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    Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town
    Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town
    Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town
    Audiobook11 hours

    Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town

    Written by Brian Alexander

    Narrated by Bob Souer

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    The Anchor Hocking Glass Company, once the world's largest maker of glass tableware, was the base on which Lancaster's society was built. As Glass House unfolds, bankruptcy looms. With access to the company and its leaders, and Lancaster's citizens, Alexander shows how financial engineering took hold in the 1980s, accelerated in the 21st Century, and wrecked the company. We follow CEO Sam Solomon, an African-American leading the nearly all-white town's biggest private employer, as he tries to rescue the company from the New York private equity firm that hired him. Meanwhile, Alexander goes behind the scenes, entwined with the lives of residents as they wrestle with heroin, politics, high-interest lenders, low wage jobs, technology, and the new demands of American life: people like Brian Gossett, the fourth generation to work at Anchor Hocking; Joe Piccolo, first-time director of the annual music festival who discovers the town relies on him, and it, for salvation; Jason Roach, who police believed may have been Lancaster's biggest drug dealer; and Eric Brown, a local football hero-turned-cop who comes to realize that he can never arrest Lancaster's real problems.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateApr 4, 2017
    ISBN9781681686974
    Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town
    Author

    Brian Alexander

    Brian Alexander has written about American culture for decades. A former contributing editor to Wired magazine, he has been recognized by Medill School of Journalism's John Bartlow Martin awards for public interest journalism, and by other organizations. He grew up in Lancaster, with a family history in the glass business. He lives in California. Brian is the author of Glass House.

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    Reviews for Glass House

    4/5

    45 ratings7 reviews

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    • 1/5
      Analysis and story-telling too simplistic. The narration (a person? A computer?) was excruciating to listen to. Gave up about a third of the way in. Borrowed a print version from library to read more, but couldn’t finish. This could have been any excellent book, but reads more like a masters thesis. Author went through motions of interviewing and contextualizing, but fell far short.
    • 4/5
      I was drawn to this book because I teach in Lancaster, Ohio, the book's namesake. I don't live there, but I have noticed how this town is different than where I live. The author of the book is a hometown boy and interviewed literally hundreds of residents and executives to get his story. It's not much different than I surmised.In the 1940's Forbes Magazine listed Lancaster, Ohio, as an up and coming industrial town; a bedroom community about 30 miles south of Columbus, Ohio. There were some major industrial players at that time, such as Anchor-Hocking, maker of all types of glassware from beer bottles to wine goblets, to dinner plates. Local schools were good, a hospital was built, and people were generally happy. However in the 1980's venture (vulture) capitalism hit Lancaster and several businesses closed and Anchor Hocking was sold to venture capitalists. That will happen about 11 times in the next 30 years. Each group of "investors" would only have one thing on their mind: how to extract capital from the company to pay off shareholders. There were two ways to do this: step up production or demand union concessions. The equipment at the plant was so old that production could not be stepped up. Also, cheap glass from China was available to Anchor customers. Concessions were to come from the unions. In 1980, the average glassworker made $16.00 per hour with health and retirement paid for by the company. Today, the average worker makes $9.45 per hour with no retirement and healthcare which costs the employee $300 per month; which most can't afford. Before 1980 there were 1500+ employees, today there are less than 500, and some of them temps.Along with the devastating financial losses, comes the usual 80's crimes of the poor and unemployed: drugs, guns, children who can't perform in school. This could be the story of any American town who has been crippled by vulture capitalists. Those equity firms that controlled Anchor Hocking were brutal. For example, the advised the executives NOT to live in Lancaster, to live 30 miles away in Columbus and commute. The reason: so they would not be asked to attend and contribute to community functions. "Corporate elites said they needed free-trade agreements, so they got them. Manufacturers said that they needed tax breaks and public-money incentives in order to keep their plants operating in the United States, so they got them. Banks and financiers needed looser regulations, so they got them. Employers said they needed weaker unions–or no unions at all–so they got them. Private equity firms said they needed carried interest and secrecy, so they got them. Everybody, including Lancastrians themselves, said they needed lower taxes, so they got them. What did Lancaster and a hundred other towns like it get? Job losses, slashed wages, poor civic leadership, social dysfunction, drugs." 320 pages, 4 stars.
    • 5/5
      I loved it. I had to read it in a hurry, but the author has really put together a well researched and interesting read about society and economics in the "All-American" town.
    • 5/5
      I'm gonna call this a "gems of a book because who knew a book about anchor hocking could be so interesting?!?! Highly recommend
    • 5/5
      The business of business is to make money. That's the basic premise of an economic theory advocated by the late Milton Friedman and embraced by politicians from Reagan to Trump. Investors entrust companies and corporations with money with the expectation of receiving even more money. Investor value is therefor the primary concern of businesses. It's not about producing goods and services, at least not primarily. Those are simply a means for making money. It's certainly not about creating good-paying jobs. Employees are human resources to be used as needed and discarded when not, just like any other resource. An efficient business creates as much product as it can sell while employing as few people as possible, paying them only what it must. Anything beyond that cuts into profits that could otherwise be returned to investors. Generating more money at less cost makes a business efficient. It makes it successful. It increases its value and attractiveness for even more investment. It raises the price investors can get when they want to sell their shares. It's a fairly simple idea. Investors provide capital to fund businesses in which workers create wealth, and then the investors extract the wealth beyond that necessary to maintain the business. It's a great mechanism for making money, and somehow, through the magic of the invisible hand of free market capitalism, it brings prosperity to all. Or so the theory goes.

      Glass House provides a case study of how the theory has worked for Lancaster, Ohio. It's a compelling account of the Anchor-Hocking glass company, once a major U.S. producer of glassware and the lifeblood of this small city. The company has generated a lot of wealth for investors over the last half century, but there has been a cost. This is the story of those who paid it.

    • 4/5
      So, financialization destroyed the American economy while convincing (white) Americans that the problem was liberal government and its handouts. Alexander traces the collapse of one town, Lancaster, Ohio, which used to have a lot of manufacturing including a huge glass factory. Lancaster was a decent deal if you were white, especially if you were Protestant; a white man could work hard and have a decent, though not lavish, life, and his wife could stay home and raise the kids while being involved in the community. Some of the story follows heroin addicts, mostly young, who may have come from middle-class families but see no future, and no reason to leave either. Longtime residents decided that these troublemakers and ne’er-do-wells were outsiders who’d come in to get free food and welfare, but really they were from longtime Lancaster families—they just didn’t have any belief in anything bigger or better.The rest traces the fate of the Anchor Hocking glass factory, from paternalistic employer whose executives lived in the town and felt responsibility for it to asset bought up by various “investors” (corporate raiders, S&Ls that collapsed in scandal, venture capital/private equity geniuses) whose short-term desire for profits led them to load it up with debt, merge it with other companies, fire lots of people, delay maintenance until things fell apart, charge it tens of millions of dollars in management fees, and then repeat the cycle all over again, weakening the company each time in ways that the people of the town couldn’t even understand. Management shorted contributions to the pension funds that workers had bargained for years ago, destroying their retirements. The jobs didn’t just disappear; they were destroyed, and destroying them made a small number of people a whole lot wealthier. The union made concessions and people took nominal, not just real, pay cuts, and still they kept losing jobs, even as the consultants and lawyers made hundreds of dollars an hour.But none of these machinations were visible, though Alexander doesn’t really ever explain why that made “Obama” or “government” the scapegoat instead. As Alexander points out, “Whether because of the conservative small-government tide ushered in by Reagan, or because many internalized its diminished status and lost confidence in the future—any any willingness to invest in it—or both, Lancaster stopped spending on itself.” The schools deteriorated; streets and fire protection deteriorated; civic life deteriorated, including the rise of scandals of government mismanagement. To keep Anchor Hocking in town, the city took money from schools and gave it 100% tax abatements—then lost the jobs anyway. People with money liked Republicans; union and working-class people often didn’t vote and saw gay and transgender rights “as an attempt to impose an exotic order”; Alexander discusses one man who “leaned Democrat but sometimes voted Republican because he worried that Democrats wanted his guns.” Locals blamed the government for encouraging idleness and baby-having. At the same time, the town owed many of its remaining jobs to government: Medicaid and Medicare supplied 60% of the hospital’s income, and the hospital was the town’s biggest employer while the public schools came second and Anchor Hocking only third. Many blamed corruption and drugs on “a breakdown of old restirctions and codes,” “[a]n aversion to hard work,” but attributed those things to “the media” or liberalism, “not the decades of lousy education, economic collapse, and the minimum-wage and barely-above-minimum-wage dead-end jobs that replaced factory work.” People who had good jobs no longer involved themselves in the town, commuting elsewhere to work and focusing on their own concerns—in part because they were so busy working.Racism flutters in around the edges, as with the slurs that Lancaster’s drug-buying whites used to describe their black and Latino connections. Confederate flags became more popular in the wake of Dylann Roof’s mass murder. “They denied the racist and traitorous interpretations of the flag in favor of disobedience. Just as with guns, it didn’t matter that they hadn’t been interested in flying the Confederate flag thirty years before.” Lower-class whites felt screwed, and they thought, correctly, that somebody must be screwing them—they just didn’t figure out who. They liked Trump’s attack on Obamacare and his anti-Mexican immigrant stance.The diagnosis is grim. Politicians who enabled deregulation and financialization have not suffered; the social contract has fractured and taken trust and the feeling of being part of something bigger with it. Alexander has no solutions, only a record of decline.
    • 5/5
      A pretty good read, although the George Packer book The Unwinding is better, I think. This book looks at the town of Lancaster, Ohio, and the Anchor Hocking Glass Company, over many years. There is nothing that one can do about this,because life goes on and the people who screwed up this company and its town would have happened anyway.I spent 35 years on Wall Street, and one of my good friends recommended Newell, and another person that I worked with said that the strong dollar eliminated a lot of stupid capacity, among them Anchor Hocking, Fair;ly well written, although not as good as Packer. If I had not worked on. the Street and followed investment banks, I would have had a hard time following the ins and outs of private equity (LBOs), They certainly make their money the old fashioned way- they steal it.