The Summer of '64

It wasn’t until over a decade later that I was to know my father was fired from his job in early 1964.  His sin had been to search for a better job; one of the potential employers to whom he had applied contacted his manager and the rest was history.  What I did know at the time was that we were moving.  We were leaving Florida, where my sister and my parents and I had all been born, and moving to a little town in Georgia.

           

            My father went to work as an accountant for West Point Manufacturing Company, a textile manufacturer headquartered in West Point, Georgia, population 4,000.  I was eight and had just finished second grade when we moved there. 

            This was to become “home.”  My parents had both grown up in a small town, and my mother thrived in that environment. 

            Within a couple of years, West Point Manufacturing merged with Pepperell Manufacturing to become WestPoint Pepperell, “the Company” as it was known to locals.  I will not defend all the practices of this corporation nor pretend all days were halcyon, but this company provided the people of the little town of West Point with stability, with a reasonable income, and a fairly comfortable and safe life.

            We lived through Vietnam and saw a couple of locals come home in boxes.  We lived through the civil rights movement and saw our schools integrated, as well as the rise of several “Christian Academies” catering to white students.  West Point’s was a story that would be told, with variations, across the South in the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. 

            I graduated high school there in 1974, college a few years later.  My parents were still there, still working, still paying their mortgage, thinking about moving back to Florida when they retired. 

            In 1989, my father turned 62.  Although healthy, he had suffered a major heart attack and had bypass surgery a few years earlier.  Plus, William Farley, owner of Fruit of the Loom, was making a bid for a hostile takeover of WestPoint Pepperell (WPP).  With those things in mind, my father took early retirement.  WPP was then billing itself  as the largest textile manufacturer in the world.

     William Farley, then chair of Farley, Inc., a holding company whose crown jewel was Fruit of the Loom, Inc., came into the picture. A former investment banker, Farley was a noted takeover artist who had had great success throughout the 1970s with leveraged buyouts, hooking up with investment banker Drexel Burnham Lambert in 1984. He acquired Fruit of the Loom as part of his 1985 purchase of conglomerate Northwest Industries, Inc.--a billion-dollar acquisition he pulled off with the help of emerging junk-bond specialist, Drexel. Farley then groomed the underwear company into a billion-dollar business.

In 1989, Farley launched a five-month, hostile battle to take over WPP and won. The price tag was $3 billion--much more than initially expected--and the deal complicated. Through the ad hoc entity, West Point Acquisition Corporation, Farley purchased 95 percent of WPP's stock at 20 times the company's 1988 earnings, planning to sell $1.6 billion in junk bonds to repay debt and buy the remaining public shares. But he was unable to raise the money when both the junk bond market and Drexel Burnham, Farley's investment banker, collapsed, and his West Point Acquisition Corporation found itself owing $800 million to banks and $700 million to bondholders.

Farley incurred $2.4 billion of acquisition debt in the purchase and had hoped to negotiate interim financing with a junk-bond offering handled by Drexel. He also planned to sell WPP assets.

(http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/West-PointPepperell-Inc-company-History.html)

            This is called “venture capitalism” today—it’s what Mitt Romney’s old company, Bain Capital, does.  It all sounds very clinical and legal and “good for the economy.”  The real-life consequences for real people are quite different.

            It had been years since I lived in West Point but my parents and many friends and relatives were still there, and I visited frequently.  There had been rumblings and minor upheavals for years; Wal-Mart had opened a superstore and a number of local retailers went out of business as a result.  Much of the fabric my father’s company made now went to overseas clothing manufacturers and was re-imported as finished goods.  Textile plants were closing across the South as they sprang up in the Philippines and Thailand and Mexico.  But the upheaval that was experienced from 1980-1989 was revisited a hundredfold in the next year.  Uncomfortable rumblings were suddenly  panicked collapse.

            Company headquarters, a proud, modern, brick-and-glass 2-story office complex that was once a showcase, was shuttered.  Farley carved off profitable divisions of WPP and sold them to the highest bidder, foreign and domestic.  The several WPP mills in the immediate vicinity all closed.  When you live in a one-company town and the company closes up shop, things get desperate.   In 1989, I was 33.  I had many friends from high school who had worked for the company and still lived there, who had acquired families and homes.  They were now jobless and had mortgages on properties that wouldn’t sell for half of what was owed on them.  Why would anyone want to buy a house in a town without any jobs?  (Sound familiar?)

            My father’s decision to retire proved propitious.  Though they couldn’t sell their home, it was in good shape and the mortgage payments were comfortable on their income.  Their dream of returning to their childhood home and spending their golden years near relatives was gone, but they were not uncomfortable nor unhappy staying where they were.  Those younger than he were not so lucky however.  People in their thirties and forties and fifties who had had relatively comfortable office jobs or reasonably well-paid manufacturing jobs were all now unemployed, all now desperately seeking employment in a suddenly much-shrunk market.    Those lucky enough to find work were often making half their former pay or less.

            The first couple of years were the roughest.  Some smaller companies picked up some slack.  The little telephone company, which had remained an independent, profited from deregulation and got into the long-distance market, became an internet service provider, and made some other forward-thinking moves and quite a few people ended up going to work for them over the years. 

            Twenty years after WestPoint Pepperell was chewed up and the bones spit out, Kia, the Korean car builder, opened a plant in West Point.  Has my hometown recovered?  As much as any place in America or the world these days.  Unemployment is still high, but no higher than most places now.  Property values rose when Kia announced the new plant.  They have fallen some since, but seem stable.    But it’s been twenty years of scrambling and diversifying and sacrificing to overcome the reckless acquisition and dismemberment of a sound, publicly-owned company.  Everything that was done was legal, I’m sure.  But the end result was that money was put into the pockets of William Farley and the other investors who staged the hostile takeover of WPP.  And money was taken out of the pockets of my parents and the other workers and property owners in West Point, Georgia and Lanett and Valley, Alabama (the three towns adjoin and were all “company towns” for WPP).  Was it a direct transfer? No, of course not.  No one in Lanett wrote a check to Farley.  But the people of Lanett, and Valley, and West Point, lost their jobs and their homes.  If they managed to keep their homes, those homes lost value and, like most Americans, those homes represented the life savings of their owners.  Because of Farley’s actions, they became poorer.  And Farley and a few investors made a great deal of money.

            And this, this is what Bain Capital and other ‘venture capital’ companies do.  They buy up companies, extract what wealth they can, and put those companies back out on their own.  A quarter of  Bain Capital’s acquisitions have ended up like WestPoint Pepperell, a name in the history books. (http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/01/09/400404/ romney-bain-bankrupts-billions/).  Let me make clear, as far as I know Bain had NOTHING to do with Farley’s acquisition of WPP; I am not blaming Romney or Bain for any of that. 

            But what happened to WestPoint Pepperell  was made possible by the relaxing of financial regulations that started under Jimmy Carter and snowballed under Ronald Reagan.  What the Republicans have been calling “wealth creation” for a generation has, in fact, been wealth extraction.  WestPoint Pepperell has happened time and time and time again.  Sometimes in small towns, sometimes in big cities.  Sometimes with privately held companies, sometimes with publicly held companies.  Sometimes it’s names we know like Maytag or American Motors.  Often it’s names we never heard of unless someone we knew worked for the company.

            I am not naïve.  I will not say that all of WPP’s policies toward its employees were benign.  Nor will I say all of its business practices were good for the community.  But this quick, surgical extraction of wealth by basically one man impoverished thousands of people for a generation.  And the pattern is repeated across America and across the world. 

            Yes, it’s legal.  Our laws have been changed to make it so.  The repeal of Glass-Steagall was the crown jewel of deregulation.  And we have all, each and every American, each and every citizen of the world, paid a price for this. 

            Mitt Romney, already a son of privilege, grew immensely wealthy by making other people poor.  Yes, he helped some get wealthy right along with him, but he helped many, many more lose jobs and homes and livelihoods. 

* * * * * * *

            In the spring of 1964 my daddy lost his job; a few weeks later, he found a new one.  We turned down the back seat of the Opel station wagon, slid a mattress in, and my sister and I climbed in the back, along with a hamster, a toy fox terrier, and a five-gallon Tupperware with the contents of my aquarium in it.  We drove 200 + miles through a hot summer day without air conditioning and arrived in the place my parents would call home until they died, decades later.

            Many mamas and daddies have lost jobs over the last few years.  Many children will be climbing into the backs of station wagons with the family dog this year, on a quest to find a new home. 

            What kind of world are we building for that second-grader who’s starting a new life this year?  Is it going to offer the comfort and stability that his parent’s steady employment can provide?  Is it going to offer some upward mobility? Some chance for higher education?  Or is Bain Capital going to buy out that new employer in a few years?  Now in fifth or sixth grade, the child will have to climb in the back of the station wagon once again, hoping to find another new home, another new situation?  What kind of America are we building?  What kind of America do we want?

The Least Among Us

A chance happening last night gave me an opportunity to observe myself.

I am occupying.  OCCUPYing with OCCUPY ANTELOPE VALLEY, our local group of Occupy Wall Street.  Though I’m not there 24/7, and no one is at our site yet, we have a site and we have a group of a few dedicated individuals and we’re growing.  One choice we have made is to move our Occupy site from one of the nicer city parks to what we refer to as “Plane On A Stick Park” – it’s Boeing Plaza in Lancaster, California.  Boeing is a major employer in this aerospace town.  The centerpiece of our encampment is a USAF Phantom F-4 mounted in a giant display 30 or so feet in the air – thus “Plane On A Stick”.  The whole park is a few years old and somewhat timeworn, but still impressive.  It’s within a short walk from the Lancaster MetroLink station, the end of the line for this spur of our regional commuter rail line.  Across Sierra Highway is the Lancaster station of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office. The park is small, in a narrow strip defined by the highway and the rail line, Lancaster Boulevard and a parking lot.  In fact, it’s not even officially designated a “Park”, but is a sidewalk according to the Parks and Recreation folks.  But it’s relatively clean and well-lit, it feels safe. 

Some of the local homeless people use Boeing Plaza as a base during the day.  We checked with them before moving our Occupy site there, and they were cool.  They are, after all, part of the 99 %, and I believe some of them are gaining a sense of empowerment just by associating with the Occupy group.  There are still two groups, but there is definitely interaction and there is no ill-will between us.  We have all made efforts to accommodate.

We performed our first real act of civil disobedience yesterday.  Palmdale Mall was the site of a flash mob.  Fifteen of us met in the center of the mall, at the display where Santa will hold court in a few days.  Once there we removed our coats, revealing our home-made Occupy t-shirts, which came out very well I think.  We did a human microphone for about five minutes and were politely escorted to the mall entrance by security.  Once outside, they told us they were with us and asked where we were located.  I really don’t want to have to go through what our brothers and sisters in Oakland are going through.  I can do without teargas and mace.  But it would be nice to get a little publicity.  We do have some good folks with cameras and we’re getting stuff out on our Facebook pages and on YouTube as best we can.  This is a link to an interview with me, if anyone is interested: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnadljXBWzg&feature=BFa&list=ULnvkRYkGqGqM&lf=mfu_in_order

In fact, three or four of the homeless group were with us at the mall.  When we got back to our encampment, one of our members had brought pizza to celebrate.  It was a good day, it was a good action.

As background, in the last few years I have developed some foot problems.  The first couple of General Assemblies I came to I stood.  I realized that if I continued standing like that for two or three hours at a time I would be crippled.  So I threw a plastic lawn chair in my car, and have carted that back and forth with me.  I get it out when I get to the site.  I certainly don’t mind people sitting in it if I’m not using it, but I don’t mind asking people to move if I want to sit, either.  And that’s worked pretty well so far.

Last night, as the pizza was being doled out, I returned to my car to grab my jacket as I was getting chilly.  My chair was already out.  As I returned to the group, a man sat in my chair.  He is one of the homeless group.  He’s from India.  He tells a rather strange and disjointed story, and I’m not sure what’s real and what’s not.  I don’t think he’s dangerous but to be honest he does make me a bit uncomfortable.  My first inclination was to ask him to move so I could sit.  I feel sure he would have; he is always meek and mild-mannered.  But then I thought – how long has it been since this guy has been able to sit in a chair and share food with “normal” people?  The kitchen where many of these people get their meals does have tables and chairs to be sure.  But just to be able to sit in a casual group and eat pizza – I don’t have much, but I have a plastic chair. 

So he sat, and he talked, and he enjoyed himself.  After a while, one of the other chairs in the circle became vacant and I sat, and the other man continued to sit and talk and eat and enjoy himself. I listened.  He introduced himself but I honestly didn’t understand his name, or much of what he said.  My hearing isn’t what it used to be and his accent is fairly heavy. Trains and traffic often drown out the spoken word.

 I don’t really have anything left to give at this point, at least not money or material possessions – my assets are gone.  But maybe I was able to give a little man from India, a man who must feel apart and alone much of the time, an hour of respite last night, an hour of feeling like a normal person, an hour of feeling a part of.

How We Treat Our Heroes

Anthony is a firefighter in one of the square states north of Texas and south of the Canadian border.  I met him in one of the online communities that have sprung up so ferociously these last couple of years.  His story is one I cannot get out of my head, and is the story which has prompted me to attempt blogging.  This is a story every American needs to hear. 

            In October, 2005, Anthony rescued seven people from drowning during a flash flood.  He received a commendation for this from the governor, now a member of President Obama’s cabinet.  When I googled Anthony’s name, I found a slew of stories with his name in them, and everything I found shows him to be a true stand-up guy, the kind you want as a neighbor or the kind you pray your daughter will date and marry.  He started off as a volunteer in the township fire department and after several years moved up to assistant chief and then chief.  I found several newspaper stories of heroic rescues.  Anthony tells me that on his watch, there was only one fatality.  An elderly lady in a wheelchair was unable to get out of her burning house after she called 911. They knew she was still in the house because she was still talking to dispatch on the phone, and dispatch relayed the information.  The roof began collapsing as his men entered the burning structure and they had to back out.  I’ve never heard Anthony’s voice but when I read how they found the woman’s body phone still in hand, I could feel his agony.

His life hasn’t been a bed of roses.  Anthony had been married to his wife and mother of his four grown children for 25 years when she ran off with a preacher.  I know it’s cliché, but I grew up in a small town, and I can remember two instances of ministers running off with other women.  Only someone from a small town can understand what kind of special shame is felt by the innocents in such a case, even today.  Anthony later started dating a woman he and his family had known for twenty years.  They fell in love, and Betty, her teenage daughter Morgan, and Anthony moved in together as a family.  On her fifteenth birthday, Morgan fell off a jetski. Something was strained in the fall; continued pain in Morgan’s leg and back and repeated exams led to discovery of cancer in Morgan’s pelvic bone several months after the fall.  Anthony went to his human resources to check about getting Morgan on his insurance.  He was told if he and his wife would legally marry, he could put Morgan on his insurance as if she had been born to him. 

Next, the township board met and fired Anthony.  At the time (that was in 2007) Anthony and his wife decided their daughter’s health was the only battle they could fight.  Even though they believed the firing to be illegal, they decided to marshal all their resources in the fight to save their daughter.  Eighteen months after Anthony was fired, Morgan died.  When Anthony did take his case to his state’s Ethics Board, he was told that, indeed, he had been fired illegally, but too much time had elapsed before he decided to take action, so nothing could be done to remedy the situation.

Bankrupt from their daughter’s medical bills and jobless because he’s blacklisted, Anthony and Betty have lost their home to foreclosure.  As of this writing, he has to be out of the house by the end of the year.

If you cannot understand and do not share my anger on reading this story, do not ever read me again, because you will never understand anything that I write.  What is the key in this whole tragedy?  I haven’t even uttered the words yet.  The legal scam we Health Insurance.  The scam that allows corporations to extract premiums from us for years and then deny coverage, either through canceling insurance outright or making premiums so expensive as to be prohibitive. Anthony was fired not because he was doing a poor job.  He was fired because he was going to put a very expensive juvenile cancer patient onto their insurance roll and the township’s premiums would skyrocket as a result.  You can always find another fireman, especially in this economy, but money is hard to come by.

And health insurance is only a part of the whole scam that is Wall Street.  Health insurance is but one way that the top one percent has extracted “excess funds” from the rest of us.  Why is health insurance so expensive?  One reason is that drugs are so expensive.  Drugs are so expensive because drug companies create new drugs that don’t do things any better than the ones we have been taking for fifty or a hundred years.  They get a patent on the new drugs, which give them exclusive rights, and push through advertising that if you have high blood pressure or high cholesterol or erectile dysfunction then their pill is the remedy you need.  They give doctors thousands or even millions of dollars to conduct studies on their new patent drugs and those studies inevitably come out favorable.  The same drugs can be bought in Canada or elsewhere for a fraction of what we pay in the US, but it’s illegal to buy them out of the country and bring them back in.  Government medical programs are often forbidden to even get competitive bids on drugs they buy.

 I can go on and on but I’m not going to try to connect all the dots in my blogging.  Matt Taibbi and a number of other writers are doing a much better job of that than I can.  I am going to try to tell the stories of some people whose lives have been broken by the institutions upon which we all depend.  If you have a different take on why Anthony and his family have suffered this tragedy, I’d welcome your response.

Anthony and Betty’s story has, if not exactly a happy ending, at least a hopeful one.  They have secured property outside of town and have started an off-grid organic farm.  They’ve constructed rainwater catchment and a gravity water feed and everything should be ready for them to move in by the time they have to leave their home.  They will sell organic produce and live plants and seeds.  It doesn’t sound like they’ll get rich, but it sounds to me like they know what they’re doing and they might just make it.  I think they’re survivors.  I wonder whether I’ll be one.