What can happen to a town that really doesn’t care about anything
but jobs.

Adam Nagourney writes in the NY Times 1 March 2011:

Plan Would Erase All-Business Town

VERNON, Calif. — Vernon is a bleak, 5.2-square-mile sprawl of
warehouses, factories, toxic chemical plants and meat processors that
looks like the backdrop for “Eraserhead,” the David Lynch movie
set in an industrial wasteland. It has a population of 95 — and 1,800
businesses, drawn by low taxes, lax regulations and cheap municipal power.

It also has a history of corruption and public malfeasance going back
nearly 50 years.

The rest of the story is mostly about how it’s gotten so bad

the state
is trying to abolish the city of Vernon and make it part of Los Angeles County.

John A. Pérez,
the Democratic speaker of the State Assembly, is the chief sponsor of
legislation to disincorporate Vernon. He described it as a shell city
created to enrich municipal officials and businesses at the expense of
the struggling, lower-middle-class communities that surround it.

“I have been frustrated with Vernon for a long time,” Mr. Pérez said,
while driving the streets of this city, which is in his district. “How
bad a neighbor it’s been. How shady its practices have been. And the
more I looked at it, the more I realized this was really the center of
tremendous corruption.”

Naturally, Vernon boosters fought back, with this, for example:

A slick two-minute advertisement promoting Vernon as a bastion of
blue-collar employment will be shown in theaters in working-class
neighborhoods with the opening of a new movie, “Battle: Los Angeles.”
The commercial follows a $65,000-a-week television advertising campaign
that began last week.

More tax money going to benefit corporations at the expense of people.

The story goes on and on about fraud convictions, lawsuits, advertising
campaigns pro and con, and so forth.
Obviously it’s not that bad here.
But Vernon might be considered a cautionary tale about

“jobs, jobs, jobs”.

-jsq