The American Prospect | G Holtermann/Sipa USA/AP Images
If there’s a signature American business, it might just be union busting. Bosses in this country have long stood out for their violent hatred of labor organizing. Other nations have had strikes, but few others have had labor conflicts escalate to an outright shooting war, or company thugs burning and machine-gunning a union tent encampment filled with women and children. As the robber baron Jay Gould once boasted, “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.”