company town

These typical environmental justice narratives are compounded when they take place in a company town.

Sorkin’s versions of Washington, as seen in A Few Good Men, The American President and The West Wing, reduced this company town to a dichotomy of absolute good versus unquestioned evil, morality against depravity and truth against hypocrisy.

The Bethlehem Steel works were once the largest in the world, an industrial sprawl on the Sparrows Point peninsula that employed some 30,000 people, several thousand of whom lived in an adjoining company town.

Text at the beginning of the film tells us that in 2011, faced with a declining demand for sheetrock, US Gypsum shut its plant in Empire, Nevada, which had been a company town for 88 years.

On Chicago’s Far South Side, the historic Pullman neighborhood was founded in the late 19th century as a company town for laborers who assembled luxury passenger railcars.

And unless you live in a company town, you can probably pick up a part-time job--and if you do, you can move to one.

But Washington is no longer a one-dimensional, provincial company town.

Here are five indications that Obama has already changed the company town.