The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (23 page)

Dean began reading around on the Web and found that when a big-box retailer came into
your community, eighty-six cents of every dollar spent there went somewhere else.
Very little money stayed home to benefit the people who lived, worked, and shopped
there—just like with the local truck stops that kept only a dime on every gallon sold.
Even before Wal-Mart showed up, the main streets of Madison and Mayodan were emptying
out, the center of economic life moving to the highways where Lowe’s and CVS had already
arrived. “And if you think about it,” Dean said, “the people that ran the hardware
store, the shoe store, the little restaurant that was here, they were the fabric of
the community. They were the leaders. They were the Little League baseball coaches,
they were the town council members, they were the people everybody looked up to. We
lost that.” The rest of the country was supposed to be booming—Wall Street and Silicon
Valley had more money than ever—but Rockingham County and the Piedmont were sinking
into something like a depression. Anyway, how many investment bankers and software
designers were there around the country? Then think of how many farmers.

A lot changed in Dean’s mind very quickly. He had always voted Republican, except
in 1992 when he went for Ross Perot, but after Katrina he realized that Bush was teamed
up with the multinationals and the oil companies in the worst way. Even Reagan, his
idol, had made a big mistake when he cut deals with the oil countries—wasn’t Iran-contra
about that?—and kept America on fossil fuels for thirty more years. History would
judge Reagan harshly for that.

One day, Dean was sitting on a bar stool at his kitchen table, surfing a website called
“Whiskey and Gunpowder: The Independent Investor’s Daily Guide to Gold, Commodities,
Profits and Freedom” on the lousy dial-up connection that was all you could get in
Stokesdale, when he read the words “peak oil.” It meant the point when petroleum extraction
would reach its maximum rate and begin to fall off. A geologist with Gulf Oil named
M. King Hubbert came up with the theory in 1956. Hubbert predicted that the United
States, the world’s largest oil producer, would hit its high point in domestic production
around 1970—which was what happened, and which explained why oil prices became so
volatile throughout the seventies. Hubbert’s theory was that the rest of the world
would reach peak oil right around 2005.

Dean stood up at the table, went weak in his knees, and stumbled backward. He had
a vision of what peak oil would mean where he lived (Katrina had already given a glimpse):
long-haul trucks coming to a standstill, food stranded on the highways, local people
unable to eat or get to work or heat their homes. Riots, revolution. At least, things
getting very chaotic very fast. People around here had guns, they had the Scotch-Irish
mentality to fight. Then something like martial law, maybe a coup d’état. This was
what America was facing. He knew that this moment would stay with him, just like discovering
Napoleon Hill. Napoleon wrote about the power of concentration—that if you concentrated
your mind on one subject for an extended period of time, things would start popping
into your head and what you needed to know would be illuminated to you. Dean could
feel that happening to him now. He immediately called his mentor, Rocky Carter—the
contractor who had built the truck stop by the Martinsville Speedway and turned Dean
on to Napoleon Hill—and told him about this discovery.

In the spring of 2006, around the time Dean found out about peak oil, his friend Howard
saw a story on CNN about a man in Tennessee who was making ethanol that he sold for
fifty cents a gallon. Howard was twelve years older than Dean and had grown up in
a house that his family rented for twenty-five dollars a month on the Price tobacco
farm. He was stocky and irascible, with a thick white mustache and powerful forearms,
and he had spent most of his adult life stringing television cable, drinking, fighting,
and riding motorcycles. He lost several front teeth in a bar fight in High Point after
he ran out of pool balls to throw at the bikers coming after him. Then, at age fifty-three,
he married a tough little slip of a woman—“harder than a raw bone on a ladder knot,”
Howard said. She had been his first love in his teens but she’d married someone else,
so Howard had to wait most of his life to settle down. They lived in a trailer in
Madison with his wife’s daughter, who was obese and drew a disability check.

The ethanol man lived outside Lynchburg, Tennessee, home of Jack Daniel’s. One day,
Howard and Dean drove eight hours and found him by a creek at the bottom of a crooked,
foggy road—a short, beady-eyed man with a big gut, making moonshine and adding gasoline.
The man sold them a still—a long copper tube, like an oversized bassoon, with several
valves—for $2,100. Dean and Howard weren’t his only customers. What with Katrina,
the gas price spike, and the CNN clip, the ethanol man sold ten or eleven stills that
day.

Dean and Howard drove back to North Carolina, bought some corn from local farmers,
and started fooling around with sugar and yeast. They soon found out that making ethanol
was too costly, in terms of the energy needed to separate the water and alcohol and
also the number of government permits required. But Dean had also been reading about
another alternative fuel: biodiesel. Before Katrina, he’d never heard the word, had
no idea how it was even spelled, but biodiesel was appealing for a number of reasons.
Transesterification—that’s what the production process was called—took much less energy
than making ethanol: for every unit of energy you put in, you created almost five
units of fuel. Biodiesel was made from fat compounds called triglycerides, and the
oil could come from various feedstocks, like soybeans or crushed canola seeds or animal
fat, or even the waste cooking oil that restaurants got rid of. It could be manufactured
on a small scale for relatively little money. Blended with regular number 2 diesel
at a concentration of up to 20 percent biodiesel, it could go straight into an engine
that needed no conversion. With slight modifications, a diesel engine could run on
100 percent biofuel. Politicians worried about the price of gas because that’s what
went into the voters’ cars, but diesel ran the economy, got the food to market.

Dean and Howard drove back to Tennessee. The ethanol man had hooked up with two Germans
who were making what they called “bee-o-diesel.” Dean bought one of their portable
reactors mounted on skids for twenty thousand dollars, having secured an investment
from Rocky Carter. The reactor could produce a thousand gallons a day. Dean and Howard
drove it back home and traded the ethanol still to a farmer in Harrisburg, Virginia,
for two crops of canola harvested on fifty acres. Canola—it stood for Canadian Oil,
Low Acid—was a winter cover crop derived from rapeseed. Forty-four percent of the
crushed seed became oil, the rest meal for feeding livestock. Dean read that canola
oil had 93 percent of the BTU value of number 2 diesel and took less energy to convert
to fuel than other feedstock, because the fatty acid chains melted down at lower temperatures.
Canola was a mustard seed. There was a parable about the mustard seed in the Bible—Jesus
compared it to the kingdom of heaven: “Though it is less than all the seeds that are
on the earth, yet when it is sown, grows up, and becomes greater than all the herbs,
and puts out great branches, so that the birds of the sky can lodge under its shadow.”

Dean harvested some canola seeds, tiny black balls like peppercorns. He ran the seeds
through a small crushing machine twice, caught the stream of oil, filtered it, poured
the oil into the reactor, and turned up the heat. He began making biodiesel. Unlike
the Germans, he gave the first syllable a full, high, open-mouthed lift, as if it
were the opening phrase of an old Baptist hymn. This was the stuff that was going
to set him free.

“All I’ve ever wanted to do all my life,” Dean said, “is farm and be left alone.”

TAMMY THOMAS

In the late nineties, Tammy’s high school sweetheart, Barry, reappeared. She had run
into him a few times over the years and would never talk to him, once even fled with
her kids when she saw him approaching at a festival. Then, at her godmother’s son’s
wedding reception, Barry’s aunt was the caterer and Barry was working with her. He
pursued Tammy and cornered her and asked for five minutes to explain that he had never
stopped caring for her, always loved her, regretted marrying the pregnant girl Tammy
had seen him with the summer after their daughter was born. “If I could just give
him five minutes,” she said, “and it cost me seven years.”

For a while it was a for-real fairy tale, as if God had wanted them back together.
Her older daughter was told that the Time Warner Cable serviceman her mother was going
to marry on July 3, 1999, was her father. She graduated the next year and left to
study theater at Ohio State, so it didn’t matter so much that she didn’t like her
mother’s new husband. But Tammy’s other two kids didn’t have a great relationship
with their stepfather, either. And within a few years, Tammy and Barry began to quarrel,
and the marriage fell apart.

Tammy stopped going to the church on the south side where Barry’s family was prominent.
For a while she didn’t want to be seen around the city. “Youngstown is very, very
small,” she said. “A lot of people were surprised that we were together anyway, so
it was even harder being separated.” So many things from her life that she’d repressed
came back to hurt her. God and her cousin led Tammy to an interracial megachurch in
Akron, the House of the Lord, where a sign in the sanctuary said
RELATIONSHIPS ARE EVERYTHING.
She decided that this was where she needed to heal, and she began attending services
several times a week, and for two or three years church was her life.

She had lived in four different places on the south side, and it was now worse than
the east side. She never felt safe getting into her car in the middle of the night
when she worked the midnight shift, or leaving her younger daughter home alone after
dark. She let Barry have the house, since there was already enough turmoil (he lost
it to foreclosure a couple of years later). She could have moved to the west side,
which was the last part of the city where homes were holding their value, but that
was where white people from the east and south sides had fled. It would have felt
wrong for her to join them there. In July 2005, she and Barry decided to divorce,
and in August Tammy bought a modest house for seventy-one thousand dollars, with an
attached garage, on a safe street in a township on the northern edge of Youngstown
called Liberty. For the first time she had an easy drive to work.

In October she moved in. That same month, Packard Electric, going under a new name,
declared bankruptcy.

*   *   *

For the two decades that Tammy worked there, Packard steadily chipped away at the
labor force in Warren, going from more than thirteen thousand employees in the early
seventies to seven thousand in the early nineties to three thousand by 2005. During
the same years, the foreign workforce expanded to more than a hundred thousand, and
Packard’s auto parts factories became the largest employers in the maquiladora belt
of Mexico. At some plants, like Plant 14, Tammy came to see that nothing was locked
down, and over time all the machinery was moved south of the border, and with it the
jobs on those lines. It was like a repetition of the steelworkers’ agony, but in slow
time, by attrition.

Tammy watched the union get weaker and weaker. The company’s 1993 contract with Local
717 established a new third tier of workers who would never receive full wages and
benefits. Tammy noticed how management treated the 93s differently, with stricter
work rules, wouldn’t let them talk to Tammy’s line at Thomas Road, stood behind them
and watched them work in a way that would make anyone nervous. The contract also gave
incentives to do twelve-hour shifts, which was impossible for someone with a family,
like Tammy, or for someone with health problems. It seemed like a way to get the more
senior employees to retire, and then hire more workers as 93s.

In 1999, having consolidated its parts divisions, including Packard, into one entity
called Delphi Automotive Systems, General Motors spun off Delphi into an independent
corporation, with a public stock offering and a prospectus for investors that promised
to “improve operating performance” with “a ‘fix/sell/close’ plant-by-plant analysis
through which we seek to improve our cost competitiveness, and various other sourcing,
labor, and cost reduction initiatives.” Wall Street had been pushing GM to spin off
Delphi for at least a year, thinking there would be more shareholder value in a smaller
automaker and a separate parts company than in one vertically integrated GM.

Tammy found the whole spin-off suspicious. “At the time, Packard Electric was profitable.
As soon as we came under Delphi, we were no longer profitable,” she said. “I had a
feeling then that something was not right about this. I’m not a conspiracy theorist,
but I think the writing was on the wall. There was a plan to get rid of some of the
long-term workers, so you spin these people off, you put them under an umbrella, and
then you don’t have to deal with them, because now they are not going to be GM employees.”

The new corporation was independent in name only—Delphi’s fate remained tied to its
biggest customer, GM. Over time, it became clear that the spin-off was a tactic to
break up what remained of the company’s American workforce. From the outset, Delphi
claimed to be profitable. But the profits turned out to be bogus—for three years,
top management had engaged in accounting fraud. The company was investigated by the
SEC and sued by two pension funds, and its senior executives quit. When GM went into
a deep slump in the early 2000s, Delphi took billions of dollars in losses, before
filing for bankruptcy under Chapter 11 in 2005.