Don't be so smug. No one has snubbed their noses more at the American people than those Wall Street theives!

After you destroy unions, let's see what happens to all other workers' rights from middle management down! We'll see a greater widening of the gap between the haves and have nots!

And let's see how much those foreign companies/automakers contribute to America -- its charities, its disasters, and its communities (many of those dissasters occurring in the South and for which American automakers contributed millions of dollars -- compare what was given by foreign car companies). And let's hope we don't need to use those foreign automaker factories in an emergency -- like another WW II -- if our countries politics don't parallel theirs, we may be up the creek!

What planet are YOU from. A couple of hundred thousand UAW line guys out of work isn't going to change how my company already treats people like shit. It won't make the least difference at all.

A couple quick points in response.

First, I mentioned that the immigrant experience was somewhat different than presented in The Jungle. The town of Gary is a good example. Once called the "magic city," it was a wonder in its time -- built on the sand dunes of Lake Michigan by the newly formed U.S. Steel Company, its workers had state of the art schools and housing by 1900 standards. Some of those workers came from the Silesian region of Poland, then one of the poorest parts of the world. Today, a bit of the idealistic architecture from that era survives in the form of beach and bath buildings in Marquette Park, on the lakeshore. And, some books, including a large tome on the immigrant experience in Indiana (published by the state historical society) and the Images of America series touch on this era. Again, much different than the urban nightmare presented in the Jungle novel.

I also mentioned it is difficult to imagine those past times, and you objected. I was thinking principally of rural agriculture. In the north, the ag methods of just 50 years ago have vanished, and in the south, of course, the mechanized cotton picker did much to end the era of large rural populations comprised of agricultural workers. The world of Treemonisha, found in Joplin's music, is indeed hard to picture, at least for me.

Republicans to Workers... 'Fuck You'

I wonder how the Honorable Senator from Honda will sleep tonight.

But the US has become the Mexico of the First World, and the GOP (and many Democrats) are working hard to hasten that role. We're the place with the cheap labor, the non-union labor, the place without national healthcare, where higher education is increasingly only available to the richest few -- banana republicanism, basically. That's why this latest fight is so important to the GOP stewards of this old new world order -- this rollback of our economic culture is fundamental to their agenda.