The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

The Blob was what Jeff Connaughton called the power structure of people who move between Wall Street and the federal government. He is a member of the Blob for a long time. After Wall Street crashes, he laments that the Blob is too big to be killed as the Obama administration ignores his calls to punish Wall Street executives.

Carriage Pointe was a “boomburg” community built in Gibsonton by somewhat fraudulent means. The developers had promised a community center and that 80% of homes would be occupied by the owner, rather than owned as investments. Mike Van Sickler visited Carriage Pointe and found a ghost town of sorts during the mortgage crisis and then houses occupied by renters years later. Carriage Pointe serves in the book as a representative of all the subdevelopments in Tampa built to feed the growth machine.

Clarium Capital was Peter Thiel’s investment company and hedge fund. He made a series of successful investments before the mortgage crisis but lost money during it. Thiel continued to lead Clarium and continued to invest funds from it in startups later too, and Clarium Capital represents the revolving door between Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

Founded by Matt Drudge, the Drudge Report was an internet site that published stories the mainstream press wouldn’t touch. It inspires Andrew Breitbart to make a similar site. In the book, Drudge is an example of the impact of new media on the growing distrust in the media institution.

The 1933 Glass-Steagall Act separated commercial banking from retail banking. Its repeal at the end of the Clinton administration allowed banks to trade collateralized debt and mortgages, leading to the financial crash of 2008. As a senator, Ted Kaufman advocated for something similar to the return of Glass-Steagall but failed to pass it through Congress due to resistance from Chris Dodd and much of the Obama administration.

Grasstopping is a lobbying strategy in which someone organizes the public in a top-down manner. This makes it seem like there is grassroots support for an issue that really is being influenced by someone else. Quinn Gillespie used it, and the book hints at the ways the Tea Party movement and the “No Tax for Tracks” movement were not organic grassroots efforts but, rather, grasstop efforts.

The Mahoning Valley Organizing Collaborative (MVOC) was formed by Kirk Noden with funding from nonprofit founded on old steel money as a community organizing group. Tammy Thomas worked for MVOC as an organizer, and she helped create protest actions as well as empower other people to tell their stories and learn to lead. MVOC is an example of a community group trying to remake society after the unwinding.

Packard Electric was the original name of a General Motors subsidiary that made auto parts for GM cars. Tammy worked on the assembly line there for several years in her adult life until Packard, which had been spun off from GM and renamed Delphi, closed down the factories. Eventually, it went bankrupt but netted huge bonuses for its executives and Wall Street investors, all while reducing its American workforce, another example of the ways that only the rich were benefiting from the decline of American manufacturing.

PayPal was founded by Peter Thiel and Max Levchin and became wildly successful as an online cashless pay system. Thiel was excited about the technology created by Levchin because he believed it would lead to a world in which currency was decentralized. When eBay bought PayPal in 2002, its founders, the so-called PayPal Mafia, made millions of dollars, much of which they reinvested in other tech startups.

Peak oil is theoretical time in which the global rate of oil production reaches its highest point and then gradually declines. It is based on the fact that the world’s oil supply is finite. Embraced by both Dean Price and Peter Thiel, the theory led others to assume the future would be a tumultuous one due to America being unable to meet its energy demands. In the book, it serves as a catalyst for Dean’s entrepreneurial ideas as well as one of the many sources of apocalyptic visions and fears felt in the period the book covers.

The Piedmont is a region of the United Sates between Appalachia and the Atlantic Coast. A plateau, it stretches from Alabama all the way up to New Jersey, although the region mostly discussed in the book is limited to North Carolina and Virginia, the places Dean Price lives and works. The area had a rich history of tobacco farms and factories, furniture manufacturing, and textiles, but those industries slowly died at the end of the twentieth century, leaving behind unemployment, poverty, and fallow fields.

The Purnell Mansion was a house built by an heiress of the Tod family. It was paid for by steel money, just as the whole town was. Tammy Thomas spent time there as a child when Granny worked there as a maid, and she watched the slow decay of the house her whole life as the steel industry died. The house, then, is a metaphor for the whole history of Youngstown.

Red Birch Energy was the biofuel company Dean Price started with Gary Sink and Rocky Carter. The idea was to create a closed loop system in which local farmers grew canola that would be turned into fuel sold at Dean’s truck stops. It struggled financially due to gas prices lowering and financial problems caused by Dean’s other businesses, as well as tensions between the owners who eventually bought Dean out. Red Birch represents something of a what-if in the book, as it could have been the type of new, green energy business that remade society had gas prices not fluctuated.

Robo-signing was the term coined to describe the rubber stamping process banks used to approve mortgages and loans, often fraudulently. Some credit Matt Weidner with first using the term. Robo-signing helped facilitate the house of cards that Wall Street lenders built in Tampa and other areas.

Shorting refers to a trading technique in which an investor sells a security with hopes of buying it later. Investors short when they anticipate the price of a security will fall in the short term but rise in the long term. In the book, Kevin Moore eventually shorts the housing market and makes money, suggesting that there is always a path for Wall Street to make money regardless of the price of a stock or the shape of the economy.

"Too big to fail" was a theory in finance and government circles that said that some banks got to be too large that their failure would destabilize global markets. Ted Kaufman and others argued that there should be no such banks legally, since the existence of “too big to fail” made the global financial markets inherently unstable. He introduced legislation that would have prevented such institutions, but his law failed to pass after receiving resistance from members of both parties and the Obama administration.

Youngstown, Ohio was a town dominated by the steel industry until one day, there were no mills. Then it turned into an impoverished and shrinking city in need of revitalization. It was Tammy’s hometown and the base for her later activism with MVOC. The town is representative of all other rustbelt communities that suffered as deindustrialization spread.