Today's main columnist in the New York Times business section, Andrew Ross Sorkin, echoes the comments Larry Summers made on TV this weekend with regard to the AIG bonuses and the sanctity of contracts. Sorkin quotes Obama: "[The issue of AIG bonuses] isn't just a matter of dollars and cents. It's about our fundamental values." Sorkin goes on:
Sorkin frets about whether government "abrogating contracts left and right" would lead companies to break contracts willy nilly. But it's more about the government, and companies, breaking contracts left, but not right. As Ali Frick points out at Think Progress, companies already seize opportunities to break inconvenient contracts—with unions. And the government, egged on by the right-wing, encouraged them to do so:
SUMMERS: We are a country of law. There are contracts. The government cannot just abrogate contracts. Every legal step possible to limit those bonuses is being taken by Secretary Geithner and by the Federal Reserve system.
UAW President Ron Gettelfinger emerged from the meeting to say the union would rework a retiree health care trust fund, eliminate the union's maligned jobs bank program…and cut additional measures that would loosen the union's trademark job-security protections.