The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

Headlines and broken quotations report that the income gap has widened while the Tea Party is lighting a fuse for rebellion on the right. A tweet by John McCain at Snooki is quoted, while another source notes that banks are preparing for big bonuses and the public’s anger. Headlines reveal that the health bill is signed and that China replaces Japan as world’s second largest economy. A conservative commentator accuses Obama of not identifying with America but instead with his father in Kenya. More headlines make note of the Kardashians, Republicans take control of the House, and the jobless only have desperation. Lyrics from a song by the National describe owing money to the money already owed.

At three weeks old in February 1969, Andrew was adopted to a Jewish steakhouse owner and his banker wife, Gerald and Arlene Breitbart, in Los Angeles. In those days, Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in America, and his nightly news show was watched by one in six households. When Andrew was two, The New York Times and The Washington Post defied the Nixon administration when they published the Pentagon Papers, and a year later, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein started investigating Watergate. This was the golden age of the Old Media. The Breitbarts were upper-middle-class Republicans who lived in rich, liberal Brentwood. Andrew was always more interested in Hollywood celebrities and New Wave music than politics, though. When he was 11, the Cable News Network started broadcasting, and two years later, Crossfire and The McLaughlin Group introduced yelling talking heads into news analysis. Still, Andrew ignored news, preferring to act as the class clown at a private Brentwood School and live the life of a self-described Gen-X slacker.

In 1987, the same year the FCC voted unanimously to repeal the Fairness Doctrine, a 1949 rule that required broadcasters on the public airwaves to present important issues honestly and equitably, paving the way for Rush Limbaugh to syndicate his show nationally, Breitbart entered Tulane. There, he was forced to learn the harmful doctrines of the American Studies professors who made him read foreign philosophers instead of American classics, but he was too drunk most of the time to become indoctrinated to critical theory. After graduation, his parents cut off his allowance, and he started working as a waiter near Venice, where he found hard work rewarding.

In the fall of 1991, he watched the Clarence Thomas hearings expecting to side with Anita Hill. But he was outraged that porn rentals and a stray comment about a pubic hair seemed to be used to destroy a man simply because he was conservative and Black. Worse, journalists who were supposed to be neutral were leading the attacks. He knew he would never forgive the mainstream media. In 1992, his girlfriend’s father told him to give Rush Limbaugh a try. During the 1992 election, Breitbart was converted by Limbaugh’s ability to break a news story down humorously and clearly, and he felt he was finally understanding the hidden structures of the world. That same year, a friend told him that Breitbart’s future was the internet.

In 1994, Breitbart spent hours trying to hook up a modem to the internet, but once he did, he was blown away by the world he found there, a place beyond the media complex where anyone could say or be whatever they wanted. Then, Breitbart found the Drudge Report, a one-man news digest, that was covering Clinton sex scandals the mainstream media ignored. Breitbart knew what he wanted to do with his life, feeling the internet had saved him from the cynical irony of the era. He felt the internet gave him the power to expose the corruption of the nation and the Complex. He got in touch with the site’s founder, Matt Drudge.

The internet and conservative movement were one in the same in Breitbart’s brain, and he realized the best way to fight for conservative beliefs was through popular culture. For the next eight years, Breitbart and Drudge worked together. Their biggest success was exposing a Clinton friend’s lies about his war record, an exposure that resulted in his getting disinterred from Arlington National Cemetery. They were beating the Old Media which was diminishing after some notable scandals. Jayson Blair had fabricated stories in The New York Times, and Dan Rather had broadcast some false documents on CBS. Critics on both the right and left screamed at any sign of bias, and the media itself was turning to infotainment and opinion-based journalism until no one trusted the press anymore, including the press itself.

In 2005, the same year Rather was dropped from CBS and newspapers like The Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times cut the sizes of their papers and their staffs, Breitbart launched Breitbart.com, a news aggregator and forum. At media parties in New York, Breitbart would show up, drink their free drinks, and denounce the media to their faces. He told them the American people were now in control of the story.

The pivotal moment for Breitbart was in August 2009, the same year the Chicago Tribune and The Washington Post closed down bureaus beyond their home cities. James O’Keefe, a young citizen journalist, entered Breitbart’s office with a batch of videos in which he and another citizen journalist named Hannah Giles posed as a pimp and prostitute at the offices of ACORN, a national left-wing organization in Baltimore, and got low-level staffers there to give them advice on how to best establish their business. Breitbart instantly knew to leak the videos one by one on a friendly network like Fox News. The target was the mainstream media, and the poor homeowners ACORN protected from predatory lenders were collateral damage? ACORN folded a few months later, and Breitbart became a Tea Party hero and the subject of countless mainstream media profiles.

In 2010, he was everywhere: the Tea Party Convention, the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, social media. In 2011, he scored his biggest coup when he published a selfie taken by Congressman Anthony Weiner of his erect penis.

Then, on March 1, 2012, in Brentwood, Andrew Breitbart died of heart failure at 43.

In early 2010, Mike Van Sickler was taken off the housing beat to cover St. Petersburg’s city hall. In June, Sonny Kim was indicted and pleaded guilty to fraud and money laundering. Months went by, and no more arrests were made. It was the same in Washington and New York, where none of the big banks had criminal charges brought against them.

For the Tampa area, 2010 was the lowest point, with more than 12 percent unemployment and with middle-class people showing up at crisis centers and social service offices. Families of four were sleeping in cars, and radio ads for gold and silver warned of collapsing markets and hyperinflation. No one seemed to have solutions beyond merely waiting for the housing market to come back, which supposedly would be around 2015. The county commission tried to kick the growth machine back up by cutting regulations and reducing the impact fees for developers again to no avail. There was one idea that excited some in Tampa: light rail. Tampa was the only big, growing Sun Belt city that did not have a commuter rail system, even though there was a plan for a system there; it just had been blocked from reaching the ballot by the Hillsborough County Commission.

In 2010, that changed, with Mark Sharpe, the Republican county commissioner, throwing his weight behind the plan and arguing that it would bring economic development and finally make Tampa the great city it wanted to be. Sharpe was a conservative in the mold of Newt Gingrich, but he was appalled at how narrow and extremist the Republican Party had become by 2010. He now aspired to be a John McCain-like reformer, and he recognized that the growth machine had made some mistakes. Light rail looked like streetcars and was cheaper and slower than regular rail or subways. The plan called for 46 miles of track that would go from the airport to downtown Tampa and over to the college and New Tampa. Van Sickler was inspired by the plan, too, as he saw light rail as the solution to the sprawl problem in Tampa; it would create jobs, but more important, it would change the way people lived. It would be up to voters to decide whether to pass a one-cent sales tax referendum for light rail.

Karen Jaroch had grown up in Tampa but had never been politically active. She and her husband lived next to a golf course in New Tampa, a boomburg north of the city. Karen was a stay-at-home mom, a PTA member, and a churchgoer who was in every way the epitome of a typical middle-class American. She always voted Republican, but she was unhappy with Bush’s prescription drug plan and education policy. She and her husband lived within their means, staying in a $250,000 house they owned. She blamed the government for letting people live beyond their means believing the Community Reinvestment Act of 1992 forced banks to give subprime mortgages to unqualified people who could not afford their houses, so it was the government driving the banks, not the other way around. In 2008, she was mad that the government sent out stimulus checks because the government’s job was not to redistribute money. John McCain didn’t interest her either, but she was electrified when Sarah Palin entered the scene in August. Palin wasn’t an elite; she was a mom who had the same views she did, and Karen identified with her.

Karen thought spending was out of control. She didn’t know that a third of the stimulus was tax cuts, but she didn’t need to know that; she was against the stimulus package as soon as she heard about “shovel-ready projects.” Responsible people like her were being asked to bail out the freeloaders and freewheeling spenders over and over again. She believed Obama didn’t understand the American value of hard work, believing instead in the teachings of his communist father and radical mentors. Karen began to fear for America’s future and her children’s.

Karen was also a longtime listener of Glenn Beck, who had gotten his break on Tampa radio in 2000. She DVR'ed his Fox News program, and he was voicing the same concerns she had. Beck encouraged his audience to meet each other, and Karen sent in $10 to set up the first gathering of the Tampa 9/12 Project. Beck’s project was based on principles such as the greatness of America and the idea that people who work hard can choose to share their rewards with whomever they want. On March 13, 2009, people gathered for viewing parties of Glenn Beck’s show all across America, including at the Tampa Ale House, where 80 people watched Beck’s video about September 11, 2001. So began Karen’s her life in politics.

The summer of 2009 brought Obamacare and the nationwide fight over it. On August 6, Karen and other members of the 9/12 Project shouted out a town hall hosted by Tampa’s Democratic congresswoman. CNN invited Karen to be interviewed via satellite, Karen told CNN she and her movement were grassroots and not receiving any money. They were there simply to fight for the people like her who were afraid they would lose their health care. Her friends in the movement congratulated Karen for standing up to the mainstream media for the forgotten Americans.

Then came the rail. Nothing else got her as riled up as the proposal for tax-payer funded light rail in Tampa Bay. She started a group called “No Tax for Tracks” and read an antirail report from the Heritage Foundation. Karen argued the rail project would create no jobs and would have no riders. It would fail and leave the community in debt. When someone would present a fact against her point, she would simply move on to another topic, because she was more upset about what the rail represented than its actual effect on the economy. Where rail had once been the future of transportation, by 2010 it represented everything conservative Americans hated: big government, taxes, and a society in which people were supposed to share public services with strangers. Rail represented a threat to the car-based lifestyle of New Tampa where the line would end. Karen denounced urban planners and warned against Agenda 21, a nonbonding UN resolution on sustainable development that many Tea Partiers saw as the seeds of a world government. That Obama was in favor of intercity high-speed rail only confirmed their fears.

On November 2, the light rail referendum was defeated 58 to 42. Rick Scott, a Tea Party hero who had rejected meetings with all the newspapers, was elected governor, continuing uninterrupted Republican rule of the state (going back to 1998). Scott rejected $2.4 billion in federal funds for a high-speed rail connecting Tampa and Orlando just weeks before work was to begin on it. A company that studied statistics for stress levels in cities found that Tampa was the single most stressful city in which to live in all of the US (four of the top ten were in Florida). Sharpe survived a challenge from a Tea Party candidate and won reelection, and then he voted to put Karen on the Hillsborough Area Regional Transit Authority Board. Her side had won the debate, and he found her the most reasonable of the Tea Party activists.

A few weeks after the election, Mike Van Sickler found himself lost on the way to a building called the EpiCenter where he was supposed to cover a meeting of the Pinellas County Transportation Task Force. The defeat of light rail had depressed him, and it seemed to him that America was a country that no longer believed in itself. When he did finally arrive at the Epicenter, he saw two twenty-something men in the front row of the meeting who were jeering the meeting silently. Van Sickle asked them about the meeting, and they told him that the task force members were a bunch of communists who want to raise taxes. One was an unemployed construction worker who refused to apply for unemployment benefits and told Van Sickler the political class needed to be eliminated piece by piece. Driving away from the meeting, Van Sickler thought of the contempt of those guys and the contempt he read in online comments to stories he’d written, comments that had nothing to do with the articles themself. Every local issue was being swallowed up by shouting, and nothing could change anyone’s minds.

One Sunday, Van Sickler went out to Carriage Pointe. He found the houses slightly less deserted than they had been, but now they were occupied by renters, because rent was so cheap. They didn’t know their neighbors and had nowhere to go if they couldn’t afford gas. But it was still there. Van Sickler drove away with a vision of Carriage Pointe as a future slum in the middle of nowhere. The rich would live in the cities, and the poor would be stuck in the exurbs as Tampa waited for the growth machine to turn on again.

In the weeks before the 2010 midterms, Southern Virginia and the Piedmont were full of billboards and a bus sponsored by Americans for Prosperity, a group Dean had not heard of that was funded by the Koch brothers, a pair of oil and gas billionaires from Kansas who believed that Obama was intentionally ruining the free enterprise system. The billboards had phrases such as “Failed Stimulus,” “Cap & Trade Energy Tax,” and “Healthcare Takeover.” The Tea Party was so big where Dean lived that he didn’t advertise his personal views much. His neighbors never gave Obama a chance, calling him a socialist, a secret Muslim, and, most frequently, the n-word. Many of them had been easily conned by hucksters such as Glenn Beck, who he had tried to listen to but who he realized was more entertainer than newscaster; Dean also thought MSNBC was also hopeless. Mostly, though, he couldn’t understand why Obama didn’t do a better job of explaining his ideas about a new economy. He had made a mistake in tying biofuels with global warming, which was too partisan. And it was disappointing that Obama of all people would get into power and side with the multinational corporations.

In November, the Tea Party targeted Tom Perriello. After being in office a month, right around the time his Republican colleagues stopped returning his phone calls, Perriello saw the first TV ads against him. He figured the Republicans had decided the economy was unlikely to be fixed by 2010 and therefore voted against anything Democrats wanted to do, a smart strategy but an unpatriotic thing to do. The recession in Perriello’s district was so severe that local officials had to choose between raising property taxes and closing schools. The Recovery Act did bring $300 million into his district, which helped pave roads and keep schools opened, but Glenn Beck and the Republican party as a whole kept attacking the act for not creating any jobs. Then came the summer of 2009. After Perriello and the House voted on Obama’s energy bill, outside money from groups like Americans for Prosperity poured in, and the local Tea Party organized protests outside his office, denouncing the federal energy police they were certain the energy bill would create and who would be empowered with raiding their homes.

But all that was a warm-up for health care. In August, Perriello held 21 town halls around his district. At each of them, he’d be met with massive crowds of vitriolic protesters who would spit on his staff and rant at him while he tried to answer questions. The town halls generated lots of media attention and gave the impression that everyone in the district was against health care reform when, in fact, many of the people who attended were in favor of it or open to it—their voices were just drowned out by the Tea Party who came to believe that Perriello was ignoring unanimous opposition to Obamacare. Perriello voted for the president’s bill, and a Tea Party activist posted what they thought was Perriello’s home but was in fact his brother’s house. Someone cut the gas line there the next day.

Perriello also felt Obama was letting him down. The administration had let the bankers who had caused the financial crisis off the hook despite his talk of a new era of responsibility, an era that apparently didn’t apply to Wall Street. Perriello noted that everyone on Wall Street was trying to get back to the 1990s, a time when they made huge profits but places like rural Virginia were decimated. With Koch-funded ads and right wing attacks, no one paid attention to Red Birch or the work Perriello had done for the district. Six Republicans challenged him, with the winner of the primary being a politically malleable state senator named Robert Hurt. While campaigning to the point of exhaustion, Perriello actually ran into Dean one day. They hugged, and Perriello told him he’d like to get a beer when the election was over.

But the typical voter in his district wasn’t Dean but instead women like the retired schoolteacher who carried a sign for Hurt and believed Obama fundamentally wanted to change the country for the worse. She listened to talk radio and watched Fox News because she believed the rest of the media was biased. In her rant, she didn’t even mention Perriello’s name. Her vote was against Obama.

Perriello lost to Hurt, 51 to 47 percent. He came closer than the other Virginia Democrats who had lost, including those who had taken politically safer votes. But in 2010 the Republicans routed Democrats, and he couldn’t compete with that. Still, he felt good about his time in Washington where he fought for the right things.

Dean felt useless at the refinery by then, but he was still looking for what Napoleon Hill had promised: the benefit presented by every adversity. He owned very little of Red Birch Energy by that point, and Gary was running it. Dean disagreed with Gary’s business tactics, noting that Gary was costing them potential licensing customers because he quoted huge fees. Gary didn’t care what Dean had to say, since Dean was always too willing to do anything with anyone else’s money. Rocky Carter wanted to be bought out too, since his construction business was hit hard by the recession. Gary told Dean he was worried he was mentally unstable like Dean’s father had been, and that upset Dean more than anything else. In the winter of 2011, everything began to unwind.

First, Dean was found guilty in the tax case. Then, Red Birch was audited by the IRS and, because Dean was on the board, the government pulled the company’s permit to make fuel. In March, Dean resigned and gave up his remaining stock for $10. Gary heard Dean had continued to talk as though he were a part of the company, and he sent a letter telling Dean he was sorry, but it was no longer Dean’s company. Gary was cutting off Dean’s health insurance too, which Dean saw as being kicked when he was down. In the meantime, his other businesses were being liquidated, but his debt problems persisted. One of his creditors was Eden Oil, which was owned by Reid Teague. Dean considered him a friend, but Eden Oil got a judgement for $325,000 from Dean on unpaid fuel bills, and then Teague became his nemesis. Teague went after his personal property to get payment, going after the house Dean’s grandfather had built and that he had moved piece by piece away from the roadside. To save his house, Dean declared Chapter 7 bankruptcy, joining the other 1.4 million bankruptcies declared across the US that year.

Dean’s debts totaled a million dollars, but he was able to keep his house and other personal property. He had to undergo credit counseling and take classes on financial management. On July 25, he went to the courthouse in Greensboro to meet with his creditors. There, he found himself surrounded by other debtors and his father’s shadow in the old people broken by failure he saw in the waiting room. During that period, he thought about killing himself, just as his father had done, but he couldn’t do that to his own sons. By August 30, his case was closed, and he had felt God’s presence on him through the ordeal. In the end, he thinks it was a blessing, because it got him out of Red Birch and onto his next big thing.

Tammy loved doing public actions but hated public speaking. In Mason, Ohio, she and her group stormed the lobby of United Healthcare. In Washington, Tammy, Miss Hattie, and others from Youngstown joined a national progressive group and shut down an intersection before marching to Bank of America to protest Wall Street. Tammy was angry that the banks had gotten bailouts while she couldn’t get a loan and had to pay her mortgage every month. The actions put her leaders on national stages she had never thought possible. Miss Hattie became a local celebrity who others thought spoke for those of them that couldn’t speak. Tim Ryan, the Congressman for Youngstown, told her she was a dynamic speaker who should introduce him every time he takes the stage. Tammy, Miss Hattie said, molded her into the leader she became.

Miss Hattie had planted a community garden on her street after getting Tammy’s help in writing a grant application to the Wean Foundation for $3700. Miss Hattie wanted to add beauty to the neighborhood and teach local kids a lifelong skill and way of eating better foods. Another MVOC leader trained by Hattie also started a community garden, and everyone in the neighborhood honored the rules that anyone could pick anything from the garden as long as they didn’t tear it up. Beyond the gardens, MVOC also did a second map of Youngstown, this time focusing on grocery stores. They found there were practically no good stores in the entire city, and they pressured corner store owners to stock fresh and nutritious food and try to prevent the stores from becoming hangout spots for local drug dealers. Through the food campaign, Tammy met a White evangelical minister who had a co-op farm on church ground that hired teenagers, ex-cons, and people with disabilities to work over the summer. Tammy worked out an arrangement to have food from that farm trucked up to community centers and farmer’s markets around Youngstown. She stopped going to church as much as she had because she was busy but also because she was trying new things; she recognized how much more there was to life than she had ever known when she was raising children and working at Packard Electric.

When Tammy left Packard, now Delphi, she had a buyout of about $140,000, which amounted to 30 months of pay with no promise of another job. Delphi had actually given too many buyouts and needed to hire some workers back. She heard of people doing twice the work for the half the pay they had earned previously. In 2009, Delphi emerged from bankruptcy with most of its operations sold off to GM, the company’s original owner. The rest were owned by private investors who gave the company a new name: DLPH Holdings Corp. The hedge fund manager John Paulson, who had made billions by shorting subprime mortgages, made a profit of $439 million on his investment in DLPH. American workers made up less than a seventh of the company’s global workforce, and the factories Tammy worked at were closed, as were the bars and restaurants nearby that depended on factory workers for business. Delphi itself was seen as an exemplar for how to use bankruptcy to cut costs.

After paying taxes, Tammy had $82,000 left on her buyout. Some of it she put into a CD, and some of it she spent to help her mother and children. She decided to invest the remaining $48,000 with a relative of Barry’s who worked in real estate and promised annual returns of 10%. The first year worked out great, but by 2009, the checks stopped coming. She figured the relative must have been running a Ponzi scheme after she demanded her money back and he said he no longer had it. Tammy threatened to go to the police, but the relative told her it was not what Christians did to each other. He wrote her a check for part of what he owed and disappeared. The check bounced, and she was angrier at herself than she was at him.

In the midst of all that, her father died of liver cancer in September 2009. Her mother, Vickie, had been ravaged by years of heroin use and hepatitis C and was hospitalized. Tammy had to have surgery in December that would require a month of recovery. She spent the days before the surgery getting caught up on work for MVOC and never was able to visit her mother who died alone in the hospital on December 6. Tammy felt awful that she couldn’t be there for her.