Rachel Maddow tells us that "filibuster" is a boring word, even if it originally meant private adventurers going off risking life and limb trying to make themselves President of some Central American country.
So I will use the other common English language phrase for it, "Talking a Bill to Death".
The ability to Talk a Bill to Death was introduced by mistake when Aaron Burr in 1806 argued for removal of the motion to "move the previous question". This is a motion that can be used to postpone debate, when a measure does not yet have a majority, and can of course also be used to bring a measure to a vote, if it has a majority. Aaron Burr appealed to the fact that it had only passed once in the previous four years - but then again, the Senate did not at that time have a filibuster tradition.
But ... well, we know this. We have known since the 1970's that we would become increasingly dependent under the Old Energy Economy. We have known since the 1970's that our four centuries of energy self-sufficiency since European Settlement of the eastern seaboard of North America would be coming to an end unless we made substantial changes.
And then our ruling elites collectively decided to pretend that social division of national product is a more fundamental question than the ability to continue producing it, and we descended into the last thirty years of the wealthy focusing in grabbing a bigger share of the pie, while assuming that the baking of the pie would magically take care of itself.
Betwixt and Between, I find myself. I observe the validity of D00m.P0rn shrill warnings about the future ... when seen as possible outcomes rather than when seen as certainties. Yet I also see the potential for better outcomes.
And with respect to the strategy of sitting on the sidelines, weighing the likelihood of one versus the other ... I'm against it. Simply the decision to sit on the sidelines makes the calamity more likely as a result. So I am for getting into the fray and trying to make the calamity less likely and the hopeful outcome more likely.
The Calamity Cavalcade
As far as potential calamities, we do not have to look far for those.
We are on track to have a higher concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere than at any other time in the Holocene. We are engaged in this experiments with absolutely no serious evidence to suggest that it is known to be safe. Indeed, those benefiting in the short term from the reckless experiment will even try to reverse the sane burden of proof and place it on those who do not approve of undertaking the reckless experiment.
The argument being, in essence, that if you are driving through a thick fog, then as long as you don't see any cars coming, its OK to speed.
And of course, before the peril of climate chaos came to our attention, there was already the risk of ecosystem collapse hanging over our head, as more and more populations on the planet rely on an industrial technology that is quite clearly ecologically unsustainable and therefore certain to collapse sooner or later, unless we restructure our technological base to approach sustainability faster than we approach ecosystem collapse.
And then of course, even before the risk of ecosystem collapse was widely understood, the threat of nuclear holocaust.
Flood, Nuclear fire followed by Nuclear Winter, Famine and Plague ... and all three involved in or certainly leading to War ... surely rather than Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, there is a whole Cavalry Unit.
Against that backdrop, it may seem provincial to worry about a mere collapse of a single national economy from first world to banana republic status, but that is the specific calamity that I am focusing on here.
(the bad news on the economy... - promoted by poligirl)
The April employment numbers are out. The Broad Based (U6) unemployment figures ... the best measure of the "total people available to take on more work" ... give, on the one hand, bad news, and on the other hand, worse news. This is, of course, treated as "good news", because the expectation was that it would be on the one hand worse news and on the other hand catastrophic news.
.
..
...
..
.
U6 seasonally adjusted
JAN
FEB
MAR
APR
MAY
JUN
JUL
AUG
SEP
OCT
NOV
DEC
2008
9.0%
8.9%
9.1%
9.2%
9.7%
9.9%
10.3%
10.9%
11.2%
12.0%
12.6%
13.5%
2009
13.9%
14.8%
15.6%
15.8%
This is not the "headline" rate, or U3, which takes everyone working any hours at all as "employed", even if they want more work, and anyone who has not actively sought work in the last four weeks is dropped out altogether.
Instead, its the "broad" or "U6" rate, where those who express an interest in working who have looked for work in the past year are included, as well as those who are "involuntary part-time" employees. So the U6 series is the best measure of the "total people available to take on more work".
Also note that BLS unemployment statistics are not determined by the numbers of people drawing unemployment ... it includes a broad range of data sources, including an ongoing telephone survey.
... or in terms of changes in the unemployment rate.
Change in U6
JAN
FEB
MAR
APR
MAY
JUN
JUL
AUG
SEP
OCT
NOV
DEC
2008
-0.1%
+0.2%
+0.1%
+0.5%
+0.2%
+0.4%
+0.6%
+0.3%
+0.8%
+0.6%
+0.9%
2009
+0.4%
+0.9%
+0.8%
+0.2%
The bad news is, of course broad based unemployment is still rising. The worse news is that it is more than halfway to the "depths of the Great Depression" benchmark of around 1 in 4 out of work.
Even more, the populace has been trained to accept as "normal" unemployment rates what would have been considered an economic emergency back in the 1960's.
What's happening here is the collision of several realities:
1. You had institutions, who years if not decades, believing the hype they built themselves to sell to their clients. ...
2. That you can't simply create your own damn financial instrument to meet a client's needs. ...
3. Derivatives products work when they are designed well and implemented on a regulated environment. ...
4. Many of these items will never be liquid. This brings us to today. The reality of the situation is that we now have to be discriminating between those derivatives that are somewhat liquid and those that aren't. The former can have mark to market, but there needs to be a proper exchange for these things. Both the CME and ICE are going to have such a thing, and these banks should be made to trade them on it to get these things off their books. As for the iliquid ones, well unless our goal is to bankrupt these banks in some attempt to punish them, we will have to facilitate either a suspension of FASB 157 for these or some hybrid. ...
5. Banks holding on to these illiquid derivative step children, that must be re-engineered, will have to realize they won't get all their money back. ...
6. Lastly, new accounting rules and financial regulations must be in place to keep in check the establishment of new positions. ...
... in order to "rescue" banks that distributed a massive amount of contingency reserves as if it was income ... by pretending that massive downsides did not exist ...
... we "have to" reward the people who proved to be grossly incompetent in the core competency for senior executive management of a bank.
In other words, there is good and bad in the Good Bank / Bad Bank plan. And if we reverse who ends up with the Good Assets and who ends up with the Bad Assets, we can have all of the Good, and avoid most of the Bad.
UPDATE
Keith Olbermann cites "my" plan on the Tonight show ... posted at the Big Orange
Now, lets look at the Federally Designated Corridors -- and you have to have a designated corridor to get any of the $8b.
Yup, no corridor to Vegas. Oh, and what's that we see ... two, count 'em TWO corridors through Ohio ... Cleveland to Chicago and Cleveland / Columbus / Dayton / Cincinnati.
But, pontificating aside, the reality is that we had a large scale grand robbery of the past few years. To make it simple: the Fed printed money, gave it for free to rich people, who lent it to poor people at at nice profit instead of paying them wages; reimbursement was possible only if house prices went up, and that lasted for a while. The rich made out like bandits on their assets, financial or otherwise, and the poor thought they were more or less keeping up with the Joneses (the reality was a large-scale transfer of wealth from one group to the other, no bonus points for guessing which was which). Now that it's no longer the case, the poor lose their house, stop paying their debt at some point, put the banks in a pickles, and the economy unravels. Except that the banks are being bailed out, which means, fundamentally, saving the owners of financial assets (bank bondholders specifically, and bond holders in general) at the expense of taxpayers, thus having the goverment validate and consolidate the past transfer of wealth.
So leverage is the central problem ... or rather, the central problems:
For those looking to hold onto their ill-gotten gains, how to maintain the maximum amount of wealth while they deleverage, which means how to convert what was always in a large part fantasy wealth into actual claims on actual productive capacity
For the other 99% of us, how to prevent those who obtained fantasy wealth from converting it into real wealth at our expense
That is why we set forth this $85-billion initiative from our committee. It's been reduced in the final going. We expect that it'll come out somewhere around $63 billion, but $30 billion for highways.
The reason for the reduction in overall funding ... was the tax cut initiative that had to be paid for in some way by keeping the entire package in the range of $850 billion.
As I described in Transport Stimulus: You're Doing It Wrong, actual effective stimulus spending was shortchanged -- and in particular spending with substantial long term economic and strategic benefits -- to "pay for" tax cuts.
In reality, if we want to be able to "afford" tax cuts, what we need first and foremost is growth, and economic growth requires effective government investment in the infrastructure of a New Energy Economy.
Rachel Maddow 
... or perhaps that should be, so we no longer need a memorial day for the US economy.
Betwixt and Between, I find myself. I observe the validity of D00m.P0rn shrill warnings about the future ... when seen as possible outcomes rather than when seen as certainties. Yet I also see the potential for better outcomes.
The 
The problem with the 
So leverage is the central problem ... or rather, the central problems:
OK, so, to make an egregiously long story merely excessively long, a very strange thing happened on the road to the Stimulus Package. As 
