The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (52 page)

The media predicted strikes over the threatened cuts, but the unions went quietly
as they negotiated their members’ steep loss of pay and benefits. Delphi emerged from
bankruptcy in 2009 with most of its operations sold off to GM, the company that had
owned it from 1932 to 1999 (in 2009 GM was also reorganized under Chapter 11, with
a $50 billion investment from the U.S. government). Delphi’s remaining assets were
owned by a group of private investors, which gave a new name to the company that had
once been Packard Electric, then Delphi Automotive Systems, then Delphi Corporation:
it was now DLPH Holdings Corp. The hedge fund manager John Paulson, who had made almost
$4 billion by selling subprime mortgages short in 2007, unloaded 20.5 million shares
in the new entity and made a $439 million profit on a $14 million investment. By then,
the company employed fewer than twenty thousand people in the United States, out of
a global workforce of almost a hundred fifty thousand.

The factories where Tammy worked—Plant 8, Hubbard, Thomas Road—were shut down. They
soon joined the landscape of broken windows, weedy asphalt, and empty parking lots
that stretched across the Mahoning Valley. The restaurants and bars frequented by
Tammy and her coworkers lost most of their business.

Delphi was hailed as a model of cost cutting through bankruptcy.

After paying taxes on her buyout money in 2007, Tammy had eighty-two thousand dollars
left. She spent part of it helping her mother and kids, and she put part of it into
a CD that earned 3 percent. But in 2007 she hadn’t yet been hired by MVOC, and she
was thinking again about leaving Youngstown. She wanted to make a little extra on
the rest of the money in order to position herself to leave, and to receive regular
payments because she was in school. She had a relative by marriage who was a real
estate agent in the area, and who had helped Tammy and Barry finance their house on
the south side. He admired Tammy, called her a hustler—someone who knew how to survive
and didn’t get too down—and he was always asking her to come work for him (he also
had a lawn care business, a day care center, and a nonprofit that helped people coming
out of prison). Sometimes he even called her “daughter.” He offered to invest her
money in real estate. He wrote out a contract promising a 10 percent annual return
in monthly payments, and Tammy gave him her last forty-eight thousand dollars from
the buyout.

The first year went great. The checks came every month and were enough to cover her
house and car payments. When the second year began in mid-2008, with the housing market
sinking, he asked her to turn the money over for another year and negotiated the rate
down to 8 percent. By that Christmas he was paying her only 5 percent, and the payments
were arriving late. In 2009 they stopped coming.

Tammy’s mother’s health was declining, and Tammy wanted to get her out of a nursing
home into a decent house. She asked the relative to bid fifteen thousand dollars of
her investment on a house that was probably worth twice that. She won the bid, but
when he couldn’t come up with the five-thousand-dollar down payment, she knew something
was really wrong. When she demanded her money back, he said that he didn’t have it.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m going to get it together. I’m trying not to file bankruptcy,
because if I do ain’t nobody going to get paid. I’m going to rebound and then you’ll
get your money.”

She knew that he was trying. Without the payments she couldn’t keep up on her house
in Liberty and the bank was getting ready to foreclose, and somehow he gave her the
twelve hundred dollars she needed to get a loan modification. But he still couldn’t
come up with the money that she had invested with him, and she began to think that
he had been running a Ponzi scheme, using her money to pay other people, and he’d
been caught by the collapse of the market, just like Madoff at the very same time.
She began to hear stories about other people, some out in California, who had invested
with him and never got their money back, and other stories that he had transferred
mortgages to relatives using his broker’s license and refinanced without letting them
know. His employees weren’t getting paid. She confronted him and told him that she
was thinking of going to the police. The relative, who was a deacon in his church,
said, “That is not what Christians do to each other.”

She was trying to be a good Christian and do the right thing. Anyway, what would a
police report get her? She didn’t turn him in, and she told few people in the family.
Finally, he wrote her a check for part of what he owed her. When she took it to a
check cashing place, it bounced. That’s when he stopped taking her calls and disappeared.
She never heard from him again, and never saw her money again—money that she had counted
on for the lean years after Delphi, then her retirement. She was furious with herself.
She should have put the money in a safe CD with a low return, maybe set aside part
of it to experiment with the stock market. “You’re so damn stupid,” she railed, “I
don’t know why you even did that. Why did you ever trust him?” She was angrier at
herself than at him, and in spite of everything she felt a little sorry for him, because
he was ruined.

In the midst of this fiasco, Tammy lost her parents. Throughout her life, her father
had often been cutting and combative, and ever since her teens she had defied him,
but toward the end she saw a buried softness in her father that allowed her to believe
that he loved her. In September 2009 he died in his sleep of liver cancer, after leaving
the hospital and going home to be with his wife and their children and enjoy a meal
of barbecue, watermelon, grapes, and a beer.

But for Vickie it was different. Her health had been bad for years, with the disintegration
of her bones, hepatitis C, and the ravaging effects of heroin. She was depressed,
fading mentally, and Tammy was trying to figure out a way to bring her home and care
for her. Over Thanksgiving, Vickie was hospitalized at St. Elizabeth’s, where Tammy
visited her. But Tammy had surgery scheduled for December 2, with a month of recovery
afterward. She didn’t feel that she could take time off from organizing the way she
had done at Packard if someone covered for her. She spent the days before her operation
trying to catch up on work, and though they talked on the phone three times, she wasn’t
able to go see her mother again. While Tammy was in the hospital, her mother, without
telling her, asked for her own treatment to be stopped. Tammy was released from the
hospital on December 4 and went home. Two days later, her mother was taken to the
emergency room with congestive heart failure, and she died at the age of sixty-one.
“She was alone,” Tammy said. “I couldn’t make it to the hospital in time. I promised
her I’d be there with her. My mother needed me and I couldn’t be there for her.” This
thought would not leave Tammy alone.

They still had so much living to do. But Vickie had been ready to go for a long time,
even though she knew that Tammy wouldn’t let her. And after she was gone, Tammy missed
climbing into bed beside her, sitting next to her without saying anything, her hug,
her hand stroking Tammy’s hair, a comfort no one could replace, because in spite of
everything it was her mother.

For a long time afterward, Tammy questioned herself, and her work, which had kept
her from seeing her mother at the end, and God, who had filled her life with so much
struggle and taken away so many things that she loved—everything except her children.

TAMPA

At the bottom of Tampa, where the peninsula died into the bay, South Dale Mabry Highway
ended at the front gate of MacDill Air Force Base, the home of United States Central
Command. World-famous four-star generals—Tommy Franks, John Abizaid, David Petraeus—drew
up war plans for Afghanistan and Iraq there, commanded hundreds of thousands of troops
in battle, took off in their personal jets to fly around their Area of Responsibility,
committed huge strategic errors, and belatedly tried to correct them. They enjoyed
the lavish hospitality of Tampa society hostesses while shaping U.S. foreign policy
and the fate of nations across the most volatile region of the globe, from Egypt to
Pakistan, with all the authority of Roman proconsuls. After the White House and the
Pentagon, no parcel of America exercised more power during the War on Terror than
MacDill. And four blocks away lived the Hartzells.

The Hartzells were Danny and Ronale, their kids Brent and Danielle, Danny’s younger
brother Dennis, and four cats. They lived on South Dale Mabry Highway, across from
the MacDill Motel and Bay Check Cashing, in a two-bedroom apartment on the ground
floor of a complex where the neighbors dealt drugs and got mad if someone looked at
them wrong. The Hartzells regularly watched HGTV, which was devoted to real estate,
but they were too poor to flip houses, lose them in foreclosure, or end up as clients
of Matt Weidner. They didn’t even have a car, which left them at the mercy of Hillsborough
Area Regional Transit buses. Danny never made more than twenty thousand a year, and
the only time they had spare money was at tax time—one year they spent their Earned
Income Tax Credit on a computer, the next on a black vinyl armchair and sofa, then
on a cheap flat-screen TV. They were estranged from their surviving relatives, most
of whom were heavy drinkers. They had few friends, and no church (though they were
Christian) or union (though they were working class) or block association (though
they wished the area was safe enough for the kids to go trick-or-treating). They hardly
gave a thought to politics. What they had was one another.

In 2008, when the recession hit Tampa, Danny was laid off from his ten-dollar-an-hour
job at a small factory near the base called Master Packaging, which made plastic snack
food bags. The worst thing about it was that his supervisor, who had gone to high
school with Danny, made someone else give him the news. Danny brought the pink slip
home and showed it to Ronale, and she said, “What are we going to do now?” That was
in March. Danny spent the rest of the year searching for a job. He applied at Home
Depot, Sam’s Club, Publix, and sixty other places, taking long bus rides to interviews,
but he was always the twenty-fifth applicant for one opening. He was in his late thirties,
short, with a pot belly on him, a wispy goatee, and a nearly hairless head under his
Steelers cap. He was missing a bunch of teeth and spoke in a loud hoarse voice because
of deafness in one ear. He classified himself as a “blue-collar-type guy,” not a “behind-the-counter-take-your-money-can-I-help-you-find-your-dress-size-type
guy,” but the only jobs left were in retail, and he lacked the right look and manner.

One evening just after Christmas, the family sat around their cramped living room,
a teen game show on TV, the kids holding hands on the gray carpet, which had seen
better days. Brent, who was twelve and small for his age, and Danielle, who was nine,
still believed in Santa, had no trouble doing so because they didn’t see how their
parents could afford presents. In fact, Danny and Ronale had depended on charity for
Christmas this year. Danny didn’t like having to do that—other people out there were
in worse shape than they were—and he hated not being able to put Danielle in dance
class or Brent in soccer. He thanked God every day for Ronale, but, to be honest,
he was actually starting to lose heart. “Why do all these people out there view me
as such a bad person? They don’t know me, they don’t know my work history, they won’t
give me a chance. I start to wonder, what’s wrong with me? You work for what you have,
that’s all anyone can do, and then all of a sudden the economy gets so bad and instead
of thirty people looking for work there’s three thousand.”

And yet somehow Danny blamed himself. He had dropped out of high school his senior
year and now regretted it deeply, and he felt that the world was singling him out
for some terrible payback, that this trouble must have been his fault, that the failure
was his alone and he had no right to anyone’s help. From the bankers on Wall Street
to the homeowners in Weidner’s office, no one else seemed to take this view of themselves.

Danny came from outside Pittsburgh. His father, an alcoholic, had been a maintenance
man for the railroad, then the power company, then a local college, before moving
the family to Tampa when Danny was around twelve and the steel mills were closing
in the early eighties. He drank even harder in Florida. He taught Danny to drive defensively
and love the Steelers, but otherwise no one kept after Danny to brush his teeth or
do much of anything else.

Ronale had it far worse. She was born in Tampa. Both her parents were drunks, her
mother a spiteful woman with an evil look in her eyes. They split up when Ronale was
seven, and she was dragged around Florida and North Carolina by her mom (who drank
rubbing alcohol if she couldn’t find booze and shacked up with any man who would have
her), sometimes living in their car, missing a lot of school, stealing Reese’s cups
because her mother was too strung out and selfish to buy her food if Ronale said,
“Mommy, I’m hungry.” From an early age the idea stuck in Ronale’s head that she’d
never be that type of parent.

When Danny was in tenth grade and Ronale in ninth, they lived next door to each other
in South Tampa, near the base. Danny’s older brother, Doug, went after Ronale, and
out of sheer jealousy Danny would barge into the room whenever they started to make
out. He’d walk past Ronale on the sidewalk, look her in the eye, and say “Bitch,”
and she’d answer “You’re such an asshole,” and when they found out that they liked
talking to each other it was the beginning of lifelong love. Ronale dropped out of
high school earlier than Danny—she was sick of being bullied. “Quite a few people
literally wanted to kill me,” Ronale said. “Backed into corners and no one to help
me and stuff, and everything.” She went to work in a Laundromat, and he got a job
as a grinder at a welding shop in St. Petersburg. When she became pregnant with Brent
at twenty-two, in 1995, they moved into a trailer together. In 1999, with Danielle
on the way, they married.