Driving to Garden City, which is far from any interstate highway and well beyond the reach of my cell-phone service, I was reminded of one of those New Economy parables that some computer company used to run on TV back in the nineties: A bright and eager junior executive is shown driving a hardened old senior executive far out into the countryside. On the way the old guy gripes about the price of doing business in Manhattan. Once out in the middle of nowhere, though, the kid's dream is explained to him: New communications technology makes Manhattan irrelevant! This isn't the boondocks; this is the frontier–the land of opportunity. The old fellow's eyes light up as he gets it; he leaps and yips, a veritable cowboy. Out here he is his own master once again, a Wyatt Earp unencumbered by grandstanding aldermen or grievance-filing shop stewards or fancy intellectuals.

Driving back from Garden City, after taking in its brooding slaughterhouses and its unearthly odors and the feeder lots that sprawl over the landscape like some post-Apocalyptic suburb of death, I was reminded of another parable, one that the Kansas Populists used to talk about: the frontier as a site of ghastly, spectacular plunder. Buffalo carcasses littering the ground, cattle ranchers shooting down the Indians, corporations moving whole populations around the globe, farmers exhausting the land, railroads taking the farmers for all they're worth–free-market economics in full and unrestrained effect.

Viewed from Mission Hills, this is a social order that delivers quaint slate roofs, copper gutters, and gurgling fountains in elegant traffic islands; viewed from Garden City, it is an order that brings injury and infection and death by a hundred forms of degradation; rusting playgrounds for the kids, shabby decaying schools, a lifetime of productiveness gone in a few decades, and depleted groundwater, too. The anthropologists caution us in their sober way about a recipe for "growth" that blandly accepts a permanent impoverished class, but the people of Mission Hills are unfazed. They may be too polite to say it aloud, but they know that poverty rocks. Poverty is profitable. Poverty makes stocks go up and labor come down.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

It all seems faintly pagan to me, like I'm expecting the townsfolk to start offering up their young to be sacrificed so that the apple orchards will blossom again. On second thought, they already are offering up their young… but their town only gets more blighted.

21st century Western civilization will be nothing but sparse conglomerates of Jesus shacks, car dealerships, rusting post-industrial infrastructure, and laundromats (plus the inexorable gun store).

Manufacturers go there because the labor is cheap and unions non-existent. The people are down-trodden and depressed, but they are trainable and have low expectations.

And really, what conceivable future as part of 21st century Western civilization can these places have, when they're little more than sparse conglomerates of Jesus shacks, car dealerships, rusting post-industrial infrastructure, and laundromats (plus the inexorable gun store). I mean, come on.

I'm still puzzled by a manufacturer's decision to set up shop in places where under-education and a host social problems run rampant. It may only be car assembly, but not anyone can do it productively and skillfully.

I was often not invited to these meetings. I can't understand why…

My only quibble is with your time line. This has been going on for decades.
Honda Marysville, OH 1982
Nissan Smyrna, TN 1983
NUMMI Fremont, CA 1984
Mazda Flat Rock, MI 1987
Diamomd Star Normal, Ill 1988
Etc.

All wholly or partly foreign

Grabbed the table data here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=J3vMT3TU_zMC&pg=PA38&lpg=PA38&dq=mazda+flat+rock+michigan&source=bl&ots=z4I2jjoYOC&sig=JNfELMvh-NDgBBrmLbUWApuETiQ&hl=en&ei=vkZbSuK3NeGptgf67cmaCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=11

Flat rock gave enormous concessions over 20 years ago. I'll bet they haven't his break-even yet.