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Before Wilson there was William Knudson, the dollar-a-year man of FDR’s war effort who converted GM and Detroit into the great arsenal of democracy, a story movingly told by Arthur Herman in Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II.

“In the good old days,” writes Patterson, “Americans could at least count on business leaders being pro-American. Beloved or not, major corporations functioned as true stakeholders of America: fortifying American industry and building American factories, spreading American innovation, paying billions of dollars in American taxes and creating millions of high paying ‘family-wage’ jobs that helped create and sustain an expanding middle class.”

And today?

“No longer committed to a particular place, people, country or culture, our largest public companies have turned globalist, while abdicating the responsibility they once assumed to America and its workers.”

Citing Joel Kotkin’s work, Patterson adds, “the worst offenders are Apple, Facebook, Google, the high-tech firms secluded in Silicon Valley, a dreamland where the information age glitterati make Gilded Age plutocrats look bourgeois.”

Google has five times GM’s market capitalization but employs only one-fourth the number of GM’s American workers. Steve Jobs’ Apple has “700,000 industrial serfs” working overseas.

Since we bailed it out, GM has become “General Tso’s Motors,” creating 6,000 new jobs in China while shedding 78,000 U.S. jobs here.

Marco Rubio today leads Senate Republicans in doing the bidding of corporate America, which, in payback for its campaign contributions, wants amnesty for 12 million illegal aliens.

Agribusinesses need more peons. Restaurant chains want more waitresses, dishwashers, busboys. Construction companies want more ditch-diggers. Silicon Valley demands hundreds of thousands more H-1Bs—foreign graduate students who can be hired for half what an American engineer might need to support his family.

“Merchants have no country,” said Thomas Jefferson. “The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.”

Amen to that.