The New Gettysburg, or Ode to a Plutocracy

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a nation for the wealthy and well-connected, conceived by corporations and dedicated to the proposition that all wealthy men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether the wealthiest insurance companies can remain fabulously wealthy at the expense of the American people. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave massive donations to Congress so that the wealthy insurance companies might be even wealthier. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The corporate lobbyists, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here to defeat health care reform that ordinary Americans so desperately need. It is for us the privileged and wealthy rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished corporate subsidies which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored corporate lobbyists we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the fattest campaign contributions -- that we here highly resolve that these donations to key Senators and Congressmen shall not have been given in vain, that this nation under the dollar sign shall have a new birth of subsidies for corporations and top income-earners, and that government of the corporation, by the corporation, for the corporation shall not perish from the earth.