I know of immediate openings for a C#/.Net programmer and an Oracle developer working in the green energy industry in the Boston MA area. People who are interested, or who know someone who might be, send an email to stirling [dot] newberry [at] gmail [dot] com

It isn't like this isn't obvious: the Commonwealth fund comes out and says that mandatory private insurance is the model for the US. It's BoD has on it the chair of Obama's MedPac and Presidents of leading private insurers and for profit Hospitals. Call it the Third Way Think Tank for how to defeat Single Payer, without dirtying their hands with the facts that it works better. The facts are "a non-starter."

So why is the Dutch Model a bad one? Well, because it isn't a model. Let's do the numbers.

The drumbeat of history pours forth, at times, like a torrent, when every day brings forth a revelation which opens a window to how events hang in the balance, and decisions, by the many or the few, have been made that touches the scales. On other times, it seems as if all stands still, and there is a cold quiet. Often, in reality, a cold peace has been made, it is not that weight of history could not swing one way or the other, but that those who are in positions of power recognize that it could, and what would happen should it do so is beyond their calculus.

Now is such a moment. We are seeing a cold peace in American politics.

The orderly cycle of American elections creates a texture to power. There is an election, the people speak. But, like Plato to Socrates, the political class sets down, and that is what is known to history. So they organize, and feel out each others power. The majority, at first, does those things that both sides recognize the election was "about." The minority may oppose, but it will seldom stop. It may join, suing for some kind of armistice in the political war. The majority then pushes for those things which are in reach. The minority tries to halt with whatever means they have the will to muster.

And then, there is, unless events overwhelm them, as they did after 9/11, a halt. There is a peace. The minority sets a line, and says that they will allow to a certain point, but after that they will bring the functioning of the legislature to a halt. Often this halting is unheralded. Daschle did it to the Republicans in the last years of Clinton's second term, in hopes that 2000 would buy more time and a few more votes.

We are at such a moment.

[I'm leaving this sticky because Stirling's ideas generated such good discussion. --lambert]

[And again Sunday. Generally, I'm agnostic about policy lists, but after looking at what Obama and our tribunes of the people in the blogosphere -- that is, the Moderates -- did to single payer, I'm starting to change my mind. What would be Progressive policy wedge issues that would break up the Confederates and/or the Moderates? I say policy because it might make sense to start from the fresh perspective that "It matters that you're a citizen. It doesn't matter what your fucking social identity markers are -- These are the basics that every citizen should get." --lambert]

It would be easy to hope that this downturn represents the final capitulation of the Bush years, and that once we work away the excess, that there will be a new age after it. However, this is not what the numbers indicate. While selling self-spin and hope may be the province of those who hope to curry favor with the powers that be, or with masses of people desperate to believe that this is as bad as it will get, hard slabs of reality are my stock and trade.

Let me introduce you to post-petroleum thesis.

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[Welcome to Digby's readers. -- lambert]

Lambert asked me to write on "the money thing" and "straighten it out" for people. Let me turn that around, what we are getting wrong is "the reality thing." The "money thing" is a consequence of getting reality wrong.

So what has happened? What has happened is that the outside world is willing to fund the United States only to do those things that the outside world values. The rest, the US has to pay for itself. The Bush era killed the goose that laid the golden egg for Americans, and that is the thing that needs to be explained, over and over again, in no small part because economists and policy makers are not getting what happened.

Lambert warned me about English majors, but it is the MBAs that I worry about, they write things like "pursuing synergies in multiple horizontally integratable vertical market universes." As an aside, the previous phrase means that they are going to lay people off from merging the two companies because the two companies, while not actually being connected, service the same kinds of people. Just to translate from the Corporatese.