The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (24 page)

But the bankruptcy was also tactical. It applied only to the company’s North American
operations. Delphi argued that reorganization under Chapter 11 should allow it to
tear up contracts with its workers, and to oversee the winding down, the board hired
a new CEO, Robert S. “Steve” Miller, who specialized in taking troubled companies
and slashing them to pieces in order to make them profitable for new investors. He
had done it before at Bethlehem Steel, and in 2008 he published an autobiography called
The Turnaround Kid
. Delphi’s board gave Miller a compensation package that was worth as much as $35
million, while a group of senior executives got $87 million in bonuses, and stock
options that were ultimately valued at half a billion. Two Wall Street banks, JPMorgan
Chase and Citigroup, lent Delphi $4.5 billion and positioned themselves to stand first
in line to be paid back, with interest and fees, when the company emerged from bankruptcy.
Miller, his senior executives, and the banks would be the winners. The losers would
be Delphi’s American workers. No one was telling them what was going to happen, but
Delphi had a confidential written plan, code-named NorthStar, to pursue “aggressive
cost reduction via product exits, site consolidation, and legacy cost reduction.”
The plan was leaked to
The Detroit News
and published a month after the bankruptcy.

Still, Tammy didn’t see it coming. She was making close to twenty-five dollars an
hour, bringing home fifty-five thousand a year with overtime before taxes. She had
her ten years in, so they couldn’t lay her off for more than six months, and when
she was off they had to pay her 80 percent of her wages. Her younger daughter was
going to graduate from high school, and after that Tammy could focus on herself, maybe
even travel. She was about to turn forty, and her last twenty or so years on earth
were going to be smooth sailing. She was thirteen years away from early retirement,
and when she got there she could finally grow up and decide what she wanted to be—something
that fulfilled her and made her feel good, and it wouldn’t matter how much it paid.
She had given up the wedding business and was taking some classes at Youngstown State,
thinking of going into counseling. By the time she retired she could have a Ph.D.
Or go live in some third world country on her pension.

Tammy had seen jobs leave, seen the work getting condensed—you went from working one
machine to two—and she could imagine Warren becoming a smaller plant. But the whole
plant closing? “No. I never imagined that. Even seeing what happened to the mills.
As long as GM was doing okay, we would probably be okay. We worked so much overtime,
we literally could not keep up with orders. No one could have ever told me my job
would go away.” Three decades earlier, the workers at Sheet and Tube had never imagined
it, either.

In March 2006, Delphi announced that it would close or sell twenty-one of its twenty-nine
American plants and get rid of twenty thousand hourly jobs, two-thirds of the total.
Warren would remain open but with a drastically reduced workforce, and the survivors
would take a 40 percent pay cut. Tammy’s wage would drop to $13.50 an hour. Workers
were encouraged to accept a buyout with a lump sum of pay, because Delphi intended
to retain fewer than six hundred fifty of Warren’s three thousand remaining hourly
employees. The buyout meant that they would lose most of their pension. The message
was delivered via PowerPoint in a large conference room to groups of a hundred workers
at a time. Everyone received a packet of information and was given until August to
sign up for the buyout. People walked out of the room crying. Tammy was stunned.

But then something changed in her. She felt a calming spirit, like she knew it was
going to be okay. This feeling had come over her at other hard moments in her life,
when she had to live in a closet at age ten, when she became a mother at sixteen,
when she lost her fiancé at twenty-nine. Her coworkers were in a panic, asking one
another, “What are you going to do?” Tammy told them, “You know what? There is a whole
wide world outside of Packard.” She was actually a little excited. With the buyout
money she could go to college full-time and become the second person in her family
to get a degree—because her older daughter was already the first. After that, Tammy
didn’t know what she was going to do, but for the first time since she was a girl,
she could dream.

Her friend Miss Sybil had always seen something of herself in Tammy: east side girls,
single mothers, factory workers, women with ambition who had stuck it out in Youngstown.
In a way, Sybil had it harder because she started working at GE in 1971, when black
women were the lowest of the low in a factory. On the other hand, when Tammy came
up a generation later, everything was falling apart. Sybil had stayed at GE until
she retired in her sixties, but Tammy was making a great change at forty. Sybil knew
exactly what she was risking. “Tammy had to make her own way and to be determined,”
she said. “I’m sure those three mouths looking at her were a great incentive. Packard
was a darned good job. When she left Packard by the wayside she was taking an awful
chance. She had that determination and drive. Most people I know who left Packard
lost their luster. You step out on that limb and you can’t fail.”

Tammy took the buyout on the last day of 2006. She thought of the saying that God
closes one door and opens another. “No. God is going to open
patio
doors for me.”

2003

CITIES JAMMED IN WORLDWIDE PROTEST OF WAR IN IRAQ
 … A brutal dictator, with a history of reckless aggression, with ties to terrorism,
with great potential wealth, will not be permitted to dominate a vital region …
I lift my lamp beside the golden door to pee, / And make a vow to make men free, and
we will find their WMD.
…
BUSH ORDERS START OF WAR ON IRAQ
 …
If the end is near, the Green and Miller family, who are spread out across the country,
want their relatives close by. So they’ve hatched an emergency plan in case the phones
are knocked out: Meet in Wichita, Kan., at the confluence of the Big and Little Arkansas
Rivers, under the outstretched arms of the Keeper of the Plains, a 44-foot steel sculpture
of an Indian warrior.
…
MOUNTING ANGER WITH FRENCH NOT ENOUGH TO STEM THE FLOW OF BORDEAUX
 … These bastards who run our country are a bunch of conniving, thieving, smug pricks
who need to be brought down and removed and replaced with a whole new system that
we control.…
LATINOS NOW LARGEST MINORITY GROUP IN U.S.
…
POPE TO GAYS: YOUR WAYS ARE EVIL
Slams Homosexual Marriage, Adoption
 …
In an emotional press conference at L.A.’s Staples Center, Bryant, 24, clutched his
wife Vanessa’s hand and apologized for his betrayal six months after the birth of
 …
THE “BUSH DOCTRINE” EXPERIENCES SHINING MOMENTS
 …
The laughs come from finding out just how isolated the overprivileged can be from
the rest of the country. So much so that the 22-year-old Hilton, a fixture in society
columns, doesn’t quite know what a well is and has never heard of Wal-Mart.
…
WALL STREET GIANTS PROSPER AMID DOWNTURN
 …
He displays other Master of the Universe attributes, including a fabulous art collection,
a power wardrobe, and an attractive, blond second wife several inches taller than
he is.…
HOUSING HOLDS AS SAFEST HAVEN FOR INVESTORS
 …
be glad that you own a house in Florida
 … But because I signed the contract and fulfilled my obligation to fight one of America’s
wars, I am entitled to speak, to say, I belong to a fucked situation
.
…
U.S. COPTER IS DOWNED IN IRAQ, KILLING 16
 …
“It was a tough week, but we made progress toward a sovereign and free Iraq,” he said.
…
Sir, I supported the war. / I believe in who we are. / I dedicate red wine to that
today. / At Montrachet, near the Franklin Street stop, on West Broadway.

INSTITUTION MAN (1): COLIN POWELL

Once upon a time in America

there was a family of light-skinned immigrants from the islands who lived in the city
of immigrants, the New York of La Guardia, DiMaggio, and Coney Island, where mothers
served oxtail soup for Sunday dinner or challah by candlelight on Friday night and
fathers yelled at the newspaper in Sicilian or Polish while boys with condoms in their
wallets and girls snapping gum became American in the streets.

On the third floor of 952 Kelly Street in the South Bronx, President Roosevelt’s portrait
hung on the living room wall, the flag and the Capitol behind him. Outside their tenement,
the parents and two children were absorbed into the vast and generalizing wash of
American institutions.

The mother was a proud member of Dubinsky’s ILGWU (three hundred thousand strong),
sewing buttons and trim on women’s suits at Ginsburg’s in the Garment District, where
the father was the shipping room foreman and there was always work, even in the Depression.
On Sundays they sat in the family pew at St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church, where their
younger child, a boy, was an acolyte in love with pageantry and incense. The boy went
from PS 39 to PS 52 to Morris High School, and by virtue of his diploma, his New York
City residence, and ten dollars, in spite of being a mediocre student he was admitted
to the City College of New York, founded in 1847 on a hill overlooking Harlem as the
Free Academy, whose first president, Horace Webster, said, “The experiment is to be
tried, whether the children of the people, the children of the whole people, can be
educated; and whether an institution of the highest grade, can be successfully controlled
by the popular will, not by the privileged few.”

And beyond the lights of the city, across the republic, stood the structures that
held up the postwar order of middle-class democracy:

General Motors, the AFL-CIO, the National Labor Relations Board, the urban boss, the
farm bloc, the public school, the research university, the county party, the Ford
Foundation, the Rotary Club, the League of Women Voters, CBS News, the Committee on
Economic Development, Social Security, the Bureau of Reclamation, the Federal Housing
Administration, the Federal-Aid Highway Act, the Marshall Plan, NATO, the Council
on Foreign Relations, the GI Bill, the U.S. Army.

The last of these became the boy’s American home. He joined ROTC his first year at
City College (he was going to be drafted anyway) and pledged the Pershing Rifles.
A uniform and discipline gave the new pledge a sense of belonging. He needed structure
to thrive. “I became a leader almost immediately,” he later wrote. “I found a selflessness
within our ranks that reminded me of the caring atmosphere within my family. Race,
color, background, income meant nothing.”

In 1958 he received his commission as a second lieutenant. The army had been integrated
for just ten years, but the most hierarchical institution in America was also the
most democratic: “Less discrimination, a truer merit system, and leveler playing fields
existed inside the gates of our military posts than in any Southern city hall or Northern
corporation.” Hard work, honesty, courage, sacrifice: the young officer practiced
the Boy Scout virtues in the sure belief that they would bring equal opportunity.

His American journey took him to South Vietnam in 1962, Birmingham in 1963, Vietnam
again in 1968.

The captain stepped on a punji stick and escaped a mortar round in the A Shau Valley.
Stateside a few months later, he was refused service at a drive-in burger joint near
Fort Benning, Georgia. The major survived a helo crash near Quang Ngai and rescued
several men. None of it upset his carefully calibrated balance.

He collected a chestful of medals and the admiration of his superiors. He refused
to be undermined by the humiliations of racism or the folly of a war in which the
fighting was done by America’s have-nots. Both offended his democratic values. “Of
the many tragedies of Vietnam, this raw class discrimination strikes me as the most
damaging to the ideal that all Americans are created equal and owe equal allegiance
to their country.” But he was building his life on that ideal, so he remained practical,
and his self-control became almost inhuman. The institutions showed their health by
lifting up a man of his qualities, and even when they went off course, their ultimate
power lay in self-correction.

And he would show anyone who doubted him.

Promoted to lieutenant colonel. Made a White House Fellow, just in time for Watergate—but
even the worst political scandal in American history proved the institutional strength
of democracy: Congress, the courts, the press, and the popular will cut out the cancer.

Battalion commander in South Korea, where he began restoring good order and discipline
to the army after Vietnam. Brigade commander at Fort Campbell. Carter administration
Pentagon. First star in 1979, age forty-two, the youngest general in the army. Fort
Carson, Fort Leavenworth. Reagan administration Pentagon, where “the military services
had been restored to a place of honor.”

In 1986, the major general sat at his desk outside the office of the secretary of
defense and placed a reluctant call on orders from the White House to transfer four
thousand antitank missiles from the army to the CIA. They were destined for Tehran:
arms, a Bible, and a cake for hostages. Iran-contra was the first blot on his résumé,
but it sent him to the Reagan White House as deputy national security adviser, detailed
to clean up the mess. “If it hadn’t been for Iran-contra, I’d still be an obscure
general somewhere. Retired, never heard of.”

Restoring the National Security Council to good order and discipline was the perfect
job for the lieutenant general. He loved to fix up old Volvos and Saabs. He was efficient,
inspiring, a master of bureaucracy, the world’s greatest staff officer. The institutions
were at the peak of power. After all, they were about to win the Cold War.