This is a fun, quick read from Paul Krugman: "Wheee! The Heritage Foundation is engaged in frantic damage control."

Don't forget it's Mother's Day tomorrow, and your morning open thread begins below.

International markets in Asia and Europe opened down on Monday on the news of an unprecedented proposed bailout by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund for Cyprus that would put a tax on bank savings to finance the bailout. Cyprus’s Parliament will hold an emergency session on Monday to discuss the bailout, which has angered the public and caused a bank run as people rushed to remove their savings before being hit with a tax. Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades pleaded to the angry public to accept the deal, saying the country is facing its worst crisis since the Turkish invasion in 1974. Cyprus is the fifth European nation to appeal to the EU for bailout, and the country had apparently invested heavily in Greek debt:

Under the currently agreed terms, depositors with less than 100,000 euros in Cyprus accounts would have to pay a one-time tax of 6.75%. Those with sums over that threshold would pay 9.9%.

Our correspondent says the president may want to lower the former rate to 3%, while raising the levy on the larger depositors to 12.5%.

An EU source told Agence France-Presse there could be a three-way split on the level of levy, grouped into accounts holding less than 100,000 euros, between 100,000 and 500,000 and more than 500,000.

Nobel Prize winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote in his Sunday column that "It’s as if the Europeans are holding up a neon sign, written in Greek and Italian, saying “time to stage a run on your banks!”

Nobel Prize winning economist and New York Times columnist, Paul Krugman -- goes bankrupt? Satire website The Daily Currant posted just that story, which was picked up as fact by a number of websites, including Breitbart News. Tipped off that it was duped by the fake news, the conservative site quickly took down its own reporting of Krugman’s not-real bankruptcy. Now the old link returns a “Page Not Found” message.

Breitbart.com ridiculed Paul Krugman for filing for Chapter 13 bankruptcy protection in the since-deleted post, after just last month castigating a news outlet for running with a story from that same website. Breitbart.com editor-at-large Larry O'Connor tweeted, saying he "trusted Boston.com as the source for that Krugman piece, but they were duped by Daily Currant, therefore, so was I!"

Media Matters noted:

In his post, O'Connor jabbed Krugman for supposedly spending "$84,000 in one month" on Portuguese wines and "a dress from the Victorian period," and concluded that "apparently this Keynsian [sic] thing doesn't really work on the micro level." O'Connor sourced the report to a Boston.com post written by "Prudent Investor." The post by "Prudent Investor" sources an Austrian website, which reprinted the original Daily Currant story.

Just last month, the Breitbart team laid into the Washington Post when the paper's website adopted a satirical story about Sarah Palin from Daily Currant. In a post about the snafu, Breitbart blogger John Nolte ripped the paper for not letting "facts get in the way of a good Narrative." According to Nolte, if Post blogger Suzi Parker "had a shred of self-awareness, integrity, and dignity, she would have changed the headline to 'Too Good To Check,' and under it posted an essay about how shallow, smug, bitterly angry partisanship can blind you to common sense."

But when his website ran with a too good to check story about Paul Krugman, they merely deleted the post without explanation.

Then a truly hilarious ending to the Breitbarting of Paul Krugman, from Paul Krugman:

OK, I’m an evil person — and my scheming has paid off.

On Friday I started hearing from friends about a fake story making the rounds about my allegedly filing for personal bankruptcy; I even got asked about the story by a reporter from Russian television, who was very embarrassed when I told him it was fake. But I decided not to post anything about it; instead, I wanted to wait and see which right-wing media outlets would fall for the hoax.

And Breitbart.com came through!

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go give a lavishly paid speech to Friends of Hamas.

He who laughs last and all...

John Amato: What a great birthday present.

Bill’s conversation with New York Times columnist Paul Krugman yielded many insights, cautions, and honest takes on Jack Lew, President Obama’s choice for Treasury Secretary. We clipped three of those specific moments — including one web-exclusive that will not be shown on air — below.

In the first cut, Krugman discusses public support for seeing him in the Treasury position, and why Lew might have the right temperament for the job.

In this next, web-exclusive clip, Bill asks Krugman what he thinks of Jack Lew’s stated view that financial industry deregulation was not the “proximate cause” of the financial crisis, a view that recently moved Senator Bernie Sanders to oppose Lew’s nomination.

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In 2008, the United States economy experienced a nearly unprecedented crisis, due to a perfect storm involving banking deregulation, complex derivatives, financial mismanagement, and larger systemic causes, including an inadequate educational system. Three years later, people rose up in protest—an organic national movement called Occupy Wall Street, its members chanting "we are the 99%" and saying that our system was broken, gamed by the wealthy and powerful.

The movement brought an entire nation's frustration with a runaway banking and financial sector, student debt, and unequal educational opportunities to the forefront of public debate. And thoughtful institutions responded, investing time and money to look into the phenomenon. On April 17th and 18th of 2012, the Rockefeller Foundation funded two panel discussions to address these urgent questions. The panels were sponsored by the New School and were held at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, DC, and the New York Society for Ethical Culture. Moderator John Cassidy of The New Yorker perhaps summed up the issues best when he noted that the 1960s and 1970s had discredited the idea of an all-efficient government, and the 90s and zeros had done a very good job of discrediting the idea of an all-efficient market. "What's to replace both of those ideologies?" Cassidy asked. "That remains to be seen--Occupy Wall Street is obviously a part of the discussion."

Panelists included, among others, Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow; Pulitzer Prize-winning financial journalist David Cay Johnston; world-class international economists Jeffrey Sachs, Raghu Rajan, Carmen Reinhart, and Robin Wells; the Financial Times's Martin Wolf, and Bethany McLean of Vanity Fair.

Both panels grew out of The Occupy Handbook, a compendium of articles, edited by Janet Byrne, featuring leading economists and others on the causes and implications of the Occupy movement. This video features selections from the two panel discussions as well as public remarks by contributors to the Handbook.

Please Note All times are Eastern Standard Time.

Latino Vote Matters: Immigration, Power, and an Interactive Look at the Map

Panel; Sat, 06/09/2012 - 10:30am, Ballroom A

The War on Voting

Panel; Sat, 06/09/2012 - 01:30pm, Ballroom A

Winning Without a Vote: Working with Federal Agencies to Advance a Progressive Agenda

Panel; Sat, 06/09/2012 - 03:00pm, Ballroom A

Safeguarding Democracy: Innovations in Technology and Human Rights

Panel; Sat, 06/09/2012 - 10:30am, Ballroom B

Intervention, Isolation and the Future of Progressive Security Policy

Panel; Sat, 06/09/2012 - 01:30pm, Ballroom B

The Worst Immigration Law in the United States

Panel; Sat, 06/09/2012 - 03:00pm, Ballroom B

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"Yet if King could see America now, I believe that he would be disappointed, and feel that his work was nowhere near done. He dreamed of a nation in which his children “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” But what we actually became is a nation that judges people not by the color of their skin — or at least not as much as in the past — but by the size of their paychecks. And in America, more than in most other wealthy nations, the size of your paycheck is strongly correlated with the size of your father’s paycheck."

"Goodbye Jim Crow, hello class system."

Read the full article here.

[Photo via Flickr]

Occupy the Midwest Conference to be held in St. Louis March 15th – 18th. Their website is here and they give a detailed timeline of events and working groups. This is a huge event and should really energize the occupy movement all through out the Midwest.

From the website:

We, the General Assembly of Saint Louis, in the spirit of solidarity call upon our brothers and sisters in occupied spaces across the country to join us in forming the Midwest Regional Summit. We feel that it is time for us to create new spaces to connect in; new ways to share knowledge, experience, resources, and to express our solidarity.

Zuccotti Park may be vacant, but Occupy legal battle continues...

From my favorite nobel laureate, Paul Krugman today, "America Isn’t a Corporation"

FAIR on Occupy-related abuse of journalists.

Mayor Gray wants Occupy protesters removed from McPherson Square: to “allow for elimination of the rat infestation, clean up, and restoration” of the downtown park.

Is This Land Made for You and Me - or for the Super-Rich?

Why Now? What’s Next? Naomi Klein and Yotam Marom in Conversation About Occupy Wall Street

Occupy Wall Street needs an accountant.

Occupy Washington is thankful for the local police this cold winter:

Early in the pre-dawn hours of Jan 5, Park Police went from tent to tent in the freezing night to wake up sleeping Occupy Washington protestors at Freedom Plaza, a block away from the White House. But they were not about to evict the 100 people camping there for three months hoping to "get big money out of politics" as they say.

Instead, on the coldest night of the winter to date, with temperatures down in the low teens, the police were making sure that no one died of hypothermia in the freezing night.

"We were glad they came – we couldn't have woken everyone up," said Joe Bieber, 39, one of the Occupy leaders at the site.

The police came at 1 a.m. and then returned at 4 a.m., the depths of the cold, to be sure everyone could respond to their questions and was not going into life-threatening hypothermia.

It's rare to have an opportunity to say such on a site devoted to the occupy movement, but sincerest thanks, and kudos to those wonderful officers!

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