The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

In early 2008, just over a year after she lost her job, Tammy agreed to meet Kirk Noden for coffee. Noden was a professional organizer who had worked in Chicago and London, using the Saul Alinsky model of gathering up a group and marching to city hall to make noise and getting the powers that be to open coffers and shake loose resources. In Youngstown, which was near where he grew up, he realized this would not work because Youngstown had no resources to spare, lacking both industry and tax base. He consulted with the Wean Foundation, an organization funded by old steel money but committed to rebuilding the valley rather than reviving the past. In 2007, Wean and Noden formed the Mahoning Valley Organizing Collaborative (MVOC) to fight the cause and effects of the decline in Ohio. They wanted to organize block by block and would need local organizers. The president of Wean told Noden about Tammy, who had been studying sociology at Youngstown State and leading workshops for single mothers in an internship funded by the Wean Foundation.

Tammy was skeptical of a job at a new organization. Noden sold her on it by telling her that her job would be to teach other people to hold the powerful accountable and asking what made her angry. She told him she was angry that her children all had to move away to find work and that Granny had worked too hard to see her neighborhood look like it did. Noden noted that she had a kind of raw power and that she knew the Black community in Youngstown because it was her community. The formal interview took place at a Unitarian church, which scared Tammy. She had never heard of that faith and thought she was entering a church for devil worshippers. But she was excited about the work too and felt that God had opened a door for her.

Noden told her to recruit 75 people to attend a meeting or organize some kind of an action. She did not want to work on the east side as Noden had assumed she would, because she knew too many people there, so she began organizing on the north side. She went door to door hoping to recruit local people she could empower to find their own voices and gain their own agency. On one street, she heard a Steeler fan complaining about how she couldn’t afford health insurance. Tammy asked her about her concerns and then asked if she could be a leader for her community. The woman, Hattie, Black and in her fifties, had been head of her union in a pillow factory until she was forced out for causing trouble with management. Her granddaughter had been shot while leaving a party at 16 years old, and Hattie had turned one of the vacant lots on her block into a cut flower garden in the granddaughter’s memory. Miss Hattie had lost her power base as a leader when she lost her job, and she agreed to join Tammy, who became her role model.

MVOC’s first big project was to map Youngstown and find which houses were occupied. It turned out that two-fifths of all the parcels in Youngstown were vacant, with roughly a quarter of them owned by random people in far-flung places. The vacancies attracted crime and other problems. MVOC’s map became the only usable model for the city. In 2005, the city had created a rational plan to deal with the fact that the city had shrunk called the 2010 Plan. People talked of public gardens and green spaces, and the 2010 Plan attracted praise from the national media during an era when the term “shrinking cities” was coming into vogue to refer to cities like Detroit. But the 2010 Plan was never implemented because it meant that some people would have to move, and older Black homeowners were especially unwilling to give up their history. Tammy focused on actions she could organize, including an event that called out a slumlord on the east side. Tammy was learning that she had been wrong to blame individuals alone for failing to help themselves. Now she recognized that individuals suffered the problems of a community that experienced failing schools, lost jobs, and generational poverty.

Tammy had always voted for Democrats because Granny had told her to, and she was confused when other blue collar workers at Packard—White women especially—voted for Bush because of religion. Mostly, though, she thought politicians were corrupt, as so many in Youngstown had been. One of her friends from Packard got her interested in Barack Obama, and they went to hear him speak at Youngstown State in February. She had never seen such excitement about an election, and she even reconnected with her dad over Obama, although both were sick of hearing other Black voters assume he would be assassinated.

The MVOC offices threw an election party, and Tammy could not shake her sense of disbelief when Obama won. She had always taught her kids to be proud of being Black and celebrating Black history, but now there was something from Black history that was part of all American history.

Obama was the first Democrat Dean ever voted for. He was impressed that Obama came to Martinsville, Virginia and talked about a new economy based on green energy. In 2008, the rest of the company started to catch up to the Piedmont, with millions losing their jobs after the Wall Street collapse in September. Obama promised what he called “a new era of responsibility” in January of 2009, the worst month in decades with banks like Wachovia going under and GM on the verge of dying too. Dean thought America was ready for a radical change. Electing a Black man as president was just the first of many changes to come.

Dean’s congresswoman in North Carolina’s Fifth District was a Republican in her late sixties who seemed like a relic of the past. Across the border in Virginia, a Democrat named Tom Perriello beat the incumbent Republican by 745 votes. It was one of the biggest upsets of the year, and Perriello seemed to represent something of a modern-day William Jennings Bryan. He talked about God and guns, but he denounced the ways corporations were dominating Washington. Perriello was Dean’s kind of politician, and he represented the district where Red Birch Energy was located. One of the first things Perriello recognized the Piedmont was full of new economic opportunities not rooted in the past. These businesses created jobs and kept money in the community, and Perriello wanted to highlight them

Dean had fine-tuned a pitch and PowerPoint presentation that varied depending on his audiences. He believed as passionately in what he was selling as a new convert to religion and made sure he did not cross the thin line that existed between a con man and an entrepreneur. He felt biodiesel was the way into the future and out of the current economic disaster. In February of 2009, he ran into Congressman Perriello at a Starbucks in Richmond and invited the congressman to visit his company. Meeting Dean confirmed to Perriello that America’s elites did not have answers for the working or middle classes anymore and that new ideas would come from obscure people in unknown places. Perriello and the governor of Virginia visited Red Birch.

Against the wishes of his constituents who had heard the bill would kill coal jobs or raise utility costs, Perriello had voted for the Obama administration’s energy bill, which was known as “cap and trade” or “the climate change bill.” Because of Perriello, Dean was invited to Washington to participate in a conversation about the nation’s energy future. He asked the event’s last speaker, Van Jones, the administration’s green-jobs czar, about the administration’s thoughts on peak oil. Jones did not have an answer. Still, Dean was sorry when a couple weeks later, Jones had to resign after an attack by conservative media personalities tied him to extreme views on 9/11 and foul language used to describe congressional Republicans.

Red Birch was looking for stimulus money when its competitive advantage dissipated as oil prices dropped below $4 a gallon. The company had to cancel orders it had made with local farmers. Dean and Gary realized they needed to adapt into a business model that used canola oil twice: first converting feedstock into food-grade cooking oil to sell to restaurants and then collecting 70 percent of it back as waste to be converted into biodiesel. But converting their machinery for that project required a half million dollars and a new micro turbine. In January 2010, Perriello came to an event in Martinsville to announce that $750,000 of federal stimulus money would be awarded to Red Birch. At the event, Perriello talked about how both parties had favored big corporations and that politicians came to places like Martinsville to take photos of jobs of the past but that an industrial revolution was starting and green jobs would be the path to the region’s future. The event got media attention, and reporters flocked to interview Dean and Gary. It was the high-water mark for the company.

The company had financial problems, the most pressing of which was Dean’s truck stop, Red Birch’s number one customer. In October 2009, Dean had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which allowed him to keep it open and reorganize the debt. Compounding the problem, the stimulus money took months to arrive and attracted the attention of county officials who sought $85,000 in back taxes Dean owed on the truck stop. In 2008, when the future looked bright, the closed-loop system Red Birch had designed seemed like a good one, but in 2010, it was clear the interests of the truck stop were opposed to those of Red Birch Energy. In September, Dean was ordered to declare Chapter 7 bankruptcy for the truck stop. It was sold off to Wilco Hess which tore down any remnants of Dean’s business, even switching from biodiesel to the regular number 2 diesel that had been cut off after Katrina. Dean was then indicted by a county grand jury for failure to turn over thousands of dollars in taxes.

He had always feared two things: poverty and the power of government. He had spent one night in jail in 2007 for failing to pay alimony to an ex-wife, and he did not want Ryan to see him led to jail again. Dean retreated into his imagination of the past and future, ignoring calls and pressing matters. That year ended up being one of the worst years of his life, but he would not give up like the gold prospector Napoleon Hill described who gave up digging just three feet short of hitting the mother lode.

Shawn Corey Carter was born in the Marcy Houses project in Brooklyn in 1969 to Gloria Carter, a clerk, Adnis Reeves, a preacher’s son. The 70s were actually not that bad in Marcy, with kids daring each other to tip over junkies and playing football in fields strewn with glass. He liked the funk and soul records his parents played and, after seeing a kid he never knew rapping in 1978, became obsessed with rhyming. He took to writing down rhymes all the time, and then delighted in recording them with an older boy named Jaz-O. Kids started calling him Jazzy. He was good at school, but it never challenged him. In sixth grade, he first realized he was poor after visiting a teacher’s apartment on a field trip.

Crack entered Marcy in 1985, just a few years after rap. Shawn Carter saw an opening, getting into drug dealing at age 15. He helped his mom with the bills and bought nice clothes for himself. He was all business. He got cheaper product from the Peruvians in Washington Heights and hurt the local competition. Once, he was arrested but not charged, losing only his stash. His dream was to be Scarface, and he got addicted to the rush of the life. Kids who went to work at McDonald’s were suckers who tried to play by the rules, losers who didn’t have a dream. He didn’t touch drugs harder than weed, always staying focused on the money.

He stuck with rap too, but it looked like a pay cut to him, especially after seeing EMI cut Jaz-O loose after his first single failed. Shawn switched over to Big Daddy Kane, a famous Brooklyn rapper with a bus tour. Shawn rapped under the moniker Jay-Z and blew audiences away with his cleverness, speed, and confidence. When the tour ended, he went back to hustling.

His crew expanded their business down to Maryland and Washington, moving a kilo of cocaine a week. In 1994, a rival in Maryland shot three times at him but missed. It was a close call, and he decided to try rapping one more time. A Brooklyn producer connected him with a Harlem promoter named Damon Dash who was impressed by Jay’s Air Force 1 sneakers. They couldn’t find a record contract, so they started their own label, Roc-A-Fella. In 1996, Jay-Z released Reasonable Doubt using samples from the records his parents had loved, and the album was big. It landed Jay-Z a distribution deal. Then, his voice, the one America had tried to suppress, was in the bedrooms of kids throughout America. They learned from him that the game was fixed and that there could be shortcuts with big payoffs, just like the ones Shawn Carter had made.

Music was just another hustle. He dumbed down his lyrics to sell more records, especially after realizing young White people could relate to the basic rap story of why the rapper is doper than the listener. That audience made him rich. He started a clothing line that brought in hundreds of millions of dollars more than the music company did, his own vodka, his own cologne, even his own trademarked shade of blue. He retired from rapping in 2003 at Madison Square Garden, then became president of Def Jam, the biggest hip-hop label, cutting his old partner Damon Dash out of the business. The mainstream embraced rap, just as rap had copied the mainstream. He wasn’t a sellout, since selfishness was rational given his background. He just played the game better.

He did what all top celebrities did and became a lifestyle brand. He got sued by employees for back wages, made the Forbes 400 list, hung out with presidents, and married a singer as big as he was, even buying her an island for her birthday. Success was about nothing besides success itself. When he bought a piece of the Nets and moved the team to Brooklyn, he opened the arena with a concert. He told the audience not to pay attention to how small his slice of the team was. What mattered was the fact that he, a poor Black kid from the Marcy Homes a few minutes away, owned a piece of the arena. That was the accomplishment. At points in his life, he thought he was getting away with murder.

Foreclosures came by the thousands. Notices came to abandoned houses, houses with young children, mostly empty motels, and houses owned by investment entities with no fixes address. The foreclosures started as complaints from companies with opaque names implying trustees and custodians of multiple banks, and they were written by attorneys at foreclosure mill firms such as the Florida Default Group or the law offices of David J. Stern. They were processed as summonses by various process servers or sometimes the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office, and those summonses were personally served or nailed to the door of the houses owned by actual people or often companies with names such as LSC Investor, LLC or even John Doe. This process set in motion a series of lawsuits in the downtown Tampa courthouse. The state as a whole had a backlog of a half million foreclosure cases, and judges were called out of retirement to oversee them. A typical judge handled 3,000 cases at a time, usually handling around 120 per day. Most of the cases were unopposed, with only the bank’s lawyer, usually someone from one of the foreclosure mills, appearing. If there was nothing unusual about the case, the judge set a date for a foreclosure auction elsewhere in the courthouse.

In the summer of 2010, a woman in her sixties named Sylvia Landis started to appear frequently. She was a civilian who simply had an outside interest in how the courts were handling all the foreclosures. Originally from Pennsylvania, she had worked her way up to the middle class as a trainer for the LAPD. In 1999, she began to invest in real estate after attending a seminar hosted by Marshall Reddick who preached about how real estate could wipe out poverty in the middle classes. At one time or another, Sylvia owned five properties. She developed ovarian cancer in 2004 and had to retire early. In 2008, she had to be hospitalized and still owed Bank of America $157,500 on one house in Cape Coral, which was at the epicenter of the housing crisis. She found a buyer for less than it was worth, but she wanted to cut her losses, and that’s when she found out how the banks operated. She couldn’t get anyone on the phone at Bank of America and figured the bank was padding her costs. No one knew the term “robo-signing” yet, but she figured out that the documents she received about the transfer of her loan from Countrywide to Bank of America were not genuine. Instead, they were computer copies with awkward signatures and erroneous dates. Even after making the short sale of her house, she received a foreclosure notice from the bank’s firm, David J. Stern. It took four months to straighten out the bank’s mistake.

She went from having a million dollars in assets to zero. Some of the money had gone to another investment guru which didn’t pan out. In LA, some were already filing a class action against Marshall Reddick. Still, Sylvia, despite her failings, was not ashamed of trying to invest in real estate even if investors like her were now being denigrated nationally as the causes of the mortgage crisis. She saw herself as what a New York Times columnist dubbed “the formerly middle class.” She was mostly apolitical and trusting of authority but found herself changed.

She wanted to be in the courtroom to see how the justice system worked. Members of the court were leery of her presence at first, but there was no rule against public observance. At the hearings, she noticed that the original mortgage documents were often missing from the file and that sometimes there simply was no file. She typed up the names of the cases she saw and sent it to a network of Florida attorneys working in foreclosure defense. Sylvia had started a middle-class movement of concerned citizens, and this movement led her to Matt Weidner.

Weidner was in his late-30s and ran a storefront law office between a bikini bar and another bar. Divorced, he had left a house with a big mortgage and knew the fall was coming when he started seeing Hummers in his subdivision. Growing up, he was a Republican who believed in institutions. His uncle was director of the Florida Republican Party, and he loved Reagan and later Newt Gingrich. Through 2009, he assumed the government would come to the aid of the foreclosed, offering some sort of buyout package to banks that would allow people to keep their home, but no such bailout for homeowners ever came. He told clients that he never lost a foreclosure case, which was true, because most of the time when anyone offered any resistance at all to the banks, their cases would crumble. The paperwork usually had a fraudulent signature or some other abnormality, fraud that went unnoticed when the economy was booming but that proved the entire mortgage industry was a hoax when the crisis hit. Basically, Wall Street had traded the mortgages so many times that it was impossible for one institution to clearly establish a right to someone’s home. Weidner made this point to judges who usually offered stays on foreclosure sales but never would dismiss the case since, after all, his clients still owed money to someone.

For example, one of Weidner’s clients, Jack Hamersma, owed $600,000 on two loans on his house in St. Petersburg, a house worth maybe half that. As with many of his clients, Jack had lost his job, then had the foreclosure motion on his house, and then had health problems brought on by the stress and the loss of income. In Jack’s case, he had three types of cancer. Weidner was fighting for him, but the fight with the banks took years. Jack could not get aid from the government for his house, and he was getting fed up with the very idea of debt. Weidner wondered why banks didn’t aggressively pursue Jack’s house and then realized it was all random. Weidner also couldn’t understand why homeowners across the country didn’t unite to form a mass movement, but Jack suggested that it was because the whole ordeal cuts the debtors off from everything else in their lives and leaves them hopeless. As the fight dragged on, Jack lived in his home, where he died.

Weidner was always on edge because of what he knew about America’s decline and the kleptocracy run by both political parties. He kept an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle next to his bed, but it didn’t make him feel safe. He saw the hordes of collectors at gun shows who looked like they were starting militias. After Obama’s election, there was a run on ammunition. Weidner felt the future was civil unrest and chaos. He kept a small victory garden in the courtyard of his condo, thinking the only answer was for Americans to become farmers again and grow their own crops. He began a blog in 2009 and became a leader in the foreclosure defense movement that had been started by a Jacksonville legal aid lawyer who introduced Weidner to Sylvia Landis. He was reprimanded by courts for disrupting procedures and sued by lenders he accused of signing false mortgages or “robo-signing,” a term the press credited him with coining. Weidner liked talking to reporters, too, as the press was the only American institution he still trusted, and he took solace in the fact that his blog and his legal efforts were costing the banks millions.

One day, Weidner got a call from Usha Patel who told him Business Loan Express was trying to take back her Comfort Inn. He got tangentially involved in the case because he was impressed by her fervent belief in the American Dream and her tenacity. Business Loan Express was rebranded as Ciena and was being sued by the Justice Department for fraudulent loan practices. Having declared bankruptcy, Ciena was searching for ways it could pay off its creditors and went after people like Usha who owed Ciena money. Usha could not pay off the debt and declared Chapter 11 protection for her company. The motel was granted a stay, but everything was complicated further when she found out she was no longer fighting Ciena but HSBC, the second-largest bank in the world. Suddenly, documents were filed showing that her mortgage was assigned to HSBC, but the documents lacked a notary seal, witnesses, and dates. It also showed suspicious signatures. Usha fought for two years, studying property law and hiring four lawyers (including Weidner). Her family sustained her, as immigrant families often do (and in contrast to the families of Jack Hamersma or Sylvia Landis). Two days before she was supposed to go to trial, HSBC, worried it might lose the case, agreed to settle and work out a payment plan with her. Usha came out of the ordeal convinced that justice was only for the rich, not people like her, but she still saw a bright future for her children and maybe even herself.