Companies such as General Motors are an ideal historical example of an organization which has literally created and sustained towns in order to power its manufacturing operations, such as the notorious center of production which once was Flynt, Michigan. With the closure of its major plants in the 1980s, as per the pattern whereby such nations moved operations to cheaper markets, Flynt and towns just like it have descended into despair, poverty, crime and an outright sense of having been birthed, fostered and subsequently abandoned to a place with no capacity to reinvent itself. As a microcosm of America, this helps to underscore what our reading has been largely about. Namely, the ethical imperatives of this questions are deeply relegated by more practical questions about the maintenance of the American economy as a whole. Situations like Flynt and the knitting mill are indicative of a corporate callousness and a humanitarian disregard that has spread throughout the dying manufacturing culture of America, and have shown a total ignorance or disinterest for the economic requirements of the America which has been created.

For individual corporations, no such patriotism exists, nor does any rational assumption about the dependencies of such companies on the economic fortitude of the American buying public.

As Chapter 5 denotes, the interest in cheaper labor opening up in Mexico had driven all manner of manufacturing operation out of the country and into the waiting wings of a desperately cheaper labor context. Thus, then as today, we find that economic recession is being stimulated by the closing and relocation of perfectly healthy and flourishing manufacturing operations....

In the cases noted above, the resentment and fear felt by workers would be given foundation by a firm awareness that plant closings during this time of urban restructuring were not motivated by need but by greed.
And indeed, though it is a popular refrain to denote that America's gloried past is evident in its proud agricultural tradition now largely deceased, the texts which we have examined point out that in the social restructuring that has occurred over the last 30 years especially, the farm economy has emerged, if not with greater economic security, at least with an economic balance whereby America's farm-system as a whole has been largely steady in its scale. Where a small farming concern disappears, it is typically that its place in the market will be occupied by a larger, more expansive entity. To say nothing of its impact on the human participants who may have lost farming operations, from a broader and more systemic economic perspective, "the loss of factories has had a much more pervasive and deeper impact on the economies of rural communities in the last decades than has the loss of farms. "(Ch. 5, 1)

This is to say that ultimately, those factories and the jobs which are affiliated therewith have been lost and will not be supplanted by additional entities or forces within the market. Those manufacturing and factory jobs which are exported effectively leave the American economy with no recompense to the impacted laborers, the local market which has lost its outlet and to the nation in general, which is today under the thumb of a mounting economic recession produced by persistent displacement of American asset and prosperity to other parts of the world.