Robert Bonomo - Media Appearances


Robert is a frequent guest on podcasts where he discusses his documentary, The 21 Faces of God as well as topics ranging from financial markets, world events, esoterica, the Matrix and his novels.

Below is a sampling of guest appearances.  If you wish to schedule Robert Bonomo for your show, please contact him at:  rfbonomo@gmail.com





Miguel Connor and Robert Bonomo discuss The 21 Faces of God, as well as the state of the world, alchemy, anarchism and Gnosticism.  Link











Greg Carlwood from the HigherSideChats and Robert had a lively and interesting conversation that ranged from the banksters, to Tarot and archetypes.  Link


















Seriah from WhereDidtheRoadGo and Robert discuss the Tarot and other esoteric topics.  Link












Freeman, from Freeman TV and Robert Bonomo have a wide ranging discussion from Tarot and Strange Angel all the way to UFO's.  Link

Darren and Graham from Grimerica have a wide ranging conversation with Robert Bonomo from money creation and the financial system all the way to Tarot cards.  A fun, interesting conversation.  Link











A conversation with Joshua Wisley on his podcast, Eschaton.  Joshua really got into The 21 Faces of God which made for a very informed conversation on the film.  Link














Great conversation between Robert Bonomo and Ryan McCormick on Ryan's show, The Outer Limits of Inner Truth. Robert and Ryan are both members of the Liberty movement and both deep into the esoteric world, (and both Irish/Italian). Fun and interesting conversation. Link



Joe Rupe and Robert Bonomo discuss Robert's documentary, The 21 Faces of God. Link









Robert Bonomo joins Erik Arneson to discuss Robert's documentary, The 21 faces of God, a documentary about the major arcana of the tarot. The two of them majorly nerd out on the Tarot, Gnosticism, the grail legend, physics, psychology, and alchemy. This episode has it all!  Link


Alex Tsakiris is the host of Skeptiko, the leading podcast on the science of human consciousness. Alex has interviewed the most prominent figures in the world of consciousness studies, including: Rupert Sheldrake, Dean Radin, Daryl Bem, and Sam Harris among many others.   

Alex and Robert discuss conspiracy and the 2016 election.  Link 




Miguel Conner's Aeon Byte radio is one of the the leading outlets for Gnostic thinking.  He has interviewed world renowned authors like Elaine Pagels and Timothy Freke. 

In this edition, Miguel interviews Robert Bonomo regarding the connections between Gnosticism and anarchism.  Link



Is Glen Beck Peter Pan?


Glen Beck is enjoying his time in the spotlight: the cover of Time and a three part series in Salon, the Fox show, the books. His story is well known, precocious shock jock in the 1980’s and 90’s who matured into a conservative talk radio personality and finally, into the Rush Limbaugh mold of bestselling author and TV personality.

It is very easy to scoff at his fans and the man himself as immature and intellectually challenged. But there is something appealing about him and his world view. Conspiracy films like Loose Change and Zeitgeist: The Film have a similar appeal, a world of good guys and bad guys, it is like bad television from the 70’s, but people still flock to the re-runs of Kojak and SWAT.

A brief look at the career of Glen Beck and it is clear that he is not a thinker but rather a performer and an expert at creating PR stunts. His recent ramblings about the secret messages in Rockefeller Center are a perfect example. Does anyone think that Glenn Beck was looking at the murals in Rockefeller Center and suddenly realized that there was a secret message hidden in the paint? Of course not. He understands that the country loves conspiracy theories and the upcoming publication of the new Dan Brown mega bestseller about the Mason’s in America set the mood for him to delve into a little symbology. Beck is not a political thinker and beyond a childish patriotism and a middle aged Anglo-Saxon affinity for conservative politics, he has no real ideology.

Beck is the consummate manipulator. He will push and push until one day he explodes into a wild hysterical rage that will keep him off the airwaves for awhile. And where will Beck cross the line? He will touch the greatest taboo of modern American life. He will connect the obvious dots that no one dares connect and ask how the United States fall into the trap of serving Israel in its foreign policy and why are Jews so overrepresented in government, media, culture and public life in general. His instinct to be the bad child won’t allow him to stay away from that one, and it will be his undoing.

From a transactional psychology point of view (remember the book by Eric Berne, The Games People Play) Glen Beck is the consummate child, provoking the adult (the Democratic Obama supporter) and instigating the Republicans (Parents) who are tired of being parents for 8 years and starting wars and destroying the world economy and are just dying to be bad children again. Glen Beck is screaming to them, like Peter Pan, to go out and have fun with him. Why think? Why Read? Why have intelligent adult debates. It’s so much more fun to put on a funny costume and go tea-bagging (no sexual innuendo intended). Does anyone think this not complete Astroturf?

The “right-wing conservatives” are miraculously driven to the streets by a sudden sense of fiscal responsibility and abhorrence of big government? The government is taking over our economy and they are outraged out corporate bailouts? Please. The GOP started two wars AND cut taxes. No one budged. Lets not forget, according the FT “the top one percent of households have 44.1% of all privately held stock, 58.0% of financial securities, and 57.3% of business equity.” So who was the government bailing out with TARP? But now, that maybe we might have to raise taxes on that 1% to pay for the whole mess, we suddenly have spontaneous grass roots movements popping up all over the country. How simple can we be to not see this?

Glen Beck may not be a genius, but he does have good instincts and he can push the big collective buttons. People are afraid of a black President and a progressive congress, even if it will give them more security and peace of mind. The fears are much more deeply rooted than the worries of maybe not making ends meet. The United States has for years become progressively more divided: racially, ethnically, religiously, ideologically, culturally and most importantly, economically. This is one of our biggest taboos. The typical upper middle class American has very little in common with their urban poor counterparts, and there is a latent fear that one day the “other’ will wake up from a daze and began to ask some serious questions. Barack Obama represents that other, and Glen Beck is tapping the fear.

The sad part is that while Glen Beck has his fun at the expense of a productive national debate on important issues like health care, education, economic recovery and the environment, the “1%” club continue to manipulate the oblivious masses who let themselves be herded like sheep into demonstrations to support the immense wealth of a miniscule minority who are working counter to their own middleclass well being.

The problem with America is we have become immature. My father was born in 1922 and my mother in 1930. They lived through epic world events and while God knows they were not perfect, they were able to engage in political debate and discourse in a mature way. War was bad, only when absolutely provoked and necessary, Dogma was dangerous, beware of it, and Government had to toe a difficult line between maintaining the governmental infrastructure, public works and helping out folks who really had problems while paying for it all with taxes. Being on the left or on the right was usually only a nuance of the last point.

The mess we are in now is monumental, and the whole house of cards is swaying, more than most would like to admit. This is the time for people to snap out of the childish mode of borrow and spend, pay later, fix it later, the environment and oil will hold up attitude. But instead of beginning a mature, civilized and PRODUCTIVE national debate, we are led around by Republic operatives and children like Glen Beck. We still our The People, and while most of us may not have millions, we have hands, strong backs and the fortitude that money can’t buy. It is time we used them.

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One War We Don’t Need


Mr. Obama, the momentum that carried you to the White House needs to be used to end a war. This war has gone on for too long and it needs to end now. This could be the war in Iraq or the war in Afghanistan which you are hopefully doing all you can to get us out of and bring peace to those lands. No easy task, but you wanted to be President.

But the war you need to stop immediately is the war on drugs. The United States has over 2.3 million people behind bars while China, with 4 times our population, has only 1.6 million locked up. According to the US Department of Justice, “30-40 percent of all current prison admissions involve crimes that have no direct or obvious victim other than the perpetrator,” and it continues “Nearly a third of all prison admissions are from non- violent drug offenses.” Why are we waging a war on ourselves?

If we compare the number of deaths in the United States (Center for Disease Control) each year directly related to smoking, over 400,000, alcohol consumption, approximately 75,000, marihuana, cocaine and heroin combined are under 10,000.

If we take into consideration the amount of social damage that the illegal drug trade causes not only in the United States, but especially in Mexico and Colombia, the entire idea of a drug war becomes absurd. We must immediately end this war and legalize marijuana, heroin, cocaine as well as methamphetamines and designer drugs like Ecstasy.

How can we purport to be a free society when we have the highest incarceration rate in the world? The largest portion of these inmates are non-violent drug offenders. By sending this people to prison the only thing we are doing is making them more dangerous, more marginalized and less civilized. Whether it is recreational drug use or flat out addiction, we should not be incarcerating people because they want or need to medicate themselves.

By legalizing these drugs and creating a market price that eliminates the incentive to smuggle, we will end the international drug cartels without firing a shot, or putting one more person in jail. This will bring much needed stability to many regions of Latin America currently reeling from drug wars and drug financed civil wars.

There will certainly be an increase in the usage of these drugs once they are legalized but it is a small price to pay for the peace that will be won and it will no where near reach the type of damage that alcohol causes in our society. As a society we accept the damage that alcohol causes. We not only accept it, we allow the manufacturers of alcoholic beverages to actively promote the consumption of alcohol and lifestyles that emphasize it. We can not live in a completely sober society, nor is there any significant groups calling for that. By simply opening the possibilities of the chemicals legally available for people to use for their enjoyment, we will become a more tolerant and free society. With the revenue generated from the sales of these drugs rehabilitation centers will be opened to care for those who need rehabilitation not only for newly legalized drugs, but for alcohol and prescription drugs.

Some studies say that 1 in 5 adult males in the US either has a serious drinking problem or abuses alcohol. How many families are ruined and people killed and maimed in alcohol related fights and automobile accidents? Yet no one promotes a return to prohibition. We understand that as a society most people can use alcohol responsibly, and a minority will abuse it. The same will occur with drugs. Why should the government decide how its citizen can intoxicate themselves? It makes no sense and it also disproportionately affects minorities. Whites use alcohol more, minorities use marijuana more.

The debate on health care has shown the very limited capacity of the American people to conduct a national debate on an important issue. Instead of focusing on the real consequences of public policy, the discussion becomes an adolescent name calling contest, falling back on clichés and archaic historic references. This debate will no doubt further inflame the fringe. I new strategy must be used to bring a national consensus to the drug issue.

The United States has a long tradition of personal freedom and libertarian values which are much admired with the political right and fundamentalist groups. We must equate the right to use and buy drugs with the right to bear arms. It must be a debate about personal liberty and about less government. Who is the government to tell its citizens that they cannot consume marijuana? Where does the Constitution talk about marijuana? Maybe soon they will say we can only drink California Chardonnay? What if we want Bud Light? This must be made a fundamental rights campaign.

From a marketing standpoint there could be no better promoter for this than a “talking head, right wing radio personality”. If one can’t be engaged, it should be simple enough to create a new one for the job. The health care debate has shown the nation is not mature enough to have a serious debate, and the only way to find consensus is to employ mass media demagogues able to disguise good policy in childish rants.

For those more intellectually inclined, a data rich website should be constructed, giving people a healthy dose of numbers to show how misguided this policy has become and how it has turned the United States into one of the worlds biggest police states. The numbers are truly staggering when apples to apples comparisons are made between legal and illegal drugs. Anyone capable of simple logic and cost benefit analysis is convinced almost immediately.

The ancient Greeks understood the delicate balance between vice and pleasure. When Bacchus, the God of the Vine, was imprisoned by Pentheus, the outcome proved disastrous. Bacchus must be free, or he will create violence and havoc similar to what we have on our hands now with the war on drugs.

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The King of Online Porn


In the summer of 2001 I was the king of porn, “king” of porn in my company that is. I worked for an ad network in Madrid, and we, like everyone else in the Internet world, were taking a beating. It was a particularly difficult summer for me, my company moved me back to Madrid from Buenos Aires, a relationship ended abruptly and I was living out of a hotel, and I had to adjust from being Country Manager of Argentina to porn manager of an ad network on the verge of bankruptcy. The CEO of the company told me I had better pay for my salary in sales or else, he gave me a couple of porn leads and told me to handle that side of the business. I got lucky and landed a very big client from Hong Kong who bought through a French media buyer and I kept my job. The long hot summer turned nightmarish on September 11.

Behind my cubicle was a big red sign that read Red Light District, and I could watch porn all day, it was part of my job. I was always amused by the banners the porn guys would send me. There were light, medium and hard core. It was amazing the sexual acts that could fit on a standard 468*60 banner. The porn money was crucial in getting us through those difficult times, and very importantly, they paid up front. One of the big problems during the collapse of the Internet bubble was unpaid advertising invoices. The Internet companies spent a lot of money to get traffic, and as they died, they left a lot those campaign invoices unpaid.


I think it’s no mystery how sexual the internet is, but if you had any doubts, here is some data from Israel Opinion.

“There are over 500 million pages of pornography on the Internet. Two out of five Internet users regular visit pornography sites. In a … poll of university students in America, 87% admitted having "virtual sex" with their computers. Over 63 million viewers enter adult websites per month, reaching 42.7 percent of the Internet audience. The Internet pornography industry generates $12 billion dollars in annual revenue - larger than the combined annual revenues of ABC, NBC and CBS.”

It is always shocking to read this kind of data. We should know how sexual we are, but with the internet we can really quantify it. For example, Google knows exactly what percent of searches are sexually related, and it is around 25%. The very Web 1.0 activities like watching porn online have given way to the Web 2.0 cybersex. And I remember Web 1.0 schemes that were entirely driven by revenue from ‘dialers’, programs that called a different internet access number and charged you a lot of money per minute. This was the old school affiliate program that got shut down when a lot of grandmas got $1,000 phone bills run up by there hormone supercharged grandsons. Average session was 11 minutes if that means anything to you. But today’s Web 2.0 affiliate programs are for webcam girls that charge per minute on credit cards or PayPal for ‘cybersex’ with a cam.

What is cybersex exactly? It is a web based conversation that becomes erotic, whether just by chatting with IM or using a cam. I’ve noticed since I began using ICQ many years ago that IM’s are dangerous because they can become heated more quickly than face-to-face conversations, people lose inhibitions. I have seen this at work many times, and I often avoided IM conversations on delicate topics because I realized IM’s discussions could get nasty more quickly. This is purely anecdotal, but I was convinced of it.

Maybe IM’s can also get heated in another way more quickly than face-to-face conversations. We know how sexual we are as humans, so should it be any surprise to us that as the Internet advances, so will the type of sexual encounters it creates online and offline. I have found some data, take it with a grain of salt, but I think it can give us an idea of how sexual the Internet has become.


• 57% of people have used the Internet to flirt.
• 38% of people have engaged in explicit online sexual conversation and 50% of people have made phone contact with someone they chatted with online.
• Evidence proves there is a high correlation between on-line infidelity and subsequent real-time sexual affairs.
• 31% of people have had an online conversation that has led to real-time sex.
A few years after the bad summer of 2001 I was actually offered the job of managing all of Private’s (very large porno content producer) marketing through Grupo Prisa’s media (Spain’s largest media group). But in a bizarre twist there was a fusion the night after I was offered the position, and when I went to sign the contract a hiring freeze had been put in place. And that was the end of my porno career.

The two key elements to online sex are anonymity and variety. The imagination, a voice, a blurry image and many people are finding themselves fulfilled online. And imagine what the future holds! Once machines can stimulate that body electronically, the possibilities are endless. And with the propagation of English as a world language, borders fade away and people find a new kind intimacy.

It’s very easy to pass judgment on these types of relationships as superficial, or escapist. And many are already talking about cybersex addiction, destroyed marriages etc. But what is clear is that our imaginations are without a doubt our most erotic organ, and as the technology and forums advance, so will the erotic nature of encounters.
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Time to Send GM West


The Midwest, Michigan in particular, has been the home to the US auto industry for almost 100 years. It had its heyday, and has now reached a decadence almost as complete as Detroit. This decadence did not occur quickly, neither to the city nor the industry. It is something that has come on like a slow developing cancer, and has now reached a point where both patients need hospice care.

The home of the new economy is undoubtedly on the west coast. Silicon Valley alone is home to Google, Intel, Apple, EBay, Oracle, Adobe and Yahoo just to name a few. This type of innovation and thinking is what has kept this country moving forward. The aircraft industries, the film industry, software, microchips, are all based on the west coast. The one last bastion of the east coast, finance, has finally almost led the world to financial catastrophe. What’s best about America has become a West coast phenomenon.Should the auto industry be moved to the west coast? Do we even need an auto industry? If by auto industry we mean companies dedicated to vehicles with combustion engines, than the answer is no. That is best left to those who do it best, the Japanese and Europeans, and those who are on the verge of jumping in for the first time, China and India. For the United States to try and regain a foothold in the automotive industry would be like marrying a long forgotten high school sweetheart.

But, if we redefine the automotive industry as creating vehicles that move people on the existing automotive infrastructure, powered by clean energy, than yes, we do need to save it. First, it must immediately be moved to Silicon Valley. The new GM, owned by the American people needs to leave Detroit. It may seem like a terrible thing to do to a city that has already been pummeled, but unless the entire culture of GM is changed, the company is doomed. The old brands could remain in Detroit, and maybe the headquarters for the combustion operations.

A new GM needs to completely rethink the automobile. It must move at least two people, and carry at least 100 pounds of cargo, (45 kilos), and have a range of 300 miles (around 500 kilometers), and reach a speed of at least 80 mph (130 kph) and be powered by clean energy i.e. no fossil fuels. This, along with the full array of Silicon Valley marketing, should put GM back on its feet. The problem with GM, and its two smaller siblings, was not the world economic crisis, healthcare costs or unions. The problem with GM is and was the cars themselves. If instead of Buick, Oldsmobile, Pontiac, and Cadillac, we were talking about Mercedes, BMW, Porsche, Lexus, and Audi, Detroit would still be going strong.

The United States is not going to compete on price; it must compete on design, features, quality, innovation and marketing. Detroit was challenged in all of these areas. Only Silicon Valley can bring together the group of people capable of re-launching this industry. A new headquarters in Sunnyvale, and a Washington backed VC fund, loaded with $10 Billion in seed money to feed start ups in the area. The model that worked with new technologies should be employed to update an old one. The 10 Billion will make a nice return for the American people, and fund the kind of technologies we need to enter the post oil world.

The marketing and distribution of automobiles must move forward. Small automobile stores with a few models in the storefront, a service center in the back, and a couple of cars to test-drive in the parking lot. GM must get away from the tremendous amount of models. The old and new will need to live together simultaneously for a period, create a new brand, move it west, and have it completely separate from the old GM.

New materials, new design, new power sources and engines. The whole thing must be re-thought, than re-marketed using the internet, delivery services and small storefront shops in malls, etc. more I- store, than mega car lot.

How will this be paid for? A national tax on gasoline, oil and combustion engines should produce more than enough capital to fund the new GM. Once it is on its feet, the old “GM” could be sold to a combustion producer. Non-combustion vehicles, NCV’s, will become the standard for the future. Clean, sleek, marketed and sold online, interactive and fun, the automobile can be rethought, but on not in Detroit.

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Jean Rhys, Expats & Books


Jean Rhys was an expat too. She married a shady Belgian character who was thrown in jail and she wound up living with Ford Maddox Ford and his wife in Paris, setting up the scene for her novel Quartet. I remember finding Jean Rhys. I remember finding her like I remember the first time I saw a woman I loved. I was in the FNAC in Madrid, on the fourth floor in the English section. It was a Penguin Classic, the kind you used to find all the time in bookstores in non-English speaking countries.

I had never heard of her. But I liked the cover of the book, the description, her life. She intrigued me like only a woman or a book can. I remember the first time a sat down with her in my small apartment near the Prado in Madrid. Like the first time we made love. I never found books like that when I was living in the States.

Now we have super bookstores and Amazon. But there was a time when acquiring books for the literary expat was an adventure and a delicacy. I lived in Cartagena, Spain. An old port town, decadent, punch drunk. The name comes from Carthage. It had been taken by Hannibal and the Carthaginians from the Iberians, than the Romans took it from them, and it had been a Phoenician port before all that. When you see the port of Cartagena from the hill above the city you realize how perfect a port it is, how the first Phoenicians to meander in must have felt very good. The place had history. But no book stores with English books. I would send away for the Penguin catalog to Madrid. I remember spending hours going through it, preparing and budgeting my meager teacher’s salary to pay for the books.

I had two luxuries, a New Yorker international subscription and my two times a year Penguin shipment. As an expat, wherever you are, there is a unique kind of loneliness. At home, wherever that may be, it’s impossible to feel that isolated. For some it must be terrible, but it never bothered me. As a writer, it may actually be a good thing to help one concentrate. Even when you find your fellow patriots, it seems different. You are almost forced together. Nonetheless, wonderful friendships can emerge from these forced encounters. The same way one embraces those books one finds in your native language, so one reaches for those fellow expats.

Writing a novel is special process that can only be understood if you have gone through it. The pain, the doubt, the moments of inspiration, the intimacy with the ideas and characters is something that is very difficult to explain. I have started four novels, and completed three. This week, I will begin number five. It always reminds me of the scene in The Great Escape when the Charles Bronson character draws a big circle in chalk, and puts a number in the middle, the number of tunnels he has begun, before breaking ground on the new tunnel. I think most writers would say that novels take years to form in their minds before the first word is written.

I will never forget the day I knew I was ready to write Cactus Land, my third novel. I had pondered the story for over 20 years, I knew how it would end, and I had an idea of how it would be structured, but I needed a “feel” or ambience. I went to see the film 28 Days Later, and having a drink after the film, I knew, that was the ambience I needed. Not that it is a great film; it’s a good, entertaining, modern version of the Night of the Living Dead. But something about the first few scenes were the gel my mind had been looking for. It is like cooking stew, there is a moment when the soup becomes stew, and that moment is very elusive.

I suppose the writer’s life must be lonely, and the writer must not only be able to support loneliness, he must seek it out. Maybe that is why so many writers become expats, because the special loneliness of foreign lands is the right tonic for writing. Many writers will tell you that talking about a story in progress is a big taboo. Maybe too many close friends and good conversations and the air would go out the writers balloon. For the writer, the reader is a mystery best left vague.

I was thinking recently about people I have been really close too, that I felt completely connected too. Unfortunately, not many came to mind. I few women that I was in love with, but unfortunately they didn’t feel the same connection I did, so I think in those cases the ‘connection’ was more imagined on my part. Writing must come at least in some part from a sense of isolation and marginalization. Could someone like Fidel Castro, who gives eight hour speeches, and is always listened to intensely by the throngs, ever write a good book? I doubt it.

Jean Rhys has just had a new biography written about her, The Blue Hour. She wrote several novels in the 20’s and 30’s than faded into obscurity, such a deep obscurity that many thought she was dead. In the 1950’s the BBC did a radio play of one of her works, and one of the actresses decided to try and find Mrs. Rhys. She found her hard at work on a new novel, The Wide Sargasso Sea, which became her seminal work. I haven’t read the new biography, only the reviews, and honestly, some of the intimate details of her life I wish I hadn’t come across. But we have had our affair, so to speak.

So now I will begin what hopefully will end in completed novel number four. At this point I always think this will be the last one, that somehow the story will capture all I ever want to say, which I suppose is a good thing to feel before one starts writing. And those elusive readers, where are they, who are they? Now, it doesn’t matter, if it did, I don’t think I would every get through writing. Now is time to be intimate with the ideas, with my loneliness and my craft.

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How Washington is Screwing Up Health Care Reform – and Why It May Take a Revolt to Fix It

Published on Saturday, September 5, 2009 by Rolling Stone

by Matt Taibbi

Let's start with the obvious: America has not only the worst but the dumbest health care system in the developed world. It's become a black leprosy eating away at the American experiment - a bureaucracy so insipid and mean and illogical that even our darkest criminal minds wouldn't be equal to dreaming it up on purpose.

The system doesn't work for anyone. It cheats patients and leaves them to die, denies insurance to 47 million Americans, forces hospitals to spend billions haggling over claims, and systematically bleeds and harasses doctors with the specter of catastrophic litigation. Even as a mechanism for delivering bonuses to insurance-company fat cats, it's a miserable failure: Greedy insurance bosses who spent a generation denying preventive care to patients now see their profits sapped by millions of customers who enter the system only when they're sick with incurably expensive illnesses.

The cost of all of this to society, in illness and death and lost productivity and a soaring federal deficit and plain old anxiety and anger, is incalculable - and that's the good news. The bad news is our failed health care system won't get fixed, because it exists entirely within the confines of yet another failed system: the political entity known as the United States of America.

Just as we have a medical system that is not really designed to care for the sick, we have a government that is not equipped to fix actual crises. What our government is good at is something else entirely: effecting the appearance of action, while leaving the actual reform behind in a diabolical labyrinth of ingenious legislative maneuvers.

Over the course of this summer, those two failed systems have collided in a spectacular crossroads moment in American history. We have an urgent national emergency on the one hand, and on the other, a comfortable majority of ostensibly simpatico Democrats who were elected by an angry population, in large part, specifically to reform health care. When they all sat down in Washington to tackle the problem, it amounted to a referendum on whether or not we actually have a functioning government.

It's a situation that one would have thought would be sobering enough to snap Congress into real action for once. Instead, they did the exact opposite, doubling down on the same-old, same-old and laboring day and night in the halls of the Capitol to deliver us a tour de force of old thinking and legislative trickery, as if that's what we really wanted. Almost every single one of the main players - from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Blue Dog turncoat Max Baucus - found some unforeseeable, unique-to-them way to fuck this thing up. Even Ted Kennedy, for whom successful health care reform was to be the great vindicating achievement of his career, and Barack Obama, whose entire presidency will likely be judged by this bill, managed to come up small when the lights came on.

We might look back on this summer someday and think of it as the moment when our government lost us for good. It was that bad.

Here's where we are right now: Before Congress recessed in August, four of the five committees working to reform health care had produced draft bills. On the House side, bills were developed by the commerce, ways and means, and labor committees. On the Senate side, a bill was completed by the HELP committee (Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, chaired by Ted Kennedy). The only committee that didn't finish a bill is the one that's likely to matter most: the Senate Finance Committee, chaired by the infamous obfuscating dick Max Baucus, a right-leaning Democrat from Montana who has received $2,880,631 in campaign contributions from the health care industry.

The game in health care reform has mostly come down to whether or not the final bill that is hammered out from the work of these five committees will contain a public option - i.e., an option for citizens to buy in to a government-run health care plan. Because the plan wouldn't have any profit motive - and wouldn't have to waste money on executive bonuses and corporate marketing - it would automatically cost less than private insurance. Once such a public plan is on the market, it would also drive down prices offered by for-profit insurers - a move essential to offset the added cost of covering millions of uninsured Americans. Without a public option, any effort at health care reform will be as meaningful as a manicure for a gunshot victim. "The public option is the main thing on the table," says Michael Behan, an aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. "It's really coming down to that."

The House versions all contain a public option, as does the HELP committee's version in the Senate. So whether or not there will be a public option in the end will likely come down to Baucus, one of the biggest whores for insurance-company money in the history of the United States. The early indications are that there is no public option in the Baucus version; the chairman hinted he favors the creation of nonprofit insurance cooperatives, a lame-ass alternative that even a total hack like Sen. Chuck Schumer has called a "fig leaf."

Even worse, Baucus has set things up so that the final Senate bill will be drawn up by six senators from his committee: a gang of three Republicans (Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Olympia Snowe of Maine, Mike Enzi of Wyoming) and three Democrats (Baucus, Kent Conrad of North Dakota, Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico) known by the weirdly Maoist sobriquet "Group of Six." The setup senselessly submarines the committee's Democratic majority, effectively preventing members who advocate a public option, like Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia and Robert Menendez of New Jersey, from seriously influencing the bill. Getting movement on a public option - or any other meaningful reform - will now require the support of one of the three Republicans in the group: Grassley (who has received $2,034,000 from the health sector), Snowe ($756,000) or Enzi ($627,000).

This is what the prospects for real health care reform come down to - whether one of three Republicans from tiny states with no major urban populations decides, out of the goodness of his or her cash-fattened heart, to forsake forever any contributions from the health-insurance industry (and, probably, aid for their re-election efforts from the Republican National Committee).

This, of course, is the hugest of long shots. But just to hedge its bets even further and ensure that no real reforms pass, Congress has made sure to cover itself, sabotaging the bill long before it even got to Baucus' committee. To do this, they used a five-step system of subtle feints and legislative tricks to gut the measure until there was nothing left.

STEP ONE: AIM LOW

Heading into the health care debate, there was only ever one genuinely dangerous idea out there, and that was a single-payer system. Used by every single developed country outside the United States (with the partial exceptions of Holland and Switzerland, which offer limited and highly regulated private-insurance options), single-payer allows doctors and hospitals to bill and be reimbursed by a single government entity. In America, the system would eliminate private insurance, while allowing doctors to continue operating privately.

In the real world, nothing except a single-payer system makes any sense. There are currently more than 1,300 private insurers in this country, forcing doctors to fill out different forms and follow different reimbursement procedures for each and every one. This drowns medical facilities in idiotic paperwork and jacks up prices: Nearly a third of all health care costs in America are associated with wasteful administration. Fully $350 billion a year could be saved on paperwork alone if the U.S. went to a single-payer system - more than enough to pay for the whole goddamned thing, if anyone had the balls to stand up and say so.

Everyone knows this, including the president. Last spring, when he met with Rep. Lynn Woolsey, the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Obama openly said so. "He said if he were starting from scratch, he would have a single-payer system," says Woolsey. "But he thought it wasn't possible, because it would disrupt the health care industry."

Huh? This isn't a small point: The president and the Democrats decided not to press for the only plan that makes sense for everyone, in order to preserve an industry that is not only cruel and stupid and dysfunctional, but through its rank inefficiency has necessitated the very reforms now being debated. Even though the Democrats enjoy a political monopoly and could have started from a very strong bargaining position, they chose instead to concede at least half the battle before it even began.

Obama wasn't the only big Democrat to mysteriously abandon his position on single-payer. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Henry Waxman, the influential chair of the House commerce committee, have both backed away from their longtime support of single-payer. Hell, even Max-freaking-Baucus once conceded the logic of single-payer, saying only that it isn't feasible politically. "There may come a time when we can push for single-payer," he said in February. "At this time, it's not going to get to first base in Congress."

And helping it not get to first base was ... Max Baucus. It was Baucus' own committee that held the first round-table discussions on reform. In three days of hearings last May, he invited no fewer than 41 people to speak. The list featured all the usual industry hacks, including big insurers like America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), Blue Cross and Aetna. It's worth noting that several of the organizations invited - including AHIP and Amgen - employ several former Baucus staffers as lobbyists, including two of his ex-chiefs of staff.

Not one of the 41 witnesses, however, was in favor of single-payer - even though eliminating the insurance companies enjoys broad public support. Leading advocates of single-payer, including doctors from the Physicians for a National Health Program, implored Baucus to allow them to testify. When he refused, a group of eight single-payer activists, including three doctors, stood up during the hearings and asked to be included in the discussion. One of the all-time classic moments in the health care reform movement came when the second protester to stand up, Katie Robbins of Health Care Now, declared, "We need single-payer health care!"

To which Baucus, who looked genuinely frightened, replied, "We need more police!"

The eight protesters were led away in handcuffs and spent about seven hours in jail. "It's funny, the policemen were all telling us their horror stories about health care," recalls Dr. Margaret Flowers, one of the physicians who was jailed. "One was telling us about his mother who was 62 and lost her job and was uninsured, waiting to get Medicare when she was 65." The protesters were sentenced to six months' probation. Baucus later met with them and conceded that not including single-payer advocates in the discussion had been a mistake, although it was "too late" to change that.

Single-payer advocates have had an equally tough time getting a hearing with the president. In March, the White House refused to allow Rep. John Conyers to invite two physicians who support single-payer to the health care summit that Obama was holding to kick off the reform effort. Three months later, a single-payer advocate named David Scheiner, who served as Obama's physician for 22 years, was mysteriously bumped from a prime-time forum on health care, where he had been invited to ask the president a question.

Many of the health care advisers in Obama's inner circle, meanwhile, are industry hacks - people like Nancy-Ann DeParle, the president's health care czar, who has served on the boards of for-profit companies like Medco Health Solutions and Triad Hospitals. DeParle is so unthreatening to the status quo that Karen Ignagni, the insurance industry's leading lobbyist-gorgon, praised her "extensive experience" and "strong track record."

Behind closed doors, Obama also moved to cut a deal with the drug industry. "It's a dirty deal," says Russell Mokhiber, one of the protesters whom Baucus had arrested. "The administration told them, 'Single-payer is off the table. In exchange, we want you on board.'" In August, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America announced that the industry would contribute an estimated $150 million to campaign for Obamacare.

Even the Congressional Progressive Caucus, whose 80-plus members have overwhelmingly supported single-payer legislation in the past, decided not to draw a line in the sand. They agreed to back down on single-payer, seemingly with the understanding that Pelosi would push for a strong public option - a sort of miniversion of single-payer, a modest, government-run insurance plan that would serve as a test model for the real thing. But one of the immutable laws of politics in the U.S. Congress is that progressives will always be screwed by their own leaders, as soon as the opportunity presents itself. And with a bill the size and scope of health care, there was plenty of opportunity.

STEP TWO: GUT THE PUBLIC OPTION

Once single-payer was off the table, the Democrats lost their best bargaining chip. Rather than being in a position to use the fear of radical legislation to extract concessions from the right - a position Obama seemingly gave away at the outset, by punting on single-payer - Republicans and conservative Blue Dog Democrats suddenly realized that they had the upper hand. Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid would now give away just about anything to avoid having to walk away without a real health care bill.

The situation was made worse as the flagging economy ate away at Obama's political capital. Polls showed the percentage of "highly engaged" Democrats plummeting, while the percentage of "highly engaged" Republicans - inspired by idiotic scare stories from Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin about socialized medicine and euthanasia - rose rapidly. By late summer, "the depth of Republican support was starting to rival the breadth of Democratic support," said noted statistician Nate Silver. The more the Republicans and Blue Dogs fidgeted and fucked around, the easier it would be for them to kill the public option. Democrats, who on the morning after Election Day could have passed a single-payer system without opposition, were now in a desperate hurry to make a deal.

The public option is hardly a cure-all: Among other things, it does nothing to reduce the $350 billion a year in unnecessary paperwork and administrative overhead that makes the current system so expensive and maddening. "That's one of the big issues," says an aide to a member of the progressive caucus. "None of this addresses the paperwork issue. It might even make it worse." But the basic idea of the public option is sound enough: create a government health plan that citizens could buy through regulated marketplaces called insurance "exchanges" run at the state level. Simply by removing the profit motive, the government plan would be cheaper than private insurance. "The goal here was to offer the rock-bottom price, the Walmart price, so that people could buy insurance practically at cost," says one Senate aide.

The logic behind the idea was so unassailable that its opponents often inadvertently found themselves arguing for it. "Assurances that the government plan would play by the rules that private insurers play by are implausible," groused right-wing douchebag George Will. "Competition from the public option must be unfair, because government does not need to make a profit and has enormous pricing and negotiating powers." In other words, if you offer a public plan that doesn't systematically fuck every single person in the country by selling health care at inflated prices and raking in monster profits, private insurers just won't be able to compete.

Will wasn't the only prominent opponent of reform openly arguing in favor of the insurance industry's right to continue doing business inefficiently. Sen. Ben Nelson, who together with Baucus are the Laverne and Shirley of turncoat Democrats, complained that the public option "would win the game." Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell admitted that "private insurance will not be able to compete with a government option." This is a little like complaining that Keanu Reeves was robbed of an Oscar just because he can't act.

For a while, the public option looked like it might have a real chance at passing. In the House, both the ways and means committee and the labor committee passed draft bills that contained a genuine public option. But then conservative opponents of the plan, the so-called Blue Dog Democrats, mounted their counterattack. A powerful bloc composed primarily of drawling Southerners in ill-fitting suits, the Blue Dogs - a gang of puffed-up political mulattos hired by the DNC to pass as almost-Republicans in red-state battlegrounds - present themselves as a quasi-religious order, worshipping at the sacred altar of "fiscal responsibility" and "deficit reduction." On July 9th, in a harmless-sounding letter to Pelosi, 40 Blue Dogs expressed concern that doctors in the public option "must be fairly reimbursed at negotiated rates, and their participation must be voluntary." Paying doctors "using Medicare's below-market rates," they added, "would seriously weaken the financial stability of our local hospitals."

The letter was an amazing end run around the political problem posed by the public option - i.e., its unassailable status as a more efficient and cheaper health care alternative. The Blue Dogs were demanding that the very thing that makes the public option work - curbing costs to taxpayers by reimbursing doctors at Medicare rates plus five percent - be scrapped. Instead, the Blue Dogs wanted compensation rates for doctors to be jacked up, on the government's tab. The very Democrats who make a point of boasting about their unwavering commitment to fiscal conservatism were lobbying, in essence, for a big fat piece of government pork for doctors. "Cost should be the number-one concern to the Blue Dogs," grouses Rep. Woolsey. "That's why they're Blue Dogs."

In the end, the Blue Dogs won. When the House commerce committee passed its bill, the public option no longer paid Medicare-plus-five-percent. Instead, it required the government to negotiate rates with providers, ensuring that costs would be dramatically higher. According to one Democratic aide, the concession would bump the price of the public option by $1,800 a year for the average family of four.

In one fell swoop, the public plan went from being significantly cheaper than private insurance to costing, well, "about the same as what we have now," as one Senate aide puts it. This was the worst of both worlds, the kind of take-the-fork-in-the-road nonsolution that has been the peculiar specialty of Democrats ever since Bill Clinton invented a new way to smoke weed. The party could now sell voters on the idea that it was offering a "public option" without technically lying, while at the same time reassuring health care providers that the public option it was passing would not imperil the industry's market share.

Even more revolting, when Pelosi was asked on July 31st if she worried that progressives in the House would yank their support of the bill because of the sellout to conservatives, she literally laughed out loud. "Are the progressives going to take down universal, quality, affordable health care for all Americans?" she said, chuckling heartily to reporters. "I don't think so."

The laugh said everything about what the mainstream Democratic Party is all about. It finds the notion that it has to pay anything more than lip service to its professed values funny. "It's a joke," complains one Democratic aide. "This is all a game to these people - and they're good at it."

The concession to the Blue Dogs comes at a potentially disastrous price: Without a public option that drives down prices, the cost of other health care reforms being considered by Congress will almost certainly skyrocket. The trade-off with conservatives might be understandable, if those other reforms were actually useful. But this is Congress we're talking about.

STEP THREE: PACK IT WITH LOOPHOLES

Even seasoned congressional aides, who are accustomed to sitting through long and boring committee meetings, have found the debate over health care reform uniquely torturous. Unlike other congressional matters, where there is at least a feeling that the process might at some point be completed, the endless sessions over health care have led many staffers to fear that they will be locked in hearing rooms for the rest of their lives, listening to words like "target" and "mandate" and "doughnut hole" being repeated ad nauseam by weary, gray-faced, saggy-necked legislators - who begin, after weeks of self-inflated posturing, to look like the ugliest people in the universe. "You come out of these hearings," says Behan, the aide to Sen. Sanders, "and the number of interconnected, moving pieces going in and out of these bills is insane - the case for single-payer health insurance makes itself."

For those looking to fuck up health care reform - or to load it up with goodies for their rich pals - the tedium actually serves a broader purpose. Given that five different committees are weighing five different and often competing paths to reform, it's not surprising that all sorts of bizarre crap winds up buried in their bills, stuff no one could possibly have expected to be in there. The most glaring example, passed by Ted Kennedy's HELP committee, would allow the makers of complex drugs known as "biologics" to keep their formulas from being copied by rivals for 12 years - twice as long as the protection for ordinary pharmaceuticals. The notion that an effort ostensibly aimed at curbing health care costs would grant the pharmaceutical industry lucrative new protections against generic drugs is even weirder when you consider that earlier proposals, including one supported by Obama, would have protected brand-name drugs for only seven years.

Another favor to industry buried in the bills involves the issue of choice. From the outset, Democrats have been careful to make sure that a revamped system would not in any way force citizens to give up their existing health care plans. As Obama told the American Medical Association in June, "If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what."

That sounds great, particularly in conjunction with the new set of standards for employer-provided insurance outlined in the House version of reform. Under the bill - known as HR 3200 - employers must provide "essential benefits" to workers or face a stiff penalty. "Essential benefits" includes elements often missing in the fly-by-night plans offered by big employers: drug benefits, outpatient care, hospitalization, mental health, the works. If your employer does not offer acceptable coverage, you then have the right to go into one of the state-run insurance "exchanges," where you can select from a number of insurance plans, including the public option.

There's a flip side, though: If your employer offers you acceptable care and you reject it, you are barred from buying insurance in the insurance "exchange." In other words, you must take the insurance offered to you at work. And that might have made sense if, as decreed in the House version, employers actually had to offer good care. But in the Senate version passed by the HELP committee, there is no real requirement for employers to provide any kind of minimal level of care. On the contrary, employers who currently offer sub-par coverage will have their shitty plans protected by a grandfather clause. Which means ...

"If you have coverage you like, you can keep it," says Sen. Sanders. "But if you have coverage you don't like, you gotta keep it."

This grandfather clause has potentially wide-ranging consequences. One of the biggest health care problems we have in this country is the technique used by large employers - Walmart is the most notorious example - of offering dogshit, bare-bones health insurance that forces employees to take on steep co-pays and other massive charges. Low-wage workers currently offered these plans often reject them and join Medicaid, effectively shifting the health care burden for Walmart employees on to the taxpayer. If the HELP committee's grandfather clause survives to the final bill, those workers who did the sensible thing in rejecting Walmart's crap employer plan and taking the comparatively awesome insurance offered via Medicaid will now be rebuffed by the state and forced to take the dogshit Walmart offering.

This works out well for the states, who will get to purge all those Walmart workers from their Medicaid rolls. It also works great for Walmart, since any new competitors who appear on the horizon will be forced to offer genuine and more expensive health insurance - giving Walmart a clear competitive advantage. This little "glitch" is the essence of the health care reform effort: It changes things in a way that works for everyone except actual sick people.

Veteran legislators speak of this horrific loophole as if it were an accident - something that just sort of happened, while no one was looking. Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon was looking at an early version of the bill several months ago, when he suddenly realized that it was going to leave people stuck with their employer insurance. "I woke up one morning and was like, 'Whoa, people aren't going to have choices,'" he recalls.

As a means of correcting the problem, Wyden wrote up a thing called the Free Choice Act, which like many of the prematurely sidelined ideas in this health care mess is actually quite sensible. The bill would open up the insurance "exchanges" to all consumers, regardless of who is offered employer-based insurance and who isn't. But Wyden has little hope of having his proposal included in later versions of the bill. Like Sanders, who hopes to correct the committee's giveaway to drugmakers, Wyden won't get a real shot at having an impact until the House and Senate meet to hammer out differences between their final bills. In a legislative sense, the bad ideas are already in the barn, and the solutions are fenced off in the fields, hoping to get in.

STEP FOUR: PROVIDE NO LEADERSHIP

One of the reasons for this chaos was the bizarre decision by the administration to provide absolutely no real oversight of the reform effort. From the start, Obama acted like a man still running for president, not someone already sitting in the White House, armed with 60 seats in the Senate. He spoke in generalities, offering as "guiding principles" the kind of I'm-for-puppies-and-sunshine platitudes we got used to on the campaign trail - investment in prevention and wellness, affordable health care for all, guaranteed choice of doctor. At no time has he come out and said what he wants Congress to do, in concrete terms. Even in June, when congressional leaders desperate for guidance met with chief of staff (and former legislative change-squelcher) Rahm Emanuel, they got no signal at all about what the White House wanted. On the question of a public option, Emanuel was agonizingly noncommittal, reportedly telling Senate Democrats that the president was still "open to alternatives."

On the same day Emanuel was passing the buck to senators, Obama was telling reporters that it's "still too early" to have a "strong opinion" on a public option. This was startling news indeed: Eight months after being elected president of the United States is too early to have an opinion on an issue that Obama himself made a central plank of his campaign? The president conceded only that a "public option makes sense."

This White House makes a serial vacillator like Bill Clinton look like Patton crossing the Rhine. Veterans from the Clinton White House, in fact, jumped on Obama. "The president may have overlearned the lesson of the Clinton health care plan fiasco, which was: Don't deliver a package to the Hill, let the Hill take ownership," said Robert Reich, who served as labor secretary under Clinton. There were now so many competing ideas about how to pay for the plan and what kind of mandates to include that even after the five bills are completed, Congress will not be much closer to reform than it was at the beginning. "The president has got to go in there and give it coherence," Reich concluded.

But Reich's comment assumes that Obama wants to give the bill coherence. In many ways, the lily-livered method that Obama chose to push health care into being is a crystal-clear example of how the Democratic Party likes to act - showering a real problem with a blizzard of ineffectual decisions and verbose nonsense, then stepping aside at the last minute to reveal the true plan that all along was being forged off-camera in the furnace of moneyed interests and insider inertia. While the White House publicly eschewed any concrete "guiding principles," the People Who Mattered, it appeared, had already long ago settled on theirs. Those principles seem to have been: no single-payer system, no meaningful public option, no meaningful employer mandates and a very meaningful mandate for individual consumers. In other words, the only major reform with teeth would be the one forcing everyone to buy some form of private insurance, no matter how crappy, or suffer a tax penalty. If the public option is the sine qua non for progressives, then the "individual mandate" is the counterpart must-have requirement for the insurance industry.

"That was their major policy 'ask,' and it looks like they're going to get it," says Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, a Boston physician who is a prominent single-payer advocate.

The so-called "individual mandate" is currently included in four of the five bills before Congress. The most likely version to survive into the final measure resembles the system in Massachusetts designed by Mormon glambot Mitt Romney, who imposed tax penalties on citizens who did not buy insurance. Several of Romney's former advisers are involved in the writing of Obamacare, including a key aide to Ted Kennedy who was instrumental in designing the HELP committee legislation. The federal version of the Massachusetts plan would slap the uninsured with a hefty tax penalty - making the HELP committee clause barring people from opting out of their employer-provided plan that much more outrageous.

If things go the way it looks like they will, health care reform will simply force great numbers of new people to buy or keep insurance of a type that has already been proved not to work. "The IRS and the government will force people to buy a defective product," says Woolhandler. "We know it's defective because three-quarters of all people who file for bankruptcy because of medical reasons have insurance when they get sick - and they're bankrupted anyway."

STEP FIVE: BLOW THE MATH

Health care is a beast - a monster. The House 3200 bill alone is 1,017 pages long and contains countless inscrutable references to other pieces of legislation, meaning that in order to fully comprehend even those thousand pages one really has to read upward of 9,000 or 10,000 pages. There are five different versions of this creature, each with its own nuances and shades, and solving a highly complex mathematical challenge like reconciling the costs of each of the five plans would be beyond even minds who were (a) expert at such things and (b) motivated to get it right. Imagine the same problem in the hands of a bunch of second-rate country lawyers and mall owners, and you about get the idea of what the congressional picture looks like.

For instance: All five of the bills envision a significant expansion of Medicaid. As it stands, the LBJ-era program, which celebrated its 44th birthday on the day before Nancy Pelosi laughed at the progressives, awards benefits according to a jumbled series of state-by-state criteria. Some states, like Vermont, offer Medicaid to citizens whose income is as high as 300 percent of the federal poverty level, while others, like Georgia, only offer Medicaid to those closer to or below the poverty level.

The House plan would expand Medicaid eligibility to automatically include every American whose income is 133 percent of the poverty level or less. For those earning somewhat more - up to 400 percent of the poverty level - federal subsidies would help pay for the cost of a public or private plan purchased via the insurance "exchanges." That worries state governments, which currently pay for almost half of Medicaid - and which are already seeing their Medicaid rolls swelled by the economic meltdown. A massive surge in new Medicaid members - as many as 11 million Americans under the current proposals, according to the Congressional Budget Office - might literally render many big states insolvent overnight.

Democrats pointed out that under the House plan, the federal government would pay the costs of any "newly eligible" members of Medicaid. But that phrasing, it turns out, was a semantic trick designed to undersell the cost to the states. When Massachusetts imposed a similar mandate under Romney, thousands of people who were already eligible for Medicaid, but had not enrolled, immediately joined the program in order to avoid the tax penalty for being uninsured. So while the House plan would pay for "newly eligible" patients, it won't cover the "oldly eligible."

Congress in this instance is behaving like corporations in the Enron age, orphaning hidden costs and complications through clever wording and accounting. Another neat trick involves the federal subsidies for low-income people who make up to 400 percent of the poverty level. The Congressional Budget Office projects that under the House bill, the subsidies will cost upward of $773 billion by 2019. But some aides think that number could end up being much higher. "Without a real public option to drive down costs, the federal support to make sure everyone gets coverage is going to get very expensive very fast," says Behan, the aide to Sen. Sanders.

Here's the other thing. By blowing off single-payer and cutting the heart out of the public option, the Obama administration robbed itself of its biggest argument - that health care reform is going to save a lot of money. That has left the Democrats vulnerable to charges that the plan is going to blow a mile-wide hole in the budget, one we'll be paying debt service on through the year 3000. It also left them scrambling to find other ways to pay for the plan, making it almost inevitable that they would step in political shit with seniors everywhere by trying surreptitiously to whittle down Medicare. As a result, the Democrats have become so oversensitive to charges of fiscal irresponsibility that they're taking their frustrations out on people who don't deserve it. Witness Nancy Pelosi's bizarre freakout over the Congressional Budget Office. When the CBO questioned Obama's projected cost savings, Pelosi blasted them for "always giving you the worst-case scenario" - which, of course, is exactly what the budget office is supposed to do. When you start asking your accountant to look on the bright side, you know you're not dealing from a position of strength.

To recap, here's what ended up happening with health care. First, they gave away single-payer before a single gavel had fallen, apparently as a bargaining chip to the very insurers mostly responsible for creating the crisis in the first place. Then they watered down the public option so as to make it almost meaningless, while simultaneously beefing up the individual mandate, which would force millions of people now uninsured to buy a product that is no longer certain to be either cheaper or more likely to prevent them from going bankrupt. The bill won't make drugs cheaper, and it might make paperwork for doctors even more unwieldy and complex than it is now. In fact, the various reform measures suck so badly that PhRMA, the notorious mouthpiece for the pharmaceutical industry which last year spent more than $20 million lobbying against health care reform, is now gratefully spending more than seven times that much on a marketing campaign to help the president get what he wants.

So what's left? Well, the bills do keep alive the so-called employer mandate, requiring companies to provide insurance to their employees. A good idea - except that the Blue Dogs managed to exempt employers with annual payrolls below $500,000, meaning that 87 percent of all businesses will be allowed to opt out of the best and toughest reform measure left. Thanks to Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama, we can now be assured that the 19 or 20 employers in America with payrolls above $500,000 who do not already provide insurance will be required to offer good solid health coverage. Hurray!

Or will they? At the end of July, word leaked out that the Senate Finance Committee, in addition to likely spiking the public option, had also decided to ditch the employer mandate. It was hard to be certain, because even Democrats on the committee don't know what's going on in the Group of Six selected by Baucus to craft the bill. Things got so bad that some Democrats on the committee - including John Kerry, Chuck Schumer and Robert Menendez - were reduced to holding what amounts to shadow hearings on health care several times a week, while Baucus and his crew conducted their meetings in relative secrecy. The chairman did not even bother to keep his fellow Democrats informed of the bill's developments, let alone what he has promised Republicans in return for their support of the bill. "The Group of Six has hijacked the process," says an aide to one of the left-out senators.

This leaves Democrats on the committee in the strange position of seriously considering pulling their support for a bill that will emerge from a panel on which they hold a clear majority. Other Democrats are also weighing an end run around their own leadership, hoping to sneak meaningful reforms back into the process. In the House, Rep. Anthony Weiner of New York refused to support the bill passed by the commerce committee unless he was allowed to attach an amendment that will enable Congress to vote on replacing the entire reform bill with a single-payer plan (Bernie Sanders is working on a similar measure in the Senate). On the labor committee, Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio took a more nuanced tack, offering an amendment that would free up states to switch to a single-payer system of their own.

It's highly unlikely, though, that the party's leaders will agree to include such measures when the five competing reform bills are eventually combined. On the House side, "Pelosi has unfettered discretion to combine the bills as she pleases," observes one Democratic aide. Which leaves us where we are today, as Congress enjoys its vacation, and the various sides have taken to the airwaves in an advertising blitz to make sure the population is saturated with idiotic misconceptions before the bill is actually voted on in the fall.

The much-ballyhooed right-wing scare campaign, with its teabagger holdovers ridiculously disrupting town-hall meetings with their belligerent protests and their stoneheaded memes (the sign raised at a town hall held by Rep. Rick Larson of Washington - keep the guvmint out of my medicare - is destined to become a classic of conservative propaganda), has proved to be almost totally irrelevant to the entire enterprise. Aside from lowering even further the general level of civility (teabaggers urged Sen. Chris Dodd to off himself with painkillers; Rep. Brad Miller had his life threatened), the Limbaugh minions have accomplished nothing at all, except to look like morons for protesting as creeping socialism a reform effort designed specifically to change as little as possible and to preserve at all costs our malfunctioning system of private health care.

All that's left of health care reform is a collection of piece-of-shit, weakling proposals that are preposterously expensive and contain almost nothing meaningful - and that set of proposals, meanwhile, is being negotiated down even further by the endlessly negating Group of Six. It is a fight to the finish now between Really Bad and Even Worse. And it's virtually guaranteed to sour the public on reform efforts for years to come.

"They'll pass some weak, mediocre plan that breaks the bank and even in the best analysis leaves 37 million people uninsured," says Mokhiber, one of the single-payer activists arrested by Baucus. "It's going to give universal health care a bad name."

It's a joke, the whole thing, a parody of Solomonic governance. By the time all the various bills are combined, health care will be a baby not split in half but in fourths and eighths and fractions of eighths. It's what happens when a government accustomed to dealing on the level of perception tries to take on a profound emergency that exists in reality. No matter how hard Congress may try, though, it simply is not possible to paper over a crisis this vast.

Then again, some of the blame has to go to all of us. It's more than a little conspicuous that the same electorate that poured its heart out last year for the Hallmark-card story line of the Obama campaign has not been seen much in this health care debate. The handful of legislators - the Weiners, Kuciniches, Wydens and Sanderses - who are fighting for something real should be doing so with armies at their back. Instead, all the noise is being made on the other side. Not so stupid after all - they, at least, understand that politics is a fight that does not end with the wearing of a T-shirt in November.

As Rolling Stone’s chief political reporter, Matt Taibbi's predecessors include the likes of journalistic giants Hunter S. Thompson and P.J. O'Rourke. Taibbi's 2004 campaign journal Spanking the Donkey cemented his status as an incisive, irreverent, zero-bullshit reporter. His latest collection is Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire





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Is this Market Recovery Real?


One year ago today, Sept 3, 2008, the DJIA closed at 11,629. Today, Sept 2, 2009, it closed at 9,281. In March of 2009 the DJIA hit its “crisis” low of a little below 6,600. So, if you bought an ETF on the Dow at its low point, you would have made 40% on your money in 6 months. Was the March low an exaggeration or is the current bull market way overbought. The consensus seems to think we are in line for a pullback.

Oil, after reaching a high in July of 2008 of $147.02 a barrel, fell to $33.87 on December 21, 2008. As of yesterday it closed at $68 dollars a barrel. If someone had invested in oil in December 2008 at $33.87 a barrel, they would have made a return of about 100%. Not surprising to hear about the oil trader for Citibank who is due to receive a $100 million bonus for his trading in 2008. Is it possible that demand for oil could have fluctuated so much in one year?

I am a casual observer of the markets, I have no positions at all right now and for me it is a purely intellectual exercise to try and predict where they are going. Many market pundits are saying that this fall will come a major correction. Some talk of a “secular bear market”, I love that expression. It means a long term bear market, apparently, the last one we had was between the early 60’s and early 80’s. What would a religious bear market look like?
So let’s have some fun and spend 20 grand in funny money and make the obvious bet, than look back afterwards and see what happened. This is a mindless, unoriginal wager. First, we will by a puts on a Dow ETF, in this case DIA. A Dow ETF (Exchange Traded Fund) is a fund that represents the 30 stocks in the DJIA. It is a simple a way to gamble on the Dow, Dow goes up you win, goes down you lose. We are going to buy 75 put contracts ($10,350). Each contract is for 100 shares and costs $138. For each contract, we control 100 shares. A put is the right to sell, so for $1.38 we have the right to sell a Diamond ETF share at a strike price of $87 from today until the last week in October. Today, Sept 2, 2009, DIA closed at $92.83. So we don’t make any money unless DIA drops below $87. For example, if the share price goes to $80 before expiration, (third Friday in October, we have 44 days left) we sell our shares for $87 and buy them at $80 and make $7 a share, which would give us a nice profit of $42,500

Let’s do the same thing for oil. There is an ETF for oil, with the symbol OIH and it mirrors the price of oil. We will by around 10 grand of puts, the Oct 09, 90 put, $1.86 per share, or $186 per contract (100 shares). OIH closed on Sept 2, 2009 at 102.32 (Oil closed at $68 dollars today.) We will buy 50 put contracts, $186 a contract ($9,300). We don’t make any money until the price goes below $90. This contract expires the same day as the DOW ETF, third Friday in October, so we also have 44 days till expiration.

This trade is so obvious I can’t resist it. I am so sick of reading the NY Times, so bland and boring, a barn for sacred cows. (Of course, ten minutes after writing this I read a fabulous article by Paul Krugman on macro economic theory, has to be the best thing I've read in NyTimes in years, go figure How Did Economists Get It So Wrong? ) Lately, the only thing I can read are crazy market newsletters that claim the end is near. There is one I love, Taipan Daily, both writers are clever, articulate and iconoclastic. They actually say things, not just spew aphorisms, so I guess the NY Times won’t be hiring them soon. And all these market doomsayers are claiming a massive crash this fall. You have to believe that they had their generational collapse last fall, but they continue to think the worst is coming.

So what causes oil to go from $147 to $34 and back to $68 a barrel in a period of 13 months? Supply and demand? Ha, that is a good one. Oil supply and demand changes by a few percentage points a year, what we see in oil, and I also believe the DJIA, is pure speculation. Speculation is supposed to be good, finds the correct price when there is enough information, so what is the correct price for a barrel of oil? This is really a fascination topic if you consider the future prospects of Peak Oil. Where those price fluctuations really a representation of the collective confusion as too how much oil we have left?

From a 60 Minutes piece.

“In a five year period …the amount of money institutional investors, hedge funds, and the big Wall Street banks had placed in the commodities markets went from $13 billion to $300 billion. Last year, 27 barrels of crude were being traded every day on the New York Mercantile Exchange for every one barrel of oil that was actually being consumed in the United States.”

If you think about that, only 1 in 27 barrels was actually bought for consumption, the rest for speculation. How could supply and demand have any effect on the final price?

Dan Gilligan, the president of the Petroleum Marketers Association further explains.

“Approximately 60 to 70 percent of the oil contracts in the futures markets are now held by speculative entities. Not by companies that need oil, not by the airlines, not by the oil companies. But by investors that are looking to make money from their speculative positions.”

But when congress asked Lawrence Eagles of J.P. Morgan what was driving the volatility he explained. "We believe that high energy prices are fundamentally a result of supply and demand,"

How long can we let these people speculate on our natural resources? Has anything really changed since things blew up a year ago?

“The percentage of U.S. homeowners who owe more than their house is worth will nearly double to 48 percent in 2011” From Reuters. So, either I am missing something or all that garbage mortgage paper that no one wanted a year ago is still worth nothing.

"If one considers the people who would like a job but have stopped looking -- so-called discouraged workers -- and those who are working fewer hours than they want, the unemployment rate would move from the official 9.4 percent to 16 percent”, said Atlanta Fed chief Dennis Lockhart.

“In July, more than 360,000 U.S. households drew a foreclosure filing (i.e., notice of default, auction, and/or bank repossession), which represents a new monthly record since RealtyTrac began issuing its updates in January 2005” From Consumer Reports.

And commercial real-estate “Total delinquency rate reached 4.1% in June, 2.2 times its March level and 3.5 times that in December. Delinquency rates are likely to soar higher over next 24+ months on billions of dollars of pro forma loans that never stabilized and resetting partial IO loans” From Deutsche Bank. Many say that this is just the beginning, and that the 3 trillion dollars in commercial real estate debt will be the final blow to the banking sector.

What about credit card debt, how are the big banks treating us now after we bailed them out to a tune of God knows how many billions of dollars?

“Fitch Ratings reported Tuesday (July 2, 2009) that defaults on credit cards hit a record 10.4 percent last month amid rising unemployment, falling home values and reduced wages. Total losses on loans that credit card companies have given up on collecting have risen more than 62 percent from a year ago, according to the credit-rating agency. On Tuesday, the Financial Times reported that Citi raised interest rates on 15 million cards co-branded with companies like Sears and Macy’s. Cardholders who did not pay off their entire balance saw their credit card rates increase by an average of 24 percent, according to research by Credit Suisse cited by the FT.”

I don’t have an MBA from Harvard, I never worked on Wall Street, I never made a million dollar bonus. But one of the unfortunate things about getting older is that you stop believing the “talk” you hear from folks high up on the food chain. My experience is, the higher you go up, the more ____ you hear. 'Green shoots', 'Blue Dogs', I have really heard and seen enough of people blowing smoke into interesting places. I see speculators making fortunes on oil and stocks, and I also see that the real value of everything is about to take an enormous crash. Will it happen in the next 44 days? Who knows, but it will happen. Check back and we will take a look at the box score.


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The Elusive Single Payer Plan


Mr. Obama, are you ready to rumble?

Mr. President, consensus is a good thing and compromise is often the basis for lasting agreement. But the stubborn refusal to accept the demands of the majority is a common response of a group that is scavenging off the welfare of the public. We see this response in mafias, in corrupt governments and with cartels and price fixing. This is the case of the insurance companies and the health care system in America.

In 2000 the World Health Organization ranked its 191 member’s health care systems using five criteria, they were:

1. Overall health of the population.
2. Even distribution of health (not big differences in health of wealthy and poor for example.)
3. Responsiveness of the health care system.
4. Even distribution of the responsiveness.
5. A fair distribution of the costs of health care.

Of the 191 countries the United States ranked 31st. Nonetheless, the US ranked first in per-capita health care costs in 2003, at $5,711 while France, who ranked number one in the WHO survey, had a cost of $3,048. So why is health care so expensive in the US?
It is important to consider health care as a portion of our GDP. Japan spent in 2003 right about 8% of GDP on health care, while Germany spent a little less than 11% of GDP compared the US which spent a little more than 15% of GDP on health care. We are losing competitiveness, especially in traditional manufacturing and we are short-changing the American people by selling them very expensive health care that does not deliver.

This is a simple business question. Most countries have a nationalized health care system, one set of system costs, granted, there might be large inefficiencies, but the system costs what it costs. Many countries have of a national public system with an alternative private system functioning parallel to it. The private system can remove some of the burden of the public system, or simply act as an upscale version of public system. Nonetheless, it is competing with a “free” option for the end user.

For the United States, no one contemplates creating a complete public option, with large state run hospitals. Our mix of private, state owned and non-for profit hospitals supplies a good quality health care to a large portion of the population. The problem is that it is too expensive and that it doesn’t reach all end users. Almost 45 million Americans don’t have health care, which is over 15% of the population. By eliminating one tier of margin (insurance companies), and aggregating all buying power in a single payer nationalized insurance, two things are accomplished. One, everyone in the United States is insured, and two, the overall cost of health care would drop significantly.

Everyone who works and reaches a certain threshold of income pays in. All employers who employ pay in (maybe have waivers for first few employees as to not create barriers of entry for small entrepreneurs). People who are independently wealthy or live off fixed or investment income would simply pay their portion in when they file their income taxes, always when income is above a certain threshold.

We let free enterprise battle for the Federal dollars, with the end user deciding where the money is spent. All people who live in the United States would be covered, and all those who work, have income or employ, pay in. By spreading the burden we make ourselves more competitive. In this plan no one is asking for anything for free. All will be paid for, the budget will balance every year. No one living in the United States will ever have to go to bed at night worried about what they will do if they get sick or how to pay for their own or loved ones health bills. People will not go into debt to pay for basic health care.

If the American people decide this is what they want, it is up to our politicians to implement it. If, on the other hand, a large portion of our politicians are in the pockets of insurance companies, we the people have a very simple and effective option. Remove the entire congress. Our founding fathers wisely gave us this option. Every two years we can replace the entire congress if need be. It is time that the people of this country demanded a single payer health care option. No compromises. If we the people demand this, it will be accomplished, maybe not the first time around, but certainly by the second. If we told the 111th congress, if we do not have a single payer plan approved by both houses of congress within your existing terms, we will replace the entire congress and all Senate seats that are open, and we said it loud enough, I think they would listen. Enough propaganda from greedy insurance companies and paid for pundits and politicians, enough with Blue Dogs and whatever other ridiculous excuses are found to do nothing. We the people want universal health care, and we want it now.

A movement must begin that demands action in congress. It is all or nothing. Political affiliation is irrelevant. All we ask is that you go to Washington, and pass the legislation that we want. We are talking about four or five major pieces of legislation per congress. If the movement gained enough momentum, it could play a big enough role where both parties would be scared into actually solving problems and creating viable legislation. Clear concise goals for each congress, with a completely transparent score card. This would be a grass roots movement, and authentic American rebellion against the ineptitude of our current political leadership.

Mr. Obama, you said you would bring about change. Have you ever heard of change without a battle? Take a leadership role on this. Bring it to the people. Present a single payer plan to the country. A simple plan, all receive health care, all who have income above a certain threshold pay in, all who employ a minimum number of workers pay in. Everyone has the same card. While diversity may be one of our most treasured qualities, when we are sick we are all the same. Mr. Obama, make this your fight. If this congress can’t do it, we will do it in the next congress. Lead the people in demanding what is rightfully theirs.


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