the mind numbing symptoms of deficit hysteria syndrome. That disease has already incapacitated the brains of everyone else at the Post. But now it seems he’s become incoherent, simultaneously babbling in conflicting tongues.

Sometime Tuesday the Senate may take up an amendment to the Senate financial reform bill that would require the Government Accounting Office to conduct an audit of the operations of the Federal Reserve. The outcome is much in doubt, but it shouldn’t be.

H/T Big Tent Democrat

Geithner on Meet the Press:

DAVID GREGORY: How viable a political force do you consider the Tea Party to be?

TIMOTHY GEITHNER: [L]et me do the positive side of this. Okay? We’ve– just been through eight years where people said– many people said, ‘Deficits don’t matter. We can– we can pass huge tax cuts, pass huge new programs without paying for them.’ That debate has changed fundamentally. Now you don’t hear people say anymore, ‘Deficits don’t matter.’ You don’t hear people saying that we can pass enormously—enormous expansion of government without paying for it. That’s an important change. I think all Americans understand that our deficits are unsustainable. And I think that’ll be helpful as we move to try to make the hard choices to bring them down again.”

I know that time is short between now and April 28th. But nevertheless, I propose that we organize a counter Fiscal Summit “Teach-in” Conference in Washington DC, on that day. Such a “teach-in,” depending on how many people we could get to attend, could steal media attention from the Peterson-sponsored event, and introduce an opposing narrative to the ones coming out of the deficit hawk events on the 27th and 28th. To have such a Conference would take money. Speaker expenses would have to paid, as would hotel expenses if it were possible to get a hotel site at this late date. On the other hand, it would not be hard to think of high-level speakers for such a Summit. Here’s my list of speakers who could do a really good job delivering a Modern Monetary Theory counter to the neo-liberal paradigm: L. Randall Wray, William K. Black, James K. Galbraith, Warren Mosler, Marshall Auerback, Bill Mitchell, Rob Parenteau, Yeva Nersisyan, Scott Fullwiler, and some other very good top-level participants who would question the neo-liberal paradigm to at least some degree are: Yves Smith, Simon Johnson, Joseph Stiglitz, Robert Johnson, Robert Reich, Robert Kuttner, and Dean Baker. Finally, someone who ought to be invited, since he’s expressed frequent and very explicit criticism of the neo-liberal paradigm is George Soros. It would be valuable to get him into direct discussions with others on the relationships between hedge fund traders and nations with unencumbered fiat monetary systems.

a diary about economic effects coming

Watching the Democrats continue to destroy the party in the Bernanke confirmation.

This is an important week to focus on Bernanke’s reconfirmation. He runs the central bank, which up to now acts like a feeding trough for the big banks. With Bernanke gone, we can develop momentum to democratize the fed in order to make the central bank work for the public’s interest and JOBS!