Rep. Charles Rangel, D-Harlem, may or may not be guilty of the charges now being levied against him. I want to make that clear at the outset, and will repeat it at the end. That’s beside the point.

Rangel cannot be beaten at the ballot box, and sits in the middle of the health care debate, an advocate of strong and meaningful reform. The fact that these charges are rising above the Mendoza line of credibility at this time is telling a story, but few outside the halls of Congress will hear it.

It’s the story of power. Daily political dabblers that I deal with simply do not understand power. Many of them will express concern about money in politics, but none will do anything about it, as their favorites are major recipients. Corruption is rarely known to heal itself.

But power is more than money. It is a threat. Money can remove a man from office by financing his opponent, but Charles Rangel is immune to that threat. He holds office at his pleasure, always reelected since the days of Watergate.

He is vulnerable, however to exposure of nefarious deeds.

And any man or woman in Washington, with few exceptions, can be found guilty of something. So-called “evidence” can be real or planted, but real is better. The decision about whether a person misdeeds are exposed is not arbitrary. It depends on whether a person is cooperative or not.

In Rangel’s case, exposure of his alleged misdeeds at this time points to an overt threat, not only to him, but to every person in the House and Senate who will vote on health care reform. Each must realize that he could be next. So removal of Rangel from office, or at least loss of his chairmanship of Ways and Means, serves two purposes: Removal of an opposition force, and an example to everyone else who might be guilty of something.

There are many, many guilty people in those chambers. Opportunities for procurement of money and property abound. For the men, gay or straight, the chances for frequent and easy sex are abundant, and any partner can turn up at a press conference with photos. Entrapment is easy, and hard-driven, narcissistic men are usually easy prey.

The key is this: Once the guilt is established, the evidence in place, it need not be exposed. It is merely leverage.

And, if the man or woman plays ball, it will never see light of day. In fact, the opposite. Money will follow, and campaign coffers will be stuffed, lucrative employment will follow tenure in office.

There are very, very few people who can rise above this, and stay tenured and clean.

Rep. Charles Rangel, D-Harlem, may or may not be guilty of the charges now being levied against him. That’s beside the point.

Senator Max Baucus (D-MT) has been slavish in his devotion to the health insurance industry, to a degree that far surpasses any ideology (he’s never been accused of being ideological). He has angerred and puzzled his base, maybe even burned some bridges. But he has not wavered in service of power.

Rep. Charles Rangel (D-Harlem) has not shown any devotion to the health insurance industry. In fact, he has openly opposed them. He is under pressure now to step down. Baucus is secure in his chambers, free of threat of removal, well-financed. He was unopposed in his last election bid. That’s likely no accident.

I suspect Charles Rangel to be innocent of wrongdoing. I could be wrong. There are few saints among us.

I suspect Max Baucus to be guilty of something. I don’t know what, but someone has something on him. Men of that caliber are easy prey.

And that, dear student, is how power works. It’s money, for sure. But it is so much more than money. It’s wiretaps, secret bank accounts, planted evidence, real dalliances, and most important: Rewards for service go on even after leaving office.

And if you think such power exerts itself only in Washington, or in politics, I beg you take a trip to your state capital. Or city hall.

In October of 2007 I sat in a family room in Boulder, Colorado watching game four of the World Series between the Boston Red Sox and the Colorado Rockies. I had a sense of impending doom, and felt powerless. The Sox were crushing the Rocks. It would be a four game sweep.

We had tickets for game five. That’s why we had come to Colorado.

I read now that there is a growing consensus on health care and the chances for passage of “reform” is growing daily. A somewhat liberal Republican, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has endorsed the “Obama Plan”, and others will fall in line.

Reform is dead. Barring some brave resolve by the House Progressive Caucus, we’re screwed. Health insurance companies are about to score a major victory.

Here’s what we are going to get:

Here’s what we are going to give up:

This is, in other words, what Democrats might call a “sweep”. It’s total victory for the insurance companies. There’s no control of pricing other than a wispy notion that insurers might “compete” when they have no incentive to do so. The important corporate subsidies are still in place. We’ll have no choice but to purchase private insurance, and those of us who cannot afford their whacked-out prices will be used as conduits for yet more subsidy.

The Democrats are talking like this is some sort of victory. I think they are thinking about Game 5.

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Read on from here only if you want real reform of a decrepit non-functioning democracy. The rest is about a much broader topic – elimination of the tyranny of the Democratic Party.

In 2000, Al Gore supposedly lost Florida, though we’ll never know for sure, as what happened there that year, in this silly system, cannot be regarded as any kind of meaningful forum. Nonetheless, the official tally had George W. Bush winning by 537 votes.

Here’s some other tallies:

Guess who, in the above list, the Democrats decided was the “spoiler”.

Here’s further breakdown, courtesy of Sam Smith: The following constituencies voted for George W. Bush in the following percentages:

Again, guess who the spoiler is. Ralph Nader.

Democrats, in the years since 2000, have demonized Nader and taken special pains to marginalize any who voted for him. Nader voters present a real threat to Democrats – we are natural liberals and progressives. The purpose of the Democrat(ic) Party is not to advance liberal and progressive voices, but to quash them. Consequently, even though Al Gore beat himself in so many ways, Democrats have seized on the opportunity to put any nascent threats of a progressive uprising down.

And we must now live with the results. A majority of the American public wanted single payer, even more a meaningful public option in health care. The Democrats stuffed us.

Further, in 2008, Democrats campaigned on a wide range of progressive issues beyond health care reform – ending the war in Iraq, closing of Guantanamo, the end of torture, the end of rendition .. all of these have been carried forward by President Obama. He has even given us a bigger and better war in Afghanistan (the real purpose concealed) and managed to drive everything else off the radar screen. There has been no meaningful reform. It is as if George W. Bush won yet another term.

Oh yeah, and there’s that bailout thing. Oh yeah – and he’s ratcheting up tensions with Iran, playing the jingo card, just like Bush.

There are no progressives in the Obama Administration. His Chief of Staff, Rahm Emmanuel, is a right winger. Obama is to liberals as Reagan was to conservatives – a muse, a Pied Piper, one who looks good, sounds good, and smells bad.

Obama and the Democrats used the community organizing group ACORN to roust up votes among the underclasses. They have now unceremoniously dumped them.

We need to fight back, of course, and there is always hope, as party politics has never been the well from which we draw progressive change. But the first step in meaningful reform is to turn people against Democrats, and towards reform movements outside that party.

Doing so, you might say, will only result in the election of Republicans. Maybe so, but as the record shows, election of Democrats makes not a dime’s worth of difference. Why should we care about that?

Wendell Potter did an interesting interview several weeks ago – he is the former CIGNA insurance PR executive who quit the business and now works for insurance reform. The interview is wide-ranging and can be downloaded as a Word document. (Click here and scroll down to September 6.)

The part that interested me most is this:

Potter: Back in the 90’s, the largest number of people, more people, were enrolled in non-profit Blue Cross Blue Shield plans back then. CIGNA was certainly around, and Humana was around, and they were big companies, as was Aetna, but by and large the Blues dominated. Those Blues at that time were largely non-profit.

So long as the market was dominated by non-profits, the problems we have now were not so apparent. There were uninsured, but nothing like now. There was an administrative overhead burden, but nothing like now.

Since that time a lot of the Blues have converted to for-profit status. Many of them have been bought up by Wellpoint. Wellpoint is now one of two very large health insurance companies. Its largest rival is United Health Care. They both, between them, insure about sixty million people. After that, you’ve got Aetna and CIGNA, and then you drop down and you’ve got Humana and Conventry and Health Net. So you’ve got these very large insurance companies to the point that now there are about seven insurance companies, all for-profit, that dominates the industry. One out of every four Americans is now enrolled in a plan that – excuse me – one out of every three Americans – is now enrolled in a plan that is managed by one of those seven companies. So you’ve got, essentially, a cartel of very big companies that are publicly traded – they’re owned by investors.

Now, the free market people will tell you that the domination of the market by for-profit insurance companies will introduce efficiencies. The market will do its magic. Not so. In fact, in deliverance of basic health care, market forces work against the goal of delivering health care to people.

The consequence of that – I don’t think people realize the consequences – what that means. Every three months a pubic company has to report earnings to investors. And investors look, certainly, at earnings per share – that’s a number they look at for any company – but in the health insurance industry they look for something they call the “medical loss ratio”.

In 1993, the medical loss ratio was about 95%. What I’m talking about here – that means that ninety-five cents out of every premium dollar that insurance companies took in it paid out in claims from people who went to the doctor, went to the hospital, or picked up their medicines. Now it is down to about eighty cents. And it fluctuates sometimes above eighty and sometimes below eighty on the average for these big companies.

And that means that now just eighty cents of every dollar that we send to these insurance companies are paid out in claims. The remainder goes toward what they all “administrative” expenses, to pay for advertising, sales, marketing underwriting, executive compensation. Also, profit. A large percentage of the dollar now goes to reward shareholders.

The result of introduction of for-profit domination of the market was the diversion of fifteen cents of every health care dollar from actual health care to administration, executive salaries, and profit. This does not count the administrative burden that private insurance puts on hospitals and doctors.

So that is a big change and it continues. There is constant pressure on these companies to make sure that every time they announce earnings, every quarter, that that medical loss ratio does not inch up. Investors want it to go the other direction. They want the insurance companies to pay less and less every quarter on medical claims.

No current proposal for reform affects the basic problem we face: The pressure on for-profit insurance companies to divert premium dollars away from heath care and to investors. The answer is simple: Eliminate the profit motive, as every other industrial country has done. It’s not rocket science.

Footnote: I was surprised to hear Potter say that the health care system in this country was so much more efficient in the early 1990’s than now. That was the time when the Clinton’s proposed Hillary Care.

Her plan, as I understand it, would have turned the country into one giant HMO run by Aetna, Travelers, and Humana, all on a for-profit basis.

The insurance industry supposedly killed Hillary Care with a devilish ad campaign centered around Harry and Louise. While it was indeed insurance companies that sponsored the ad campaign, I doubt that Aetna, Travelers, or Humana were behind it. They had far too much to gain. The ad campaign was most likely a product of smaller companies that were dealt out of Hillary’s game.

That would make Hillary Care look more like a corporate power grab than health care reform. Failing there, they took another route to domination, buying up the Blues, and forcing all companies, for and not-for profit, to compete on the same tilted playing field.

In Montana, for example, Blue Cross is technically non-profit, and has about 70% of the market. It behaves just like a for-profit company. It’s Gresham’s Law applied to health care – bad business practices force out good ones. Non-profits either behave like for-profits, or they wind up with all of the for-profit rejects, forcing them out of business.

Public broadcasting took a hard shot on the integrity-chin the day they took their first corporate dollar.

National Public Radio has a founding charter that says its mission is to “serve groups whose voices would otherwise go unheard.” What a joke that is, unless those unheard voices belong to people with car problems, investors, people who like word games, or fans of the fluffy interview. I think of NPR as being just like ABC, but with better production values. (How many interviews have you heard on NPR with gurgling brooks or birds singing in the background?)

Back in the 1990’s, NPR did some good investigative work on the Archer Daniels Midland lysine scandal so well covered in the current movie The Informant. ADM did the logical thing – it started giving NPR money. End of problem.

Public Broadcasting System is to TV what NPR is to radio. It is mostly an investors’ network where Ken Burns gets to try out his stuff. They have done some good work in the past, and Bill Moyers has had slot there, and the Frontline show was once a solid investigative program.

T.R. Reid is a documentary film maker who did a show called Sick Around the World that took a close look at health care systems in France, The U.K., Japan and Taiwan. Frontline asked for a follow-up, and Reid made Sick Around America.

But if you watched the Frontline show on PBS, nowhere in the credits will you see T.R. Reid’s name. He pulled out and split with Frontline before it aired.

The reason: Reid noticed that other countries that have successful universal health care systems have outlawed for-profit insurance for basic care. Frontline would not let him air that fact.

Since that was pretty much the whole thrust of the documentary, that for-profit health insurance is at the heart of our problem, Reid decided that he could not be associated with it, nor ever again with Frontline.

Russell Mokhiber writes about this at Counterpunch. Amazingly, PBS went beyond merely undermininig Reid’s message. They completely contradicted it, airing instead the following interview with Karen Ignagni, president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, the lead health insurance lobby in the United States.

Moderator: Other developed countries guarantee coverage for everyone. We asked Karen Ignagni why it can’t work here.

Karen Ignagni: Well, it would work if we did what other countries do, which is have a mandate that everybody participate. And if everybody is in, it’s quite reasonable to ask our industry to do guarantee issue, to get everybody in. So, the answer to your question is we can, and the public here will have to agree to do what the public in other countries have done, which is a consensus that everybody should be in.

Moderator: That’s what other developed countries do. They make insurers cover everyone, and they make all citizens buy insurance. And the poor are subsidized.

No mention of outlawing for-profit insurance everywhere else in the world – instead, and American health insurance lobbyist pushing what would months later become the Baucus plan – mandated coverage without a public option.

The United States is badly in need of a public health care system, and a public broadcasting outlet, one that “serve groups whose voices would otherwise go unheard.”