Class Myth: “We’re taking back this country…!”

…from whom? the old? the sick? the poor?

I could be blunter, but that would be politically incorrect even as a form of criticism. Is that really the subtext of this expression? Or in the language of punditry rather than academe, who are the We that the “dog whistle” is calling? to taking what from whom?

I don’t know that the country was ever owned by anyone other than a group of folks who are mostly white and mostly male. So are We wanting to take it back from Ourselves?

Maybe, if We already own it, We’re wanting to take back something else. There isn’t much to take back from the sick, the poor, the old; all they have is pitiful remnants of entitlements left over when the people who really own the country are done taking what they can get. And even then they (the true owners) make the middle class pay for most of it.

Maybe We ought to take back the country from them. But that would involve raising somebody’s taxes. And that is one of the things they’re afraid of.

Then again, maybe all We want is to take back control of the country. That looks to be a close run thing, doesn’t it? But if We’re wanting to take back control from the poor, the old, the sick, what will We do with it? disadvantage them? Again, it’s slim pickins’. And as I’ve argued before, We – at least some of Us, the ones to whom this slogan is designed to appeal – are only going to be robbing Ourselves.

Maybe the goal is to take back the country from them, so they can’t tax Us so much, because We’re “taxed enough already.” Well, same answer: the other “them” are the true owners. There’s little or nothing to be had from the old, the sick, the poor. If you don’t consider the remnants “pitiful,” try living on them, and them alone. Not everybody gets poor. But only the lucky never get sick. And everybody gets old.

The confusions over the actual interests at stake in American political and economic life are so rich that it’s impossible to believe the big bourgeoisie really conceived, bought, and paid for them all. With some, all they had to do was amplify the emotional content of beliefs that were already very much, if by accident, in their interests.

We the dogs hear the whistle abundantly well. But wait…now I can hear it too. The We aren’t taking the country back from them, they’re taking it back from him!

Now I understand. Completely.

Do you hear it too?

Just How Much…

…cash is on the books of the Fortune 500? The S&P 500? Any 500 of them you might care to name?

Is it anywhere near the $800 billion the American people spent trying to revive the economy? Half that much? Two-thirds? I bet you could find a bunch without hardly trying.

That money was supposed to be spent, respent, and spent again. It was supposed to circulate, creating what is called the multiplier effect – creating economic demand and therefore jobs.

But if it’s accumulating on the corporate books, it’s not doing any of those things.

Whose decision was that? The question answers itself. Those people are supposed to be “Job Creators.”

To be sure, it wasn’t the President’s decision. And so he can’t be blamed for much of anything, it seems to me, except expecting the economy to work the way it is supposed to work.

Lots of people say the stimulus didn’t work. Never mind that the recession could have been, and probably would have been, a lot worse without it. The President has a measure of control over the spending of the United States government, but little or none over the decisions of the CEOs and boards of the companies I am talking about. If what I suspect is in fact the case, it is because those people preferred to perform their duties to their shareholders, and not their patriotic and social duties.

Surely the President can’t be blamed for that.

The Court Decides

I never understood why there could be any argument or how the result could be in doubt – except on grounds of the ideologies of certain appointees to the Court – about the insurance mandate.

Here’s an example. I’m an urban homeowner. If the City says they have to replace the sewer lateral to my home, it’s for my good health and the health and safety of the community. Then they put it in and they make me pay for it. So if local government can make you buy something you don’t particularly care to buy for yourself…. Get the point?

Probably there are many such examples. Yet I don’t know the subtleties of the issue lately resolved in favor of the mandate. I do know the President will be expected to defend it, and the whole scheme of legislation, in the election. And I know it’s going to cost me money. But I’m going to vote for him anyway.

The health care act is eventually going to cost me money because my family has “Cadillac” health insurance, provided as part of my compensation by my employer. Soon part of that compensation will be considered income, just like the cash money it would cost me to buy it for myself. And the taxes on that income will help defray the costs of certain benefits, say, coverage for pre-existing conditions, people less fortunate than I will enjoy under this legislation.

Many petit bourgeois types find this upsetting. And they, and their big bourgeois friends who couldn’t personally care less about the cost of health insurance nor indeed who stays healthy and who gets sick, have got the “tea partiers” upset about it too, even those tea partiers who will never pay a cent of the penalty or the tax, and even, or so it might seem, those who aren’t insured at all but are afraid of the legislation for no articulable reason anyway.

There’s no need to repeat in all detail the steps in that argument. Bourgeois types, with a real fear of seeing the cash balances in their accounts dwindle in order to pay the public costs of health care, have to generate other kinds of fears among people who don’t share their interests, in order to influence and, they hope, control the outcome. These are necessarily false fears precisely because the real interests involved are not the same. And so I say, put yourself in the shoes of the working poor, because you’re a lot more likely to become one of them than to become one of the Few.

Next: Whose Shoes?

Excuse me...

…but I think I understand the grammar of the English language passably well. Apparently some of the law faculty of Georgetown University, who lately appeared on the News Hour, do not.

In English the subjunctive mood of a verb is sometimes used to express a condition that does not exist. Mr. Obama is not a commentator in the conservative media. If he were, he might have said that “unelected” persons display “judicial activism” when they overturn the deliberate acts of an elected body established for that purpose. But he’s not. And he didn’t. That’s how the subjunctive mood is supposed to work.

So the law professor who said the President’s proposition is “invalid” ignored, or is showing his ignorance of, the form and natural meaning of the sentence in question. Other speeches on this matter, including Mr. Ryan saying the expression was “unpresidential,” have some, if only partisan, cause for overlooking the rules of grammar.

The Georgetown colleague who delivered the counterpoint at least expressed the view that the statement is valid, without taking note of the question of grammar. Maybe that’s even worse, if it means he thinks the President was criticizing “unelected,” “activist” judges. The President made it clear he wasn’t, the following day, without backtracking, but just by expressing himself in the indicative mood.

Yet last Friday, even Mark Shields, whom I respect, didn’t note the construction of the sentence in question either. So perhaps what I call its “natural meaning” no longer holds. There’s a lot more to be said about this – from the people who brought you “Who to Contact,” in a collectively unconscious effort to obliterate the distinction between the nominative and objective cases.

What I heard the President say, I took to be a criticism of the conservative media, who, if they wanted to be consistent with themselves, ought to be criticizing the Court for legislating at all on the matter of insuring for the national health. But they don’t. And they aren’t.