Why big cities thrive, and smaller ones are being left behind

[moondust]

2. Corporations killed rural America.

Corporate farming, corporate industry, corporate finance, corporate everything. Backed by Wall Street.

Basically back before Reagan there were still some small farms and small factories in rural areas that employed people from surrounding towns and sustained rural economies and schools. Then came corporations increasingly obsessed with maximizing profits, mergers and acquisitions, taking over everything they possibly could, moving their jobs and thus job hunters to urban centers where most of the money, shopping, transportation, and unemployed became concentrated. Of course later they moved many of those jobs offshore to cheap labor markets.

Ironically, rural Americans who voted for Reagan and other Republican moneygrubbers and thieves bear much of the responsibility for the decline of their rural way of life.