A response to a blog about Santa -- The Health Care Sleigh Ride:
Yes, when Virginia grows up she will have a RUDE awakening. Things ain’t (pardon the colloquialism) what she was taught they were. One premise with which I take issue is that our country was founded upon great principles of freedom and equality. I do not think it was exactly so. Without the discussion of the inherent inequalities of slavery which the country had from its inception as a colony of Britain, the revolution was initially manifested because of a tax on tea. The initial spark was about money. The Bill of Rights ensuring our freedoms was an afterthought inserted as the first ten Amendments to the Constitution some ten years later when radicals within the revolutionary movement demanded something be written within it to guarantee a check on the power of government.
Moreover, our country was founded by men of privilege and class who changed the Constitution after the Declaration of Independence was written (which said people have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness) to people have a right to life, liberty and PROPERTY. That was an important change. It attached an importance of property that has remained to this day even within our attempts to create a more just nation. I do believe that that very concept of the importance of property and money made it possible for a corporation to be accorded the same rights as a person when in the 1886 case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, during the presidency of Grover Cleveland, the U.S. Supreme Court held that a private corporation is a person and entitled to the same legal rights and protections the Constitution grants to an individual. We all know what that did. Our entire government is controlled now by the corporation at the expense of the individual person’s rights simply because it has the wealth that the average person does not possess to essentially buy the government it wants.
Our present wholly watered down so called health care bill proves that point. The little guy of no pecuniary standing will ultimately have to pay huge amounts of money he cannot afford to the health care industries because Congress, the presidency and the political parties receive hundreds of MILLIONS of dollars from the insurance, health care and pharmaceutical industry and the bill without a public option will mandate coverage. The corporation and the state are now inextricably bound to each other and nearly impossible to untangle. The state is now a wholly owned subsidiary of the corporation.
Virginia will have to learn if she is not among the fortunate to have been born into wealth OR with the brains to acquire that wealth in this country she will be out of luck and even perhaps out on the street! Yes, Virginia there may be a Santa Claus for one day but the other 364 days belong to Wall Street.
