Steve_American wrote:I'm sorry, but I don't see any connection between small farmers lossing their land and immigration.
Can you flesh it out a little better?
without desperate immigrants, oftentimes illegals, from Latin America willing to work for bare bone wages, the huge corporations would never be able to find American employees willing to put up with the horrendous working conditions in corporate slaughterhouses
immigration and the recession in America is also what led to the rise of the humungous corporate retailer Walmart, which then put many smaller retail stores (including many small family owned stores) out of business.
When workers have more leverage in the economy, those workers often prefer to work on their own terms, or in smaller businesses that will treat them well, like a family. But when those workers lose all their leverage in the economy, they become a commodity, and then it's all about relentless "efficiency". The big corporations then take control. It all becomes about extracting maximum "productivity" from the employees for the least cost possible, and the workers all become disposable because if they don't like it, there's plenty more to take their place.
The thing is, the big corporate model really isn't the most efficient, but then becomes the most cost efficient model when the cost of labor drops and becomes negligible--basically when the cost of labor becomes a non-factor and there is less need to efficiently allocate it.