Mortgage Pool

The Cockburns’ American Casino is a flimsy documentary about the real estate collapse telling us a lot of things we already knew, but it has a couple of redeeming moments, including the stories and faces of those affected, a bracing reminder that we’re not just talking about trillions of dollars but also lives. But a segment on mosquitoes in pools is new stuff.

The camera pans along a streetful of McMansions in Stockton, California, where most everyone is getting thrown out after being bamboozled into believing that they could somehow pay 800K for these monstrosities. The houses now list for less than half that, which presumes that the entire neighborhood still has a reason to exist. (I wouldn’t live there unless wearing an ankle bracelet.) Behind the still-intact façades are abandoned swimming pools festering with rodents and roughly a million mosquito larvae each.

It’s a chilling view and provides an insight into why the American public has gone along with the systematic destruction of its way of life for three decades, starting, as many Labor Day commentators have noted, when Reagan breached the social contract by firing striking air traffic controllers.

Reagan signaled to employers that they needn’t worry about the federal government when disciplining the workforce and also convinced the workers themselves that they didn’t need to seek workplace protection in each other. Suddenly, no one was really a ‘worker’ any more at all—we were all ‘middle class’ lords.

The ambitious purchasers of these faux Stockton estates were encouraged to think that they could strive and triumph strictly on their own merits and devil take the hindmost.

We’ve had a steady drumbeat of ideological reinforcement to this worldview for three decades, and it partly explains the tolerance, including by many liberals, of the Republican-Clintonian dismantling of our manufacturing base and its high-wage jobs through ‘free’ trade. Respect for ‘Labor’ was replaced by worship of wealth. Individual effort over collective bargaining. Reaching ‘the top’ versus shared solvency.

Meanwhile, actual remuneration for labor was so cheapened that the will-‘o-the-wisp of middle-class largesse could only be pursued through a massive expansion of credit, leading us into the current cul-de-sac. The Stockton purchasers were part of that phony bubble.

Reagan discredited the idea of shared social goals and the creation of collective goods through public initiative as exemplified by his famous phrase, ‘Government is not the solution to the problem; government is the problem’. No longer were we to feel solidarity with our fellows (qua workers) or count on the state to protect us from the corporate bosses, which lay at the heart of unionism. Instead, we had the church social, cowboy capitalism, iconization of the fetus and charity.

The Stockton bankrupts who once nestled into their four-bedroom split-levels and cheered California’s low property taxes must be wondering what happened as they watch both their dreams and their state slide into the Trough of Despond. If Obama were to generate a convincing new narrative to explain to them what has happened and how to get out of it, he might find an audience willing to listen. The wackosphere certainly has one all ready.