The social contract has been destroyed, and it has been destroyed on many
fronts.
I suppose, one might say, that the housing aspect of the social contract
was exploded from below when people who really couldn't afford their
mortgages bought into them anyway. But, of course, many Americans
were literally stampeded into this behavior by banks and other
mortgage sellers--and then, as real estate values went up, were stampeded
into getting some of their equity out and refinance with the assumption
that the price of their house was permanently on the rise. Besides,
these were not honest transactions since everyone pushed the mortgagees
to lie about assets and income, no proof required.
Of course, the sub-prime calamity has hit almost all of the counting
houses in the world. Some bankers actually understood the fraud
they were promoting, and these are the ones who farmed out their
mortgages to other financial institutions in an almost endless sequence
like the unborn eggs in laying hens. Which is why the disaster is
near-universal. It's hard to know how much of it spread because of
a vast and sustained absence of mind.
No institution seems to be immune to this contagion. And no medium
of exchange.
Everybody who had any investments has lost money. Sales are down in
virtually every sector of the economy. Unemployment is rising.
Education both public and private is being squeezed like a lemon from
which a few drops emerge. Health care, well, we know about health
care. Taxes may not be going up absolutely everywhere. But
service fees are, and these are class-skewed against the middle class and
the poor. Sales taxes are a mixture of both, regressive, as we used
to say.
But, frankly, what I find most repulsive is the emerging collapse of the
pension system. Yes, some people will sustain themselves with their
pensions intact. And some will even sustain themselves with their
pensions cut in half. But that is not what most retirees and future
retirees can expect.
There is a fascinatingly detailed, dreadfully detailed story,
"Plight of Carmakers Could Upset All Pension Plans," by Mary
Williams Walsh on the first page of the business section in Friday's New
York Times. There go decades of securing economic guarantees to
retirees, right out the window. Right down the shaft. Right
into the garbage. And it's not just with workers who were
represented by the United Auto Workers at plants of the big three--GM,
Ford, Chrysler--any one of which could go bankrupt within days or
weeks. It's also with non-union workers in the southern plants of
foreign auto workers. With one plan of part-way rescue, this plan
will collapse. Another plan, that one will collapse. Then
will come the employees of manufacturers of auto parts. And on and
on.
It once was that American workers would be guaranteed a certain
annuity. They knew what that annuity would be. There is a
pension protection agency in the U.S. government. It has few
financial resources (laughingly few), little leeway, less muscle. Pensions are last in the line for government help. Behind the
bondholders and the bankers, the stockholders and the executives. They had nothing materially to do with the disasters visited on their
employers. Their contribution was that, as the old union song has
it, "without our brain and muscle/not a single wheel can
turn."