9
Street roots
Nov. 7, 2014
DIVIDED STATES, from page 8
follow the rules, which is for suckers, ‘cause
the game seems rigged. If the game seems
rigged, why not deal crack? I mean, why not
do what Jay Z did? (Editor’s x. ote: As a teen,
Jay Z sold crack on Brooklyn streets while
memorizing his own rap lyrics.) So there’s
kind of a moral temptation when you see
people becoming so successful and flaunting
it and almost gloating over i t I think Jay Z,
unlike Oprah, he isn’t really saying you can
do i t too. Jay Z’s message, tom e, from his
music, is more: I’ll do it so you don’t have
to.« It’s a little more cruel.
Jay Z comes from the projects, but Robert
Rubin, who’s a financier and was Clinton’s
treasury secretary, is another of the well-
known figures in the book. He thinks of
himself as a good man and cares about
social issues and justice and all th a t but
really, he’s part of Wall Street. And during
those years, Wall Street became a form of
organized crime. It wasn’t helping the
country: It was helping itself. He became
part of that and didn’t really want to see it
because he had a higher idea of himself.
So there’s different ways in which these
successful characters project the message
to the 99 percent.
R.R.: I t seems beguiling that people
wouldn’t be able to see it. I mean, there was
Occupy, talking about the 99 percent versus
the 1 percent, so it seems like income
inequality is something we know about.
G.P.: Oh, yeah. It’s discussed all the time.
So the question is: Why doesn’t anything
change? It’s a big, big subject, and
politicians have sort of caught' on to i t
Obama talked about it at different times,
Elizabeth Warren talks about i t It’s just very
hard to address — and it also is not a subject
that the people who fund politicians really
want to hear about So it may be something
to talk about but not too boldly. I don’t
know. There’s a lot to say about why nothing
changes on that front,'but the fact is nothing
changes. In fact it got worse with the
financial crisis and the recession.
R.R.: One o f the people you profile in this
book is Tammy Thomas, and she’s from
Youngstown, Ohio. Could you talk about
Youngstown and the changes there?
G.P.: Here, 1978 really is a crucial year.
That was the year the first big steel mill,
Youngstown Sheet and Tube, closed down,
and it happened like that (he snaps fingers).
The board of directors — it had out-of-town
ownership — met at the Pittsburgh Airport.
They were flying in from Chicago and from
Tampa and San Francisco. And they voted to
close (the steel mill): It was too big a money
loser, and it would have taken too big an
investment to turn it around. So it was kind
of a canary in the coal mine. In the next five
years, every major steel plant in Youngstown
closed. It was like a house of cards; it just all
collapsed. Fifty thousand jobs in a very
small area disappeared.
Tammy Thomas was a teenager at that
point, so she basically came of age in a city
that had lost its whole foundation. And, you
know, the odds were already against her:
Her mother was a heroin addict; she was -
raised by her great-grandmother; she didn’t
know her father very well when she was a
girl, and jobs were very few and far between.
The ’80s and ’90s were a disaster for
Youngstown: epidemics of arson, gangs. So
Tammy had three children, and the odds of
being able to raise those kids in Youngstown
and keep them in tact, body and soul, were
so slim - and she did i t She got a job on an
assembly line in one of the last factories still
open, wiring harnesses for GM engines.
And she did that for 20 years. Her kids all
graduated from high school, and they all left
Youngstown and didn’t come back She ,
would say to me over and over, “I just did
what I was supposed to do.” Which seems
so simple, but who does that? So she’s
remarkable. Not just a survivor but I’d say a
great success.
y
Then the inevitable happened, and Delphi
Auto Parts, her employer, decided to get out
of its American businesses. At 40, 41,
Tammy suddenly had nothing, her pension
was cut in half. And instead of folding the
tent, she became a community organizer,
and that is what she was doing when I met
her.
R.R.: There’s also someone else that had
determination and that’s Usha Patel.
G.P.: Yeah. A big part of the book takes
place in Tampa, Fla., because Tampa is
ground zero of the housing boom and
housing bust, this economy of housing as a
disposable commodity. People own five or
six of them, constantly flipping them,
making a living investing in property, which,
like most gambling, ends up going badly.
Usha Patel was an immigrant from India
who scraped together savings from working
two or three jobs around Tampa to buy her
piece of the American Dream, which was a
Comfort Inn, so she became a motel owner.
That was going great, and she had a big z
loan, one from the Small Business
Administration, one from a bank. That loan,
as with all of these loans, started changing
hands and getting sliced up and sold off to
different investors, until no one really knows
R.R.: So here we have these decades of
unraveling. How do you get it back on the
spool?
G.P.: I don’t think there’s a set of
instructions. I think it just takes a
tremendous amount of hard work,
organizing, repeating things over and over
again. I mean, it took a long time for the
right wing to convince large parts of the
country that they didn’t need the
government, that government was negative
and that if you just turn everyone loose,
then we would all do well. I think reversing
Journalist George Packer is known fo r writing about U.S. foreign policy in The New Yorker.
His latest book, “The Unwinding: A n Inner History o f the New America,’’.covers the history of
that and reminding people that we actually
America from 1978 to 2012. The book won last year’s N ational Book Award for Nonfiction.
do need institutions that work, starting with
government, that takes a long time as well.
Seattle’s a good example. Campaign
toxic politics that we live with. From
who the owner of the note is. When the
finance reform is a big issue here in
entertainment, Oprah Winfrey: the rags-to-
housing bust came, her motel was a victim
Washington, and so is the minimum wage.
riches story, which is a powerful American
of it: She started having 80 percent vacancy,
To me, right there, those two issues are at
story, but also the faith that she offers to
and suddenly in comes a whole new bank,
the heart of a lot of what we’re talking
other people, that if your mind is in tune
HSBC, demanding the motel back. She had
about And if those two issues can take hold
with the hidden powers of the universe, you
no idea that HSBC had the note.
in other communities around the country
might
end
up
with
She fought them
and begin to be enacted... It’ll never go back
nine houses as well.
and unlike all the
to the way it was when I was a kid or when
From business, Sam
other people in the
you were a kid. And there were a lot of
Walton, because I
book, Usha Patel had " I t 'l l newer go back to the
things wrong with the country when we
think Walmart is the
an extended family
were both kids, as you well know. Some
way It .was when X was a hid
representative
from India, across
things are better.
corporation of this
three continents, and or when yon were a M d . Änd
I’d say we’re more free. We’re more
era
of
inequality,
there were a lo t ©I things
they supported her
tolerant
but we’re less fair. I don’t want to
cheap goods, low
while she fought this
wrong w ith the country when wages.
see us become less tolerant, but I want us
case to a draw. So
to become more fair. Issues like the ones I
we were both kids, as- yon
essentially, she
R.R.: Oprah’s so
• just named are good wayp into th a t
w
e
ll
know
.
Borne
things
are
survived, kept the
fascinating: She’s a
better. I'd say we're more
motel but lost all her
black woman and a
R.R.: Do you think that becoming more fair
money to the lawyers free. We're more tolerant but
billionaire.
is a groundup movement?
and is still running it,
we're less fa ir."
G.P.: I think she’s
G.P.: I do. I mean, nothing happens in
as far as I know — but
the richest woman on . Washington anymore. It’s broken, it’s
always struggling to
earth. She’s huge.
paralyzed. I used to think it would come
stay above water. It
The first sentence of
from good people elected to high office. I
was interesting to me
that chapter is “She was so big that she
that, as the one immigrant, she was the one
don’t want to give up on that because I don’t
owned the letter Ó.” (laughs) You know, she
who had people to support her. All the
want to give up on democracy, but I’m
wrote an autobiography that she then
native-born American characters, they were
pretty realistic about the chances of reforms
suppressed before it was published, which is
kind of doing it on their own, which I think
coming from there. I also don’t think Silicon
too bad, because I depended a lot On what
is true of a lot of people in the country
Valley is a place to look to. A lot of people
they’ve written about themselves for these
today.
think that’s where exciting ideas for a new
chapters. I wouldn’t have been able to get
economy are going to come from. I think
interviews
with
most
of
them,
and
it
would
R.R.: Interspersed with people like Usha
Silicon Valley has shown its color, and it’s
have not borne much fruit. But I use their
Patel and Tammy Thomas are short profiles of
essentially —
own language, to kind of get inside the
people like Oprah Winfrey and Jay Z. Why did
you decide to do that?
G.P.: Because I felt that to understand
American life in this generation, which was
my absurdly ambitious project, you had to
see life at the top, too, because we live in a
celebrity culture. Celebrities are our
household gods. They shape the language,
the way we think, and they offer this mirage
of “I can make it, so can you.” That’s
certainly Oprah’s sort of not-so-subtle
message.
I wanted to choose celebrities from
different walks of life, so from politics, I
chose Newt Gingrich because I think,
maybe more than anyone else, he’s
poisoned the atmosphere. He’s created the
sentences they use. So Oprah’s is that
cascading excitement of things are getting
better and better. Sam Walton, it’s kind of a
fake, folksy, home-spun language.
We associate or identify with and kind of
almost put our hopes into the hands of
celebrities and millionaires and billionaires,
at times when the normal, ordinary path to
success doesn’t seem to work. So to put on
a McDonald’s uniform? Jay Z has a line in
his autobiography about how when he .was
young, he thought, How could you do that?
I’m gonna do something else that’s gonna
work a lot faster and a lot better. And in a
way, the message is: It’s better to cut
comers, cut the line, break the law, do it
your own way and get to the top than to
R.R.: Green.
G.P.: So I think people like the characters
in my book are where I find hope. And I
don’t want to exaggerate it, because they’re
all up against huge odds and none of them
are thriving. But the fact that they haven’t
given up is inspiring.
We know there are many more of them
so, yes, I think it will come from obscure
people in out-of-the-way places, and it will be
very slow and long. But that’s what it takes.
It takes a stick-with-it-ness, which is
something Americans have.
Reprinted from Street Roots’ sister paper,
Real Change, Seattle, Wash.