The Unwinding of America
Back in 2007, most of us had a hunch something was seriously askew with the American Dream. In my case, someone was asking over $400 thou. for a house on our modest little cul-de-sac. True, home prices had been going up and up and up. But seriously—doubling within a few years?
A lot of people seemed happy about it. It was as if all that cash was miraculously falling from the sky into our happy little laps for some unknown, but certainly tainted reason. You didn’t even need to sell to be in the money; you just took out a home equity. The orb of my little neighborhood boomed into a honking asylum of the nouveau riche.
A year later, another hunch came my way. Met two guys on a Greyhound to Knoxville. Rafael was on leave from his job, specifically an oil rig, even more specifically, a platform floating in the Gulf of Mexico. Three weeks out at sea, three weeks back at home. He was what the companies call a roustabout, what the guys call a roughneck—a lot of rigging and muscle-work, supply lines, massive hoses, saltwater and oil spraying all over everything. “Good money, man.”
When Raphael hopped off, another guy filled his seat—that was Samuel—said he’d be getting off before we hit the Tennessee line. Samuel didn’t look too good. He leaned like he was in pain, sat down slowly. Slim guy, burnish of sun on the veins of his black hands and forearms, I’d say about 50 years old. Then he said they’d run out of work for him. Samuel was a framer. “Big old house. Out on Tybee Island. We just had to walk off the job. Left the dang place not even half-finished.”
I mention Samuel because the working class knows something about boom and bust. I mention Raphael because for every downside there’s a boom side. Right now, for example, if you live in Calgary and you know anything about hard work, you’re probably not doing too badly. Fracking, like the oil wells that came before, paves the way for nice houses and big SUVs too.
These Greyhound guys were just guys. They weren’t stereotypes or racists or gray-beards or pickup-truckers. They weren’t the subject of a hillbilly elegy, nor were they painted with a broad brush from the pallet of a blogger’s imagination. In fact, they had no place to hang a bumper sticker. These guys were sort of like you and me, if the tables had been turned.
I often thought about Samuel when the economy began to seriously tank. I thought of Raphael a few years later when Deepwater Horizon blew its nasty little gusher on the bottom of the deep blue sea. Naturally, I sort of wanted to know if either one of them made it out OK.
To judge by the work of two journalists who followed that long road, it is just as likely they both did, and didn’t.
ROGER MOORE “ROGER AND ME” (1989)
Since the election, every thoughtful person in this country grows concerned for the future. But the perceived glory of the past was a focal point of the campaign of Donald Trump. Voters surprised by his victory might want to look more deeply into the brokenness of this country’s recent history, which has been a faultline in the political geography for many years. Certainly we all felt the tremors; many also had a hunch.
You may remember “Roger and Me” (1989), the first of Roger Moore’s sardonic (and now-classic) films. Whether you consider him a satirist or documentarian or journalist (or all three), Moore took a serious look at GM’s cold, corporate insensitivity to American labor and the resulting aftermath of that economic tragedy in the city of Flint, Michigan.
But alongside the corporate “suits” and government officials and various celebrities he features, Moore also interviews the ordinary people who tried to survive the plant-closings on whatever skills they could quickly acquire. There was Janet the Amway distributor, and Tom the lint roller salesman, and (most famously) Rhoda Britton the “rabbit girl” who warily confessed that it took a heck of a lot of rabbits to make just one fur coat.
If nothing else, you can’t watch this film and doubt the sincerity and pugnacity of these folks. Moore went back to Flint in “Pets or Meat: The Return to Flint” (1992) but didn’t stick around to see that many of the downtrodden have since been forced to work two or more jobs at minimum wage just to stay afloat. Short-shrifted or not, these people were the genuine article. They tried as best they could to hang in there. Back in the day they got sucker-punched. Over the years they learned not to put too much hope in government. Some managed to eke out a living in spite of the odds. Many haven’t made it back yet.
The Long View
A few years ago, a couple of journalists decided to take the long view. They captured and published the hard-luck stories of American life as it occurred over the last few decades. Bill Moyers and George Packer begin their tales well before the election of 2016. They take us back to the GM days, the 1980s, and 1990s when unions had begun to shrivel, factories and mills had begun to close, jobs moved to non-union states or disappeared entirely into third-world countries. We’re kind of used to it now. But back then a spasm of corporate outsourcing, combined with economic uncertainty, was in its mature stage of ascendency.
Bill Moyers and Kathleen Hughes “Two American Families” (2013)
So it was in 1991 that Bill Moyers had his own hunch, a different kind of hunch. He wanted to address the flight of manufacturing jobs, but needed to come at it from a different angle. How are we going to really know what happened, he thought, if you look at it over the years? What have these folks gone through, what have they done, or not done, to fix their plight, and what new challenges lay ahead for them? Moyers gives his wife credit for the original idea: why don’t you just follow them through the years? she said. The result: “Two American Families“.
So the film crew started recording in 1991 and came back four times over the next twenty years: 1993, 1995, 1998 and 2011. Moyers and Hughes focused on the fate of two families who suffered layoffs in the manufacturing sector: Claude and Jackie Stanley (upper photos), and Terry and Tony Neumann (lower photos), all from Milwaukee. The guys were the original breadwinners. They had both been union plant workers, they made decent money, they had cars and mortgages and kids and a hope for the future. The women were stay-at-home moms. Then came the pink slip.
I cannot in the space of a blogpost recreate for you the power and immediacy of Moyer’s documentary. It is very personal. But taking a look at the outlines of each family’s stories, and paying close attention to the sequence of events, we can sense the kind of longing and bitterness and endless hassles they were subjected to—all telescoped for us through the words of those who strived but could never get ahead.
1991
For the Neumanns, the economic dislocation has already begun. Tony Neumann went from $17/hr. union to $6/hr. with no benefits. Terry Neumann tries to sell skin-care products but loses a bundle. After a time, Tony finds a night-shift job in a small non-union shop—an event celebrated in his hometown Catholic church as a kind of miracle from God—now at $8.25/hr., still with no benefits. Tony: “Our marriage is really on the rocks. I’m thinking about divorce, seriously.” Terry: “He feels guilty. Guilty he can’t support the family.” Terry took a series of low-wage, part-time day jobs: the last a cafeteria worker.
Claude Stanley erupted: “Don’t want no food stamps, I’m gonna get me a job.” He did, waterproofing basements at about $6/hr. compared to $20/hr. at A.O. Smith. To make ends meet Jacqueline Stanley gets a real estate license, and then finds out real estate is declining, and learns, as a black woman, “I can’t sell suburbs” only the central city.
1993
The Stanley family put their hopes in the Clinton presidency. We see them watching the 1993 inauguration. Claude is promoted to foreman of the crew. His pay now amounts to over $7/hr. with modest a health benefit. Claude: “We just keep holding on.” He keeps his spirits up as a lay minister in a tiny church. Jackie’s house sales haven’t rebounded. Her percentage is down. “If I think poverty all the time then I’ll act that way.”
1995
Jobs come back; more highly-skilled but still don’t pay enough. Both sets of parents are working, with the kids coming home to empty houses. Terry is a driver and guard for security company.
Keith Stanley graduates high school and goes to college, and helps pay tuition with odd jobs at school and using his Discover Card which Jackie hopes to pay back. The Stanleys fall way behind as Claude comes down with a serious lung infection that resulted in an extended hospital stay. He was two months off the job recovering.
1998
Claude’s medical bills now stand at $30,000. His young ones are working to help support the family, at Burger King. Claude Jr., now an older teen, is unemployed but doing some modeling. His twin, Klaudale, joins the Navy. The older Keith is an RA at his dorm, holds two jobs, and organist at church. He is still charging college tuition, but now on the Chase card. Claude and Jackie borrow against their home to set up their own business, Jackie doing real-estate and Claude a home inspector.
Tony Neumann is still working the night shift. For years he and Terry have not slept together. The family begins to see a therapist. Terry finds a job making $15/hr. at warehouse work, more than Tony, but she also has an unpredictable schedule, nights, weekends, days.
2010
Jackie had to quit doing real estate due to health problems; she works as a volunteer at charitable clothing outlet, and an alcohol and recovery group. She is taking classes to get back into real estate. Omega, the youngest daughter lost her job at a Milwaukee call center. Claude’s entrepreneurial venture didn’t make the cut. He took a job unloading planes at the airport, at minimum wage. He also worked the graveyard shift as security guard at the hospital. Currently he works with sanitation department for the city, on a garbage truck. Now 60, he is making $25k per year with (finally) some benefits.
The college graduate Keith Stanley works as an assistant to an Alderman at the state legislature at $45k per year—and has taken in a nephew from an aunt who wants her own son to have a positive male role model. The younger son, Klaudale, has returned to the Navy—he works in Afghanistan.
The Neumanns are divorced. Tony is in construction and a handyman working out of Milwaukee. Terry, now 49 years old, lost her warehouse job, couldn’t find another. In 2008, she retrained as a nurse’s assistant and home health care aid—we watch her very patiently caring for a severely handicapped 16-year-old. Terry makes $9/hr. but only 24 hours a week. No benefits. Terry lost her home (of 24 years) in 2011. J.P. Morgan Chase would prefer to sell the property at foreclosure for $40K instead of refinancing with Terry. She moved in with a relative, then a friend. She finally found a full-time job—in a nursing home, on the overnight shift. $11.50/hr. plus benefits. She hopes someday she can buy herself a spot in a trailer park.
Daniel Neumann, age 28, works for a lawn care company at $9/hr. He is on state food assistance. Adam Neumann is an unemployed auto mechanic who studied at a local tech institute, had a daughter in high school, and lives south of Milwaukee with his pregnant girlfriend. Karissa Neumann (age 26), managed to get an associate degree, and works for the hospital as a billing agent at $17/hr. Her husband is currently unemployed—they live with his relatives.
Quotes
Yeah I been there with Reagan, Bush and now Clinton. I’m not saying I don’t trust Presidents, it’s that you say a lot of things to get on top. If I was running for something I’d say something like everybody get free candy and everything, you know, so you say a lot of stuff to get on top.
– Keith Stanley, high school student, watching the Clinton Inauguration in 1993
*
The [real estate] deals seem so good, and at the last minute they fall apart. And that falling apart is our mortgage, that falling apart is the car notes. To someone else it may not seem that important that they decide not to buy the house, but for us it’s a matter of not life and death, but for us it’s a matter of light and gas.
– Claude’s daughter Nicole Stanley
*
Moyers: What does it say to you that he can make more money employed by a military contractor in Afghanistan than he can make here at home in Milwaukee?
Claude Stanley: That’s crazy. And we supposed to be the richest country?
*
The economy is just so bad right now a lot of people don’t have money and stuff. And the world is just goin’ all downhill right now. All this stuff going on, here in Milwaukee and all these shootings and all that.
– Terry’s son, Daniel Neumann
*
My grandfather always said you never let the devil win. But the way the economy is going now I don’t think anybody’s going to be financially secure. Truthfully. And we’ll just work until we collapse and keel over and die.
– Terry Neumann
*
By the time I get up in the morning, I’m just thawin’ out. My bones haven’t finished gettin’ warm. I can’t keep doin’ this.
– Claude Stanley on his latest job collecting garbage
GEORGE PACKER “THE UNWINDING” (2013)
Long before our current era was dubbed a “New Gilded Age,” George Packer had his own hunch. Perhaps we are living through an “unwinding”?
In this “inner history of the New America”—as Packer states in his subtitle—the dark days of economic and societal unwinding are illuminated, not by analysis or scholarship or editorial opining, but simply by stories. The economy was very good to many, but cruelly and efficiently ruinous to many others as well.
In the unwinding, everything changes and nothing lasts, except for the voices, American voices, open, sentimental, angry, matter-of-fact; inflected with borrowed ideas, God, TV and the dimly remembered past.
– Prologue
Unwindings, in this telling, are the ebb and flow of success and failure, of riches and privation. Unwindings may bring freedom, but also inevitably a dispiriting. And if you’re not lucky, a downward spiral of helplessness.
Packer cuts a wide swath across twenty or more years with a steady and patient ear for long conversation. He has been both a novelist and a writer for many years with the New Yorker. He takes to heart the personal view of every story—and in the process he produces an entertaining tour of many diverse personalities and their milieu as they see it. The perspective is never overly sympathetic, nor satirical. The views expressed speak for themselves, edgy and biting and hard storylines of an open wound.
You might expect the real subject to be the disillusionment that comes from living in a freewheeling, cut-throat society—but a fighting spirit seems to emerge even in the darkest of days. In our world now, the loss of steel, textiles, tobacco, sewn fabric and assorted other materials and products fabricated by American mills was deeply felt, a direct assault on our national psyche as much as a result of the economics of maximum profit. American business, it turned out, was not ours after all. It was just business.
Tammy Thomas
Youngstown native, a laid-off steel mill worker who eventually found work in making wiring harnesses for GM electrical components, a job which itself would eventually be replaced by robots and computerized mechanization. She heard the drip, drip, drip of bad economic news, downsizing, employees becoming contractors, then part-timers—and yet still she had enough confidence in the economy to buy a house in 2005. In the following month, she herself was laid off. But Tammy had learned over the years she had a gift of gab. She went on to become an organizer and community activist.
Dean Price
North Carolina roadside convenience entrepreneur, son of a poor tobacco road preacher, with a single-minded missionary zeal for diesel biofuels, had by 2005 come to despise Republicans, as they enabled only the very rich to have every advantage under the law—advantages which kept him from expanding his business and eventually killed it off. He finally made some money, though not nearly enough, in a partnership to supply biofuel for the buses in the various and sundry county school systems in that state.
Jeff Connaughton
Pennsylvania Democrat and strategist who first got into politics in the office of Joe Biden in the 1980’s, an idealist who gradually came to understand the underbelly of politics only too well. Went on the make money on Wall Street, and then returned to politics briefly in order to assist the short presidential bid of Biden in 2008. Political insider and also a lobbyist.
Tampa
. . . say again? Yes, Tampa—one of the leading metropolitan areas in the United States for bankruptcy and foreclosure—and in George Packer’s view a kind of consolidated personage made of an assemblage of characters from the drama of the housing crisis in Florida. The (plural) stories of Tampa are basically a multi-headed hydra of middle-class retired people, the working poor, lawyers, real estate flippers. There is Usha Patel who refused to let the banks take her Comfort Inn because of falling behind on her payments. There is Danny Hartzell, whose family found more ways into bankruptcy and bad health than is conceivable. There is Karen Jaroch, one madder-than-hell Glenn Beck fan who railed against the system. And there is Michael Van Sickler, St. Petersburg Times reporter who covered the housing crisis starting in 2005, and exposed sophisticated “flipping” practices by real estate companies, as well as shining a spotlight on the Florida judicial system and it’s “rocket docket” courts known to issue as many as a hundred foreclosures a day—due in large part to defendants not even showing up.
Quote
“My view on everything—if you want to change this country, you have to put a person in office who has never done it for a day. Put a regular old guy like me, someone who’s lived it and never done nothing else but lived it.” He sipped his Diet Pepsi. “We’re struggling, but we’re not starving. There’s no life, but there’s a roof over your head.”
– Danny Hartzell, p. 407
Now and then Packer throws some curveballs—for between his many down-and-outer profiles are cameos of celebrities like Newt Gingrich, Oprah Winfrey, Jay-Z and many others who have had a huge impact on the era. But the effect of the contrast is useful—it jars us back to square one—especially when you consider that even as workers knew their pay was not going up, all the while the salaries and lifestyles and much-ballyhooed bonuses of their overseers were upwards into the millions. If sometimes Packer uses words like “plague” and “blight” to describe the almost insane and fickle fate of the downtrodden, well, perhaps these are not the terms that a sociologist would use, but they seem perfect for the way the economy was perceived to operate by those in the down-under. The only word I don’t remember being used explicitly was “rigged.”
A Reckoning
Now for a breath of fresh air: Matthew D. Weidner, who like several other of Packer’s heroes and heroines found that fighting back was at least as invigorating and certainly more satisfying than simply giving up. It was around that ominous year 2007 when Weidner, an eccentric small-time lawyer in the Tampa area, had a hunch of his own.
Basically, Weidner took anything that walked through the door—he was a door lawyer, the subsistence farmer of the legal world, a couple-grand retainer up front. He worked out of a crappy storefront office between a saloon and a bikini bar on a sketchy strip of downtown St. Petersburg.
– p.265
Always on the prowl for new work, Weidner happened upon a spate of foreclosures that had seemingly come out of nowhere. He discovered that most of them were arriving from poor areas at first, but then, as time went on, there were more and more of them showing up from all over, like from middle- and upper-class clients, and business people too. What on earth was causing this?
By the thousands and thousands the foreclosures came. They came to Country Walk and Carriage Pointe, to inner-city Tampa and outermost Pasco, to Gulfport and northeast St. Pete. They arrived at houses where three months of mail lay in a pile at the front door, and houses where adults had stopped answering the phone, and motels with 20 percent occupancy, and obscurely named investment entities with no known street address.
p. 259
The longer this went on, the angrier Weidner became. He took all the cases that came his way, and managed to win every one of them against the banks. It wasn’t all that hard, as the banks had no clue what miserably bundled documentation they were filing. In fact, he assumed what most of us assumed: that the government and the banks would eventually work something out—maybe split the defaulted loans, the Treasury paying the banks half the values, the banks writing off the other half as bad debt—you know, something like the bank bailout.
But he discovered otherwise. In the mortgage flipping industry, fraud was rampant: court filings of non-original documents (digital facsimiles), fraudulent signatures on the documents, phony dates, bogus seals, not to mention the bundling of the mortgages into derivatives made it often impossible to discover who was the actual lender. Rarely could a financial institution establish a clear right to someone’s house. Weidner claims to have never lost a foreclosure case: “Not because he was that good but because the system was that bad.”
He also got into trouble—regularly—for venting loudly in court. He was sued for libel by a Palm Harbor company that he had accused of robo-signing mortgage documents.
Weidner was reprimanded by the Sixth Judicial Circuit for disrupting courtroom proceedings after he offered to help an old lady who was defending herself against foreclosure. The courts said that he was soliciting clients; he said that senior judges were trying to punish him for calling on the federal government to take over the Florida rocket dockets.
p. 274
But there was one thought that kept Weidner going: the idea that millions of dollars in legal fees were being spent in Gotham by banks to fight lawyers like himself over the leavings of the foreclosures. The banks were not even offering to refinance—and the reason was they needed cash immediately to repay their own obligations. Most attorneys weren’t quite as adept at the paper trail as Weidner, and clients would give up in hopeless rounds of letters and appeals to the banks that went unreturned. Many people would just give up in exasperation, and not even show up at the foreclosure hearing, dooming their chances forever.
Partly to avoid complete lunacy, Weidner began blogging in 2009. He raged against the system, and provided useful information to anyone screwed by the system. He posted all the motions that he had filed for others, so his own hard work could now be used for free. Working with Legal Aid, he found a voice in the “Foreclosure Defense Movement” founded by attorneys in Jacksonville.
In fact, he got quite a name for himself. In response to becoming a pariah of the legal community, on the week of Martin Luther King’s birthday he posted an essay to “My Dear Fellow Attorneys” (inspired by King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”).
While confined here in a foreclosure courtroom, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities “unwise and untimely.” Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of foreclosure to say “Wait.” But when you have seen good families thrown into the street, when you have seen the banks kick down doors and change the locks with no court order, when you have seen law enforcement standing idly by and saying “it is a civil matter,” when you have seen court rulings that are repugnant to fundamental laws, when you have seen the bank and corporate executives reap unconscionable profits, when you have seen clients become sick and die due to the stress and pain of foreclosure and their economic situation, when you have seen single women who live in mortal fear that her front door may be kicked down for the third time, when you see children who have only known their parents suffering—then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.
– p. 273
Horatio Alger, I believe you met your match.
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