The recent discussions among progressives about what has been gained and what has been lost over the course of the last year and recent embraces of common cause with some of the worst of the teabaggers put me in mind of the "Sons of Liberty" and their common law concept of adverse possession.
A summary of our discussions might include the observation that they occur at a time when sobriety generally fails to prevail against any excuse for mummery and wassailing.
In celebration of the holiday from working for a living we are cheerful. Good things are associated with the solstice; feasting, an exchange of presents, visits from loved ones. A merry Christmas and other cheery good will toward men and women, pooties and woozles is not conducive to fighting.
Its probably as true today as it was when the country was founded that by far the greatest number of us hate government except when we are using its roads, water, sewer, other utilities, police, fire, trash collection and healthcare. What we hate about it is not just its cost, its the perception that it helps the rich get richer at the expense of widows and orphans, small businesses and workers.
Even teabaggers can sense that the mandate of heaven has been disturbed
and their skepticism that government can be trusted to do what is right and proper engorged.
I don't think you can have some equality. You have to have complete equality or its not equality. Equal housing is good, equal access to education and employment and loans from a bank is also good, equal pay for not just women but everyone would be good, non discrimination is good, freedom of choice is good, marriage equality and equal access to healthcare ought to fall in the same category as equal justice under the law. Laws that allow some companies to be personified and enriched in ways that small businesses can never be or to be granted subsidies, tax exemptions and special considerations are not so good.
Traditionally the Great Proprieters divide things up amongst themselves with little regard for what other people whom they disdain as on no account are doing. Said division creates owners and tenants with the tenants who produce the wealth rapidly reduced to serfdom, slavery and poverty and the owners enriched at their expense.
Dividing up the many concerns we have about healthcare is almost like drawing a bunch of squares on a map and claiming we own that territory. Its unworkable unless you get boots on the ground to explore it.
Thats sort of how I see the negotiations of the Obama administration with the Insurance lobby and big pharma. Such deals, even when the congress critters involved have been bought and paid for are only as good as the consent of we the people to go along with them. We can accept the serfdom of the healthcare mandate or we can come up with an alternative which is not dependant on the whims of government and the insurance companies control over it.
By way of example:
Between 1629 and 1632 Charles I of England divided Norumbega up into three patents, the Pejepscot Patent, four miles back on both sides of the Andrescoggin river, the Plymouth Patent, fifteen miles back on both sides of the Kennebec river, and the Waldo Patent, granting the land of the St george river between the Medomac and the Penobscot with each comprising millions of acres without regard for other claims such as the deeds signed by Indians, or the colonies established by companies of settlers who had been induced to take ship to the new world iand settle it in return for grants of land to which there were conflicting claims.
One such colony was organized by the British Commander of Pemaquid, Colonel David Dunbar about a century after the Massachusetts Bay Colony first arrived in Plymouth. In return for Brigadeer General Samuel Waldo sucessfully arguing for the removal of Dunbar he was granted half of the lands of the Patent which he then sold to 10 associates who in their turn then brought in twenty more associates to help them hold title to the land against the claims of the free holders.
Their land agents then went out and told the people of the backwoods who had by now farmed the land for a century based on their indian deeds and or their agreements with land speculators such as Dunbar that unless they purchased new title from Knox they would be evicted.
Not everyone meekly accepts the idea that the government and its corporate investors own everything. Most people would probably like our government services, as with our food, shelter and clothing to be homegrown and reflect the values of our communitiy in the smallest possible definition of community.
I think thats what people mean when they say they want their country back, they want their government to be local enough that they can go down to their town hall or carry their signs to the curbs of the government roads and be a part of the decision making process.
Thats the reason that shortly after the American Revolution Joseph Pierce, a land agent for henry Knox attempting to sell off the lands of the Walso patent to the people who already lived on said land found himself tarred and feathered and run out of Monteville on a rail, and why I draw from that the lesson that our ability to prevail against healthcare lobbiests and the wheeling and dealing of the likes of Rahm Emanual, Bacaus, Landrieu, Nelson, Lieberman, Lincoln et al; is not unprecedented.
The Scots Irish immigrants of the 1820's and thirties had a long history of having as tenant farmers been thrown off their lands by landlords who had gained possession of the land by the whim of the king as he favored or disfavored their chiefs. The same probably applies to the Indians and their deals with the newcomers. Its that long standing history of watching the fat cats get fatter at their expense that ticks people off.
The analogy to healthcare is that we have become used to getting our health out of a bottle of pills which we are only allowed to have if they are prescribed to us by physicians.
We can do as the Liberty men did and take healthcare away from the Insurance companies by the adverse possession of community health centers and universal primary care. First we need to get rid of the mandate that forces us to pay for insurance. The next step is to get involved with helping to provide care at the community level even if its healthcare thats on the level of homeschooling.
Insurance is essentially a big protection racket and its probably not a lot different than what could be had from Rob Roy's cattle rustlers who for a fee promised not to steal your cattle or the sea peoples pirates who promised for a fee not to take the land folks cargos when shipped on the high seas.
For what its worth, "Liberty Men and Great Proprieters" is a book by Alan Taylor (parts of which are available online free from Google Books). I like it because it addresses some of the reasons why the towns and counties just inland from mid coastal Maine have names like Liberty, Freedom, Union, Hope, Hancock, Washington and Jefferson, dating back to the time of the Sons of Liberty and the American Revolution.
Historicaly Mainers have a tendency to be well armed and a bit casual about law enforcement. There are not a lot of "jobs" in the state and so entrepenurial professions are common regardless of such technical details as their legality.
No part of the United States provides such solid grounds of profit to capitalists as the District of Maine, Gen. Henry Knox, November 11, 1795
While the Sons of Liberty are generally associated with the taverns of Boston and the smugglers, slavers, pirates and land speculators who became out countries founding fathers in the days before John Hancock became a protection racket insurance company; we should keep in mind this was a time when Maine was the part of Massachusetts where the money was being made and where the aforesaid founding fathers were forming their ideas about liberty, and equality and hanging out at the Fraternity Village General Store and going privateering, smuggling and slaving. The modern equivalent might be the wars of the biker gangs that sometimes occur where modern amugglers pipelines come to choke points along the borders.
Its taken for granted locally that where Maine can celebrate four centuries of adverse possession against authorities of all stripes, more gets harvested from the woods than a few deer and moose.
Since the time when the Europeans first took the land from the Indians in the names of their kings, and then the kings gave the people who were loaning them money to fight their wars patents on it, it has belonged to whover could take it and hold it.
As time passed and settlers arrived looking for a place to farm, local groups known as the Liberty men took possession of it and told the French, the Indians, the British, the patent holders, their agents, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and all other authorities to just come try and take it back from them. I think maybe its time we treated our right to healthcare the same way the Liberty men treated their right to the land.
Laws, norms, mores and conventions are only as good as the ability of an authority to enforce them. Its taken the Indians half a millenia to begin to prevail on their claims in the courts.
In Massacusetts the ability of the king to enforce a tax on tea was an early casualty. Close on its heels came the whiskey rebellion against the new republic and shortly after that attempts by the ten and twenty associates to enforce the terms of the Waldo Patent with land agents like Joseph Pierce.
I think there is a nice parallel between the turf staked out by the free clinics of the hippy doctor primary care underground over the last half century, and the freeholds of the seventeeth century backwoodsmen that led to things like Shay's Rebellion.
Essentially the public option they provide is good healthcare cheap. With the Insurance Company essentially taken out of the loop by government workarounds like New Markets Tax Credits, Neighborhood Synergy, and NACHC, the poor the elderly, the homeless, and the underserved have been getting their non intrusive healthcare in community health center facilities.
The perception that taxes, rents, levies, legal fees, ursurious interest, tithes, and other payments to the rich and powerful soon led to a condition of tenancy, servitude and bondage was one of the principle causes of the American revolution.
The whole idea of Federalism vs States Rights and Jeffersonian Democracy was that with a large powerful Federal Government a few men of influence could gain the ear of the rich and powerful courtiers and in return for their service gain grants and patents allowing them to become rich and powerful themselves. To the extent that freeholders could maintain local or community rule they could say no to the protection rackets.
Indeed as Henry Knox acknowledged no government could lay claim to the ungoverned territory which had not as yet been defined, surveyed, penetrated with roads, or occupied except by the freeholders.
In 1678 the Waldo patent was first surveyed most access to the interior was by the rivers as far as their upper falls. As late as 1790 when Camden was incorporated there were no roads even along the coast north of Wiscasset.
In such ungoverned areas local rule is the only rule, and until someone builds a road its hard to take it to the streets to settle the matter.
The mafia, biker gangs and other outlaws have essentially the same system of government as the early holders of patents. They depend on their associates to make them money and in return for these services they offer protection. Over time local chapters are systematically absorbed by national and now international gangs until very few players remain in possession of their own colors.
Between 1790 and 1820 the conflict was between the agrarian and the elite or small farmers and businessmen against the land companies, the Whigs and the Federalists. After that came the railroads, the cattlemen, the coal companies exploiting the hills of West Virginia, the rivers and plains and everything that walked or crawled or swam in them or flew over them.
The situation where we find ourselves now is much like that earlier time of limitless forests before the days of stone bounded fields when it began to be perceived that against a future whose opportunities seemed unlimited there stood a group who wanted to control everything and take all those opportunities away.